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first of all happy christmas everyone!, So after making pithead which got 9th in the wingman competition, i wanted to have a bigger challenge. so i decided to make a 5v5 with @Ynel we started 4 days ago and we have made some good progress already! de_maar is set in norway close to a maar, where you can see auroras etc, our goal is to have a nice warm/cozy looking village. while having great gameplay some wip shots (some models are still placeholders) I hope you will enjoy them!!!

Starting to detail the interiors of the scene

Great stuff dude, it seems like a great closer to your Half Life modding chapter, putting together everything you learned into one final product. Awesome

So I might as well post about my current project here finally, since I've been doing so on the Discord for awhile now. Half-Life: Dark Matter is designed as if there was a fourth and final expansion to the original Half-Life from the perspective of a Black Operator named Kovac. I got the idea when I was replaying Half-Life for the 20th anniversary in 2018, I realised that although the Black Ops had appeared in a couple of mods, they certainly weren't done real justice, so I decided I would be the one to deliver it... Since then it's evolved a fair bit, and I have seven others in a team working with me now, including brand new code! There will lots of new areas and also crossovers with existing areas as well, and the story will not only be in keeping with Half-Life 1, but also Half-Life 2 and even Alyx where appropriate! This is my last ever Goldsource project*, upon completion I will be moving onto a newer and more modern game project, what that will be exactly is not known right now. Most of you guys know I've been working with Half-Life 1 for almost 22 years now, so I've got the experience and knowledge to pull this off, and the others have extensive skills in the field as well! Main page: https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-dark-matter An extensive FAQ which answers most questions: https://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-dark-matter/features/frequently-asked-questions-20 Twitter: https://twitter.com/HLDarkMatter and we also have a Discord server! https://discord.gg/yX4CfrH Right now as we speak, Dark Matter has been nominated for the ModDB Mod Of The Year awards Top 100, in the Upcoming category! So if you guys want to vote for me, that would be awesome ? Just follow this link: https://www.moddb.com/groups/2020-mod-of-the-year-awards/top100#vote41984 and select Dark Matter on the bottom! If we win, there will be a new chapter reveal in advance of the media update next year! Anyway, it wouldn't be the WIP thread without some WIPs, so here's a bunch of screenshots, more on the page above obviously! I'll post more enviroments here as I make them! Enjoy. *I might still work on something smaller for fun, if an idea arrises

As I mentioned above, I thought it would be fun to post some early blockout shots, and then post some final shots and talk about some of the design choices behind them. If people enjoy this, I can post a few more. Bomb A Changes After multiple playtests I identified a few problems with how bombsite A was playing, and how players perceived the spaces they were flowing through. In the old version, players would come down around this bend here, and be presented with option of ducking into this building to take a more protected, but tightly choked route, or they could try and work their way through the street choke and into the bombsite. The street opening here didn't have large cover, so this required a smoke or you would be destroyed by snipers. The less obvious thing that was occurring here was that players felt they were not aware they were transitioning into a bombsite/contested zone. Because you were walking down streets to get here without any changes in spaces, players did not perceive the immediate threat that was waiting around this corner. After some thought, I realized I could create a better choke point , add better cover from snipers, and create a clear delineation of spaces by adding a tunnel with vehicle cover. This also fit well with the aesthetic of Edinburgh. This would however end up impacting the secondary route that players always took into the bombsite. More on that below. As I mentioned above, players would go through the structure's interior, and be spit out at the back of the bomb site. This had its pros and cons. However, the one thing it did allow was for Terrorists to rush this point at a much faster rate than the CT's had time to deal with. In an effort to allow CT's better timing to both bomb sites, some work went in to slowing down the terrorist by just a second or 2. This also allowed me to build a courtyard that would be a bit more memorable than just an interior hallway. This also made the approach into A more interesting, especially when I did an overhaul on the bombsite in later iterations. When I started this level, I had a few core ideas I wanted to execute on. One of these ideas was how I wanted to go about differentiating the bomb sites. I knew I wanted one bomb site to be an interior or more close quarters fight, and the other to be a bit more open and long range. Possibly open enough that it might even be a bit uncomfortable for Counter Strike. Originally Bomb A was down in this recessed patio space. While I thought it may be interesting to fight down into this space, or hunker down to cover this area, it only took a few playtests to show me I was wrong. First, this spot became a grenade pit. You could almost guarantee that you were going to get 1 or more nades thrown at you here. Second, the recess made a lot of the fights kinda gross. You were trying to fire over the railings, and the players who were on the street above, you could only see their heads. The space really wasn't playing out the way I wanted. I had the idea to raise it up instead of the recess, and this turned out to be a much better choice. This got rid of the strange angles, cleaned up the fire fights, and made the space a bit easier to navigate through.

Well it's been a little over a year, but I am happy to announce that de_distillery has been completed. I originally made this thread to document the progress of the level as I built it, but I ended up getting lazy and just worked on the level without forum updates. If you are interested, the level can be downloaded from the workshop at this link. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1843682152 Below are some shots of the level fully arted. I'm going to try and do a write up later tonight of where changes were made from the beginning to the finished version, and what I learned in the process. Props and Materials: @Jonny Phive Graffiti/Logo "The Unlikely Duo": Jason McCord (MonsterClip) Ambulance Model and Materials: BMS Brian