de_Taisha

Minor Update!

I decided to do some detailing around B Main, focusing on the little shrine, stone wall, and outer parts of the map. I also did some detailing on the B site crates too!

Hello everyone! It's been a hot minute, but while we haven't been posting for a while, we have been cooking in the background. There's been further layout changes around the map, and many visual updates around most of the map. I would say the map is 75% of the way of being artpassed properly, so we'll see how we can fare before the deadline. But for the meantime, the latest version is up on the workshop, and will later be updated sometime this week hopefully. Here's screenshots of the map now, along with radar!

Middle:

A Con:

CT Spawn + Shop:

A Site:

A Main:

T Spawn:

B Site:

B Main:

B Con:

Radar:

Stage 2 Submission and Afterthoughts

Taisha has been officially submitted for the Stage 2 deadline. We were able to get a fundamental artpass down for the map, though we were unable to complete it in time due to some burnout and some project mismanagement. Regardless of the outcome, I'm happy that I got a chance to work with @ethurs and @Axesh and growing more in my experience with environment art. We plan to keep working on the map even if it doesn't make it to the next stage, though we intend to take our time to properly cook the theming and aesthetic. Thank you everyone for your support, and here are some of the latest screenshots for the map!

Quote from csWaldo

9 hours ago, csWaldo said: The lighting looks weirdly flat, almost full bright. Is this an issue with the compile or the lights themselves? This map could shine a lot more if the lights were just set up properly. Would love to see it then!

I've been having quite a lot of trouble with map compilations quite honestly, S2 hammer is often telling me that compilation is using more than what the GPU can handle (3070 TI). I'd also run into the VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST issue pretty often as well, preventing me from doing a lot of map compiles often. At first I thought maybe if I tweaked the lighting around it would look better, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if that's the reason for the lighting to be failing.

Quote from csWaldo

On 2/11/2025 at 5:53 AM, csWaldo said: You don't need to compile that often to get good lighting. You can make good use of the baked lighting preview and the path traced view to get the light most of the way where it needs to go. But you definitely want to make sure that your release compile is the highest possible quality. That means 8k final. You can help your system cope with that by closing the tools (and everything else demanding) and running the compile through CMD. Giving your PC a fresh restart just before the compile might also help clear out your System / VRAM. I would definitely look into this if I were you. The map could look a lot better for relatively little work by just fixing the lighting.

Hey Waldo, just wanted to get back andshout you out on the advice. One thing previously preventing compiles was random bouts of memory leakage within the map, which we were able to diagnose was caused by some assets absorbing a lot of the lightmap bias. We were finally able to get a compiled version of the map up with finalized 8K lighting, and your suggestions to improve performance were very helpful. Hopefully the map doesn't feel as flat as it did before (though there are parts we need to tweak with the lighting sometime down the future when we finalize the artpass)! Thank you!