ns_desolate was (is?) a derelict space station. My main 'theme' to it was the presence of hazardous concentrated nanogel, and an interesting mix of abandoned, desolate areas (around hives and such) and very clean, pristine, 'sterile' areas.
The thing I don't like about underwater bases is it's just kinda a silly idea IMO. The Kharra come from another planet, moving between host spaceships like a virus. The TSA finds these infections and neutralizes them. Underwater is just wierd. A spaceship would be utterly incapable of making space flight, reentry, and then turning into a submarine, for a variety of physics reasons (the biggest one being that space ships are designed to hold pressure IN, and submarines are designed to hold pressure OUT). Just doesn't make much sense to me.
Bob, shut up. These are the kind of things you need to know BEFORE you start ANY work. I've done maps for other games, I've run managed and released my own mods with a team, so just listen to me. If this is going to be a halfway decent map at all we can't have 7 people all randomly working on whatever they feel like. "I want a biodome!" "I want a flooded area!" "I want space toilets!" You'd have a hive that's full of piping connected to a room in the wall_lab texture set full of crates with a flooded area of bright lighting between, and a junction made of dark, dirty textures. It'd be like taking a jigsaw puzzle and cutting the pieces so they all fit together how you want. It wouldn't make a picture, and it doesn't mean you've done it right.
The absolute first thing you need to decide is, as I said, the theme. The layout is a good springboard for the actual layout, but a huge chunk of a map's design is influenced by what the map's "purpose" serves.
As well, the absolute LAST thing we need are people coming in and putting in random pieces of map because 'it's cool'. You don't want to be designing a space station map, and someone starts taking their own liberties and you end up with worthless weldables and a billion pits of doom (which are fun, but impractical on many maps). This happened on my mod: Some coders decided to stop listening to me and start just throwing ^^ at the wall and seeing what stuck. Imagine taking a single room out of each official NS map and gluing them together. You'd probably end up with something like that. The left hand should ALWAYS know what the right hand is doing.
To avoid people from randomly making chunks of map, you need a strong theme, guidelines, and a layout first. We have an in-progress layout, no theme, and really no guidelines.
Theme is a hard thing to master. I spent a while on ns_desolate thinking of what I wanted to do. I settled on a station since stations not only fit the storyline, but allow you to take some great creative liberties. An undersea base is similar to a space station, but you lose a lot of potential atmospherics, namely in ambiance and lighting. Look at my ns_desolate screenshots, especially the marine spawn. I got a lot of compliments on that because the pink lighting fit so well, and really gave the map the impression of being in space.
So let's brainstorm a theme before we do anything else first. Note that one thing I don't like about many ns maps is that they have a theme, but they're not consistant, or simply have no theme. ns_nothing for example. Just playing through the map, it has no theme. It's just random rooms tacked together. It's a fun map to play, sure, but compare walking through nothing to walking through agora. Agora screams atmosphere, the upper areas are all themed to be a sort of 'living area', and the lower areas are all themed to fit the 'mining area'. If we settle on a toxic waste facility, then most of the rooms should make it LOOK like a toxic waste facility, not just one or two. A player should NEVER have to stop and ask 'What is the purpose of this facility?' If you make the map well, every room should scream that answer right back at the player. A power plant would have fuel rooms, containment areas, coolant outflows, and a big, noisy reactor.
Some ideas:
- A ship or freighter - Ships or freighters haul things around. Generally, they should follow a plausible layout: Engines and such towards the 'back', command and control at 'front', and the 'guts' of it (cargo holds, containment areas) all should be in the middle. They give you less flexibility in terms of layout, but they can be a lot of fun to make and design.
--- Cargo Freighter
--- Passenger Ship
--- Ore Hauler
--- Hazardous Materials Container Ship
--- Military ship
------ Destroyer
------ Carrier
- A station - Stations are more or less free-for-all. You'll have airlocks and access areas towards the edges, with cargo and power cores and whathaveyous towards the central areas. There should always be a lot of windows and such so that the little people on it can look out at the prettiness.
--- Shipyard
--- Colony
--- Off-site power facility
--- Manufacturing
--- Hydroponic Farming
--- "High Tech"
------ R&D Labs
------ Nanotech
------ Kharra Research
--- Military Installation
------ Defense Station
- Planetside base - Planetside bases can be designed a lot like space stations, but with a few other things to keep in mind: planetside bases are not usually self-sufficient, whereas a station probably will be. Also, since transporting materials to build it is usually much cheaper, you'll generally have bigger rooms and halls. A setting in space would naturally have more cramped quarters: That's the nature of things.
--- Launch facility
--- Colony
--- Military Installation
------ Missile Base
------ Launch facility
--- Power facility
--- Farms or food production
--- Mines
--- "High Tech"
------ R&D Labs
------ Nanotech
------ Kharra Research
Note that I'm not too fond of 'colony' or 'passenger' themes since they fall into the idea of maps like ns_eclipse: really no atmosphere or theme, just big halls and rooms that do nothing.
Finally, I've heard a lot of people saying 'OMG PITS OF DOOM'. If the map is like playing Super Mario Bros. it's a ^^ty map. Plus, you'd really have to justify the pits of doom. A passenger cruise or an R&D lab would have almost no pits of doom, if any at all. A mine most certainly would. A space-faring vessel of any type most likely wouldn't, or if it did, they'd be highly specialized: A pit of doom would fit nicely around a reactor core of sorts, but would be abysmally retarded just randomly placed in the middle of a room. Remember you want the players to think that this is a real facility, with a purpose. A contracting team wouldn't decide (in the case of ns_nothing) to leave a big bottomless hole in the middle of the generator room, when they could easilly cover it. Conversely, the EM Drill Shaft in Bast is a very good pit of doom: I can honestly believe there'd be something like that there.
