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Author Topic: Considering making a TF2 map  (Read 1240 times)

flabort

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Considering making a TF2 map
« on: August 13, 2015, 02:10:32 am »

A few pages ago in the Games You Wish Existed thread, a conversation about non-ecludian geometry was brought up. But the most important reply was this one:

You could knock up a Source map in Hammer like that pretty quickly. The engine supports it, anyway.

EDIT: With these https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Linked_portal_door
EDIT2: And a demonstration of the kinds of things you could do with them https://youtu.be/_xFbRecjKQA

I learned what the Source SDK package was and how to boot up the Hammer Editor. And I feel confident that I could at the very least attempt to make a map with this; succesfully creating one, that's another matter, but I feel up to the task of trying.

What I'm wondering, for the map I have in mind, is the feature mentioned in that link; can I use the Linked_Portal_Door in TF2 directly, or do I have do some fancy importing thing?

For reference, the map I want to make has the following features:

There is a floating island. Falling off the island means falling into a sky-box and instant death.
The island contains a bunch of debris or tents or outhouses or something as cover while crossing it, but it's fairly open. A few walls here and there and places for defensive positions and aggressive assaults. Basically, a sniper could see from one end of the map to the other, but there's enough cover that anyone, even a heavy, could get from point A to point Sniper without being seen by the sniper, if they used the cover wisely.
On one end of the island is a fortress. It has some outer walls that a scout or rocket-jumper could reach, but no-one else. That wall is near the "ceiling" of the island's "room". It also has some internal rooms, and that is where one team spawns. There's also some external and internal stairs to the roof of the fort, which is where the aformentioned outer walls are accessible from. The walls have a great big gate, and a smaller gate to the left and a hole in them with some rubble to the right; three exits from the fort's outerwalls to the main island.
There are two towers extending from the fort into the "ceiling".
There are two visually similar towers dropping from the "ceiling" at the far end of the island. The towers are upside down, so that the peaks are below the island. There are doors, though, right-side-up in the towers that you can enter. These are Linked_Portal_Doors to what I'll call "Point X".
There is a building, like an outpost station, 2/3rds of the way from the outer wall to the far tower. It also has Linked_Portal_Doors, to "Point Y"
This "Room" of the floating island is cloned and color shifted from R.E.D to B.L.U.
The ceilings of each room is a Linked_Portal_Door leading to the ceiling of the other room. The tower from the castle going into the ceiling? Is the towers coming out of the roof on the other ceiling. (Inspired by the room in the video linked in the quote above where there is deadly goo on the ceiling)
There are four extra rooms that are basically just stairwells. The top of each stairwell is "Point X" and the bottom of each stairwell is "Point Y". Entering the tower on one island, you would go down some stairs and exit out the outpost building on the other island. And same with entering the outpost building, you'd end up at the towers of the other island after going up the stairs. Yes, these stairs fit into an impossible space.
The reason the outer wall is so near the roof is so that it's near the portal. Again, only scouts and soldiers can reach it, and it's just close enough that a properly timed double-jump or rocket-jump could get you through the portal and make you fall to the other side; where you would land near or on the outpost building (And I forget if TF2 has fall damage), if you weren't shot out of the air by snipers.

So it's a mirrored map, in a sense; it has rotational symmetry vertically.

So, to ask again, in order to get Linked_Portal_Doors for this map, do I need to do anything special?

(I can look up uploading it if it works later)
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