ONS-Shyron-BETA737

[Pegasus]

We've usually tended to deal with minor map edit discussions internally, although the point that we'd like to open this process up more to the community had been mentioned and echoed during the last few times. I figured, this is as good a time as any, then, to kick off the sharing and talking about a new minor edit straight from a public thread, so here goes.

A few nights ago I got frustrated at how this otherwise great map (and edit) could sometimes bring a seasoned ONS player to their wit's end through a couple of its more "old-timer" backwards choices, such as with its half-stocked lockers. Instead of just getting over it this time though, the thought kept nagging me today 'bout how this is such an easy thing to fix and yet we carry on living with it instead. So I fired up the editor to do just that and, well, one thing led to another, which eventually led to the imaginatively named ONS-Shyron-BETA737.

Changelog:
- All existing weap.lockers beefed up to: bio(50), shock(50), link(220), mini(300), flak(35), gren.l(30), rox(30), avril(15), LG(40)
- Added weap.lockers & playerstarts to 1st floor of distant primaries' forts, added a weap.locker to each base's rampart
- Onslaughtspecials2RNH support added: radar will display nodes' health, link beams can snap to healed nodes; nodes' names added. Extra Pack is ~500KB but everyone should have it cached by now
- Fog pushed back a bit (from 4K->5K-7K UUs to 6K->9K-12K UUs; that's FogStart, FogMinEnd and FogEnd distance) based on comparisons to other popular maps with similar terrain, size and presentation features
- Distant primaries' super shields moved to where dmg amps were, dmg amps moved to middle of main bridges
- Distant primaries' strike painters replaced with ion painters, fixed their weaponbases' tex misalignment bug
- Shield pickups added on lateral river bridges, spider weapbases (4 mines) added to river teleporters below
- Single weap pickups (~8 LG) removed

Other points of note and further discussion:
- The bots behave as stupidly unimpressively in this edit as they did in 732. There's a ton of navigation points for land and air, attempting to refine and rebuild the mess each time takes forever and hasn't improved things - at least for as little as I bothered to try. Personally, I never bother with bot behaviour specific issues when I edit a map as it's a well known fact that when they enter an online match, the game soon starts going to hell; I find accepting this and moving on to be the best course of action. That said, if anyone insists on the need to further improve bot pathing here, you're gonna have to find a mapper experienced in that to do it for ya cause I'm certainly not your guy there.
- Although, as covered above, several single weap pickups got removed in the interest of lessening the total channels number, there's still many health pickups all over the place and I'm not sure what the best course of action would be with 'em. Likewise, as far as the channel-tweaking pickups hunt goes, I held off adding a bunch of health vial breadcrumb trails along the caves. IMO one of the mapper's goals is to give the player reasons and rewards to explore the map (as my pickups' moving around might've suggested), but in this case I can't help thinking it'd all just end back to square one with that whole channel count bizz. What do you think should be done?
- There's some odd ground-sinking business going on at the distant primaries' 1st floor around a few places if you bother to switch to 3rd person and walk around (especially near the node telepad); this isn't new to v737. It threw me off at first because I couldn't simply walk onto the pad when headed straight for it from the center, but then I noticed it's doable from other angles. It's probably some wonky BSP issue and since manipulating those is still not my strong suit, someone else might wanna address this later down the road, if at all. Just mentioning it here because freaky bug is freaky.
- Shyron has arguably the spazziest, freakiest, most wavy jumppad textures of any map and the st.mesh around it ain't that hot either :/. Would changing 'em to something more conventional be a sensible move or would that work against the map's established "character"?

K, that's all. Try it out, lemme know what you think of it.

[laboRHEinz]

Cool, sounds great.

I personally always liked Shyron, I'll check it out soon.

If there's a release - mind if naming it ~SP1? :shine:

[SpaceEngineer]

Great! That map really has a problem with low ammo.

[laboRHEinz]

Hi, just took a looksie.

The changes are fine with me. Personally, I've already liked the map as it was and with your improvements, it's even better. All the remaining issues you mentioned never really bothered me tbh. Since there wasn't any further feedback at all, I'd now like to put it up (as SP1 ;-) ). Any further tweaks planned or may I?

[Pegasus]

While I'm hesitant to feed the more recent Edit* -SP* suffix compulsion that presumes to treat any kinda digital content as if it were commercial IT products at their various production stages with no other informational benefit to the end users compared to other alternatives (that I can think of at least), no, I don't have any further tweaks planned for Shyron. Feel free to host it, if so inclined. I did bring up several pending issues where more seasoned mappers could stand to chip in or even fix 'em up, but, even if not, I figured if there was anything else overlooked people here would eventually point it out. After waiting a week without any sign of critique, however, I guess ppl will make up their minds about it only once they see it online. Then those that won't like it will instantly demand to know why their various points of dislike/protest weren't caught on to and addressed before it went live by somebody else -_-...