SC 1 Ability of Map creation
If anyone has made a map in StarCraft 1 you will understand my pain for NS2. I want to make this a thing, the maps are made from top down anyways, You could make major rooms simple, have the entrances as middle placements so long esclators and small level of stairs are made. Have textures placed randomly and this will make many new maps made. We're looking for quantity not quality!
Comments
I think you will find this opinion to not be very popular here.
I'll be the first to mention it. I don't want a ton of bad maps out there. I don't think they need to be as quality as decent, docking, or refinery though. Those maps are pretty, and I enjoy it, but it is not necessary.
This is a shitty generalization - crappy combat maps do not get much play over the long run. There are a lot of combat maps getting no play now, but part of the problem is the lack of quality maps. Some servers in order to keep play fresh add new maps to the rotation despite their playability. The exception to that are fun maps like spacejump which are intentionally lacking quality visuals for the sake of game play, though they should never be in rotation in my opinion (unless 'fun map' server).
Some of the early non-official combat maps were very basic geometry and bases - which you've likely never played for a reason, but is what you would get with top down mapping.
At the cost of vertical detail which is so crucial to normal gameplay? "textures placed randomly" - seriously? I've seen maps like this, they don't get played multiple times.
In reality grayboxing a map is pretty easy - especially when you ignore any vertical change or depth of rooms. If you're serious about it just use the rectangle and line tool, sketch the layout and keep geo clean (welding vertices and removing extraneous lines separating 'rooms'), and extrude them all at once - poof a graybox completely lacking vertical variance.
I still think completely ignoring an axis will only create more long term work.
Creating SC1 maps is what got me into mapping in the first place, but I just don't think this is the right approach for NS.
Granted, ns2_honorguard also exists and was played in the custom map cup (though not since). Its simply much easier to make a combat map than NS2 map, so there typically is a trend towards 'quantity over quality'.
Only quality maps will be vetted, and therefore played, if you wanted to do small tweaks afterwards we can use the existing tools. I'm not saying just 1 layer maps. Being able to build additional layers into rooms shouldn't be too difficult. As it is right now the majority if maps consist of 1-2 layers per room.
I'm sure you could have some kind of layer system implemented in the commander interface. But my guess is the general consensus on that is, to avoid due to adding an unnecessary part, which mostly gets in the way of gameplay. Not even mentioning that it would make map balancing take even more work and as such even harder than it already is.
Did you accidentally paste that email in there?