Posts by text_fish

It's true that most players can be infuriatingly narrow-minded (especially in the CS community) when it comes to new maps, but that should be embraced as part of the challenge of mapping.

The most common mistake I see most mappers make is that they get snowblind by their own design. Once you've put the time in to design, build and tweak a map you develop a metabolic familiarity with it that no other player in the world will probably ever experience, so it can be disconcerting and infuriating to watch other players lolloping around it for the first time. The most controversial of Cottons streamed "reviews" was undoubtedly for de_sparity, partly because of 3click's outspoken reaction, but mainly because it's a map that was developed very publicly, so a lot of its fans had also developed some of that designer snowblindness and couldn't appreciate Cottons criticisms. Personally I think most of what he said was spot on for that map. Considering the number of maps he had to get through I think he was remarkably fair and diligent, and thankfully he wasn't the only judge.

When we playtest new layouts on the mapcore server, the first thing I look out for is whether one or either team adopts any sort of coherent strategy on the first round of each half. If they don't, the level designer has failed, in my opinion. It may be harsh to write a layout off so quickly, but that's what most players will do (simply because there are more maps out there than anybody has the time to enjoy) so that's the attitude you have to design for.

Quote from Bodd Jonar

Why did that guy even judge maps? He did not even know what nodraw was.

The vast majority of Counter-Strike players probably don't know what nodraw is, but that doesn't render their opinion on a map's gameplay and aesthetic quality any less valid than somebody who does.

It'd be great if the judges could stream part of their process, like Cotton did for the last CEVO mapping contest. Might be a lot of extra work though I guess.

Screenshots and a description as promised:

Story
The British chancellor of the exchequer has been secretly siphoning public money to fund the renovation of his hereditary family estate. A radical political group, dissatisfied by the muted media response have decided to blow the story wide open by bombing one of two vulnerable spots in the estate. Like it or not, the SAS have a duty to quell the insurrection by force.

Screens
[Blocked Image: http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/de_secret_radar.png]
As always, the radar makes the layout look a lot more complex than it actually is when playing. Most of the areas to the right and bottom of bombsite B feature a lot of vertical gameplay.

[Blocked Image: http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/de_secret_A_bombsite.png]
Bombsite A, which at the moment is the most visually complete area of the map.

[Blocked Image: http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/de_secret_B_bombsite.png]
Bombsite B, as well as T (left) and CT (right) catwalks above. Gunfights between the two catwalks are fun and one of the most distinct gameplay features, but I am concerned that some players might find it visually a bit too cluttered in the heat of action. I'll await feedback and rethink the visual design if necessary.

[Blocked Image: http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/de_secret_hall.png]
Hallway viewed from CT spawn. Soon there will be glorious bookshelves in the upper section, and some more ornate wooden paneling on the walls.

[Blocked Image: http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/de_secret_lobby.png]
Lobby, currently also lacking some detail. Expect rolled up carpets around the edges of the room, curtains framing the windows and maybe a few bits of furniture draped in sheets.

[Blocked Image: http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/de_secret_middle.png]
Middle area. The scaffolding isn't climbable, it was just a neat way to break up the long bare wall whilst also reinforcing the "renovation" theme and explaining the boarded up windows.

[Blocked Image: http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/de_secret_stairs.png]
Stairs above B bombsite. I wanted the area to the right of the archways to be a little gloomier than the stairwell itself to give T's an advantage and hopefully cause cautious CT's to hold back a bit.

[Blocked Image: http://www.text-fish.co.uk/mappingstuff/de_secret_T_Spawn.png]
T Spawn. I'm currently working on various tudor-ish roof assets which will allow me to finish off all of the currently rather flat rooves. Eventually I also plan to make some new trees with exciting autumn leaves.

Anyway, I hope whoever plays this map enjoys it, and I welcome all feedback and suggestions!

Thanks for putting this together Le1T!

What a lot of submissions -- I don't envy the judges.

Hello!

So as I feared, I wasn't able to finish on time, but my progress is far along enough that I'd like to submit what I have and collect valuable feedback! I also owe it to my girlfriend to submit as I've been ignoring her an awful lot the last week or so and I wouldn't like it to be for nothing! Here's the workshop link:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/fi…s/?id=510172902

It's just gone 3am here, so I think I'll wait until tomorrow to add screenshots and all that bumph. I'll also book a playtest in soon, as it's been a while. Goodnight.

I just scraped silver. Then again, I didn't bother with the player pick'em because with the exception of NIP, Fnatic and Envyus I'd struggle to name more than two players in most of the teams.

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As such a popular team, it'd be interesting to see how/if the viewership figures changed after NIP got knocked out. I definitely didn't care as much after they went, although I kept one eye on the final few matches.

Quote from Symix

But I get pretty similar fps compared to official maps.

If you're building this map for your own personal use, then that's just fab. Otherwise, I would seriously consider making those changes. CS:GO attracts players running on a very broad range of hardware, so you need to cater for the low-end players, and those weirdo's who choose to turn all their settings down super low to gain a few extra FPS.

Out of the three times I've playtested this map, tonight was the first that FPS issues didn't make me ragequit. I still had to reduce some settings quite a way to get even close to the FPS I get on most complete maps, but it's a huge improvement regardless.

I identified two small optimizations you could make, all the same:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/1456139678…2A189514AE16B1/

The pipe above could be reduced to simple cylinder with a bumpmap on for the ribs.

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/1456139678…794B813B6B88CB/

The grates above could be swapped for textures instead of props.

Both of the props above look great closeup, but 90% of the time players won't be examining them in any detail, and 99.99% of the time, anybody who does look at them won't care if they're simple.

Lastly, you have a stray nodraw texture that CT's can use to watch one of the bombsite A entrances:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/1456139678…6821FCE99AFB92/

Quote from Gale

Remake of DM-plunge.

Isn't that DM-Morpheus? :?

Yeah I guess you could play around moving the spawns up and down that new corridor, but I just find it hard to believe that it would maintain the same time differences across all three lanes. If you move the circle further forward so that T's can still take palace then they'll be able to secure mid within seconds, and probably be jumping through apt windows before CT have got to van. Move the circle further back to save mid and B, and they'll lose palace to the CT's. I guess you could slide the T spawn corridor down and to the right a bit, but then you're essentially just returning T's to their original spawn point.

It's interesting to think about, but in practical terms I think Pampers hit the nail on the head.

The timings on current Mirage are fantastic. Even when both teams rush, CT can set up a decent defense on all 3 lanes. Judging your proposals purely by eye, I imagine CT would get to window when T are already over half way through mid and probably able too molly the window (unless you lose the vent), and CT would be inside Palace before T's.

Not to draw this out or anything, but don't you think banning is a bit much? As far as I can tell, Bozo's worst offense is ignoring good advice, and that only hurts himself. If he hadn't been called a "prick" quite early on in this whole fiasco I'm sure it would have fizzled out weeks ago, but as soon as that line was crossed people had to take sides and throw in their opinions (myself included) and there was no way anybody would come out of it unscathed. The CS:GO competition has opened the forum up to a lot of new people so there was bound to be the odd tussle here and there, but it really didn't need to get to banning level, and honestly I don't think Bozo is solely responsible for this situation. Instead of resorting to extreme measures, maybe we all just need to reflect on our parts in the debate, learn what we can and move on. Trying to get "the last word" in a forum discussion is a futile endeavor -- being the first to "get over it" is where the money's at.

The maps do look pretty great.

I've gotta say though, I've yet to see a single character that I like. In terms of "personality" they seem really annoying and quite vapid, and in terms of visual design it seems to be a case of quantity (of design features/aspects) over quality.

The concept of platform exclusivity and its advocates need to die a fiery death.

I'm not surprised at all. So many dev's tow the line that the reason they don't release mod tools is that polishing their tools up for public use would be too much effort, so after making something like snapmap they're even less likely to do so. It is disappointing though. Ultimately, the lack of versatility in the tools will keep most seasoned modders away and the scene will be flooded by simple identikit maps and modes that don't evolve/improve over time in the way that more advanced mods do. Silly id.

It's fine to pimp your game on these forums, but just be honest about it and start a thread in the Work Release subforum.

Quote from Bozocow

From what I can see in the submissions that made it into the schedule, they all seem to be detailed. Is this what the mods mean when they say that my map is, "not ready to be playtested"? Why should I spend all the time and effort to detail the map if serious changes need to be made to the layout? Anybody who's tried to change the layout of a detailed map will tell you how easy that is...

We playtest graybox maps all the time. I imagine if the mods say it's not ready, it might be due to one or multiple of the following:

• There's no radar
• There are missing textures/props (i.e. not correctly packed in to the BSP)
• There are too many exploits (unclipped boosts, or ways out of the map)
• There aren't enough player spawns
• There are missing gameplay elements, such as buyzones or bomb sites
• There's some sort of glaringly obvious design flaw, like the T's spawn in the bombsite, or it's just a big killbox, or it's a maze
• It's poorly optimized and therefore doesn't run well on the mod's PC

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Slow and steady wins the race...

Quote from FMPONE

In terms of crit, I'd like to see more color normalization, sometimes it feels a bit noisy and contrasty right now. Like there isn't one overall tone in the shots, they vary a bit too much IMO

Oooh. I've been thinking about normalizing the last few days. Would you do that with colour correction, or through VMT's? In the latter case, do you know of a relatively pain-free way to batch process a bunch of VMT's or VTF's?