Posts by grapen

Great initiative, I loved the small communities during the early days of CS in 1999/2000. I think a rotation of purely custom maps is a requirement for me personally to enjoy anything other than competitive play again

Quote from cglewis

21 minutes ago, cglewis said: I am trying to nail down my final in game polycount for the model....i have heard it needs to be 1-2k Max 5k and then ive heard it can go up to 10K

what should be the polycount goal? I walk around games like destiny and doom and I feel the polycounts on environmental assets are in the 5-10 range

You should first consider the importance of the prop, is it something the player will get up close to? Intercact with? Perhaps even multiple times (bombsite in CSGO, ship module in Warframe etc)? What kind of area will the prop be in, open space with a lot of other stuff going on, or in a smaller room? 10k polys is not that much by todays standard, especially not for important props.

Nice work by the way!

I was recently asked by a few individuals as to what happened to this map, so while I'm not quite ready to push the latest version to the workshop just yet, I figure I might as well share some of the progress. I honestly should've had it ready by now, but due to a series of unfortunate events (Dark Souls 3, DOOM and Overwatch in that particular order) I won't be done until holidays are over. Gameplay, art style and optimization has been ironed out, now I'm doing details on auto pilot.

To summarize the plot of Scepter: The Phoenix has set out to fund their operations by stealing the crown jewels that are up on display in the castle treasury. They succeed in doing so, though choose to leave some men behind for one final explosive message. Counter-Terrorists arrive just before this happens.

I aim to tie this into Scepter 2 and possibly 3 as an overaching story, inspired by the campaign format of Left 4 Dead.

Interior shot:

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This is T-spawn. The floor is a Valve texture, so that has to go. I'll be adding carpets, more paintings, a cabinet to the fireplace, regal ornaments and other misc. details shortly.

Exterior shot 1:

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This is CT spawn. When comparing this to previous screenshots, it's obvious the art direction has changed. We're going full german neo gothic now. I've opened up several parts of the map to make it feel a lot less claustrophobic and more nade friendly. The layout is also simplified in a careful manner, so as to not make it any less dynamic. We see some remnants of Valve props in this shot, namely the bench, lantern, barrel and flower pot. These are temporary as I don't think they mix well with my custom stuff.

Exterior shot 2:

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This is the A site with the two standard T entrances in focus (chapel and balcony). This is, gameplay wise, my favourite part of the map. You can barely see it in this shot, but sniper duels will be had through the chapel window to the left of the balcony, below the flying buttresses. There are also windows, a lion statue and some trim missing here (and the pinnacles need to be fully UV-mapped =P). Ignore the crate from de_train for now as it will be replaced by more natural cover.

That's it for now. Hoping to wrap things up in the coming weeks!

Assets such as models, materials and particles are stored in vpk files. Use GCFScape to extract the files you want. You're going to have to put them in the proper original folder structure in your mod for them to work, since the models were compiled with a specific path defined for materials, such as: "\models\de_nuke\".

I like where you're going with this. I took a few minutes to provide some feedback and conceptualize a bit. Hope you don't mind:

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A few notes:

1. Window frames on the big barn (visible in the top left corner of the screenshot above) needs to be pushed in towards the building. Right now they look a bit like they have been hung on a nail, like a painting.

2. The window frame on the closest barn has the opposite problem and needs to pop just slightly.

2. Your mountains are a bit dark and blend in with your foreground.

3. The buildings look like they haven't been painted in a century, some color and a slight increase in value could add some life to the scene. Faded red with white corners would instantly sell the farm concept to me.

4. While on the topic of life, needs more greenery!

5. The fence poles could do with some random rotations so as to not appear perfectly straight.

6. I think dust clouds could be an interesting detail for added movement.

7. Vertical details for that unique flavour!

Keep it up!

Quote from Motanum

19 minutes ago, Motanum said: Which roller coaster? Haha, the red one is currently 37.1k triangles. It's the biggest one, but also the most visible from Exit, I will still have to do some optimizing modifiers, that should help out in the future.

I don't understand your curve pipes' corners that are out of the ground. Would you circle it out on a screenshot please?

Thanks!

Sorry, was on mobile, I was referring to the corner of these pipes:

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10 hour compile time, ouch! May I ask what the vert count is on the rollercoaster?

I would curve the corners of the pipes jutting out of the ground.

I'll share my sticker if only for the odd story related to it. I made this just as community stickers first launched. Since March 2014 it has gotten 449 unique views on the workshop. Despite this, I've ran into three different people recently on public servers that used it as their steam avatar, one of which had replaced the text to match his name. I RARELY EVER play on public servers. I managed to ask one of them where he got it from, he just said "the internet". I've tried reverse googling the image without luck. I was also invited to a dota community on steam that use a modified version of it as their logo. I just don't get it? I uploaded it to my deviantart page as well, though I'm very low profile there and hardly get any views.

Anyhow. I guess looking at it now after so long, I probably would have increased my chances if I made the outlines thicker for better readability and also varied the coloring. C'est la vie.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/fi…s/?id=239821811

In-game shots:

[Blocked Image: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/289726966093067097/35E3585220A7A2B9981FF73AF970F7F0CC368260/]

Content creators should take note of Valve increasing the standards for CS:GO level design in more than one way. With new nuke it's evident they are creating textures in 2048*2048 and then downscaling them on brushes to 0.125, doubling the amount of pixels per hammer unit. This is basically making me regret everything right now..

My favourite new props are without a doubt the moving clouds:

models/props/de_nuke/hr_nuke/nuke_skydome_001/nuke_skydome_002.mdl
models/props/de_nuke/hr_nuke/nuke_skydome_001/nuke_skydome_003.mdl

Render a cloudless sky scene in your preferred modeling package and use that as a 2D skybox. Add these props to your 3D skybox. It looks very good.

Worth to note on the topic is that Valve also added a new, better looking sun flare that DOESN'T flicker when aiming at it:

sprites/nuke_sunflare_001

Quote from Psyrius

Yeah it seems it can't be lit up with normal lights. But from what I understand, I can make a prop out of a brush and get the phong effect from normal lights. Will experiment with that tomorrow

That is correct. Brushes will only get phong'd by env light. The train models in de_train use phong however so you could study them.

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I block out the prop inside hammer with one or more brushes, then copy and paste them in a separate VMF file and save that.

Open the VMF with Crafty (http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=45) and explort it as OBJ.

Import the OBJ in blender and keep measurements the same, no need to $scale when exporting to MDL.

Awesome, thanks guys!

So the upgrade notification has been in my face for too long now. Before I go ahead and click it I figured I'd check in to see if anyone has had any compatability issues with our source "essentials" after upgrading? I'm thinking of vtfedit, gfscape, crafty, pakrat etc. I know that win10 uses the same architecture as 7 and 8, so it should be fine, but I figured I'd be better off safe than sorry :-).

Sorry if this is in the wrong section.

Did you disable r_skybox and try out different values for cl_leveloverview?

Alright then, playtest last night was good! Got a lot of positive feedback, though much of it was generic (keywords included: fun, pretty, balanced, unique, easy to learn). Some feedback was a bit contradictory though, so I'm not sure how to respond to that:

• A few felt that CT had mid on lock-down too easily, but an equal amount felt that T took mid too easily
• A few felt that entering B as T was too awkward, but an equal amount felt entering B as T was fine
• A few felt that there were too many corners to check, but an equal amount felt they wanted more cover to hide behind

So yeah, got a few things to think over going forward.

Let's have a look at the recent changes to each lane then.

Mid:

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I felt that the extra connector from "T-dark" into mid was excessive and awkward, both gameplay-wise and architecturally. The connector did however serve a purpose in that it allowed for some risky pushes for CT and an extra means of taking mid for T. The connector also made the radar look a lot more complex than it is. So with that in mind I had to figure out an alternate solution. I ended up splitting T-mid into two, one of which at a slightly higher elevation, that's still comfortable to aim at for CT. The added wall between these two entrances makes taking mid as T a lot more comfortable, as well as stramlines the sightline for which T's and CT's first meet in mid. Please ignore the weird looking doorway-without-a-door by the stairs, that's getting cut.

Potential changes: I'm probably going to cut the middle buttress to the right on the screenshot, as I feel that it might just add one extra unnecessary corner to check when splitting B as T. The natural thing you want to do here is hug the wall where the buttresses are and aim at CT-spawn. Not possible with three buttresses. I'm also considering changing "quad" (lower left corner of screenshot) just slightly, in removing the entrace closest to T-mid and making the other entrance bigger.

All in all, the new mid was a big improvement.

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B-site/CT-spawn:

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I realized that in the previous setup, one smoke would lock down two entrances into B in an afterplant situation. This is not necessarily a problem, but on this specific location it was, considering you could not flash over the wall and brave the smoke like you can at B on Dust 2. Instead I decided make the path outdoors and separate it from the door. This also allows for some interesting flashes and player movement.

Potential changes: I might just merge the double T-entrance to B and make it outdoors for at least a good 5 or so meters in. Checking the site (especially with an AWP) would probably feel more comfortable,while at the same time allowing more flexible nades.

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A-site/Church:

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Same problem as with B. The choke point into A from the church was way too narrow, without the option of nading out. The solution was to widen the choke and moving it closer to A, while making two entrances from the church and making the space between these three openings outdoors. The church has taken a new direction in that I'm making it look a lot older than the rest of the architecture. Flying buttresses inc.

Potential changes: I need to get to work on the church interior. I have to make it more open and add 1-3 obvious covers where you'd expect to find an enemy. I want the player to be able to check the covers without doing 360 ninja moves. Possibly even widening the choke point further so that it can't be entirely smoked off by one guy holding A, with a secondary smoke coming from the person holding mid from balcony/window.

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That's about it for now. Got a couple of things to think through before continuing making textures and props.

Hey there. I'm back once more after taking a step back from hammer for a couple of weeks. I wanted time to reflect on the layout and gameplay, while at the same time avoiding getting burnt.

I've been staring at the radar occasionally to try and identify what it was that didn't feel quite right, and in the end I found three major flaws, one for each lane, that I've now rectified. Unfortunately, since this new version was uploaded last night at 1 AM, I didn't have time to grab screenshots of the changes, so I'll have to upload them when I get back from work later today. I needed to do this due to the reddit community playtest tonight @ 7:30 PM CET for EU and 9:30 PM Eastern for NA.

In short, version 1.1 is a major gameplay update, with some minor aestethic changes. Details coming tonight after the EU playtest.

Quote from Tyker

Doesn't that then also override the file for any maps played afterwards until the game is restarted? I remember that being a problem when I made maps for TF2. Is that still an issue now?

As far as I know, any packed files are only run for that specific map. When you make custom soundscapes you also have to pack your custom soundscape_manifest.txt, thus overiding (temporarily while the specific map is being ran) the local soundscape_manifest.txt for the user.

I would assume the same applies to the voice files.

I haven't tried this myself, but my best guess would be to remove the specific lines from this file and pack it into your bsp, just like you would do with soundscape scripts: ..\steam\steamapps\common\counter-strike global offensive\csgo\scripts\game_sounds_anarchist.txt

Quote from Oliver

it can be frustrating to have a layout just shot down by people who only took one glance at it

*Takes a look for 2 minutes*: "Yeaaah too large and too many paths". While in reality, the map is about the same size as dust 2 with no more paths than mirage. Classic

Been into level design for close to 20 years now, it never ends.