Forum posts

Why use lots of polygons when you can overload the fillrate too? Give me some opaque faces and I'll brow a nightmare fps for ya without going over the top with faces.

@Strider: probably not, because it may take some technical insight before you can create a fps abomination. N00bs often only accidentally hit these limits. Seems like Murphey's law applies to them quite well...

I can't remember my first mistakes so much.

What I do remember though, is that the first few months I didn't know how to compile my maps... all I did was creating buildings and stuff in Hammer and stare at it. Fun times.

I program more than I play or map these days.

At the moment I'm programming a small game prototype, console styled, including a level script system. Fun stuff, just to see if my little game idea is fun to play.

3D skyboxes really aren't high-tech stuff or such, we've programmed such a feature for our harbour simulation at school too. Now I don't know how difficult resetting the z-buffer is with the HL code, so it still looks like some work to me.
Bytheway, is your 3D skybox always being rendered or only when there's a skybrush in the visibility set?

Nevertheless, nice you've got this working. That'll make building some exterior area's a much less painfull job.

No major game has ever been made purely over the internet

Oh, it's not impossible, but it's just not something to be taken lightly. Take a look at 0 A.D., for example - it surely is possible. Note that what you see there is the result of about 4 - 5 years of work and it's not finished yet, so again, it's not as easy as it looks. On the other hand, it's not as impossible as it looks, either.

So, you worked on (or rather, worked on mods for) several games. Got anything to show then? Something finished? That'll say much more, you know. (Plus, I like to see stuff... :))

And so, somehow you know it's possible to use the Unreal 3 engine for a MMORPG. But have you investigated the costs of that? How much time and experience would be required for that, not to forget about the money involved? How are you planning to get that license in the first place, without a company or company experience?
Have you thought about the expenses of running a MMORPG? I've done some reading on these kind of games a while ago, and I found out one of the main reasons companies don't start MMORPG's is the heavy costs of such games. How do you plan to scale this, being a student? Do you got investors or such?

Sounds to me you've got some big dreams, but too little sense of reality at the moment. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against you, but I seriously doubt your changes of succes with this project in it's current shape. I've seen people with more experience starting up MMORPG and similar projects. None of these groups has lasted more than a few months. Why would your project succeed?

If you can satisfyingly answer these questions, you've gone a long way already. If you can't... then you may want to reconsider your plans. After all, these things will come in your way some day...

First shot is quite dark. Personally I prefer lighter maps, not only because opponents are better visible but also because they seem to be more 'inviting' to play in.

I think the central, water-filled, area could use a little more details and some better textures on the upper platforms, but it looks like those are still in the works so I guess that's going to be ok.
What looks more troublesome is it's layout: with so much water, is it easy to navigate around in? How easily can you get across? It may be ok to jump around but being able to walk across will probably be much better for the gameflow there.

Good luck, I'm looking forward to how you finish this.

@pepper: Looks nice. BM-styled and sort of oldskool. I like it. Do you have a layout planned for this already?

All those shots are a bit on the dark side, bytheway, especially the first one. Care to lit it up some more for playability's sake? Bright maps also tend to be more popular. Personally I like them more because they feel more vivid, but I also think they look more inviting to play in general.

If you fix that example map link, it'd be more usefull, Unbreakable...

However, you may want to approach reflective floors in a different way by leaving the faces underneath just normal as they are, without copying the lights - or applying a black texture to them (which allows you to leave out detailed brushes and all). Then, place sprites at the place where the lights would be in the mirrored part.
This gives a more vague sort of reflection, one that works better in certain occasions and one that's quite easy to set up and good for performance.

If you're pro with 3ds Max, then you also know how to animate, right? Anyway, animations need to be exported to .smd files, just as the mesh needs a .smd file for itself. Then you need to compile these .smd files to a .mdl file, using a .qc file that holds the instructions for this process. I'd say, decompile a few HL models to see how this works.

As for changing damage values and such, that requires coding and doesn't have anything to do with modelling...

Unbreakable has been unbroken again? That's good to see. Let us know when you've got something interesting.

Might be best to upload your troublesome map and let some of us take a look at it first-hand. At least you can check if it's a problem with your system specifically, or if it's reproducable. It's probably hard to tell what causes this without seeing it, I think.

Looks very narrow and hard to navigate. How large is that hallway really?

About the texture, maybe such a door doesn't fit in the first place? I don't know, it's hard to grasp the problem here. Though I agree the door looks too clean now.

I liked NOLF more than NOLF II. Though NOLF II looked better, at some point it looked too good. Compared to it's gameplay, probably.

See, if something looks more real, you expect it to behave more real as well, naturally. You expect the whole game to play better and be more fun, somehow. And while NOLF II was fun, I felt NOLF did better. That goes beyond the level design somewhat.

I've been reading a lot about game design lately, and that's changing my view on mapping somewhat.

Mainly that I don't put visuals so high anymore. Don't get me wrong, it's important, but not automatically important.
See, there's different types of players. Some play purely for the core gameplay. The 'dust' people. Those that up their monitor gamma to get a better view on enemies.
Others prefer visuals more, it's more the complete immersion they like. You can think of more types of players but I think you'll get the idea: it's about the public.
If your public are those that like the gameplay only, then you're not going to spend too much time (or, in this situation, wasting time) on visuals.
If your public likes immersion and realistic, or themed, gameplay experience, you'll spend a lot of time getting the visuals and the logical interaction right.

Of course, visuals and gameplay serve more goals. Visuals help sell a game, or map, better. Visuals enhance the immersion. Bad visuals hurt eyes on the other hand.
Gameplay is what keeps people coming back - or not. On the other hand, some people like to explore more than action scene's or other things. Naturally, these people like to see new things every time, so they're more likely to switch to other maps or games faster. Again, public...

I don't think 'good' and 'bad' are so black and white. It depends on if they suit well with their public. Dust193.683.102 maps and the like are horrible in our eyes, but they appeal to a certain public... so why worry about it? I know I wouldn't want to play those maps, but they're not made for me, so that's no problem.
Say, I created a visual masterpiece, that happens to play well too. But I aimed at a public of puzzle-gamers. Then my nice and smooth action-packed level happens to be bad for them.

About not thinking to play... that's the meaning of the word 'amuse'. A-muse. I like to relax and play something easy once in a while too. Most of the time I prefer games that need a little more thinking (and the best of those games award good thinking, but allow little thinking too). I don't always want to spend hours and hours learning something... that's not what people want. They want to play. So, naturally, if a game or map requires you to learn something, either make it simple, or pack it into the playing itself. Half-Life 2 did this fantastically with the gravity gun and the spores. Other games have long manuals and a lot of boring tutorial maps, that totally take the speed out of it and only delay the fun I want to have, up to the point that I give up because I don't think it's worth the investment anymore...

//rant

I recently played Oni. It has some striking similarities to Halo as far as level-design goes: grande environments, with some small details placed now and then, that looked cloned most of the time. The nice things about both these games are their grander settings, the macrostructure of the levels. While detail is barren, overall those levels still leave the impression of the things they represented.

So far about Oni's levels, the gameplay was much fun, so even though it didn't look that impressive, not directly, it was a great fun game to play.

In contrast, Unreal II had the usual Unreal plasticy detail and style, and while it looked good, the gameplay killed it for me. It was way too shallow. While some levels definitely looked fine, others looked too overdone to me. I'm no fan of the Unreal plastic spaceship style. The mining level was good, because technical stuff was kept more subtle and the buildings felt more real, more solid. Most other settings were metal-only, with a few nice exceptions (living planet, wow... but not used too effective if you ask me, if all you can do there is run in, get artifact, run out - even though the running out part was cool).
I also think this game overdid theme variations. It gave so little consistency to the game, while the story was already meager...

As for great levels or moments, I particularly liked the view from the Citadel over City17, the first time. Just awesome. Too bad it's only the first time you see something like that that it's impressive.

The cubemapping is well-done, but some still look blurry, giving them just little better looks than their original versions. Just scaling up textures and applying bumpmapping to them doesn't do the trick, so unless you want to spend the time to recreate these ones as high-res versions, you're kinda stuck with low-res looking textures, I think...

Change that first use to paper, or doing nothing and catching idea's, FresheD...

I think it's good to gather idea's, no matter how bad they are or how stupid they sound. Write them down in whatever form or shape you're comfortable with. Once you have a bunch of idea's, try to find one that sounds good. The others may be bad, but that doesn't mean they're worthless - you can mix up things, they can influence your best idea, and what not.

My map The Playtest took about 20 minutes. Medium sized and not too complex.

Sector Gamma, which I once was working, on took little above an hour in it's last stage. Not complex either, but quite large with it's open spaces.

The map Cathedral, that I once did for a Rust compo, took little less than 30 minutes. Fairly small, but quite complex for it's size. Func_walling helped a lot here.

Mudanchee, the HL version, took hours and hours on the other side, but there I was trying things that the HL engine wasn't really built for in the first place: excessive use of triangle terrain (VIS headache, so I turned them into multiple entities, to cut down on face splitting and VIS complexity. That would hurt performance at some point again, through the sheer amount of entities. Gotta love displacements).

All in all, I think it's almost always (or just often) possible to keep the VIS process short, by using entities in such ways to keep it simple. The RAD process, however, is much harder to maintain, as it just grows when your map grows. Especially when using Opaque and other ZHLT-specific settings RAD times are quite large.

Heh, Muzzle blijft wel vrienden aantrekken naar de mapperswereld.

Welkom, ik ben benieuwd naar wat je gaat maken.

Hmm... I'm not so sure about those screenshots. There's nothing wrong with the architecture, but they feel a bit too HL-ish to me. Source allows for more (modelled :)) detail and higher res textures, which you didn't really use here.

Hmm, I'm not so happy with those floating holo screens. They totally clash with the style of the map. The whole theme breathes ancientness, and while runes and glowing symbols do fit, holoscreens don't. Unless you insert some high-tech machinery to make a nice combination of both themes, I don't think those holo's will do the map any good.

Needs better lighting, better texture usage, better architecture and better prop model usage. Source easily makes simple things look believable, but there's more to creating a good map than that.

But, nice to play with the new things, isn't it.

Uhm... well, I'd do a search for idea threads if I were you... this subject has been covered several times already now.

Not that I'm running low on idea's, I've got plenty of them. I'm running low on time, so it's more a case of picking the best idea's and sticking with them. But, again, that has been covered before...

Indeed, Tosse, hence the use of landmarks. Recognizable objects, or shapes, or colors, or style, or other things, to let the player know where he is. Sounds can play a role there too.

Sounds can play another role and that's the role of warnings. When you hear water splashing around the corner, you know there's a player coming up. Depending on the area, your equipment and the assumed equipment of the opponent, you now have a little time to decide your strategy. You could hide to ambush him, or run away, or throw some grenades already.
In UT, health vials were used sometimes to give audio warnings. Experienced players however may avoid them to surprize their opponents. A nice tactical situation, don't you think? Or how about triggering these signals but then backtracking, leaving someone else waiting around the corner only to render him vulnerable to another side...
And then there are the broadcasted signals. The one in crossfire that tells everyone to get to the bunker. Or the ones that indicate somebody has gotten the RPG.

Visual signs can serve the same function. TFC maps sometimes have a map that shows which control zones are occupied by who, that's a less direct visual sign and probably not the best example here. But think about de_aztec, the thunder that you see just after somebody crosses the rope-bridge...

Oh, and item placement. Placing a valuable item in the middle of a room not only makes it harder to get, experienced players may also use them as a bait - while they're waiting just up on a platform or behind a pillar, their opponent may rush to the weapon... of course, the opponent may also decide to scan the room first.

I'm just brainstorming a bit and rehashing things I've read and some things I've tried implementing mysels. Just take what you think is usefull here.

I don't find carving any usefull, because it is prone to errors when used with shapes more complex than a cube, plus I like to have more control over my brushes.
But feel free to use it. If it saves you time, don't discard it. I just don't find it saving me time...

Anyway, using texture lights can be a quick way to lit up an area. Fiddling with your .rad files can be of use there, as the default light information may not always suit your taste.

Be aware that colored lights affect the way textures come out. A red texture shows up black when lit by blue light, for example. Common sense but good to keep in mind. Using light tints can be a nice way to give different area's a different feeling, and they can serve a landmark function there as well. In my map mudanchee (that's still in the works...) the main cave is slightly blueish, the crystal cave is greenish, the tomb cave is reddish and the waterfall cave is wet, err, orange. Not only the objects and shape of these area's show you where you are, also the color useage lets you know your location.

Leaf portals saw into leaf too. Sounds like some complex or oddly shaped/placed brushes to me. Candidates for func_walls?
And yeah, cut down on those light styles somewhat. No deletion necessary, just don't use too many differently behaving lights.

@Elon: I know some textures in Detention aren't aligned perfect.

However, I don't think many people will notice and if they do, I doubt if it'll impact their sense of immersion. I simply think it's not worth the hassle. It's not something that feels unlogic or looks that bad, it's just not perfect. Anyway, I could've created a texture for that, don't limit yourself to HL ones...

I'd see that as much more important now. Technical tips and tricks have their place and it's good to learn new nifty trickery, but you should know it's place. Looks sell your level, gameplay keeps it being played. I'd rather put more attention to aligning the platforms and placing items accordingly (that plaza there really could've used some AR grenades to balance the weapons placed higher, for example) that fixing ladder textures like that.

Yeah, it's old, man!

But interesting nonetheless. Good work digging it up again, Satch.

That tutorial looks good to me. What didn't you understand?

Anyway, vehicles in CS are just buggy. I wouldn't want to use them in a map if I were you...

start big to make it better quality

Nonsense. There's no such thing as 'sub-pixel detail'. Working in higher resolutions may be easier if you're going to use it later on on that resolution, but it doesn't add any more detail to the final version. Actually, it's more likely small details will get lost, leaving you with a less-than-desired result.

Wally allows you to drag and drop files into it (rather, into the .wad's field within Wally, so to say) and it will automatically convert these files to 8bits with as little quality-loss as possible.

Anyway, creating good textures is a long process that may take quite some time to get a hold on. Photographs are no magical texture-makers, sometimes creating ones from scratch gives a better result (though 'better' really depends on the style you're going for, hand-made ones are often more cartoony, which isn't a bad thing if you're going for that). If you are going to use photographs as a base, you'll often still need to rework them quite some. Try taking pictures without large lighting differences on the surfaces to make your job easier.

Whatever approach you're going for, use other pictures as reference. It often helps a lot. It's also a good idea to test your textures in the situations they will be used (think about lighting, especially the light color as this affects the outcome of a texture quite radically sometimes).

As for tools, Photoshop seems to be a good choice for most, but as sm0k3y said, if you're familiar with other tools it may be better to keep using them. For example, I use a combination of Paint, IPhoto Plus, Paint Shop Pro and some other tools since that's what I'm familiar with and each program is usefull in a different stage of the process.

I wonder if there's a browser or extractor available for that format. There are many obscure package formats like these around, only a few are so widely used that it's easy to find tools for them.

Why would you need it, bytheway?

EDIT: Looks like it's some sort of Mac archive file?

And they have to know you're capable of making that movie, of course...
Plus they'll have to like it. Believe me, talented people are easier to find than committed ones...

Tell us more... what's this idea of yours all about? If you've prepared idea's and designs for over 2 years, you surely are able to tell us more. Don't be so secretive about idea's, those are just a dime a dozen anyway. Don't be afraid people will steal your particular idea, even if it's really that special - working it out is still the hard part of it.

Show us some concept art, describe the concept of your game, the core gameplay... Make us warm for it. Sure, you'll need a team, but do you specifically know where you need how much manpower? Do you have some sort of estimated production time? Do you know about the typical game/mod development bottlenecks? What modding or game-development experience do you have already? Did you finish similar or smaller projects like this before?

Also, why have you chosen the Unreal3 engine (which sounds unlikely you'll ever get it as they only license it to corporations with a solid background)? Aren't there better (and cheaper) engines out there that better fit your game requirements? Why going retail instead of releasing it over the internet (which really is a valid market if you know where to go)?

I'm not trying to bash you, but I'm interested to see why you made these choices and what you expect from this. Creating a game and spending large amounts of time and money is quite a serious thing...

If you point out which ones, you can PM or mail the authors of those maps to fix their links...

Hmm, yeah, my current host is somewhat slow and irky at times. Time to move on I guess... A forced refresh will probably do it for now...

@ZL: No, it's not Pepper. About the patches, you like a more metallic or fiber-like approach, or no patches at all?

I had posted this sketch a while ago on my forum already, but you may like it as well:I drew it as concept art for the soldiers I modelled a while ago, to give a certain skinner a better idea of how they're supposed to look for real. Guess who's skinning it...

I've abandoned a lot of maps. Perhaps 20% of what I seriously started finally got done, perhaps even less than that.

Luckily, that what I did produce is (more or less) good stuff, and what I haven't produced has learned me a lot and is still a source of inspiration to this day. I haven't been happy with abandoning so much work in the past, but now that I look back on it, I don't think it's so bad. I've had fun creating that stuff, too, so it wasn't wasted time...

So, it published? Got a link or such to show us something?

A working link?

A site that works in something else than just IE?

The other screenshots look ok, but I think they're too dark, more specifically the paths are too dark while less important sections (like that high wall) receive more attention than they need by their lighting.

Nice pole effect bytheway. Perhaps adding some vertically moving particles to them will spice them up even more?
Also, the spires radiate darkness, by that light circle around them that fades to black at the spires base. To stress their darkness more making the surrounding area's more bright would work well, I think.

About the sky-window up there, so to say, the edges are quite linear and of the same height, making the map feel limited and not part of a 'world'. Perhaps adding some small objects above it, like hanging plants or a railing or such, maybe on one or two sides only, would spice it up.

Not possible in plain Half-Life. Unless you're going to write some custom code, which then means you'll have to put the map in (mini)mod format. But that's probably not worth the hassle.

Personally, I use Pakrat rather than bspzip. Works easier than a command-line tool.

Unless you want to start a whole new type of gameplay, creating a deathmatch map as a minimod isn't worth the extra accurateness in footstep sounds and such.
As for 11 MB of textures? Why did you need that much?

Someone did this, though, but that's more because his level idea featured some interesting trap designs that wouldn't be possible without some changes to the game-code. You may want to check it out: Apotheosis.

't Was about time I posted in this thread...

Petra - This means war

That screenshot looks interesting. Some sort of control point, or healing pole, or teleport thingie?

The top-down chamber sketch looks good, but it's hard to see what the accessible area's are, a flowchart would be better for that. Personally I find simplistic circle-line schedules and in later stages area outlines easier to work with, accompanied with perspective or isometric sketches.

Take a look at Ten Four. Quite a nice list of HL mods, each with a description. You should be able to pick some decent ones through that site.

The basic rules for vertex manipulation are simple, though sometimes a little hard to keep.
First, a brush must always be convex in order to be processed correctly by the compile tools.
Second, every face must be completely flat. The opposite of this would be a bended face, one with two normals (two directions, so to say). Hence the co-planar face error.
Third, there may not be two faces who have the same normal, that is, the same direction. These should be made one face, or you should use multiple brushes in such occasions.

For complex or odd faces, using triangular faces is a safe way to avoid most problems.

Looks better already. Still somewhat monotone, try adding an intend or so, something that holds a maintenance door or so, about halfway down the tunnel. And perhaps switch one of those lights off so it looks less repetetive. And use some decals now and then to break up the long surfaces better.

I'm also wondering, does this long hallway play good? Looks way too long and linear to me for a good gameplay...

i have checked and i know i didnt make mistake when typing texture names in the .vmt file

I wouldn't be too sure of that... can you post your .vmt file and the .vtf filenames you used?

Nah, just make something that plays fun first before going all high-poly and shiny. I like the style of this, what sort of gameplay are you planning for this?