So, the beta testing of ctf6 has gotten some speed now, something which has caused long discussions and bikeshedding about how to do competitive maps. Instead of literally wasting hours explaining things to people who aren't really that interested in listening anyway, I'm gonna explain some of the less liked things about ctf6 here, to clear things up.

Let's start off with a simple, but very adequate question:

Why is ctf6 being made?

The answer to this isn't as simple as one would have hoped and wished. First and foremost, it's quite important to stress that ctf6 is meant to be a competitive map. It's supposed to be a map for both 5on5 and 6on6 cw's and cap games. With that said, ctf6 is not an alternative to ctf2. Rather, it's an complement to ctf2. For once, Wikipedia has a simple and great explanation for a word everyone might not understand the true meaning to:

In many different fields, the complement of X is something that together with X makes a complete whole—something that supplies what X lacks.

 

ctf2 is a great map. Why am I emphasizing the fact that ctf2 is a map? Because it's something people doesn't seem to understand. ctf2 is a great map, it isn't a great game, or even a great gametype. ctf2 does not show every aspect of Teeworlds. Teeworlds owes much to the classic multiplayer games Quake and Unreal Tournament, and it's good to draw parallels to those games when you think about Teeworlds. (Someone once said that "Soldat" is like "2D Counter-strike" and "Teeworlds" is like "2D Quake", I can't agree more.)

Anyway, if you check how top-level gameplay works in Quake tournaments, you will see that they aren't run on only one map, simply because one map can't alone show all aspects of what should compose a good team. The very same applies to Teeworlds: only ctf2 can't show which team is the best at Teeworlds, it can show who is best at ctf2. And that's why ctf6 is being made.

This smoothly takes us to the following bold statement:

ctf6 isn't ctf2.

This should be pretty obvious to anyone able to comprehend basic reading skills, but it seems to need a lot of stress. There have been several community projects to find an alternative to ctf2: ctf_lava and ctf_anubis are two well-known. With all due respect to the mappers here, who have done good work on those maps, they are alternatives to ctf2. As I've already pointed out, ctf6 isn't an alternative to ctf2, but instead an complement. ctf_lava and ctf_anubis are both very similar to ctf2 in a number of different ways: They are both U-shapes with open middles and similar amounts of pickups. This could lead one to think that's the only way to make 5on5/6on6 ctf maps, especially if you are one of the players which are part of the ctf2 community.

Here, I'm gonna be a little elitist and say I have a big advantage: As some of you might know, I'm an avid survival lover, and was a part of that part of the Teeworlds community for a long period before partly going over to ctf. And, because of that, I know that Teeworlds isn't only ctf2. With that said, ctf6 isn't made with survival gameplay in mind or with any thought of emulating survival, so you can calm down. What I'm talking about now is simply the fact that I know for sure that there are other ways to play Teeworlds 5on5 with vanilla gameplay than ctf2.

The problem with this is that because ctf6 is different, it takes a while to get used to some things. One of the most controversal aspects of ctf6 is of course the very choked middle.

Actually, I'm gonna go as far as giving it a bold, underlined headline:

The middle.

The amount of whining about the fact that ctf6 has a choke in the middle is beyond what I could ever imagine, and I'm the guy who made ctf5, so I've heard quite some whining, mind you. What's the problem here is that people tend to think in a very small scope, and not see the middle as part of a whole. Firstly, there's a fixation to numbers. Mapping doesn't work the way that two 6-tile high corridors equal one 12-tile high corridor. defending a 12-tile high corridor is close to impossible if the opponents are coming with just a little speed. Funnily enough, speed is another important aspect. ctf6 is a fast map, and it's getting faster for every revision as we're trying to cut annoying tiles to make it as smooth as possible. On the final map, people will fly past the middle with higher speed than they do in betas, and that's a fact you have to have in the calculations (I'm gonna get back to this soon). Finally, you have to think about the fact that the bases aren't very choked at all on ctf6 compared to ctf2. In a way, you could think about the middle as the equivalent to the lower base on ctf2, which is actually also a one-way choke with height advantage. The middle is actually your main defense line and that is something that will make games really interesting:

There's a secondary objective in a ctf6 game except capturing the flag: Holding the middle. It's like a small version of King of the Hill! A similar situation is present on ctf3 where it's important to catch the laser before the other team, especially if they have skilled snipers. Other games have powerups, but the ninja is underpowered in competitive gaming, so we're balancing with a choke instead. It's pretty simple when you think about it.

While this choked middle might be what you first notice being really different from ctf2, it's not the actual middle which is different as we've seen comparing it to the lower base on ctf2. The thing is that what we have a map with very much forward defending. The longer forward you are able to keep your defense line, the easier it will be for your team to get captures. This applies to ctf2, but not to nearly as high degree as on ctf6. This can be summed up with the simple line "ctf6 is a more offensive map". While ctf2 defense points are likely to stay the same through a whole game, the defense lines on ctf6 will move all the time. 

Now, this begs a question and a good followup:

Is this better that ctf2?

Answer: No. It isn't better.

Then, is this worse than ctf2?

Answer: No. It isn't worse.

It is different.

The items

Another controversial aspect of ctf6 is the hp pickups. For the people who hasn't been able to participate in the beta yet, ctf6 has only armor in the base, and only hearts in the middle. This isn't just some random idea we came up with in the process of development, no this is a direct consequence to the fact that ctf6 is an offensive map, which we just concluded itself is a consequence to the fact that the middle is so choked. This means that there is a higher frequency of flag touches in your general ctf6 game than in your general ctf2 game. This means that either the games will be substantially shorter, or flagholders will die quicker. 

Let's say the red team is able to get the flag and return the flag to the base, at the very same time as the blue time manages to do the very same thing. On ctf2 this would most likely lead to a quite lengthy stalemate where both teams defend their flagholder who will stay in base with full hp and be very hard to kill, because even if he gets hurt down to 3-4 hearts he will be able to regen completely before the next wave comes. On ctf6, he would only be able to recover the armor, not the hearts without leaving the base. Also, he risks falling into the water (which I'm gonna talk more about in another post if needed) if he isn't careful.

So, let's say the red flagholder gets really hurt by some blue attackers and only have 4 hearts left. He quickly gets full armor, but that still means he only have 14 hitpoints. To recover the hearts he has to leave the base, presenting him with a risk of getting caught outside base by attackers. To sum the armor/base thing up: it just serves for making stalemates shorter and the game quicker.

Is that better that ctf2?

Answer: No. It isn't better.

Then, is that worse than ctf2?

Answer: No. It isn't worse.

It is different.

This will have to be the end of this post, and I hope you will be able to have a more open mind about new maps in general after reading this. There is a plan behind every strange thing on ctf6, so feel free to ask me about it, but feel unfree to argue about it. I'm currently wasting too much time talking about ctf6 resulting in too little time finetuning and testing it.

And finally,

ctf6 isn't ctf2.

It is different.

~ch

As a little test, I made a timelapse of me throwing together a small DM map. Nothing spectacular, and as you can see in the video I only did testing alone, but it will give you a small glimpse of how it looks when I make a map.

Total worktime: 1 hour.

The finished result is available here: http://solidfiles.com/d/ce9a/

~chi1

Me, Steph and Ubu were having a discussion about racemaps, and chillrun was mentioned. chillrun was made by me quite a long time ago; right before 0.5.0 was released. Ubu had just made hotrun, a map which is well known as the first 0.5.x racemap. chillrun was the second.

It features such novelties as checkpoints, unhookables and deathtiles. Back then, the map could only be played with a svn/trunk client, so it was basicly me, Some and Ubu who was playing the map. For a few days we were pushing the map to its limits, and the world record settled @ 16.440s by Ubu. (Demo exists)

The map looks awful, since it was made both before the unhookgfx was made, and before landil made his spike tileset. That means that the map includes slightly illogical water :) . (Trivia of the day: The water gfx that exists in the map comes from the beta version of dm7, which by then was an island map. The water was removed from dm7 because no one of the official gfx artists had time to make some real water graphics before 0.5.0 release.)

Anyway, the map was kinda forgotten when 0.5.0 was released, because all my focus was on the official maps(and for good reason), so it was never released..

..until now! Better late than never! :D

Here you have it: http://solidfiles.com/d/TA0m

Stay tuned, we'll talk a bit more about race in our next post.

So, since I just couldn't give up when being presented to the beforementioned, awful, entities.png of ddrace I've made a trilogy of ddrace maps in a few days. They are all quite short, but all three together should atleast give a challenge for a while.

The compulsory screenshot showing nothing more than me being too lazy to do good gfx:

The whole pack can be downloaded here: http://solidfiles.com/d/ri8u

All the maps are meant to be played with 3 players, less makes it impossible, and more makes it easier.

Call me conservative, but why would you ever want to have this many features? I really can't figure out what half of these do.. I guess it's time for a good old session of trial and error. :(

Mod developers: please make your entities at least slightly understandable. It helps mappers alot. You wouldn't wanna mod uncommented code.

Some months ago, I found the old 2on2 map from 037 which he made for the TeeTv mapping contest. Unfortunately mine was better so he didn’t win (muhaha) BUT I saw some potential in it. So I asked him if I was allowed to modify it. He agreed and I made some improved versions of it, but after all I and also Ubu who helped me were not satisfied so the project froze.

Yesterday Ubu told me that he saw a sucky 2on2 map with deathtiles, but it brought him to an idea. So we took the old TeeTv map again and started working, this time in a complete new direction. We are still changing a lot of things, but I post a screenshot here so you get an idea of how the map will work. (Asymmetry and stuff are just tests.)

Gonna try to make a small series on how to analyze maps, as a mapper. I'm gonna start with map shapes.

Description

When you're starting out from scratch with a map, the first thing you have to decide is what basic shape you want for the map. The shape of a map is easily seen by putting the map fullscreen, standing 10 feet away from the screen and squinting at it. Shapes are usually described as letters.

History

Describing maps with text was initially done when discussing concepts in-game for 0.5.0 official mapping. It has been used by me and others since then.

Examples

We'll start off with the all-popular ctf2:

(I've exagerated the vertical movement in the middle for clarity)

We can conclude that ctf2 is W-shaped. In some situations it might be regarded as U-shaped.

U-shaped maps are usually quite easily defended, since the defender will have a height advantage to the attacker. Therefore, it's often a good idea to make fast movement on U-shapes.

If we on the other hand look on ctf3, we can see a totally different shape.

ctf3 is M-shaped.

Tips

Shapes can be combinations of letters, numbers and signs. Example: ctf6 - o/\o
Sometimes it's easier to only describe one side if the map is mirrored. Example: ctf4 - (mirror)=<3

Usage 

Different shapes have different properties, and when you're doing balancing, it's a good idea to start by looking at how similarly shaped maps have solved problems, rather than iteming a U-shape the same way as an A-shape. Also, it's a good challenge to decide beforehand what shape you want for a map.

Got any cool ideas for a shape you think might be good? Post a comment! :D
Also, if anyone is interested, I might do another post about more shapes.

So we had another ctf6 session followed by a public test which worked well. People start to get used to the map and every test is a greater success. We will do a little more tweaking within the next days and then we are finally hitting beta. Yay!

 So the nodes mod is in beta already, but it still lacks of a good balanced map, so chi1 and me started working. First, I tried to make a completely new map, but soon I noticed how hard it was.