CloseCombat 2017 - Some dev commentary!

[Philipp]

Hi everyone, first post! Thought I'd share some of the development of tr_closecombat1_2017.

Original for 1.6:

CloseCombat was one of my favourite maps for CS 1.6. I remember playing it as a wee boy and it was always a blast.

I doubled down on mapping in late 2015 and it helped me prepare my design portfolio. My mapping ethos quickly became: Visibility (even in murky maps like Lair). This was pre-Nuke overhaul, when white unfinished paint spots were used to add visibility to encounter-spots...

CloseCombat for CS:GO was quite a while in the making, this is the first version released first going back to January 2016: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=610502694

I later released an Extended version which I gradually overhauled with high-res assets as they became available. The current version took that another large step forward by adding loads more detailing and high-res wherever possible. I like doing maps in this iterative way.

I decided to open up the original remake by adding loads of scenery that also makes players semi-visible through tinted windows. This takes a bit of the randomness of the starts out of it, as the map becomes learnable. Still decided not to include a radar for a little surprise factor.

I don't do models or textures (Big thanks to everyone who made theirs available!), the dark window tint was achieved by using the urban_horizon_even texture with 10000x10000 texture scaling, letting me use it as a gradient behind glass. Blue lights inside the rooms are supposed to make the tint appear blue. The glass texture itself is scaled all the way down to 0.008. Light block textures are used on the windows to not have the blue light seep into the white laboratory section. The layers are: Glass -> Tint -> Light Block -> Bullet Block (Which I still can't get to work properly... This is especially annoying in the mid-section... Help!) -> Block LOS (So BOTS don't shoot against outer glass)

Texture fidelity is important to me, a lot of the other textures are scaled down to 0.0625.

The theme is anti-gravity laboratory. This came from a prop I discovered in the Castle assets that was used to test reflections I believe. It is a blue sphere. I added it to a re-design of my Bloodstrike remake as part of the center artwork, having it float as if not affected by gravity: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=783149992

Then I decided to make a little 'story' out of this by making the CloseCombat map the laboratory in which this anti-gravitational technology is researched. The sphere comes back, but  it is contained behind glass and has damaged its surroundings, indicating that the technology is in its early stages.

Once I released CloseCombat 2017 to the Workshop I got comments which said that the mid should be low gravity. I thought local low-gravity was not possible and dismissed it at first, but did a re-think and discovered that a trigger-gravity can achieve this. I then raised the middle part's ceiling to make a jump at 20% gravity possible. This adds quite a bit more personality IMHO.

The map is very unoptimised as I never got into that and the windows open the entire map quite a bit. FPS are semi-stable but could probably be better. The good thing about the inacessible scenery is that the props don't have to be solid. I also painted on a lot of the shadows with the shadow_simple overlay. (There's still one flickering glass texture I can't get rid of...)

That's the gist of it, would be happy to answer any questions/comments!

Workshop Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=890341091&searchtext=

Detail Shot: