Tower fighting Map - an experiment with height

[The Purple Panzer]

(I was going to call this Two Towers, but I think I've seen another map around with that name). I wanted to see what it would be like to use a lot of the third dimension in fighting.

The map consists primarily of two towers, and fighting I hope will be mainly between these towers. Each towers has a number of 3-floor groupings; these are connected vertically by teleporter (that is, within each 3 floor group you have to jump or drop, but between groups you teleport). The teleporters are slightly off to one side, and use a simple convention: the taller of the two will take you up, the shorter will take you down.

There is no inter-tower teleporting, but you can jump it. It might be good to put team bases on top of the towers, as you'd have to go down one tower and up the other to get to the other team's flag. Recently I've been playing more FFA, so I didn't toss these in.

The stuff on the ground is sparse, there just for some spawning protection, laser deflection, etc. Ideally flags would be available on all levels, but there is no way to specify this in the map file; many servers seem not to use the option to put flags on buildings, which means you have to go back to the ground - this wouldn't be very good on this map, which is intended for highly vertical play.

I tried to keep the block count low, I hope performance is OK (this was one of the goals of this map too - to be very playable); somehow it seems that expanding vertically causes a higher performance hit than increasing block count roughly horizontally - I'm not sure why. My raw version had 221 objects to be rendered; I ran it through BZMapper to eliminate overlaps, and the count is higher now (291, though it represents the same effective shape). I'm guessing that servers will be more efficient with the BZmapper-cleaned version, but I don't know.

[Grumbler]

I put it up on bzflag.galkire.net.......i called it Twin Towers until you get a full name. I made it a rabbit hunt until you get the bases in .


played around real quick. feels simlar to the small map you did.

the jumping feels a bit conjested, and jumping across to the tower is a little too far a jump.....ie fall down too many levels.

but.....much like the small map you did, it might play real well with a number of people....... 'cause, heck, what do i know.

[Workaphobia]

Quite an interesting map. The block count made it a bit laggy for intense play, but after lowering the graphics quality it was fine. I think jump height would need to be increased on the server so you don't lose as much height between buildings. Other than that, it would make for a very interesting FFA map. And if you add team bases, it would be utterly awesome.