de_chiku

It looks a tad bit too open IMO

You should really plan in height variations during the earliest stages of layout design, as this will have just as much impact on sight-lines as the basic top-down layout does.

Welcome to mapcore!

As austion says, open streets don't lend themselves well to CSGO gameplay, however you could use a road as a type of mid, and then the rest of the map plays in the built up back streets and side alleys of the area around it.

Again, reiterating what text_fish says, "verticality" as I've seen the term used before (as much as I hate it, there isn't a single word I can think of with the same meaning) is very important.

Regarding scale, looking at the van you have near the southern bombsite, those vans can hide maybe 4-5 player models shoulder to shoulder and is taller than the player as well. That is very open, and will lead to a heavy sniper biased map. I would be interested to see timings to bombsites and rotations, something you should try to include in the planning as no-one wants to take 30 seconds to rotate to the other bombsite leaving 15 seconds to play with including 5-10s for defusing.

With ongoing development it might be easier to revert some of the map to "greybox". It allows you to be more flexible with final theme and is easier to make changes!

Good luck

Quote from jackophant

Again, reiterating what text_fish says, "verticality" as I've seen the term used before (as much as I hate it, there isn't a single word I can think of with the same meaning) is very important.

Height variety?

Quote from Squad

Height variety?

I literally meant a single word, a word by itself describing the feature. Height variety would do though I suppose! *derp*

Make the theme fit the layout rather than the layout fit the theme. Making roads etc to a 'real world' layout doesn't work unless you put props etc on top as a kind of 'overlay' to make the gameplay work - see overpass/chinatown/marquis for examples of how other mappers have done this. All have realistic roads that have had props and brushwork added as an overlay to corral sightlines and player pathing.

You want a solid layout with a believable theme rather than a believable layout with a solid theme

Quote from Kham

Thanks for all the solid feedback!

I will sit down over the weekend and try to see if I change the map to maybe have 1 or 2 "big" roads and the change the rest of the map to smaller back alleys, etc.

I have one question though, Is it best if I update the OP when I have finished the next version, or should I simply post a reply with all the updates?

Again huge thanks for all the constructive feedback!

Either works. I personally prefer updating the OP as it's the first thing people will see if they're new to the thread and link back to it in a bump post, or just quote the OP in it's new form in spoiler tags

I was just thinking again about DaveJ's idea about having a main road that takes a 'tour' around the map; I like that you've done that here. Since the design of this map doesn't seem to lend itself to double doors of the type seen in Dust/Dust2/Cbble, that means the road will itself be very open and should probably not be running through the middle of the map as a main route. See if you can find some options for creating cover/chokepoints on the road itself. A depressed underpass or short tunnel going through raised ground might be one option. A bridge going over the road, like a skywalk or pedestrian bridge, which would have strong pylons/stanchions/columns coming very close to the road might be another.

There are a lot of Z/S curves in hallways in the map. The corners on these are mostly directly lined up, so once you come past the first corner you can see past the next few corners immediately. The zig-zag pattern of these hallways should usually be deeper so that you actually have to go past each corner to be able to see much further.

There is a spot that looks like you can only get onto it by boosting (dumpsters on the B side). This spot gives a big time advantage here, by letting players bypass a pretty long distance to run around either side, and also adds a new height/angle that can't be accessed any other way. This seems like too much to attach to a boost, especially since with VALVe making no-blocking (i.e. no-boosting) very common, this spot will be completely inaccessible in a lot of configurations (much like how Vertigo is gimped by inability to boost up the ladder). It's probably best to keep boosts to either a small time advantage (e.g. superman boost at A on Dust2), or a height/angle advantage, but not both.

The timing on the map seems very favorable to Ts, partly because the Ts can get out into somewhat open areas and start picking CTs before they can get to their spots. Ts going straight forward through the connector and looking past the bus shelter to the right seems especially problematic, because they can try to lock down the whole right side of bombsite A about 5 seconds after spawning.

For realism of the roads, it would probably be better to get rid of the 90-degree turns (without intersections) and just have the road made up of T-shaped intersections and segments that are either straight or slanted at a slight angle. Having some of the roads running at 75 or 80 degrees instead of 90 everywhere may make the building facades more interesting; the buildings can either be slanted to match the road, or a series of segments that are perpendicular to the rest of the map forming a series of corners.

Where you want to put a right-angle in the road along the edge of the map, this can just be a T-shaped intersection with one way running straight out of the map and blocked off. I'm not sure if it's common in Japan, but it's not unusual in the U.S. for a city to decide to close a fully-built section of road to be used only by pedestrians, and just put dragons' teeth (concrete pyramid-shaped tank traps) or yellow pipes or large planters on the road to block vehicles.

The inside corners of intersections probably need to be rounded out some (currently the sidewalk runs out to basically a square corner).

It's cool to use some car props, but there are some downsides to using/overusing them. Most cars and trucks don't really provide good cover and may even be less useful than something like a sign/advertisement or planter with a thick bush in it. Putting cars directly on the road visually highlights that the road is too narrow for cars. Good car props are hard to find/make, and the props are large/noticeable/identifiable; re-using cars from other maps makes the map look less original/distinctive.

can you upload the VMF here and I'll have a look at it tonight? It's probably your brushwork.

Quote from Vaya

can you upload the VMF here and I'll have a look at it tonight? It's probably your brushwork.

I really like when people do this and sometimes I would love to try and give someone else my project to help me but what is stopping someone from taking the .vmf and keeping it / using it as their own / publishing it etc? Is there some sort of protection against it on Mapcore or is it just based on moral and trust?

Quote from Vorontsov

I really like when people do this and sometimes I would love to try and give someone else my project to help me but what is stopping someone from taking the .vmf and keeping it / using it as their own / publishing it etc? Is there some sort of protection against it on Mapcore or is it just based on moral and trust?

not much in the way of protection but you can just decompile most bsps to grab the VMF anyway. I don't see why people would steal creations as it's not like they have anything to gain...

If you're an active poster on mapcore I assume you're at least mildly moral about these things

Quote from Vorontsov

I really like when people do this and sometimes I would love to try and give someone else my project to help me but what is stopping someone from taking the .vmf and keeping it / using it as their own / publishing it etc? Is there some sort of protection against it on Mapcore or is it just based on moral and trust? Also it appears that when shady people uses vmf from others with success, they are not from here and they only make night maps and such!

I've had the same problem as you had (previous to now) where CSGO crashes, seemingly while loading the new navigation mesh after successfully building it. I have no idea what caused it, but when I re-tested right now it seems to have gone away. So:

Give it 2 or 3 tries trying to do the same thing, to see if you get a different result. It could just be a random bug in CSGO. Delete NAV file from /maps, open CSGO, map 'mapname', sv_cheats 1, nav_generate.

If the spawnpoints don't need to be exactly where they are, try moving them a little and recompiling.

Verify CSGO in Steam; this doesn't seem especially promising, but it shouldn't hurt anything except clearing out custom configs you might have.

You could post the BSP here or elsewhere for other people to try generating with their CSGO. Whether this is successful would certainly be interesting, because it would say something about whether this issue is caused entirely by the BSP, or (partially) by the CSGO client.

I can't think of anything in the BSP that would cause this other than the brushwork itself, so posting the VMF will probably not have much benefit. The map I've been testing that had this similar problem has only spawns, buyzones, hostages, rescue zone, one prop, light_env, info_map_parameters for entities.

If you have the time/bandwidth/disk space, you could install a dedicated server and see if that will generate the NAV file correctly. Servers will generate NAV files automatically the same as listen servers would, when a bots join the game and there is no NAV file.

Hi

the issue here is you have T spawn in an unreachable position- the engine is spreading out the mesh from T spawn then shitting a brick and dying. put a t spawner on the ground to generate your mesh (you can delete after)

Map is well optimised btw Full compiled in like 3 seconds

I don't think this was the cause of the problem, but in general the way T spawn is set up does not work.

The way T spawn is elevated, once you drop down you can't get back. At a minimum, that's unacceptable because if players are AFK or drop the bomb here, potentially the bomb is out of play for the entire round. I was able to get back up by jumping on the orange box with a slanted top, but just barely; this may be impossible for noobs.

The navigation mesh also will not automatically drop this far. I was able to generate the mesh successfully, but without marking another part of the map walkable, only T spawn has any leaves. Even after making the rest of the map walkable, I doubt if bots will be able to understand. Having part of the map set up like this, where part of the map is too high for the bots to jump to, will always require some manual work to even get the navigation mesh working at all.