JorisCeoen

Could you specify what purpose color coding serves? I'm new to this term, hadn't heard of it before in Level Design... interested to hear what's it used for!

Following-up on Roald's comment, it's indeed more beneficial to sketch your layout for gameplay purposes, rather than chain it to a reference. I've learned this the hard way in all my past projects, where I always created a map and layout purely based off something that already existed (because, visually, it's easier to replicate). However this simply doesn't work in your favor 99% of the time. It's like playing the lottery and hoping you get the lucky ticket right away to have a playable layout. Use references for the hero assets and general style of your map, but shape the layout entirely based on fun-factor and balance. Regardless, it looks like a great project, and am really interested in how the project shapes up in the near future ?

These are all default assets from CS:GO, right? This looks absolutely amazing!

This map looks pretty nice! I've run around the greybox provided in the workshop link and it plays very smoothly ? I love the theme! CS:GO is truly missing out on some good Eastern-themed maps, it would be great to see this in the top-10!

I am curious to know about the benefits of autocombining props. I know Dust2 uses literally almost exclusively this feature for its props, but I just don't understand what it does. The only possible use I know for it is if you have lots of grass props and stuff like that, you can easily combine them to make a single prop and save on having each seperate prop_static entry being calculated seperatly... but in Dust2 I've discovered that sometimes 3 or even 2 props are being combined and there would literally be no reason to do it, as far as I can tell.

This thread has officially moved to 3D section, the new link can be found here: You can find a history of the comments and developments of the V2_1 beta below. All new feedback should be posted in the new thread

Just as a heads-up for a big mistake I made when participating in the CEVO 2014 contest, make sure to get the scaling right from the start. Back then I wasn't really used to good matchmaking and units etc, and ended up with a cathedral the size of a planet: https://gamebanana.com/maps/181217 This is looking very promising, I'm eager to see the final results ?

This looks pretty great! I really like the concept of it. The HR nuke textures work wonders for an orbit space station. I've used it extensively on my surf_galaxy map. Hopefully that gives you some inspiration ?

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This looks pretty cool

Hmmm, something like this?

There absolutely needs to be a segment in this tutorial (even if just very briefly) that highlights some of the features of the Wall Worm Model Tools, for those who are brand new to creating models from scratch. Or, add it to the references or additional links!

How do people make these radars that looks identical to radars from official maps? Is there a program I'm not aware of?

A lot of entries have had months/years of work-in-progress (or even use assets that have been made long-before but never used before) and are being entered for the contest. This is within the rules of the contest, so it's normal to see this. Obviously, it's hard to compete against those maps, but that's just the challenge I guess ? most people make a map for a long time, and then wait for a good contest to enter it. Even then, working on a map regardless of when you started it, can always be useful for later. In fact, if I'm not wrong there was once a CEVO contest or some other one of the same level, where one of the losing maps was accepted by Valve regardless, which I guess is the biggest reward you can ever have. In any event, whoever thinks any of the entry maps looking extremely good (or a very detailed greybox that looks insane for just a month's time of making) have been made only from the announcement date of this contest, is kidding himself. So yes, start crunching those mapping skills ?!

This reminds of the ship in Crysis: Warheads where you step out into the icefield to fight some aliens...

This looks pretty damn cool. I've seen a few entries that consider a snow theme, but I wondered to what extent that is considered 'exotic'... I mean snowy landscapes aren't necessarily 'exotic'. I'm wondering this since I've also been thinking about using a snow-theme.

All image links are broken ?

This looks incredibly nice! I didn't know that Mirage was made by someone other than Valve employees (or are you?). Great images, it seems to be a promising map ?

I fell in love with the street gaps displacements, it looks so realistic!

This looks like a pretty darng strong map! Shame you didn't participate in the contest, or did you? One note though: Can't help but feel like this is either Season 2.0 or Agency 2.0

This looks extremely nice, it immediatly made me think of de_summer in terms of art-style. Good luck in the contest!

This looks extremely interesting, one of the few visually impressive entries so far! Just one thing (judging from the props): Don't make props that are readily available in the game. Most are starting to become HR, and the metal rope-roll for instance are props you could maybe skip on to spend the time on other, more important hero assets or something. But yea, it looks extremely detailed and top-5 worthy so far keep it up!

I solved this particular problem by removing the $basetexture parameter from the .vmt with a water shader. For reference, below is the code: Water { %compilewater "1" // $basetexture "surf_greatriver/greatriver_watergreen" $bottommaterial "surf_greatriver/greatriver_watergreen_bottom" $surfaceprop "water" $envmap "env_cubemap" $envmaptint "[0.35 0.35 0.35]" $abovewater "1" $fogenable "1" $fogcolor "{22 55 72}" $fogstart "10" $fogend "40" "$refracttexture" "_rt_WaterRefraction" "$scale" "[0.09 0.09]" "$bumpmap" "surf_greatriver/water_dudv" "$normalmap" "surf_greatriver/water_normal" "$bumpframe" "0" "Proxies" { "AnimatedTexture" { "animatedtexturevar" "$normalmap" "animatedtextureframenumvar" "$bumpframe" "animatedtextureframerate" 16.00 } "TextureScroll" { "texturescrollvar" "$bumptransform" "texturescrollrate" 1.00 "texturescrollangle" 270.00 } } } Don't use a basetexture for the Water shader! Thanks to Grapen to recommend checking out conflicting commands! I'm not sure wheter the basetexture command even works for water, I think I dabbled with it a bit, but since it never crashed my map, I haven't thought about removing it. It's since the latest update that it automatically crashed the map to desktop and got fixed by tagging it out/removing it.

That sounds very interesting, and could make sense. I'll see in the vmt's if there's a shader that causes an error. Is this permanent, however? I mean if it has become this unstable, a lot of shaders would not be able to be used any longer.

I guess I'm busted can't seem to fix it no matter what