Map Design and Layout

[no-lex]

Map design in Red Eclipse is not an easy task. Red Eclipse inherits many of the requirements of other arena shooters and compounds it with the freedom of mobility which the game prides itself on. Hopefully this article can help mappers with understanding how to successfully make Red Eclipse maps.

Arena shooters' maps are intended to be for gameplay first and foremost and often are unrealistic in proportions and impractical to design organically into conventional structures.
As such, it is often easier to design the layout before any work is done visually.

This is a guide explaining the elements of good, playable layouts and does not attempt to explain how to make aesthetically pleasing maps. However, it is generally my belief that the suggestions outlined below should be put ahead of aesthetic concerns where practicable, and only after layout and design concerns are met should aesthetic concerns be addressed.

Basic Elements of Maps

• Rooms
  
  Castle's main lower room
  Areas of comparable length and width and with multiple entrances and exits, containing one or more pickups and often an affinity.
  Good rooms have:
  1. At least three exits: two exits makes a room just a swollen corridor, and is discouraged in most circumstances.
  2. Ceiling height of at least 8 meters and preferably 12+; you don't want players hitting their heads in these open spaces.
  3. Vertical changes: at least one exit at a different height from the others.
  4. Uniqueness; it should be obvious where one is in the map from the texturing and geometry cues given by the mapper.

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• Atria
  
  Auster's atrium
  Rooms of particular import and generally of a large size; these are the central rooms for combat.
  Good atria satisfy all the criteria for rooms, and additionally:
  1. Are used sparingly: most duel maps should have just one (and occasionally two) main rooms; team maps generally have one at each base and possibly one more in the middle.
  2. At least two floor levels with significant area inside the atrium,
  3. Ceiling heights of at least 12m and preferably 16+m high,
  4. Floor area of at least 160m^2.

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• Corridors
  
  Auster's second-floor corridor
  Long passageways with relatively constrained movement in all but one dimension.
  Good corridors have:
  1. Absolute maximum length of 100m between rooms: corridors are pretty boring and restrictive and it is best to not hold players in them for very long.
  2. Maximum of 60 constricted meters of corridor (to prevent corridors from becoming traps for non-rifle users).
  3. Vertical or horizontal changes (often contrived) as required where necessary to satisfy (ii).
  4. Uniqueness: no two corridors should be indistinguishable from each other (to allow the player to place themselves on the map using visual clues).

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• Obstructions
  
  Panic's crate and column obstructions
  Objects solely to block line-of-fire in situations where rifles and other long range weapons would have very large lines of sight otherwise.
  Things to note about obstructions:
  1. Obstructions do not make a layout in and of themselves: this leads to "crap in a box" maps.
  2. Anything that is at least 3m tall and appreciably thick is a useful piece of cover against long-range attack.
  3. Obstructions should not heavily obstruct movement but merely provide temporary cover for players to switch weapons or reload.
  4. Rooms and corridors may be bent or introduce verticality to create line-of-sight obstructions.

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• Teleporters
  
  Ennui's teleporter
  Means of short-circuiting one part of a map to another, often to fix otherwise unfixable shortcomings in layout design or as a feature in itself.
  Things to note about teleporters:
  1. Teleporters make it more difficult for players to keep the map's layout straight in one's head as they are shortcuts between points in space.
  2. Teleporters are easy to abuse, especially in the case of telemining (placing shock mines near teleporter exits in the hopes of hitting a player who cannot see the mine looking into the teleporter). Level designers need to be careful about how many mines they provide, especially on maps containing teleporters.

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• Jumpers
  
  Battlefield's alpha-side vertical jumper
  Means of tying together vertical or horizontal areas by giving players a push.
  Things to note about jumpers:
  1. Vertical jumpers (e.g. abuse, campgrounds) are easy to mine in a similar fashion as teleporters; mappers need to be prudent about the number of mines they place.
  2. Horizontal jumpers can be redirected sideways or upwards (e.g. ghost) and therefore should be given space to do so if possible in the layout.
  3. Too many jumpers is often a sign that floors are too seperated vertically: consider bringing floors closer to each other (reduce the total playable height of the map).

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• Death and Hurt Materials
  Means of controlling playable area and increasing the difficulty of parts of a map.
  1. Most commonly used to control map boundaries (either by falling off map into death: ghost dutility enyo longestyard ubik or using water/lava inside the map: abuse bloodlust nova error).
  2. Using deathmat actively (e.g. deathtrap) is generally not recommended as it tends to be annoying rather than particularly good at modifying gameplay (which is the whole point of a map).
  3. Hurt material is an alternative for areas which death material may be overkill, like in-map water or similar situations.

Texturing and Geometry Detail

Maps designed for serious gameplay need to stay out of the way of players' movement while also being visually pleasing and providing details which help players locate themselves on the map. Things to be careful about:

• Make sure that detailing does not result in difficult to parkour surfaces or traps: this means columns and walls slanting wider at the base are problematic. Details can also cause parkour moves to fail and may need to be clipped to help prevent this.
• Low ceilings usually cannot have spars descending from the ceiling, as they tend to catch players. Using sky texture (with skytexture 0) and creating invisible slanted "guides" may be useful (see auster's U-room).
• Different floors should have different texturing schema, to make it clear where a player is vertically in a level. Often, bottom floors are best suited by dark (and possibly wet) floors where higher floors are often lighter and allow more exterior light.
• All rooms and corridors should look different-- this isn't a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Weapons

As Red Eclipse 2 is newly a pickups-based game, experience is thin on how to effectively place weapons. However, a few suggestions can still be provided:

• If players are provided with so much ammo that they don't need to particularly change their gameplay, there is too much ammo provided and more prudence needs to be used when placing pickups.
• Ammo should be placed away from the most effective area for the weapon, to promote players moving across the map depending upon their ammo stockpiles and discourage players camping pickups.
• Ammo type should be telegraphed by map features (lighting, geometry surrounding ammo spawn) to help players quickly identify pickups (and identify spawn locations they cannot pick up themselves).
• Mines need to be placed with special prudence, particularly on maps with teleporters and blind jumpers where abusing the level is straightforward. Duel maps generally should have no more than two mines and often only one or zero.
• Duel maps do not need a rocket, and under no circumstance should there be more than one rocket. The rocket is not an absolute necessity for any level.
• Instagib and Kaboom convert all ammo pickups into rifle and mine/grenade respectively; disabling conventional weapon pickups (and perhaps having mode specific ones) should be considered for these modes.

Putting Things Together

This is where all the skill is in level design, and it isn't something I know how to explain how to be good at. Following the concepts outlined above is a good start, but it takes a lot of practice to be actually skillful at making maps.
Things to try:

• Make a lot of layouts; many mappers spend large sums of their time on bad layouts and remain bad at layout design. Plan to throw one (or ten, or fifty) away.
• Restart from scratch on layouts rather than attempt to fix major layout problems you find.
• Designing around a single atrium is often a good way to get small FFA maps started.
• Start with relatively straightforward maps (duel, FFA) before attempting difficult maps, like CTF/BB levels or maps with unique features (swimmable water, special jumper/teleport mechanics, etc.).
• Don't overreach in scope: make your map to do one thing, and do it well. CTF maps tend to be rather poor FFA maps, and duel maps should normally feel cramped in 6+ player FFA.
• Duel maps' playable area should generally fit in a mapsize 10 map (though more space for background geometry is usually recommended); CTF maps will generally need at least the space of a mapsize 11 map to be suitably large. FFA maps' size will vary greatly with the targeted game size.

Things to Focus On in Release Content

Please note that all of these criteria are important in release content; some are somewhat more so as indicated in the list.

1. Completeness: A release map should be free of texture and geometry errors and be appropriately clipped. Expect to spend a sizable portion of the total map development time, 25-35%, on fixing issues in an otherwise complete map. Other common oversights include inappropriate texture tiling (unnecessary half tiles or tile misalignment), excessive/burried geometry, and pickups not well tested for the map.
2. Performance: Players cannot play a level their GPU can't either. Try to set shadow and AA settings high enough to keep maxfps down to around 60 on current release maps, and make sure that maps are made to similar performance standards at mapeffects 0 (performance-sucking mapmodels are OK as long as they can be turned off). This is a common issue for mappers with relatively powerful GPUs.
3. Layout: The subject of this guide. Layout is important to allow the players to strategize and utilize the layout to their benefit. Poor layouts make the game into a twitch shooter, where aim and reflexes become the only important skill.
4. Looks: A pleasing aesthetic increases the immersion of players in the level. Often, this includes large amounts of background geometry (not playable), often covering half to three-quarters or occasionally more of the total map area.

Team Maps

Team maps (particularly affinity-based ones like CTF and BB) are more difficult than FFA/Duel maps, as they not only have to fulfill the layout criteria of ordinary FFA maps but also their own set of criteria pertinent to the affinities the gameplay is centered around. Team maps should additionally consider the following:

• Symmetricality: Especially for the inexperienced layout designer, attempting to make a balanced asymmetric map is very difficult. Pickups should also be symmetrical if possible.
• Multiple Paths: Multiple paths with crossovers which share similar times between bases allow players to be somewhat unpredictable. Maps with only one fast path between bases (e.g. darkness) tend to result in flag carriers always returning to their own base along the only fast path and are easily predictable.
• Visual Clues: Since team maps are usually symmetrical, providing texturing and lighting hints to help players know where to go are helpful
• Vertical Changes: If possible, running between bases should require changing floors at least once. Having both bases and the paths between bases on the same floor leads to flat, two-dimensional gameplay.

Example Issues in 1.6 Maps

Too Square:


Bloodlust (top) and Mist (bottom) filling their map areas entirely
This is likely the most common fault in RE maps overall: using all of the map area (making a big square map) which generally results in very long exterior perimeter corridors and long lines of sight for rifle users to exploit. Well designed maps should not be taking up the whole map area for playable area anyway, as some map area (often more than half) should be devoted to scenery geometry.

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Long Corridors

Deadsimple's exterior corridors taking almost all 128m of the map area
Long corridors take a long time to cross and make players (especially those vulnerable new players) easy to kill at long ranges without a way to escape. If one must have a long corridor, make sure it does not have a clear line of sight between ends.

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Too Many Mines

Decay and its 15 mines
Mines are neat. They are also annoying and difficult to mitigate without being very attentive and are often far too prevalent in maps. Mines should be few enough in number so that a player can reasonably keep track of all mines in play.

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1:1 Stairs


Pumpstation (top) and Dead Simple (bottom) exhibiting 1:1 stairs
Stairs should always be designed to have a slope of 1:2 (slope of one half) at the minimum. 1:1 stairs have issues with parkour and are restrictive in their line of sight.

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Too Tall

Battlefield's central bridge
If a map requires ladders and jumpers in order to go between levels, it is likely too vertical. If possible, keeping adjacent levels within 16m of each other makes transit between levels possible without jumpers and ladders (removing mine trap issues inherent to these "blind" climb methods)