Posts by unremarkable player

  • What makes a good CS:GO Competitive map?

    I had a good conversation with Skybex during the week about starting a new map, the designing process, reference pictures, visualisation and grey boxing. FMPONE and Volcano wrote about Crown and what processes they went through designing and developing the map. When you look at the pool of competitive maps, with the exception of Cache and Overpass, their origins track back to the original CS, some as far back as the beta releases.


    I do wonder what the experienced mappers would say the difference is, between creating competitive maps, and creating fun to play maps. I think of maps like Ali, Chinatown, Zoo and St. Mary for visual enjoyment and good fun gameplay; maps like Mirage, Dust 2, Cache and Nuke for their technical, co-ordinated game play and for allowing different play styles, and maps like Overpass, Vertigo and Train for being extremely difficult and most unenjoyable.


    Some conversations I've had with other mappers about their target crowd has been interesting to say the least, such as maps being developed for fun, more than for competitive environments, even if there was some potential for that to happen. I wonder if it's a desire for all mappers to create the next, best competitive map, or if it's just to create something for fun and the hope that it will make it into the next operation.

  • [csgo] de_canal (wip)

    Quote from caz674

    Thanks for the quick feedback guys and sorry for the late response. I spent a few days making the map player proof (clipping non accessible areas) and filling out the map so it doesnt look so empty in areas. I got to a few problems when trying to upload the map. I think the map is too big :/ (600mb), its full of custom models and textures. Any tips on reducing the map size ?. Anyway heres the bsp and nav (all packed). Hope this doesn't deter anyone trying out it.


    http://www.filedropper.com/decanal


    Muffin when you say the textures are boring do you mean dull ? I changed the colour correction and did a little post production in photoshop. How does this look ?


    600 mb?! Wow! What's taking up the most space in your .bsp? How big is the bsp when it isn't pakratted? How big is the vmf?


    There's quite a few users here on these forums that can help you reduce file size for publishing.

  • [CS:GO][WiP]de_hospital

    Quote from sevin

    The green lighting would never appear in a real hospital. It is a sickly color, the exact opposite of how doctors want their patients to feel. I would stick to a whiter palette.

    It's bright and white during waking hours and it's dull and dark during sleep hours.

  • Japanese Themed Map [CS:GO]

    dev textures are pretty easy, what you do is start off with your shades (white & black) as base colours, then create layers of red, blue and green, then use opacity over white, black or both to create different colours.


    That was you can create similar coloured tints or shades and you can adjust accordingly.

  • Japanese Themed Map [CS:GO]

    For textures, make hires textures in photoshop, or download some, and then save it at 50% quality in jpeg format, or less. Once you get past 50% it becomes lossy and noisy. Solid colours without much noise will generate small files anyway, but it's the hi-res, hi-def images that consume the most space. So make sure you reduce those images down to acceptable quality before you convert to vmf.


    As for dev textures, should take you an hour or less to create your own library of dev textures, even if they're almost the exact same.

  • [csgo] de_canal (wip)

    So far excellent work for a first time map! Block work looks good and the textures looked OK and aligned well enough so far. You should post a download link for the file.


    Some feedback:


    * Some wide open spaces that could use quite a few props just to break up the sight lines, give extra cover etc. I guess it depends on what your target audience is, whether this is a learning exercise, or an attempt at making a competitive map, or just something fun and visually pleasing. But you should look at how maps like Dust2, Inferno, Mirage and Cache work with their bomb sites, the placement of cover and how players interact with it. In the NiP fnatic game, there was an amazing moment on Cache at the A site with the bomb ticking away and a 1v1, separated by the the red container.


    * You should think about clipping non-traversable areas and adding props to prevent users from accessing it as well. You also want to put down trigger_bomb_reset to stop players from griefing and dropping the bomb in inaccessible areas. You need to use the trigger tool texture. All it does it drop the bomb to the place on the map where it was dropped from, back on the ground. That way if someone tosses it in the water, it'll just pop back up on the pier.


    * Something you should keep in mind is that when you're designing your map, design it to be optimised. This is an article by will2k that describes his method of mapping. I think every mapper should read it because it has some very good rationale for using simplified blocking techniques. I recently worked on optimising the St. Mary map in the community workshop and was able to increase the frame rate by an average of 15%, with some areas experiencing 50%+ increases in FPS. A lot of this came down to the block work, which will2k discusses, as well as understanding the way that vvis generates portals and where and why you need to hint. In the end, I reduced non-hint portals by over 3,000.


    * FMPONE made an excellent point when discussing the havana map with the author that simplifying the colour palette. Some areas could do with a change up of the textures so that entire areas aren't using the same texture. You could introduce cross beams, change the walkable space to be displacements and paint geometry. It's easy to create blend textures to use in CS:GO, and if you have the artwork to go, should take you a little over a minute to do.


    Quote from FMPONE

    For now, I would work with completely solid colors, and then add very subtle noise to them later on. The reason I say that is that less is really more, because CS:GO's lighting engine is very beautiful with minimalist styles, and also because players will very much appreciate the solidity of the surfaces. Adding more noise is easy, working with a reduced level of noise is difficult and will ultimately produce a more pleasing end result (TF2 kind of look, but more realistic). If you really reduce the amount of noise on textures you will see how you will need to be more careful about which details you do use, because they will become very strong and important, and more impressive visually.


    This may sound like a crazy suggestion, but in my experience this is the better art style for CS:GO, and I already think it would improve your work a lot on this map. Mirage is a good example of how to use solid color effectively, Season also does it but it won't be as helpful to you since it's scientific/futuristic.


    tl;dr: as long as you get the correct color tone, it's very easy to add almost transparent levels of dirt and detail for realism. So just use solid colors for now.


    Put it up on the net so people can have a play

  • [CS:GO][WiP]de_unity[Greybox]

    No reason to quit the project, best thing you can do is continue working on it and learn new skills. The more you do, the more you learn. There wasn't anything wrong with the map or the brushwork, so keep at it!


    Photo references are always good if you want to tie your design to something real world, but last I checked surf maps and aim maps aren't tied to anything

  • Need layout for new map.

    Quote from TheGuma

    Sorry bud, but I honestly don't like feel someone is going to pass a layout just for the sake of it. Old layouts are usually bad and unbalanced, good layouts are usually kept so people can make a new map later. I think instead of just "getting" the layout you should start thinking of making your own one. This gives a lot of experience and in the end run you can always change things. This would also give you an idea of what theme you wan't to look for. You can also do a remake! Some layouts like de_contra were played in leagues but the CS:GO versions are ugly and bad. You could do a remake with graphical design in mind. There's also quite a few CSS maps that have good layouts but don't have proper CS:GO remakes - De_Nightfever, De_Russka, ETC. Lastly, you will always be able to playtest your layout here on Mapcore. So don't hesitate starting to work on one, and let us know how it goes! We'll try to help you out as much as possible. That's pretty much all that can be done here.


    Probably the best advice for a budding new map developer. Probably even use it myself.


    Someone ported over de_contra to csgo, it was a really bad port and the original author was not happy: http://csgo.gamebanana.com/maps/166365

  • [CSGO] Good map rotation times

    That isn't necessarily the case with Mirage. It's a fair bit smaller than Dust and smaller than Cache and the rotation times are very fast. B > Window is 10-11 seconds, B > CT > A is more like 15 seconds, B > Short > Connector is like 9-10 seconds. Mirage doesn't give a great deal of cover in A for retaking or protecting bomb and given its openness, can be quite easy to retake.


    Quote from Nestakyo

    just my 2 cents;
    I think the rotation times are very relative to the rest of the map proportions, I mean how would you define rotation times for de_nuke, for example?
    That said I think on a more generic layout I'd say the the 10-15 seconds are a fairly good starting point.


    You really can't get any better advice than that. The new Season map has a lot of pathways and possible rotations and so does Overpass. Even Inferno has several rotations that allow for good flanking maneuvers. The paths should make sense in the context of the map, rather than just an open alley way or space between buildings. Cobble for instance was simplified because it simply had too many paths to no where, or the same place, and it made defending or attacking virtually impossible because of all the paths. The rotation times were absurd unless you went direct from A > B through doors, but no one did that because it was suicide.


    1. Keep it simple, focus on 1-2 primary paths to each site, and

    2. Connect the lanes.


    What I think the rule of thumb should be:

    A player must be able to rotate from one site to another and have time to defuse without a kit on a 30 second timer. Rotations should be maximum of 15 seconds to allow for smokes, organisation, flashes and combat. Anything exceeding 15 seconds makes a defuse without a kit impossible and improbable with a kit. Anything less than 10 seconds makes it impossible for a defending team to keep the site, whereas 10-15 seconds makes it possible. Ideally, 12-14 seconds gives a very good balance either way. Both teams can attack and defend and the CTs have time to defuse without a kit and have time to setup with nades.


    You also have to think about how players will want to protect the bomb. Mirage A is typically protected or retaken from CT, B from shop or chair, D2 A from ramp or long, Inferno B from new box or A from pit etc.