Tiny Tiny Town Arena

Post GTA1/GTA2 maps here (finished and work in progress).
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BenMillard
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Tiny Tiny Town Arena

Post by BenMillard »

Get it here: Tiny Tiny Town Arena.

This is based on Elypter's Tiny Tiny Town. But it uses arena-style weapons and respawn points, along with lots of map refinements.

Screenshots
Image Image Image

My Progress
  1. Started by randomly zooming around, tweaking stuff which caught my attention.
  2. Took 2 hours to do not very much.
  3. Adding traffic through the middle works really well.
  4. Traffic around Eastern loop is useful when you respawn there or get chased by cops.
  5. Play-testing in single player shows mistakes can be very costly...but the fights between pros are epic.
  6. Made refinements, more testing, cycled through this several times over Saturday.
  7. Lots of tiles are now more correct than original Tiny Town! Construction of buildings is cleaner, too.
Elypter is free to use my .gmp and .mis alterations in your official Tiny Tiny Town! The screenshots as well, if you like. I'm really impressed how much area you reduced whilst keeping the feeling of original Tiny Town.

Compile-Time Crash
Needed to tweak locations of some powerups due to map changes. But now Mis Pad was hanging every time at the "checking script output" stage. The filename was tytytown_b1_arena.mis.

(EDIT: I'm now using tinytiny-arena.mis and this is working fine. So the whole release is named like this.)
Last edited by BenMillard on 31 Jan 2010, 03:39, edited 5 times in total.
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elypter
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Re: Tiny Tiny Town

Post by elypter »

I have downloaded and tested your recent modified version. Well done, I will have a closer look at it within the next days.
about the filenames:
there is allready a map called "tiny town tweaked" (with ttt.gmp as filename as far as i remember) so i had to choose something different. i think i will use tinytiny* in the next release. the version in the filename was thought to be for the (theoretical) situation that 2 people have the old version and are too lazy to download the new one. i see that this is not very likely, so i wont do that anymore.

I think both versions have the potential of getting popular.
yur sa'nok ngeyä
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Lantyz
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Re: Tiny Tiny Town Arena

Post by Lantyz »

I promised I'd post some suggestions, so here goes. Some may be relevant for both the original version and yours.

Add a weapon spawn near the double damage, since players are relatively helpless when they spawn there with another player nearby. Also, consider switching the direction of the single lane road there. Most of the times I spawned there I wanted to go in the other direction, since most of the action is in the right half of the level). A more definite solution would be to make the left half more interesting, but that may not be that easy.

I rarely (if ever) saw a car on the road around the vehicle machine guns. The regular Tiny Town has the same problem, but they fixed it somewhat by removing a road arrow, thus forcing cars on one lane of the main road to go around the corner. Perhaps the same approach would work on Tiny Tiny Town. And speaking of road arrows, there seems to be erroneous road arrow in the bottom right corner.

Desynch is a major problem in this level, which is a pity. General consensus seems to be this is caused by lots of explosions in a small level. If that is the case, then perhaps it is wise to cut down on the molotovs and grenades (although I would try to keep both in the level). Maybe the standard 12 molotovs/grenades each minute decreases the problem?
Related: I would also seriously cut down on the oil slicks and mines. Infinite supply of oil slicks + very small level = not good. It doesn't take long for the whole level to become one slippery nightmare. I don't even want to think about what would happen if a frustrated player would find 99 mines. There's an unsolid wall near the mines, by the way.

The wall near the health is unsolid, due to the half blocks. This can be fixed by adding a wall of flat tiles next to the half blocks.

It's a great action packed level. Hope you find my suggestions usefull.
BenMillard
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Re: Tiny Tiny Town Arena

Post by BenMillard »

Lantyz wrote:Add a weapon spawn near the double damage.
Definitely! Added machine gun, so it's quite a worthwhile place to go even if you have weapons.

Removed the 45 degree wall at (72,125). This opens up the hairpin after the tall ramp by Vehicle Bomb. It's still nice and tight but now more drivable.
Lantyz wrote:Also, consider switching the direction of the single lane road there.
Any other traffic setup through the middle causes a "no cars" problem. The whole Western half of the level was empty in early versions! Getting a car soon after respawn is essential in such a small level.

Also, going West from there takes you North to Machine Guns and then Electro Gun, or South to Flamethrower.
Lantyz wrote:I rarely (if ever) saw a car on the road around the vehicle machine guns. The regular Tiny Town [...] removing a road arrow, thus forcing cars [...] to go around the corner.
Done because I agree it's too rare. Forced all Southbound traffic and gave Northbound traffic the option. Hopefully more traffic will now go past that spawnpoint whilst keeping the same amount going past Electro Gun.

Might get some pileups as traffic crosses over, giving some cover to newly spawned players and making that first car a bit easier to get.
Lantyz wrote:[...] there seems to be erroneous road arrow in the bottom right corner.
Fixed my mistake at (96,122). These affect traffic density so it's really good to find them!
Lantyz wrote:Desynch is a major problem in this level, which is a pity. General consensus seems to be this is caused by lots of explosions in a small level.
Grenades replaced with Molotovs. The bouncing and weird interaction with peds and cars seems to make Grenades especially desync-prone.

Also means fewer entries to get confused by in your weapons list.

Spamming explosive weapons will sometimes desync, sometimes won't. Smaller levels promote denser spamming and you get into those situations more frequently. But I reckon the actual problem is to do with network effects.

Throwing a maximum of 5 molotovs at a time seems stable. Throwing once per footstep instead of hammering the key also seems to help, as well as giving you more chance to react and dodge incoming attacks.
Lantyz wrote:Related: Infinite supply of oil slicks + very small level = [...] one slippery nightmare. I don't even want to think about [...] 99 mines.
Reduced both to 10; 99 is excessive even in MultiSlayer City. Vehicle Machine Guns remain 99 since there is no way to repair the car. Drive-by spawnkills can add up fast, so I might reduce this after more testing.
Lantyz wrote:There's an unsolid wall near the mines, by the way.
Fixed. Tile 488 collision options were set to None.
Lantyz wrote:The wall near the health is unsolid, due to the half blocks. This can be fixed by adding a wall of flat tiles [...].
Done. Such an obvious fix but it never occurred to me!

Thanks for the great feedback. It's really helpful to have specific technical and gameplay reviews! You can get this updated version from the same Tiny Tiny Town Arena page as before.
BenMillard
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Re: Tiny Tiny Town Arena

Post by BenMillard »

A few other tiles were missing their collision properties. I've corrected all the tiles which have been reported. They were all from the brick-built central area.

Latest version has these fixes.
BenMillard
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Re: Tiny Tiny Town Arena

Post by BenMillard »

This level now uses a single tinytiny-arena.mmp file, instead of 5 different ones. It includes a tinytiny-install.bat file to remove the old files.

This is a temporary measure until Sektor or BenMillard make Game Hunter automatically clean up your *.mmp files when new one is released. Hardcoding a list of renamed maps into Game Hunter would be easiest for users but might have performance and maintenance problems, so individual modders will probably have to provide batch files for that situation.

Code: Select all

REM Removes old MMP files from Tiny Tiny Town Arena 2-6 Players.
REM Now uses a universal "tinytiny-arena.mmp" for any number of players.
IF EXIST tinytiny-arena.mmp DEL tinytiny-arena2p.mmp
IF EXIST tinytiny-arena.mmp DEL tinytiny-arena3p.mmp
IF EXIST tinytiny-arena.mmp DEL tinytiny-arena4p.mmp
IF EXIST tinytiny-arena.mmp DEL tinytiny-arena5p.mmp
IF EXIST tinytiny-arena.mmp DEL tinytiny-arena6p.mmp
Hopefully this batch file will prove good enough. If so, I'll re-release MultiSlayer using ms-* for all the filenames and one *.mmp per level.
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