Posts by NihiL

Hey, quick question that always comes up for me when I see layouts as organic as this one: how do you keep things on-grid in Hammer? Is it through usage of func_details or how do you manage to do that?

New layout looks like a step in the right direction. Still seems extremely mazey though, like a connector hell. If I imagine myself in literally any place on your map overview, I feel I could be killed from 3-4+ angles at all times pretty much. I'd try and reduce that further. Looks very unique and interesting though!

Sweet thanks guys. I always messed with the ambient setting of my pointlights, not the light_environment, this makes sense. Cheers!

Thanks, great post. It clears up some things for me. Sun light being orange-y is obviously a given and spice colors are clear as well. But can you control the blueness of the shadows? I've never tried this in Source, can you change the ambient (shadow) colors to be blue?

Quote from D3ads

DAT CHAIR.

IT'S PERFECT!

Quote from FMPONE

My second (incredibly unpolished) tutorial is up on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7iRg6iMbq0

Hey, as promised on Twitter, I watched your tutorial live @FMPONE - but I was late with my questions and thoughts, so I thought I'd maybe write them down here.

- First of all, I liked the idea of decoration walls. I would previously split my world brushes for multiple textures and thus unnecessarily increase my leaf and portal count. Making a second wall for that instead is pretty clever! I guess you just have to be careful if you want to keep your room dimensions (moving the world brushes out a bit so as not make the actual room smaller)?

- With func_brushes you showed us how to disable shadows and mentioned that you'd disable the fake ambient occlusion shadow (and keep the sharp normal shadow) because that makes your level look better. Can you elaborate a bit on that? Do you just dislike the ambient occlusion effect because the shadows look a bit noisy in Source? I've personally never done this and never thought that it looked bad with all shadows enabled. Is it something you just eyeball, when and if to do it for which brushes? Or is there a rule to it?

- When it comes to your color theory and your examples, it seems that we were exclusively talking about texturing as opposed to lighting, right? I mean, on Season or Cache, the colors seemed to come more from the diffuse textures than from colored light sources? Is that correct? What about light color then? Do you keep them white? White-ish? Or do they reflect your ~3 color palette for texture colors as well somehow?

Thanks for taking the time to livestream/record your tutorial!

Thank you very much, @KID A, great to hear that it's helpful to you! I'm planning on recording more but I'm running out of ideas as to what to cover. Any ideas anyone?

If anybody is still following the series, I just released a short 2-part video that aims to explain the bsp->vis process, leafs, portals and how to optimize with hint and skip brushes:

The first video explains the theory (how the source engine 'works' in regards to visibility checks):

And the seconid video shows how to make hint and skip brushes in hammer and how to check what's being rendered (and if you actually optimized well) in CSGO:

Hope this helps out, even though I'm sure most people here are aware of this stuff.

Cheers!

Quote from Vaya

It's literally the only rule. I'm impressed!

I'm guessing it depends on the level on input though? If their name is not on the workshop page does it count?

I guess it's going to boil down to something like that. But he already stated, in his - to quote jackophant - infinite wisdom, that he has received actual triggers from the guy that made Insertion, so that's actual elements of the map I guess? Some clarification would be great on the ruleset here.

Yeah, good thread, this is always a tricky and hard part of the procedure I'd say. Everybody has their own style I suppose, what I do is I sketch out... well... sketches in paint or photoshop first. Then when I go into Hammer, I put down simple brushes that represent the playable areas themselves, the 'air' between the walls, floor and ceiling basically. Just to get an idea. And I already use measurements like 128 units for a single story wall (ie. inside, like in normal apartments), twice or three times that for 2-3 story high buildings, 256 minimum for openings usually etc. This allows me to then go ahead and delete a brush, put in the walls, floor and ceiling as world brushes with dev/graybox textures and get the right measurements and clean brushwork. Then move on to the next 'air' brush, remove it and do the same. And then you can prototype that layout you get, move things around etc. and when you're happy, edit->select everything, apply nodraw texture and start texturing, putting in detail brushes and props.

This workflow basically enforces you to think about two things (proper scale [measurements for textures] and optimization [separation between world and detail brushes]) right from the get go. That's why I like it. But I'm interested to hear about other people's approaches as well.

I'm aware of that. My question is: where am I using textures that you'd never see in my Middle Eastern setting? Aren't all the outside regions Mirage/Dust textures? Because I think they are Pretty much all of them at least. That's why my question was and is: where do you see 'clashing' textures that don't belong? That way I can replace just those. Maybe I just don't have an 'eye' for it yet or something (or maybe I've just been looking at my own map for too long) but I'm not able to really to see any textures that absolutely wouldn't belong.

Cool I'll mix them in right away then, thanks for tip!!

EDIT: Wow, 5 pages! Thanks for interest everybody, it's really really appreciated and motivates me to go back and make improvements to the map every day!

Hm well I target ~150 FPS @ 1080p minimally because people do have 144 Hz monitors nowadays hehe.

It's 9pm CET (Berlin time)!

It's the normal Mapcore playtest, I think it's public. Everybody can join! Check out the link I posted a couple of posts above for more information!

No you're right, I'm still working on the first step, to add hint-skip everywhere it's needed. Then I'll add area portals as well of course!

Cool sounds great, I'll definitely be there! Thanks!

This is the thread with all the information, P1g3oN: https://migrationtest.mapcore.org/topic/17116-ma…ting-40/?page=1

And thanks, wow, that really means a lot to me! I personally see countless other maps before Spice but the fact that you like it very much is motivating!

Yeah I know, it was crazy. Especially around T spawn. I've done everything I could in the limited time I had before the playtest to get the FPS up as much as possible. Hopefully it's enough for the playtest tonight!

Quote from Michael Greenwood

But how much of a map's detailing is done with prop_details, and how much with just using brushes?

And how to I add something like a road texture to the ground? Is it actually adding brushes in such a way that you just do it as a normal adding the texture to the face? What about something like a curving dirt path on grass with displacements?

Detail brushes versus props is hard to say I think. Ultimately, props can just do things (easier) that you couldn't do with detail brushes alone so if you do have props, use them. If not, use detail brushes.

If it's a 'clean' road, you can use detail brushes, arch tool for curve templates and normal textures or decals. For a curving dirt path on displacements you should use alpha blend painting (look up tutorials for that if you don't know what it is, I made one just recently on my channel but I don't want to advertise).

Hope this helps!

Meanwhile I'm sitting down and putting in hint/skip brushes in spice and learning a LOT more about optimization and the visibility engine, leafs and portals. It's already helped a lot so thanks for pointing me in the right direction, everybody. I'm still not sure what causes the automatic vvis process to speed up so dramatically on my end but who knows. At least I now know how to fix it and I've learned very important things for how to avoid getting into that situation again with future maps. Maybe you just need to dive in to the deep end of the pool with an almost finished map that suddenly doesn't run well at all anymore to really make you sit down and learn all about these things.

@Vaya Had any luck writing up that texturing post you promised me?

So, tonight at 9pm CET de_spice will be playtested! I'm looking forward to it. I recently ran into serious and frustrating optimization issues BUT have managed to relieve the largest offenders already and will continue to improve the FPS. It did mean I finally had to sit down and REALLY learn EVERYTHING about optimization, including how to best place hint/skip brushes and all - so I've definitely learned a lot, as previously I would just optimize by choosing between world and detail brushes.

Quote from ScottehBoeh

Pigeon. I am WORKING WITH OSKMOS. He is the CREATOR of cs_insertion. I have all permissions from him and we're designing this map together!

Doesn't this disqualify the map from entering the competition? Working together with someone that already had their map featured? This sounds like another tricky fringe case of rule abusal hehe, sorry to whoever has to 'judge' these cases, must've be pretty shitty...

Apart from that I can't really say anything about the map. I hated the gameplay on Insertion and consider it a failed experiment, it didn't have anything to do with CS and everybody I know and follow disliked having to play on it, so I can't say anything positive about this 'version' of the idea either. Additionally, I have to say, it seems that the author is not capable of taking constructive criticism or even interested in it so I don't know why the thread even exists.

Awesome, thanks. If you've followed my latest posts here, you know that I've run into a lot of optimization issues with de_spice. This new version does improve things considerably for almost all sections of the map (only bombsite A is spotty on my system but still ~100 fps here). Should be enough for playtesting hopefully!

Thanks RZL, you're super quick at this! Looking forward to tonight.