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Many designers don't actually play the game as much as you'd think, it's about the ability to look at what works and figure out why, I could play CS:GO for 60 hours and make a good level, you just look at examples and figure it out, A part of what makes showdown interesting, is you will be discovering what makes the mode great, developing games is hard, it's even harder when they are not complete yet. This is very similar to working in a development team, not on games that have been proven long ago. The point of any contest really is to better yourself, we will always be considering good levels for the market place and the game, even after the contest has finished.

Just a great opportunity here for people, you can remake DoD:S maps, or do your own thing, win stuff, get a portfolio item, your map in the game, etc. Excited to see what you guys cook up

I really agree with Paul's final words. I think it is good advice that it can be applied to a much wider audience, not just games. Mapcore, thanks for putting together good quality articles like these. I'm looking forward to the next one.

I worked with these guys for a little over 5 years, and it was in no small part responsible for where I am today, if anyone is on the fence about this, do it, you won't regret!

Alright - my girlfriend convinced me to get the game and take part in the contest. Gotta love that girl. I'm in boys!

We've come a long way over the years on here from making HL1 mod maps.

@MapCore can we have a sticky Discussion Thread or Subforum like for the Unreal Tournament contest? It would be helpful to talk to others since the tools for DoI seem sparsly documented.

Great job! Read this while listening to the Max Payne theme, can recommend!

Great article @FrieChamp!

Thanks Squad, always appreciate your cheers and support Thanks Vaya; your optimization questions about open maps were an additional motivation to concentrate on writing and finishing this article Thanks, glad to hear Thank you Thanks Shawn I see you updated my grade to optimization God feels good Seriously though, I just believe in sharing my humble knowledge for the greater good of the community. I do know a thing or two about Source but there are many things that I don't; and I still learn new things from virtually everyone around me in the community If anyone has questions related to this article, please feel free to post them here and I'll try my best to reply and clarify. Cheers

Great contest! 2 months seems really short though, but definately gonna consider this!

We released some example maps in the last update in: dayofinfamy/sdk_content

Thanks a lot for this awesome guide guys! Just wanted to add something, if you get this to work, you'll probably get strange lighting results. That's because vrad recently started doing something with lighting origins. When props are combined, the center of the newly combined prop will be used as the lighting origin. This can sometimes be inside brushes etc. You can fix this by adding -StaticPropLightingOld to vrad's params.

Still the best moment in games history:

was a productive year A respectful batch of awesome maps and envs Still impressed what you guys are doing with CSGO, pushing the engine to its limits

I think i will crack open an unfinished DoD:S map that I was working on for this contest. Need to play Day of Infamy more though and see if the map would work with the objectives.

5 year old thread? No worries, i got this. There are currently 2 merch stores: The old one: https://shop.spreadshirt.co.uk/mapcore/ and the new one: https://teespring.com/stores/mapcore 1. The old one should be nuked to avoid confusion. Also: Old logo. 2. The new one got cut down for some reason. Can't buy a mug no more? GUYS! MURGS - WE NEED THEM MURGS!! 3. The store isn't really linked to around here. Gotta fix that. ? Edit: Tagging some cause otherwise nobody will find this comment ever. @FMPONE @Thrik @Yanzl

Amazing work all! Really inspiring stuff here, it's incredible the amount of work that was done in under a year. Congratulations, hope 2019 is even better and let Hurg be with you.

Such a great breakdown of the process that an experienced LD goes through when designing such a level. Excellent work and thanks for sharing!

@Radu Thank you for the support, I'm planning to give tangerine a proper rework in the future.(After learning more of Blender and etc)

You better finish that remake. It's looking pretty promising! Yeah, I like the vibes of Tangerine as well. It's really rough around the corners, but with some more TLC it could turn out as something special. That is, if @Harry Poster wants to keep working on it. A lot of promising maps from the contest, some that didn't make it to the list. I hope their respective creators manage to take them to the next level.

The one of the problems I have found in the industry is a desire from certain people to want to control levels a lot as if that is the true goal of level design, they aren't willing to let elements go to create Sandbox designs. I am finding myself more and more drawn to sandbox design. I'm sure I would still enjoy building a linear experience if I was learning from level designers who are really experienced at making linear levels, its certainly an area I could improve in but I think sandbox design is becoming more and more standard.

Oh, thank you your comment made my day This is extra motivation to keep writing new articles and papers

Today I have read this article, Man Vs. Engine and the other writings of yours referred in this article and I have to tell you it's nothing but fantastic piece(s) of work, both cohesive and inclusive. Whenever I see guys like you giving away so much to a community, no matter if it resides at GameBanana, Mapcore or somewhere else, I get this happy feeling and inspiration to do the same some day. I'd like you to know that next week I will start up an 8 weeks long HL2 campaign project with my level design class consisting of 14 students and a lot of your work will be mandatory reads. Thank you so much for this, helps out immensely!

I have a VPS in which I can host day of infamy server if you guys want? We can play/test together .

Building the map currently and for me the music I listen to is important to getting things right. So I've got this on.

Found a real ww2 battle that would be great for this contest, will have to work hard to get it together though. By the way, are we replacing the UT contest thread for this one soon?

Dammit I'd love to do this but I have a side-gig outside my fulltime employment. Won't participate this time but I love to see so many frequent competitions going on, keep it up mods and best of luck to anyone who enters. Looking forward to see the results, I expect cool shit as always!

just gotta get the coffee out squad.

HO AY ! Any kind of topics somewhere about DoI mapping basics ?

Lovely looking maps! Hope to see more competitions in collab with the developers of the games like this. Cheers!

Some really promising maps in there, looking forward to the final results!

I actually love DM-Eternal's chunky colourful style.

Cool. I feel I learnt a lot about encounters on Crysis, but working on Killzone 3 really solidified my understanding of when you talk about fronts and arranging the cover to create a no man's land, etc. It's cool to read this, as I think people who've worked on a few titles internalize this stuff but it's great to see it all written down and illustrated as a reminder and also for people new to the process! You should probably also link to a YouTube video of the encounter playing out too, btw!

Designing maps for a new game mode is a great challenge, that's how you can improve as a designer

Awesome work to see here guys! I've spent many hours in some of the environments. As always mapcorians hitting it out of the park. Also Fjell best map of all time? Best map of all time.

What a fantastic read!

Love the article. The bit Paul mentioned about learning a lot of different lessons from shipping Homefront was a great nugget of truth.

Great article. Thanks for putting it together!

I would prefer documenting the work on here if possible- one central place where I know the rules and the peoples is always preferred. I understand if there's obligations to spread stuff between here/game banana and the official forums though.

Same thing is happpening... ~~EDIT~~ So it seems like the problem only appears when you double click prop in 3d view and then open the model browser. ~~EDIT2~~ Ok. I don't really know what is causing the problem but its gone now...

I doubt it, if anything there's probably a higher size limit for maps since they are based on warzones, so they will likely be more sprawling.

Is there any limits on what you can do in DOI compared to CSGO? Brush limits/texture sizes etc

Dang, time to warm up the DoI Hammer again. Let's see if i'm able to get something playable done. Good luck and lots of fun for every participant!

Rule 2: Remakes of existing maps are not allowed, however maps inspired by classic DoD maps are encouraged. Basically you can make maps based on or inspired by a DoD map, but no like-for-like copies.

Managed to call in a favour, looks like I'm taking part!

Please someone remake dod_avalanche !

Thanks for writting this article, i believe it's an interesting subject and what you did clearly shows that more detailed models do clearly impact performances. But i'm also a bit disappointed, you could have pushed this a lot further. There are only 2 sets of data with only 2 points for each one, which is really not enough in my opinion. For example, it just can't answer in what way the performances are decreasing with the polycount increasing. And it would have been much more interesting to see the results on a graphic instead of showing a delta, something like this for example : You could have made a sort of "test sample" model, that you could have compiled in 10 versions for example (from 500 to 50 000 tris for example, i'm not even sure you can compile that, but you get the idea!). And you can then make 11 tests and get 11 points : without the model and with 1 version of the model every single time. Then you could have used that model many times, and see if there is some instancing that makes the use of the same model many times cheaper in the same rendering. Everytime you can note the polycount in each renderings and get much more results. You could also have combined them, for example imagine if you can make a conclusion like this (which is just an example, it's totally wrong) : Ok that would be hard to trust, because lots of other stuff could skew results (depending of what shaders you used for example, as you said in your article), but that would be extremely useful for Artists and Level Designers ! It's just an idea, maybe it's not reliable but that would be nice.

Nice article! It would be great if you could profile and investigate how frame renders with a certain assets so you could actually tell that this model is X poly, has a pretty heavy material that has screen space reflection and performance depends on the object size on screen, material drawcalls, if it's grabbing heavy textures etc. Microsoft have PIX tool, I bet there's one for PC too. There was a Crytek profiling tool but I can't find it That data would be suuuper useful.

Awesome!