Poor platform usage can be a true killer for a netmap, because they can be a huge boon to flow if they're done right, or totally destroy it if it's done wrong.
In a netmap, doors serve one major purpose, and one minor one. The major purpose is to allow cover for people in transitional areas; that is, hallways. Doors eat up shots coming from behind and are a hindrance to stalkers and vultures. They also provide a certain amount of cover in gunfights if used right, allow for interesting ambushes, and can be used by clever players to detect incoming enemies (because doors typically make a sound when toggled). Doors can also prevent people from lurking in hallways and shooting people in a large area, conceal what's up ahead, and can hide secrets or valuable positions.
The minor purpose is that doors can add a certain flair to your architecture.
The benefit of having doors is fairly slim; there's almost no need for doors. They're added anyway because they usually look good, but also have the psychological benefit of keeping people in certain regions, even if the doors are unlocked. For instance: if a player can choose between a hallway with a door and a hallway without, and the yield is the same in position and ammo, most players would go through the hallway without a door.
Doors are not necessarily bad, but that psychological thing can be bad, too; you don't want people to feel claustrophobic in a netmap.
A ground rule for proper door usage is this: they should open quickly and have a brief delay. You don't want people running into doors while waiting for them to open, but you also don't want them to stay open forever (thus defeating the purpose of having a door at all). For most doors, a good speed is 3-5 WU/sec with a 1-2 second delay. Keeping other flags unchecked (i.e. crushing, delay before activation, etc) is recommended, but it's situational.
Doors themselves have four important subsets in netmaps: automatic doors, manual doors, switch doors, and locked doors.
Automatic doors are doors that are opened by stepping on a nearby polygon which is bound to toggle said platform. The end result of an automatic door is something that's seen in, say, Quake: doors that slide open quickly when you approach them, so a player doesn't need to stop or even press any buttons to pass through.
The problem with this is that it's unnecessary and unusual. Players are used to doors that they have to toggle, meaning that what would happen is this:
You could remedy this by checking "Cannot deactivate externally," but this has another problem: what if the player doesn't make it through the door in time, or what happens if another player is pursuing the first one? This means that another player runs smack into the door and has to find the activation polygon again to open the door.
The bottom line for automatic doors, thus, is to avoid them.
Manual doors are doors that the player toggles simply by looking at it and pressing action. In other words, they represent almost all of the doors used in most maps. Manual doors have nothing special about them, just so long as you keep the speed and delay within the ranges mentioned above (3-5 WU/sec speed, 1-2 sec delay).
Switch doors are doors that you open by pressing/shooting a button, and are otherwise locked. While these doors are not inherently bad, they can be used poorly:
Summary: One-way doors are pretty much the only practical use for switch doors.
Locked doors are doors that will never open; there is no switch and no way to manually open it. Locked doors are thus decoration, but make sure they don't look like doors that CAN be opened on the map, or else players will stop to try and open them, and get shot. Don't use them in excess, either.
Lifts are used to transport players vertically. The problem with lifts is that they are EXTREMELY picky, not only in the platform polygon itself, but nearby polygons too. However, they are often a necessity in netmaps, because stairs take up a lot of space and can be clunkier still, so knowing how to make lifts good is important. Lifts should be easy and natural to use, and furthermore, unobtrusive.
Lifts should fall between 3-6 WU/sec in speed, and 0.5-3 sec in delay, with as few additional things checked as possible. In the case of all lifts, you will want to consider the following: what if someone wants to go back down? For automatic lifts, if someone jumps down from the top, and the lift is in a shaft, he will have to wait for the lift to hit the top and then go back down in order for him to pass, which is irritating. Thus, it is better to keep an area of the shaft "un-platformed" -- the same floor and ceiling height as the platform itself, but without a platform, so people can jump down unbothered.
To make lifts noticeable, it's usually wise to make the minimum height of the lift slightly higher than the adjacent floor. Only a little bit, though: 0.05-0.1 WU. If the minimum is under knee-deep water, make it stick out of the water.
Normal lifts are down-to-up. Up-to-down lifts are a bad idea because it's redundant. There's no falling damage in Marathon, so you can just jump. Plus, there'd be no way to go up. If you only WANT a pathway that goes down, you don't need a lift.
Lifts fall into the following subsets: Automatic lifts, manual lifts, switch lifts, crushers, bridges, and gimmick lifts.
Automatic lifts are lifts that move without any input, and are always active. In other words, they have the following flags: Never deactivates, and initially active. These are obnoxious and should never be used, because the obvious problem is, what happens if you get there and the lift isn't there? That's possible with any lift (someone beat you to it), but it's so much more likely with automatic lifts, that they do not provide any kind of benefit over a manual lift. Avoid these.
Like manual doors, manual lifts are the standard lift. They toggle when a player stands on the lift polygon, meaning that, unless someone beat you to the lift, it's always there, waiting for you. These should be used almost all of the time, except for very special situations (gimmick lifts, i.e. the stairwell lift in 'Fugee Camp).
Switch lifts are lifts operated by switches, in the same way that switch doors are... well, anyway, these are usually unnecessary. It requires the player to toggle a button in order to use a lift that would otherwise serve as a manual lift. The benefit to a switch lift is if the lift is in a main thoroughfare, and a player would not necessarily want to toggle it, but would like to walk over the polygon anyway. This IS a legitimate use of switch lifts. The other good use for switch lifts is if you want a lift in a shaft, but you don't want to have clearance space for people going down -- thus, people jumping from above won't toggle the lift on the way down, like they would with a manual lift.
If you want someone to hate your map, spread crushers liberally. Crushers are lifts that come from the ceiling and kill people underneath, or come from below and pancake people on the ceiling. Crushers have the same automatic/manual/switch classifications as normal lifts, and I'll summarize them briefly:
Bridges are switch-operated lifts that, instead of transporting players from below to above, help a player span a large open gap. Bridges are usually more useful in spanning lava rivers than canyons, because in the event of a canyon, a bridge will end up blocking flow below. Moats are the best use for bridges. Make sure that the switch is easy to find.
Gimmick lifts are not lifts in the general sense. They don't often simply transport someone from below to above, but instead, usually require several polygons in tandem, look nice, and require a bit of dexterity, or else rigorously change the layout of the map.
Gimmick lifts are tough to do right, and usually end up being a bane to the map. A good example of a gimmick lift is the spiral staircase in 'Fugee Camp from classic Infinity. A switch turns a not-so-nearby flat area into a giant coiled staircase, which puts a giant wall up in most of the midfield, creating a more contained and strategic environment, but also providing access to the only flamethrower on the map. While the flamethrower sucks on 'Fugee Camp, it's a nice sentiment. Gimmick lifts should be limited to ONE PER MAP, and should not be too confusing. However, the scope of gimmick lifts is pretty large, and I encourage you to be creative. Just be sure that it doesn't impede too much with normal flow (for instance, completely dividing the main room into two sections).
Platforms add a lot of necessary flavor to a netmap. While it is easy to make a map a total disaster with platforms, a more careful approach can turn a dull map into an interesting and exciting one.
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