If I could remake Doom CTF...

Let me start this thread off by saying that I don't necessarily think that CTF is bad or that we are "doing it wrong" I'm just sharing a little bit of idealist opinion out here; some interesting thoughts that I think are kinda misguided in today's perception of capture the flag as combined with the Doom universe.

This is a little picky and probably sounds kinda complainy, but I'd probably ditch the whole Red vs. Blue thing -- mainly because Blue doesn't have a whole lot of colors in the Doom pallete and more importantly, not a lot of textures. Red tends to fade to brown in darker levels, which makes players a little more camouflaged among Doom's thousands of brown textures, while blues are a little easier to detect, unless they fade to gray in REALLY dark areas. If I had to use colors, the players would probably be Green vs. Blue I think, since both colors are rather vibrant and it would work with the colored torches. I'm still trying to think which colors would work best with Doom's pallete and would be high contrast with Doom's most common texture themes though.

I'm not really in favor of the monotone techbase maps with red and blue lights/borders/banners etc., however I understand that what a mapper chooses to make is not up to me. But if it were, i'd like to see CTF maps more along the theme of Hell vs. UAC, where one side of the map is a tech base, and the other half is a symmetrical layout with Hell themed textures and decorations instead. I'd also like to see CTF maps based on actual Doom levels, where the most dominating areas are mirrored and pitted against each other, such as the BIGBRIK forts from Underhalls, and the players gotta navigate through the sewer network to get to each other's forts. Nothing's really stopping me from making maps like that though I suppose.

If it were up to me, Doom CTF would be a little more "Doomy" by being something like Capture the Firestick or something along those lines, instead of actual flags. And carriers of the enemy's torch would always be fullbright so they'd be harder to hide. CTF should utilize a little more of Doom's elements such as finding secrets, teleports, using keycards to activate temporary shortcuts to the enemy's base, or using items such as radiation suits to get through damaging lava tunnels, instead of rocket jumping and 3D bridges and stuff.

I think that's about it. I understand it took modern source ports to make CTF popular, so without a doubt it's strange to not expect modern things overpowering the classic things, but these are just some of my thoughts.

CTFDOOM had green vs. gray team (flag carriers were still blue and red), always thought that was kind of interesting:

40oz said:
Let me start this thread off by saying that I don't necessarily think that CTF is bad or that we are "doing it wrong" I'm just sharing a little bit of idealist opinion out here; some interesting thoughts that I think are kinda misguided in today's perception of capture the flag as combined with the Doom universe. [/B]

nothing wrong with that, although it's a bit too late for that. competing gamemodes come, but they usually go as well, because they simply don't have the draw. something REALLY close to ctf-as-is with just slight tweaks could hit the right string.

This is a little picky and probably sounds kinda complainy, but I'd probably ditch the whole Red vs. Blue thing -- mainly because Blue doesn't have a whole lot of colors in the Doom pallete and more importantly, not a lot of textures. Red tends to fade to brown in darker levels, which makes players a little more camouflaged among Doom's thousands of brown textures, while blues are a little easier to detect, unless they fade to gray in REALLY dark areas. If I had to use colors, the players would probably be Green vs. Blue I think, since both colors are rather vibrant and it would work with the colored torches. I'm still trying to think which colors would work best with Doom's pallete and would be high contrast with Doom's most common texture themes though.

mmmm... i'll be honest, you're overthinking this colour thing in a wrong direction.
- ctf isn't really played in the original doom palette and custom textures are common. the reds and blues work best as colour-coding, wall decoration and occassional markings/"pathways" in floors. full colour theme just tends to be too distracting for the eye.
- darkness is almost never a problem, because dark (not to mention REALLY dark) maps just aren't played. it's a DM thing, we don't do dark. dark is bad for our business, because we can't see each other.
- green is actually not that awesome a choice. it fades easily and often looks just grey, it gives you mimesis superpowers on a lot of doom surfaces, etc. red/blue was picked because it tends to stand out in doom settings, green does not. zdaemon uses white and green for teams 3 and 4 in 4-way team modes... and the green colour sucks.
- there was a time when the red team was believed to be in advantage because of pain. you get hit, you see red, red guys are harder to follow. THIS is how the ctf crowd thinks about colours.

I'm not really in favor of the monotone techbase maps with red and blue lights/borders/banners etc., however I understand that what a mapper chooses to make is not up to me. But if it were, i'd like to see CTF maps more along the theme of Hell vs. UAC, where one side of the map is a tech base, and the other half is a symmetrical layout with Hell themed textures and decorations instead.

this sounds cool, but i can see plenty of pitfalls. first of all, the hell textures are BUSY and rapid moving targets get blurry against them. this is why the boringest techbase textures get picked so much - they provide fantastic contrast. your idea is still intriguing, but it won't work with regular symmetric ctf. your best shot is to tweak it into a counterstrike-style mode where one side's goal is slightly different/harder, but sides are switched halfway through the match.

I'd also like to see CTF maps based on actual Doom levels, where the most dominating areas are mirrored and pitted against each other, such as the BIGBRIK forts from Underhalls, and the players gotta navigate through the sewer network to get to each other's forts. Nothing's really stopping me from making maps like that though I suppose.

here you go. it actually plays quite well!

If it were up to me, Doom CTF would be a little more "Doomy" by being something like Capture the Firestick or something along those lines, instead of actual flags. And carriers of the enemy's torch would always be fullbright so they'd be harder to hide. CTF should utilize a little more of Doom's elements such as finding secrets, teleports, using keycards to activate temporary shortcuts to the enemy's base, or using items such as radiation suits to get through damaging lava tunnels, instead of rocket jumping and 3D bridges and stuff.

well, the flags originally replaced keycards, so it's Capture the Keycard, but the fullbright idea sounds neat. however i'd recommend it for your revamp mode, because ctf is already played at uniform fullbright, p much. :)

I think that's about it. I understand it took modern source ports to make CTF popular, so without a doubt it's strange to not expect modern things overpowering the classic things, but these are just some of my thoughts.

some of your ideas are flawed by not being completely in touch with the trends, but others were a neat insight. no harm done in discussing status quo!

It's definitely tricky to get red/blue CTF stuff to not look like crap in Doom, due to the limited color choices. (edit: And yes, like dew said, that the maps have to be rather bright in addition to it.) In the past I've usually just opted to use a neutral brown/gray scheme for everything and then added some red/blue lights and compblue, but it wasn't really ideal.

I find that the result often ends up looking rather garish. I hadn't found any palettes that were really well optimized for CTF, so when we did 32in24-12, I took some time to create palette and colormap adjustments that would better accommodate the prominent use of red and blue. I remapped the red range to feature more contrast and fade seamlessly into darkness without brown mud (well, technically I ported over this change from Back to Saturn X), and edited the blue range to incorporate a graduated hue shift that would soften it a bit while still allowing it to stand out vividly. I needed to palette-remap some red textures and flats to keep the changes from causing problems, but at least in my opinion I think it worked out really well.

Hell vs. UAC could make for some cool-looking CTF maps. It'd probably be best to still maintain at least something of a red theme on the Hell side and a blue theme on the UAC side to keep things obvious to new players.

I always wondered why flags were used and not Skulls. Skulls seem so much more Doomy, and I think the original "Skull Tag" game mode had the "Doomier" right idea, but executed it poorly. Looking back, if Skull Tag had been CTF with skull keys as flags, it probably would have taken off more.

I just wanna say that while CTF is always a neat mod for games that didn't have it, I never liked the idea of it in Doom /opinion