Posts by text_fish

  • The Steam Sale Thread

    Quote from grapen

    1 hour ago, grapen said: You own the software forever, you just stop receiving updates after 12 months from purchasing.

    I don't really understand why this is a thing. Or are they planning on releasing a new installment every 12 months, so they won't be updating old ones anyway? Or are they just milking us? Either way, think I'll wait and see if it drops down any further in the next sale, I can't currently justify spending the best part of a hundred quid on something that might be irrelevant in 12 months.

  • [WIP] de_katana

    Ah I see, I thought that was just a dark alley! I just had a run through with bots and I agree with JimWood that the routes need simplifying. A team of 5 CTs have to split their forces to hedge their bets as to where T's are going to attack, and once T's do attack they need to be able to hold their site for long enough that reinforcements can rotate. At the moment both bombsites need probably 3 CT's to defend well because there are multiple entrances and a whooooole lot of quite complex cover, which leaves the other two to take a random roll of the dice on defending mid and/or the other site. Speaking of mid, I don't really see how it offers any tactical opportunities. T's can easily smoke it off, but that doesn't really give them any more options than they already had from T spawn, especially as the CT can just fall back a bit to still cover the main mid-route. Once T's have used one of the connectors off mid, it doesn't really seem to offer them much more of an advantage over the bombsite than their standard route. It's great to give players options, but the more you give them, the less control you as the level designer have over encounters and the more your players will depend on luck rather than strategy. Games that require luck are generally frustrating or just not fun. Simplify simplify simplify.

  • [WIP] de_katana

    You should try to remove non-playable areas from the overview, either by erasing them from the image completely or or reducing brightness/saturation. It only takes five minutes, but it makes the overview so much more useful both in game and here.

  • Level Design Help Files

    Quote from leplubodeslapin

    28 minutes ago, leplubodeslapin said: You can use water at different heights, you just can't use the real-time reflection shader that Source uses on 2 separate plans.

    That's why you can find 2 types of water texture : Expensive and Cheap. The cheap type can still have reflections but it will be cubemap based (which can be fine if it's not a playable area !). So, try to read some water VMT files and create 2 water texture using the same diffuse and stuff, just use the cheap cubemap reflections shader for the higher water brush.

    Also, most of the time you don't need to use a refract texture but a normalmap mask.

    Thanks for the reply Lep, I had thought that was the case as well but it stopped the expensive water from rendering correctly and when I looked in to it on the VDC I found out that expensive and cheap water can't be used within the same PVS. As a temporary workaround I've placed a brush with a semi-transparent watery-looking texture at the height I want the non-playable water and I've got an expensive water volume underneath at the same height as the playable water, which sort of gives some movement to the area. It's still far from ideal, but I think I'll move on to another part of the map for now and hopefully in time I'll come up with a better solution.

  • Level Design Help Files

    I need water at different heights within the same PVS. As far as I understand it this is very illegal in Source, however the higher body of water is not in the playable area and is only a visual thing, so I think I should be able to hack something together. My current thinking is to create an animated refract texture to sit on a brush face just above a fairly plain opaque texture, though I've no idea how costly this would be performance wise or whether it would even look any good.

    Any ideas?

  • What have you watched recently?

    I finally got around to finishing season 1 of Mr.Robot. So refreshing to see hacking done well, without a bunch of hokey visual crap!

    Spoiler The whole father "twist" was pretty obvious from the get go because it definitely had a Fight Club vibe about it so I wish they'd challenged my expectations a bit more there.

    Looking forward to seeing where they go with S2, and I'm definitely going to download the soundtrack for running.

  • Tabletop/board/card Games (Warhammer, Munchkin etc)

    I get together with friends or family from time to time to play board/card games. Haven't dared touch anything as involved as Warhammer yet. About the most involved we got was playing Risk Legacy which was fantastic, though now that it's over I doubt we'll be organised enough to go through it again from start to finish. More recently I've been enjoying Ticket to Ride and Exploding Kittens. I bought Five Tribes the other day but I've yet to organize a night to play it. It looks exciting though!

  • Quake Champions

    I think the "problem" with Lockbox's visuals is that they're a little oldschool. There's an unusual amount of blank space for a 2017 game. Personally I like that for readability purposes, it sets it apart from things like the new UT where every inch of every wall has some sort of intricate pipe detail or ten layers of trim. I agree with Grapen that the lighting could do with some attention though.

  • Beyond Good and Evil 2

    Loved the original. This does seem a bit of a major departure, but I guess I can just about imagine the franchise morphing in to this over the course of several sequels, so being as it's been in development for so long maybe it's an attempt to keep up with the times.

    It's obviously difficult to tell some things from a pre-rendered trailer, but here are the few similarities, for those who didn't get around to playing #1:

    1)The Soundtrack 2)Anthropomorphic animals with attitude (albeit less course language in the original) 3)Chaotic vehicular action played out against aforementioned soundtrack 4)A kind of busted up technological world with an underlying mystical element

    I guess it's BGE1 without the playful innocence. Hopefully it'll still have puzzles and photography, but I see absolutely nothing in the trailer to reassure me of that.

  • [WIP] cs_cult

    Thanks SirK. :) Yep, the upper hostages are only accessible by those two narrow hallways, which makes this route much more about close quarters fighting and/or sneaking. There are windows that can be jumped out of for a quick exit. I've done this to provide a suitable alternative to the hostages on the right which are much easier to grab. If it turns out I've taken the close quarters idea too far I have an idea how to open it up a bit, but I won't know for sure until a playtest.

    I'll upload to the workshop once I've created the displacements and tweaked some cover.

    Thanks for the feedback!

  • [WIP] cs_cult

    I finished the basic gray box yesterday and I've spent several hours tweaking bits here and there to get timings right. The overview below shows the general gist of the map -- CT's start low down on a beach and have to climb up towards a cluster of buildings to retrieve the hostages. CT can either cross the beach and climb the cliffs to the right or ascend some stairs to take a passage with more cover to the left. Thanks to the hill CT's crossing the beach are fairly safe at the beginning of the round and the building on that side is also comparatively easy to navigate, but once they retrieve that hostage they either have to take a long route back to maintain cover, or risk the open beach which T snipers may have covered by this point. Conversely, if they head for the left-hand hostages they face more dangerous close quarter battles early on but if they can break the hostages out their best route back to the RZ has fairly good cover and can be crossed pretty quickly.

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/6ds8Hs7.png]


    Next on the agenda is to start turning that terrain in to displacements, which shouldn't take too long as I put them together modularlylylyly. Once they're tweaked for sightlines etc. I'll think about a playtest with real people.

    Thematically, I've decided to swap the cabins for an olde-English pub/inn, but the cliffs and woodland remain.

  • de_vila

    Hi Joshua, if you want good quality feedback I recommend making it as easy as possible for people to get an idea of what you're aiming for. Post screenshots of the map's overview as well as in-game shots of areas with lots of complex verticality so that everyone can get an idea of how different parts of the map fit together and play. Good maps don't happen by accident, so it's also important to explain your design choices. Ultimately we're all here to have a good time, so it's unlikely that many people will hit subscribe and run around your level based on a non-descript screenshot like the one on your workshop page.

    Anyway, good luck in the contest.

  • [WIP] cs_cult

    Thanks for your interest ExtraCheesy!

    I'm still laying down basic brushwork at the moment, so nothing to show. As long as I don't get called up for work in the next few days I reckon I'll have something rough to show around Tuesday or Wednesday next week.