Comments

Nice map! Although I had some problems trying it. I was lagging and fps-dropping a whole lot in the map. I checked the console and it was spamming the message "non-sprite set to glow". I quess this could be it.

The map look fantastic for the most but you seem to have used the carve / cut function to make round wholes in some walls. For me this rarely work so I never use it and for you it left some glitchy looking walls with cracks and stuff. This also lowers the performance of the map.

I couldn't stand the lag so I don't think I saw the whole map but what I saw was pretty damn good, I like the mood and atmosphere :).

Yeay, thanks guys

Nice map, I love the scene when spawned, it is really beautiful. I like the architecture of the house and them cars are pretty cool, bit glitchy and with oval tires? But cool.

There are some unaligned texturing and a feel of emptiness here and there.

Your brushwork is impressive sir! Did you ever think about making models? I think you should. Maybe that "making models in hammer"-tutorial could be something.

Well, the map wasn't totally empty, it had a lot of nice details I just feel like if you spend some more time on it could be a lot better. But yeah, that wasn't really on the map in the first place, I guess, considering the nature of this little competition :P. Good work nonetheless.

Trololol, potatis invalid din skadade individ I can see my house in that picture. You should use that picture as that little picture people have at the end of their forum posts, you know? Not much more to say on that topic, your post pretty much covered it all! Bhahaha, get it? It covered it all, cuz you know, it's big...

Hrrm, Hi Lyssa! Greetings and a premature happy birthday to you :).

HOWLY MAC DOODLE BALLS! It even has a awesome video review. Woho! Thanks for letting me know.

Oh I didn't even know I got the MotM :P. Niice!

Thanks guys, been trying that alt+RMB and its really powerful ^^

Hnnnng, datt rack!! "Life is a beach" lol.

Thanks TJB!
Of course you can use that method man :P. I wouldn't be surprised if someone else already did it this way or thought about it. I was also thinking about using func_train for the moving trees and mountains but I didn't have so much time so I did it this way.

I think having to guess and make a few wrongs will make the game experience better :).

hehe, dont tell me you played this in 1/8th of the normal speed xP. That would've taken some serious patience.

Haha dude, cerealsly?! a speed run of casino games? Haha, I saw the title on YT and I was like, what is this game? Speed runs are usually cool, like super mario, mega man and sonic, you know? Where they avoid death and crazy jumps their way through a map, with awesome precision! But this is the first time I see one of a casino gambling game >_<.

What was hard with making this? *Don't wanna sound like a douche, I'm sincerely wondering :P.

Looked like a well made game nonetheless.

Very nice! I love the silenced weapons and the elves :). Wish it would last longer it was so good. Nice voicing also!

Ah I see, smart way :). Yeah, rotating that detailed brush work would make 90 % end up off grid and when compiled totally F-d up :P.

Thanks CT!!

Yeah, the voice audio is kinda crappy but I backed up the important stuff with text.

The first question in the train was most likely triggered but you didn't see it because the background was too bright and the attention goes directly to the moving scenery outside the windows. I kinda didn't see that text too during some test runs and since it's triggered by a "trigger once" trigger it wont come back. That could be improved indeed. In the third map however the questions can be triggered countless times.

I'm not sure what you mean with the fat baby. When you open the last door you can enter the little temple-house and it will trigger some text like "Good job, you past the test" and some other stuff too like music and an xmas egg. Inside is also some hints to who made the map and the xmas egg popping up somewhere is a quite a give away hint too.

There are 9 questions in total, 3 per map. Just in case you missed one the last one :P.

I worked really intensely on these maps for like 3-4 days only, so they have some small flaws :P.

Haha, this was awesome and hilarious, awesilarious! Just love the opening! And the transition! Brushwork was cool too :P.

Did you build the bike in a horizontal position and then rotate it so that it stands on the back wheel? Or did you build it like that right off the bat?

Nice texturing too. I like how the fiber-flow follows the shapes of the bike.

Wow, good job DiscoStu!

As Captain T said, you should save this in the tutorials section too. It will be easier to find it when it's needed.

I never played SciHunt, I'm gonna google it now but it would be nice if you linked to the original mod ^^. It'd make the installation of your map pack easier... for me

Haha, even the slippers are penguin, how genuine. Oh that rhymed!

Thanks :), I used wisdom-soft AutoScreenRecorder 3 free quite good free program. No trial time but I haven't got that good fps on it. Maybe can be fixed in the codec settings. But yeah, when sped up it doesn't show.

Wow, breath taking to say the least. I kinda enjoyed this one even if it was a bit short. I liked the Joebama ball.

I can't run it! It says it can't load the client.dll file.
Did you program it to be playable on the 24th or what am I doing wrong?

I pasted the HLXmas folder in to my half-life folder and restarted steam. I load "The Spirit of HL" and it crashes.

Anyone else have this problem?

I love this. I like the way you used different textures in the same "face" to make a new texture. Nice ambiance. Everything is nicely designed and it really draws me in. Not big but not too small either compared to other entries.

I cant see why this didn't make it in to the top 3. Well, except that you seemingly used decals even though that was not allowed.

Thanks for sharing anyways!

Ahrgh, my brain! This map is awesome but I can't help but feeling that it's a bit sloppy made at times. Can't decide whether to give it 4 or 5 stars.

Awesome story and feel to the map. It's spooky and scary and it looks really nice. The game play should be nice too.

++ The scary parts are well executed. Sometimes they are there and sometimes they are not. This is brilliant!
++ lighting is nice
++ ambiance is nice
++ Nice architecture
++ good use of decals and models and, well, entities in general.
++ Running smooth, good visuals with good r_speeds. This is hard to make.
+ detailed textures, looks nice

Quite a few glitches here and there
- Many visible NULL faces. On the roof is a glitch so you can see down inside the whole building.
- There is a red wheel-lever close to T spawn that doesn't spin when activated. I couldn't figure out what it does except starting a loud and annoying slow pulsing fan sound that never stops.
- The main door: Null face, strange metallic stop sound, rotates around the wrong side. Well, the rotating thing on the wrong side could be intentional to make it strange and scary but still, idunno about that.
- all glass is radiating light, it looks strange imo. But I do love the hostage on the attic standing in front of that illuminating glass, it makes a nice silhouette.
- Skybox - could be better.
- would be nice if the fire made some damage.
- Metal grate breaks into wood. Where? T-spawn -> basement and attic -> ventilation. But I guess the rusty grate could look like wood, if I try really hard.
- The balchony over CT main entrance door, if you jump over the handrail onto the roof, you cant jump back in. If you just move the handrail 1 or 2 units closer to the house one could get back in over the handrail again.

Overall a very nice and thoughtfully made map. It feels like a beta version and once retouched it's a solid 5 star map. Ah, I wanna give it 5 stars but u get 4, sorry. I feel it can be a little better. But it is really good still.

Thank you kind sir, I deeply appreciate your kind and honest words :). I'm glad you recognized the hard work I did and the thought I put it in to this.

I did it all from scratch :). I got really stressed towards the end to finish it because I wasted some weeks in the middle to play CS and I had a lot of compiling trouble due to some "complex" terrain.

I was really hoping for a top 3 place, who wasn't hehe, but yeah. Everyone likes different things, too bad for me I didn't appeal to the judge(s)'s likings. But I can't help but feeling a bit disappointed.

I do understand that my entry is not very special really, it just another standard type of CS map. Even if it's well executed it doesn't really bring anything new to the table.

I actually tried playing this map with players and bots and it works out quite good. It is not too big IMO.

Anyways, thanks again and congratulations on the victory. I'd love to see more of the map you did in a more finished state even more so in a SP-edition.

I'd love to see more of this toooo. I don't have HL2 or above :C. Could you or someone make a play through on this one and post to youtube?

Awesome, this very helpful. How did find out the radius? Trial and error? I was thinking of this idea too, to lift em up in the air so that just the small area in the bottom would be hearable but I couldn't find the radius.

Thanks, good job mate ^^

Cool cool, please let me know the name of that map I wanna see it.

A tip is to press "map" (next to "file" and "edit") and then "load point file" It will load a draw a long wiggly line going from blue to red. At some part it is out side the map and at some part it's inside the map. Where it finds its way in is where the leak is, mostly. Try this first.

-edit-
Or actually, first, you should maybe try the search function on this site or google, you know? :P.

Awesome! So beautiful! The sounds, the lighting and the architecture makes for pure aesthetic candy.

Seems like a good sized map for fight yard IMO. Only draw back is high poly count which I'm sure you're already aware of.

Thx bojidar4oto!

@venko
Hmm, I am not sure how to solve this. I got a similar error message in an earlier version of the map because I had to many func_illusionary but I fixed it by tying them together.

Do you have the latest cs and steam? Try downloading my map again and unzip and overwrite the old files. Sorry, can't come up with any better ideas at the moment.

Looks freaking nice, love the idea to surf in more real world looking like places. Unfortunately I suck at surfing and didn't make it pass the first jump to the fire ladder. But I'm sure surfers will like this map a lot :D.

+ Intended gravity and air accelerate values clearly visible in the map
+ The area to surf on is bigger than it seems, I mean the wires are really narrow but the actual surfing area is wider and invisible.
+ Looks good and quite big judging from the YT clip

Not gonna vote since I couldn't get anywhere -_-.

Oh damn, that's quite far away. You have your own studio? Recording in studios is quite expensive. Especially if you are paying a mixer dude to do the mixing :P.

Nice! Well made, it sounds professional. Like this single most of the ones on your page. Singer is good too

What are you playing in the band?

Very nice looking map indeed!

@DiscoStu, yeah, that's what I thought too but when I played the map I learned it was a "de_rats"-style map. The player is actually standing on the desk in the screenshot.

Aight, on with what I have to say about the map.

+ Nicely designed, a lot of details and good use of transparency.

+ Nice textures, I like how the screens have different motives and even the mouse pads have different colors. That's cool.

+ Nice lighting

+/- No sounds, actually did not bother me so much on this map.

+/- Some glitchy looking brushes - the monitor stands.

-- r_speeds are crazy high in a lot of places. Over 5000 wpoly, which leaves me with around 30 fps and thats when I'm playing alone! It's hard to do efficient VIS-blocking in this kind of map (since it's only one big room) but smarter texture scaling and less brush details (textures instead) and use of func_wall will reduce your wpoly count quite much on this map.

Over all good work, but for me it's just painful to see something nice like this and it's just barely playable. Four stars.

This is for hl2, right?

Wow, this is awesome Great work setting up those entities. This will helped me solve a problem for a map I'm working on. Very useful feature to sense whether a player is in an area or not. There should be one entity for this :S.

Im curious about func_plat. This one is triggered when a player is on it and goes back to initial state when player goes off. However it doesn't have a target field :S.

@Captain Terror
Thanks for the review!

I will let you know when it's on a server.

@Captain Terror
Thanks! I was looking for a good upload site like this! I've uploaded and changed the download link now. Here it is too,
https://hostr.co/hV8h7zf

@Stojke
Thanks, hehe, yeah it was a bit of a problem to fit the whole map into the drawing space of hammer. The Terrorists are actually driving under the city on their way in. So were it seems be blue sky above is actually the city itself :P.

I put a lot of effort into VIS blocking and such. Probably more than a month on just optimizing so I'm glad to hear that it gave some results :).

Awesome map, it looks great. However the r_speeds are really high. Like average about 2000 and max is ~5000 that I could find. When I play the map alone I get like 50-70 fps and with players on it... o.O it would be painful to play.

Maybe this is only me but I think there is a lot that can be done the optimize the map. Like, use textures instead av brushes to make details, use models instead of brushes. Do some VIS-blocking. This work is of course not so much fun though so I can see how you skipped it.

Nonetheless, stunning map and maybe it is still playable on a full server.

PS: There is spot in the slope with the truck and the road barricade where I get stuck at times. Some clipping problems that could be fixed with CLIP brushes on the ground perhaps.