Quote from laminutederireEdit, I forgot to mention: I read that a map specific.rad could lead to some issues because it is said that the brightest light will be chosen if it appears in two .rad files
That may be the case (although my understanding was that the .rad files would be read in a predictable order), but if/when you start using something other than light002, that won't be a problem anymore.
Quote from laminutederireI guess I did it wrong, mine appear glowing but it doesn't lit the room.
Maybe because it wasn't the right white texture. And I read the article, but it wasn't specified that only white002 worked with cs go, but I guess it is not the weirdest thing about hammer
However I can stress enough the fact that I am very grateful for your help!
The place to find this out is to open csgo/lights.rad in Notepad (or other text editor) and see which materials are listed. In mine, all that appears are:
xeno/crys_4b 255 160 128 40000
lights/white002 189 233 247 425I haven't tried using crys_4b, but I can only assume that being a relatively strong red with brightness at 40,000 it's not especially useful.
You can define your own lights in this file, or make a map-specific .rad file (better idea, in case lights.rad gets overwritten by update).
Quote from laminutederireI'm trying that but I have trouble though, my reference would be this picture, don't know if it is too ambitious or not to try to achieve that!
It should be doable. You could start testing just by texturing the 'window' with white002*. You can make any material a texturelight (and specify color and brightness) by adding/editing a .rad file for the map, this will make the specified textures emit light similar to the sky (ambient).
See here specifically from the link 3Dnj posted:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Glowing_Textures#.rad_files
* I think white002 is the only one that works by default in CSGO
white002 in action:
Quote from laminutederireI managed to do something like that based on your idea, and it's a lot better than it was better so thanks
Two things stand out in the screenshot. First, the walls are way too thin. Second, light seems to be bleeding across the floor and ceiling past the walls, maybe the walls have been tied to an entity (func_detail?) but shouldn't be, or maybe the walls don't actually touch the floor or ceiling.
Example of window lighting using only light_spot (x2). I used toolsskybox behind the windows to make the windows visible, because with measuregeneric (dark grey) and weak lighting, there is about zero light coming back to the windows. There is no light_environment, the light only comes from light_spot.
VMF attached.
Quote from laminutederireThe last idea you mean like you do in PBR software when you have your windows with an emitter propriety?
The trouble I had with linear or constant attenuation was I had trouble having it not too bright but thanks I quickly tested one of your idea and it looks better thank you
Constant and linear attenuation will look much brighter than quadratic at most distances, because the quadratic light field is strongly concentrated toward the middle. So, when you change from 100% quadratic to something that is more linear, you may be able to reduce the brightness a lot. A different way to see it is that because quadratic falls off so quickly, you have to make it overbright to compensate, which is why it looks bad if there are any objects close to it.
I don't know about PBR, but light_spot produces a cone of light, which can have a very sharp edge (if inner/outer angles are close together) or fade out very gradually. So if you make it not-too-bright and make the outer angle very wide and the inner angle narrow, it should be a reasonable fake for light coming from a relatively small window, and will not affect anything behind it (outside) directly.
The links posted by AkatsukiUK and Squad above should be very helpful.
A few other thoughts to add/reinforce:
Lighting attenuation is important to understand in Source engine (quadratic, linear, constant properties). This is the main article: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Constant-…adratic_Falloff
Remember from algebra/calculus: limit as X approaches infinity, only the highest powered exponent is relevant. Quadratic (X^2) is much more powerful than Linear (X). When you want to get something in between quadratic and linear, the linear coefficient will need to be larger (i.e. 1:1:0 will be barely different from 1:0:0).
Most of the time, linear looks better than quadratic or constant, especially for 'light' entities indoors.
You should be able to get a lot of environmental light inside, depending on how big your windows are. Running VRAD with '-final' option (=== '-extrasky 16', see https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VRAD), or -extrasky at 4+, will help the light coming through windows to be less patchy (smoother). Making the light_environment stronger will also help get more light inside.
Texturing the ground outside, especially with a bright texture, will help probably much more than you think. Light bounces off the ground, so the difference between the ground outside the window being nodraw or bricks or grass will mean a big change to the light bouncing onto the windowframe and the ceiling near the window. Having a pale-colored ceiling (bright, desaturated) may multiply this by having this light bounce more inside.
You could 'cheat' with your windows by putting light_spot entities in them, facing directly into the room (perpendicular to the window). I've never tried this, but if you match the skylight color, or the overall color of the view out the window, use low brightness, and leave a big difference between the inner and outer angles, it seems like you should be able to get a good effect. You could even use two, one pitched up slightly and the other down slightly, colored with the color of the sky and the color of the ground.
I don't think this was the cause of the problem, but in general the way T spawn is set up does not work.
The way T spawn is elevated, once you drop down you can't get back. At a minimum, that's unacceptable because if players are AFK or drop the bomb here, potentially the bomb is out of play for the entire round. I was able to get back up by jumping on the orange box with a slanted top, but just barely; this may be impossible for noobs.
The navigation mesh also will not automatically drop this far. I was able to generate the mesh successfully, but without marking another part of the map walkable, only T spawn has any leaves. Even after making the rest of the map walkable, I doubt if bots will be able to understand. Having part of the map set up like this, where part of the map is too high for the bots to jump to, will always require some manual work to even get the navigation mesh working at all.
I've had the same problem as you had (previous to now) where CSGO crashes, seemingly while loading the new navigation mesh after successfully building it. I have no idea what caused it, but when I re-tested right now it seems to have gone away. So:
Give it 2 or 3 tries trying to do the same thing, to see if you get a different result. It could just be a random bug in CSGO. Delete NAV file from /maps, open CSGO, map 'mapname', sv_cheats 1, nav_generate.
If the spawnpoints don't need to be exactly where they are, try moving them a little and recompiling.
Verify CSGO in Steam; this doesn't seem especially promising, but it shouldn't hurt anything except clearing out custom configs you might have.
You could post the BSP here or elsewhere for other people to try generating with their CSGO. Whether this is successful would certainly be interesting, because it would say something about whether this issue is caused entirely by the BSP, or (partially) by the CSGO client.
I can't think of anything in the BSP that would cause this other than the brushwork itself, so posting the VMF will probably not have much benefit. The map I've been testing that had this similar problem has only spawns, buyzones, hostages, rescue zone, one prop, light_env, info_map_parameters for entities.
If you have the time/bandwidth/disk space, you could install a dedicated server and see if that will generate the NAV file correctly. Servers will generate NAV files automatically the same as listen servers would, when a bots join the game and there is no NAV file.
I was just thinking again about DaveJ's idea about having a main road that takes a 'tour' around the map; I like that you've done that here. Since the design of this map doesn't seem to lend itself to double doors of the type seen in Dust/Dust2/Cbble, that means the road will itself be very open and should probably not be running through the middle of the map as a main route. See if you can find some options for creating cover/chokepoints on the road itself. A depressed underpass or short tunnel going through raised ground might be one option. A bridge going over the road, like a skywalk or pedestrian bridge, which would have strong pylons/stanchions/columns coming very close to the road might be another.
There are a lot of Z/S curves in hallways in the map. The corners on these are mostly directly lined up, so once you come past the first corner you can see past the next few corners immediately. The zig-zag pattern of these hallways should usually be deeper so that you actually have to go past each corner to be able to see much further.
There is a spot that looks like you can only get onto it by boosting (dumpsters on the B side). This spot gives a big time advantage here, by letting players bypass a pretty long distance to run around either side, and also adds a new height/angle that can't be accessed any other way. This seems like too much to attach to a boost, especially since with VALVe making no-blocking (i.e. no-boosting) very common, this spot will be completely inaccessible in a lot of configurations (much like how Vertigo is gimped by inability to boost up the ladder). It's probably best to keep boosts to either a small time advantage (e.g. superman boost at A on Dust2), or a height/angle advantage, but not both.
The timing on the map seems very favorable to Ts, partly because the Ts can get out into somewhat open areas and start picking CTs before they can get to their spots. Ts going straight forward through the connector and looking past the bus shelter to the right seems especially problematic, because they can try to lock down the whole right side of bombsite A about 5 seconds after spawning.
For realism of the roads, it would probably be better to get rid of the 90-degree turns (without intersections) and just have the road made up of T-shaped intersections and segments that are either straight or slanted at a slight angle. Having some of the roads running at 75 or 80 degrees instead of 90 everywhere may make the building facades more interesting; the buildings can either be slanted to match the road, or a series of segments that are perpendicular to the rest of the map forming a series of corners.
Where you want to put a right-angle in the road along the edge of the map, this can just be a T-shaped intersection with one way running straight out of the map and blocked off. I'm not sure if it's common in Japan, but it's not unusual in the U.S. for a city to decide to close a fully-built section of road to be used only by pedestrians, and just put dragons' teeth (concrete pyramid-shaped tank traps) or yellow pipes or large planters on the road to block vehicles.
The inside corners of intersections probably need to be rounded out some (currently the sidewalk runs out to basically a square corner).
It's cool to use some car props, but there are some downsides to using/overusing them. Most cars and trucks don't really provide good cover and may even be less useful than something like a sign/advertisement or planter with a thick bush in it. Putting cars directly on the road visually highlights that the road is too narrow for cars. Good car props are hard to find/make, and the props are large/noticeable/identifiable; re-using cars from other maps makes the map look less original/distinctive.
As far as I can tell, there are two accepted spellings for amphitheatre, but neither of them is the title of this map.
You can change the bombsite letters on the radar by moving the site you want to be B to world, then tying it to a bomb target again. The first bomb target entity shows on radar as A, and the last as B.
It seems like both the spawns could be moved forward into the map, so that there aren't buyzone-boxes dangling off both ends.
Most of the stairways and ramps seem to be taller than necessary. Or, the vertical variation between different areas is more than it needs to be, and that forces these stairways and ramps to be tall. Some of the ramps (not detailed as stairs) are very steep, especially the two by the platform in front of B (radar A), but others also. Large vertical variation can slow down movement, because players have to use longer stairs/ramps to move up and may avoid dropping down in some places because of fall damage.
There aren't many walls where you can see both sides of the wall, but the few you have seem too thin.
For areas like the spiral stairs on the B (radar A) side and the amphitheatre, it may help your brushwork to split the stairs up into separate runs with landings, instead of trying to have the whole length of stairs shaped like a single run. The doorway out from the middle of the spiral stairs is very narrow, this is presumably related to the absence of a landing here.
Some of the hallways, especially on the T side, are very long and narrow. Being in a narrow space is risky, because you can't move to avoid things, and there will not be much room to use the doorway as cover, so narrower hallways should usually also be shorter.
It seems like the distance between the amphitheatre and CT spawn, and between the bombsites and T spawn, could all be shortened.
Walked around a little and my main impression is that it takes a long time to get from place to place, and a lot of that time is taken up by hallways that don't need to be as long.
The timing for the Ts and CTs to get to the sites seems about right. The sites are very far apart though. The most direct routes between the bombsites are about 15-20 seconds, without accounting for any fighting, and running past T spawn to use the outside B routes is about 30 seconds. Compare to dust2, where the time to run between the sites is about 10-15 seconds across CT spawn, and CTs don't need to run through T spawn to be able to use the further site entrances (long A, B tunnel).
It seems like a few seconds could be taken out of the middle of the map, mostly between mid and B, but also between mid and A, by just shortening some of the hallways and bringing the sites closer together.
The two outside B routes could be left separate from the rest of the map all the way to T spawn like they are, but that will give the Ts two large areas to lurk after planting where they don't need to worry much about watching their backs, they can just face towards boiler from upper, or towards site from lower and only watch one angle. A plant on the T-side edge of B in the open seems very difficult to defuse because of this; Ts can watch/listen for defuse from two different angles with really no chance of being attacked even from the side, and if the CTs come around the back, they will make noise because they need to be running the whole way.
Similarly, having two areas at A (the white walls) where Ts can back into a corner and wait for a defuse seems very tough on the CTs as checking both of these kills a lot of time (CTs need to run back toward these corners to check for Ts, since there is plenty of space to hide from view and then pop out).
It's hard to guess the balance/competitiveness of the map. The Ts have 4 ways to go, and it looks like can rush across mid to the B bridge relatively easily for a fifth, which is a lot to cover. On the other hand, the two outside routes to B are very isolated from the rest of the map, meaning Ts will have a big time disadvantage transferring to and from here.
Some of the extra connectors (underground to mid, mid to B, mid to A) are long enough that they start to become an area themselves, which may contribute to an overall feeling of confusion and too many options. These could easily be shortened and open up in different places, so they become a 1-3 second way to shortcut a longer path.
The overall loop connecting lower B and the upper hallway behind/above B is very long. It seems like the CT side of B (or just the wall separating upper from lower here) could be shortened quite a bit, and the point where the upper and lower routes from T spawn separate could be a lot closer to the bombsite. Moving this split could improve the balance of the map by letting the CTs block the Ts at one point here instead of two, if the map does prove to have too many ways for the CTs to defend. A connector or one-way drop from behind T-mid down to the lower B route might make these two routes into B more viable for the CTs to defuse.
On a more pedantic note, there are five entrances to B (three easily accessible by Ts) and two entrances to A (only the front way easily attacked), suggesting that B is actually the main site and should be called A. Also, the low ceilings in some areas that you can hit when jumping are annoying and don't seem to serve any purpose.
I would say the biggest problem or area for improvement is that the map is mostly made of two bombsites that are too-large open areas, and alleys/streets which are too straight (can see almost all the way across the map) and whose walls are too straight (can't be used for cover). Two maps to look at would be Italy and Inferno, where there are long streets and hallways, but there are opportunities for cover in the form of corners and walls that have corners in them, and very long areas are broken up with corners (banana on Inferno, CT far left on Italy).
From the T spawn, the time to get to the bombsites and plant is a little on the long side (but not much).
The fence running between the columns where the underground path comes out seems like a killer. Whether you come up from underground, or around from CT spawn, the distance you have to run to go around this fence is very far, and without much in the way of hard cover. The extra time the fence adds makes the underground route basically useless for the bomber, because this is already the longer route, and any benefit from coming out by surprise here is lost by having to run 5-10 seconds in the open to go plant.
A lot of the open areas and alleyways are unnecessarily large.
Bombsite A could easily be reduced by 25% or more in each direction. The area from CT spawn overlooking A could be smaller, and the wide stairway could be a lot narrower. The alleyway leading into A from mid is very tough, because you have to run what looks like about 512 with no cover to get into the larger open area, which also has no cover nearby against the stairs on either side.
Bombsite B could probably be reduced some as well. Most of the crates in the bombsite don't provide good cover, because they're out in the open (instead of against a wall) and still leave you exposed to a lot of angles.
The two blue buildings in between the bombsites don't need to be nearly as big as they are. The time to run between the bombsites for the CTs is probably too long, and this is made more difficult by it being very long straight areas.
The bridge is unnecessarily long and wide, and the height of the arch looks weird. Also, the bridge itself seems out of place; maybe there should be water running under it, instead of just a puddle back by T spawn. The two displacements (with the puddle, and under the bridge) have deep bowls in the middle, but this doesn't do anything, so they might as well be flat.
Most of the outside low walls are too wide and tall. If you walk up to a wall like this, you should be able to see down at least somewhat. The low walls (bannisters?) at bombsite A are probably about the right height and width (along the top) to be used around the map: you get good visibility if you walk up to them, but you would have to jump on top to see someone directly below. These bannisters are inconsistent though; some of them on the lower side you can walk over, you should wrap these in clip brushes to make sure that they act as a low wall instead of steep stairs.
The CTs would be helped some by an entrance more directly from CT spawn into the orange-hallway building. The hallways inside this building are inconsistent in width. The doors that you have to +use to open seem like an unnecessary impediment, and the one near the bombsite will probably be very problematic for the CTs, because the Ts will just close it, and when they hear it open, they have a free kill on a CT stuck in a very tight hallway with no cover. The stuck-open bedroom door seems like just something to get stuck on. The small space between the bed and the bombsite-side wall makes the left side of the balcony more difficult to use for cover. The kitchen right now is mostly a useless dead end, and just an extra place for a T to hide to kill a CT trying to get out the door, although if the hallway here led more directly back to CT spawn it might not be useless. The light props on the walls are a problem because you can get stuck on them; I don't remember offhand if the way to make them passable by the player is to change to a different entity, or set a flag to disable collisions. The light from these might be improved by using more linear attenuation than quadratic.
The light in the cellar is much too dim. It's hard to say how good/bad this area looks because it's so dark. It seems like it would be easy to get stuck on the wooden columns, if there were a fight here, and especially if you get blinded. Clip brushes could be used to block off the gaps between these columns, and the amount that the wood sticks out from the wall probably does not need to be much (maybe 8, or even less?). If you jump while running, you hit the beams, stop and drop straight down. Overall, this is a very long tunnel; any way it can be shortened from end to end would be good.
The ceilings over stairs can probably be improved some by having the ceiling run level/flat over the top few steps, and having the floor level after the bottom steps where the ceiling finishes coming down to the correct height. You lose some height in the stairway by having the stairs and ceiling just form a straight parallelogram.
Two quick improvements to the stairs throughout the map would be (1) make all the stairways that are similar have a consistent height and depth for its steps, (2) put a slanted clip brush over all the stairs so they run smooth.
It seems like bombsite B will be very difficult to defend, because it has 4 entrances for the Ts (mid by top of stairs, bridge, around the corner by mid, from underground), which is probably too many since B also has 2 entrances. Moving the bridge almost to where the far right side (Ts' right) is, so that crossing the bridge puts you slightly behind the corner and not able to see all the way back to the round staircase would probably help balance a lot, and the route around the far side of the bridge could probably be removed entirely.
Even with 4 routes if the far side around bridge is removed (lower A, mid, bridge, underground), the map may still be very difficult to defend, because the Ts can go under the bridge and use the stairs as a fifth route without being seen by CTs watching A.
The CTs might be helped a lot if they could push out a bit on short A into a spot where they could defend themselves from mid and have a good chance to kill Ts going from mid to B (or coming up from the stairs to go to B). Right now it's just a Z room, which the CTs will have to hold from the back corner, where they can't see the stairs at all. Moving/rotating/rearranging this connector so the CTs hold it from closer to lower A (where they can overlook the stairs and bridge) might be good. Moving where the stairs come up might make that easier, or just getting rid of the lower level of mid on the A side (so anyone jumping off the bridge has to go back to the T side of bridge).
The stairs leading up to a porch and rooftops from T spawn seems like an extra advantage the Ts don't need that will make the map more chaotic. If an AWP stands in the doorway here watching the bedroom, that will make the bedroom basically unusable for the CTs, and will also get at least one shot at any CT running along the fenced columns.
If someone is on the lower level below mid towards the A side, the distance they have to run to get back to a stairway seems too long. Maybe the stairway leading up from the underpass to B should also go back down the other side, or there should be stairs or boxes to climb out of the corner by A.
The height difference between different areas seems like it could be reduced almost everywhere. Most places where a run of stairs is about 64 high could be reduced to 48.
Quote from RivFader
I would have thought of 3D_Mike's holland map, but I've found this
http://counterstrike.wikia.com/wiki/Rotterdam
That's the one I keep finding, but the one I meant was set in the historical inner city and featured a few bridges over a river. It was a bit like Coldwater in the CSGO Workshop in terms of style.
Maybe a long shot, but are you thinking of de_deadlock? http://cs.gamebanana.com/maps/158085
