Design Tips and Suggestions

> > · 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.

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