Part 2: The Problem Of The Cargo Doors[/size]
I’m really happy with the setup I discussed preciously, and all of it is pretty much ruined by this section right here.
Any connection to the stairwell is going to run right past these three doors and presumably connect to them- which is not a problem idea-wise, I made a pretty neat 4-way intersection with an elevator way back in the original version of this map. The problem is that I now recognize that the actual office sections of Office Complex are almost universally
flat- the only areas where there’s any change in height whatsoever are in and around the cafeteria in Map C, but these sections are up a good ways from the level of both the stairwell door and the admin one- and yet, unfortunately,
not quite high enough to be on a level
above the offices. This is complicated by the fact that that transformer room has
two doors to it, and there really is not a lot of space for the far one to lead to:
The way I see it, I kind of have two options.
Option A is to do what I did in the original map- put a stairway going upwards somewhere in the office section, build most of it level with the cargo doors, and then have another stairway going down near the white door in the main stairwell. The second door in the ‘electrical room’ isn’t really relevant; whether it connects to elsewhere in the complex or just terminates in small generator/HVAC room is a question I can answer later:
I don’t like this for a number of reasons. For one thing, it adds a lot of verticality to the office sections, which as I mentioned previously is not really something the first two maps
do. For another, that verticality is in a very ‘zigzag’ fashion where to get, say, from Admin 1 to the Dev Offices, an employee would have to go
down a flight of stairs in the main stairwell, then
up a flight of stairs past the white door, then down
another flight of stairs to the emergency exit door- basically, the stairs ‘cancel each other out’ in a way very foreign to how large buildings are actually designed.
Option B is to actually push the offices back farther and have them kind of loop around to the door, and put another, wider maintenance area behind that garage door, which would have two stories and thus descend into the office area proper.
But what would this area
do? One would think the stuff being held in that storage area would
go somewhere and it doesn’t make sense for cargo to be moved up on that freight lift in the main room only to go back
down immediately after, so perhaps there is actually another elevator stop up there, or a passage leading to some other sector of the facility.
The problem is, the office sections (which, remember, are all on one plane and I really want to keep them that way) have ceilings that are about 32 Hammer Units higher than the floor of the freight-elevator area. That means that if I tried to have anything at all in the maintenance section run over the office area (which it needs to do in order to connect to any other sections of the facility, as it is completely encircled) the two spaces would clip into each other. I could make something in the maintenance room lift up more to solve this, but that’s another version of the ‘self-defeating stairwells’ problem I ran into up above- why would the freight elevator go up to the height it does when there is just a ramp or stairway (or, heaven forbid, another elevator) immediately after it? Why not go up all the way?
Instead, I am sorely tempted to cheat.
Several times in Blast Pit the BM devs hide trigger_teleports in areas that don’t quite connect topologically in order to make them accessible- if the area where the teleport is is small and the player’s vision is restricted, this is pretty much seamless (not quite, which is why you can lose the Hidden Hat so easily in that level, but I think I have a better way to do it where such issues won’t happen). The maintenance hallway towards the end of this level is actually pretty damn ideal for this sort of trick:
Then, the office and maintenance areas could actually be split up like so, with ‘the same’ elevator shaft (assuming I do indeed want an elevator hookup here) actually existing in two different locations but nobody noticing because the two are identical:
Then, I wouldn’t even have to bother with collisions for the offices versus the freight area at all, and would be free to expand the maintenance area after the electrical room as well. This would require another cheaty trigger_teleport in the portion of the office leading up to the stairwell, but as I am designing that area I think I can make it teleport-friendly without too much trouble.
This option also has another enticing prospect to it that I will get to in either the next section or the one after.
Looking forward for the other maps!
