: Alright, so I finally tried out the map. It looks
: fantastic, with some minor notes: - What's with the
: books on the floor in the first Halway?
In the original map there's some shreds of paper/debris on the ground there, there's no deco mesh for this, so I went with what I felt was a close enough approximation.
: - The crates with the weird non-marathon symbol are
: distracting. Normally I wouldn't bring this up, except
: the marathon community/purists would probably call it
: blasphemous. I agree that putting something in those
: places is a good thing, but perhaps not using that
: symbol/texture.
Yeah, true. I'll try changing some of the textures on those meshes to see if I can get them to look more like they fit in the environment. I'm skeptical, due to the way texture mapping works on meshes, but we'll see. (I actually interpret it more as a pixellated low-res texture, rather than a symbol of some sort on the boxes.)
: - In the lift room, there's a plume of smoke above one of
: the elevators (I believe), that you can't shoot
: through..I blew up half my health, shooting at the
: switch and have it blow up in the smoke in front of my
: face. Ow.
The room with 7 lifts? I only used smoke in 3 places that I remember -- (1) Under the stairs, in the chamber with the flaming BOB containers, (2) coming the shorted out light in the Red Room, and (3) as steam coming from one of the pipes in the shield-charger room. If there's smoke anywhere else, it probably shouldn't be there.
I had noticed a problem in the 7 lift room where you could "hit" the second (sequentially from where you enter the room) lift as if it were extended to the ceiling, even when it's still on the ground. However, I haven't experienced this in awhile (not since I set the keys on those movers). It seems weird to me though, since if you're shooting from the 4th lift, you certainly shouldn't be having the grenades blowing up in your face if they're hitting the 2nd lift, or even the 3rd. Can you try to take a screenshot of the location?
: - All the big rooms (the first large room with all the
: aliens, the elevator room, the large room with the
: lift at the end, and the other where you have to step
: off the lift then shoot the switch, and climb on each
: elevator in succession), all have parts that make my
: computer c r a w l. I don't know if this is just my
: computer, or too much stuff going on, but if this can
: be optimized/reduced in some way (i.e. find some
: artistic middle ground), that would probably be
: excellent.
Most of the rooms are pretty good... Under 200 polys. The 7 Lift room does hit 400 polys when you first enter it, which is a bit high, but not unheard of for UT levels released two or three years after the game.
: - I'm assuming the terminal in the last big room after
: the elevators should teleport you to the next level?
: (it's been a while 
)
Correct, I just don't know how to do that, and don't have a map to link it to in any case.
As an aside -- Is there any way to do bold text in the terminals? You can see that I tried #b, but unfortunately that didn't work.
: - Most of the places where you used some UT textures work
: really well, just be careful to not place this in ways
: that would make the player think they're anything more
: than just decor. There's a few minor areas that aren't
: really an issue. I'm mostly saying in this as
: something to keep in mind for future maps.
I guess you're referring to the overhanging monitors, yeah, I know what you mean. They strike me as the kind of thing that might be able to be interacted with -- I might add an actionkeytrigger for them and give them a sound effect that plays if you hit them, or something. (I did this for most of the additional decorations, such as doors and such that you can't open, to try and give some indication to the player "Don't waste your time trying to get inside here")
: With all that said, this map looks excellent and if you
: even made these adjustments I'd say call it done!
: Thanks a lot. Hopefully someone else will get a chance
: to give this a whirl and give you some comments, BUT
: if they don't, just finsh it up, call it done, send it
: in, and move onto the next one. The worst thing would
: be to get bogged down waiting for stuff 
.
Thanks a lot. I know there are still some things to be accomplished there, but I havent been holding up work on other things.
Couch Fishing is about 30-40% finished right now. That level's basically broken into two parts: 3 large rooms, and lots of corridors. I'm almost done with the corridors, which really take a disproportionate amount of time due to working in the confined space. After I finish the 3 larger rooms, which should be pretty fast, I'll be about 80% done, then place the creatures, zone a bit, set up the 2-3 switches and I'm basically done.
