{"id":143,"date":"2010-01-14T22:50:12","date_gmt":"2010-01-15T06:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/?p=143"},"modified":"2010-06-04T12:39:44","modified_gmt":"2010-06-04T20:39:44","slug":"the-many-faces-of-ramps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/archives\/143","title":{"rendered":"The many faces of ramps"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the big features of 2Fort Revamp is to change how people treat the central water pool, so I thought I’d detail some of my design decisions (and past attempts) to alter it.<\/p>\n

Normally, it’s a route to be avoided because it’s inconvenient. If you fall in, you often must go through a long extremely-predictable path into the enemy base. A path that’s much further than just crossing the bridge. Not only that, but if the enemy puts up stiff resistance, your only choice is to backtrack through an equally-long path through your own base to end up where you started. It’s handy to avoid the snipers, \u00c2\u00a0but in many ways it is too<\/em> inconvenient.<\/p>\n

By making it easier to backtrack from the sewers, I believe it would make people more <\/strong>likely to use them. Why? Because you don’t commit as much by going and taking a look. Here are some of the variations I’ve tried over time…
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A simple ramp, but some people complained that they kept falling off.<\/p><\/div>\n

With the first version, the ramps are pretty narrow, and I got a complaint that it was easy to accidentally fall off.<\/p>\n

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A simple ramp, but some people complained that they kept falling off.<\/p><\/div>\n

With the second, I added a guardrail and widened the whole thing. However, I became concerned that the importance of the bridge was being a bit too <\/strong>eroded. If it takes the same amount of time to jump in the water, swim across, and climb out… why wouldn’t people do that?<\/p>\n

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It's-a Me, Mario!<\/p><\/div>\n

And so enter the jumping puzzle. It looks like some innocent pillars, but in reality you can use it to get out of the water but you may have a tough time avoiding being shot. You can’t quite tell, but if forces attackers to swim to the opposite side of the water before they start zig-zagging their way up. You can’t use it to avoid getting wet unless you’re a scout. Some complained this was a bit against the TF2 style involving ramps and how people get from A to B, and I realized they were right.<\/p>\n

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No bridge survives 2fort for long.<\/p><\/div>\n

The next incarnation used ramps, but still forced the player to swim to the other end and zig-zag to ascend. It’s actually got a lot<\/strong> invisible clipping brushes on it to make it easy to run along. Also, the fencing that constrains the playing field has been moved out a bit to make more room. While I tried to make it look like the ruins of some other bridge, I got a lot of comments that it looked ugly compared to the others so I think concrete is what people want.<\/p>\n

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Sure it blocks the water, but it seems dry times have come to 2fort anyway.<\/p><\/div>\n

Here’s the latest version. The big compromise is that it seems to block the canal, something which–even after playing a lot of TF2 with healing sandwiches and unlimited dispensers–bugs the “it must all make physical sense” part of my brain. I still need to put something in that hole to make it clear players can’t travel up\/down-stream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the big features of 2Fort Revamp is to change how people treat the central water pool, so I thought I’d detail some of my design decisions (and past attempts) to alter it. Normally, it’s a route to be avoided because it’s inconvenient. If you fall in, you often must go through a long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[12,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions\/174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}