GRiNET

I am running hammer through the .exe. I will check with the .bat file!

@will2k Thank you so much for playing through my map. I appreciate your feedback! I strongly agree that I will have to rework the cover area in the middle of the plaza, as of now it feels very rigid and too linear to feel real. As for the tip to add health kits and batteries at the museum door, I think you will like the upcoming version of this map! ;-) As a side note, thank you for writing all those great tutorials on optimization in the source engine. I am reading through them quite often and altough I find it hard to understand they have helped me immensely. Perhaps you can answer some questions some time in the coming future? I have taken some notes when I tried to optimize my Day of Infamy map for the competition and I can't really get my head around certain things. Thank you, GRiNET

Hello lads. I've encountered another problem. Whenever I try to paint alpha on my discplacement brusches on the ground hammer crashes, no error or anything just straight to desktop. The texture I am using is called: de_mirage/ground_de_tileh_blend3_diffuse. Is it something wrong with the texture or is it me?

Occupation Game: Half-Life 2 Context: Part of the HL2-TGA-Project Description & background This map is a part of the HL2-TGA-Project where I am one of the level designers. My level is taking place right after the Cathedral level where the player is going deeper into the city. In my level, the player is going through some alleys to later arrive at the center of the city, the old town. At the center of old town, the town hall is located and unfortunately for us, held and heavily fortififed by the combine. When the player reaches the main street they can see and hear rebels fighting the combine and quickly the player will jump into the fray. Role in the campaign The player will be fighting the combine, retake the square and hold out for a brief time to feel in control. This to set a shift in power in the campaign. First, the player is weak and hunted, but now more people in the city have begun to resist the combine's hold on the city. Therefore they now join the player in the struggle and provid extra firesupport. Since I am in the middle, I am introducing the crossbow to snipe out high value targets such as machine gunners. I am also introducing large scale battles and the turn of the campaign. My design idea on this map is to make the player feel vulnerable at first before they have taken the square. Being under heavy machinegun fire makes you feel weak and vulnerable. But after taking the square the player will feel strong, powerful and smart to have succeeded with this feat of strength. Alpha build Here is the first build of my map. I've been putting in some extra man hours in to polish things up so therefore everything is textured and looking less alpha than it really should. LINK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bys6E59JXPuUeHVOYk9xQnhWS2M/view?usp=sharing Alpha screenshots

Here are two WIP screens of Heidel in its current state. A lot of cover have been added for balancing purposes and fleshing out the level.

@Radu Looking really tight. I really dig the destroyed buildings with several floors. Great job!

Hello everyone! Does anyone know if source batch compiler works with DOI and Insurgency? And also, I still have the purple texture / specularity problem. I cant seem to solve it permanentely. Everytime I run my map I have to do mat_spec 0, build cubemaps and then mat_spec 1. Is there a fix to this?

@Xanthi Thanks for the heads-up! Going through some massive reworking so I'll put another gear in!

In the screenshots above you can clearly see that a lot of the buildings are just plain cubes, some with a window inserted into them. That is because I wanted to block out the map before I settled down with the details. So instead of building houses directly in the map, I created a new file which I call "PrefabFactory". This allowed me to make new buildings in all kinds of designs and materials and align them correctly to the grid. "ALWAYS WORK ON BIG GRID SIZES AND STAY ON THE GRID" I cannot stress this enough for everyone out there, proffesional or amateur. This house building method proved efficient since I could simply copy and paste the new buildings into my original level. I noticed a big problem with my map when I inserted the new buildings. I had been sloppy and I hadn't built everything on the grid. Sadly enough, I took the decision to rebuild the whole map with the new time given to us mapmakers in the competition. Since I am not only creating this map for the sole purpose of winning the competition but also master the source engine and up my level designing skills, I found the remaking of my map a good choice. Do it again and do it right! A lot of feedback from testing was that the water was a cool idea but it wasn't working as expected. Water physics and playermovement are no good combo, atleast not in the source engine. However, I didn't want to remove the bridge from my level considering I early on decided that it was going to be my centerpiece. I instead opted to go another route. I decided to remove the water and instead make it a railway going under the bridge, more like my first drawings and original concept. This rework is however a big risk since it probably will alter all the gameplay in the map. But I guess that's whats make you a designer, to make decisions that affects someone, for better or worse is hard to say.

Hello again everyone! Time for post number 2 with some talk about the skybox, lighting, fog and choic of material. Also, as an added extra I will touch on the criticism recieved from playtesting and how I've approached that feedback. Since my map is inspired by the german town "Heidelberg" I wanted the buildings to represent some kind of german city with buildings looking like the ones from around 1920-1950. I constructed these simple buildings seen below. During testing I found out that when everything was brown bricks it was very boring to look at and it all looked the same. I tried to switch things up by adding some plaster to the sidewalls. But that didn't quite do it either so I had to chose from a pool of materials. I settled down with some orange brick, stone and yellowish plaster to make some buildings pop out more and catch the eye. With that finished for now I went on to the lighting. Before my map was very bright, almost like a clear summersday. I didn't want everything to look so clean and happy so I chose a skybox with a sun that represents the afternoon and I was instanly more comfortable with the map. I also added a thin amount of fog to reduce field of view around parts of the map and to set the mood.

It worked amazingly! Thank you very much!

Hello everyone! I suffer from some problems which I cannot solve no matter how I try. How do I solve this? * Purple textures * Cubemap or reflection in windows

I have to agree with Zastels on this one. This is a competition. Still, if the devs at NWI wanted to extend the deadline by a week or so I would be fine with it. But by extending a competition where we already have had 2 months of worktime to a whole another month.. That's a 50% increase in time, which is just ludicrous. I think it is wrong to say that the competitors who are on track are angry because they've lost the advantage. There is no advantage, there is simply working against a deadline which we do in this business all the time. And now because of this we, the people who have planned, produced, cut features and whatnot to be in time, are told we have much more time. This would've made a significant impact on the initial map design. I think this is a scumbag move and frankly I am quite angry with it.

I don't support this decision at all. I find this very unfair and annoying since we all have planned and worked out our levles with the time given in mind. Now suddenly we have a lot more time and will basically have to do fundamental changes to the core structure of the map. Not good.

Heidel http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=791980094 Liberation game mode

Thank you! I've added an overview image based on your feedback. Thank you! Thank you!

Hello everyone! I am sorry I am late to the party. I've had some busy weeks making this blog very postponed. I was thinking of updating this as I was working on the map, but now I will do it in bulk instead. In this post I am going to talk about my map and the design choices I've made for it at this time. A little bit about myself. I'm a Level Design student at The Game Assembly in Malmö, Sweden. When I saw that the people over at NWI had this competition in cooperation with Mapcore and Gamebanana I was very happy. I really like the source engine, and I found this to be a great opportunity to make a complete map from scratch and work on my personal pipeline as well as getting to know the engine, contribute to an awesome game and compete against you guy's awesome maps! When I first began making my map I was really tempted to just jump right into the engine and produce the most awesome map ever made. But I decided to play it cool and do some planning, paperwork and research first. I've played Insurgency since it was only a mod, I wanted to replicate it's excellent gameplay in a game like DOI. I love what they did with DOI but what I do not love as much is that I find the maps to big, making the player run a bit too much and less focused on fighting. In Insurgency the maps were big, but they felt more combat-oriented which I loved. So my idea was to make a map inspired by the gameplay in Insurgency but make it a tad bigger to get the feel of the large scale battles from WWII. The final result is a medium sized map with both plenty of props and cover, but also some open areas with high visibility. THE LEVEL OVERVIEW RESEARCH First off, I looked up some things about WWII and looked at all kinds of photos. I also watched movies such as: Saving private Harambe and Band of Brothers. This inspired me and when I randomly stumbled on the german village Heidelberg, I knew I wanted to make a map with a bridge as a centerpiece. I gathered a couple of images from the web and sat down and tried to sketch out a rough draft of the level and its key areas. During this stage I wanted to find a look and feel of the map that I would find interesting. I settled down with these two designs. http://i.imgur.com/nITtXn3.jpg http://i.imgur.com/OocJuB9.jpg FIRST BLOCKOUT When I was satisfied with the sketches I began the first blockout pass in the engine. Here I quickly encountered some problems. I had no acutal knowledge of how to build a city and make it feel real. Therefore everything I threw into the level felt stale and unrealistic. The distances and street sizes either felt too broad or to narrow of just plainly wrong. I solved this problem by choosing a scale and size of the streets that I was happy with. This opened up the possibilty to lay down the foundations of the city and then construct buildings on top of that. After the streets were placed, everything went smoothly and I was speeding through the blockout phase. After the initial greybox were put down, I started detailing the buildings. I wanted to see how they turned out and how I could design them to both feel realistic and provide good gameplay possibilites. http://i.imgur.com/O58hZHo.png http://i.imgur.com/JbWBMRG.png http://i.imgur.com/fum5bVu.png http://i.imgur.com/t1dB9N5.png Soon enough I encountered some problems again. The visibility was too great, the line of sight was outrageous across the map and everything felt to big and distant. This led me to make the decision to start redesigning the buildings and shorten the width of the streets. This solved most of the problems and it felt very good. Yes, I know one pictures is a screenshot of a screenshot.. http://i.imgur.com/aHY5Kp1.png http://i.imgur.com/ETyYAAv.png http://i.imgur.com/W2MM1gj.png But even though I had cut down the distances of the map it still felt too big and the streets were taking up most of the space. The bridge was enormous too, making it feel very out of place. Most of it had to be reworked and redesigned once again. This took a lot of time. It is very important for me to have an idea in mind when designing the level. In my level I wanted to have tight corridors with limited visibility, open areas with great line of sight and flanking opportunities. I want the player to feel both enclosed and exposed depending on the areas. Since the bridge is my centerpiece and middlepoint, for the liberation game mode, I wanted it to be no man's land. This to make it very hard to take for both teams and a highly valued point. On the bridge you are exposed and even though there are a lot of cover on the bridge itself, because the bridge is surrounded by highground positions located in the buildings surrounding it. http://i.imgur.com/0WnshYZ.png http://i.imgur.com/3lpkC6N.png http://i.imgur.com/3QOV40U.png GAMEPLAY DESIGN The concept of this level is something I call rubberband gameplay. Rubberband gameplay is a dynamic form of gameplay, in this case it is to push the frontline forward and back. Much like the tides of the sea. Being a former competitive CS player, I wanted the different sites to feel unique, play fun and promote different tactics. The sites should be different but in the same time design to promote map balance. THE BRIDGE http://i.imgur.com/ZeWU7py.png The bridge is an excellent piece to promote this kind of gameplay. For now, this is the only way to cross over the other teams site. By forcing this movement, all players will naturally gravitate towards the bridge point. This promotes intense firefights and strategic thinking and cooperation to take the bridge. To take the bridge both teams will have to take up good positions, smoke, grenade and assault and cover at the same time, otherwise they will just add to the bodypile. The bridge is a valuable target because the team taking the bridge first will have a wave advantage and at the same time push the frontline forward. It takes both of the teams the same time to reach the foot of the bridge from their spawns. This promotes more-combat-less-running gameplay. And here is the design philosophy behind this design. The team taking the bridge first will have a wave advantage - meaning more reinforcements. The attacking team will controll the frontline, therefore deciding where the firefights will take place. The team taking the bridge WILL take heavy casualties no matter what. By this design the team taking the bridge will have certain options. If they play aggressively they can attack the other teams natural site and try to capture it fast - this is risky since they probably are few in number. If they fail the push the defending team will easily retake the bridge - turning the tides. If they opt to play defesively to allow themselves to gather their respawned team mates they will give the defending team time to do the same and set up good defensive positions. ALLIED NATURAL SITE http://i.imgur.com/HLUm7Eq.png http://i.imgur.com/bYzaINp.png http://i.imgur.com/tVe9t73.png The allied natural site is a tight site revolving around a destroyed half-track with a mounted AA-gun. Adding to the setting of the level. The site is full of good defensive MG-nests and holdout spots. It is also connected by tight corridors and alleys, making it tough to defend if you want to cover all the spots. The MG-nests are good to defend the corridors but exposed to certain sniper angles in the surrounding buildings. This is to promote the axis team to coordinate multi-pronged attacks to the sites and take the surrounding buildings to help their assaulting teammates. Because of the superior sniping angles in the surrounding angles the allied team will try to defend the buildings as long as possible even if the bridge falls. AXIS NATURAL SITE http://i.imgur.com/L6OiXuy.png http://i.imgur.com/zeglDXy.png The axis natural site is more open than the allied site but more exposed to flanking manouvers performed by the allied team. The site is a big mounted AA-gun, once again showing the significance of air control in the area for the story of the level. The team holding the AA-guns will hold the skies. The axis site is more open but the same as the allied team the site is more deeply designed. The surrounding buildings are important. They provide high ground for their assualting/defending teammates, they provide cover from artillery fire and they open up paths to the objective. THEME I wanted the level to feel like there had been battle but not full out war. Therefor a lot of things are destroyed but there are still things that are whole. I wanted to show the struggle of winning and losing the bridge making it very exposed and chaotic while the different buildings in the city weel more strategically used.

Thank you for the reply! I got some help yesterday and we made it work but if it shows up again I will try this one!

It says: Running command: "D:\Engines\Steam\steamapps\common\dayofinfamy\insurgency.exe" -dev -game "D:\Engines\Steam\steamapps\common\dayofinfamy\doi" +map "doi_heidel" +sv_lan 1 Any reason why?

I don't get doi hammer to work. Whenever i try to compile a map it tries to run insurgency? And when it runs insurgency it says I miss a manifest game sound file. Please help. Thanks

Thank you for your feedback! I have displacements on every ground that isn't blocks, I don't think displacements would be a great idea on stone blocks. Maybe it isn't clear on the screenshot but every 90 degree wall have random blocks mesh on them, maybe that isn't enough since it still look very straight. I am not too fond of the wooden crates every where maps in general seem to have, but maybe it is a great idea to put in more stuff like that to break up repetition. Thank you for the tips, they will prove valuable!

Hello everyone! I have been working on a demolition map for CSGO called de_ellora. It is inspired of the visuals from de_aztec. I have reworked the map a couple of times and done a first detail pass for the map. I still need the map tested with the new layout. I also need help with breaking up texture repetition on the brick floor texture. Please, if you have any constructive feedback and or other impression of the map don't hesitate to contact me. Thank you! Below are the current Screens and Workshop link. WORKSHOP LINK: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=742262472

I like the idea with the ramp very much, I'll do some testing and see how it goes! I will look into a rework of the tight corridor. Thank you for the kind words! Try jumping again! ;-)

Hello and thank you very much for testing! I appreciate the feedback and that you used the screens to point out the problems. T-Spawn runtime is a deliberate choice even though I know some people despise it. Regarding the A site I understand the feeling that there is too much going on, even though I personally find it too empty when removing, for example, the triboxes. I am trying to make it get a more temple look and the ramp you noted was awkward have been remade. It's smaller and is now a staircase instead of a ramp. Good point that I maybe should push it further away! I will take this in consideration! The smaller crates in the levels are jumpable with crouch jump! Regarding the B site and the corner smoke issue, do you have any suggestion on how I can improve it? I think the CT can jump on the ledge and shoot through the smoke, much like when T's smoke end of tunnel at Dust_2 and run out.

Hello everyone! This is my first ever CSGO map. I am doing a demolition map with inspiration from Aztec. I need help with gameplay feedback and therefore I am posting the map here to you, if you would like to test it out you can download it from the workshop. This is an early alpha of the map so the only things here are basic geometry and lighting. I am in need of CONSTRUCTIVE feedback regarding gameplay, balance and flow in the level. Please let me know what you think! Hello again! This is my map at the moment based on feedback and playtesting. The map is coming together with a reworked middle section and A site. The major reworks are A site as a whole, removing useless space, unecessary pathways and cover. Some pillars in Hallway at B are removed to reduce cluttery. B site pillars have been removed and graffiti added to bombsites. (Old Screens): http://imgur.com/gallery/d2Deg New Screens: http://imgur.com/gallery/5tE1p Map: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=742262472