Official map packs

[TRaK]

This might belong in mapping, dunno.

As we all know, there are many mappers out there who are busy making maps for tremulous, many of which are excellent. However, these new maps don't get played very often because there are many players who don't download them, and servers don't want to take big hits in their player numbers.

Pulse, Procyon, Thermal, UTCS, Ancient remains, Sokolov, flap, Meep, Outpost P4, ATCSza, and surely many others, just don't get played very often even though they stand up quite well to the original maps.

So I suggest that we have an official tremulous mappack, which players will be notified to download by the tremulous client. Obviously, maps would have to be chosen carefully, but this would allow for deserving maps to actually get put into a server rotation without emptying out the server.

I know autodownload kinda serves this purpose, but a lot of players don't want to wait for the download to finish, nevermind that there are very few popular servers that actually have beta maps in rotation.

What do you think?

[Caveman]

Who gets to decide what maps to include?
The devs? They do it anyways with each release of Trem...

[TRaK]

Who gets to decide what maps to include?
The devs? They do it anyways with each release of Trem...

The devs could decide, or they could make polls or something like that. I am aware that they do it with each release of trem, but the problem is that trem hardly gets updated on a regular basis. IIRC, 1.1.0 has been out for at least a year, and most servers still play almost exclusively the ~10 original maps.

[Caveman]

That has a different reason
Most maps are outright crap, some look good but use not enough vis nor hinting, others are too big.
There are only so many maps you can run.
And those maps are already on  most servers.

[Odin]

The default maps should be included in the data pk3, like in Wolf: ET. This preserves complete purity on servers.

[Caveman]

Especially in rtcw:et it did not preserve purity.
And having a pure server is not as relevant as being pure on the client side.

[Catalyc]

Also... 1.1.0 came out march 31st.