[csgo] de_canal (wip)

Already looks pretty nice, but I have to say, some of the textures look a little boring. Maybe try and make them brighter?

So far excellent work for a first time map! Block work looks good and the textures looked OK and aligned well enough so far. You should post a download link for the file.

Some feedback:

* Some wide open spaces that could use quite a few props just to break up the sight lines, give extra cover etc. I guess it depends on what your target audience is, whether this is a learning exercise, or an attempt at making a competitive map, or just something fun and visually pleasing. But you should look at how maps like Dust2, Inferno, Mirage and Cache work with their bomb sites, the placement of cover and how players interact with it. In the NiP fnatic game, there was an amazing moment on Cache at the A site with the bomb ticking away and a 1v1, separated by the the red container.

* You should think about clipping non-traversable areas and adding props to prevent users from accessing it as well. You also want to put down trigger_bomb_reset to stop players from griefing and dropping the bomb in inaccessible areas. You need to use the trigger tool texture. All it does it drop the bomb to the place on the map where it was dropped from, back on the ground. That way if someone tosses it in the water, it'll just pop back up on the pier.

* Something you should keep in mind is that when you're designing your map, design it to be optimised. This is an article by will2k that describes his method of mapping. I think every mapper should read it because it has some very good rationale for using simplified blocking techniques. I recently worked on optimising the St. Mary map in the community workshop and was able to increase the frame rate by an average of 15%, with some areas experiencing 50%+ increases in FPS. A lot of this came down to the block work, which will2k discusses, as well as understanding the way that vvis generates portals and where and why you need to hint. In the end, I reduced non-hint portals by over 3,000.

* FMPONE made an excellent point when discussing the havana map with the author that simplifying the colour palette. Some areas could do with a change up of the textures so that entire areas aren't using the same texture. You could introduce cross beams, change the walkable space to be displacements and paint geometry. It's easy to create blend textures to use in CS:GO, and if you have the artwork to go, should take you a little over a minute to do.

Quote from FMPONE

For now, I would work with completely solid colors, and then add very subtle noise to them later on. The reason I say that is that less is really more, because CS:GO's lighting engine is very beautiful with minimalist styles, and also because players will very much appreciate the solidity of the surfaces. Adding more noise is easy, working with a reduced level of noise is difficult and will ultimately produce a more pleasing end result (TF2 kind of look, but more realistic). If you really reduce the amount of noise on textures you will see how you will need to be more careful about which details you do use, because they will become very strong and important, and more impressive visually.

This may sound like a crazy suggestion, but in my experience this is the better art style for CS:GO, and I already think it would improve your work a lot on this map. Mirage is a good example of how to use solid color effectively, Season also does it but it won't be as helpful to you since it's scientific/futuristic.

tl;dr: as long as you get the correct color tone, it's very easy to add almost transparent levels of dirt and detail for realism. So just use solid colors for now.

Put it up on the net so people can have a play

The textures look much better. I just meant using the same brick texture or overall the same texture gets bland and dull. But it looks good now. Anyways, 600 mb is WAYS too large for a map. Most maps at most will be about 150 mb, and that's a lot for the average Internet. I would suggest toning the file size down to at least 200 mb. But under 100 is ideal.

Oh, and valve only allows up to 200 mb upload size for files

Quote from caz674

Thanks for the quick feedback guys and sorry for the late response. I spent a few days making the map player proof (clipping non accessible areas) and filling out the map so it doesnt look so empty in areas. I got to a few problems when trying to upload the map. I think the map is too big (600mb), its full of custom models and textures. Any tips on reducing the map size ?. Anyway heres the bsp and nav (all packed). Hope this doesn't deter anyone trying out it.

http://www.filedropper.com/decanal

Muffin when you say the textures are boring do you mean dull ? I changed the colour correction and did a little post production in photoshop. How does this look ?

600 mb?! Wow! What's taking up the most space in your .bsp? How big is the bsp when it isn't pakratted? How big is the vmf?

There's quite a few users here on these forums that can help you reduce file size for publishing.

By the way, is the map set in Venice?

So buildings like that exist, that is super cool.

Change the water texture to Inferno water or Boathouse water.

At the first screens I was going to say that the tiles artwork was a bit too much and not very realistic cos I haven't seen that building in my walks around Venice... fancy that; with new lighting and better surroundings, it's starting to fit quite well! Although I think it's still a bit distracting and a bit "too much", sometimes realism hurts. Maybe wash the artwork down a bit, like weather wear, aging etc.

Quote from caz674

Yes ! the map is Venice, nice that you noticed without me telling you haha. Here's the real A building

Sizes of the map files -

BSP 27,921KB

Nav 697KB

VMF 4,154KB

I should mention i've done no optimization yet and the map was compiled with VVIS to fast. Not sure if that would make a difference to the mapsize.

Display More

Optimisation will make a small amount of difference. I had to kill my download at 200mb, it's just way too big for a map to be. St. Mary is around 190mb and that's as big as a map can get with custom content. And to be honest, it's as big as it should be. You need to host your bsp and your assets separate and find a way to reduce the file size.

How much space are your models consuming? What about your materials and textures? Are they 7MB each or 100kb?

By the way, I've got a heap of reference pics from my visit to Venice last year:

http://www.justinmitchell.com.au/city-of-canals/

http://www.justinmitchell.com.au/from-the-float…azur-with-love/

I'm going to hazard a guess that the mural is the bulk of the file size.

You really need to save to JPG before you export to vtf, and your jpeg images should be < 100kb in size. You can use bump and normal maps to bring detail to a model, you can also use decals, which are probably more appropriate.

FMPONE talked about using less noisy textures earlier this year and used Mirage as an example. I think that's valid here where you could get away with using basic, low detail textures with decals over the top. That should save some space.

But if your textures are taking up 400MB of your 600MB+ file, you're still way over budget. You need to look at the size of the props, how much detail, how many different textures you're using etc. as well as your brushes, because it all takes up space. Like you said, your non-pakratted file is under 30mb, but pakratted, it's over 600mb.

It isn't practical to do any testing until you sort those out.

You must be saving them as uncompressed because a 1024x vtf should only be 683kb.

Also, make sure the textures don't have an alpha channel if they're not supposed to have one (as this will double the texture's filesize). This is something I did wrong on a bunch of textures for zoo and it ended up saving us dozens of MB to bring the filesize down.

Quote from Skybex

You must be saving them as uncompressed because a 1024x vtf should only be 683kb.

this

If you're using photoshop, just make sure that you save as compressed without alpha channel, same with gimp.