Rodea2007 wrote:karsten wrote:Whew, after that, I need a holiday!
See you all again in two weeks.
1. As the largest map ever there, it was 24x24 (previously only 20x20), did you get any trouble when to play it your computer.
2. What conclusions do you get when playing this map and what your suggestions to mapper to create a better map and fun.
3. I do not know what map style I use, when compared with the SAM or the CIC what can you conclude
4. Thank you for playing my maps and respond to it, this is actually expected, you play a map and then you give comments to it and I think this is another form of credit you give to the creator's map
Well, back from my holiday, and delighted to respond to Rodea's questions:
1. I had no problem at all
running this huge map from start to win to Rodea Victory Screen (is that cool fellow your son, by the way?) Even toward the end, game freezes (when SMR stops for a while to think after you lay new track) were minimal. - Having said that, I have 3GB installed and the crucial patch that makes SMR aware of large memory. I also run a core i7 processor, but that probably makes little difference, since SMR is single thread.
2. Rodea's Borneo is a hugely fun and challenging map and certainly one of the best ever. The new content is super-duper, wins hand down. And in addition and just as important, lots of carefully constructed brain-teasers, puzzles and traps in the map, which increase the replay value tremendously. Because all puzzles are fair and have logical solutions, every map replay is a great opportunity for further optimization, which is one of the key fascinations of SMR.
Suggestions on how to make the best better?
This is a map about a real place, Borneo, and yet, beyond town names and the currency denomination, there is not much we learn about it. One way to create tremendous additional authenticity is to use the individual victory screens, perhaps even the map-specific event screens, to provide visual
Borneo feedback to the gamer. An excellent example of how to do this is provided by Universum in "Utah".
Scenery: I know it is difficult to do good "jungle" with the trees provided by SMR. But jungle defines Borneo, as far as I can see, so some typical jungle scenery would be awesome.
Bridge file: as can be seen in the screenshot, the bridge file does not cleanly separate the bridge type heights. So SMR gets into a muddle when constructing a bridge. No biggie!
3.
CIC is a certification, a confirmation of certain characteristics of a map by external review. CIC confirms that a map is easy to install and that it runs crash-free to completion. I conclude that this is an
excellent Rodea-style map, neither SAM nor CIC. It is almost CIC, because it has a flawless event file, and it does not crash. But despite the hard work that doubtlessly went into testing the Installer, I have to agree with Jancsika that it does not always work, certainly not on my Vista system. I also did not find restarting a saved game straightforward.
Many people have criticised Lowell's map files as excessive and as too verbose, and intuitively, I would tend to agree. But the fact is, you can move any of Lowell's maps into the SMR UserMaps folder, start up SMR, load a months-old SaveGame of that map, be it Ohio or Mudskippers, and the map will start and run flawlessly, exactly as you saved it months ago! THAT, to me, is CIC.
I am not saying that Lowell's structure is optimal, it probably contains too many files, but it WORKS. The optimal file structure will probably be discovered some day somewhere between Lowell's over-careful structure and the reduced structure currently used by Rodea.
4.Yes, I could not agree more, constructive feedback to the map creator, or a simple thank you, are tremendously important payback for all the days and weeks of effort that go into the construction of a good map. In fact, the amount of comment a map generates can be used as indicator of a top map. I once made for myself a list of the top 30 most commented maps and I would have recommended at least 24 of them immediately for inclusion in the top 30 of best maps - and the other 6 fell out not because they were not excellent, but simply because they were unfinished with crash problems. That is why it is so important not to separate the maps from the thread, or at least to provide a link to the map thread.