dm_backwash (hl2dm)

[aaron_da_killa]

Hey guys, my name is Aaron and I'm new to this website, anyway here is my first source map.

Here is the maps description:

A small, abandon, overgrown dam located in the heart of a northern hemisphere alpine forest.

The Dam was built on a small creek that branched off a large river and was used to serve a small town roughly 35km south west in 1963. However due to the towns growth in the recent years, the dam was not supplying a sufficient supply of water and become obsolete 35 years later.

The Dam has now been left behind and is no longer maintained, and as a result has become over grown and graffitied on.

You can download the map here, hope you like the map, feel free to let me know what you think

[Punky]

Looking good!, I'll try this map when I have the time and if its good I'll recommend it to my HL2Dm clan

There was one thing that I noticed, your 3D skybox (the grassy mountains) doesn't look too good, it isn't realistic, so if you're planning to change something in this map I recommend you to adjust your 3D skybox and make it more realistic.

[Josch]

Looks pretty good!

But i really don`t like all the invisble walls... Please change this. Add fences, rocks, whatever ^^

The performance isn`t good at all. The main reasons are the many models. Could you arrange it that models with a certain distance to the player will be faded out?

When I watched the whole scene I had about 10fps.... (OK, my PC isn`t the most powerfull...)

[Punky]

That'd be caused by no or bad optimizing, more on this can be found here: http://www.student.ru.nl/rvanhoorn/optimization.php

Good luck!

[RA7]

Adding mirror at LanmaniaX. Good work

[aaron_da_killa]

Thanks for all your feedback guys!

Looking good!, I'll try this map when I have the time and if its good I'll recommend it to my HL2Dm clan

There was one thing that I noticed, your 3D skybox (the grassy mountains) doesn't look too good, it isn't realistic, so if you're planning to change something in this map I recommend you to adjust your 3D skybox and make it more realistic.

Your quite right, and there was really no excuse for me not to polish the background mountains. What I did to make them was made a narrow hill and shifted dragged the displacement, resized and rotated each copy and arranged it around the map and then just left them like that.

Looks pretty good!

But i really don`t like all the invisble walls... Please change this. Add fences, rocks, whatever ^^

The performance isn`t good at all. The main reasons are the many models. Could you arrange it that models with a certain distance to the player will be faded out?

When I watched the whole scene I had about 10fps.... (OK, my PC isn`t the most powerfull...)

There are no invisible walls in the map, only really rough push effects and trigger_hurt effects that will kill the player , put I had to somehow fence off the other side of the creek without destroying the view, my only option really was to add an artificial wall that would block the player. And yeah, the performance on this map is pretty bad, but this was my first map and I wasn't really sure of the engines capabilities. The lag is due to the amount of models that are on screen at one time and the light map in the map, as I have lowered the lightmap on all the floors to 10 and the inside 5 surfaces of the 'death hole' to about 5 or 6, this means the shadows are more crisp but its really demanding because lightmaps for some reason use up alot of processing power in Half-life 2.

That'd be caused by no or bad optimizing, more on this can be found here: http://www.student.ru.nl/rvanhoorn/optimization.php

Good luck!

Thanks for the link, there is some really great information on that website, already added the link to my favorites.

Adding mirror at LanmaniaX. Good work

Cool, thanks.

[m8nkey]

Looks good. I'll download it and check it out over the weekend. Good to see another aussie on mapcore

[ReNo]

Hey Aaron, nice to see you at Mapcore, welcome

And yeah, the performance on this map is pretty bad, but this was my first map and I wasn't really sure of the engines capabilities. The lag is due to the amount of models that are on screen at one time and the light map in the map, as I have lowered the lightmap on all the floors to 10 and the inside 5 surfaces of the 'death hole' to about 5 or 6, this means the shadows are more crisp but its really demanding because lightmaps for some reason use up alot of processing power in Half-life 2.

Just a small response to this point. Lightmaps aren't actually all that demanding at all on the engine, at least not in terms of processing power. They will increase your filesize significantly if you increase the resolution (ie. use lower lightmap values), and they'll increase compile time significantly too, but they won't have a particularly noteworthy effect on in-game performance unless you're really going overboard with your texture memory.

Also, I'd suggest sticking to powers of 2 for your lightmap scales - 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc... - as opposed to using numbers like 5 or 6. Means your lightmaps will align better with your brushwork and whatnot, provided you do the same with your brushwork (and you should!).

Anyway, I've yet to take a look at the map in-game but I was really impressed with the screenshots seeing as it's your first Source map. Onwards and upwards, looking forward to seeing what you do next

[aaron_da_killa]

ReNo, thanks for the feedback! I just assumed that because the map seemed to perform better during those, quick, no vis, no rad compiles to test something. Maybe that was because the water wouldn't compile without vis and there was a nice performance gain with no water. And thats an interesting tip to, I'll keep that in mind .

Hey m8nkey, did you play the map yet? And it sure is nice to see another aussie . It means that the Australian game development actually has some potential workers and such, although all the work is in Melbourne and I live in Sydney . Maybe I should start a studio in Sydney, and all we would do is make fps games that for some reason always remind players of ... Halo .

[Meotwister]

Hey man looks pretty nice.. when I get home I'll give it a whirl.

Quick question though, where did you get the weeping willow tree? Or did you make it? or is it stock and I never seen it somehow!

[m8nkey]

And yeah, the performance on this map is pretty bad, but this was my first map and I wasn't really sure of the engines capabilities.

Using +Showbudget I found my system was spending way too much time processing the world rendering. It sat at between 5-10ms with spikes up to 15ms. A typical map sits at around 3-5ms.

Visually the map looks great. Nice work.

[aaron_da_killa]

Quick question though, where did you get the weeping willow tree?

I got the tree model from a multiplayer map that caught my eye on fpsbanana, check out the readme file for the link if you want to see the map, I don't have it on me at the moment.

Thanks for the tip m8nkey, that will defiantly help me in the current map I'm working on.

Anyway, thanks for all your wonderful comments, thanks for downloading the map.