[RELEASED] de_postcard

[Neuton]

Workshop Link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1111983968

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It's been a while since I posted anything here, 5 months and 10 days to be exact.

But since I still intend to submit this map, Postcard, my first map, for this years MapCore Mapping Contest 2017, I might as well put something here.

 

Postcard has been in many ways an ambitious task. Having never mapped before or done anything significant with level design, my development of Postcard has coincided with learning Hammer. Furthermore, Postcard isn't and hasn't been designed procedurally or methodically, but rather by conforming an existing geometry to become a playable and competitive CS:GO map. It all started with this:

Instead of engineering a fictional or semi-realistic setting after finalizing the layout of Postcard, I started with the place: Postcard Row, in San Francisco. My first task, I determined, was to replicate this city block containing Postcard Row to an appropriate scale as best I could, and then move on to renovating the layout to form a map out of the madness. 

I knew that if my map was going to seem to scale I needed to make the entire map relative to dimensions which I felt were comfortable. To do this I loaded de_cache into Hammer and determined the squeaky door measurements: 117x60 hu. Then I loaded Google Street View and closely examined this doorway on the tall apartment building seen on the far right in the picture above.

By declaring the faintly-visible-roughly-2:5 black doorframe as equivalent with the 117x60 hu door dimensions, I was able to extrapolate the dimensions of the beige panels adorning the lower part of the apartment building, which I determined to be 36x18 hu, and the sidewalk tiles as 53x53 hu. These two measurements would become important later on. By manually counting the number of beige panels across each side of the apartment building, I could determine its length and width. Then I located which beige panel the sidewalk tile reaches at the apex of the sloped street, and which beige panel the sidewalk tile aligns with at the northwestern-most corner of the building (off-screen to the left in the picture above). Finally I could accurately replicate the dimensions of the building and the slope of the street:

The next step was calculating the width of the houses of Postcard Row themselves. For this step I counted the number of sidewalk tiles—which I had decided to be 53x53 hu—needed the span the slanted width of each house. Then by using Google Maps to find a ratio of sidewalk tiles to beige panels, which I had determined to be 36x18, I could calculate the approximate horizontal width of each house in hammer units using the slanted width of each house sidewalk. Here's a pastebin of my measurements for my calculations.

A little bit later...

Edited December 1, 2017 by Neuton
updating