What's on my mind:
hello
dc7
Welcome to Team Fortress 2. After nine years in development, hopefully it will have been worth the wait. To listen to a commentary node, put your crosshair over the floating commentary symbol and press your primary fire. To stop a commentary node, put your crosshair over the rotating node and press your primary fire again. Some commentary nodes may take control of the game in order to show something to you. In these cases, simply press your primary fire again to stop the commentary. In addition, your secondary fire will cycle you through all the commentary nodes in the level. Please let me know what you think after you have had a chance to play. I can be reached at Among Us, and my favorite class is the Spy. Thanks, and have fun!
Ideally matches should end in a victory for one team and a loss for the other. Stalemates are essentially a loss for both teams. To avoid stalemates, our map design considers two key variables: team respawn times and travel time from the respawn point to the front line. The team that's winning gets slightly faster respawn times and more forward respawn points, a positive reinforcement loop that increases the chances for them to push forward and win the game.
Two-dimensional HUD elements present a particular art problem, because they have to look good and sharp no matter what resolution the user is running their game at. Given today's availability of high resolution wide-screen displays, this can require a lot of texture memory and a lot of work anticipating different display resolutions. The problem for Team Fortress 2 was even more daunting because of our desire to include a lot of smooth curved elements in our HUD. We developed a new shader system for drawing 'line art' images. The system allows us to create images at a fixed resolution that produced smooth silhouettes even when scaled up to a very high resolution. This shader system also handles outlining and drop-shadows, and can be applied in the 3D space to world elements such as signs.
Each of the Team Fortress classes was designed to make a unique contribution to attack and defense, and control points are, fundamentally, methods of focusing players' attention on these core offensive and defensive activities. They're also useful for drawing players to different points of the map.
Stalemates generally occur around doors, where teams have a strong defensive presence on either side of the opening. To help counter this, we provide alternate routes with high travel costs that become more attractive only when the enemy has strong defenses behind the main route. The number of enemy entry points into an area is crucial to its design, since it's extremely hard to hold an area when enemies approach from multiple fronts. This makes one way exits a useful design tool, since they let us uncouple the number of enemy entry points from the number of friendly offensive routes.
To accommodate Snipers, maps need wide open spaces, long sightlines, and protective cover. Targets of the Sniper require alternate routes that bypass the Sniper's sightlines, though these usually have an additional cost, such as increased travel time. This leaves players with a choice: do they take the more direct, but hazardous route, or the safer yet slower route? Sniper positions generally also have a corresponding enemy Sniper deck, positioned on the other side of the arena, which allows one Sniper to counter another, offering cover for teammates in exposed areas.We build our 3D skyboxes at 1/16th scale to reduce the memory used by the large spaces in them. This means that we have to get a little tricky when dealing with trains moving between the skybox and the player space. There are actually two versions of each moving train: a player-scaled one for the actual gameplay space, and a tiny one out in the skybox. The small repair sheds on either side of the middle building disguise the point at which we swap between the two trains.
For gameplay purposes, we sometimes need to neutralize the speeds of the classes. For instance, these central door timers were created to ensure that all classes could make it to the middle part of the map by the time the action actually starts. Playtesting showed that it was more fun to have the teams waiting as a group as soon as the doors open. The anticipation of battle, combined with the hazardous moving trains, creates a great opening clash for the middle control point.
In our original design, once attackers were cleared off a point, they lost any progress they'd made toward capturing the point. Playtests revealed that lone players near an enemy control point had no incentive to try to capture it if any enemies were in the area. Furthermore, once a team was reduced to defending a single control point, the stronger attacking team was often unable to successfully assault the final point for the full capture period, which caused too many games to end in a stalemate. We changed the capture mechanic so that the capture progress persists for a while even after the attackers are cleared off the point, and this improvement fixed both of the problems with the original design.
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Ideally matches should end in a victory for one team and a loss for the other. Stalemates are essentially a loss for both teams. To avoid stalemates, our map design considers two key variables: team respawn times and travel time from the respawn point to the front line. The team that's winning gets slightly faster respawn times and more forward respawn points, a positive reinforcement loop that increases the chances for them to push forward and win the game.
Two-dimensional HUD elements present a particular art problem, because they have to look good and sharp no matter what resolution the user is running their game at. Given today's availability of high resolution wide-screen displays, this can require a lot of texture memory and a lot of work anticipating different display resolutions. The problem for Team Fortress 2 was even more daunting because of our desire to include a lot of smooth curved elements in our HUD. We developed a new shader system for drawing 'line art' images. The system allows us to create images at a fixed resolution that produced smooth silhouettes even when scaled up to a very high resolution. This shader system also handles outlining and drop-shadows, and can be applied in the 3D space to world elements such as signs.
Each of the Team Fortress classes was designed to make a unique contribution to attack and defense, and control points are, fundamentally, methods of focusing players' attention on these core offensive and defensive activities. They're also useful for drawing players to different points of the map.
Stalemates generally occur around doors, where teams have a strong defensive presence on either side of the opening. To help counter this, we provide alternate routes with high travel costs that become more attractive only when the enemy has strong defenses behind the main route. The number of enemy entry points into an area is crucial to its design, since it's extremely hard to hold an area when enemies approach from multiple fronts. This makes one way exits a useful design tool, since they let us uncouple the number of enemy entry points from the number of friendly offensive routes.
To accommodate Snipers, maps need wide open spaces, long sightlines, and protective cover. Targets of the Sniper require alternate routes that bypass the Sniper's sightlines, though these usually have an additional cost, such as increased travel time. This leaves players with a choice: do they take the more direct, but hazardous route, or the safer yet slower route? Sniper positions generally also have a corresponding enemy Sniper deck, positioned on the other side of the arena, which allows one Sniper to counter another, offering cover for teammates in exposed areas.We build our 3D skyboxes at 1/16th scale to reduce the memory used by the large spaces in them. This means that we have to get a little tricky when dealing with trains moving between the skybox and the player space. There are actually two versions of each moving train: a player-scaled one for the actual gameplay space, and a tiny one out in the skybox. The small repair sheds on either side of the middle building disguise the point at which we swap between the two trains.
For gameplay purposes, we sometimes need to neutralize the speeds of the classes. For instance, these central door timers were created to ensure that all classes could make it to the middle part of the map by the time the action actually starts. Playtesting showed that it was more fun to have the teams waiting as a group as soon as the doors open. The anticipation of battle, combined with the hazardous moving trains, creates a great opening clash for the middle control point.
In our original design, once attackers were cleared off a point, they lost any progress they'd made toward capturing the point. Playtests revealed that lone players near an enemy control point had no incentive to try to capture it if any enemies were in the area. Furthermore, once a team was reduced to defending a single control point, the stronger attacking team was often unable to successfully assault the final point for the full capture period, which caused too many games to end in a stalemate. We changed the capture mechanic so that the capture progress persists for a while even after the attackers are cleared off the point, and this improvement fixed both of the problems with the original design.
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