MapCore CS:GO Playtesting 3.0

    Hey Guys,


    Could we postpone the playtest of de_streets_beta1 ? We have few mapcore members that we know that won't be there tonight and we'd like to have them in the playtest. Tuesday would be cool, is that possible ?


    Cheers !

    Sure, it's possible, playtest on tuesday for de_streets it is. Anyhow, we are still playtesting leplubodeslapin's map CS_Opera today at 21:00 GMT+1! So make sure to join us anyway :>

    Quote from leplubodeslapin

    No problem, you're welcome.


    My map cs_opera_alpha4 will be ready for the sunday playtest, can it be in ?


    So, I forgot about this test and joined a bit late. But when I got into the test today, it was the first time I had seen the map and holy fuck let me tell you, its impressive as hell. Your brushwork leaves me green with envy man, just damn. On top of that, all the play spaces are immediately readable and the encounter spaces interesting and fun.


    I took the liberty of decompiling it to look around and I was even more impressed when I saw it in hammer. Straight up got a hammer design boner. One last thing - your main stage is 24 solids when it really only has to be one. (just a friendly fyi) But I bet you already knew that


    Insane work so far man.

    Quote from JeanPaul

    So, I forgot about this test and joined a bit late. But when I got into the test today, it was the first time I had seen the map and holy fuck let me tell you, its impressive as hell. Your brushwork leaves me green with envy man, just damn. On top of that, all the play spaces are immediately readable and the encounter spaces interesting and fun.


    I took the liberty of decompiling it to look around and I was even more impressed when I saw it in hammer. Straight up got a hammer design boner. One last thing - your main stage is 24 solids when it really only has to be one. (just a friendly fyi) But I bet you already knew that


    Insane work so far man.


    seriously ?! I wasn't expecting a reaction like that, i didn't think this dev work could be appreciated as much !

    Thank you a lot for this, it's really motivating, espacially from you because bms is for me the reference in terms of brushworking (curves and weird and really complex things on bms). So i'm happy that you noticed my work on brushworking and feel free to decompile and take a look at the map, it's an honor for me.

    You don't really have missed anything, the last playtest was really different, the map has changed a lot and i already have restarted lots of things from scratch.


    I have big issues with the 2D grid of the CS:GO SDK, frequently there are bugs that move just a little the vertexes (maybe just 0.01 unit) and it ruins the optimisation if i don't fix them. For some shapes, like the main stage, i just can't fix it because, every time i open the map on hammer, everything have slightly moved, and it's extremely annoying (this is for example the reason why i did the sloping floor in a model, because there were lots of bugs on it).


    Thank you a lot for your post


    Wow impressive improvement from the pervious version haha.


    Source + Hammer's grid is really a strange ass thing. It has so many quirks that you cant honestly ever know about unless you spend countless hours trial and error-ing things in your map. Having your brushwork get re-snapped in hammer once you reload the map is a result of improper brush creation as oppsed to the (commonly thought) idea that any vertices off grid are automatically snapped on-grid. Hammer forcing or moving vertices around on the grid is a result of an invalid solid trying to be made valid. The clip tool and any translation tool (resize, rotate, skew) will never create invalid solids and can be used to make some weird shit if you play around with them. However, the second you start using the vertex edit tool, you have to be extremely careful as to not accidentally create any concave surfaces as it makes Hammer go nutso.


    I also noticed you have pretty decent understanding of how brush triangulation works. (your ceiling dome and a few other things) This same concept could easily be applied to making your opera floors, here take a look at this:


    Your floor being a model, while good in terms of optimization, is not good in terms of lighting (especially since its indoor and csm cant touch it) or collisions. So, make it out of brushwork!


    1. Count the number of sides each arch has that you want to connect

    2. If each number is different (you want to connect a 14 sided arch to a 16 sided arch) use the endpieces as outlier control to "absorb" the left over sides. This makes it so that you can neatly triangulate simple rectangles to keep it as simple as possible

    3. Clip the outlier brush using ONLY the clip tool as to avoid invalid brushes here (because it will probably have more than 4 sides therefore making it extremely difficult/impossible to triangulate)

    4. Perfectly align the tops of your brushwork to that of the surrounding areas using alt+right click in the texture tool

    5. Triangulate the brushwork

    6. Select the top row of vertices that you want to drag down to meet the lower arch (this part is important) and drag them down to the area you want to connect. Make sure you drag and not push, as pushing vertices in hammer results in valid solids becoming invalid. Your brushwork should have been made so that the bottom of your connecting arch is the top of the walkable space below so that when you move all the vertices down, you weld the vertices into triangles.

    7. Bam! done:


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


    I tell you to align your textures before you vertex edit because if your original brushwork shape and texture align to a nice grid, then the following vertex edited brushwork will also do the same even though the new resulting surface is slightly larger than the previous one. (Hammer will ever so slightly stretch the textures for you perfectly and without actually "scaling" the texture - meaning if you click on it, it will still say "0.25" as opposed to a slightly larger number even though it still fits perfectly)


    If you did it right everything should stay on grid even after re-opening it ANd your textures will remain perfectly fit and workable:


    http://i.imgur.com/PIQjFCG.png

    http://i.imgur.com/gxNC1FP.png


    I attached a vmf with that brushwork in it if you want to look at it in hammer. (copy it from my vmf and "paste special" with the "center of original" option checked and it will place it exactly in the map where it needs to be)


    EDIT: Also thanks for the bms compliments

    opera_floor.zip

    The map was quite fun and it certainly has a unique setting. I'd make some of the alternate routes slightly less "twisty and turny" to aid players in finding their way and I'd look closer at the T-sidedness.

    Thanks for this answer JeanPaul.

    Actually i don't have any problem with the vertex tool, the issue i'm talking about comes with the clipping tool. I don't think it's due to invalid solids, i'm really careful about that.

    I totally agree with the fact that it would be better that my floor is in brush (mainly because of the lighting as you said), and it was in brush before, the same way that you generously have done :


    [Blocked Image: http://img98.xooimage.com/files/b/e/2/pente_deja_faite-4257d5a.png]

    (it's the lower floor)


    But i had the problem that i said to you, and i'm sorry but i have the same issue with your vmf, take a closer look :


    [Blocked Image: http://img95.xooimage.com/files/e/b/6/grille_hammer_bug1-4257d5e.png]


    [Blocked Image: http://img97.xooimage.com/files/3/e/1/grille_hammer_bug2-4257d66.png]


    [Blocked Image: http://img99.xooimage.com/files/b/0/4/grille_hammer_bug3-4257d6a.png]


    Maybe i just have this issue on my PC, i don't know (those screenshots were taken in a grid scale of 1 and the biggest zoom possible), could you try to check yourself ?

    So, this is the reason why i made it a model, because vertexes can't move once the model is compiled and the lighting isn't that bad with -staticproppolys and the other compile commands (i don't remember). And it seems that it doesn't bother the bots.


    Still, thank you very much for this explanation, i didn't know about the texture thing.


    Thanks puddy for coming yesterday, i'm not sure i will be able to make the paths less "twisty and turny" but i'll try and yes, i also think there is a balance problem, especialy in the main entrance. I'll try to do something helpful for the CT. Thank you


    So I re-downloaded the opera floor to open again in hammer to see these misaligned lines you are talking about here. I can safely say the misaligned vertices you are talking about are misaligned by less than 0.1 unit. Since this is a func_detail and doesnt block vvis, this discrepancy can be safely ignored. Not only is it too small distance to be noticed as a gap in the brushwork ingame, but it is also 100% optomization safe because its a func_detail. Sometimes, even with the best knowledge of the engine, what you are going to make will always have some small problem with the brushwork at a micro level. I would honestly use what I posted earlier in a final version of my map because you wont even come close to noticing a 0.1inch gap in the brushwork


    Quote from Rick_D

    why don't you just fix it? :S


    Well actually, the vertices in the images he posted are so close together that Hammer wont actually let you select them individually. (weird bug) When you click one, it selects both.

    Quote from JeanPaul

    So I re-downloaded the opera floor to open again in hammer to see these misaligned lines you are talking about here. I can safely say the misaligned vertices you are talking about are misaligned by less than 0.1 unit. Since this is a func_detail and doesnt block vvis, this discrepancy can be safely ignored. Not only is it too small distance to be noticed as a gap in the brushwork ingame, but it is also 100% optomization safe because its a func_detail. Sometimes, even with the best knowledge of the engine, what you are going to make will always have some small problem with the brushwork at a micro level. I would honestly use what I posted earlier in a final version of my map because you wont even come close to noticing a 0.1inch gap in the brushwork


    As i told to Pampers, it makes collision issues, when you walk on the floor you get stuck and you don't know why. This is the main problem, if it was just about the visual yes of course it could be ignored because it's a func_detail, i agree.


    Quote from JeanPaul

    Well actually, the vertices in the images he posted are so close together that Hammer wont actually let you select them individually. (weird bug) When you click one, it selects both.


    Yes you can, by doing a manual selection, like this :


    [Blocked Image: http://img97.xooimage.com/files/a/8/6/manual_selection_1-4259e75.png]


    [Blocked Image: http://img98.xooimage.com/files/1/2/9/manual_selection_2-4259e7a.png]

    (and then replace the vertex)

    i guess you get these tiny precision errors if you are working far away from the origo, you could test this by moving the brush to the center of the world and see if the problem still occurs.

    The only concrete thing I can say about streets is I don't feel you guys give enough incentive to go A bombsite. Mid leads back into long A or you can flank A but you're already closer to B by the time you do that. The underground route feels the same, you're so close to B I don't feel there's reason to go A. Beyond that I don't feel I've played it enough to give better feedback.

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