I just read the entire thread and I have some comments to make about community/collaborative tracks.
When I first started building duo tracks, it was with my clanmate Kent. Nothing against Kent personally, but he was a lot like Windows3.1. If you touched anything he made, he'd get really annoyed. The result is that most of our duo maps felt very disjointed. Scenery, flow, route, style ... everything differed a lot between our parts.
I've always had aspirations to make duos and community maps where everyone has a say in the entire map, at least as much as is logistically possible. Everyone should allow any other member to change and modify their parts, as long as the general concept behind their part is kept. And if the concept itself is bad, then the author of that part should have the chance to change it, and should be willing to sacrifice their first iteration for the sake of the common good of the project.
I'm building a duo map right now with Exploding Lemon for the October MTC. More or less we're each building 5 seconds, and then passing it off to each other. We've both changed each other's parts. We've both contributed bits and pieces of scenery. Because of so much cross-collaboration, the track is coming together as a more focused and unified effort than if we both had said "don't touch a single block of my part, that's MINE"... because then... where's the collaboration? I really don't think it's the ideal way to work.
I appreciate Exploding Lemon for letting me change his parts, and I appreciate the updates and refinements he's made to my parts.
Fallout is one of the best builders I know.. with killer ideas of his own. He could stick to only making solo maps, but apparently he wants to do a cool community project. And I respect that he wants to make a community map that's actually nice to drive. It's inevitable that some people's toes might feel like they're stepped on in projects like this.
The thing is, I've seen too many community maps go down the route of keeping crappy parts just so that someone's toes didn't get stepped on.
Every project like this really has to have a good leader. Someone who says whether a part should stay or go. Everyone can chime in with their opinion, but ultimately the leader should make the call... or else the project can fall into anarchy and simply stall.... and never get done.
In the end, everyone involved is responsible for the quality of the track, and everyone involved should be happy with it. Simple as that. After all, the goal should be to make an awesome map to drive.
Don't let pride get in the way of making a great collaborative track.
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Edit: I've added a little. I hope I used the right version as the base.
.usa unnamed (v0-3-eyebo).Map.Gbx
Last edited by eyebo, 2011-10-11 22:10:34
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