Playtest #3 results

After some late nights, the third playtest is completed.
My main testing goals during this test were the following:
- do the players learn that the yellow diamonds mark destructable walls?
- is the sniper nest used more?
- do the players use the hellbender?
- do the players find and use the manta?
- do the boost pads now work on all vehicles?

The destructable walls had some issues. I had blocked off all the exits from the spawn base with destructable walls to teach players the marking and destruction mechanic at the start of the level. The walls have very low health and would be destroyed using minimal ammo as to provide very quick feedback to the players. However, it seems that the default UTdestructable objects are not synched. This means that while the walls are breakable, they don't appear broken to other players when you do destroy one. A way to fix this is to use kismet instead to scale the object when it has taken enough damage, tracking the damage in kismet.

The trash in some of the alleyways has collision, I don't know why epic did this but I can remove it.
I assumed small clutter props like that would not have collision, and have used them to decorate tight corridors. Collision on these props restricts movement through these spaces more then I want.

An armor pickup placed in an open-topped trash container was unreachable thanks to the container's box collision. This can be fixed by removing collision and adding blocking volumes.

The minimap is just a bit too dark and could use some better contrast.

The AI has trouble with vehicle pathing, I'll have to mark a lot of nodes as infantry only.

The large tree at the red base is placed at such a distance from a wall that is looks like you can just squeeze in between them, but you cannot. I'll move the tree a little further away from the wall to facilitate players.

There are small holes in the terrain around the rear of the map that people can fall through, this is obviously bad and these holes have to be closed.

The water under the bridge is a small seam where two static meshes connect, these need to be aligned.

These players are very good at moving around, and always seem to be able to find paths I did not plan. While I'd normally encourage such behavior, it leads to unintentionally good sniping positions and will have to be curbed by blocking off some rooftops.