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Part II of ...
After that monster session locked up in Tartarus with the programmers from hell, I needed a break before delving into the wonderful world of the TF2 maps. Since I wasn't allowed to leave the Valve building without clearance (and getting a stamp on the back of my hand so I could re-enter that day without having to pay admission again), I resigned myself to a walk around the facility, thinking that I might get lucky enough to happen upon an awkward situation in the boss' office, or perhaps glean some interesting information that I could sell to rival software developers.
I came across a lot of things that were interesting, but I will leave out because they don't deal with TF2 (to misquote Sherlock Holmes, "The world is not ready for such tales"). I did, however, happen to be strolling down one of many office-lined corridors and came upon a staff meeting where many balding and cigar-chewing suits discussed what I presumed to be earthshaking corporate decisions. The bodies that presumably once wore those suits were tied up in the corner. Eager to overhear a valuable phrase or two, I listened intently for several minutes, until ...
... until I got tired of straining my ears for nothing more than a syllable here or there, so I got up and returned to the Gulag so I could get the dirt on some of the contracted maps. The expanded ones, too.
I had a detailed run-through with Ian (the behavioral psychiatrist examined him and allowed him to rejoin the compound with the others), so there were about fifty pages of notes on the topic. Unfortunately, they all got jumbled up on the flight home. I tried to reconstruct them as best as I could, but there might be some mistakes in there somewhere. I slapped this together as quickly as possible, since I had no time to have anyone else proofread it. I've divided it up by map author.
| Previous Maps: | Half of 2fort32, a real nice section on another one, stunning wall in some lesser known map, and allegedly completed a whole one by himself, but it is an unconfirmed rumor |
| Reason for taking up Mapmaking: | "I was rocketing way up the professional croquet circuit, but broke my only mallet one day and had to find something else to do." |
Tyr is the co-creator of one of the greatest underplayed TF maps ever -- 2fort32. Obviously, TFS was eager to snap him up from the very beginning. He's been working on his map since God knows when, but still isn't finished. It's a very complicated map.
So complicated, in fact, that he has been doing some additional work in order to make the map accessible to the ordinary player. "I took advantage of the extremly flexible and extensive mapC within the game and played around with it. Eventually I came up with one bloomer of an idea -- use 'homing pigeons' to guide the players throughout the map. I took a genetic sequencing course at the local community college, extracted the pertinent DNA from homing pigeon chromosomes, spliced it into the map code, toyed around with the entities, and did a little work with the AI so that not only will the pigeons take you exactly where you need to go, but try to shake the opponents homing pigeons that are trying to find you. Of course, they're extremely realistic -- their droppings are deadly accurate and if you've upgraded your team's pigeon high enough, they will even squirt one in your opponent's eye. We now have a very effective way to show players around the map as well as provide an alternative to the regular shoot-em-up style game."
Naturally, when the "pigeons" become superfluous, they can be killed with any weapon in the game.
I found this new concept in multiplayer gaming quite stimulating; surely this will be one of the major features which attracts new players. Shooting pigeons in the middle of a battle? Things are slow, need something to do? HECK yeah! Bye bye, Deer Hunter, hello Team Fortress 2! It's not a bad idea actually, considering how Deer Hunter is selling nowadays ...
As far as the map itself, I didn't see much since the homing function wasn't fully operational yet. It was a city map, hence the pigeons (as opposed to, say, a farm map using dogs abandoned by their owners that would trek hundreds of miles to return home only to get thrown in a pond with a cinderblock tied around their neck). From what I was told, I deduced that it was a terrorist-based map, centered around the IRA taking the head of Chrysler Corporation hostage for not exporting the new and improved "Cheap Imitation of the Overpriced Town & Country Minivan with Steering Wheel on Right Side" to Ireland. Sounds like a barrel of monkeys; we all know what kind of a party those Irish throw when they break out the AK-47s and submachineguns, don't we?
| Previous Maps: | BaM, Ironfort, EMP, Bases, Braveheart |
| Reason for taking up Mapmaking: | "Just my way of becoming a useless member of society. Mektoub -- it is written." |
Spoken with the fatalism of a true Eastern philosopher. They've rubbed off on him, I guess.
Robin revealed in the interview here at the Citadel that Midori was working on several different styles of maps. The most impressive was the base destruction map -- the residents of a small mountain community band together to torch the HQ of the evil oil drilling corporation that's trying to intimidate them off their property, all the while trying to avoid elk and moose in the midst of mating season; the residents are armed with Molotov cocktails and barrels of black powder along with their usual stock of rifles, traps, and animal skins. The finale on this map is spectacular!
Continuing with the theme first brought forth in the map Braveheart, in another of his maps we are taken to the moors of moden-day Scotland where sheep herders come to blows with a large American corporation wanting to buy up their land for cattle grazing, in order to support the huge McDonald's boom in rural Great Britain. Nothing much to say about this one.
The scenery in this map was incredibly detailed and realistic. The bogs have pockets of noxious gases that shoot high into the air at random intervals, creating a solemn background for the fighting. There are special areas where rocket infantry (don't ask where they get the rockets ... or the infantry, for that matter) can hole up and launch from safe areas; if they run out of ammo, they can search in the swamps for animal bones, chip them into long, thin shards on a nearby boulder, and create makeshift nail grenades (using the "macguyver" command).
And are you noticing a theme here? Big, evil corporation trying to take over the innocent, simple folk who just want to be left alone to live their lives as they see fit ... makes you wonder if TFS isn't just a little bitter about getting run over by the Valve juggernaut.
Naw.
| Previous Maps: | Canalzone (Ramirez did .bsp, Hellface helped revise the entities later), rock1 and 2, Hunted, town4, all the Doom2 levels, and episode 3 of Quake. |
| Reason for taking up Mapmaking: | Ramirez: "I played single player Quake a lot, but
could never find any secrets; I gave up on it and decided to make my own
maps so I could always be the first to know where to get the red blast
armor or megahealth." Matt: "I was getting too good at kickboxing, so in order to give my opponents a chance, I would sit for huge stretches in front of the computer instead of sparring and working out at the gym." |
Naturally, I had high expectations for this map, supposedly a beefier version of the original classic, Canalzone (what would that map have been like if Matt had been a mapmaker back then? Say that five times fast). Seeing Ramirez potter around in the much more flexible environment of the TF2 map code is something not to be missed. Unfortunately, they took a chance and departed from the "defeat the evil corporation against all odds" theme. It was tried and true, but they decided to forge ahead (sideways, in this case) and do something totally different. NOW how are we going to get the thousands of theme clones that kept TF alive for as long as they did?? Hmmm?? Answer me!
Think Canalzone, but instead of a peaceful Venetian canals, a boiling cauldron of melted rock and sediment. Think platforms floating around in midair. Think hwguys everywhere. Think spires with command points on top rising out of the lava. Think Pele. Most of all, think David Sawyer knocked unconscious, slumped in the corner of a room, and Hellface grinning demonically -- no pun intended -- as he completes the map entirely by himself. I was utterly shocked; not at the map itself, but at the fact they're splitting the booty 50 / 50 (or so I assume). Come to think of it, the map really is pretty good ... only that most games will end in negative frags (lava deaths), and every 183 seconds a stylized ASCII "(V)" gets displayed in all the windows on your HUD.
Don't ask me. This is Matt we're talking about, remember?
Like I said before, this new map is command-point oriented. It's in a rain forest setting, actually, much like the wilderness of the volcanic Hawaiian islands. This time, a group of Marines has decided to go Commie and take on the entire US Armed Forces by attempting to sieze the island of Kuale-Beppo -- except that the island is so remote that it's days before any reinforcements will arrive. Can you take control of the most important points on the island (phone, electricity, Mr. Goodcents) before they can, or will these evil Red bastards fulfill their dastardly plans and wrap you in a plaster caster? Will democracy triumph over socialism, or can you just not keep those pinkos down? Will two men, one from each side, strip down and duel to the death using quarterstaffs (type "indianajones" at the vote prompt), or will the two last men put a hollow point through each other's skull so the whole thing starts over again? It's up to you and your team.
Well, that was as far as I got before curfew, so we had to quit then. I organized my notes, submitted them to Customs (that's what the skinny guy in uniform calls himself), and got a six inch "APPROVED" stamp on each page, something which made going over them later a mite difficult. I did manage, though, and as you can see, ended up with quite the review, covering less than a third of the maps which will be included in the game. They said to tease you, so I teased.
With more than the usual deftness I have avoided the topic of the game itself almost entirely during this update. Please accept my heartiest congratulations, because DAMMIT I'm not going to go through this hell again for a long time!
Signing off ...
Next time we'll be doing the Q&A, so please send any questions you may have to [email protected] !