Posts by will2k

Quote from shawnolson

With the absolute flop of the first level design contest, I had to rethink my strategy for getting people interested in using 3ds Max to make a level for Source.

Hey Shawn, have you considered contacting Jonny at Gamebanana for a joint-contest with money prizes? GB runs periodic contests every Monday or so, either alone or with developers (such as Valve, Insurgency devs, PVKII devs, CEVO, etc...)

Here's one of the latest contests (http://gamebanana.com/contests/58) where you can grab Jon's email and contact info at the bottom of the contest page.

I say, give a shot ; Jon will be happy to hear from you and money prizes are a real motivator to enter contests

Thanks for all your efforts and perseverance in pushing wallworm to new limits and reaching out to new designers, keep it up.

Quote from catfood

This makes my RC-1 look like a toy! What does the rest of your setup look like?

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Sweet (although i'm not a Gibson fan )

Haven't played my electric guitar (I'm a stratocaster guy) in almost 8 years; your picture/setup makes me want to pick it up again

Quote from laminutederire

Load the pointfile and it should point you to the leak location.Make sure that no transparent/translucent materials/brushes are sealing the map.It's usually what I do in these cases but there isn't any pointfile, that's what bothering me.

I found a partial fix, with the cordon tool I can compile it with not so much issues, it is just very slow. Still off-topic, for indoor levels with rooms not rectangular at all, are hints the better way to optimize visleaves?

The cordon tool should be used to narrow down and pinpoint the location of your issue, not as a permanent solution for the potential "leak".

Start decreasing the cordon borders with each compile until you reach the smallest area possible that includes the "error"; you will then have a pretty good idea of what happened (brush, entity or prop issue).

For the pointfile not showing, this could be a glitch in your map that is causing the "leak"; try copying the map into a new empty vmf and test again.

For the optimization, hints are always your first line of defense especially indoors followed by areaportals on all your doorways and hallways ends.

Quote from Pampers

Year 2007 called and wanted their phong shading and text editor shader tweaks back

With Valve, the call went straight to voice mail

Quote from laminutederire

fixing up env_cubemap materials on brush sides...

0...1...2...3...4...5...6...7...8...9...10**** leaked ****

It's a leak apparently, but the issue is that there is no entity leaking, so no way to determine where the problem is, in addition, there was no leak before, I've just added some details on my buildings and it starts leaking anyway. I've browsed the internet, and google is not my friend because I checked, all entities are in the map, their origin too, I do have an entity, there are no areaportals yet, so it cannot come from here. It must be something ridiculous, as it always is...

Load the pointfile and it should point you to the leak location.

Make sure that no transparent/translucent materials/brushes are sealing the map.

Quote from 2d-chris

Painted the house last year in off-white (neutral but boring ) and i think I will repaint some parts this summer with different colors.

What colors did you choose? are you going for a different color for each room (mood/color theory) or a unified color?

For my living room, I went with warm and very vibrant accent walls, for the bedroom I went with a soothing green once the apartment is done I'll defo post some pics, spent a lot of time, effort and money on it so far!

I am intending to go light green in bedroom and light yellow in kitchen; and maybe light blue in living room, still undecided

What Puddy said.

If I were you, I would check UT99 and UT2k4 for some of the best and iconic CTF maps. Play some of them then engage your critical eye to examine what makes them enjoyable and work so well. Beats any book

Quote from FrieChamp

This is where it all started for me. Enjoy!!!

Seconded.

Half-Life Deathmatch was the main reason I opened Worldcraft editor 2.1 in early 1999 and started making HL maps; the good old days

Quote from 2d-chris

Paint and a painter! So bored of boring ivory walls

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Painted the house last year in off-white (neutral but boring ) and i think I will repaint some parts this summer with different colors.

What colors did you choose? are you going for a different color for each room (mood/color theory) or a unified color?

Looks like the gravity gun made its way into GTA5 (sorry if this has been posted before)

http://www.pcgamer.com/gta-5-gravity-…tfully-chaotic/

Quote from Skybex

How did you get CSGO's tools mode working? I thought it has been broken since release

3 years after release, they are still broken

But as nico said, you can load all the tools with "toolload" and unload them with "toolunload" (toolload vmt for material editor, toolload pet for particle editor and so on)

Thanks everyone who took the time to test this nice feature and post results, much appreciated

Quote from Skybex

Does produce a lot of heat though so its not really usable on your lap.

Be sure to invest in a laptop cooling pad if you have not done so already; they'll greatly reduce overheating and extend the life of the laptop and prevent premature failure (happened before on 1 of my laptops that used to generate considerable heat)

$normalmap is a unique command for the water shader only; for everything else, use $bumpmap.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Water_%28…ader_parameters

Quote from cashed

I havent bothered with the PS plugin for a long long time. I'll be old school and open the tga in vtfedit haha

I keep it on standby just in case of a quick edit of a vtf on the fly

But VTFEdit is the main weapon to go for handling the vtfs/conversion

Quote from will2k

While everyone is pointing to the 2nd one (big contrast and I somehow agree), the 1st one could also work with a bit more contrast between buildings and sky. If you could switch the environment lighting to a more orange version (sunset setting or even dusk), things would look better and building shapes will be more pronounced (couple that with some sharpening/contrast in the post process entity and you will be fine).

I can see the setup totally working for a dock yard at sunset with a pier and lighthouse

Bonne chance

To further elaborate on my point, when I saw your pics, I immediately thought of Dishonored, specifically the Hounds Pit area at sunset.

I had this in mind when I recommended the sunset setting:

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You could go for a subtle sunset (orange-pinkish)

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or a pronouced sunset with LOTS of heavy orange

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I reckon both will work well with your architecture and mostly brown brick textures.

Dishonored would be a great reference for your map

Quote from RaVaGe

In game, shitty lighting as always.

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I need some advices, i'm not really sure about the colors/looks It will be a huge industrial building next to the shore.

While everyone is pointing to the 2nd one (big contrast and I somehow agree), the 1st one could also work with a bit more contrast between buildings and sky. If you could switch the environment lighting to a more orange version (sunset setting or even dusk), things would look better and building shapes will be more pronounced (couple that with some sharpening/contrast in the post process entity and you will be fine).

I can see the setup totally working for a dock yard at sunset with a pier and lighthouse

Bonne chance

Quote from Thurnip

The most annoying issue for me, is that you must edit alpha channel as a actual channel. (So that's one of the reasons i rigged the stuff.) This is required to export a correct tga from Photoshop, right?

Yes, I believe the alpha channel must be present in your TGA so VTFEdit can recognize the correct format (ex DXT5) with 32 bit and transparency.

I usually leave the alpha channel creation til the end; I could have several layers on the diffuse (overlay, adjustment, fill layers etc..) then when I'm done I can select one or several layers that i want to include in the alpha channel (could be overlapping layers too) then I duplicate these layers and merge them into one layer. I ctrl+ left click on this layer to select it then right click on the "marching ants selection" and choose save selection. this will automatically send the selection to the alpha channel with all the shapes and the tranparencies nuances and I wouldn't have to manually edit the alpha channel anymore.

Probably not the best method but it works for me

Yes, unfortunately Valve locked the 2 cmds in CSGO (mat_specular and mat_bumpmap), despite being very helpful in quickly checking spec and normal maps in-game.

For normal maps in CSGO, my earlier post clarified the new method to check them in-game (mat_normalmaps); you can also try mat_fastnobump 1/0 to quickly enable/disable bumpmapping.

For specular maps, first type r_showenvcubemap 1 to turn your glove and pistol model to a reflective texture. Run around the map and you should see that the reflection is changing depending on the cubemap in that particular area. If your cubemaps are not loaded correctly, then the texture will reflect only the skybox or not reflect at all. This is to ensure that your reflections are enabled and correct.

Now for your particular texture, I guess you can inspect it visually to check reflectivity. Make sure all video settings are on high in CSGO (low settings disable reflections by default), then wander near your texture and you should easily see that it is reflecting light. If in doubt create a small test map in CSS and use this particular texture then you can use mat_specular to toggle reflectivity and check the texture closely.

Hope this helps

here is a sample vmt's to make things clearer (stock texture from office):

LightmappedGeneric
{
"$basetexture" "plasteroffwllb"
"$surfaceprop" "plaster"
"$bumpmap" "plaster/offwllb_normal"
"$envmap" "env_cubemap"
"$envmapcontrast" "1"
"$normalmapalphaenvmapmask" "1"
}

To test your normal maps in-game, open the console and type mat_normalmaps 1; all your textures with normal maps will turn to the blue normal map. If a certain diffuse texture that you are sure you made a normal map for it does not turn into the blue normal map then you know something is wrong either in the vtf or the vmt switches.

To test spec maps in-game, open the console and type mat_specular 0 to temporarily turn off specularity and reflections (so you can check which textures are changing)

These are boolean command so 0 to toggle off and 1 to toggle on.

As many fine folks have already mentioned, the biggest issue would be copyright infringement and intellectual property theft. The free workshop is loaded with such content and with money involved, I can see it increasing.

Without being disrespectful or ungrateful to their brilliant work on the games side, Valve sadly has a poor track record in combating these issues and keeping things under control; they are slow in responding and rather reactive rather than proactive. Maybe the relatively small team size and flat management structure is making them overwhelmed; maybe this management style that worked so far for game development isn't very much suited for a huge financial institution that Valve has more or less become.

They definitely need to have active moderation of the workshop with dedicated proactive admins/moderators that can deal with copyright on the spot and finalize any related support tickets from complaining original authors.