Ravenfield

Ravenfield

Midtown
Misc. Criticisms
Alrighty, so first off, let me give you some general editor tips that will help you going forward: For the placement of buildings you have grid snap and rotation-by-numbers at your disposal. Trigger grid snap by holding shift when moving one or several objects at once. You can change the size of the grid to pretty much any value in the editor settings, i think it defaults to 1m. When rotating objects, it helps to manually input a right-angle value (90˚, 180˚, 270˚, 0˚) on various axis, so that your big concrete walls dont look crooked.

Be warned that if you select one of your buildings and move them with grid snap, the alignment of their objects might get all messed up, especially if they're not all at perfect right angles already. But by using these techniques, you will be able to put together some very clean geometric environments.

Also, placing an Infantry pathfinding box over the whole map with a Cell size of 0.1 and character radius of 0.4 will render all outpost towers and tight spaces accessible to bots, in case you encountered that problem while testing.

Now, onto my first criticism: Flag placement.
First, i think there are far too many flags for such a modest size of map. Second, i think that most of them are way to close to one another. And third, the Neighbours are way too indiscriminate.

Neighbours are meant to designate which flags you want to be attacked in sequence. Ideally, in your case, you should not have the red team base attacking the rearmost flag in the training area, because there is a risk that the center flag, or that any other flag that they will be passing through, could be hostile. No matter the kind of map, neighbours should never be set up to allow for this sort of airheaded bot behaviour.

Now, say you set up neighbours in a more sensible fasion: say the Red base can only travel to/from the flag in front of it, which can in turn only travel to/from the outpost flag infront if *it*, which can in turn chose to travel between canal, centre, or training flags, (and etcetera etcetera for the rest of the map). You might notice that, with the reds holding the outpost tower flag in front of the centre, there will probably never be any fighting taking place behind them during a normal match.

This brings me to my next issue, that there are too many redundant flags. 15 is alot, you can easily halve that number and still have every area of the map be active. In the case of the red and blue roads, One flag at each end might just be enough. The canal area can keep all of it's flags, since that little U-shaped area makes for two distinct lanes of combat, potentially, and because all 3 of those flags are in very different areas.

The training area though, that is a nightmare. One flag, i say, that's all you need in that tiny dense little area, not 5. The other reason to not have so many flags is their proximity to one another. Because of the way Ravenfield matches are structured; it's best not to use flags as "go here now" waypoints or breadcrumbs for bots. A flag works best as a self-contained miniature Base, complete with a safe corner for spawnpoints, and some minimal form of defensive perimeter, so you can actually hang around it without being in the open. For this reason, the blue-sided fort flags are kinda awkward to play around. For the same reason, the flags in training are chaos. Have 1 flag there, let the rear of the area be for safe respawns, have the front of the area be the defensive perimeter, and you'll have less random chaos, more controlled, tactical battles.


Next point: Object count.
My computer is whimpier than average, so it lags more than the average machine. If you are experiencing lag too, or want weaker computers to handle this map, consider reducing the number of objects. At least 600 sandbags are being used on the training areas back wall alone, that really is a bit of a waste of processing power considering you cant even really see those bags' details in the shade. The sandbag walls that are used elsewhere are also quite superfluous. Try scaling one sandbag up 2 or 3 times its height and width, you'll find that it does the same job as like 6 or 8 smaller ones (though may try to shoot through the gaps in the object, so you may want to layer them or something.)

Windows are less of an issue, but it's still much tidier to delete any windows that are not visible to the player.

aaaand i think that's all of the stuff i had to say. I really like the power lines, though they do appear a bit more frequently that posts do in real life. I also like the detail in the training area, especially those little tables and chairs! The whole maps has a pretty nice consistent feel to it, it just needs a little bit more of a strategic layout to really shine. At least, that's what i think. Nice job with this one.