Quote from kingkaider
THis might be the veteran in me talking, but I remember the original Sea of Flames and Infernal Sky, Survival maps designed before the idea of the monument, and the wools added in later. What got me into these maps was the idea of survival in a harsh and vicious enviroment, and recently a lot of maps have started to feel more like an offshoot of the adventure genre than the survival genre.
I'm all for story and handing out loot, but c'mon, Kaizo caverns still stands up to these criterion better than some of the maps I've seen be lauded by this community (interestingly out of all the maps I replayed on 1.7.9, Kaizo is still the most compatible. TMYK). As an example of what I'm talking about, I imagine everyone in here has seen a Zisteau CTM playthrough (or at least part of one). This is a man who wants to make the world his own personal playground, and treats it like he would a survival world, building cool bases, making useful farms and so on. (If you haven't already, go watch Legendary. I know it's 49 episodes long but I still maintain it's the best series on youtube). I miss the idea that a CTM isn't an example of what cool gimmick you can come up with for an area and more about the idea of creating a world that the player wanted to play in rather than their silly and excessively easy vanilla.
I guess CTM has changed - evolved - for worse or better. I do believe that if we had never changed from "Survival++", CTM would be long dead by now as the genre would've been fully explored. Branching out into Adventure effectively makes the possibilities for a CTM map endless, although a Survival-focused map still has a place in CTM IMO.
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On the contrary: Just a day or two ago, we finally got one of the last areas that we've been waiting on before we could compile the entire map and start working on balancing and testing it. So... it's coming. Soon. I promise.
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I think we should all just wait until 1.9 is balanced before we start making maps for it... and I'm not saying this in a "Mojang's attempts at balancing have been terrible" sense, I mean that in a quite literal "they haven't put any effort into balancing yet" sense.
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So a while back, I posted about some trouble with some strange lag... Basically, the game would slow down, occasionally freeze, and then try to catch up. What makes it strange, though, is the fact that it would happen consistently in the same area. I first noticed it as I started to approach the town in Valley of Blood, and it only got worse as I proceeded. Eventually, I died so much to it that I restarted the map.
This next attempt was no better; however, with a bit of knowledge of what was ahead, I was able to push through. I finished the white crystal area, and continued to the Nexus and beyond... and the lag stopped completely. I didn't see it again in any noticeable amounts.
Skip ahead to intersection 4, where - despite some difficulty on a couple of bosses, which is a whole other story regarding my biggest legitimate complaint about the map - I was able to do pretty well. I beat brown with no real trouble, and went into green...
Basically, the lag came back worse than ever. It started maybe 1/3 or 1/2 of the way through the area, and I couldn't figure out what caused it. I had thought that the lag in white was due to approaching some corrupted chunks beyond the far side of the area, but in green, I started getting it as I moved around vertically inside the castle.
Finally, I began to notice a pattern: the lag would happen whenever the plague zombies spawned. I started wondering if the lag was being caused by a command block system. It wasn't until after I restarted the map again that I put it together: the problem was custom player heads. While most custom mobs have some sort of head decoration, almost none have a custom player head.
Some background may be necessary at this point. I have no internet at home. None. I do all my YouTube watching and internet browsing - including this post - from either my phone, or on my laptop at a local Starbucks. With this context, it seems somewhat obvious that the lag when I played on my desktop at home was from Minecraft being unable to reach the skin servers. However, the lag in green was not actually what caused my second ragequit... which brings me to the issue I mentioned earlier.
Simply put: It is too hard to recover your stuff if you die in a boss fight. Death doesn't pause or even restart the fight. It keeps going, meaning that if you want your gear back, you have to get through the middle of a massive swarm of neverending mobs.
Trying to get control of the fight and then recover your stuff isn't an option, since your gear is likely to despawn - especially considering that the fact that you died probably means you had completely *lost* control. On the other hand, devoting any amount of attention to recovery before handling the mobs that have spawned means you're far more likely to just get killed again.
I died at most 5 to 10 times outside of boss fights; I got killed more than that in the Pharaoh fight alone. About 15 deaths there and maybe 20 more in pink, which both thankfully don't require full attention to what's going on. If I had died even once in blue, it likely would have been similar there. (By the way, does that fight have any later stages? I think I might have skipped them by reflecting a ghast fireball. It felt a bit too easy.)
The real killer, though, was green, where I died nearly 50 times before ragequitting to severe lack of not only usable items, but also the ability to make more.
I guess the problem is that the fight's mechanic is simply too punishing. Not only does it have the same "do this every 30 seconds or you (probably) die" mechanic as the black wool in RC2 - made worse by the comparative rarity of the "prevent death" mechanism - but it also has a stupidly powerful boss that is much harder to run from.
Earlier, I mentioned the inability to get more gear; let me explain that a bit more. It's true that I could have made some diamond armor and put some good enchantments on it; in fact, I did so several times. It simply wasn't enough.
Part of the problem with CTM maps that have a bunch of fancy attribute or command block equipment is that they start to *rely* on it, without actually making it renewable. This means that eventually, you can't beat the map with even the best gear you could get in vanilla survival.
Yes, the map is supposed to be hard. However, I don't think that any map should allow players to get into unwinnable situations (barring the player doing something really stupid). It *absolutely* shouldn't happen late in a map when the player has poured perhaps dozens of hours in.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's a fine line between "really hard" and "excessively punishing", and most of the boss fights fall on the wrong side of that line.
**TL;DR player mob heads cause problems in offline mode, the boss fights might be too punishing, and green is worse than Unholy Arena from RC2.** Sorry for the wall of text; I had a lot to say.
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Guys. Stop. It'll be released when it's ready. That may or may not be 10 minutes, but I'd be inclined to say that if you don't stop spamming, then Heliceo should deliberately be slow about releasing the map just to teach everyone a lesson.
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1. Ragecraft 2. Not a surprise. Probably the best execution of the design philosophy that CTMs have evolved into.
2. Spellbound Caves, which really is the map that began the aforementioned change in philosophy: the clear presentation of the "fun path", and the desire to make it actually fun.
3. Waking Up. It was when this was made that Vechs was at the top of his game.
4. Kaizo Caverns, the actual first CTM. No doubt here.
5. Vinyl Fantasy 2, one of the first famous non-Vechs CTMs.
6. Pantheon; despite its many shortcomings, it gave us all so much to learn from.
7. Uncharted Territories 2. No, not 3. I mean UT2. Undeniably influential in the change of the CTM community from a group of players to a group of creators.
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I am proud to present:
Caught in the middle of a massive lightning storm while piloting your airship, you desperately seek refuge... and discover the abandoned outpost of Cloudhome. Legends are numerous, but nobody knows for sure why it's completely deserted. Soon, you'll find out that it's not as empty as you thought...
Important notes:
- I actually finished this yesterday, but due to terrible internet I was unable to upload it.
- Natural spawns are disabled - it helps immensely with balancing purposes.
- Mobgriefing is disabled - the map is a bit compact, and rather than give up using creepers, I decided to do this.
- Due to how tightly packed the areas are, I recommend not digging through too many walls in order to keep the experience at its best. Most of the buildings are empty anyway.
- This map has had next to no balancing. Good luck.
- Please don't blame me for the terrible aesthetics. It's tough to make things look good, y'know? Prioritizing is also hard.
DOWNLOAD Cloudhome v1.0
For MC 1.8.X (really any 1.8 version should work)
So I was originally intending some sort of elaborate time-travel-loop map, but that idea was quickly abandoned and I went with this instead. None of the lore I had come up with fit here, so as a result this map has no lore other than what's in this post. I mean, it's probably atmospheric as heck, but no story to speak of. I feel like the map as a whole is barely adequate, but hey, at least I finished it. What I think will be most interesting about this map is any potential speedruns, so... yeah, go right ahead if you feel like it.
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I feel like the core of CTMs is a concrete objective with many viable approaches. Like, CTMs are the only maps where tunnel-ratting is even an option. While anything that isn't "the fun path" seems to be becoming less popular, we should never forget that it should always be an option.
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So did I mention that 15-17 doesn't work for me? I think I might have mentioned that. If we're going to change the date just because of people complaining in the thread, why did we even do the poll?
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15th-17th and 22nd-14th are actually pretty terrible for me; I probably won't be able to do either. 29th-31st is only a little better. I guess I'm voting for 8th-10th, seeing as this weekend seems a bit soon (and I sorta have a couple things planned).
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Or 4. Make the spawner spawn two slightly different versions of the same mob, one of which has 200% drop chance and the other of which has 0%.