WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    I've been lurking for months now and have learned a lot from these forums as I worked on my first game. I thought it was time to finally share what I've been working on: Grimoire: Manastorm is a fast-paced multiplayer wizard shooter with some MOBA inspired spells and built in UDK.


    I've created a imgur album since it seemed excessive to post all 12 screenshots (3 per map) here.


    http://imgur.com/gallery/YX2bf


    We are still in closed Alpha but will be moving to Open Alpha as soon as a critical connection bug is fixed (hopefully sometime this week). If the game looks interesting please feel free to sign up on our forums for a key as soon as we move into Open Alpha OR just send me a PM and I will send you one asap.


    Thanks for being such an awesome community as a total newb to level design this place has been incredibly helpful!

    The second image seems to have a different scale for those texture for some reason (probably the -ohnoyoudidn't- decompile that caused that). So that should be an easy fix.


    The top building however, the scales, coords etc. all match up. They have a lightmap scale of 8; the textures are stock and I haven't changed those from the original dust2. All the instances should be fine, but I'll have a check once I get home.

    I'm surprised decompiling even keeps instances in-tact to be honest! I assumed you would have used the D2 example VMF that comes with Hammer.


    I only mentioned instances because I've seen collapsing them do some pretty weird things.


    I guess another thing to check would be that there are no collision meshes in the 3D skybox, as this can supposedly cause weird lighting glitches (though I've not seen this myself) and I can imagine either a decompile or instance collapsing might mess with those sort of settings.

    Decompiling doesn't actually read a func_instance, since it's contents are incorporated into the same file upon compiling. Instead, the contents of the instance are in the normal vmf file without losing data.


    I've also checked a number of brushes' coords in the raw vmf to see if there were any rounding errors due to the decompile, that doesn't seem to be the case.


    What exactly do you mean by collision meshes in the 3d skybox? It's unchanged from the original as well.

    Quote from Spherix

    How would I get rid of these lighting errors? Compile options used for light_exe: -ldr -final -textureshadows -StaticPropLighting -StaticPropPolys -game $gamedir $path$file [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/9ZqkMj1.jpg]


    So... the official version of de_dust2 is full of texture sloppyness... My lighting and compile settings just made them more obvious.


    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/12NdVhv.jpg]


    More found in 30 seconds: http://imgur.com/a/cKBr9

    I'm fixing them..I must've altered over a 100 surfaces already.. It's a mess. They also have a lot of _bottom textures without a normal map, and then the top part has one, which makes the oddities shown in the other screenshot I've posted before. Might be intentional, but it sure looks odd when you take the time to look at the map properly.

    Quote from Spherix

    How would I get rid of these lighting errors? Compile options used for light_exe: -ldr -final -textureshadows -StaticPropLighting -StaticPropPolys -game $gamedir $path$file

    CSGO does not like ldr; compile with -hdr keeping all other vrad parameters.


    Texturing and brushwork on official maps has always been more or less of a mess since the early days of CSS; If you check the CSS versions of dust/dust2 or italy, you would cringe and if you have OCD, you will fall off your chair . Recent maps in CSGO (cbble, overpass, mirage, train) are way better compared to earlier maps.


    One way to deal with those corners is to ALT+right click to make sure textures are perfectly aligned then use smoothing groups with a lightmap scale of 8 to evenly spread the light around all faces.


    It would also help if all textures on the corner have more or less the same attributes in the vmt (normal map, specular, tint..) otherwise you will get those differences especially after building the cubemaps.


    Finally make sure that no func_detail is partially inserted inside another brush as this would also cause black-ish tints on parts of your brush nearest to the location where it goes inside the other brush.

    I've all the texture/lighting issues sorted, even a LDR compile is no longer an issue Had to align hundreds of surfaces, also made some alternative VMT's without the normalmap to match the rest of the wall segment textures. I've let it run a full HDR+LDR compile in one go, took a good 13 hours only to find out I made an error with an areaportal; yay.


    Adding a little extra holiday flair now I have to recompile anyway, this is it's current state:


    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/uGcRM7Z.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/n9rsIgK.jpg]


    More here; http://imgur.com/a/QRATj


    All I need now is a modeler to help me with the arctic avengers as the version I have of them is incomplete and therefore buggy

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