m8nkey

Not a bad start. I think the style of architecture is appropriate for the period and feasible in that environment. I also agree with Sentura, pirates are more likely to live in a dilapidated shanty town comprising of wooden hovels, possibly even renovated boat hulls if your going for a fantasy style. Something else I'd suggest is possibly checking out real life historical/architectural references in conjuction with games.

looks interesting to me, I'll definately keep an eye on its development. The trailer doesn't really depict a robust melee combat system but if there's one there that would be cool.

Just wondering if there is a way to utilise a different $surfaceprop for the alphamap of a texture. For example, I have a plaster wall with alphamap windows where I'd like to use both plaster and glass surface props for the respective areas.

@ killertomato Appears to be a VERY early WIP. I'll wait to see more before chucking in my 2 cents. What's it actually for? CS or a mod? @BJA Damn that looks nice. Do you intend to release it as a playable level? I hope so.

The average Joe thinks downloading games or "sharing" games with friends is completely acceptable. There is no moral dilemmer or consideration for the game developer, only the money saved. Except that food is a necessity, expensive entertainment isn't. I wouldn't look down upon someone who had to steal to survive and it's in no way comparable to video game piracy (Reminds me of a funny Lars Ulrich sandwich/filesharing analogy). That's the sort of logic that has resulted in many problems with electronic copyright and the slow adoption of electronic distribution (for music, video, and games). As mentioned by numerous people throughout this thread already, taking the moral high ground and telling people they are evil for pirating is futile. There are many more productive ways to reduce piracy and increase revenue already discussed in this thread. I buy my games because I can, that doesn't make me better in any way than my friends who don't.

I agree. The interface is different between your splash page and your galleries. An intuative navigation system is simple and remains identical on every page leaving no guess work to the user (treat the user like an idiot). Personally I prefer good old fashioned HTML. It's fast, doesn't require any pluggins and your work doesn't get lost in unnecessary effects. I love flash animation and have been playing around with it since v1.0. HTML still beats it hands down for functionality though. How many websites do you frequent that are flash based? Despite my entirely subjective CC, I think your content is great, love the architectural visualisations.

Cool . The water shader looks convincing. Something else you may find useful is some light reading into oceanography. The typography of the sea bed is broken down into very distinct regions which are very different looking. For example the continental shelf is abundant in coral and fish. The abyssal plain (several kilometers deep) is baron in comparison. The abyssal plain can still be interesting though with underwater canyons and ridges. There's a drastic decline in fish and coral as you progress deeper beyond the continental shelf. Something else you may be interesting in playing with is a night environment. Many things underwater are bioluminescent, even the sand when it's disturbed.

Looks interesting Bluestrike, very aquatic. Is it underwater? If that's what your objective was I'd say it's well done (I'm a qualified scuba diver and dive regularly within my job). I'd be interested in knowing the premise for the game.

Also of note, I had to disable User Account Control in Vista or I'd get a very annoying error message when I went to run GUIStudioMDL. Love your work Wunderboy, your tools make life one thousand times easier.

As I hadn't seen any mention of it I thought I must be the only one. I missed the beta release of DE_Museum in the downtime. A fine beta it is too.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145547/ My favourite Australian movie (almost by default as most australians films are shit)

This is an interesting thread, I'm impressed how civilised it is considering the subject matter. I strongly agree with the ideas and issues raised by Zaphod. Consumers are lazy, very lazy. A large torrent may take a couple of days but it's still very convenient. Last time I went shopping I checked out a major game store franchise and the range they had was an absolute joke, for example they didn't even have a copy of UT3 in store (not interested in buying it yet but noticed it wasn't there). Sure they could order a game in for me but that would take several days and require another trip to the store. On the other hand the ever increasing filesize of games could deter both illegal and legitimate game downloads as the average user has a bandwidth cap. Online distribution is still my prefered means of purchase though.

For around a month now I've had difficulty accessing mapcore from both my home and work. On a weekly basis I can't access the site, sometimes for a few days (just get a page not found message). No other websites are effected so it's not my Net access. I've spoken to some other mapcore members in other countries and they haven't experienced the downtime. Any ideas???

Awesome work Theropod-X, the level reflects the massive amount of research, effort and skill you've put into it. Congratulations on seeing such an ambitious and lengthy project through to fruition. The exhibits are amazing and look truely authentic. Love the architecture throughout the museum too. Can't wait to play the final version!!!

Even if SKDR was directly influenced by that work, it doesn't constitute stealing in my books. SKDR never proclaimed to invent the supported bridge. If I'm trying to create an environment or effect and I know it's been done before I'll definately take a look and be influenced by it. I'm constantly looking at other peoples brushwork, levels, models, textures, effects etc (both commercial and amatuer) similar to what I'm trying to achieve. Sure inovation and originallity are very important but so is the ability to recognise and impliment things which have already been done, especially when building upon stock content. If someone was influenced by my work I'd consider it a compliment, not acuse them of theft.

I'm with Warby on this one Zete. As a legitimate customer, anti piracy measures shit me to tears. An encumbering security system is just going to irritate and alienate your legitimate customers and will have negligable effect on piracy. Another posible issue is that business models, copyright, fair use, and the concept of intellectual property are all decades behind current digital technology. It's just too easy to anonymously steal software. If people could anonymously steal LCD tvs and cars from the convenience of their living room, as they can digital media, there'd be plenty of that going on too. I do agree with Zete that Steam is a great distribution system (though by no means perfect). It's cool being able to log into an online system that retains your entire library without requiring cd keys etc. The verification system is very unobtrusive.

All media has always had piracy and I'm sceptical about the impact it has on actual sales. There's no way every pirated copy is a lost sale, there's no financial loss so people will pirate anything, even if they wouldn't normally buy it. I also believe that just because illegal copies are very accessible, people won't purchase what they can. There's absolutely no quality guarantee on bootlegs and you're typically getting an inferior product. In the case of games you probably can't update a bootleg or play online. The games industry, including PC is massive and I'm sure it's only getting bigger. Eventually it may even eclipse the movie and music industries. To me it seems like a lot of creative roles aren't getting their fair share of that money. It seems like the income of a typical game related artist doesn't acurately reflect the level of technical skill, creativity and training (either formal and self taugt) that is required to perform the job. You guys are being robbed by someone and it's not the pirates. This is just my 2cents and I have nothing to support my argument other than pure speculation. /runs and hides

I'm also working on my first Source map (on and off for 14months now) and I'd have to aggree with most of the advice you've been given. Just about everything but the world brushes isn't worth importing. I'd even suggest creating the world geometry from scratch to fully utilise the level of detail attainable in Source. The most time consuming part for me has been making the custom content (higher resolution textures and props) and learning as I go. In Source you have a heap more stuff to play with and it's worth learning to utilise everything the engine can offer. It can seem overwhelming at first but just focus on learning one thing at a time as you need it. As people have mentioned the SDK provides examples of most stuff though I too prefer to discuss issues on a forum or over chat when I'm stuck. If you're interested in making custom props I'd highly recommend General Vivi's 3ds Max tutorials as an introduction. http://www.iwannamap.com/tutorial.php?type=model In conclusion I'd suggest you continue on your current map, simply learn and impliment features of the engine as you need to. Having a background in hl1 is certainly a big advantage and the learning curve shouldn't be too high if you're prepared to put in some effort. Good luck!

It has to be done to progress to the next level. Crytek have developed a solid engine with foresight that has guaranteed a long lifespan. Neither HL2 or Doom3 ran well on my average system at the time of their release though they have faired well with time and can still be found under the hood of games today. Piracy always has, and always will be an issue though it can be minimised. Any software that requires connection to an online system to operate should be relatively easy to protect. Another issue is the cost of new games, typically $80-$100aus for PC, $100-$110 for PS3 or 360. I'm fortunate enough to have a disposable income and would modestly guess I spend around 1000 a year on games though i still check stuff out before I buy. How much of this money is going to middleman? Lower the cost to something a typical gamer (teenage male??) could reasonably afford and watch the number of legitimate copies sold increase. Titles on Steam are very reasonably priced and it's so convenient I now purchase more stuff through it than I do from traditional game stores.

Very nice SKDR, nice to see some high quality custom content for TF2. Your content blends in effortlessly to the TF2 style too.

Personally, I think first person provides a higher level of immersion and if they manage to pull off their ambition of natural movement and the impression of an entire body, it'll be a big step forward for the fps genre. Sure they could have made it as a third person game. Then it would of just been another prince of persia clone and brought nothing new to the table. Dark Messiah comes to mind as a reasonable attempt to introduce an entire body to an fps though it fell short as a game in a few areas. I'm with FrieChamp, this is one of the rare occasions I'm highly anticipating a game.

Thanks for the feedback. Nexus: You're right about decals but I consider them a finishing touch. I still haven't completed the world geometry or creating all the custom props I need which is what I'm concerned with atm. Sentura: A new bin and a bus are on my list of models to make, along with an ATM, phone booth, post box, building signage, bollards, magazine dispencer.

Thanks for the possitive comments on the road texture . My texturing skill are pretty ordinary. I applied a high res version to a box in 3ds max and bent it to create the curve followed by more ps work to tidy it up. It was simple but I wasted an entire day getting it right. For some reason I was getting seams between the curve and the straight texture even though it was completely seamless. I even blended them together as on giant texture in PS then cut it up and it still had seams. After hours of playing around and remaking the texture from scratch I found out that it was caused by the edge textures on the opposing side of the curve (because the curb is part of the texture). I offset a couple of pixels of the road to appear on the other side of the texture and it removed the seam. Some more wips this shot shows the refractive texture i'm working on for the shopping mall. hopefully it'll look alright and allow me to create a convincing internal area with limited detail. I'm looking for someone with better texturing skills than myself to assist in skinning my models. Please contact me if you're interested or know someone that might be.

apologies for the stupid question. I had a look through the standard materials in the gcf file and although there are examples there, I couldn't find 'em. I ended up finding an excellent reference map with many examples (25 different maps!!!) for refractive maps made by a guy called "nudel" http://nudel.omega2k3.de/refract/refract_upd.rar I still have no idea what a dudv map is and intend to look into that further. They look unusual and I'm interested in finding out how they're produced.

I'm trying to create a glass texture which blurs and distorts anything behind it, similar to the lab windows in Portal, for CS Source. Is this even possible or is it utilising features post Orange Box?