Posts by spence

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Found some more time to work on my airport map (cs_hijack) now that exams are almost finished for the year.

    I still think something is missing or a little 'off' about the outside areas, but I can't put my finger on it. I have a few more things on my to-do list that might help, like more tire and oil stain overlays and fixtures for the jet bridges, but I don't know if they're enough to make a big difference. Maybe I've just been looking at the map too long without any external feedback. I'm not sure. There are a lot of rough bits that still need to be completed and polished, of course.

    I'm going to try and snag a playtest slot for this next week once my exams are complete. If you are interested in having a go yourself in the meantime, you can check it out here...https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/406357/terminal/cs_hijack_a4.rar

    Nothing is complete...there's still some placeholder brushes/temp textures around, and there are some weird things that may or may not have an impact on actually playing (sloppy navmesh, props without collision, etc) but if you do have a peek and have any feedback I would be happy to hear it

  • Textures / Materials reference Thread

    A few new ones from the Easter holiday:


    Oil? and grime accumulation on roadway

    Contrast in aged/weathered paint on a fire alarm box (the cleaner area in the middle is protected by a panel which is normally closed)

    Water staining/grime on pottery


    Grime accumulating around corners on smooth concrete floor

    Waxed concrete floor in a hangar

  • Tips on creating a suitable color scheme/texture set? (CSGO)

    I know you already touched upon this, but if you don't have any references, it's really hard to get an idea of what to put down in the environment. It seems like this is part of what you're experiencing here. Spend a little time assembling some references that fit your vision for the environment. It makes your job a lot easier and will certainly give you some ideas when you're feeling stuck. You don't have to find pictures that mimic what you're constructing (which obviously might be difficult or impossible in this case) but just things that seem inspirational or give a rough idea of what the level should 'feel' like.

    I think when it comes to areas, you need some more geometry to help you along, as you've mentioned. This in itself helps some areas feel more realistic and less 'off'. Think about how structures are constructed and look at your references. There are often trims, ledges, or variations in geometry at the top of structures or where they change to a different material. When poured concrete is used for surfaces like walls, there are often reinforcing structures or trusses left in place, or at least marks from where they were installed during construction - the texture on the lower curved portion where the window is looks like a floor texture because it's just one continuous, concrete surface, for example - it's hard to see for certain because I had to zoom in a little on the image, but just making an example of something that looks a bit 'off' here

    Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think the issue here is that you're expecting textures to help fill in a blank resulting from your geometry. I'll use this image to illustrate what I mean.

    (The image isn't mine, it's from the HAER: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/)

    A pretty boring structure (it's from a military base, no architectural creativity here), but I think it serves as a fitting example. You can see that it's constructed almost entirely of one material; a flat plaster or concrete of some sort, but it still has some interest because of the construction and the lighting (the construction being extremely simple, too). The point I'm getting at by all of this is that the materials really work in conjunction with their underlying surfaces and how they were built and especially with the way the environment is lit. You don't need a huge set of unique materials to make an environment feel convincing, sometimes less is more.

    I'd try adding more geometry first and see how things are feeling then, but when it comes time to create materials you really need some reference...ehm, materials to work from. Even a handful of photos or a concept paintover or sketch will do the trick. If I'm really focused on working around a colour palette I'll generate one based on the key colours I have in mind or from the references (just some swatches in Photoshop) then work on adjusting their colours to match the swatches during the process of actually creating the individual materials. I'm no pro texture artist though, I'm sure someone else here could give you a better insight into this process

  • Camera Info Thread

    Quote from 2d-chris

    don't get too hung up over the long term investment if your just getting into it, give it a try with something cheap and then make the jump up to serious gear if your really into it.


    This is really true. Worrying about making an investment in a piece of consumer-grade equipment like this is a mistake. New equipment comes out all the time and there's not much of a resale value for this sort of thing because the market is already saturated with used equipment so you're not going to get much back if you decide to upgrade and want to sell your old equipment. If you choose to invest in some more professional equipment later down the line the investment becomes more of an issue but I wouldn't bother until you figure out you enjoy this sort of thing and actually need a higher tier of equipment. I second going for something cheap(er); you can spend a lot of money on expensive equipment but it's not going to make your photos any better and even the lower-grade cameras nowadays are really amazing.

  • [CS:GO]de_zoo

    This is looking great! I don't think the spray paint decals make much sense on the sand, maybe add some planks or something with the decals on them instead. I think some fine detail wouldn't go amiss in the human-occupied areas as well (litter and whatnot) but that's a really minor thing and perhaps a stylistic decision that may conflict with your goals, depending on if you want a cleaner look for the map overall. Can't say much else really except that I want to play it

  • Source Skybox Texture Pack (403mb)

    Quote from Stiffy360

    Late quote, but CS:GO broke the "sky" shader. The only way to do it now is to use "UnlitGeneric" on the LDR skies.

    Thanks. Does this mean we dont have HDR skies in CSGO? It's strange, because some of them from the pack appear to work correctly (sky_reddusk01 as an example) but only when their LDR equivalent is loaded. The same goes for the stock skies; loading the HDR equivalent displays the compressed HDR texture while loading the one without the HDR extension applies the bloom effect to the sky.

    This is good to know though, cheers. If you have the uncompressed versions of the skies it would be a huge asset, because some of the LDR ones were shrunk down to save texture memory and are very pixelated (~256px for example) while their HDR equivalents are full 1024px. If you need hosting for this let me know, I've got tons of space!

  • designers / devs: important skills you can't learn from tutorials?

    Quote from Campaignjunkie

    Oh, hmm... one thing I try to stress really hard is pushing back vs. workaholic crunch culture. I mandate breaks every hour during class, and I tell them not to spend 8 hours a day on their games. To some extent, I suppose this makes them less "employable", but I think less-crunch is the way the game industry is moving (especially re: tech industry's concern over work/life balance), at least in the US where it's a big problem.


    This makes me really happy. I don't think it reduces anyone's employability whatsoever. The lesson students need to take away is to work smarter to eliminate crunch, rather than just throwing man-hours at something and expecting it to resolve the issue (it never does). It really upsets me that for some work environments there is an expectation of spending 10+ hours a day or whatever fixing mistakes or doing busywork that could have been avoided by simple planning, and that the norm/expectation is that people should be perfectly okay with this. Employers limiting working hours and encouraging a better work/life balance is good but it doesn't necessarily solve the issues involved in project management that create crunch so maybe planning and managing to avoid crunch is a good topic to discuss with students.

  • The Mapcore Open Source Initiative

    I like open source .vmfs because it allows others to learn from your work, which is the point here. If someone is curious about an entity setup or how a particular set of solids was constructed they can just look at the map instead of a messy decompiled version. If you're worried about people lifting stuff then there's no point in making anything open source, including assets like textures or meshes. If someone just outright lifts a bunch of open-source stuff and starts parading around like they've created it all by themselves, they're bound to get caught out for it eventually anyway, so I agree, the only person they're hurting by doing this is themselves. The benefits from a bunch of people being able to learn from it and apply it to their own unique work far outweighs the problems here, IMO at least. I always like to see how other people are doing things because I always learn a new trick or two along the way; part of that includes the big picture stuff like visgrouping etc, which a decompile completely ignores.

    By that line of reasoning I think it could be argued that re-using assets and thematic styles waters down the identity of their respective maps, including the stock maps. It's an issue regardless of whether the source file is open-sourced or not. Anyone else get bored of seeing tons of maps with the exact same art style as Dust?

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Looks cool. The overgrown/abandoned test chambers were my favourite areas from P2. I must admit that I skimmed through as to not spoil the puzzles so much, but the theming looks really faithful to the stock levels/style which is a good thing

    Quote from OrnateBaboon

    At the moment it looks like you have at least 7 main routes, which is more fitting of a demolition map. To make it work better as a hostage map, I think reducing the number of main paths down to 3 (like most good hostage maps), and blocking off as many windows as possible would help things massively. Once you do this, you can then focus on refining the chokes, and work on balance/fun/sightlines etc.


    Just from the overview, it does not look like anything that cannot be solved, or at least radically improved by some simple changes.


    Assuming all the necessary entities are in the map to get it working, it totally looks like it is worth a playtest on the server so that people can give meaningful more feedback. There is too much work here to let the map go to waste!


    Solid suggestions, cheers! I think you're spot on; 3 seems to be the magic number when it comes to hostage rescue maps.

    I'll try and sort something out for a playtest on the server soon to collect some more in-depth feedback as I would really appreciate it. Probably towards the end of April as I'm going on holiday next week and won't have time to sink my teeth into any meaningful changes or join in with testing.

  • designers / devs: important skills you can't learn from tutorials?

    I don't know if this is really applicable and I don't know if it's even something that can be taught, but I think fostering a sense of self-discipline and self-motivation is something lacking in education. Having recently started going back to university to complete a degree it feels like a lot of fellow students I meet that want to break into games development think that they can get there without any sort of extracurricular practice or development and I don't find many sources that reiterate that it requires a lot of work and self-motivation to bring projects to completion, especially if one finds themselves working with a small development team or on a particularly ambitious project. I think this really applies to every aspect of life and education and not just game development, but it's really relevant here because of the scale and complexity of game development projects nowadays.

    Regarding concrete teaching I agree with what you have mentioned above. However I don't think sketching is necessary for everyone because I think some folks have an easier time getting their ideas out in a software package than they do on paper, and this can help with understanding the end product, how all the pieces will fit together, and any potential complications early on. For some people I can imagine sketching works better, though. Whatever is fastest and helps get the ideas down quickly and early is the key, IMO.

    Regarding finding inspiration, and what helps with making things. Students should be encouraged to keep a journal/scrapbook (digital or otherwise) of ideas or things they find interesting, inspirational, whatever. If something seems really super awesome and really inspirational but the purpose isn't readily apparent, it's better to squirrel it away for reference and make a decision on its usefulness later, than to forget about it entirely. Encouraging ancillary creative activities is also useful because if you eat, sleep, and breathe making games, things can get a bit stale after a while, and doing a different creative activity for a while (I find, at least) often sparks new ideas and renewed motivation. Plus by doing other creative things you build up skills in something else while having fun.

    I'm sure a lot of this is really obvious. I feel really strongly about my first point though and I think schools would be producing graduates of not only a higher quality, but also better suited to the workforce they wish to enter, if they were to foster this sort of attitude early on.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Yeah, the new banner reminds me I need to change the livery/branding textures....I think an MP-EOT registration tag is necessary

    Both have been hostage-based. I can illustrate many of the problems of the other map with a few images:

    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/406357/terminal/tm_routes.jpg]


    This is an overview with the routes drawn in (there are probably a few I forgot, because there's too many at the moment). The arrowheads denote that the routes go up into the second floor of the terminal; there are also routes underneath the middle part of the terminal that link into the ground-level paths, the most prominent one being the route drawn in basically the exact middle of the image. You can already see that there is a very circular/roundabout pattern here and this often led to one of two outcomes: either everyone met at one of the chokepoints, or everyone ran to the right at the start and ended up going in an anti-clockwise circle for the duration of the match until they killed each other by chance, or until the CTs grabbed one of the hostages - when they did they generally were able to escape undetected by the left or right 'long' routes around the ground level while the T's were wandering around upstairs or hanging out in the shorter routes waiting for someone to come their way.

    I don't think these issues are anything some refinement to the routes couldn't fix. The lower-left and upper-right 'quadrants' of the ramp area could easily be blocked off and this might improve a lot of these problems, particularly these long sight lines on the 'long' routes:


    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/406357/terminal/longway.jpg]

    One of the other really big issues is partially related to the abundance of routes but also the design of the terminal itself. Most airport buildings are very airy and have lots of windows, which makes it really overwhelming to anyone manoeuvring along the ground level and makes these areas very risky. See below:

    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/406357/terminal/overwhelm.jpg]


    There's just so many areas to watch for enemy players. My solution was to block some of them off with stacks of cover so people can't hang out in front of every window and watch the lower level. It stops players in the terminal from doing so, but it doesn't help players on the ground level to read which windows are a threat and which aren't.

    These issues aside, it also was feeling a bit plain graphically after fleshing it out a bit. The terminal design was really boring IMO and tweaking the skylight so that it didn't cause shadowing artifacts on the plane but also had an interesting angle inside the terminal was getting really annoying (changing pitch/angles by 1-2 degrees and recompiling gets tiring, fast ).

  • Source Skybox Texture Pack (403mb)

    Bit of a bump but does anyone know if the CS:GO specification for HDR skies changed at all? I've been playing around with all of these and some of them work as HDR just fine while others just show the compressed HDR texture as it appears in the preview/when decompiled to tga (all pixelated, etc). I tried a bunch of tests and examined the VMTs between the skies that worked correctly, the ones that didn't, and the HDR skies that come with CSGO and they are all identical from what I could tell, so the only conclusion I could draw is that something changed in the VTF specification along the way?