On SHO amlup has confirmed he is starting work on ut4. He has a patreon too. If he gets enough he can deticated more of his time to map making like vechs
I would try to get the feel for command blocks. If you can get even just somewhat familiar with them it opens up the door for a lot more interesting mechanics that can help make your map different. Just try to make sure you stick on the side of useful mechanics and less on the side of gimmicks for the sake of having command blocks.
As far as open world maps go, I think it would be tough to do as a newer mapmaker. Balancing something like that would be much more difficult. I also think that having teleporters would go against the feel of an open world map as well. What I would recommend if you wanted to do one is to do it but not have it be a full 16 objective map. If you keep it small enough to be manageable you can get a better hang of balancing maps and keep each area fresh. And also since its your first map keeping it small will make it more likely that you finish it. A big part of getting better is actually releasing things so you can get feedback, and a lot of people who try to take on a full CTM for their first map will run into issues completing it, or find that their skills increase and they have to keep going back and redoing areas. If you do a 6 wool map or something like that you can get it done, learn the lessons from it, and then have your first full map be much more solid.
I actually really like the above shot of the Quarry, but the deep down part in the last image seems a bit too much. I see blue and stuff down there which seems out of place. The Reds, Blacks, Greens, and Whites seem really well put together though.
Thanks for the feedback, surprised how few people commented lol. Yeah the upper half is almost done (just going to complete the ring of white trees around the perimeter), but the deep part is still subject to change. I could see how the blue ores violate the color scheme. The point is that it's a mining operation and they need something to mine, but coal ore and coal blocks could achieve that same purpose without messing with the visuals.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
There ain't much left of the world these days. The gods have forsaken us, there's no denying that. But still you press on. For what? A chance to sift through the ashes one last time? The hope to one day be called a hero? Whatever your reason, you've got a lot of work to do. The corruption won't leave without a fight, so you better get started.
This is the way I see it, all of those people who do not join the discord and just stay here in silence all have the ability to join the discord. The "content" we create here is mainly our maps and the conversations we have on here are mainly what we do on discord, discussing maps or unrelated things as friends. That 90% you speak of doesn't participate because they are mainly here for the maps. Sure they will click on links we send and pictures we take but that isn't the reason they are here. Posting maps on the forums will not be going away as its a great place to attract attention and new players. The thing that is mainly going away is the day to day talking between us which is basically just made a 1000x easier using a social platform designed for that such as discord/skype/teamspeak/etc... Like I said before the people who want to listen in on the day to day always have the option of joining discord and keeping to themselves and just reading.
We have had a social platform more active than the forums long before rock made the discord. For awhile we had a skype that people talked on as friends and left the mapping stuff to the forums. The main advantage of having these is that the applications are great for talking with their quick response chats and voice channels for actual conversing. Besides even without all this its brought the community a lot closer together. I have made a lot of great friends through the CTM community that I wouldn't have gotten to know well if it wasn't for discord/skype. I actually did not like a lot of people based on the forums but after talking to them a lot of those people are some of the nicest I've ever met. We have greatly improved the community aspect through media with events like movie and game nights and people hosting servers for us to play maps together all made possible by the use of programs better suited to fit our style than the forums. It usually takes about 8 hours to a day to get a response on the forums. Discord? 5 minutes maximum during peak hours.
We may be content creators even if we didn't want to, but if we didn't set out to be that then why should we adapt our style to suit that? If we want to keep conversing as friends on a different platform I see no real reason for us to change anything, especially when literally anyone on the forums can join us.
The forum thread is for relevant discussion and such, as it really has been for a long time. It's a forum so anyone can join in, no matter their interest in a topic, anyone can see it, and it takes time for comments to come in and such.
Discord (and Skype before it) is a more immediate thing - It's a way to further build the Community we're already sitting on, and expand the social aspects of it. I don't think anyone here has any plans of abandoning the forums - I for one don't at all - but the Discord is a place for people who actively want to chat with others, get immediate discussion and feedback, and just have fun conversations and join events outside the forums themselves.
They exist to complement each other; the forum for more official announcements and discussions, and the Discord for more off-topic conversations and quick iteration. And that's both fine and how I really think things work best.
I decided I wanted to try reviewing more CTM maps, so today I chose to do an old map from long ago:
-Inferno Mines by Vechs (Map Version 3.1, made for Minecraft 1.5.2)
Alright, I'm done with this map.
See you in the after-life.
Difficulty: 9
Overall Enjoyment: 3
Comments:
I first played this map with my brother through rose-tinted glasses: Having only played Vechs CTM maps, I had little idea of the community that actually surrounded it. So, after a number of years and more CTM experience under my belt (both playing and creating), I decided to revisit this map, wondering how it would stand the test of time after extensive growth of the genre.
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I should have chosen to stay home. As in, "lock the door and never leave home."
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So let's dig in to the dumpster that is Inferno Mines, shall we?
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There are dozens of problems to go through, so I'll start with one of the obvious ones: the loot has no balancing at all. It's all randomly placed into the map with no care, and the problems can easily be seen going on. Every chests is filled with piles of coal, weapons, armor, potions, and so forth in uncountable numbers. Upon completing the first area of the map (and going through Skylight C), this is what I had in my inventory when I finished the first dungeon:
The first dungeon. The first dungeon.
And this just kept going on. Before I even got to the second intersection, I had almost full iron armor. Heck, in Hane's Disgrace, there a giant piles of Minecarts Chests that give you all the armor you could ever need, even a full set of diamond armor. In the fifth/sixth dungeon. Vex had little to no balancing in his loot, and it really shows when you can get full diamond before even completing half the Monument.
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Since the loot is obviously out of whack, the only way to bring the line of balance in tow is to up the ante with the mobs in the most unfair way possible. Witches with super-speed and high-jump (and this was in 1.5 where they had 31 second poison with super accuracy.), Skeletons with super-speed and Punch II bows, Zombie knights with two Flame skeletons on top, a super-durable cactus mob with an extreme level of thorns. And lets not forget the worst of all: The Zistonian Pigmen. Quick enemies with high damage, Fire Aspect II and being invincible for a few seconds once spawned (in addition to their spawners summoning more within seconds), you've got a recipe for an absolute disaster. I've never faced a mob that I have despised more than the Zistonian Pigman.
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And that's just counting the custom mobs in 1.5. There's still your usual slew of blazes, creepers, poison spiders, etc. But normally, they come in swarms. Lush Ruins has rows of spawners spitting out cave spiders left and right, Everforge suffers from a hectic skeleton infestation, and Eternal Conflict is nothing but an endless mob of zombies and wither skeletons. When the map isn't using its super-dangerous OP mobs, it's swarming the player with regular mobs.
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Oh, and let's not count out the Fleecy Mobs. They were either super easy to defeat or extremely tough - never in-between. The Fleecy Mob in Salire Castle was easy to beat - I just stood a distance while I mowed it down with my bow. On the other hand, the Fleecy Mob in Black had me killed about three times before I finally got the wool. The only real "challenge" might have been trying to pick up the wool while seven other copies of the Fleecy Mob had spawned as well.
That is just one row of spawners out of the dozens in this dungeon.
The dungeons themselves could pick up where the rest of the map dropped off, right? There's still some redemption, any hope at all? After all, this must be his best - his opus magnum! Surely, he pulled out all the stops to make his dungeons sparkle and shine, right?!
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*Cue TF2 Engineer saying "Nope"*
- Most of the dungeons themselves are fairly bland and boring. All of them take place in the sandstone-laden caves they lie in, with little variation between colors or blocks used. In addition, areas usually consist of only one of two block types with little mixing of materials. Most of the areas are Veches' standard, blocky style. Very basic pillars of stone keep the roofs from crumbling while standard, banal walkways keep the gameplay "going." Though there were a few areas I liked the looks of (Flame Citadel and Vexian Gallery come to mind), they don't make up for the absolute dullness produced by every other dungeon in this map.
Well, I think this looks nice IMO. Despite the very basic design.
And I'm just talking in terms of aesthetics/design, not specifically gameplay. And that's what really kills it for me. The map could be super ugly and if the gameplay at least had some heart to it, maybe I wouldn't be so demeaning to Inferno Mines.
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But NO. The difficulty curve was a wild roller coaster that never sat firmly in one spot. At times, it's heartless and brutal. At others, it feels like it's not even trying to kill me. The gameplay in this map feels like its trying to make you quit playing the map rather than giving you a reason to keep pushing on.
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Allow me to give a few examples to you:
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Lush Ruins: A large open cavern with large piles of mossy bricks everywhere. Most of it feels empty and dead, and where there is life, it is in volatile abundance. Creepers, skeletons and cave spiders all pour out of the rows of spawners that lie everywhere in this area. Also, there's the occasional death potion spawner that gives you every bad effect in the game at one, and if you don't have a milk bucket/some way of off-putting the damage, you're dead. It felt like someone made an RPG, forgot to add most of the RPG elements, and where they did, it was completely unbalanced.
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Zistean Blast Caverns (I don't remember the name completely, it's in Intersection III): This may have been just a standard, boring old dungeon if not for the armies of Zistean Pigmen everywhere. Heavy damage and serious Fire Aspect, just one of these mobs could easily cut a player down. Just one hit would deal two whole hearts of damage (not counting the fire) while I was wearing full iron armor. On Normal. Even if you do manage to kill one, the spawner keeps pumping out more of them. And when there's more than one Pigman spawners, it's just made much, much worse. I died almost ten times in this area trying to clear out the spawners to get to the wool.
Don't worry, I'll get to Eternal Conflict soon.
Zistonian Battlecry: Nothing but a straight-forward run towards a wool box, blocked by super-thorns, Zistonian pigmen and creepers. All seems normal until you get right up to the end and then a swarm of ghasts and blazes descend upon you. I was trapped behind the glass to the wool box due to the mob that grew right outside. The only reason I was able to escape alive was due to ender pearls (which, again, the map gives in abundance, along with everything else.)
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Eternal Conflict: This area was one of the worst dungeons I had ever witnessed, taking everything bad about this map and stuffing it into one dungeon. First, you are thrown into a wooden pseudo-fortress where swarms of zombies and wither skeletons come pouring in. You get a bunch of snow golems and an occasional iron golem to help you out, but unless you can get out of the fortress, they're just going to keep building up. Once you manage to escape that, you have to go to the castle in the corner and slay a Fleecy Mob to get the Black Wool - don't forget all the other mobs that come to his aid. Finally, you have to go to the other side of the map to get to a teleporter that takes you out of the dungeon that has death potions (the ones like in Lush Ruins) pouring down on you constantly. And once you get out of the dungeon, you don't teleport to a safe spot where you get the chance to calm yourself or catch a breather. Nope, you end up in mid-air. In the Vexian Gallery. Right above lava. I actually died and had to do the whole dungeon over again because of that death.
- This map didn't feel like fun. This map felt like I was being held prisoner by a sadist - a sadist who wanted nothing more than to see me crying in agony and pain. This map is a gauntlet of pain and frustration to see how long it takes the player before they through their computer out of the nearest window in blind, seething rage. I didn't enjoy my time here, and I wouldn't recommend this map to any poor soul who would want to even consider it.
SCORE
Aesthetics: 3
Creativity: 4
Gameplay: 2
TOTAL: 9
Edit: Forums decided to mess up order, bolding and so on, should be fixed now.
I'd be surprised if people did. The community is super active, just not always on these forums, and new projects are constantly in the works.
I feel that the misconception that CTMs are "dead" is a product of how CTMs have evolved over the last couple of years. Half-stack says it very well here: Link
Minecraft has changed, and so have maps and map development. In 2011, the development time for most maps was measured in weeks. As standards and expectations inflated, so did development times. IMO we're all indie game devs at this point. xD
Honestly though, Vechs' maps were what got me into CTM maps in the first place (and pretty much why the genre is here in the first place), but there's no doubt that even the best mapmakers can end up making a bad map. I'm just wondering if Vechs will ever return to the CTM mapmaking scene (and I'm not talking Super Hostile Online, that doesn't really count IMO) and if he does, will he be able to stand out from the rest of the community? Since we have maps like Myriad Caverns (which is essentially a good, modern Veches map), Ragecraft III (the current pinnacle of CTM mapmaking) and many other great/terrific maps, I'm not sure if he'll be able to compete if he just sticks to his roots rather than try to grow out with what is available now.
(Then again, it's Vechs. He could probably make a bad map and still make half a million downloads.)
Hi everyone, Kaladun here. Judging by the newest Strawberry Jams and the discord chat, I know there's a lot of new mapmakers in the community with lots of cool ideas. I think a lot of people, both mapping newbies and veterans alike, are scared of command blocks, so I wanted to break down three simple but powerful effects we can do with command blocks in the hope of both teaching and giving you some ideas. So welcome to the first
CTM Command Block Tutorial
Now, a quick note before we dive in, this is designed for 1.9 and 1.10 mapping as the new repeating and chain command block types make these tricks a lot easier. You can do all of these in 1.8, but you'll need to make fill clocks in lieu of the repeating blocks.
#1 - Mob Proximity Effects
Sometimes, you want a monster to do more than just physical damage. You want something dangerous to happen when the player gets close to them. Blindness, slowness, poison, or maybe even buffs if you're super nice. Either way, it's all the same command. Let's start by making a mob to work with. For this tutorial, we'll use "Evil_Wizard", as shown below.
_
Note the "_" in the middle of the name instead of a space. For commands, a mob's name has to be one connected string. This command will have two parts, and we'll go through them one at a time. First is the execute command, which will trigger another command around a mob:
/execute @e[name=Evil_Wizard] ~ ~ ~
The @e is a target selector that selects every available entity. Then it only chooses the one with the name "Evil_Wizard". The ~ ~ ~ then says that we'll run our second command at the mob's location. Next, we'll use the effect command:
/effect @a[r=3] slowness 5 0
The effect command is pretty simple. "@a[r=3]" will target all players within 3 blocks of the command's origin, which will be the Evil_Wizard. "slowness" refers to the effect and you can replace with whatever debuff you'd like. "5" is the duration in seconds the effect lasts, and "0" means the level 1 effect (1 would be level 2, 2 level 3, and so on). Putting these together we have:
Place this in a command block and set it to "Repeat" and "Always Active" like below and voila! Players will be slowed whenever they get near your Evil_Wizards! Enjoy making your areas even eviler with this trick. Of course, you can use any mob and status effect for this trick, so you could make deadlier foes with effects like wither, or even healing beacons by executing from armor stands and the regen effect.
#2 - Particle Effects
Our Evil_Wizard from #1 is nice, but it could stand to be even more evil looking. We'll do that with particles, in this example by making arcane runes float around our wizard. First off, let's choose our particle effect. You can see the list at http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Particles. For this example we'll be using "enchantmenttable". Like before, this is a two part command; we'll use "execute" like before to select each Evil_Wizard, and a new command, "particle":
/particle enchantmenttable ~0 ~1 ~0 1 1 1 0.5 10
The first 6 numbers describe a box around the entity that the particles will spawn in. The first three numbers are the center of the box relative to the entity. The next 3 scale the size; you'll probably have to mess around with these, as they act differently for different particles. The 7th describes the speed of the particle; increasing it makes for a more energetic looking effect. Finally, the 8th says how many particles it'll make, in this case 10. Putting the commands together we get:
As before, place in an active, repeating command block and you'll have all the effects you want. Try playing around with the numbers and different particles to see what you can make.
#3 - Special Weapon Effects
With its slowness aura and intimidating particle effects, we'll need a powerful weapon to take down the Evil_Wizards. Let's make a sword that gives the player a speed buff. Using something like MCstacker, NBTedit, or MCedit, give yourself a special sword like this:
The critical part isn't the enchantments or even the base item, it's the default colored lore text "=Ninja=", which we'll use to detect when it's being used. Make sure your item has that lore text. Next, type and run the following command in chat:
/scoreboard objectives add Ninja dummy
This will create a 'scoreboard' for us, essentially a variable we can use to track numbers. This command only has to be run once, which is why we used the chat there. Now though, we'll break out our command blocks. Place a repeating command block down (set to always active), and then two chain command blocks after it, like so:
Chain command blocks will trigger when the previous command block in the line does. Note the 'arrows' on the top and sides, it's important that they all point to the next block in the sequence. Now, starting with the repeating command block, enter these commands in order, one per command block.
The first command block is our most complicated, but we'll go through it piece by piece. 'scoreboard players add' lets you add a number to a scoreboard of selected players. '@a' means we'll look at every player. 'Ninja 1' means that if our player matches some criteria, it'll add 1 to their Ninja score. Finally, the bracketed portion at the end will detect if the held item has the lore tag =Ninja=, just like our sword. So, if the player holds the sword, it will add +1 to their Ninja scoreboard.
The effect command should be familiar to you, but our @a has a new criteria. 'score_Ninja_min=1' means that this effect will only work on players with a Ninja score of 1 or higher. Finally, 'scoreboard players set @a Ninja 0' resets every single player's Ninja score to 0. This is important because without this reset a player would only have to hold the sword once and they'd have the effect forever. With all of these in place, try switching back and forth between items and you'll see the speed effect appear and disappear.
Here's everything together; the slowness and particles from our Evil Wizard, and the speed from our ninja sword.
This basic approach of incrimenting a score, doing an effect, and then resetting is very useful, and can be used for more complicated effects like area damage, armor sets that increase in power, or items that place fire or torches. Mess around and explore what you can do with scoreboards and this method and you'll easily be able to make memorable weapons and items for your map.
I hope this helped someone learn, or maybe just inspire some interesting ideas for a new map. Let me know if there's other commands or techniques you'd like to see explained, as I'll happily do another one of these if it helped people or there's requests.
oh boi
i just want to add in, that maybe you didn't understand what was in vechses mind when he was creating the map (sure, most of the time it probably was nothing) and some of the 'mechanics'. As you can watch in his dev commentary the gameplay around zistykins is 'walk into the proximity range then back off, kill the zistykin and sprint towards the spawner (there's a lot of those eff X pickaxes to let you do it quickly too). You said that you died a lot there but maybe if you took your time on figuring the mechanic it might have been a bit better for you.
The teleporter to get out of Eternal Battle can be shot with an arrow (or enderpearl, which you should have prepared for the last area [also considering you said that there's too much of them]) so you can avoid the rain of death potions after the initial freakout when you get hit by one of them (there's also cows and milk right next to it. take a hint smh).
Can't really talk about Lush Ruins or random items, that surely was tragic. And the difficulty curve is similar to other vechs' maps where he gives you easier areas to let you rest before the storm (aka next area).
That's it for me dude. Nice review.
oh boi
i just want to add in, that maybe you didn't understand what was in vechses mind when he was creating the map (sure, most of the time it probably was nothing) and some of the 'mechanics'. As you can watch in his dev commentary the gameplay around zistykins is 'walk into the proximity range then back off, kill the zistykin and sprint towards the spawner (there's a lot of those eff X pickaxes to let you do it quickly too). You said that you died a lot there but maybe if you took your time on figuring the mechanic it might have been a bit better for you.
The teleporter to get out of Eternal Battle can be shot with an arrow (or enderpearl, which you should have prepared for the last area [also considering you said that there's too much of them]) so you can avoid the rain of death potions after the initial freakout when you get hit by one of them (there's also cows and milk right next to it. take a hint smh).
Can't really talk about Lush Ruins or random items, that surely was tragic. And the difficulty curve is similar to other vechs' maps where he gives you easier areas to let you rest before the storm (aka next area).
That's it for me dude. Nice review.
Whoa whoa whoa... whoa...
no.
Can we please not even try to defend the travesties that were Zistykins and Eternal Battle? Just because the designer had a "mechanic" in mind when they made something doesn't excuse it from criticism, especially when the mechanic itself turned out absolutely horridly. Zistykins, especially in Dumb Zisteau Blast Cavern, were an absolute mess of bad mechanics, bad area design, and bad balancing. The area was not designed for this sort of gameplay, intentionally putting spawners in locations where this "back up, then jog in and kill a spawner" design simply wasn't possible. As for Eternal Battle, shooting it with an arrow? How are you going to aim for that when you have several thousand stacked mobs chasing you down? And you expect people to just casually craft Milk where they're being assaulted? The area was not actually balanced for that sort of casual gameplay, and pretending it was is kinda laughable.
On SHO amlup has confirmed he is starting work on ut4. He has a patreon too. If he gets enough he can deticated more of his time to map making like vechs
[[/b]url=http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/maps/maps-discussion/1564860-ctm-the-ultimate-ctm-community-thread][[/b]img][/b]http://i.imgur.com/zxb18Te.png[[/b]/img][[/b]/url][/b]
Thanks for the tips!
[[/b]url=http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/maps/maps-discussion/1564860-ctm-the-ultimate-ctm-community-thread][[/b]img][/b]http://i.imgur.com/zxb18Te.png[[/b]/img][[/b]/url][/b]
Thanks for the feedback, surprised how few people commented lol. Yeah the upper half is almost done (just going to complete the ring of white trees around the perimeter), but the deep part is still subject to change. I could see how the blue ores violate the color scheme. The point is that it's a mining operation and they need something to mine, but coal ore and coal blocks could achieve that same purpose without messing with the visuals.
Hey all. Usual post like the usuals. I'm planning on streaming here-more Myriad Caves shenanigans. Feel free to join me at the usual place:
If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter to know when I stream:
https://twitter.com/Aurabolt1
Screenshots?
You can send me screenshots whenever you want.
Aurabolt is streaming jam maps right now.
This is the way I see it, all of those people who do not join the discord and just stay here in silence all have the ability to join the discord. The "content" we create here is mainly our maps and the conversations we have on here are mainly what we do on discord, discussing maps or unrelated things as friends. That 90% you speak of doesn't participate because they are mainly here for the maps. Sure they will click on links we send and pictures we take but that isn't the reason they are here. Posting maps on the forums will not be going away as its a great place to attract attention and new players. The thing that is mainly going away is the day to day talking between us which is basically just made a 1000x easier using a social platform designed for that such as discord/skype/teamspeak/etc... Like I said before the people who want to listen in on the day to day always have the option of joining discord and keeping to themselves and just reading.
We have had a social platform more active than the forums long before rock made the discord. For awhile we had a skype that people talked on as friends and left the mapping stuff to the forums. The main advantage of having these is that the applications are great for talking with their quick response chats and voice channels for actual conversing. Besides even without all this its brought the community a lot closer together. I have made a lot of great friends through the CTM community that I wouldn't have gotten to know well if it wasn't for discord/skype. I actually did not like a lot of people based on the forums but after talking to them a lot of those people are some of the nicest I've ever met. We have greatly improved the community aspect through media with events like movie and game nights and people hosting servers for us to play maps together all made possible by the use of programs better suited to fit our style than the forums. It usually takes about 8 hours to a day to get a response on the forums. Discord? 5 minutes maximum during peak hours.
We may be content creators even if we didn't want to, but if we didn't set out to be that then why should we adapt our style to suit that? If we want to keep conversing as friends on a different platform I see no real reason for us to change anything, especially when literally anyone on the forums can join us.
discord wins, sorry boys
its a lot more fun over there
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Retired StaffLet me put it this way:
The forum thread is for relevant discussion and such, as it really has been for a long time. It's a forum so anyone can join in, no matter their interest in a topic, anyone can see it, and it takes time for comments to come in and such.
Discord (and Skype before it) is a more immediate thing - It's a way to further build the Community we're already sitting on, and expand the social aspects of it. I don't think anyone here has any plans of abandoning the forums - I for one don't at all - but the Discord is a place for people who actively want to chat with others, get immediate discussion and feedback, and just have fun conversations and join events outside the forums themselves.
They exist to complement each other; the forum for more official announcements and discussions, and the Discord for more off-topic conversations and quick iteration. And that's both fine and how I really think things work best.
I decided I wanted to try reviewing more CTM maps, so today I chose to do an old map from long ago:
-Inferno Mines by Vechs (Map Version 3.1, made for Minecraft 1.5.2)
Alright, I'm done with this map.
See you in the after-life.
Difficulty: 9
Overall Enjoyment: 3
Comments:
I first played this map with my brother through rose-tinted glasses: Having only played Vechs CTM maps, I had little idea of the community that actually surrounded it. So, after a number of years and more CTM experience under my belt (both playing and creating), I decided to revisit this map, wondering how it would stand the test of time after extensive growth of the genre.
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I should have chosen to stay home. As in, "lock the door and never leave home."
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So let's dig in to the dumpster that is Inferno Mines, shall we?
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There are dozens of problems to go through, so I'll start with one of the obvious ones: the loot has no balancing at all. It's all randomly placed into the map with no care, and the problems can easily be seen going on. Every chests is filled with piles of coal, weapons, armor, potions, and so forth in uncountable numbers. Upon completing the first area of the map (and going through Skylight C), this is what I had in my inventory when I finished the first dungeon:
And this just kept going on. Before I even got to the second intersection, I had almost full iron armor. Heck, in Hane's Disgrace, there a giant piles of Minecarts Chests that give you all the armor you could ever need, even a full set of diamond armor. In the fifth/sixth dungeon. Vex had little to no balancing in his loot, and it really shows when you can get full diamond before even completing half the Monument.
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Since the loot is obviously out of whack, the only way to bring the line of balance in tow is to up the ante with the mobs in the most unfair way possible. Witches with super-speed and high-jump (and this was in 1.5 where they had 31 second poison with super accuracy.), Skeletons with super-speed and Punch II bows, Zombie knights with two Flame skeletons on top, a super-durable cactus mob with an extreme level of thorns. And lets not forget the worst of all: The Zistonian Pigmen. Quick enemies with high damage, Fire Aspect II and being invincible for a few seconds once spawned (in addition to their spawners summoning more within seconds), you've got a recipe for an absolute disaster. I've never faced a mob that I have despised more than the Zistonian Pigman.
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And that's just counting the custom mobs in 1.5. There's still your usual slew of blazes, creepers, poison spiders, etc. But normally, they come in swarms. Lush Ruins has rows of spawners spitting out cave spiders left and right, Everforge suffers from a hectic skeleton infestation, and Eternal Conflict is nothing but an endless mob of zombies and wither skeletons. When the map isn't using its super-dangerous OP mobs, it's swarming the player with regular mobs.
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Oh, and let's not count out the Fleecy Mobs. They were either super easy to defeat or extremely tough - never in-between. The Fleecy Mob in Salire Castle was easy to beat - I just stood a distance while I mowed it down with my bow. On the other hand, the Fleecy Mob in Black had me killed about three times before I finally got the wool. The only real "challenge" might have been trying to pick up the wool while seven other copies of the Fleecy Mob had spawned as well.
The dungeons themselves could pick up where the rest of the map dropped off, right? There's still some redemption, any hope at all? After all, this must be his best - his opus magnum! Surely, he pulled out all the stops to make his dungeons sparkle and shine, right?!
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*Cue TF2 Engineer saying "Nope"*
Most of the dungeons themselves are fairly bland and boring. All of them take place in the sandstone-laden caves they lie in, with little variation between colors or blocks used. In addition, areas usually consist of only one of two block types with little mixing of materials. Most of the areas are Veches' standard, blocky style. Very basic pillars of stone keep the roofs from crumbling while standard, banal walkways keep the gameplay "going." Though there were a few areas I liked the looks of (Flame Citadel and Vexian Gallery come to mind), they don't make up for the absolute dullness produced by every other dungeon in this map.
And I'm just talking in terms of aesthetics/design, not specifically gameplay. And that's what really kills it for me. The map could be super ugly and if the gameplay at least had some heart to it, maybe I wouldn't be so demeaning to Inferno Mines.
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But NO. The difficulty curve was a wild roller coaster that never sat firmly in one spot. At times, it's heartless and brutal. At others, it feels like it's not even trying to kill me. The gameplay in this map feels like its trying to make you quit playing the map rather than giving you a reason to keep pushing on.
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Allow me to give a few examples to you:
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Lush Ruins: A large open cavern with large piles of mossy bricks everywhere. Most of it feels empty and dead, and where there is life, it is in volatile abundance. Creepers, skeletons and cave spiders all pour out of the rows of spawners that lie everywhere in this area. Also, there's the occasional death potion spawner that gives you every bad effect in the game at one, and if you don't have a milk bucket/some way of off-putting the damage, you're dead. It felt like someone made an RPG, forgot to add most of the RPG elements, and where they did, it was completely unbalanced.
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Zistonian Battlecry: Nothing but a straight-forward run towards a wool box, blocked by super-thorns, Zistonian pigmen and creepers. All seems normal until you get right up to the end and then a swarm of ghasts and blazes descend upon you. I was trapped behind the glass to the wool box due to the mob that grew right outside. The only reason I was able to escape alive was due to ender pearls (which, again, the map gives in abundance, along with everything else.)
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Eternal Conflict: This area was one of the worst dungeons I had ever witnessed, taking everything bad about this map and stuffing it into one dungeon. First, you are thrown into a wooden pseudo-fortress where swarms of zombies and wither skeletons come pouring in. You get a bunch of snow golems and an occasional iron golem to help you out, but unless you can get out of the fortress, they're just going to keep building up. Once you manage to escape that, you have to go to the castle in the corner and slay a Fleecy Mob to get the Black Wool - don't forget all the other mobs that come to his aid. Finally, you have to go to the other side of the map to get to a teleporter that takes you out of the dungeon that has death potions (the ones like in Lush Ruins) pouring down on you constantly. And once you get out of the dungeon, you don't teleport to a safe spot where you get the chance to calm yourself or catch a breather. Nope, you end up in mid-air. In the Vexian Gallery. Right above lava. I actually died and had to do the whole dungeon over again because of that death.
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This map didn't feel like fun. This map felt like I was being held prisoner by a sadist - a sadist who wanted nothing more than to see me crying in agony and pain. This map is a gauntlet of pain and frustration to see how long it takes the player before they through their computer out of the nearest window in blind, seething rage. I didn't enjoy my time here, and I wouldn't recommend this map to any poor soul who would want to even consider it.
SCORE
Aesthetics: 3
Creativity: 4
Gameplay: 2
TOTAL: 9
Edit: Forums decided to mess up order, bolding and so on, should be fixed now.
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Curse PremiumI remember when Vechs maps were all the rage...
I'll show myself out.
My Minecraft Maps: coldfusionmaps.com
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Curse PremiumI feel that the misconception that CTMs are "dead" is a product of how CTMs have evolved over the last couple of years. Half-stack says it very well here: Link
Minecraft has changed, and so have maps and map development. In 2011, the development time for most maps was measured in weeks. As standards and expectations inflated, so did development times. IMO we're all indie game devs at this point. xD
My Minecraft Maps: coldfusionmaps.com
Honestly though, Vechs' maps were what got me into CTM maps in the first place (and pretty much why the genre is here in the first place), but there's no doubt that even the best mapmakers can end up making a bad map. I'm just wondering if Vechs will ever return to the CTM mapmaking scene (and I'm not talking Super Hostile Online, that doesn't really count IMO) and if he does, will he be able to stand out from the rest of the community? Since we have maps like Myriad Caverns (which is essentially a good, modern Veches map), Ragecraft III (the current pinnacle of CTM mapmaking) and many other great/terrific maps, I'm not sure if he'll be able to compete if he just sticks to his roots rather than try to grow out with what is available now.
(Then again, it's Vechs. He could probably make a bad map and still make half a million downloads.)
Just thought I'd post some screenshots of the WIP area, the Elder Rot.
That looks great!
I don't care about the Xs. You can call me Navarog. Or Nava if you really want to be a hipster. It's fine.
Wow, floating islands are really hard to make look good, I'm shocked. This is great.
Hello CTM Community. <3
Hi everyone, Kaladun here. Judging by the newest Strawberry Jams and the discord chat, I know there's a lot of new mapmakers in the community with lots of cool ideas. I think a lot of people, both mapping newbies and veterans alike, are scared of command blocks, so I wanted to break down three simple but powerful effects we can do with command blocks in the hope of both teaching and giving you some ideas. So welcome to the first
Now, a quick note before we dive in, this is designed for 1.9 and 1.10 mapping as the new repeating and chain command block types make these tricks a lot easier. You can do all of these in 1.8, but you'll need to make fill clocks in lieu of the repeating blocks.
#1 - Mob Proximity Effects
Sometimes, you want a monster to do more than just physical damage. You want something dangerous to happen when the player gets close to them. Blindness, slowness, poison, or maybe even buffs if you're super nice. Either way, it's all the same command. Let's start by making a mob to work with. For this tutorial, we'll use "Evil_Wizard", as shown below.
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Note the "_" in the middle of the name instead of a space. For commands, a mob's name has to be one connected string. This command will have two parts, and we'll go through them one at a time. First is the execute command, which will trigger another command around a mob:
/execute @e[name=Evil_Wizard] ~ ~ ~
The @e is a target selector that selects every available entity. Then it only chooses the one with the name "Evil_Wizard". The ~ ~ ~ then says that we'll run our second command at the mob's location. Next, we'll use the effect command:
/effect @a[r=3] slowness 5 0
The effect command is pretty simple. "@a[r=3]" will target all players within 3 blocks of the command's origin, which will be the Evil_Wizard. "slowness" refers to the effect and you can replace with whatever debuff you'd like. "5" is the duration in seconds the effect lasts, and "0" means the level 1 effect (1 would be level 2, 2 level 3, and so on). Putting these together we have:
/execute @e[name=Evil_Wizard] ~ ~ ~ /effect @a[r=3] slowness 5 0
Place this in a command block and set it to "Repeat" and "Always Active" like below and voila! Players will be slowed whenever they get near your Evil_Wizards! Enjoy making your areas even eviler with this trick. Of course, you can use any mob and status effect for this trick, so you could make deadlier foes with effects like wither, or even healing beacons by executing from armor stands and the regen effect.
#2 - Particle Effects
Our Evil_Wizard from #1 is nice, but it could stand to be even more evil looking. We'll do that with particles, in this example by making arcane runes float around our wizard. First off, let's choose our particle effect. You can see the list at http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Particles. For this example we'll be using "enchantmenttable". Like before, this is a two part command; we'll use "execute" like before to select each Evil_Wizard, and a new command, "particle":
/particle enchantmenttable ~0 ~1 ~0 1 1 1 0.5 10
The first 6 numbers describe a box around the entity that the particles will spawn in. The first three numbers are the center of the box relative to the entity. The next 3 scale the size; you'll probably have to mess around with these, as they act differently for different particles. The 7th describes the speed of the particle; increasing it makes for a more energetic looking effect. Finally, the 8th says how many particles it'll make, in this case 10. Putting the commands together we get:
/execute @e[name=Evil_Wizard] ~ ~ ~ particle enchantmenttable ~0 ~1 ~0 1 1 1 0.5 10
As before, place in an active, repeating command block and you'll have all the effects you want. Try playing around with the numbers and different particles to see what you can make.
#3 - Special Weapon Effects
With its slowness aura and intimidating particle effects, we'll need a powerful weapon to take down the Evil_Wizards. Let's make a sword that gives the player a speed buff. Using something like MCstacker, NBTedit, or MCedit, give yourself a special sword like this:
The critical part isn't the enchantments or even the base item, it's the default colored lore text "=Ninja=", which we'll use to detect when it's being used. Make sure your item has that lore text. Next, type and run the following command in chat:
/scoreboard objectives add Ninja dummy
This will create a 'scoreboard' for us, essentially a variable we can use to track numbers. This command only has to be run once, which is why we used the chat there. Now though, we'll break out our command blocks. Place a repeating command block down (set to always active), and then two chain command blocks after it, like so:
Chain command blocks will trigger when the previous command block in the line does. Note the 'arrows' on the top and sides, it's important that they all point to the next block in the sequence. Now, starting with the repeating command block, enter these commands in order, one per command block.
/scoreboard players add @a Ninja 1 {SelectedItem:{tag:{display:{Lore:[=Ninja=]}}}}
/effect @a[score_Ninja_min=1] speed 1 0
/scoreboard players set @a Ninja 0
The first command block is our most complicated, but we'll go through it piece by piece. 'scoreboard players add' lets you add a number to a scoreboard of selected players. '@a' means we'll look at every player. 'Ninja 1' means that if our player matches some criteria, it'll add 1 to their Ninja score. Finally, the bracketed portion at the end will detect if the held item has the lore tag =Ninja=, just like our sword. So, if the player holds the sword, it will add +1 to their Ninja scoreboard.
The effect command should be familiar to you, but our @a has a new criteria. 'score_Ninja_min=1' means that this effect will only work on players with a Ninja score of 1 or higher. Finally, 'scoreboard players set @a Ninja 0' resets every single player's Ninja score to 0. This is important because without this reset a player would only have to hold the sword once and they'd have the effect forever. With all of these in place, try switching back and forth between items and you'll see the speed effect appear and disappear.
Here's everything together; the slowness and particles from our Evil Wizard, and the speed from our ninja sword.
This basic approach of incrimenting a score, doing an effect, and then resetting is very useful, and can be used for more complicated effects like area damage, armor sets that increase in power, or items that place fire or torches. Mess around and explore what you can do with scoreboards and this method and you'll easily be able to make memorable weapons and items for your map.
I hope this helped someone learn, or maybe just inspire some interesting ideas for a new map. Let me know if there's other commands or techniques you'd like to see explained, as I'll happily do another one of these if it helped people or there's requests.
oh boi
i just want to add in, that maybe you didn't understand what was in vechses mind when he was creating the map (sure, most of the time it probably was nothing) and some of the 'mechanics'. As you can watch in his dev commentary the gameplay around zistykins is 'walk into the proximity range then back off, kill the zistykin and sprint towards the spawner (there's a lot of those eff X pickaxes to let you do it quickly too). You said that you died a lot there but maybe if you took your time on figuring the mechanic it might have been a bit better for you.
The teleporter to get out of Eternal Battle can be shot with an arrow (or enderpearl, which you should have prepared for the last area [also considering you said that there's too much of them]) so you can avoid the rain of death potions after the initial freakout when you get hit by one of them (there's also cows and milk right next to it. take a hint smh).
Can't really talk about Lush Ruins or random items, that surely was tragic. And the difficulty curve is similar to other vechs' maps where he gives you easier areas to let you rest before the storm (aka next area).
That's it for me dude. Nice review.
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Retired StaffWhoa whoa whoa... whoa...
no.
Can we please not even try to defend the travesties that were Zistykins and Eternal Battle? Just because the designer had a "mechanic" in mind when they made something doesn't excuse it from criticism, especially when the mechanic itself turned out absolutely horridly. Zistykins, especially in Dumb Zisteau Blast Cavern, were an absolute mess of bad mechanics, bad area design, and bad balancing. The area was not designed for this sort of gameplay, intentionally putting spawners in locations where this "back up, then jog in and kill a spawner" design simply wasn't possible. As for Eternal Battle, shooting it with an arrow? How are you going to aim for that when you have several thousand stacked mobs chasing you down? And you expect people to just casually craft Milk where they're being assaulted? The area was not actually balanced for that sort of casual gameplay, and pretending it was is kinda laughable.
I hope this was sarcasm. I do.