Hoooooooooot pockets, indeed. I've been putting some serious hours into the mapping even though my uni workload is fairly heavy at the moment; my hate for the newer BF2 patches has made this possible (haven't played a game of anything in two weeks, and I've barely played at all since the 1.2 patch which arrived many weeks ago). This is probably a blessing. Rejoice.

Anyway, the bases theme is being strengthened and reworked. Some of the newer textures the artists have made resulted in a slightly different theme evolving. Combined with a light blue fog and an environment lighting change, oranges, purples and blues seem to be the order of the day. I'm currently changing the flag room cliffs to be less 'boxed-in' and more natural. A distant fortress overlooking the FR has also appeared in the skybox. I'm trying to make the world appear to be more continuous and far-reaching than fortress-in-a-box syndrome usually suggests. The only problem with this approach is that if you show players all this cool shit, they feel slightly confused or even cheated when they can't reach it. Trying to reach a balance between aesthetics and accessibility is sometimes tough. Example: I've taken the grate off the roof of the bases FR now. It looks, aesthetically, a lot better. Unfortunately there's no longer a visual indication that informs you, the player, that you can't get up there. Ultimately, I believe a better looking FR with a non-visible obstruction is better than an uglier scene with a visible grate. Players will learn that they can't get up there and just have to live with it.

Or they might, as the man at the duck pond said to Rothko, say ,"stop it", and, "this is appalling".

Compromise, sacrifice and balance are common threads of level design, moreso with the introduction of new technologies which in turn make new possibilities. For TFC, most of the time a level designer clipped off part of a map, the lack of possibilities made it implicit that you couldn't proceed anyway. Example: Bases FR in TFC. The fact that you can't get up there and monkey around is readily perceivable due to the .. lack of stuff up there. It was just sky. Want to go hug the sky, Larry? Didn't think so. Now that there's a bunch of stuff up there, it's not so obvious. If people gnash their teeth when they bounce off an invisible ceiling, I may have to reconsider my approach or find a new means of blocking off the ceiling without compromising aesthetics. In most games, you can simply clip stuff off using fences (with an invisible clip brush extending upwards) and nobody can breach these barriers through normal means anyway. In counter-strike, for example, you have to go to extreme lengths on many of the maps (triple boosting or more) to get anywhere near the invisible barriers. Even simple fences require several players to boost up before the clipping becomes obvious. In TF games, players can conc, rocket jump, trimp (and god knows what else) on the vast majority of maps. Natural clipping soon becomes harder to disguise, and in some areas you just have to bite the bullet and accept that players will notice a discrepancy between what they can see and what they can access. Sometimes you can get around it (there doesn't need to be an open topped flag room) but other times you can't (hunted has lots of surrounding areas that are fenced off, push has a fenced off yard). Ultimately it comes down to doing what you feel is best for that particular situation.

The way I'm working the theme is that the flag room is cut into some cliffs and there's also a hill leading up to the skybox fortress which connects into the FR roof. I'm planning on making the roof earthy, so there's a lot of plantlife and things like that taking hold without quite making the used parts of the base appear to be overgrown or dilapidated. I've fleshed out the theme, and I'm currently requesting some props from the artists so I can start adding the final touches. Framerates in pretty much all parts of bases are all very high due to well-optimised visibility and use of func_details (amongst other stuff), so I'm currently not sacrificing much rendering speed for this stuff. The trouble with unearthing a new and better style is that it means the old stuff needs to get reworked. This is both bad and good, but it generally does need to be overhauled to retain a consistent style throughout. I doubt the reconstruction work will be hugely time-consuming.

Anyway, I just thought I'd post some stuff on my mind rather than not post some stuff at all. This ain't rocket science, it's just stuff I'm currently wrestling with.

My map currently weighs 20 to 30 kilos. "That is maybe about as big as two or three squirrels."