I hope everyone had a happy new year. I thought I’d add a little more info about the 6 pictures I uploaded a couple of weeks ago, because there is more than meets the eye in most of these pictures.

Picture 1: The office

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The office in V1 is a little empty bonus wise. The office and staff rooms themselves were meant to be bonus’s in their own right as they are hidden. Beside the visual jokes though (Snipers mug from ‘Meet the Sniper’ resting on a toxic barrel) the only thing people go in the room for was to press the button behind the Painis Cupcake poster which of course only ever works once.

So what’s new in V2? Well I think the most obvious change is the safe which has had a notable upgrade. Yes the old items are still there, you just need to figure out how to open the safe first. What else is in the safe you ask? I’m not telling! I will tell you that you can actually see the button that opens the safe in the picture.

While on the subject of buttons, there are 3 in this picture (so far). We all know about the Painis Button, and I’ve just told you there is a button to open the safe, but the 3rd button I will let you guys find. I won’t even say what it does because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

Picture 2: This thing

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This is actually an example of our efforts to put the map on a diet. In V1 this space at the top of the stairs houses a load of toxic barrels and a lone bird, as well as a teleport to the sky-platform. The problem was though that all those barrels took quite a bit to render on players computers. So long as the map ran OK on my laptop (which technically shouldn’t be able to play TF2) we figured the map was stable enough. Now though we want a bit better than ‘good enough.’ We want playing on the map to be a smooth experience.

In these example by removing the barrels we cut down on the number of individual things to be rendered while in that area. Many other things have reviewed to see where reductions could be made and hopefully these changes combined with some clever areaportaling that WhosAsking and I are still working on, the map as a whole will run smoother and be a smaller file than the current 81.0mb of V1b. Having said that, a fair amount of the file size is the custom stuff like the music and textures. File sizes aside, the map should be a much better optimized experience.

Picture 3: The Bot Rooms

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The bot rooms are where 80% of achievements happen. Most achievements require killing x number of players, or killing certain classes while they do certain things. We are very proud of how adaptable the rooms and the bots are. Because they are so important for achievements were take anti-trolling measures seriously. The addition of the glass door guards, empty-room detectors and changed Helper door design in V1b have all helped individual players get achievements without being disturbed. We have found there are room for improvements though.

The glass door guards, while they stop players shooting into or out-of a room, people walk into the guards themselves a lot. The guards in V2 have been changed slightly to make them more visible which should help, though we won’t really know till they get tested.

The empty-room detectors are probably one of the things expected to be used in Snaggle’s upcoming BotfarmV6. In Factory_V2 though, we are considering removing the 10 minute timer on the doors altogether so that as long as a player is inside a room the door will stay locked. We also want to add a sentry detector that will keep the door locked for a short time (probably up to 20 minutes) so that engineers can leave their sentries to farm their 5,000 kills without some troll coming along and swapping the team of the bot or any other annoying behaviour. Ideally we would set up the detectors so that if the engineer stays in the room the whole time the room stays locked, but if they die with the sentry still in the room the timer would start the moment the player died. However we aren’t sure this is possible yet so it may not happen, not to mention we can’t do anything about the players who never lock their doors or leave the room to go do something else while their sentry farms kills.

The other thing I mentioned was the helper doors. While the newer doors used in V1b are more secure in how they only let in one player at a time and it is much harder to fire across the doorway, they do have a drawback – Its harder to see though at what’s on the other side. This means red players can’t see if there are any camping trolls waiting to rush in when the door opens, and blue players can’t see if the room they are going into has any waiting sentries. The solution has been to remove the doors completely and replace them with windowed teleporters. The new design improves the visibility in both directions and is impossible to shoot though because there are moving gaps. Instead there are 2 teleport panels on the floor, one each side of the room. On the blue side, the teleporter is disabled and is only enabled when a red player presses the button. The waiting blue player gets teleported to just the other side of the glass. On the red side is an always on teleport that is filtered to only teleport blue players back to the Blue spawn.

Of course none of those things are actually visible in the picture above, even though they are the more important changes. The ‘new’ red colour scheme in the bot room is to help emphasise the fact the bot rooms are Red territory and that any blue player is a guest in there. Some players can’t seem to understand that they need to be on the Red team if they want to use all the features of the Factory. Though what surprises me is when a blue player waits by a helper door for a red player to let them in, and eventually a red player does, the blue player then goes and kills the red player and steals the room! Then the Red player complains that they got killed and their room stolen when all they had to do was not open the door! *end rant*

Pictures 4 and 5: The new basement.

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The basement is actually kind of hard to describe without more pictures but at the time I took those pictures I was still working on the areaportaling for parts of the basement, and not all them were working properly leading to graphics errors. I hope that in the next update I will be able to show you the layout of the basement and all its rooms. I can however tell you a bit more about what’s down there.

As the picture shows, the cart is one of them. It runs on a shorter track and doesn’t go up or down any ramps meaning players should find it easier to ride the cart. I plan to add a raised section along the back wall so that players can easily get onto the cart. The cart itself moves 10% faster than it does in V1, meaning it’s now only 6-7 seconds in between capping points rather than the near 30 seconds on V1.

The other room I’ve been working a lot on is the Strange room. Its much more compact and the dividing wall is much thinner. I have added a gentle trigger_push to the blue side that presses them against the wall. The red side has more – each of the 6 booths has a door which shuts automatically and reopens when the players leaves (using the same method as the Bot rooms to detect for players) and has a func_regenerate to help. FYI, a func_regenerate is the thing that actually makes lockers work though the 2 in the Strange room aren’t paired with a model.
The main change to the room though is the doors – both teams can walk in and out of the rooms at any time with any weapon, unlike the button in V1 which doesn’t like arrows or sniper rifles. Even though its not needed, that button might remain due to the fact the strange room isn’t a short walk from spawn.

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What will possibly be the 2nd most popular room in the basement is the Boss room. Located so far under the factory it should really count as an additional floor in its own right, its also secure enough to hold both the HHH and Monoculus. Both are spawned by the buttons seen above which will have signs on or near them to show which button spawns which. The room will also feature a smarter reset mechanism – All red players are teleported back to spawn 5 seconds after either boss dies, while any blues (who shouldn’t be there) and any buildings are destroyed, meaning players can’t just idle in the room waiting for the HHH/Mono to respawn like happens on Botfarm and killing it with a sentry.

The other 2 rooms on the basement are the Pit room which is simply the relocated lava pit from that used to be in the middle of the cart track, and the office which is no longer hidden.

Picture 6: A toilet?!

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Yes, its a toilet. I’m not going to say anything about where this is or what is in there. In fact the only thing I will tell you is that somewhere in this room is a unlockable teleport to another bonus room. Oh and the teleport is not unlocked within this room, that’s hidden somewhere else!