Skjalg Posted December 17, 2006 Report Posted December 17, 2006 Yep, a good level designer will make it look visually appealing. A Great level designer will make it look visually appealing AND decent on the fps. I remember that was one of the best advices I got when making stuff for the HL engine (think it was davej that wrote that somewhere). (oh and, ofcourse the gameplay is important )
JamesL Posted December 17, 2006 Report Posted December 17, 2006 Fabulous looking map. Big respect for the time and effort put into this work, you gotta love custom content. Added to rotation on our servers, mirrored on our website. Great job mate.
Belgarion Posted December 18, 2006 Report Posted December 18, 2006 wow. now that's what I love to see. It's beautiful and NOT destroyed. Positively gorgeous. I'd rather look at beauty like this rather than destroyed vistas any day. Fantastic work. absolutely fantastic.
IR Posted December 18, 2006 Report Posted December 18, 2006 great work!!! i love the elevation, use of materials etc, i have to agree wih some that the "funky" parts work against it because the surroundings dont suggest it they just sortoff stand out in a "wtf" kinda way.. however this map seems to be more of a "skill" showcase so its all good i was alitle disapointed with the crazy amount of ladders used.. some area's they were aceptable and almost made sence, but others felt like lazyness to build a proper staircase, while there seemed to be room to do this. still nice work!!! thumbs up
Slackiller Posted December 18, 2006 Report Posted December 18, 2006 Map looks sweet, beautiful lighting , rich crisp textures , great looking models. Great job warbeast !!
Campaignjunkie Posted December 18, 2006 Report Posted December 18, 2006 Are you already getting requests to cannibalize this map for the custom content?
Warby Posted December 18, 2006 Author Report Posted December 18, 2006 Are you already getting requests to cannibalize this map for the custom content? you bet !!! i told em all to go to hell :roll:
spine Posted December 19, 2006 Report Posted December 19, 2006 Awesome work Warby! Those 2 first screens with that old building is just unbelivable, gobsmacked!
AdamBrome Posted December 21, 2006 Report Posted December 21, 2006 Warby, sorry for the late response but I finally had a few minutes at work to load this up. Threewave's been working with the Source engine for the past year so I figured I'd show it to the team and get their thought. Overall, its really pretty. And very very impressive for just 1 dude to have worked on - even if it did take you awhile. Here are some thoughts I collected from about 6 different people here (artists and level designers). -The scale is mish mashed throughout. Your windows on the buildings are huge. The ladders are huge and in some spots your bricks are the size of a car - even if they are on the outside of the playing area. -Your lighting is overbright and not using the HDR wisely. There should be some nice contrast areas of light/dark throughout. You've got some dark spots but some more areas with this treatment would be ideal. -Valve lights assets with environment map masks weird when in the dark. Your envmap saturation and contrast should be turned down (in the .VMT) on certain objects to correct thing. The view finders specifically come to mind. -The textures used for your skyportal meshes look really cartoony when compared to the rest of your texture work. It's a contrast thats all too obvious, and ruins the effectiveness of the setup. -Water is a multiplayer killer for CS: S. Did you know this? There's things you can do to water to make it efficient for multiplayer gaming with Source. One of the things I know to help is making the water non-clear. -You're using a single model for a huge vertical aesthetic of a building and this causes major lighting issues. In one spot it works well, but in others it looks horrible as the model is lit lightly but the wall its against is dark. There's ways to work around this. Firstly, the engine vertex lights from the assets origin so having a large asset like that is extra prone to lighting failure. You could break the model up and piece it back together in Hammer - thus giving you multiple original and more accurate lighting. The other fix is to use 2 new vrad parameters that you'd add to hammers compile window in export mode. -staticproppolys and -staticproplighting. This will tell vrad to create lightmaps for all static props and essentially create self lighting assets. -Again, great job for one person. With all of this said - do you work somewhere?
Zacker Posted December 21, 2006 Report Posted December 21, 2006 Regarding where he works we got this nifty little topic: http://www.mapcore.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5989 Btw. my game director came by while browsing this thread and pretty much just seconded what I already posted in previous replies.
Warby Posted December 21, 2006 Author Report Posted December 21, 2006 so in general i agree with everything you say adam but just like with most of the more critical posts here you like everyone else are not in the trenches you have no idea what other technical difficulties i had to over come to make this map work at all ^^ so let me just comment on the points one by one in a hopefulyl friendly and professional manner =) *iam not justifieing anything here just trying to make everyone understand better* Warby, sorry for the late response but I finally had a few minutes at work to load this up. -Valve lights assets with environment map masks weird when in the dark. Your envmap saturation and contrast should be turned down (in the .VMT) on certain objects to correct thing. The view finders specifically come to mind. *YES and this is especially bad with hdr turned on without hdr it looks the way i wanted it to. i just found out yesterday that you can change the reflectiveness when hdr is turned on ( hessi told me )... to late now *SOB* -The textures used for your skyportal meshes look really cartoony when compared to the rest of your texture work. It's a contrast thats all too obvious, and ruins the effectiveness of the setup. *they are all screenshots from building that i actually have inside the map so i blame the mipmapping * -Water is a multiplayer killer for CS: S. Did you know this? There's things you can do to water to make it efficient for multiplayer gaming with Source. One of the things I know to help is making the water non-clear. *i did not know ?! i really liked the water in militia and aztec those maps are being played right ?! i assume you talk performance when you say playable ?* -You're using a single model for a huge vertical aesthetic of a building and this causes major lighting issues. In one spot it works well, but in others it looks horrible as the model is lit lightly but the wall its against is dark. There's ways to work around this. Firstly, the engine vertex lights from the assets origin so having a large asset like that is extra prone to lighting failure. You could break the model up and piece it back together in Hammer - thus giving you multiple original and more accurate lighting. *this also splits it into smaller batches which will result in even worse fps and the people already complain about it also the compiler's crash when you use 4096 entities right now i use 4095 the last month long i had to sacrifice an entity for each new feature i HAD to implement so splitting models is really not an option actually combining is !* The other fix is to use 2 new vrad parameters that you'd add to hammers compile window in export mode. -staticproppolys and -staticproplighting. This will tell vrad to create lightmaps for all static props and essentially create self lighting assets. *that sounds pretty cool but where odes it get the uvs for the lightmap ?! sounds like it will be one huge artifact hell to me personally but i am really curious about this and i am gonna try it in the future * -Again, great job for one person. With all of this said - do you work somewhere? i am looking for a job right now all in all i am once more a bit wiser thanks to you guys and i promise the next map will be even more pwnage ^^
Warby Posted December 21, 2006 Author Report Posted December 21, 2006 so one thing i leared for sure is to do more public beta stuff and name your releases _alpha_05 _beta_02 _rc_1 etc ... so even you always have the option to change it wothout causing to much map differs form server hassel ^^
Dodger Posted December 21, 2006 Report Posted December 21, 2006 Played your map warby. Good map if to say so.. I liked the place (basement vine cellar) rooms. Little like catacombs..
sk3tch Posted December 21, 2006 Report Posted December 21, 2006 so one thing i leared for sure is to do more public beta stuff and name your releases _alpha_05 _beta_02 _rc_1 etc ... so even you always have the option to change it wothout causing to much map differs form server hassel ^^ That's kinda crap sometimes though. I did a beta and people didn't realize the final was out. Kinda sucks seeing more beta versions being played than the final.
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