More maps, rotation, automatic downloads...
Magneto
Join Date: 2010-12-22 Member: 75856Members
Join Date: 2010-12-22 Member: 75856Members
When will we see these basic features added?
I hate to make one of these threads but i honestly think it's getting on a bit now and there's little sign of it improving any time soon, which is odd considering these things are quite important to keeping a game feeling fresh and interesting, really if i wasn't for the community we would still be stuck playing the same two old maps, when we got a large quality map like summit it was a great change, however as good as it is, playing the same map 24/7 gets old after a few months, surely it's time to let the community push out their maps on their own if we're not getting anything official for a long time to come?
I hate to make one of these threads but i honestly think it's getting on a bit now and there's little sign of it improving any time soon, which is odd considering these things are quite important to keeping a game feeling fresh and interesting, really if i wasn't for the community we would still be stuck playing the same two old maps, when we got a large quality map like summit it was a great change, however as good as it is, playing the same map 24/7 gets old after a few months, surely it's time to let the community push out their maps on their own if we're not getting anything official for a long time to come?
Comments
Not automatic, but easy to work around.
Triad has gotten quite a bit of love.
I hope we get a mapcycle when a good map is coming, now it's not really an issue since there is only one decent map, but if more arrive...
Actually Alien Swarm does have an automatic map pack tool. It's not integrated into the game though, so you'll have to launch it - get the map packs you want and then launch the game.
The tool is community driven though, but it worked very well the last time I played. Any time a map pack got an update and uploaded to the repository the program would notify you that this and that map pack was updated and ask if you wanted to update to the latest version.
The reason it asked was because not everyone was using this approach and might still have servers up with the old version of the map pack.
The reason it died was mostly because people don't want to do anything themselves - so when they had played the map that was shipped with the game they didn't want to make their own maps and just left.
Also, Russians. Damned Russians(no offence) invaded the game and couldn't talk a lick of English. This forced teamplay out the window, and in a teamplay based game that's pretty much the end of it.
Edit:
I'm not saying the community driven program is the way to go - but it has been done before, so why not.
Personally I would OFC prefer a built in map downloader, but that could be far, far away.
+1 to map download/rotation
There are also some pretty good community maps that I think would get some play if map download we're enabled (ns2_triad, for example). Sadly though, there seems to be more WIP than released maps in the mapping section right now.
Rotation, map download, etc.....is considered be in-the-works. After all, this is beta people.
+1 map rotation, automatic downloads
for all i care not now, not even soon but PLEASE have an ingame downloader for maps, i have hated this for l4d and l4d2 (although understandable there as campaigns are huge as f*ck) while it works so well in games like killingfloor, counterstrike, cs:s,...
and preferably really high quality community maps should be added to the game via update to both client and server.
for the rest servers should decide what maps they run besides that although i would prefer voting then like in killingfloor (and disabling maps for x rounds after it has been played)
Not automatic, but easy to work around.
Triad has gotten quite a bit of love.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's great if a server admin wants to run community maps but as you probably know not many players take the time to download and add them, so i think at this stage of development it would be a good idea to get these features in, better now rather than later as we'll continue to see more and more maps appearing but not getting played, it would sort out the lack of maps issue once and for all.
The tool is community driven though, but it worked very well the last time I played. Any time a map pack got an update and uploaded to the repository the program would notify you that this and that map pack was updated and ask if you wanted to update to the latest version.
The reason it asked was because not everyone was using this approach and might still have servers up with the old version of the map pack.
The reason it died was mostly because people don't want to do anything themselves - so when they had played the map that was shipped with the game they didn't want to make their own maps and just left.
Also, Russians. Damned Russians(no offence) invaded the game and couldn't talk a lick of English. This forced teamplay out the window, and in a teamplay based game that's pretty much the end of it.
Edit:
I'm not saying the community driven program is the way to go - but it has been done before, so why not.
Personally I would OFC prefer a built in map downloader, but that could be far, far away.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Which is basicly exactly my point. "It dies because people were to lazy...", yes people ARE lazy, we can't fix that but we can add an ingame download, then players can be lazy
good :)
Why was this possible? Because nobody had to go to the forum to download and install it.
My map ns2_triad, was seen in NS2HD and made ​​many people interested in downloading it and test it, only 2 servers up and that was it.
Thanks to the notes left by players who come alone to see it and give me a hand, I've improved a lot and saw things with the help of the community.
Automatically download the map is necessary because many people do not bother to go through the forum and manually do it.
We must be realistic there are things more important to fix in the game but it would be helpful for mappers have that tool.
ns2_summit is a great map, very colorful and beautiful architecture, made ​​it official, so it is the most played by how well built it is, but after "formalize" many vercion and modifications appeared to improve team play.
Why was this possible? Because nobody had to go to the forum to download and install it.
My map ns2_triad, was seen in NS2HD and made ​​many people interested in downloading it and test it, only 2 servers up and that was it.
Thanks to the notes left by players who come alone to see it and give me a hand, I've improved a lot and saw things with the help of the community.
Automatically download the map is necessary because many people do not bother to go through the forum and manually do it.
We must be realistic there are things more important to fix in the game but it would be helpful for mappers have that tool.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Alex, as much as I love the map, is it just not able to be heavily played. The largest issue is the fact that you can still easily build outside the map and exploit it. Until that is 100% fixed (like summit), the map just can't be played :(
All in time my friends, just wait.
can somebody explain me. what is the (big) deal with automatic downloads including? i assume that its not a big deal on the coding side, but im no programmer, so i cant say that for sure.
is it because uwe doesnt want to stress the server more? so the server performance does not suffer under map downloads?
if so, cant somebody host a server just for map downloads. so if someone connects to a server, your map download request is send to another server?
im such a newbie on things like that, so, can somebody explain to me if this is a difficult task?
maps like triad and descent needs to be tested and tweaked. automatic map downloads would help a lot
sincerely Trainee
More people play custom maps --> more feedback --> better map --> better game.
Like vizionz says: too many exploiting.
Only playtesting can reveal how creative players can be to exploit bugs in the map.
This game really needs an autodownloader, now. There are more then 3 custom maps coming close to a final version.
There is no need for maprotation at the moment since the only viable map atm is Summit.
What makes you want to say this kind of statements?
What's so terribly wrong with for example Triad, Turtle and Descent that makes them unviable maps?
Even if they were not viable for some reason map rotation would help a lot to test and get feedback about these maps. It is very hard to get motivated on creating new maps and developing them further because of the lack of map rotation. I feel that the lack of map rotation has killed the interest of many mappers already. The graveyard of maps is just getting bigger every month.
It might be a little more than that. Right now things probably aren't shutting down very gracefully, instead Windows cleans up the server's mess when it is killed. If map-rotation is put in, server-uptimes will become drastically longer, and more importantly maps will have to be loaded and unloaded without memory-leaking and such going on (which like I said is currently 'fixed' by letting Windows deal with it).
Also, the Lua-environment isn't destroyed throughout the various maps (at least this was told to me when I asked, and I'm kinda banking on it now, so if Max happens to be reading...), thus it too needs to clean-up after itself, and be able to re-initialize without issues.
What's so terribly wrong with for example Triad, Turtle and Descent that makes them unviable maps?
Even if they were not viable for some reason map rotation would help a lot to test and get feedback about these maps. It is very hard to get motivated on creating new maps and developing them further because of the lack of map rotation. I feel that the lack of map rotation has killed the interest of many mappers already. The graveyard of maps is just getting bigger every month.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Also, map rotations without a server map download option would be a bit of a disaster. For example, if the server changes to triad, but most don't have triad installed, then you've basically just kicked most of the players.
and it'll be using http to download from, right? meaning not hosted from the server? (That would bog down the server even more, it doesnt need that)