Mapping Guide for Slender Fortress

A guide that goes into detail about level design for maps within Slender Fortress, this is intended to make it easier for mappers that are interested in making maps for the gamemode to understand certain things.

Introduction

Slender Fortress is a multiplayer gamemode for Team Fortress 2 is based on Mark J. Hadley's "Slender: The Eight Pages", a freeware game.

This guide is intended to share some light for mappers into the design choices to make when creating a Slender Fortress map, if you wish to try the gamemode before you consider designing any levels for it, you can visit my steam group to join my servers that happen to host the gamemode.

If you have any worries about this, I have been working on Slender Fortress for 2 years now and I've worked on the majority of maps for the gamemode. 32 maps to be specific so far.

For beginners

If you are an experienced mapper and you are fimilar with Hammer and TF2 already, then you may skip this section, this is for those that are new to mapping and wish make their first map.

Ok, experienced mappers moved on? Good, so, if you are making your first map in Hammer. Stop what you are doing, now, I'm not saying give up, but I would strongly suggest you read up on certain things about hammer before you continue, no one likes a bad map.

Here are some helpful links for mapping.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Category:Level_Design_FAQ
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dimensions
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/TF2/Team_Fortress_2_Mapper%27s_Reference

Once you have read up on these, you may continue on with this, as it's extremely important.

Getting started

Part 1: What's first?

Ok, so we're getting started and the first question being asked is, what should I work on first?

The Waiting Room
The Waiting Room is an area for BLU team to sit inside when they are waiting for their turn, this area needs to at least contain a spawn room and a PVP arena. You may add additional stuff such as mini-games and parkour to the map if you wish for players to waste their time with. The Waiting Room also doesn't require to be one complete section, so you can break it off into different parts linked with teleports if you wish.

The Play Area
There needs to be an area for RED team to play the gamemode in, this is needed just as much as the Waiting Room, there is no exceptions for this. The Play Area must also have an escape point in the map along with an area that players spawn into, the map must also be entirely connected into one section, it cannot be broken up into parts linked with teleports, this has been done in the past and proved troublesome.

Now while this is down to personal choice, I personally recommend working on the waiting room first before creating the play area, since usually the play area is intended to be much, much larger than the waiting room, so completing the waiting room first is both easier and more organisable.

Part 2: Design Choices?

There are of course, many design choices that can be made when producing a map, for Slender Fortress there are specific things that you need to stick to.

Geometry
It's recommended to keep the Geometry as simple and flat as possible, with the occasional slope or staircase companied with propper clip brushes to make sure the bosses can travel ontop of them. This is just to prevent any complications that the AI could encounter when pathing around the map. Also try to avoid spots that players could jump from back and forth since that could also cause the AI to misbehave and allow players to exploit the map.

Puzzles
If you are doing any form of puzzle that requires jumping, it is required that you place npc clips over any death pits within the map in order to prevent the bosses from falling into them when chasing a player.

Doors
If you place any doors in the map that are to be opened by anyone, it is recommended to link them to a trigger that can be activated by both the player and the npc's. If the trigger isn't present, the AI can easily glitch out and treat the door as a permantly sealed solid.

Clip placement
Besides placing clip brushes into out of bounds area's within the map and certain brush placements such as slopes and staircases, clip placements must also be applied to any props in the map that would normally be out of reach for the player, since in the past players have found aways to be pushed up onto such props by the bosses and then proceed to camp in the spot, prevoking the boss endlessly until their team beats the map.

It's important to also block off players from being able to stand on anything that's smaller than 32 units wide, such has handrails and small props, either this can be done by making them non-solid or applying a clip brush to them.

Dynamic events
Aslong as this doesn't affect the actual geometry of the map, ie, no moving platforms or doors, then you should be fine with this, any changes the actual play area can easily screw with the AI and cause pathing issues. As such, it's recommended to avoid any events that would change the play area, as the AI works on a static navmesh.

Health & Ammo placements
If you are intending to put health into the maps, which should only be done if you are doing a raid map anyway, please make sure to prevent them from respawning, or else players will purposely camp ontop of these spots against bosses that don't normally do a lot of damage.

Light placement
Lighting within Slender Fortress maps is an optional choice, but it's recommended to have around half of the play area have some form of lighting while the other half is dark, it's down to personal choice, but the waiting room must be fully lit.

Part 3: Naming the map

So one of the hardest choices to make when creating a map for some people, including myself is choosing a name for the map and this can be difficult and while it is, please refrain from using common names, as this can easily lead to conflicts, we don't need 3 people making maps with the name slender_spookie_b1 or slender_town_b1.

Part 4: Updating the map

If you are ever updating the map, please take the changes you make into consideration.

Moving the map on the Hammmer Grid
Please, DON'T do this, if you move the map around on the hammer grid between each version, it will require the navmesh for the map to be entirely rebuilt. I personally choose to create the navmeshes for each map by myself, so you wouldn't have to, so if you move the map, I'd have to rebuild it again.

Adding expansions to the map
This should honestly be fine and you can expand upon the map if you can.

Changing existing geometry
As stated previously, please try to not make the design of your map overly complex and if you are changing existing area's of the map, try not to make massive changes, as again, this could misalign the map with the navmesh, requiring a huge section to be deleted and re-generated, which always has to be edited afterwards.

However making small changes like moving props or adding props should usually be fine.

Part 5: Packing and LDR

Now, when it comes to packing files for the map, you may pack everything as you normally would, but please avoid packing a navmesh file into the map, if you do this, there's a chance it can become corrupted and cause the server to freeze. Plus it's easier to update the navmesh without having to update the actual map, as the packed .nav file will override the one that isn't.

And as for LDR, this is required for all of the SF2 maps, why? There appears to be a crash issue with a lot of clients when loading between maps that support HDR, the reason for this is unknown but it's believed to be related to how TF2 behaves when trying to load everything at once on a system that has a bottle neck somewhere, that slows the system down. Potentially resulting the operating system thinking that TF2 is now stuck in a hanged state.

Types of maps

Now, there's several spin off maps within Slender Fortress that tweak the gameplay of SF2 in order to keep things different, keeping players interested in playing.

Page Finding

This is the default map type within Slender Fortress, as the name suggests, these maps are mazed like in design and are intended for players to search throughout the map for pages, that would open up an escape that would be placed somewhere in the map.

Survival

Involves players moving around a medium sized map, looking for an item to trigger the escape countdown, which'll open usually around 30 seconds before the end of the round. During the countdown however, players have to rotate around the map, trying to avoid any bosses that actively seek for them. In a sense, hide and seek.

Run!

This map starts off with the players picking up an item to trigger an entrance to open, which players then pass through and then head down a lengthy path to the escape as the boss(s) attempt to chase them down, either by spawning in their path or behind them.

Adventure

Traveling down a set path, collecting an item in order to move onto another area, an example of this type of map would be Swarm and it's currently the only type of map for this that we have.

Raid

Includes bosses that the players have to fight within a confined area, with guns. The bosses in this map would of course be killable, unlike the other bosses within the gamemode. Sadly, at the moment there is only one type of this map.

List of Map Entities

For information in regards to Map Entities, please visit the following:
Public SF2 Documentation Repo on GitHub.[github.com]

This repo is intended to provide all the information you need in regards to SF2 and it's map entities. Select the Map Creation folder to see the text file documenting each entity and look upon the provided Zoo file in Hammer if you have trouble with manually producing the entities.

Finished?

If you've finished a map after following this guide, please get in touch as we're always looking for new stuff to add to the servers and having new maps for the gamemode would be greatly appreciated.

[milk]

ok.... time to maked a map :D

[Elite]

This Guide is kinda dead but if you anybody still reads this i'm looking for an answer please, the server master for sf2 says "# THIS PROJECT IS DISCONTINUED THE MOD MAY OR MAY NOT WORK USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISKS" and for setting up a server on the wiki it says "game servers need to be running on a Linux based OS such as Ubuntu or Debian (recommended) in order to run the gamemode. For Windows, self gamedata maintenance is required, hence the lack of support for the time being." (i'm on windows and I don't think I want to go through with linux) is there any other fixes to these problems?

[Glubbable~ ❥]

Also I guess I should provide a link to this, it has an entity zoo file to help with mapping as this isn't really updated.

https://github.com/Glubbable/Slender-Fortress-Documentation

[Glubbable~ ❥]

No, just find your way to my discord via my group and share screenshots of your work in the slender fortress channel. However, for stuff to be accepted it has to be a certain degree of quality.

This guide is old and was made when we were all kind of fresh out the gates. So as a result our standards are higher than it once was.

[Dian]

Does it cost something? Idk, I wanted to try it out but as I see the gamemode makes the stuff himself so. I thought it would be nice to add it someday. It's you after all

[Dian]

Do you still add new maps to your slender fortress server? I'll try to make a nice map but, just wondering. And how am I gonna get touch with you? or the server itself

[Glubbable~ ❥]

Boss overrides are only valid if the boss exists on the server and is loaded.

[Glubbable~ ❥]

You have to use the entry name for the boss profile in the override.

[Dian]

rake is the model name? Is there a way that I get a sniper? or I just let it blank so I don't lose my time

[Glubbable~ ❥]

Also for naming conventions, it is strongly recommended to keep things in lowercase.