Captain P

I downloaded it and tried it, and it looks quite usefull to me. It detects your game installations (it supports multiple games like HL2, UT2K4, Q4, D3 and some are yet to be added) and gives you a list of submitted maps and mods for the selected game, which you can download from within the Vapour GUI and it installs that stuff into the appropriate directory for you. So, no Hammer 4.0 without Steam, but a nice way to distribute and get levels and mods. I like this.

Aw man, a City17 map that actually looks fresh! Really good fog usage and I like the lighting a lot. The fog reminds me of a war-scene. Nearby artillery, anyone?

Yeah, I think dismapping those stairs is overkill even though it adds just that more natural feeling to them. It's consuming time as popcorn, too, so why not get this map done faster while having a smaller download too? Anyway, really awesome work with this map. Looking forward to it even though I don't play CSS.

@DEAD|DJBourgeoisie: Finally a map where the fog blends well with the sky. Or, sky, anyway, that looks athmospheric. The texture on the sil is indeed too obviously tiling, curman said it all there. I also think the terrain could be a bit more bumpy where it meets the house: the edge looks too clean, too perfect to be real. The rest looks very nice.

Nodraw will be visible when it's applied to a displacement surface. Don't create displacements for those surfaces, only select the surfaces you need to have dismaps and then hit the Create Displacement button.

You're lonely farmers, that like to walk around snowy deserted mountains for weeks all on your own. You also wear a red uniform and ride horse in your free time. Netherlands

I agree on the lack of good, easy to get documentation. There's a lot of information around but it's scattered and sometimes requires a lot of time to get. I also agree that Valve should put some more time fixing annoying bugs like the inverted alpha and the cubemap/shadow problems. I haven't heard anything official about it, not even a 'we're working on it'. Those are things I'd like to see as well. Oh, and fix the model wireframe bug, and the Hammer crashing after HL2 bug, and so on. Auto-updates are fine with me but only if they're good updates. I can live with a few bugs, for a little while, but it's far from ideal and they have to get fixed if Valve is taking modding serious. As for tools... I used a lot of custom tools for HL, and now it's the same. The custom ones improve working with Source a lot for me. vmtCREATE, StudioCompiler, VTF Explorer, PakRat... even though the mapping and modding communities haven't really taken off that much yet, the custom tools are already available. I've never really used Valve-provided tools to create textures and stuff, it was all custom. I don't believe that's what made HL so popular, the easy tools that Valve gave us. Worldcraft was probably the only really usefull tool in that time, the rest came from the community.

Those guard towers make me feel the map is set up too square, but it looks like a nice athmosphere. The colors work well together.

I don't think Source is that hard to work with. Yeah, there's tons of folders and the new way they're organized, plus Steam, feels forced upon you and the tools given with the SDK might not be too easy to work with, but some shortcuts and some good custom community-made tools go a long way. I just think it's not as good as it could've been and it's not the best at first sight, but once you're familiar with it, it does work well. At least it does for me. Hurray for community-made tools bytheway. Custom models and materials are easy to create and to put into your map. Now I may have had luck that I learned to model during the HL days so I'm used to creating models for details, and I believe there's a sort of trap for HL people who rely too much on brushwork and see custom content as not belonging to the mapping realm, but hey. I like the materials system, I even like the external model materials because it lets me share them between models, and change them without ever touching a modelling tool so a look in a model viewer or a playtest is enough to see the change. For me, Source feels good to work with. Maybe not the best, but I kinda like it. I think it has a steep learning-curve or at least a steep getting-used-to-curve and that may put so many off in my opinion. I know I felt lost at first, not knowing what to do with all this new stuff... it took me a year before I finally got mapping with Source, and now that I do, I really like it. And yeah, there's this bad habit going on amongst mod teams and generally people. Maybe that's because the novelty of modding and mapping has worn off in general and people only look at the outside. They see others got hired and made big names while they overlook the reasons these guys did what they did, and what finally got them that far. I used to map on myself without showing off too much to others and then finally post a finished map, while really it should've gone through at least a few playtests. For my current map I take a different approach, building a playable ugly thing first, testing it, tweaking stuff, detailing, testing again, and so on. The people that try to make the next big thing in one release should know that this approach is so much more fun. It's more effective too but it's also a lot more fun. Those playtests got me playing HL2DM again while I'm really not a multiplayer fan. I guess we're all ranting today...

Dodging points? That sounds stingy... why the angry reaction? Sex has a huge impact, and you take that with you in another relation if the first one didn't work out. In the second relation when having sex, you can't fully give yourself to that girl anymore. The third, same story. Sex has much more impact than talking to a girl, getting to know her. Nowadays people don't care and call me old-fashioned, but that doesn't change the situation. I want to keep this as a special thing I'd only give to the one I promise to stay true to untill death. It means paying a price for it, but is that wrong all of a sudden? If someone kept that special for you, wouldn't that feel much more special and precious than if she had done it with 4 others before? I mean, you can get to know a girl without having sex... I think you're right when you say that sex tells a lot about a girl, but I also think you don't need it to get to know someone. As for divorce ratio (I guess I dodged that? ), I don't live in America so I can't say a lot about that, but I do know God doesn't approve divorce. It's also written that 'not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven'. Hence why I said not everyone who says he's a christian really is one. Even God Himself says so, so why would that be a stupid remark? And if you're saying that christians make mistakes... well, that's true. Those that are actually christians are still humans, and not everyone does an equally great job at serving God, but it's by grace that we live and we're saved by God because He loves us. That's asolutely no excuse to sin, in fact using it as an excuse would be throwing away what God has given us and actually rejecting Him again.

Final mapper, as in a mapper that finishes and tweaks other maps, or as in the last guy to be added to the team? Just a question, I'm way too busy to enter any mod right now, but that word just made me wondering.

Wow, 10 days without a WIP? That ends here. I'm still working on mudanchee and while those last shots were dark - too dark - the new ones show the work I've don on the lighting, as well as some new (some unskinned) props. Here goes: Comments are welcome, especially about the lighting. Oh, and for those that want to check out the layout, here's version 14 of the map (the screenshots are from v16, but the layout is the same): mudanchee_v14

Looks nice imho, though those buildings look somewhat blurry. Get rid of that indeed.

Not mutually exclusive, but not bound together either. Hence why I said I think getting to know the character is more important than having sex. There's more than just one sentence in my post... Is it really that stupid? After all, if they don't agree on that, then they probably don't agree on a whole lot more subjects. I don't think it would've been an easy marriage then. Oh, bytheway, being religious doesn't mean you're a christian. Christians are followers of Christ and not everyone who says he is one really is one. Too bad...

I think it's much more important to get to know her, her character, who she is, before marrying. After all, you should love her, not her body... sure, sex is a part of marriage and a very attractive part, but I'd rather stick to one person that I have sex with than having it with multiple persons. After all, it has a huge impact on a person, you don't forget it that easily and I wouldn't want my mind to wander off to other persons when I have sex with my wife. It'd be treachery towards my wife. Besides... what's wrong keeping something valuable apart for the person you really love, and are willing to marry and stay with for the rest of your life? I see multiple examples of people that did not have sex before marriage, and lead really good marriages.