NikiOo

@lamarrite Rule 5 is there as a guardrail to protect the integrity of the competition, to make sure everyone starts on the same level, but you can't catch everyone since you can't know how long they've been working on it, unless they've shown it publicly. Making a map from scratch within the 4 months that are given for the 1st stage requires skill and confidence and not everyone can do it. It's perfectly within the rules to submit a map that you've been cooking in secret for half a year already and give yourself a bit of a crutch.

Very strong Nuke Yard vibes at Yard and very strong Nuke Ramp vibes at Lobby. It feels like the same cover pieces with the same composition and the same overall architecture. Even the routing seems the same. Too much of that Nuke DNA, you might lose originality points for that. I'd suggest that you take more inspiration from architecture and compositions that are unique to your theme, instead of trying to shoehorn your theme onto Nuke. Also, B site feels very cramped — too little space, too many close angles to clear. Maybe take some inspiration from Nuke's B site there — it has just one cube and one cylinder, and still the post-plant fights are super exciting and fun because of all the space and the wrap-around route. A site is really cool and unique. And, this could just be a me-thing, but the ceilings feel too low and claustophobic — you jump and you can almost bump your head into it. Everything except for site A feels tight and cramped, just like Anubis. Mid seems like it's gonna be really boring for the CTs, and a little less boring for the Ts. It's basically Anubis' mid but more boring. I'd shorten those organic-looking benches so that you can walk onto them, rather than having to jump, or get rid of them completely.

Let's be honest guys, Anubis sucks as a competitive map. We gotta do better. Stop making operation maps. There's no more operations.

Theme Update I've been thinking about how I could make the theme more epic and this is what I came up with: a solar-system-themed-solar-thermal-power-plant. It's planets, but silos. Planet-painted-silos, and the receiver tower is the Sun. Targets would be the earth silo and the mars silo (sphere-shaped steam condenser). Then I would pick textures and shapes for the buildings to give them a space station sort of vibe. The terrorists arrive in 1972 Maserati Boomerangs. This might be a bit too surreal. I'm still on the fence about it. Here's a quick mockup —

Cool idea! If you were to make a complicated map with a lot of routes work, it would be with something like this, to assists awareness. A func_door_rotating camel would also fit the theme.

The name is Flare now, but I am going to change it Sol some time in the next few weeks. Be ready for it. Here's a cool reference photo of a real life ultra-modern building taken from the real world — Actually, you go tricked! This is an in game photo. Stunning! I know you wish you could go to this place and brush your naked skin up against the smooth glass panels and taste its metallic trims with your tongue. But you can't. I'm sorry. This is only in the virtual world.

Kudos for taking risks! Very excited to play this. I'm curious if you have some heuristic for measuring the complexity of pathways, or if you're just waiting to see how it plays? You seem to have a lot of loops, twice as many as the single-layer maps in the official map pool (not that that should be a standard, especially since this is a new game).

Art Update Pantone blue with red and yellow accents is the color scheme of Nuke, so I'm moving away from it. Fit check. This is the vibe — — except a bit more vibrant, and with accent colors of rose, teal, and straw. Layout Update I discovered a really cool element of Inferno, which is seen in practically no other map in the pool, and which is — I think — essential to what makes Inferno such a great tactical map. I'm looking for ways to implement it in Lux. It fits the theme and it would complement my other ideas really well. Inferno better watch out! I'm so thrilled. I'll tell you more later.

Here's some more cylinder-centric geometry — A year from now, the pundits in the pro scene will be talking about cylinder-savvy teams and cylinder-dull teams. And new stars will be birth from artificial cylindrical wombs to push the game to new limits.

Wetness is the essence of beauty — Derek Zoolander Hence, here's some water — in a cooling pond and a silo — And here's some water — in a tank — And here's my zen garden — I have almost all the pieces now.

Here's connector — Here's A site —

Lux Flare Lux https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3302009197 I scrapped the previous layout and theme that I was working on and started from scratch, with a more interesting theme and more concrete ideas. My new map is set in a solar thermal power plant, in the desert. Key Ideas The key ideas that I want to implement are: I like big, arena-like bombsites, à la A site on Train, where you have a lot of freedom to choose where and when you take fights. I like bombsites where the majority of the spots are effective against one of the entrances but vulnerable to the other, meaning that if Ts coordinate well and CTs don't communicate effectively, the Ts can obliterate the CTs. I like areas where players with good movement can use the walkable surfaces more effectively to get an advantage over their opponents. I like long sightlines that penetrate the map, rewarding players with intel about how the enemy is moving so they can make pro-active decisions. Layout This is the abstract layout. There are two big sites close to one-another, an upper level (purple), and a connector for fast rotations, which can be accessed by the upper level. Everything else is subject to change. A site is called A because Ts get 2 entrances to it and B site is called B because Ts get 1 entrance to it (unlike Anubis and Ancient which have them backwards). Filled circle means ladder, empty circle mans drop-down (maybe boostable). The upper level acts effectively like a "middle" in your generic 3-lane map. Bombsites I chose the particle receiver tower and the air cooled steam condenser for the bomb targets, because they're most recognizable from afar and I can make them tall enough to be visible from both spawns, which is a neat feature. This is bombsite A. There is a stack of explosives placed next to the receiver tower. There are 4 entrances. Ts come from bottom-left and bottom-right. Connector is top-left. Top-right leads to CT spawn. Everything else is subject to change. This is bombsite B. You're blowing up some pipes connected to the steam condenser. Ts come from the bottom-left. CTs come from the top-left and top-right. Bottom-right is connector. Everything else is subject to change.

I think the best thing you can do to improve the look is to focus on the wall textures. They're too noisy and too saturated and too homogenous. If you look at any real photo of this city, you'll notice: A lot of buildings have soft, desaturated colors. There is often a lot of color in the window details -- the frames, the awnings, the shutters. Newly painted buildings next to buildings with old, weathered paint. Paint aging in different ways. Sometimes paint peels smoothly, sometimes it peels sharply -- I think sharp blending might look better with more saturated colors. Sometimes underneath the paint there is cobblestone wall, sometimes there is white plaster, sometimes there is brick, sometimes there is mud. The interiors look really nice, they look like a real place. The exteriors don't -- except for the left one-third of the last photo. I think also mixing four different kinds of grass and three different kinds of crate in a single scene makes it look very surreal. Each asset is stylized in its own way and when all the assets are stylized in the same way, you don't notice it, but when they're not, it stands out a lot.

Nuke has stacked bombsites. It's also a really good map. So don't let radar readability be a deciding factor on how much verticality you have. I think the staircase doesn't introduce too much complexity. You can still keep the layout readable by making sure that the areas peripheral to the staircase overlap as little as possible — ie, every floor spreading in a different direction — which seems to be what you're doing. You should be able to judge by your own intuition if your map is becoming too complicated. And the CT and T stairways must stand out a lot because it would take a while for players to learn which route goes where. What I would do is I would paint interiors of each staircase in a different color or insert strongly saturated colored lights so that when you look at the entrance you can immediately link it in your head to the other entrances of the same stairway.

Someone should update this meme and just replace the images with examples from former competitions. And put this in an Advice for Beginners topic.

I don't think people care about why a map is being bombed. You can totally get away with bombing a volcano for the lulz.

Cool theme. If you google kibbutz urban plan or international community urban plan or international community master plan, you'll find architectural drawings that might give you ideas. Keep at it!

I guess this is the only way to make sure most competitors have roughly the same amount of time to prepare a map for the competition. It wouldn't be fair to start with something you've already been working on for months, while others start from scratch. Starting with a layout that has already been worked on and refined but never published is not illegal but it is unfair and you want to minimize that, and the time of publishing a map to the workshop is one of the few ways to objectively determine how long a map was worked on. That being said, rule 3 says "Remakes (maps of the same name and mostly identical design of an existing map released for public download) can NOT be entered. An entrant’s own prior ideas or concepts may be improved upon for this contest if their entry is, on the whole, new and uses a new name." So technically you could change the name and re-release the map only after you've made significant changes to the previous design (I don't know if this counts for the layout only or for the theme as well). I suppose there could have been a compromise made to allow old maps as long as the final version of the submitted workshop map is mostly distinct from the initial version that you started with, but again there is no way to prove that — unless you create a new workshop submission.

I agree with Helios that it seems a bit too much. Your map seems too corridory to me — too many narrow, empty paths, too many paths that lead to same place. Think about what other maps have that isn't corridors. Mirage A site is a big open area with interesting cover, different elevations, you stand behind a box and you can peek left side or right side, you stand at the stairs you can peek from the top or from the side, etc. Train A site is a large courtyard with a bunch of trains in it and lots of interesting angles, just standing behind a train provides so many options. Dust 2 A site has a small amount of cover but many different ways to play around it because of the height variance, you can hide close to the walls, you can use a ramp to create a headshot angle for yourself, etc. Overpass A site has multiple paths that lead to it, but they are not just trivial choices for the terrorists, they are places that the counter-terrorists can push forward to and comfortably defend from. Maps in the game have areas that have a lot going on in them, apart from where the connectors are placed to other areas and apart from the angles of the walls. I suggest that you zoom in — pick one of the important areas in your map and design it after one of these cool references. But most importantly, when you're making a house, don't make what you think a house looks like, find a reference of a real house and do that instead, you will learn more and houses have interesting elements which don't notice until you start trying to build one, and cities have other things in them not just buildings and roads and stairs, and when you add those things your map will become too complicated and you'll have to reduce the number of corridors.

It's not just molotov. All the grenades seems like they hit something immediately after you throw them. Maybe some of the environmental effects you're using — I'm not very familiar with the engine. Try disabling them and see if it changes anything. The directional sound from the rain is fine when you're outside in the rain, but when you're inside it sounds really bad — especially when you're in the tunnel at spawn and turn sideways. Maybe try with different headphones to see for yourself. I don't know if you've noticed that in some parts of the water in middle you are slowed down. Maybe it's too deep, maybe that's how you want it, but it annoyed me. I think it's okay to have crouch sections but not so much in places where you're gonna be fighting a lot. Maybe think about raising the ceilings of some of the vents. There's generally a lot of jumping and crouching and snake paths that you have to do to navigate the map and people might find that annoying, but you have to playtest it to find out. The theme is epic. I like how you enter the map by dropping down and I like the big open bombsite with the statue. The middle portion of the map feels a bit claustrophobic to me, but I've only tested it on my own.

The only glaring issue I see is your layout — It doesn't look like Edinburgh. Here's Edinburgh: Notice all the right angles and straight lines. This plan was bestowed to you by the Lord — signed in the bottom center. It is a blasphemy for you to violate it. But fear not, for you are still young and you may be forgiven.

In my experience focusing on the floor plan without having anything built is the fastest way to fail at "making it a believable place you could visit if it was a real life location". That is, unless you are using real floor plans of Ricardo Bofill buildings as reference. I would start by making buildings from reference and fitting them together in a way that feels natural. Maybe have a rough floor plan to know where to place what. Or maybe copying blueprints of real Ricardo Bofill buildings and morphing them in ways that make them fun to play in CS while retaining the essence of an apartment complex. I'm only saying this because your layout seems a bit off-the-cuff to me.

Oops, I meant selection wheel, not color wheel . And no, I'm talking about the new buy menu. I'm making my own shooter game and, because I don't like clicking on buttons, I made a wheel interface (with sub-wheels) for the dev tools, and I think it's a pretty good replacement for menu bars and dropdown menus. In terms of the editor, I hope the new one has a better asset importing pipeline. Importing textures and models was such a chore in Hammer even with the community-made tools.

Does anyone else think that selection wheels (e.g. weapons inventory) are good—and not just for console. To me, it's like the windows button when it was in the corner. Gets burnt into your muscle memory very quickly, and you can do it with eyes closed. You only have to get the general angle right and pass the threshold distance.

I got the Witcher 3 on sale. I had very low expectations of the combat, but it turned out to be good. It's much closer to Dark Souls than it is to other shitty open world games like assassin's creed, spiderman, and what have you. I decided to play without a mini-map cause it felt more immersive and I enjoy learning to pay attention to my surroundings and to recognize places and people. I used my ears to find the blacksmith instead of the mini-map. There was this side quest where you had to help some soldier find his lost daughter. After asking around I found out that she was last seen going into *the woods*. I walk the outskirts of the village looking for what *the woods* might be referring to. I see trees of roughly equal density in all directions. I decide to open my map to get a better idea of where *the woods* might be. And then I see it. A large dense forest north of the village. And the most infuriating thing - a quest marker in some very specific location in the forest. The other characters never mentioned exactly where she was supposed to be. "I will go look for her", said Gerald, and silly me thought I was going to look for her, but no, Geralt knows exactly where to go. They could have put a question mark on the edge of the forest like start looking here and then I would have used my witcher senses TM to find the pack of wolves. Some quests are better at this sort of thing. There was another quest that said "find the abandoned village with the well" and I didn't need a quest marker for that. The game has looked incredible so far, except for the first inn you go to with other witcher. That place looked awful.