Karthoum

TBC

Just to clarify with your references - the city of Catania, where the church and "slummy" buildings are in real life, is built out of scorched rock recycled from volcanic destruction in the past. The streets are all ashy and covered in black soot pretty much permanently. This contributes to the run down look but in reality it's anything but, the area is full of life and people. You have picked a particularly good area to get inspired by, the Elephant Fountain square is surrounded by thin beautiful alleys and parks with lots of stairs.

The layout looks more compact in a good way! Not going to argue against the theme change as I can't recall anything similar being made in the past.

The latest updates made the map much better but there is still too much open space in general in some places (underground and A site). Visibility in B is awful with all the grates - there's also an infinite amount of angles to check if you have to fight in a post plant situation there.

Really loving the ground fog, adds an incredible layer to the atmosphere

Yet another update and shrinkflation has hit this map as well! I've reduced the timings from CT spawn to B and resized the building that dominates the site so the narrow corridor that is B main shouldn't be as oppressive now for Ts.

The map is slightly smaller than it seems, at least in my mind so the long sightlines shouldn't be a problem. I've addressed the T spawn issue, adding a new connector to middle/B and pointing the old one to A instead, along with moving the B site towards middle. Will have to wait and see what feedback I get during playtests, too curious how it plays. Radar has been updated, you can see the new path in the 2nd pic. The T middle has now been made a bit tighter, could do that for the rest of the map possibly. The colour temperature has been adjusted to match the skybox a little better, there's not so much harsh mid day light now.

Almost made it to the last page, but I've been reworking this so many times I need to stick to a layout for playtesting for once. Any feedback is appreciated!

Quite liking the B bombsite, I think it should be kept exactly like this until release. That tall ladder seems excessive - it could be combined with the big "drop" slope to have a path to walk up unless it's set up intentionally to play like this. Not liking either of the Mids, just awkward claustrophobic yet long hallways with some harsh angles to clear. Will definitely give it more plays through the week, it does seem like one of the bigger maps but it also works somewhat well.

Workshop Link Wishful thinking got me to visit Mapcore every few months for a contest and well would you look at that! It was bound to happen one day. Currently I'm working on a remake of an old map, but that won't fit the rules of the contest and my previous Exotic mapping contest entry was already uploaded to the workshop - does it count if it was only uploaded for CSGO years ago? Initially I was set to do Annecy as I just visited it this February and it was amazing in person, but that already is taken so I'll go with my 2nd choice - the sunny UK! I'll be focusing a lot on interiors and elevation changes despite what the pictures might suggest - but that will all come down to testing. My favourite maps are Overpass, Overpass, Overpass and a little bit of Inferno and Cobble thrown in, so if you don't like those then this won't please you at all. Good luck to everyone, I'm hoping to post regular updates and a greybox soon.

I've got an old DE_ layout based on Monastery's style (from 2015 or around that time) that I'd like to revive, would it be possible to use the assets from this to help me along the way? Full creator credits and so on included, I'll be (re)modelling my own assets as well.

I was shocked to see them not make it but I do see the judges' point, maybe with Mustang's layout not being that great for sure, but the theme was already explored in Monastery.

The A site looks awesome now, you've got clean design in almost everywhere so far

Hey guys, I'm going to have to throw in the towel and withdraw from the competition. I can't get the map to work ingame properly and it's causing me a lot of grief, I've tried to turn functionally everything into displacements and using wallworm (in a way you'd be using propper) to no avail, it's just too much work. It'll take either 2 months to fix it or 3 months to remodel it all and I've not got enough time to make anything by the deadline. Please accept these screenshots in hammer as something that could have been. https://imgur.com/a/k0C0BHx I wish good luck to everyone else and am looking forward to who comes out the winner and play the maps! Thanks for following the thread

Wow, my favourite right now. Great job on the middle! Although not sure if that graffiti is exactly fitting in a setting like this.

Hey guys, thanks for checking in again. Since the last time I've had major hurdles (not just procrastinating, that's just me by design) with my 17 year old dog passing away, moving to a different place and my car burning to crisp just before Christmas. It's fine though, the map is still coming along and I'll try my best to make it before the deadline. I've cordoned off T-Spawn/A Long of the map in hammer to see how it looks in game, ignore weird props or bad lighting, I've done nothing about it before pressing compile. I also wanted to share this with you before but never got around to it. If you want to see some of the progress in more of a instant update format, here's the link to our Trello. https://trello.com/b/D2MLQfbG/fiorentini It's not updated for anyone except us to keep track of things we need to do and/or fix.

If you remove one of terrorist's mid entrances, Middle becomes identical to Mirage. And to mention (judging by overview) the sites are heavily favouring Ts, as you need 3 CTs to sort of hold middle at this point (it's the meta in Mirage which is 1 window, connector and B short with other 2 CTs anchoring sites). But I don't know how this plays out, it could be good.

I went back to old radar to overlay the new one/copy the old radar values onto new one.

The fix I've had to do for my map was to redo the radar back the old way (so it's the pre-2016 image overlays) and put the values from that into TAR made one + used photoshop to overlay/fix the TAR one. I've had a frustrating experience with it as that wasn't the only issue and spent a long time trying to solve it so hopefully that helps you.

That's the reason I'm working on my map, after having people playtest it I can confirm this strategy works if you've carefully planned it out beforehand

UE4 is the only thing OP seems to work with according to his youtube channel/website

Yes the combination of trees and skies like that is what I meant and I'll be honest, it doesn't look pretty in that picture. Why not try it first with players and see what they think, maybe it's not that harsh on the eyes in motion?

Orange skies and pink trees? I'm not trying to discourage you from using the same time of day as I am (oh I definitely am trying) but that's got to look weird. Blue sky is overrated but Pink trees aren't common at all.

Map has been released, there already has been a playtest done by Raidboss community and I think it's pretty positive as the map played out exactly how I designed it to. On to more important things, since this is an exotic map competition there are things I wanted to try in this map just for this kind of competition. First thing would technically be the Mid being horizontal between sites instead of like it normally is between spawns, but it's not that important. The main thing I want to show is https://imgur.com/a/w6JcSXb Fire Exit door, it can only open from inside the church, not the other way round. It can only open once per round and only from one direction. If terrorists push up to it for A take, they can not do anything but go underground/mid as an alternate path or to B site instead. Counter terrorists can open it if they're in A and need a surprise for Ts (so could be good for ecos) or need to rotate to B without taking the long path.

After an insane amount of procrastinating (I will look back at this period and reminisce with sorrow because man, this map would be nearly done by now and playtested to near perfection) I've finally gotten round to making the first radar for the map. Does anyone have access to Terri's Auto Radar that supports instances? My map is made out of 20-30 instances so I tried to compile the source code again from the GitHub but it wouldn't work.. I had to do it manually in the end, still pretty good if I keep an alternate version of the map just for the radar. On a side note, I'll be playtesting this map soon with a download in Steam Workshop if anyone cares. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1894082604 (Have to wait until it's approved) Edit: I'm struggling with making the overview match my radar coordinates, it just seems to be shrunken and you can walk out of the spot it shows on the radar