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xfoo
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I was wondering if the idea of a 2k4 UT Comp map pack has ever been thrown around.
At the moment there are a small number of maps which are played competitively for 2k4 TDM and 1v1 (more-so 1v1). And frankly, some of the maps played are not the greatest.
There are several advantages which make UTComp a good candidate to bring new maps into the 2k4 community. First, the UT Comp name would be able to draw high class players to test / prove the worth of maps before they are released. Second, when a map pack is released, every competitive server that uses UT Comp will have the new maps, making it easy for the maps to be played
Q3 mods, such as OSP and CPMA, have had great success in combining mappers with players to create awesome competition maps. A project which combines mappers and players together to hash out new 2k4 maps would do a great deal for the 2k4 community.
I'm quite interested in helping to promote a 2k4 mapping project. I have quite a bit of map beta testing experiance through my work on the CPMA design team. As well, I have limited mapping experiance which could be put to use (my last map won the CPMA 2v2 gameplay mapping competition).
Is there any chance of a UT Comp map pack project being started?
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| 07/05/05 13:49 |
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dawgpound
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Not a bad idea at all, but I'm wondering if the efforts would be fruitless considering the future of UT. There are only a couple custom maps that I have played that might be worthy of inclusion, one being solitude.
It's not enough to succeed, others must fail.
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| 07/05/05 14:58 |
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xfoo
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I agree that the state of the community is moving downwards. Call me optimistic, but I think there will still be people playing in a year. (I come from q3, i've heard "omg wtf q3 is dead" for the last 3 years).
I'll check out solitude when I get home from work.
I was really thinking about either a) building maps from scratch or b) REMIXING existing maps. There are lots of maps with decent layouts, but horrible item placements. Moving a few items around can do wonders. The only real issue with remixing is you need the authors permission / assistance in most cases.
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| 07/05/05 15:24 |
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dnx3
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This is actually something we discussed in the past, but decided not to do, mostly due to technical issues, the main one being that in a game like UT2004, an overwhelming majority of the players are going to get new versions of UTComp through server downloads, as opposed to grabbing it off a webpage osp/cpma style. (Which is most probably due to q3's horrible ingame download code...) Obviously, we can't push a bunch of 20mB maps through in-game downloads in UT2004 either, unless server admins are using http redirection for fast downloads. However, a totally unscientific test I just did (by renaming my utcomp file and connecting to a bunch of random servers) shows that, as expected, most servers do not have redirection enabled. Which basically means most players would be downloading a 20mB maps at 2kB/sec. Not good.
But to be honest, if there was enough interest in such a project, we'd probably try and figure out a way to do it nonetheless. There has to be a practical way to push those maps to as many systems as possible faster than 2kB/sec.
***THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED***
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| 07/05/05 17:32 |
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PoisonBagels
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Everyone has Goose and Campgrounds, why just not push them unless they are being played on?
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| 07/06/05 00:16 |
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xfoo
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Those are great TDM maps, don't get me wrong.
But there is definatly a need for new 1v1 maps. There are 3 standard maps played, with lea POSSIBLY catching on (even though a lot of players dont seem to like it).
TDM isn't in a need for maps quite as much, which is why it might be best to focus on 2-3 1v1 maps, and a TDM map.
dnx3 - In the past map packs have been released and announced on the news sites and spread by word of mouth. In the end no one has a problem going to the mod's website to download the map pack (look at OSP, CPMA and 3WaveCTF). As long as hosting can be found, I don't see distributing the maps to be a problem.
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| 07/06/05 11:22 |
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concrete
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the biggest problem is making sure the maps don't suck... you're talking about ways of presenting and packaging the maps before you get over the biggest obstacle: getting them accepted in the first place...
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| 07/06/05 18:22 |
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dnx3
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I did think about it, there's a fairly decent solution that can be reached... The thing is, while most players get new versions off server autodownloads, servers will inevitably get it off the web. (Unless they go through the trouble of getting it as a client on a server, uncaching the file, etc... But I doubt many would do that) This basically means that as long as the web package has the maps, they would be installed on all servers that have the latest UTComp on.
Therefore, all we would have to do is, say, release a new UTComp 1.7 or something, (whatever it'd be called... I can't speak of our future plans on non mappack related things anyway) with the maps included on the website. That way, everyone getting it off the website (therefore, all servers...) would get the maps. Then, future versions, whether it would be a 1.7a or 1.8, would be packed in two different versions, (as osp is doing) with or without the maps.
Basically, this is exactly what OSP did, but with a minor difference: they could expect their playerbase to also download the maps off the web, while getting the latest osp update. We can't expect that in UT2004, so clients would most likely have to download the maps off servers too. Now, one of two things would happen... First, the server might have proper http redirection set up, and therefore when a map is switched to a utcomp-map-pack map, they'd just grab it at a really fast speed, or, the server doesnt, and it downloads at 2kb/sec, in which case most computer-savvy players would probably go and download it off the website. The only people who would be screwed are the casual/less knowledgable players who aren't aware that you can even get utcomp off a website, and are playing on servers without redirection...
We'd just have to figure out how many of those would be affected, and see if its worth potentially screwing them over ot not. I would think it would be fairly low, simply because most of the casual players aren't playing with UTComp in the first place, and those who are, well, might not even get to play on servers which are using maps from the mappack, which would obviously be a bunch of maps built for high level competitive play. But anyway, we'll talk it over when lotus gets back from eswc... As concrete pointed out, there are also several other non-packaging issues that we'd have to consider.
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| 07/06/05 19:51 |
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ep1taph
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There have been a lot of map packs, but they were mostly eye candy and the maps had limited thought for actual competitive use.
No matter what TDM map you release out into the community, I guarantee that a faction of people will ardently claim it's bad. Most players are just afraid of new maps. They'll nitpick it to pieces, but they don't realize you could do that for any map (even existing competitive ones).
I'd support any effort like this, and I hope it comes together.
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| 07/07/05 00:21 |
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Stik
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| QUOTE |
No matter what TDM map you release out into the community, I guarantee that a faction of people will ardently claim it's bad. Most players are just afraid of new maps. They'll nitpick it to pieces, but they don't realize you could do that for any map (even existing competitive ones). |
This is why such a project would probably be doomed to failure before it even started. :(
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| 07/07/05 12:58 |
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xfoo
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Perhaps focusing on 1v1, where the most people vocally complain ("fuck not rankin AGAIN"), would be the best idea then.
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| 07/07/05 13:46 |
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