Critiquing two different maps in one post here, as they’re both from the same source and have very little to talk about. Said source being the weird PvP battleground gamemode from the equally weird Left 4 Dead 2… clone? Mod?
Now that I think about it, I have no idea just WHAT the hell Revelations 2012 even IS…
There was a part of me that was curious as to whether anything from Revelations 2012 would work in Left 4 Dead 2, as the game is clearly based on it. Yet I never got anywhere in attempting to port any of the main campagin maps (partially due to laziness and the amount of assets that would need porting (read: copy and pasting) over).
However, the weird Battleground gamemode had small arena maps, so I decided “Well I’ve made survival maps before. So let’s turn these into survival maps!”.
The longest process of these ports was transferring assets over from Revelations 2012’s VPKs to Left 4 Dead 2 itself. Thanks to being the same version of Source, I could at least just copy and paste them; but there was a LOT of assets to pick up. This lead to a pattern of:
- Compiling the map and seeing how many missing materials were printed to the console during the VBSP process.
- Finding the VMTs that were mentioned.
- Copying them to a Left 4 Dead 2 folder.
- Opening said VMTs to see what textures were used by them.
- Finding the VTF files and copying them to the correct locations.
- Rinse and repeat.
Models were the same way, minus throwing them into the Half-Life Model Viewer to see what materials they used.
One of the main issues with the maps themselves were their structure. As they’re still kinda large for survival mode which, in conjunction with my lack of care for object placement, lead to a lot of wide open space and me just kinda sprinkling items around at random (and even then some areas are just completely empty pathways with nothing on them).
Of course, even when my job mostly boiled down to “place entities and call it a day”, I still managed to screw it up in some places. While I didn’t notice anything too sloppy on the Forest map, the Volcano map had a ladder cheaply thrown into the “bases” on each side of the map (causing some odd blocky shadows on the wall behind them) and two areas where a health pack was seemingly placed a bit too low, causing it to fall into the ground. I assume I just never noticed that second fact?
While this is probably a problem with the original map, the Forest map did have a missing trigger_hurt in places. As a result, a couple of campfires found around the map can be stood on top of completely safely. Is that really an issue? No not really, but it is a little silly, especially when some other torches mounted on walls actually do damage you as they probably should.
Of all my mods, these two are the ones that feel like they’re just kinda… There. I don’t think they’re necessarily BAD, they look decent (though that’s because they looked alright in their source game) and don’t have any glaring “what was I thinking” level flaws. But there’s nothing special about them at all.
I think I did toy with the idea of doing the other battleground maps as well, but I can’t remember why I ended up only doing these two (nor can I be bothered reinstalling and loading up the original game to look at them).
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