ol_styx (Off Limits map)

[Mazy]

Looks really good and fun map. Quite an achievement for your first HL2 map, and in just a few months. Visually I think its sort of a mixed bag tbh. Most noticeably the parking lot and subway seem to kind of stick out

Those tiles in the subway are just used way too much without any trims to, adding just some few around the ceiling would do wonders I bet. Also it seems just a tad too close to the ceiling, but maybe that’s just me. I know its kind of hard to make a parking lot look interesting, but those textures and colour schemes are really dull and just look way too bland. Also the lighting contrast in both the subway and parking lot is kind of all over the place, instead of having some more defined shadows that sort of outline the room. But by the little Source mapping I've done I really had a hard time getting some proper inside lighting, so I totally understand , it’s just a shame when the outside lighting looks so much cooler.

Also as ferret mentioned it also has a somewhat HL1'ish feel to it in terms of claustrophobia, which I think is totally forgivable given the relative huge size of the outside.

Anyway I hope I'm not coming on as mega negative here, I think it looks really good and just with some minor additions it could look great.

[Wesley Tack]

Thx for the comments Mazy, no you don't sound like a mega negative guy, all your crits are valid. But i'll explain one or two of them:

About the trims, as you will see, the whole map doesn't have many trims, this is for a reason. This map is build for Off Limits, and it will have a wall/ceiling walking alien. Since i'm not sure yet how that will work on trims i left them out, cause if the alien has to go over each trim thats lets say 8*8 units and the player has to move over each small trim like that it would be dumb after a while. But the biggest issue that would be is that the character animations would look extremly stupid seeing the alien turn 90° 3 times over a small 8*8 trim. So therefor i tried to stay as flat as possible with many of the surfaces.

And about the subway/parking details. I really don't know what else to add there. I planned to add pipes in the subwaytunnel, but that would again be between 50 to 100 entities, and i don't have that much entity's left (i tried, i got errors.. to many ents ) And since subway tunnels are pretty bland in real life (same as parkings) i'm not gonna bother with them anymore. The mod needs more than one map (i started finalizing another map already).

About the lighting being bland (Rick_D) I had to move the light_environment to -90 (straight down) because of the tall buildings when using an angle it darkens the map A LOT. I tried a lot of things (dozens) and mailed Valve about this. The only thing that worked "ok" was to move it straight down. If you look at the minimap, you'll see that the outside area is a lot brighter than when you look at the 1st person view. So there you can clearly see howmuch the brightness gets darker because of the surrounding buildings.

-W

[requiem2d]

Really nice Wesley, great atmosphere

[Duff-e]

hate to bring back old threads but...did anyone else notice this?

times square lol...it also says espn zone in the corner of one of the map screens (another times square business)

[Sa74n]

you, sir, are fastest person ever.

[Duff-e]

shaddup :x

[Wesley Tack]

haha, yea i did use a time square image my mate took when he was in New York.

The JVC globe, the ESPN ZONE ads and the big ad from motorola is the one you see with all the lights at the bottom.

Here is the picture:

I use references for a lot of things, so someone is bound to recognize something they know sooner or later

These props were all made by Reko Dave btw http://www.bestofthebeast.com/

[Rek0]

thats me alright

made these too. made for NMRIH but donated to OL as well

[Minos]

An arcade machine!! rad shit boy

[Bic-B@ll]

that picture was taken standing infront of my dad's building

[Wesley Tack]

that picture was taken standing infront of my dad's building

Your dad owns a whole building in time square?

[Bic-B@ll]

[Wesley Tack]

Heres what I made just now, 4 hours work, for my map (and other Off Limits maps). This is to replace the Half-Life² doors, which are 108 triangles for some weird reason, when they could be 12 triangles. I modeled mine with 12 triangles. It may sound stupid, but if you count all the doors together in one map you get a total of 10.000 triangles difference, ed least thats what I save in my map by replacing them.

http://www.wesleytack.com/images/doors/doors_001.jpg

http://www.wesleytack.com/images/doors/doors_002.jpg

http://www.wesleytack.com/images/doors/doors_003.jpg

http://www.wesleytack.com/images/doors/doors_004.jpg

Also, new images on my map with HDR support and color correction can be found here:

http://www.wesleytack.com/level.html

[static07]

mmm Duvel!

[Wesley Tack]

you sure are late lol

There have been some new shots released for Off Limits last week taken in this map (yes we are getting close to release ;p )

(WiP Alien view)

The rest of the screens can be seen on our site: http://www.off-limits.be/

Hope you like it and hopefully people will stop playing CSS or TF2 for a while to play this