de_wanda by warby ... final release !

    Quote from Campaignjunkie

    Are you already getting requests to cannibalize this map for the custom content?

    you bet !!! i told em all to go to hell :roll:

    Warby, sorry for the late response but I finally had a few minutes at work to load this up.

    Threewave's been working with the Source engine for the past year so I figured I'd show it to the team and get their thought.

    Overall, its really pretty. And very very impressive for just 1 dude to have worked on - even if it did take you awhile. Here are some thoughts I collected from about 6 different people here (artists and level designers).

    -The scale is mish mashed throughout. Your windows on the buildings are huge. The ladders are huge and in some spots your bricks are the size of a car - even if they are on the outside of the playing area.

    -Your lighting is overbright and not using the HDR wisely. There should be some nice contrast areas of light/dark throughout. You've got some dark spots but some more areas with this treatment would be ideal.

    -Valve lights assets with environment map masks weird when in the dark. Your envmap saturation and contrast should be turned down (in the .VMT) on certain objects to correct thing. The view finders specifically come to mind.

    -The textures used for your skyportal meshes look really cartoony when compared to the rest of your texture work. It's a contrast thats all too obvious, and ruins the effectiveness of the setup.

    -Water is a multiplayer killer for CS: S. Did you know this? There's things you can do to water to make it efficient for multiplayer gaming with Source. One of the things I know to help is making the water non-clear.

    -You're using a single model for a huge vertical aesthetic of a building and this causes major lighting issues. In one spot it works well, but in others it looks horrible as the model is lit lightly but the wall its against is dark. There's ways to work around this. Firstly, the engine vertex lights from the assets origin so having a large asset like that is extra prone to lighting failure. You could break the model up and piece it back together in Hammer - thus giving you multiple original and more accurate lighting.

    The other fix is to use 2 new vrad parameters that you'd add to hammers compile window in export mode. -staticproppolys and -staticproplighting. This will tell vrad to create lightmaps for all static props and essentially create self lighting assets.

    -Again, great job for one person.

    With all of this said - do you work somewhere?

    so in general i agree with everything you say adam but just like with most of the more critical posts here you like everyone else are not in the trenches you have no idea what other technical difficulties i had to over come to make this map work at all ^^ so let me just comment on the points one by one in a hopefulyl friendly and professional manner =)

    *iam not justifieing anything here just trying to make everyone understand better*

    Quote from AdamBrome

    Warby, sorry for the late response but I finally had a few minutes at work to load this up.-Valve lights assets with environment map masks weird when in the dark. Your envmap saturation and contrast should be turned down (in the .VMT) on certain objects to correct thing. The view finders specifically come to mind.

    *YES and this is especially bad with hdr turned on without hdr it looks the way i wanted it to. i just found out yesterday that you can change the reflectiveness when hdr is turned on ( hessi told me )... to late now *SOB*

    Quote from AdamBrome

    -The textures used for your skyportal meshes look really cartoony when compared to the rest of your texture work. It's a contrast thats all too obvious, and ruins the effectiveness of the setup.

    *they are all screenshots from building that i actually have inside the map

    so i blame the mipmapping *

    Quote from AdamBrome

    -Water is a multiplayer killer for CS: S. Did you know this? There's things you can do to water to make it efficient for multiplayer gaming with Source. One of the things I know to help is making the water non-clear.

    *i did not know ?! i really liked the water in militia and aztec those maps are being played right ?! i assume you talk performance when you say playable ?*

    Quote from AdamBrome

    -You're using a single model for a huge vertical aesthetic of a building and this causes major lighting issues. In one spot it works well, but in others it looks horrible as the model is lit lightly but the wall its against is dark. There's ways to work around this. Firstly, the engine vertex lights from the assets origin so having a large asset like that is extra prone to lighting failure. You could break the model up and piece it back together in Hammer - thus giving you multiple original and more accurate lighting.

    *this also splits it into smaller batches which will result in even worse fps and the people already complain about it also the compiler's crash when you use 4096 entities right now i use 4095 the last month long i had to sacrifice an entity for each new feature i HAD to implement so splitting models is really not an option actually combining is !*

    Quote from AdamBrome

    The other fix is to use 2 new vrad parameters that you'd add to hammers compile window in export mode. -staticproppolys and -staticproplighting. This will tell vrad to create lightmaps for all static props and essentially create self lighting assets.

    *that sounds pretty cool but where odes it get the uvs for the lightmap ?! sounds like it will be one huge artifact hell to me personally but i am really curious about this and i am gonna try it in the future *

    Quote from AdamBrome

    -Again, great job for one person.With all of this said - do you work somewhere?

    i am looking for a job right now

    all in all i am once more a bit wiser thanks to you guys and i promise the next map will be even more pwnage ^^

    so one thing i leared for sure is to do more public beta stuff and name your releases _alpha_05 _beta_02 _rc_1 etc ... so even you always have the option to change it wothout causing to much map differs form server hassel ^^

    Quote from Warby

    so one thing i leared for sure is to do more public beta stuff and name your releases _alpha_05 _beta_02 _rc_1 etc ... so even you always have the option to change it wothout causing to much map differs form server hassel ^^

    That's kinda crap sometimes though. I did a beta and people didn't realize the final was out.

    Kinda sucks seeing more beta versions being played than the final.

    Quote from AdamBrome

    The other fix is to use 2 new vrad parameters that you'd add to hammers compile window in export mode. -staticproppolys and -staticproplighting. This will tell vrad to create lightmaps for all static props and essentially create self lighting assets.

    uhm well i tried what you said but it is pretty useless right now.

    first at all for al of you who want to try. this copy paste from vrad paramter list:

    -StaticPropLighting : generate backed static prop vertex lighting

    -StaticPropPolys : Perform shadow tests of static props at polygon precision

    -OnlyStaticProps : Only perform direct static prop lighting (vrad debug option)

    -StaticPropNormals : when lighting static props, just show their normal vector

    and here are some screenshots, which are pretty crap as i must mention.

    [Blocked Image: http://img445.imageshack.us/img445/6997/fuglyvtxlightinglr3.jpg]

    didn't you test that before? i mean it is obious that this feature is not really well implemented yet.

    and even if it would work: default T&L Lighting does its job pretty well anyhow in the official maps, doesnt it?!

    greetings

    Great work, Warby. I especially love the waterfall.

    Too bad the hdr blooming effect pounds like a madman, it hurts my brains.

    I hope there will be a _final2

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