· The skull
generator in Harvester tosses skulls about it to a maximum distance
of 96 units. The id map designers usually allowed for a drop radius
of 104 to 128 units as a minimum. As a rule, the generator should
drop skulls only in a places accessible to the players. Skulls
should not drop out into death fog or the void.
· Where you place
the persistent team power-ups is really more a matter of personal
style than a fixed requirement. Generally speaking, we found having
all or most of them in easy view of the initial start positions was
a good thing. In some cases, we found that placing the scout in a
contested area made for interesting game challenges.
· It is not
necessary to put every team power-up on every map. If a team
power-up would be overpowering on a map, leave it out. If you study
the id team maps, you’ll note that not every map has every power
up. In a small map, the scout can be unreasonable. In a map where
the base is easily attacked and overwhelmed, the guard can unbalance
things. In a map where the base is easily defended by snipers, the
doubler is powerful.
· For One Flag CTF,
the flag should be placed in an area that is roughly equidistant
from both bases and can be easily reached by players from either
team.
· The same (as
above) is true for Harvester.
· You don’t have
to place the white flag and the Harvester skull generator in the
same place in the map.
· Don’t feel
obligated to put the CTF flag bases, the skull receptacles, and the
Overload skull obelisk in the exact same location in the bases. Just
remember to mark gametypes correctly.
· Don’t include a
kamikaze in a map where players are unlikely to ever see the full
effect of the explosion.
· The personal
teleporter entity takes the player to a deathmatch spawn. That’s
how we restricted where the player teleported to in some maps.
· When converting
Q3A CTF maps with small base areas around their flags will probably
need to have their bases enlarged to accommodate the Overload skull
obelisk.
· OVERLOAD: When
designing the base for the placement of the skull obelisk, don’t
make it easy for attackers to shoot the obelisk from protected
locations.
· FLOOR ARROWS: The
graphic arrows were added to map floors to help the players find
their ways through potentially confusing arenas and to give the
player a sense of how close to the flag room he or she might be. The
rule of thumb was that the greater the distance to the flag, the
more stripes or bars would follow the arrow. Exact style of arrow
use varied from mapper to mapper. Study the individual maps to
determine which works best for your own map. The floor arrows act
like decals (if you ever built plastic model kits, these are the
little graphic things that you soaked in water and then stuck on the
surfaces of the model). The images will appear to be a part of the
surface upon which they rest. For the arrows, you will want to build
them as nodraw brushes of the proper dimension with a surface raised
about 2 units above the floor or wall. For the arrow, use
missionpack/proto2/bluea_dcl for the blue arrows and missionpack/proto2/reda_dcl
for the red. You may have to scale and rotate the texture to get
what you want. For more than three trailing bars, add additional
decals and arrange to suit.