JorisCeoen

It's amazing to see how Valve has lately been using transparant textures as simple gradient overlays into displacements textures etc in CS:GO. Seeing that brick texture at the bottom edge of the brick wall, I'm wondering if it was a new texturing-modeling trick they simply ported to Dust 2's Kabash windows. Great work!

If you will be designing a blockout, it's my belief that it's better to keep everything brushes and func_details with grey dev-textures until you're ready to start developing all art of the map. In this case, you'd be blocking out your greybox and keep finetuning (and even adding little brush-details representing potential props or other stuff for art later on), keep playtesting and adjusting the layout based on feedback. Only then once you've got the core of your map solid and ready, start the actual art with today's techniques such as displacements for nice blending and melting everything together in a nice overall theme. Under no circumstances will the older method allow you to add as much detail as any of the more recent maps, at all. It's just not possible, not even with decals (or you would need a particularly exceptional amount of patience, resources and probably adding a ton of additional mb's to your BSP for no reason).

This is Inferno...?

Cubemaps are never the requirement for anything other than getting specular reflections. Lighting, however, is important to have and unfortunately is required to have on by default (doing a fast VRAD or VVIS will result in black props). You don’t need to have -final on, but you will need -propstaticlighting.

Well I can imagine the additional cost of running that shader compared to the non-essential addition of extra clutter in a map. CS:GO is all about clean reading, this would stand in the way of that purpose. It’s cool alright, but CS:GO’s not the right target.

? looks great. The atmosphere and coloring are spot-on. To me also worthy of the top-3 so far. You’ve made a great map, good luck in the competition!

So far this map and Extraction were on the wtf-levels of visual completion, so I’m pretty sure these maps will make it to the top-3. Can’t speak for gameplay, as I’ve recently moved and don’t have the PC installed yet, but... good luck! ?

Wishing all the contestants good luck... I’ll pass ?

Yea... pretty nice ? congratulations man!

The only real answer to this argument is that almost all of Valve's maps already make it obvious from the moment you enter the map, how it plays and where you'll encounter enemies. There's no need to just run around the map without weapons, because even in warmup it'll become obvious where you can go and where not. This is what Roald was trying to say from the beginning. The moment a map needs these sort of investments from players aka. being forced to watch without weapons or 'suffer' an -unnecessary- learning curve, it's already too late and no one in his right mind would go through that. Valve is most likely very aware of this because: They have more than enough maps. Adding new maps from the community is purely suplemental (they're not even required to do it, and would they stop one day no one would complain hard enough). It's been working this way with the right type of community maps for over two decades. There's no reason to change a succesful formula. Arms Race, Demolition and Dangerzone exist to explore more open-minded maps. I like how it looks, and the least to say is that it does look very different from the traditional defusal maps. However, due to the greybox it currently looks like it feels there's little to no player guidance, hence why one would get the feeling of being lost (not knowing where they are and where enemies can come from). In any event, I'm looking forward to future improvements and hopefully you'll be able to turn this into something quite surprising!

Engine?

Thanks man! Don't worry, I'm working on it on a regular basis, but a few things (including moving to a new place) are currently on the planning, making consistent contributions just a little slower for the moment. I have no fixed ETA, but I'm hoping to finish a first playable test sometime mid-october.

Well... can't you just manually run the game and open up the map? I always have the console open on launch by default, then just type map de_nameofyourmap and that works just fine. You get used to it very quickly.

You have to launch CS:GO in -insecure mode to build cubemaps, otherwise it just won't work (assuming this is for CS:GO, of course, you can set this in the launch properties before launching the game).

For some reason looking at the first picture I thought this was about Source 2 VR ? This looks stunning man! I'm going to take a look at it right now! EDIT: What game is this for?

But also expensive. Quite some Zombie Escape maps are doing this already, and it often takes a big dump on the FPS (though their usage is very sloppy, I don't think they optimize the particle emitters very well). Nice idea!

Wingman?

Pretty great effect! I like it ? If you're willing to go space-theme, most of the Nuke textures can easily be recycled for crazy creative rework. Especially most of the shaders they're using give a great space-effect. Keep up the good work!

I've lately been running around in this map, being in awe of the propwork that was made for conveying the atmosphere and natural setting. I just have got to say it: I think this map's visual quality has been criminally undermined. Surely, some minor interior work and certain white brushes are akwardly low-detail compared to the rest, but the cliffs with the detail props and the transparant grass is something I've actually been taking a close look at for the past week. It's rare for me to get so impressed and blown away by just a few models that I actually decompiled the map and some models to make sure I could understand just how the heck it was made. Only a professional modeler/mapper could possibly come up with such smart visual solutions, therefore wishing to applaud the team behind the design of this map. Thanks for bringing out this map, and for being a huge inspiration for my current project ?

I've ran around it yesterday, and again today just as I woke up. The map is just insane. I swear you have to be some sort of architect to design maps this sophisticated and beautiful ? Though, as much as I was blown away by the map as a whole, I just have one overall concern (right now anyways), which would be that running in the map with or without bots feels very overloaded/overdesigned. It's hard to describe properly, but it feels that at every inch of the map so much is going on at the same time in terms of visual information, that it feels quite heavy on the brain. For me, at least. I'm sure other people have less of an issue with this. It's one of the reasons I never queue for Nuke, because as much as I love that map and see it as one of the biggest Valve masterpieces, it's just too much visuals and I lose focus. However, compared to 98% of the workshop this map surpasses all boundaries, and equals only the best maps available right now. Congratulations!

Is this a trend or are people gearing up winter-themed maps for a chance in the next 2020 operation ?? Michael just released his snowy Dagner Zone map like a few weeks back as well. It's actually surprisingly similar in visual appearance as well.

I think there's a Wingman map that has a similar concept, you might want to check it out for some inspiration: Bell

Yanzl, can you create those world space textures from the radar? In other words, does the radar form a 1:1 reference for the worldspace textures, or do you need to calculate the size in a different way?

Truth be told, and with all respect to all the judges, but my opinion is that it's too late at this point. Some valuable feedback could have been given for each map specifically, and it could have boosted some mappers' inspiration to continue. But months after the final declaration of the winners seems futile now. Sure, it could be informative to some extent, but I'm certain that a lot of mappers have moved on to other projects or other stuff instead. They might not even notice if a reply is being made in their thread. Good suggestion, but too late ?

I realise this is sort of a 'necro' as the thread has been up for so long without reply, but in the unlikely event someone bumps in this thread looking for this error, it's simple: Your collision mesh has an element or part that is less than 0.5 inches thick. Make sure all part of your collision mesh are convex and aren't thinner than 0.5 inches in any direction. This error often happens when: You have unsmoothed parts of the collision mesh. Select ALL parts of the mesh, and assign them a single smoothing group (for instance, assign all parts with smoothing group 1 and it's fixed). You have any parts of the model that aren't convex. Make sure no parts of the mesh contains holes or isn't sealed. You have a single polygon hidden under any of the parts that you might have missed. These are also not convex and thus won't work. Sometimes this can even be a standalone vertex. Remove isolated vertices if you have any (in 3DS Max there's a function/button just to remove these specific type of vertices, don't know about Blender). Let us know if it was any of those errors. If anybody else comes across this error, make sure to check out this list.