diff`lx: I’ve been touting this for a while now. Seemless portals just make much more sense than the classic style portal. It discourages things like piston camping and makes maps much more fun rather than a hide-and-seek match.
Perfect example is Liandri from UT99. The map is otherwise a great 1v1 map but the portals allow for escapes and stalemates that make it too slow and boring. Turn the portals into seemless portals and suddenly belt is not so easy to lock down nor can it be so easily used as an escape.
The OP highlights the problem in this thread – just because a mechanic can be used poorly is not a reason to not include it. The inverse of this is pointing out problems in existing maps and saying they would be fixed by changing to portals.
The way your post is worded reads “liandri should be changed to portals because the teleport mechanic implementation is not very good”. Maps are key to good games and liandri did possibly have an issue with both sets of teleports. Is this a problem of teleports themselves (and thus they must be replaced with portals) or is it simply a problem with the maps implementation that could be solved with other changes, like changing teleport entrances/exits so they are not two way from the exact same spot? Or is the liandri situation one where seemless portals make more sense, which is cool as well.
Both should be available. Teleports exist in other games and are not a huge problem, they generally make maps better when used correctly. If there is a problem with teleports in ut it is their historically lacking implementation of facing upon exit. This should be looked at. If a xonotic style perfect portal cannot be done then a cludgy ut99 style one as an option would be nice. It would take more thought to include and mappers would not be able to use them for major areas, but the ability to add some interest where players leave LOS then reappear elsewhere could be interesting. See fractal and radikus in unreal.
To me the fact that liandri was never changed highlights a bigger problem than teleports. Gamers seem content to play on lackluster maps with lackluster rulesets. I abused that liandri portal in duel many times, not piston camping but two way teleports tend to be a bit of a problem..
For example it took an excessively long time for the dm6 pillar start spawn in quakelive to be removed. Now this is mainly because the creative was in ids hands rather than the communities and even if the opportunity was on the table the community would not have taken it. Or it would have been modified but then not picked up by servers/leagues.Given things like the blanket acceptance of ut99 maps for duel with minimal changes I would guess that it would be unlikely for a change like the dm6 spawn to be community driven.
If the teleports in Liandri were a problem then the map should have been fixed. This isn’t trying to imply the map was good or bad, or that epic suck because they never polished any maps after release, it is more a statement to the general attitude of gamers. We tend to play what we are given and rarely look further than what games ship with. Curse is another example of a map that kind of worked ok, was kept around for historical reasons but the crazy belt/pads pickup split left – beyond this a teleport to the upper room also makes a lot of sense.
Where am I going with this? I’m not really sure. Maps are important but player acceptance of maps that are obviously lacking plays a big role in shaping the game. It would be nice if there was some sort of push mechanism from a central repository so authors can update after the community has played their creations for a while. Testing only shows up so many problems – things like pillars spawn on dm6 or YA spawn on aero and some other average spawn pairs in quakelive can take a long time to show up, and even if play testers get them in testing they may not necessarily put two and two together and point it out.
Level Design