KungFuSquirrel

My shelf is not so rich, but I see we kinda put games the same way, showing off the covers I have a small space so I only put my favs sideways. Yeah, same here. Every one of those squares is packed full behind the "featured" games in front. It's a beefy collection

Here's my computer room - TV room is a little drab in the new house, and not worth picturing in its current state. May have to invest in one of those 65"+ TVs to match the room size

Looks fantastic, man. You're on a roll! Edit: I should add, you're also doing a great job of preserving the layout + maintaining what looks like should be excellent readability of characters, which super critical. Great choice of textures and lighting!

Yeah, seconding what he said, when I look at this I see a Natural Selection-style layout more than I see a CS layout. If you look at maps like Dust, Train, Aztec, etc., they're much simpler layouts built more around the choke point clashes between teams. Think about where your teams are going to meet - in this layout it's hard to see. Flanking routes are good, but I'd work in fewer of them on a simpler scale and work on the center of the layout - right now the middle of the map is mostly just a route from one spawn to the other rather than a way to get to the bomb points. I'd also look at your CT spawn point - the most direct route to each bomb point involves actually backing up and/or turning around, which is a strange flow. I think paring down some of the outer routes and re-working the center of the map could do you some good.

Hey, excuse the bump - is this map available on Steam Workshop? I'd like to add it to the MapCore collection

Ok, I'll leave Ali off for now. Here it is! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=145309288

Hey guys, With all the fancy CS:GO work going on here lately, I thought it might be good to get a collection going of all the MapCore CS:GO maps on Steam Workshop - I'll start putting one together over the next couple/few days as I have time, but I could use some help tracking down all the releases! Can you guys help me collect the Workshop links? I'd like to keep this list to finished and released maps, so it's a one-stop shop for all the badass maps the community here is cranking out. PS since I haven't posted in a while, congrats all you fine gentlemen on Operation Payback! Hopefully we see some solid MapCore representation in future packs, if they keep doing this!

Better late than never, right? Here's SEVENTY-FIVE .rmfs of ns_eclipse, ns_veil, and the original pre-Eclipse ns_veil for you to take a look at, which I'm pretty sure includes some fully playable layouts that are totally unrecognizeable from the final versions. And includes areas like the one pictured, which for some reason I thought I should cut. Enjoy! Blog post: http://blog.button-m.../ns_opensource/ Download: http://button-masher...tent.php?i=1406 Mirror: http://ns2-fr.com/do..._opensource.zip

Fancy new editor for Quake! http://kristianduske.com/trenchbroom/

Hey, new job time. m/

This is pretty solid first map material; the UDK content and lighting helps a lot (you should've seen what first maps looked like in my day when you had to build them going uphill in the snow both ways) but you've got some good layout elements going here. Good use of elevation, some interesting connectivity in the main arena, and a good sense of space. For your next efforts, I'd start looking at ways to break up the boxiness of the layout and work on connectivity that isn't so reliant on jump pads. Jumps are great in a pinch, and have their place, but pads + teleporters and the like can also be kind of a crutch if you're not careful. There's nothing wrong with right angles or axial layouts, but you can get some really special layout flow by integrating angled or curved routes, especially in terrain where you have a lot of free-form control. Visually you're off to a good start; try to work on adding some more weight to your structures (the roof of the building is way too thin, for example; in the first shot it looks like it's not even there). You should also keep practicing your lighting; the outside looks great because of the UDK lighting engine, but you might get stronger results by experimenting with a few different angles to highlight different parts of the level (an awful lot of the level is in shadow right now). The interior lighting is very flat (probably from having just a handful of large-radius lights); try playing around with some pockets of light and dark, or maybe even open some of it up to the sunlight. Use small radius but higher intensity lights around your light sources, and use dimmer large radius lights to fill the space. You could also get some nice mileage out of adding little accent lights to the shadowed parts of the exterior - the bridge in shots 5 and 6 immediately comes to mind.

Hey, looks pretty neat! ...now get them back to work on Naumachia

Those gifs are fantastic; I love seeing the way each layer comes together. Great work!

Hey guys, to help Psy and Puddy organize this a bit better, we've created a new Steam group (separate from the main MapCore group) for playtesting. Having a separate group will allow for use of Steam's event scheduling/notifications to help organize playtests across time zones, but won't bother anyone in the main MapCore group who may not want to participate in playtests. Right now it'll focus on the CS:GO playtests, but there's no reason we can't expand that to other games if we have people available to manage it. Anyway, without further ado, join up! http://steamcommunity.com/groups/MapCorePT It's still getting off the ground, but hopefully Puddy and Psy will have it rolling soon. Also, if anyone wants to make a custom playtest group logo, that'd be neat. Otherwise we can just use the regular MapCore group logo.

It's under the "Tools" section in your Steam library, same place as Source SDK and all those useless dedicated servers for games you probably don't own. Kind of an annoying place for it. (it's also HUGE and only works on 64-bit systems)

It should be noted, as great as this is (it is absolutely fantastic for that team as well as the Austin development community, which has had its ass kicked the last few years), that this only helps about 30 of Vigil's employees (possibly about 200 total? I don't remember the full tally). Definitely keep an eye out for more ex-Vigil talent to snap up if you can

(Starhawk )

Hey, that looks great! It looks like you're pretty far along already, but be sure to check out the thread for the MapCore CSGO server if you need a hand with testing: Also, be sure to drop the finished version in the Finished Work section when you're done and I can add it to the list of threads getting Twitter promotion.

That's pretty great! How do you go about laying that out/editing it?

http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/soldier/squirrelofkungfu/stats/343771355/ I picked up the Premium PC edition on sale the other day to jump into the MP, since I never got far in the campaign on my 360 copy (it's kind of a letdown after Bad Company's campaigns, or what I played of them at least). Add me if you feel like throwing down sometime!

You have my sword, axe, etc.

I'm raving about this to everyone tonight, so you guys get to hear about it, too! Clairvoyance is a fun little asynchronous turn-based strategy game with robots, lasers, and explosions. $5 for PC/Mac/Linux with mobile versions in the future. Adam Saltsman (Canabalt guy) made a great video demonstrating it, which led me to buy it almost instantly: And here's the result of my first game, a hilarious tie: Play me! http://www.gameofcla.../kungfusquirrel

I'll definitely second the "take a break" sentiment, especially with the holidays coming up. A little space can always be good for ideas to breathe. For me personally, a lot of the frankenmap situations come about when I've been making a lot of revisions to a level over time and there starts to be a big mix of new vs. old - the style and idea is going to evolve over time and leave some of the older sections behind, but if you identify with those sections, it's hard to step back and really objectively look at if they're helping or hurting you. Roundhouse may not look like much but I've been staring at that instance setup off and on for a couple years. One of the most important changes I made before the first playable version was taking a chunk of the roundhouse endcap that had been there for months, and just straight up deleting it. Once I got rid of that, I figured out exactly what I needed to do with that space and was able to get the map sealed up again for the first playtest. It had been there so long that I just assumed it was one of the untouchable sections of the layout, when in actuality it was holding me back. Maybe it's worth taking that sort of evaluation of the level? I'm not going to suggest gutting the whole thing and rebuilding it, but maybe find something that you're not happy with, or even something you've been really latched onto for a while, and just see what it looks like when it's not there. It might spark something, and if not - ctrl+z! There's a lot of really great work in here that'd be a shame to see go to waste, but at the same time I'd hate to see you suffer through finishing up something you're not entirely happy with. Hope you can figure something out to get things rolling again!

Love it. I like to think this (and parts of FMPONE's Veil remake) are what I'd want to do with Eclipse if I built it today. I'm interested to see what you do with the layout; Hera is a weird map in that I remember so many distinct changes to the layout that I remember its visuals and landmarks more than the actual flow, but that should give you some good leeway to make the changes you need for NS2. Can't wait to see more!

Gray Matter's game Trinity was one of my most highly anticipated at the time (keep in mind this is from about 2000): Also, this fantastic looking space sim appears to be dead: