Tactical Assault
Capture The Flag / 8 - 12 players / Large / Intermediate / Industrial

This map was my entry to the Summer 2011 Maverick Mapping Competition. It was hosted by Maverick Servers, (obviously) Massacre Servers, Lunar Module, CGTextures, Luxology, Ready Up Radio, Sapphire, Eyefinity, Wacom, and Kot-in-Action. A total of 33 participants signed up for the competition. I signed up rather early - being the third participant to enter. At the end of the competition the map recieved ninth place.

Thematically, Tactical Assault is set in a Russian underground laboratory, and makes heavy usage of textures from EvilLair and Lunaran. A few textures are also adaptions of images found on CGTextures.

The map is relatively open and large, but due to the compact design and high connectivity it is possible for one to travel about very fast. One friendly commenter noted that captures can be made especially quickly in CPM due to it`s enhanced physics. Fortunately, the bases are extremely defensible, as people can attack intruders from virtually all sides at different levels.

Tactical Assault was designed primarily for the Team Arena modification. However, there have been a few adaptions made for CPM physics, whilst still making it perfectly playable in vq3. Shortly after it`s beta release, oranje placed it on his servers for online gameplay. There were a few faults in gameplay in the beta that were noted by both players and mappers. After the release candidate, people complimented it for it`s smooth flow and generally being fun to run around in CPM, even without any players.

Possibly the most unique aspect of this arena is the two flameshooters in the lower bases. While hazards such as lava, slime, etc. are quite common in Quake III maps, utilizing trigger_hurts in ways such as what is displayed here is fairly rare. Although the fire doesn`t do much damage if you have plenty of armor and health, it poses more of a threat if you have been injured by the opposition and are taking off with the flag. You can duck under the flames and slide across the oil spill with careful positioning and timing, and with minimal speed lost.

Also worth nothing is that I moved to a new house about halfway during construction of this map. This unfortunately cut into my time and the slow computer I had to use made mapping futile during that period. Good news is that I got my fast PC back just in time to submit it comfortably for the competition.

Download: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27277779/pasctf4_final.zip

Play at FragLove: http://fraglove.com/

Play at Oranje`s server: 208.100.42.49:27960

Play at DGhost`s ..::LvL server: 64.15.78.74:27961

Map Source: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27277779/pasctf4.map

Review (by DGhost): http://lvlworld.com/#c=m1&i=2195&d=28%20Dec%202011&m=All&p=review

Tactical Assault by Ricardo "EmeraldTiger" Stevenson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.