Its been over a month now, the 6 official maps are edging slowly towards the 'I've played you too much' shelf, only a few new maps have made it into circulation (that I've seen) and I was wondering if anyone here had taken the plunge into mapping for Team Fortress 2 yet?

Personally, I have. I have two ideas for maps and am roughing out the slightly less-good (imho). Only problem is, I can't seem to create a server that anyone else on the internet can see to join, so I can't flag down a friend and test my map with him.

Anyone started making maps if so what sort of maps are you making, how far through production are they....etc
Also, anyone got any idea why I can't create a server? (I have Zone Alarm installed and I've always allowed every popup that appears when I play any steam based game)

I have not, mainly because I've never done it before so I don't really know what to care about, and I can't think of a way to do the extensive testing that would have to be done.

As for your woes, what other hardware is present in your home? Routers? What IP does your ISP give you? Are they known for blocking anything?

Your likely culpret would be a router. If you're behind a router you cannot set up a server unless you set up port forwarding. From what I understand, the default port is 27015. But you can usually change that in dedicated server configs.

If you want to test a specific map with a couple people, most home connections should be fine, but I really wouldn't reccomend more than a 2v2, unless you know your connection/computer can handle it.

If you're not sure on how to set up port forwarding, let me know what model router you have and I'll see if I can walk you through it.

I've created a couple maps but nobody will join my server :p

Lorithad wrote:
Your likely culpret would be a router. If you're behind a router you cannot set up a server unless you set up port forwarding. From what I understand, the default port is 27015. But you can usually change that in dedicated server configs.

If you're not sure on how to set up port forwarding, let me know what model router you have and I'll see if I can walk you through it.

I suspected it might be the router's fault, But giving TF2 direct access to a port will be hard, dad is pretty tight on security, having his whole business at home an all.

Lorithad wrote:
If you want to test a specific map with a couple people, most home connections should be fine, but I really wouldn't reccomend more than a 2v2, unless you know your connection/computer can handle it.

You mean on LAN right? If you don't, what do you mean by 'home connection' I guess I could get a friend over with a laptop, not really ideal but I don't have another PC capable of running pretty much any steam game. (Well, dad's work PC would but I'm not even aloud to breath near that)

The thing about port forwarding, is that it's only opening that port on your computer. Unless he has buisness stuff on your comp, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

But If security is more of an issue, you can try to emulate a LAN environment using a virtual lan. (Hamachi is probably the best one out there in terms of user friendlyness and free).

By home connection, I mean you aren't likely to have a high powered connection such as a professional game hosting company would have.

My connection has 10mbit download, 1mbit upload. With this, i've run 4v4 servers before, plus my ventrilo server which hosts around 3-5 people.
But my connection is pretty good compared to a lot of other ones out there. Thats why I reccomend 2v2 for most people.

oh, ok, maybe it won't be too hard to convince him.
My connection has 6mbit download, 1mbit upload - usually. they told us we had 8mbit download but they lied. Should be ok for 2v2, now all i have to do is find 3 other friends with tf2 could be tricky lol.
2v2 should be enough to iron out most imperfections i guess, it cant be good for getting balence right like getting good sniping spots whilst having places to get around the snipers and so on.

Getting 4 people with tf2 won't be that difficult. Just hop on the thinkingwithportals IRC. If i'm there, I'll gladly help you test.

Most people on here will have tf2, as it came with portal in the orange box.

mikebolt wrote:
I've created a couple maps but nobody will join my server :p

I missed your post!
How finished are they? got any screens?...

I've done cp_science and ctf_wall.

Once you get it playable, my biggest recommendation is to get it looking as nice as possible before releasing it for beta testing. I made the mistake with ctf_wall of thinking that I could get the layout tested before adding all the niceties, and despite repeatedly saying this, 90% of the feedback I got was "needs more detail". Server owners are sadly also a lot less likely to put your map on their server if it doesn't look pretty. I've had a lot more luck with getting cp_science on servers, even though it had/has some big issues with learning curve and cap point balance.

I also joined up over at TF2maps.net hoping it would be similar to this community, but so far their forums are useless and disorganized. The chat is pretty active and helpful, but it uses the steam chat room, which sucks. Overall it's better than FPSBanana's "community" though.

Lastly, even though my cable connection sucks and sometimes I want to leave horrible things on my ISP's doorstep, I didn't have any problems hosting up to 6 people when I was doing basic private testing to get mechanics ironed out.

Looking pretty good, I though I had played on cp_science, but looking at the pics I realise I haven't. But I wan't to, It looks really cool!

I'll look out for both when I'm playing online next

youme wrote:
:oops: I missed your post!
How finished are they? got any screens?...

ctf_pitcross.
The idea is to cross the bridge without getting sniped and infiltrate the base in order to get to the roof to get the flag and bring it back.

Has 3D skybox, sufficient lighting, and models , so I'd say it's done. shmitz is right though, it still needs more detail, though it's kind of hard to integrate detail into this map.

Its a good layout, but as you say, very under-detailed.
What to do - invent a story for your map, where is it? a granary? a farm? an industrial building?
once you know where it is add elements (both brushbased and models, tf2 models could go just about anywhere in the real world so thats handy) that reflect that, make it dead clear to the player where they are.

You have some dissalignments in your brushes where the ramp meets the very top balcony bit.

You should kill the player once they get to the botom of the bit (on impact) rather than half way down. (it wouldnt be so bad if it weren't for the massive bone crack whilst in mid-air)

You should add at least one other resupply for each team.

Perhaps give two bridges across the pit, at right angles on different levels?

Give a definat visual reason for the bridge to be a certain shape, if it is flat give it supports so that you can believe it would work in real life, if it is curved up give it appropirate supports that go with curved bridges...etc

Make your lights less evenly spaced, add a few windows here and there, light fittings, areas of darkness (not pitch black though)

make the inteligence area look like it is an inteligence room. Add destinct markings to clearly show the n00b players on your map where everything is, like the black and yellow striped lines around the intel or the big blue/red arrow signs on either side of the bridge.

Get to it

FYI: If I remember correctly, the Valve clients run on port 27015, but servers run on 27005. This means you'd have to port-forward 27005 instead of 27015.

Just downloaded and started the TF2 dedicated server. Default is 27015.

Good call. Guess I'm remembering the Bad Old Days with the 27005 business.

Hmmm, I've just noticed I'm getting an error in game when I run my map:

Spawnpoint at (608.00 4992.00 -115.68) is not clear.

I'm getting multiple of these with slightly different co-ords, I've checked all my teamspawns and they are all free of obstruction and there are no brushes going through any or anything.

any ideas?

Also, My torus tool is making invalid brushes...wtf? I make a torus, dont do anything to the result and its got invalid brushes! this didn't happen with the old SDK if i remember rightly

youme wrote:
Its a good layout, but as you say, very under-detailed.
What to do - invent a story for your map, where is it? a granary? a farm? an industrial building?
once you know where it is add elements (both brushbased and models, tf2 models could go just about anywhere in the real world so thats handy) that reflect that, make it dead clear to the player where they are.

You have some dissalignments in your brushes where the ramp meets the very top balcony bit.

You should kill the player once they get to the botom of the bit (on impact) rather than half way down. (it wouldnt be so bad if it weren't for the massive bone crack whilst in mid-air)

You should add at least one other resupply for each team.

Perhaps give two bridges across the pit, at right angles on different levels?

Give a definat visual reason for the bridge to be a certain shape, if it is flat give it supports so that you can believe it would work in real life, if it is curved up give it appropirate supports that go with curved bridges...etc

Make your lights less evenly spaced, add a few windows here and there, light fittings, areas of darkness (not pitch black though)

make the inteligence area look like it is an inteligence room. Add destinct markings to clearly show the n00b players on your map where everything is, like the black and yellow striped lines around the intel or the big blue/red arrow signs on either side of the bridge.

Get to it

Thanks for your help. I'll take as many of your suggestions as I can. I'm looking for the calendar decals for the spawnrooms, is there a list of textures commonly used in tf2?

Use the "tf" keyword. Also, searches for "sign", "decal", and "overlay" will generally find most of the overlays in the game.

found it. My decals are all incredibly oversized (im using infodecal) how should I fix this?