Accepted Various Map Enhancements

[Aar]

Hello,

My name is Aar, lead developer of the TF2 community map Coal Pit from the Smissmas 2022 update. Due to a mixture of nostalgia and boredom, I decompiled the latest version of trade_minecraft_neon and looked into it - and what I found was that the map was missing a lot of modern features and enhancements that most non-trade maps have been adopting for years. I took it upon myself to rectify that and have made my own version of the map with the following changes:

- added clipping to areas that needed it (all non-prop stone stairs etc)
- adjusted existing clipping to promote proper hit registration on projectiles (blockbullets2)
- improved optimization and compile time with areaportals and func_detail
- enabled static prop lighting and texture shadows (compile flags)
- reduced map file size with mp3 sounds where possible (every non-looping sound)
- added cubemaps for reflections (211 at 16x16 resolution each)
- packed map with compilepal to remove unused assets
- compressed map with bspzip (-repack -compress)

Map download: https://files.catbox.moe/8sewny.7z
Screenshots:

https://imgur.com/a/X68c7j1

My version does have a few small issues (since it is a decompilation), so I don't intend to use it as a replacement for the current version - moreso, I would like to get these changes merged into the main map if possible. The benefits are very nice small touches all over that add up to a better experience more in line with other maps present in TF2. Is it possible we could get in touch to get the changes merged into the next release? Thanks for your consideration!

 

[Kwas]

- added clipping to areas that needed it (all non-prop stone stairs etc)
- adjusted existing clipping to promote proper hit registration on projectiles (blockbullets2)

definitely welcome changes, back when I added clipping to those stairs just a clip brush instead of the correct block bullets was the meta, I will definitely make that change in v198

- improved optimization and compile time with areaportals and func_detail

upon checking the vmf you provided directly, there were some minor inconsistencies with entities (specifically the portals and details mentioned) provided, though this is likely because it's from a decompiled base.
I see no problem with implementing more aggressive areaportal usage

- enabled static prop lighting and texture shadows (compile flags)

definitely good changes as well

- reduced map file size with mp3 sounds where possible (every non-looping sound)

the most recent jump from v196 to v197 removed a sizable amount of audio from the map to decrease file size, including a bunch of unused audio. some of the existing audio even prior to this revised version were of considerably low quality as is, so I would hesitate to lower or compress them further.

- added cubemaps for reflections (211 at 16x16 resolution each)

definitely and absolutely can't have that many. this change (and probably the areaportal change, as well) singlehandedly puts the edict count of the map at 1,300 while in the map by myself, which is way, way too high for a modern community server

- packed map with compilepal to remove unused assets
- compressed map with bspzip (-repack -compress)

and yeah these were long overdue changes, not even gonna pretend to avoid that. not being able to upload the different file types recently was more of an issue on our fastdownload's host issue, and if you can tell by some of our sites which I can't directly fix myself [http://nhs.tf/bans], the response time from them is certainly... lacking

thank you very much for not shoehorning in vscript as well it gets very annoying when people mention that despite it not being even a nominal improvement to the map (aside from perhaps the doomsday clocks/counters lying around)

while I definitely will incorporate some of deez changes in the next map version, know that updates (unless there is a major server breaking exploit) are really far and few between due to internal reasons

overall noice post and thank you

 

[Aar]

Awesome, I'm glad you like the modifications! Admittedly I did go a bit overboard with cubemaps lol, there are a lot of areas in the map and I kind of placed them in rooms where I felt they made sense. You could definitely get away with a much lower number of them; at least it'd be better than having no cubemaps at all.

Thanks again!