Posts by ifO

Arrgh if I wasn't so busy atm I'd be in on this for sure, it's right up my street. Will be interested to see what comes out of this.

Great vid, thanks!

Amazing site, but sadly too expensive for my casual needs. Guess I'll have to keep visiting for the freebies

Incredible stuff Philip & TeddyBear.

Impressed Rick, but the head's definitely the weakest bit. The eyes look too small and bead-like and the bridge of the nose is a bit too thin. Way better than I could do though

I don't believe for a second that's your first map, but it's very decently made.

Wow! That is some nifty skyboxing, looks awesome!

Maybe some of the rooftops are a bit weirdly shapen, you could tweak them a bit, but apart from that damn nice and that facade prop is still the coolest thing I've seen in Source. Looks great in that setting.

I wish you'd let us in on your normal map techique TeddyBear. Is it something you developed for a University project maybe? Or are you in the industry?

Oh and I have flatmates from Gothenburg, and they are ace

Very cute computer thingy.

Heh you'd be wrong, I've got Source and I'm all over it but HL mapping is still where the fun is.

Well you basically get a high quality 512x512 texture and make 2 versions of it:

1. texture1.tga - a desaturated full-sized version, with slightly reduced contrast, saved as .TGA for the detail texture (you can actually leave it full colour and it seems to work).

2. texture1.bmp - a full colour version resized to 256x256, saved as .bmp for the texture.

Then place .tga in your detail folder, the .bmp in your texture .wad and set up your ..._detail.txt file in the usual way to connect the two.

texture1 detail/texture1 1.0 1.0

No, it doesn't look ugly as hell. Done properly it looks as good as 512 textures. Have you actually seen what it looks like done well or are you just making an assumption based on the way most people use detail textures (badly)?

And using 512x512 textures will give you crazy w_poly with HL's 240 subdivide, which is a good reason to stick to 256 with 512 DTs, plus you don't rule out people with old graphics cards who are a large part of the die-hard HL playing population.

Random pics, not the best and DT's aren't applied everywhere but you can see the effect on those where they are used: 1 | 2

Very nice stuff. Crossfire is superb, and the mapping standard on a whole is very high.

My only criticisms would be, firstly in Autumn - the rocky sections have 2 distinct levels and are a bit rounded-box-like, and it looks a bit odd.

Also in Factory - I think you need to break up some of those big expanses of plain concrete texturing (on walls/ceiling in particular) , even if only by adding some structural detail to the textures, or adding more grime overlays etc to break up the uniform clean look. A few extra pipe/cable props here and there wouldn't hurt either.

Yes, yes you do!

Ah, sorry, for some unknown reason I think you have to be logged in to view that section of the forum

I like the scale of it and the low wpoly is great, but it could be improved a lot I think. If you're wanting to wow us with the capabilities of the HL engine you should certainly start with raising your texture quality. If you wanted to 'go the whole hog' you can even use 512x512 'detailtextures' applied to 256x256 textures to effectively get 512x512 textures into HL.

The HDR effect is pretty eugh. You could port your map to a mod with the CG bloom shader (like HI, not that it's a brilliant effect, but certainly better than what you have there?).

Example with detailtextures & bloom: http://%7boption%7d Apologies for linking to my own map, if I had shots of the map by the texture creator I would link to his work of beauty (hi_alandalus).

Also I think you could tweak your terrain geometry considerably without hurting your r_speeds that much. And some transition textures to blend between grass and road for example would be nice.

Oh and steal de_gower's turbine model

That facade is indeed brilliant. The arches are pretty sextacular too. Fantastic stuff.

The collossus stuff is wicked but maybe it should be saved for another map?

Meh, I also lurk. Including H2, Quakis and Rick that's 7.

As far as I know custom decals don't really work in HL1.

The only way to get decals to work is to add them to decals.wad and then you have distribution issues. That's last time I checked anyway. I've mapped for many years in HL1 and never used decals..

I'm all for hand-drawn textures but I think these are letting your map down somewhat, they're just tooo flat and cartoony. At this point in HL1's life why are you using anything but the best textures you can get your hands on?