JamesL

Often skills too (not dissing you guys above just making a general comment). Don't take umbrage at the negative comments mate. Even if you make the best map in the world someone somewhere won't like it. The map shows some promise to me. It's clearly a wip as you say, but has potential. If you want some help working with displacements in source give me a shout, I've used them a fair bit on CSS maps and on the multiplayer maps for the Dark Messiah game so have a fair grasp of what can be achieved. Nice to see another Brighton bod on the forums too

Looks pretty functional as an arena in which to frag, but greatly lacks detail for a source map. Also you seem to have a lot of visibility across most of the outside sections which will likely give you performance problems and is potentially damaging to the game play. Lots of the brushwork needs replacing with models.

Rockin. Love the style and setting

Despite the fact that Taylor was only trolling I feel obliged to post random statistics: PlayerMinutes/Month Counter-Strike 8.314 billion Counter-Strike: Source 2.258 billion Counter-Strike Condition Zero 909.144 million Team Fortress 2 87.456 million Day of Defeat: Source 176.914 million Day of Defeat 233.380 million Half-Life DeathMatch 79.097 million Half-Life 2: Deathmatch 71.704 million So yeah. Keep on mapping D3

Grats mate. I really have no idea how you manage to write these and hold down a job at the same time. Awesome

Site is looking good Satan. Clear concise and easily browsable. Please release Ungarn though or pass it on to someone else to get into a playable form. We've been waiting literally years

Many thanks to those who turned up. We had a full server for most of the night. Loads of fun

Server's up for most of this evening 217.146.89.34:27019 [FragNBagBotsPractice] password: bear

Boards of Canada Burial Opeth Sepultura Cardiacs Kemal & Rob Data Calibre/Intallex Deepchord Convextion Basic Channel/Maurizio Always come back to this lot pretty much

qft I'm really looking forwards to having a go a UE3 sometime soon. It will however never stop me mapping in source because the games in the source engine CSS, DoD, TF2, INS! are some of the most fun there are to play. Hell I still map for CS 1.6 in Hammer 3.4 its just too much fun

Yeah the server is in London Minos, so your ping isn't going to be great. It is on a major backbone however, so as long as there aren't too many hops involved you should still be able to play, though at a slight disadvantage. I'll take a look at fy_suicidebomber but this week, and the next month are strictly snowy/winter/xmas maps.

We are running a winter maps special this Thursday night if anyone fancies some festive fragging. Maps from the following are going to be on vote/rotation: as_alpine as_snowconvoy as_tundra aim_snow_tundra cs_alpin cs_winter_assault_fragnbag cs_winternights cs_deepfreeze cs_snowflake cs_tibet de_snowbase de_survivor de_winterdust de_winter_austria fy_winter_fragnbag po_xmas_fragnbag po_winter_miniassault_fragnbag I'll bump the thread and post IP/pass on the night. Maps will be on fast content download so no hanging about waiting for downloads

On the subject of games to movies, I watched the Silent Hill movie last night and I was actually quite impressed. The story was trousers, but the translation of the games atmosphere and ambience was very well realised. The regular parallels between the game and the film (trainspotter moments) were enough to make up for the predictably crap plot.

It's really hurting for an editor imo. I really fancy doing some mapping for it. One of the best online shooters since 1.6 and BF1942.

Great article, cheers Minos.

You can jump up the steps on the front of the ziggurat and escape the map.

One of the games I have been most looking forwards to this year. Soo happy to hear its not a let down.

Everyone in the office is raving about this. Guess its time to buy myself a wii. Oh wait no more stock till next year in the UK. D'oh.

Heh that's kinda neat actually. I was thinking the textures were somewhat familiar

Depends how neat and regular your displacements are. If you keep things tight then sew will nearly always work. Compared to all the in-house tools I have used over the last seven years Hammer is very solid and stable. We have some of the best tools, engine and gameplay programmers in our studio, yet our tools are still unstable and flakey since they are in a state of constant development flux. Hammer is a pleasure to work with in comparison.

That sucks Zaphod. However personally I am still a whore for physical media. Hell I still buy hundreds of £/$ worth of Vinyl records every month, and am a sucker for the collectors editions of games with additional little figures, books maps etc. I support a world in which there is a choice of both

That's such a massively open ended question it's almost impossible to answer on a forum. Depending upon whether it is single or multiplayer, must support online play, or split screen co-operative play, whether AI characters must navigate it or if it is solely for human players all have a massive impact on the process of design and construction. However to generalise (and this is an over simplification) Define high level function. Define high level form. Create a paper layout. Greybox (fast prototype) the layout. while !gameplay good { Playtest, playtest, playtest Iterate the greybox layout } Whitebox the level (define what your greybox shapes actually are, add gameplay related props) while !gameplay good { Playtest, playtest, playtest Iterate the whitebox layout } Lock down layout Add textures, all non gameplay props, sound etc. Something I also do personally, and I have met a mixed reaction as to the usefulness of this, is to create fy_ map (to borrow a counterstrike term) versions of my primary encounter areas. This is a great way to test the feel and gameplay of an element of your overall design, without having to build the entire environment. If you construct and playtest your primary encounter areas in this way and prove they work, then it's simply a matter of connecting them together believably. Perhaps not a methosd everyone would use, but for me it's invaluable since it means I can build a test area in the morning, stick it on a my servers in the afternoon and playtest it with folks all evening.

I work in central London and its a pretty damn cool (though expensive) place. Def check out the Science Museum, also you could take a look at the London Eye, a massive ferris wheel type thing, the Planetarium, Natural History Museum (also huuuuge), The Tower of London (take a camera, loads of awesome photo ref. For shopping try Covent Garden, Soho, and the Camden and Borough markets. Borough market in particular is a really great place to just wander about checking out all the funky food and wine/beer stalls. Also close by is the Tate Modern Gallery. If you've never been there I throughly recommend it (its free). It was an old turbine power station and is a wicked building to explore. Its also right next to the Thames which is well worth a wander along the bank of.

Straight on the Christmas list

Very pretty indeed. Good work.