[HL2:EP2] That_Sinking_Feeling_a10

Hey. So I decided to make a nice pretty map. It'll probably turn into a mappack but knowing my record of releasing things (none yet) don't hold your breath.

So... it's not set in the HL2 universe. It's set in a dystopian future where the sea has risen a few metres, submerging the majority of the earth's former arable, pastural and, most importantly, habitable land. You play as a man who's whole family has been wiped out by the incessant war and rampant pestilence that has gripped the earth since the "sinking" began.

Anyway. So, this is alpha 10. The part of the map I've completed so far is an opening "vista" of a submerged city. Let me know what you think. I made the grass all myself and edited a mud texture from the Photorealistic Ground pack to make the muds. The HL2:EP2 vegetation is just placeholder until I can make my own. I'm using sky_ep02_02_hdr right now but I'm going to change it to sky_day02_01_HDR in a11. sky_day02_01_HDR's my HDR conversion of one of the HL2 skies. I'll add rain then. And I'm hoping to make a water texture that has rain drop splashes in it to go with the rain and the overcast sky.

Anyway so here it is. Let me know what your criticisms are. Hopefully I can change them. The grass does look a little bare so I'll be making some detail props soon to go along with the grass and mud materials, just in case that's what you're all thinking.

Also, here's a Photobucket Slideshow of some random shots:

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That Sinking Feeling:

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":l1d7rtyr]Nice displacement work! imho, it needs more texture variation to the floor, (or something to hide the boring empty spaces, like more rocks, more vegetation, etc) Try to be create, and do not overuse the same assets, as you already did with the fallen trees, cos it makes the map look repetitive.

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Thanks.

I'll try to fill the empty spaces with a detail props. I'm not sure if you know Source but it allows you to make a texture file called the detailsprites.vtf and in a text file called the detail.vbsp you specify groups. In the groups you specify what models and what sprites (from the detailsprites.vtf) you want to be randomly placed at random sizes on the materials that you have assigned that group to.

So I'll make my own detailsprites.vtf and make a detail.vbsp and assign groups filled with a good variety of sprites (and maybe rock models too) to the grass and mud materials. So It'll hopefully clutter up the map nicely without me having to individually place rock and grass tuff models.

Nice photo by the way. I really should look up more refernce shots on Google Images. Hopefully I'll find ones like the one you have there. They certainly are a good inspiration.

Quote from ginger_lord

The HDR is burning my eyes out, needs toning down.

I used the same values as the map that used that sky in EP2. Whatever's good for Valve is good enough for me. It is supposed to be a sunny day I guess.

But I'll be changing the sky in the next one anyway to an overcast day, so it won't be as bright.

EDIT:

Oh didn't see this reply.

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I get a nice vibe from some of those shots, but you say initially that it's meant to be war torn and ravaged etc. My feeling is that if the amount of land had been reduced then folk would be trying to use as much as possible of it for farming, or would have huge floating kelp/seaweed farms and floating towns. Plus, obviously if there's been a war then there's going to be lots of damage. I guess it depends on the when as much as anything though, how much the sea has risen etc.Anyway, you seem to have built a nice environment thus far, but I think it needs populating somehow and the background story you've given yourself lets you have lots of different ways to approach that.

You're correct I guess. The kelp farm is a good idea, I might incorporate that if you don't mind. But as for the lack of land use:

A: This is the sea here. As you can see the coniferous vegetation is dying as the soil salinates. The mud also is far lighter near the water, than it is further up, representing the leaching of minerals and the erosion of humus from the soil. So it's very poor land for growing anything. Also the people that are left I guess wouldn't choose some salty swamp to grow anything. The manpower needed to reclaim that wouldn't be worth it. I'm going with the idea that there's still plenty of plains and meadows inland. Also there has been massive depopulation and a return to a crypto-feudal form of civilization. No mechanised farming tools would be operational. So people wouldn't have massive farms that'll be very apparent to the player. The farms will be small plots on very good land, not large plots that we see today that only are viable due to the supplementation of fertiliser and irrigation.

B: As for war-torn. Geographically this used to be a forested hilly region a bit away from farmland, and a couple of kilometres from human habitation (the city). So it would have been shielded anyway. But the main point is that the "war" was really just a neverending string of skirmishes between tribal factions armed with what was left of the earth's arsenal in the early 21st Century. These "wars" would have been really only comparable to a very bad riot, or just civil unrest that we see in for example Darfur. There would have been no Stealth bombers, no submarines, no battleships, no napalm, no carpet bombing, etc. Just people killing people in a semi-organised fashion, with whatever they could hold in their hands. It would have been confined mostly to urban areas. When you play the map if you zoom in you'll see that I chose the skybox props from the latter half of Hl2 to populate the city, ie. I chose the destroyed ones and not the intact ones. I don't think you can really see that in the screenshots, that the buildings are supposed to be nothing more than concrete husks and rubble. So it was a "design decision" if you want to call it that, to have the countryside pristine while having the urban centres resemble bombed-out watery tombs.

Quote from dux

Are you using the same light_environment values? Also valves maps were a lot fuller and sucked up a lot of the brightness with darker objects like trees, rocks, etc.

Yeah I'm using the same values. I found them on the Sky List on the Valve Developer Wiki.

In regards to why mine looks over-bright, I think you're only correct to a point. Valve utilised a hell of a lot of cliffs and overhangs to darken their maps. So I don't think it has anything to do with props at all, why my map looks over-bright, just has to do with the world geometry. But I'm not going to go the same router as Valve and plaster my maps with rocky cliffs and big boulders for no reason, since I'm really trying to go against the grain here and have "open" maps. The Orange Box engine really does make a fairly open map, that lagged like hell in HL2, run like a dream in EP2. So I really want to keep the maps open. I think the only reason Valve didn't do something similar in EP2 was because they were trapped in the universe they'd greated (one with empty rivers and ravines with a lot of cliffs and stuff). They'd probably have gone more open if they didn't need to maintain continuity (the dried out rivers and stuff).

Anyway, so I guess I'll have to tone down the brightness to reflect how my map lacks as much "occlusion" as Valve's maps had in the Half-Life 2 series. Thanks for the criticism about it I guess. I never probably would have noticed it looked overbright if someone hadn't have said it. You kind of get used to what it looks like and don't notice these things.

Also I edited my above reply just in case people don't notice.

Quote from Schmung

Aha, well explained! Rather thick of me forgetting that it was the sea we're talking about.I still think floating cities are cool though, thats perhaps the fault of reading too much SF.

I guess the feeling of emptiness if perhaps the lack of variation of vegetation and the stock props. With a bit more colour and texture in the terrain then you could probably fix that.

At present it's the overt brightness and repetitive nature of parts of it that are hurting you. I think the other guys are right with the lighting, you could really help the atmosphere with a slightly different setup. Failing that can you clamp the maximum value or something? That seems the main issue now, the average brightness in some shots is fine, but some of the rockfaces look like they've got lights inside them in one or two of those shots.

Anyway, it's a great idea for a theme and gives you loads of potential for dramatic areas - as you said the bombed out cities, the odd protected enclave with an almost post apocalyptic feel to it, higher parts of towns that people have somehow managed to hold out for a while. All sorts of stuff.

Yeah thanks. It is indeed a good idea if just for the fact that it's different. I sort of got sick of the usual Hl2 mod where it'd just emulate Hl2's story to a tee and not bother to think up something different. A floating city would indeed be a very cool idea. And when there's an attack and you have to escape while it sinks while fighting the enemies that have boarded. That'd also be very cool.

About the overt brightness. I think there's an entity you can put in the map that can change the HDR bloom thing. Env_tonemap_controller or something. Maybe it does something completely different but I'm sure there's a way to do it. Anyway thanks for the critique.