Join the official MS:C Mapping team!

[evilsquirrel]

Join the official Mapping team!

The official mapping team, headed by myself, is now open for recruitment. We are looking for anyone with experience and/or the willingness to learn new mapping techniques (or learning mapping in general).

We are also looking for some dedicated testers, you will need to understand the current balance issues in the game – as we will be rebalancing things [vaguely] back to the original MS:C 1.0 release. And yes that means I’m hitting chapels rats/boars so hard with nerf that Hasbro might sue us.

The primary projects that the mapping team will be focusing on are as follows…

The revamping & Rebalancing of ALL maps: Thothie was not nearly as strict with balancing as he should’ve been, thusly – our first order of business will be to run through each map with the intended level of character to test it against other similarly leveled maps. Any bugs/exploits/skywalking/etc should be addressed IMMEDIATELY, through a PM to me. The other things we will be testing for are loot and XP in the map, if you don’t think a monster is worth how much XP it gives (small green spiders/hungry skeletons) it should be reported to me for examination. If you think a monster should be worth more exp than it gives, it should also be submitted to me for examination. The loot would be too difficult to test solely on maps, due to randomization – but if you notice anything that shouldn’t be where it is…or a chest that is simply worthless, bring it to the attention of me, MiB, or Jelly.

Deralia: Jewel of the human world: The current version of this map is a sad, laggy excuse for what this city should’ve been… I think you’ll all agree with me when I say it needs remade. The first step will be dividing the city into “Districts”, and moving the tower of deralia to the skybox, as there is no possible way to put it inside one of these maps without that map dying to lag (also it was much bigger in the lore, iirc). It may be possible to have a map where the player can go inside the tower of deralia, but you will not see it from the outside (half life just doesn’t work that way). The districts I’ve been considering are as follows:

The Market
The Docks
The Guilds district
The Temple of Torkalath (pending revised lore?)

I’ve yet to see the “hall of deralia” map, so I’ve no idea if we can (or will) use it in here.

Adding Quest support: It will be the mapping teams responsibility to add any quest-specific areas, monster spawns, or map-specific events (such as func_trains, env_ effects, etc.). You will be required to work with the scripting team to bring full functionality to these quests.




These are the current main projects we’re looking at, if we have time before release we will look at remaking other maps, or pick from the concepts already listed in the path to “endgame”.


Current team
Evilsquirrel
Joe!
AmIAnnoyingNow
J
Dridje
CSS
Jester

To join, Contact me via PM.

 

[tehrilez]

i hope you have the source files for every single one of these maps if you plan on redoing them all

 

[Thothie]

Blah, I dunno why’d you waste time rebuilding Deralia (when you could say, make Kray Eldorad), but you could put the tower to one side of the map or in a corner, and it’d be fine. It’s laggy, but there’s no battles there, tis why the old devs didn’t care.

We’ve no source for Deralia by the way (or ms_quest – and I really don’t know why’d you waste time remaking that POS when there’s so many lore-oriented areas to be completed.)

There’s lots and lots of blue areas on the betamap – even if you do destroy the game and start over, it seems you’d be much better off expanding the world than rebuilding maps that function. (Although I’m all for map revision/rebalancing, just not so much rebuilding.)

On the quest thing though…

One of my crazier plans was randomly generated quests. It’d involve sticking area brushes, or a special script on maps in certain areas, and NPC’s would pick from a bunch of random combinations like “Go to X map, find and defeat a monster named X return item X to me, and I’ll give you item X.” or simply "Find hidden item X in area X" – then if a player entered a map with the proper quest tag, the script would generate the special quest monster with/or special quest item in that area. Basically send people all over the world, and generate these special monsters and rewards based on the player’s level. (You would have to rig it so players could only ask the same NPC for quests so many times a day, to prevent them from just returning to the NPC until he offered the item they wanted though.)

 

[evilsquirrel]

Blah, I dunno why’d you waste time rebuilding Deralia (when you could say, make Kray Eldorad), but you could put the tower to one side of the map or in a corner, and it’d be fine. It’s laggy, but there’s no battles there, tis why the old devs didn’t care.

Well, I do care about certain people barely even being able to play the map because its so laggy. I also care that it is eternally night there, though it is under no curse. In addition, its a sad sorry excuse for "The jewel of the human world" as described by the lore - I have no use for its source.

...As for ms_quest, that's likely not one getting rebuilt by someone with actual experience - more as a learning experience for new mappers wanting something to try out, since I'm accepting anyone who wants to try.

There’s lots and lots of blue areas on the betamap – even if you do destroy the game and start over, it seems you’d be much better off expanding the world than rebuilding maps that function. (Although I’m all for map revision/rebalancing, just not so much rebuilding.)

These are the current main projects we’re looking at, if we have time before release we will look at remaking other maps, or pick from the concepts already listed in the path to “endgame”.

One of my crazier plans was randomly generated quests. It’d involve sticking area brushes, or a special script on maps in certain areas, and NPC’s would pick from a bunch of random combinations like “Go to X map, find and defeat a monster named X return item X to me, and I’ll give you item X.” or simply "Find hidden item X in area X" – then if a player entered a map with the proper quest tag, the script would generate the special quest monster with/or special quest item in that area. Basically send people all over the world, and generate these special monsters and rewards based on the player’s level. (You would have to rig it so players could only ask the same NPC for quests so many times a day, to prevent them from just returning to the NPC until he offered the item they wanted though.)

A) People do not, contrary to your belief, enjoy being sent around the world all willy-nilly... It can be quite a pain to get the entire server to go along with you for your random-ass journey that takes them far away from areas where they want to train, or get items.

B) We do not have a way to "create" monster (and especially item) scripts on the fly, during gameplay... and if we did, it would be horribly difficult to balance these quests and thier rewards out.

C) We also do not have a way to put "per day" limiters on things like this... I'm pretty sure this idea actually involves MORE work than the other ideas you complain about being "ambitious"...

 

[Glorfindel]

Evil, there's no need to be so confrontational :X It seems odd telling thothie what is possible and what isn't...considering...oh...I don't know...he may have been one of the sole people working on the game the past few years?

For one thing, I know of no one who has ever had problems with Deralia, and if they did, wouldn't it seem more reasonable that maybe they should get a better computer?

And I'm sure if someone can script a per-gauntlet run limiter on Maldora that they can script a per-day limiter, it would simply have to look to see if its the same day on FN >_>.

 

[evilsquirrel]

Not trying to be confrontational, merely pointing out some flaws in his reasoning.

And I'm sure if someone can script a per-gauntlet run limiter on Maldora that they can script a per-day limiter, it would simply have to look to see if its the same day on FN >_>.

The problem is, there's no way for the character file to save what day it did what right now - and adding such a system would increase character size dramatically, especially in the case of randomized quests...

___

And ...You're also forgetting that MiB has been poking around the code for quite a while, and has a fairly firm grasp of what he can accomplish - which is what we're going to get. I've been listening to him, which is where I get my info on code/script related things >_>



edit: whoops, forgot to address deralia...

FER is an example, and even my computer has issues with it on occasion. In anycase, its always been a map I was rather disappointed with - and many others are aswell, so whenever I've mentioned this project people go "YAY". Unimpressive currently + I want it redone + Community in general wants it redone = It should get redone.

 

[FER]

I really like that idea about random generated quests as thothie pointed.

 

[AmIAnnoyingNow]

I will join said mapping team, though i currently wish to do khazorant_stronghold before i start anything new, so i'll only be available for the lighter jobs until i get around to actually mapping it. (It's on paper, but not a map yet)