unremarkable player

Some of the detail pics looks absolutely amazing.

Finish at least 1 map! It's your idea you should make it in the way you want to.

@laminutederire Alhambra was amazing I took I think 300 or so photos while I was there @RivFader well yeah, it is Chateau and it can take place at a Chateau, no question. I'm just not a fan of the layout and it never really worked. I remember in most games players were desperate to team switch to CTs.

Toscan was alright, but why remake with a similar name? Why not name it something else... Toscan was a little too similar and a decent CS:GO make, but could be something else. Tuscan is the wrong name for that map anyway.

Importing block work is fine but I do have really good reference pictures from my latest visits to Italy and Spain that I thought could be useful. I think that there needs to be consideration for improving the game play because of the CT nature of the original version. It didn't really play out as a 3-lane map because 2 lanes merged into 1 and the choke points were always in CT favour. Some of the windows should be removed, possibly the rafters or something. I don't mind the upper layout but I think it needs to be refined so that there's at least some reason to use it; better access to B etc.

I was looking at it about a month ago, one of the CS:GO ports, to see what would need to be done. Some of them are 1:1, some have some minor edits, but they're all pretty bad. I just remember that map being a nightmare at times on T because of the choke points and lack of any flanking or rotating paths. I would be interested in co-developing Chateau with you if you're interested in giving it a layout and game play face lift since there's already a few ports to CSS & CSGO. Otherwise I'll end up tackling something on my own with some Chateau influence. One of the ports was done by my friend, I assisted him in porting it. And yes, I am fully aware Chateau is pretty bad in terms of layout. It would be interesting to try and modify layout so it fits the terms of competitiveness. However, I'm really more of a graphical/level designer, so if all I end up doing is probably a graphical remake. When you say co-develop, let me know what you mean by that (I'm fine with collaborating with other developers, I'm just curious as to how you want the process to go). 50% split of responsibility, either map together and design together, or map/design separately.

I was looking at it about a month ago, one of the CS:GO ports, to see what would need to be done. Some of them are 1:1, some have some minor edits, but they're all pretty bad. I just remember that map being a nightmare at times on T because of the choke points and lack of any flanking or rotating paths. I would be interested in co-developing Chateau with you if you're interested in giving it a layout and game play face lift since there's already a few ports to CSS & CSGO. Otherwise I'll end up tackling something on my own with some Chateau influence.

Chateau, horribly CT sided to the point where you could expect an 8-0 in casual and 14-1 in competitive if it was ever played in its current layout.

I've thought about doing a remake, but it would most likely end up being called something else to add more balance to gameplay. The map was horrendously one-sided, and at times, almost impossible for the Ts to win any ground. It's a far cry from the maps these days where both teams have at least 50% of map control to start off with. There are several ports to CS:GO of it anyway.

Looks nice, but first impressions are that you need to improve lighting and visibility and reduce the HDR effect, possibly changing the sun position to be vertical or slightly offset (say 1-2pm) rather than a deep angle, because players will end up looking directly into the sun. You also need to look at your shadows, disable them on the prop_static's and using the shadow control with the material block_light. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Lighting https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Intermediate_Lighting https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Advanced_Lighting https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Advanced_HDR One thing I find disappointing about CS:GO, is that good lighting and environmental effects don't translate to good game play.

You want to try to avoid making as many unique textures and props as possible, reuse what you can. Use sprites to make up the difference, or use alpha blends on displacements. So take 600kb and multiply it by the number of textures you have. Then add the entire size of the model directory where your custom props are located. You should be putting them in your own directory, not the existing game directories. This should give you an idea of how large your assets are. Anything close to or over 150mb - shrink it down!

What about the Costa Concordia? It could be sailing too close to an island... or it could be sinking...

If you're using photoshop, just make sure that you save as compressed without alpha channel, same with gimp.

You really need to save to JPG before you export to vtf, and your jpeg images should be < 100kb in size. You can use bump and normal maps to bring detail to a model, you can also use decals, which are probably more appropriate. FMPONE talked about using less noisy textures earlier this year and used Mirage as an example. I think that's valid here where you could get away with using basic, low detail textures with decals over the top. That should save some space. But if your textures are taking up 400MB of your 600MB+ file, you're still way over budget. You need to look at the size of the props, how much detail, how many different textures you're using etc. as well as your brushes, because it all takes up space. Like you said, your non-pakratted file is under 30mb, but pakratted, it's over 600mb. It isn't practical to do any testing until you sort those out.

But alas, the hostages were once and for all rescued by the crew aboard the SSS Buzzard But were they? The story continues...

I'd love to see this get made, but realistically you're looking at probably 2 years work and thousands of man hours to get it presentable. Grey boxing alone would take up to 2 months, whilst carving and layout changes would probably take another 2-3 months on top of that. Interesting concept, could be visually amazing.

Some of the stuff that level designers are doing these days in Hammer are really quite impressive. But the workflow slows down because of the limitations within the software. I don't think mappers would be against learning new tools, as long as the transition is easy and familiar. Take the source2 tools for example - they're significantly different, but from the few level designers I've talked to about them, they absolutely swear by the new tools. I think people can live with the limitations, if only the UI was improved as time passes. As it stands, the UI is pretty bad and the tools don't perform too well when you're looking at a lot of geometry in textured mode. Flat mode gives good performance but absolutely no distinction between world brushes, details, props, models and control brushes. I found recently that optimising a map with a lot of detail could be quite difficult and very slow going, whenever you had to display a lot of detail. Hammer crashed on me so many times I lost count and I lost hours of work with occasionally corrupted files. Joris Ceone is doing some good work in your contest with the WW tools. It's going to give other level designers, who are already familiar with 3DS, impetus to try it out. Since I'm long past being a student, how does one get 3DS without paying squillions for it?

I think that if you took a slice and made it a single hostage rescue map, it would be pretty nice.

How would this even play? 20 bombsites? An unknown number of hostages? Yikes. It's something that might work in battlefield with 60 players on the map playing control points, but I don't see how it could work in CS:GO with 10, or even 20 players. It might be something fun to make. You might want to clarify that Mont Saint-Michel isn't actually an island; the jut of land was inundated by a super tide that's subsiding. It would take, in CS:GO terms, approximately 15 minutes to run around the island, if the map is made to scale. Optimisation is going to be a nightmare.

Optimisation will make a small amount of difference. I had to kill my download at 200mb, it's just way too big for a map to be. St. Mary is around 190mb and that's as big as a map can get with custom content. And to be honest, it's as big as it should be. You need to host your bsp and your assets separate and find a way to reduce the file size. How much space are your models consuming? What about your materials and textures? Are they 7MB each or 100kb? By the way, I've got a heap of reference pics from my visit to Venice last year: http://www.justinmitchell.com.au/city-of-canals/ http://www.justinmitchell.com.au/from-the-floating-city-to-cote-dazur-with-love/

I had a good conversation with Skybex during the week about starting a new map, the designing process, reference pictures, visualisation and grey boxing. FMPONE and Volcano wrote about Crown and what processes they went through designing and developing the map. When you look at the pool of competitive maps, with the exception of Cache and Overpass, their origins track back to the original CS, some as far back as the beta releases. I do wonder what the experienced mappers would say the difference is, between creating competitive maps, and creating fun to play maps. I think of maps like Ali, Chinatown, Zoo and St. Mary for visual enjoyment and good fun gameplay; maps like Mirage, Dust 2, Cache and Nuke for their technical, co-ordinated game play and for allowing different play styles, and maps like Overpass, Vertigo and Train for being extremely difficult and most unenjoyable. Some conversations I've had with other mappers about their target crowd has been interesting to say the least, such as maps being developed for fun, more than for competitive environments, even if there was some potential for that to happen. I wonder if it's a desire for all mappers to create the next, best competitive map, or if it's just to create something for fun and the hope that it will make it into the next operation.

By the way, is the map set in Venice?

600 mb?! Wow! What's taking up the most space in your .bsp? How big is the bsp when it isn't pakratted? How big is the vmf? There's quite a few users here on these forums that can help you reduce file size for publishing.

Amazing work, really looking forward to seeing this in the next operation!