FreeGameDev

With the increase of maps being made and being accepted for submission into Red Eclipse, I thought I should maybe share a few of the things I look for (or have to fix myself) when considering something for inclusion:

Variables are set correctly. This includes "numplayers", "maptitle", "mapauthor" and "mapmusic". Too many times have I been given a map which read "Untitled" by "Unknown" on the loading screen. Does your "obitdeath" or "obitwater" make sense? Note that the music is just as important as anything when creating the "theme" for your map, and you can provide your own music so long as it fits the overall theme and licensing requirements.

Proper placement of entities. There should be at least two weapons for each player you intend the map to hold (eg. 10 player map would need roughly 20 spawns), PLUS any specials like grenades and/or rockets. They should most definitely NOT be placed all in a bunch, please spread them out over your map. You should have the correct number and types of player starts for your map size and mode types, the same goes for your affinities, these act as flags and/or bombs/goals in objective modes. Have you added atmospheric particles and sound effects to increase the mood?

Good use of lighting. Is there a sunlight being used? Could the map have better ambiance if it were lit more sparingly? Is the lightprecision up high enough to create at most 3-5 lightmaps? Could skytexture be applied to outer zones to reduce the overall lightmap count and rendering area? Are things of significance clearly visible? Does the lighting suit the area (does it have a source)?

Flow intended to aid good gameplay. Is there a good enough mix of corridors and open areas? Can the player get around easy without getting stuck (hint: clip/noclip)? Does the map account for features such as parkour and/or jetpack? Can the player get to any areas they shouldn't? Does the map run at a decent frame rate (hint: use occlusion)? Does the map play as well as others included in the game?

Attractive textures and materials. Nothing screams masterpiece like something that you want to play from the moment you see it. Make use of the large array of texturing options and materials. Could you make this scroll/pulse/whatever? Could you add some trim here to break it up and give the area some depth? There's grass there, could you maybe use a few bush mapmodels too? How about using a blendmap to create a path from this point to that one?

License and package appropriately. Make sure your map is only "mapname.mpz", "mapname.cfg", "mapname.png", "mapname.wpt", and "mapname.txt". Your license should be included in your "mapname.txt" (note: if transferring a map, this file will be sent as well); try to avoid generic names like "readme.txt" and "license.txt" because I have to fix these myself before putting them in the game.

I'll add to this as I run into future issues. But that should give you the idea.

Great post quin, I'm sure this will help a lot of people :) (myself included!)

Well written, just I miss there mention about waypointing. Making paths too thinly, which makes predictable bot's move (when for 1.3 were updated couple of waypoint files due to lack of detailed paths). Or putting the waypoints to unneeded areas, when bots actually makes parkour without them. But maybe you don't consider this as an important for possible included levels, althought I remember that with waypoints there were and there are still some issues on couple of maps.

And I don't understand.. Why lightprecision is limited of only a 5 lightmaps? (3-5) I see importance in duration of loading a map. And if map file is not that large, even when lightprecision is lower (better shadows), where is a problem then? Wouldn't be better to judge that in a context of size of .mpz file according to the map size format (small, middle, large) instead by amount of lightmaps? (also depends on, how much a map is detailed of course) But look, just a simple ruler like that:


Small (up to ~1100 kB)
Examples: bath-475 kB (could be even lower lightprecision), darkness-1171 kB, dutility-885 kB, starlibido-583 kB, ..

Middle size (from ~1100 kB up to ~1800 kB)
Examples: deadsimple-1339 kB, keystone2k-1218 kB, mist-1491 kB, fourplex-1600 kB, oneiroi-349 kB (lightpresicion could be decreased to 32 at least, amount of details could be increased), spacetech-538 kB (same), ..

Large (from ~1800 kB up to ~3000 kB)
Examples: cutec-2930 kB, forge-3340 kB, ubik-1174 kB (lightprecision 64, large map and only this size, why not decrease lightprecision for better quality shadows?!), error-3526 kB (lightprecision 32, could be increased for smaller .mpz size; with lp 64 it's just 1534 kB!), biolytic-1833 kB (lightprecision 64, could be a bit descreased), ..

Huge (from ~3000 kB up to ~4000 kB)
Examples: canals-3470 kB, industrial-3912 kB, colony-1635 kB ?!, tribal-1008 kB ?!, ..etc.

So from this you can judge by, which maps could has higher/lower light precision, and which maps could be detailed more, if it's suitable.
I really consider that more logical. Let me know if I am wrong.

An important post for me. Many of these things I had to learn by myself, when I learned it anyway, because some things are still new for me. For example to give the additional readme file the map name. This is obvious, but I haven't realized this tiny detail until now.
So it's nice and usefull to have a kind of a plan, a path where you can go through.
For answering Damiens questions: I don't know, I give qreeves the word, because he has clearly the better experience, while I will take a look here later again.
...

Wow! VERY helpful I will be sure to check back here often. Thanks quin for the post

qreeves,
I remember reading this guide this morning, 10 hours ago, and thinking "YES!--Now we have a plan for producing satisfactory maps. / This will help me produce my map. / There's something addressed here that will help eliminate an aggravating tendency that I have tried to alleviate in the past. / While I have agreed with this for sometime, I never evaluated it in these terms for lack of experience."
Cheers

nub questions:

How do you change the amount of occlusion?
What is clip/noclip and where to place it?
How do you set a blendmap?

By the way, S.E.S.'s agui is INCREDIBLY helpful with setting up a lot of these things, and is well worth installing.

Agreed, it is useful to have all of these in a sticky!

ballistic:
Occlusion is a general concept for game engines: Only things that are visible to the client are rendered and need compute resources on the client side. So if there are wide open areas of high detail, occlusion is poor, i.e. you cannot save resources and the map gets expensive/slow.
Clip/ noclip is material that controls collision detection independent of the geometry. Clip creates invisible walls or ceilings and should be used with caution as you can wall-run on it - useful to "smoothen" walls and "cap" roofs. Noclip disables collision, e.g. on small decorative geometry that could get you stuck. Aiclip only affects bots.
blendmaps are explained there:
viewtopic.php?f=53&t=2205#p22569

Another thing: Have we had any map submission yet with its own music? Probably only few people realized that this is possible and encouraged

bonifarz {l Wrote}:... Another thing: Have we had any map submission yet with its own music? Probably only few people realized that this is possible and encouraged

I have some electronic tracks, made by my own and with licence, but I was never sure if my sound fits the game properly. This music is a bit different to the RE tracks (ambient, breakbeat, experimental, mixture music between all chairs, where is no drawer for ). Another reason why I let them out was that this would mean more megabytes.

The view to the licence of music would be important. Possibly it's not allowed to take someones music, except the author feels fine with it or you made it yourself.

raiden {l Wrote}:I have some electronic tracks, made by my own and with licence, but I was never sure if my sound fits the game properly. This music is a bit different to the RE tracks (ambient, breakbeat, experimental, mixture music between all chairs, where is no drawer for ). Another reason why I let them out was that this would mean more megabytes.

You should put them up in the "Submit your content" thread :) An Electronic sound would definitely add nice atmosphere to cutec, IMO. Give it a shot!

ZeroKnight {l Wrote}:You should put them up in the "Submit your content" thread An Electronic sound would definitely add nice atmosphere to cutec, IMO. Give it a shot!

I post the music here at first, because of different reasons. I published this tracks at the end of 2009 already. I used the pseudonymous "sonar" and released on the netlabel bump foot.

virtual physics

When you scroll down and go to "Files at Internet Archive", you have a player there and can listen to the tracks via stream instead of downloading the package. This release isn't my only one, I have also some newer tracks, but they aren't mastered yet. This one cames in mp3 format, but I have also everything in #.wav, which can easily be converted into #.ogg format. One problem is that the whole album was recorded a bit too quiet. So it has to become louder to fit the volume of the RE tracks. This could be done in an audio editor, but would be very elaborate, because each fine max amplitude has to be lowered, to have the chance to increase the overall amplitude after that (a technical thing, the max amplitude has always a border to the top). Another way could be to change the volume by a special config entry in RE. ...

To the music itself: be warned, the tracks differ from each other and are experimental in parts. I provide these tracks also for the person who wants to make the RE trailer. If you think there is something utilizable, or you are interested for other tracks, remind me back here, or maybe better we should open another thread for this then.

Hi raiden,
What digital-audio-workstation/sequencer are you using? Would it be possible to use a limiter and compressor? If you are unable to resolve the volume variance issue with it, I would be willing to try this in Cakewalk Sonar. While I am not having any luck trying to get the files of the archive, you could send me 1 of the more problematic songs in flac format on a file sharing service. If you are alright with this arrangement, I recommend using http://www.box.com . If you are feeling more adventurous, you could host all of the songs there in a folder. [ This subject is continued in the separate thread, viewtopic.php?f=72&t=3662 ].
Cheers

Post moved to Music thread (partly to save space)

Greaserpirate,
You've made not only a suggestion but one with permissions. That is wonderful. I like the songs as music but I have a few comments about the 3 of them that you mention. I haven't listened to any of the other tracks yet. "Beyond the gates" and "The Frozen Lands" have percussion that might interfere with hearing the weapons fire. "The Lands Beyond Everfree" might be too mellow in the beginning but picks up at the 2 minute mark, later becoming mellow, and after that briefly picking up again. What do you think of these few well-intentioned observations?
Everybody,
I wonder, should we make a stickied "RESOURCE: Music" thread establishing preferred conventions, stylistic guidelines and general tips and tutorials similar to the "RESOURCE: Mapping" one? I would be willing to help with this effort if it is a good idea. I am no expert, but I have a basic interest in and some tools for music engineering.
Cheers

Dratz-_C {l Wrote}: ... I wonder, should we make a stickied "RESOURCE: Music" thread establishing preferred conventions, stylistic guidelines and general tips and tutorials similar to the "RESOURCE: Mapping" one? I would be willing to help with this effort if it is a good idea. I am no expert, but I have a basic interest in and some tools for music engineering ...

Surely a good idea, but let us use my thread at first and let this one for the named relevant topic .
Also thanks to greasepirate, for providing this.