Quote from R_YellMountains are made with digital elevation models as I said previously (there is a tutorial made by me into the valve´s wiki). The artistic part comes now, I'm trying to paint them to look similar as possible to real south western mountains (in the USA).
Thanks for the info, I'll be sure to look it up 
This just keeps getting better and better
How did you get your mountains to be so interesting? They're definitely amongst the best I've seen in a HL2 map.
Aye it's very readable & consistently amusing. I flipped through about 90% of it in one sitting.
From a purely personal perspective:
I agree that everyone is too precious about mod stuff now, but it's just the way things are unfortunately. There's a lot of mods and games competing for people's time and first impressions are very important.
Example:
I played dystopia a handful of times and felt it had potential, but it was so rough and lacking in many areas that I never came back. A mod has to hit me between the eyes and grab my attention for me to play it more than a few times, and I suspect a lot of people feel the same. I'm not going to spend my time waiting for a mod to fix its failings if it's really rough -- I'll just play a full game instead. BF2 or dystopia? It's not a tough choice for me.
I'll probably check back in mod every couple of months at best unless it really makes a big impression or a lot of other people start playing it.
With FF, I personally feel we have to get it pretty much 90% right on the first release, as people have preconceptions & expectations about the mod we're making (most people know what TF is and many have played previous incarnations, so a half-assed first release will kill a lot of interest). If we were making a mod based on a brand new concept, we'd probably be less precious about releasing stuff (and the mod itself) but I feel things have changed. People's expectations have changed. Maybe all of the mods out there are simply contributing to the problem? If we make people expect the earth for free (i.e. a flawlessly executed mod), then they will probably believe they're entitled to it, and anything less than that will be ignored.
The whole "we have to be professional" stuff has gone too far in many quarters ('studio' name for a mod? Please!) but on the whole I disagree that most mod teams are 'trying to be pro' in the sense that they want to end up selling their mod or starting up a proper games development company. It's definitely the case in some quarters, but on the whole I believe it's just a "monkey-see, monkey-do" scenario.
I played Halo2 at the same time Half-Life2 came out and found it to be pretty .. boring. 
Skjalg's comments are pretty realistic, if a little disheartening to hear from your perspective. I think you really need to ground yourself a little and pick out several of the stronger elements and work on those a lot. If you can rapidly concept some of the more interesting parts of the game it'll be a lot easier to pick up recruits. At the moment you've got a lot of words and some art -- this is where most mods fail, moreso when they are over-ambitious.
ReNo also hit the nail on the head regarding your description of the mod. Further, I'd say the fact you've got such a mouthful is also indicative that you've possibly bitten off more than a bunch of people can chew, even if it seems ok at the moment.
I wish you the best of luck, but you must realise that only a fraction of the modders out there are as idealistic and passionate about projects as you are your own. The reality is that a lot of people will under-produce for you and/or potentially disappear without so much as having the decency to tell you they've buggered off. It's for this reason I would recommend focussing on certain parts first.
Really nice. I agree that the green is too saturated & in your face (I started to get a bit of a headache after ten minutes 
), and I also think that you could cut back on the detail props as they really cane the framerate. In terms of aesthetics, it's hot-damn amazing. Obviously I can't comment on the gameplay yet
Quote from von*ferretJoan of Arc for life, got me through my character classes.
Quoted for truth. Amazing and very complete tutorial.
As for the brightness of my render, I guess my monitor is super bright or something, whoops. I checked the forums at uni and couldn't see shit when I looked at the picture.
Does anyone have any tips for calbrating monitors?
I've got a Dell P1110 21" Trinitron CRT (bought refurbished several years ago, so I didn't get any documentation with it).
*edit - Just googled and apparently these monitors develop overbrightness as they age -- I probably haven't noticed as it'll have crept on me. Time for a new monitor, then.
Unwrapped my deagle and started skinning it.
UV: Click. The lack stretching is good, the actual layout is.. eh. Hard to paint. I learned a lot anyway.
Started skinning it, just working on the shading and not the overall colour right now.
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It's my first attempt at a weapon skin so I'm just learning rather than going for any kind of finished product. I'll post more as I make it so there's something more to critique.
Pelt mapping is totally awesome. Define some seams and then pull the model apart -- very very cool. If you do a lot of organic modelling it's well worth upgrading to max8 solely for the pelt-mapping.
It's starting to look really cool now. What I would say is that there's an overuse of spotlights and other flashy effects -- when you cram lots of them into a map it can cheapen the look. A lot of the areas are not very well lit (in terms of visibility, not aesthetics) which can be a problem when actually playing it -- especially in visually 'messy' maps like this (hi tech, lots of wires, lights, consoles, etc). I'd break the look up by using more localised lighting dotted around the place (such as q2dm8 style walkway lights embedded in the ground), or a few bright street lights to illuminate distinct areas. Some distinct lighting / architecture to act as landmarks would probably be a good idea, too.
I really like the balance of the colours you've got going on and the look in general.
The indoor areas need a lot of work, but I'm sure you can improve them just as you've improved the rest of the map compared to the last update
That's being chewed out? I do hope you're joking
Kinda fixed:
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It was to do with the vertical hint faces running all the way to the ground. I just changed the horizontal ones so they extended the full width of the room and then made the vertical ones stop where they hit the floor. csg/bsp is weird sometimes.
I don't know what it is, ReNo, but it looks awesome.
Go into the customise menu and bind a key to the show triangles command -- it saves you having to convert it to a mesh every so often.
You'll need to copy both the props and their materials over, then edit all the material files to contain the correct paths (change the /loastcoast/blahblah to /cstrike/blahblah, I think) amongst other things.
You'd think people wouldn't pay, but you'd be surprised. Take the likes of Sky TV in the UK. You have to pay a subscription for the basic package and extra for additional channels and they still show amazingly large amount of adverts all the time.
Nice stuff -- I especially like the texture/bumpiness of the cave wall
I wouldn't say it could become a nightmare, but definitely an irritant. You tend to find that companies always find a way to take it one step further than they should, especially if a fair old wad of cash is involved.
What's next? Popups / trailers before the game starts or something equally annoying? You might scoff at such a thing, but I have a bunch of DVDs that have unskippable trailers on them. Yes, DVDs that I paid for have fucking forced-unskippable-bastard advertising on them. It just shows you that some companies will do it if they think they can. Gaming is the emerging industry, so it's only natural that the money men / marketing people will scrutinise every single aspect of gaming. I just hope it doesn't happen to the kind of scale we see elsewhere I swear at my TV when the adverts arrive. I actually mute the TV now because they annoy me so much; it's just as well I don't watch a lot of TV or I'd probably have hunted down and killed certain people over it.
