HL1DM: Supplybase Delta Created 16 years ago2008-07-09 14:20:13 UTC by pepper

I started working on this map last week, after not having done anything for the past 1.5 year. It will have custom models and textures so it still need quite a bit of work. The main layout has been done with, thanks to muzzleflash for helping me with testing it! And im working on the tree model right now. the red light you see coming from the tower(which will be higher) will be flashing on and off.

The map takes place in a military supply base call Delta, set in a lush and rocky environment(custom sky included). Right now i got costum textures for the walls and the ground(grass, tiled floor).

I hope these screenshots explain the map a tad bit better.

This is the radio tower, the player is standing in the lower right corner of the map, looking towards the office area(door next to the fence on the left), the exit of the map(close area,, fence with striped boom) and the loading door(right side, just outside the screenshot).loading area, the crates move from the underground storage along the track to the loading bay for the transport vehicle. in this area workers can safely check the outside of the crates. note that the textures on the crate are temporary.in screenshot 1 the player was standing behind the left sandbag wall. as you can see the road swivels through the map. the player will be able to see some other type of building behind the rocks in the final map.standing on the left of the second sandbag wall, looking towards the control room and the loading bay exit(behind the garage door). Note that the player can shoot through the fence, and yes the snarks will also jump through the fence.another view on the control room, now standing behind the rocks, on the left will be a tree obscuring the view to the control room.this will be the loading bay, you can see the track along which the crate moves and the garage door on the left, the view will be partially blocked.looking from the control room(i destroyed the window) towards the radio tower, as you can see the red flashing light is off in this shot(1 second interval).leaving the control room to the walkway from which the workers can observe the crates passing by, in the distance you can see the maintenance and supply room wich gives acces to the walkways seen in other screenshots.showing off a new texture, i used brushes to let the light fall on it in a correct way, im quite fond of how it looks. On the right you can see the internal checking area, a bit further to it and you will be able to monitor the crates coming from the submerged storage area. just below the crate is area that will lead to the offices, currently still in the grey dev texture.I hope i gave a good impression of what im working on, i cant say when this will be finishd, but i can assure that i will finish it!

C&C welcome!

Thanks to muzz and rimrook for there input so far!

Its looking nice, and I'd really like to see what it looks like when those ugly gray dev textures are replaced.

Lookin' great!
How're the r_speeds in the open areas?

Thanks guys!

Doub: R_speeds topped at 1338 standing to a wall looking towards the open area. Altough it is still skyboxed for the sky of development, so i cant say anything usefull about them yet. Muzz experienced some keyboard lag, but that went away when we reloaded a few other maps and went back to this one, so i doubt the map caused it.

Give this a try in case you'll be running high on wpolies.

im using a similair system for rounding awkward corners in the rocks so they transition smoothly, and yes that technique is great:).

^^

You better finish this!

looks awesome! Someone is shooting for MotM... hopefully my pointers are being useful :/

Hehe thanks for all the comments, and yes Rimrook, there very useful! I just compiled the tree with your tutorial, although im still fiddling with the scale and the DM thingie(monster_furniture does not show in DM ).

Use a Cycler.

R_speeds topped at 1338

too high!

The R-Speeds top right now at 1500, i knew it would be high though, the map is quite open with lots of detail, some area's wil stay below the 700 though. I might experiment a bit with Hint_Textures but i doubt it will do a lot.

Daub: im used to texture the triangle's that form the ground with NULL textures and the visible face with a terrain texture, does this also influence clipping? Because the NULL textured face will be discarded as far as i know, and this should happened in the CSG part.

Go for BEVEL, it should save you some clipnodes/wpolies.
It works just like NULL, plus it doesn't create clipnodes.

It indeed works, it tends to make only one clip of a brush if you make them pyramid shaped, im still testing if the terrain works better.

It should. :>

It does increase the compiling times exponentially though

Bevel is a godlike resource.

i never use bevel. :/ maybe i should. though i can't find decent info about it.

This should help you out:

http://twhl.co.za/tutorial.php?id=146

Works like a charm for me, its eating the Wpoly like a dinner when doing a full VIS compile, i must say that the compile time in the map will increase dramaticly.

Did a bit of optimization Daube's way, took me a good 2 hours, and then i still got a few rocks left, although i think this will get the current Wpoly down quite a bit.

Cheers.
I should add highly increased compile times to the cons in that tutorial.

yes, in a skyboxed testmap, it actualy seems to decrease it if everything has been properly nullified and boxed in the right way. the test map, wich was basicly a copy from my terrain with a skybox and ground beneath it had a leafthread over 14000. Now i combined it with the good map and lined it all up and now ist 8872, with, decent compile times. So i wouldnt say there are any cons to this technique unsless badly applied.

another thing, i used my terrain that i made in the triangular way, and then tetrahedron'd it, maby this is easier to work with and avoids a messy workscreen when your still testing everything. offcourse its way more time-consuming.

EDIT: Works like a charm, R_speeds are down to 700 when in the open area and looking round to the rocks, 1200 tops when looking at it from the inside, and i still got to optimzie a few rocky parts.

Glad to hear it worked.
The way you turned your triangles into tetrahedrons after VMing is actually a rather interesting way to do it. I supose in some situations it may work out better than the original one.

Heh, that's exactly 20-30% off your initial wpoly counts, too.

yeah it indeed is .

I also figured out a easy way to organize the tetrahedrons, all you need to do is take the pointy part that sticks out of the back and align it to a certain grid point. this way you always know which is the back one and it actually makes modifying the terrain easier and less prone to errors.

Working behind the scenes, mainly by optimizing the map, and changing a few things here and there. The control room has lockable doors, the garage door is almost done and working, the airduct has also been added. Which will feature my favorite cuddly creature from Half-Life; The Snark!!A airflow will come to live when a button is pushed from the control room. This airflow will then push out a bunch of snarks that will fiercely feast on any unaware opponent standing below.

Alas, no opponents yet behind this duct:

Finally got the transparency to work on the models:

Created 2 new models today, a power generator , and a powerline, the powerline still needs to be properly textured.

Good to see ya' modeling again (not since HLHS, I presume? )
Generator needs better textures, its walls mainly.

Hehe certainly not, i actually model quite a lot, mainly for school nowadays, animations and such, although i prefer modeling for games:). I also made a slot machine for a school project:

http://www.white-line.org/games/JVHslotMachine.swf

Open it in Internet Explorer, i just found out that it's bugged in fireFox 3(Worked in 2). And my other game(Tiger Assault) also has been modelled in 3D.

The walls on the generator are indeed still a bit bland, but i already added details on the other side(name, owner, type, doors, vents etc). Lightning has been rendered on it, thanks to rim for the tut on that!

Don't double post. If you made the last post in a thread, click the edit button above your avatar to edit it. Editing also bumps the thread, so there's never any excuse to double post.

Replace double with quadruple. For shame, pepper.

Actually, i dont edit that because it decreases readability? Since when did you guys became obsessed with multiple posts?

It is easier to read this way than it would be if you put it all in one post.
The screen shots looks good, although a bit dark.

Cheers! I already changed the brightness a bit, is it still to dark in these screenshots?:I modeled the standard Lamda car in 3Dstudiomax and put a cycler_wreckage in front of it, still need to add sound and a flickering light to it though.

I created a new fitting texure for the skylight in the control room, The windows are included in the texture, i made it so that it looks like there is some sort of bloom on it in-game.

Peppercorn
Awesome window.
The outside also looks nice but feels like it's missing something, maybe do some more lighting variation and chuck in a few things that say the area is in use/people have been around (like the car you have, then again I'm used to source's random props).

cheers:D

I still need to add a few bushes and foliage around the car, i still need to finish the tree.

The lightning is something im still not sure about, im trying to get a dawn-like setting, but il experiment with it a bit.

I modeled this fence today to replace the boring standard textures. The poles stop weapons/grenades etc. But you can freely shoot through the fence. I might add some sort of barbed wire on top of it as the old version used to have.

Great mapping and modeling Pepper! (i can't believe i haven't seen this thread sooner...)

Keep it up! can't wait to see a demo! = )

The outside is mighty impressive, but the grass area needs more detail imo (Vegetation?) Bloom effect on window is a nice touch. Niiiiiice

Thanks guys, still buzzy working on the foilage:), dont worry!

EDIT:

Made a first test model off the grass.

It looks nice!

Looks absolutely amazing. Keep up the good work.

Thanks:), very much appreciated!

Rotate each bush of grass randomly/use more random textures for a more realistic look.

Its a model daube:)Yeah it definately needs a few more textures, although i think it still needs some tweaking.

I think it's fine .

If you are going to use "default" Half-Life textures, use these tweaked versions instead:

http://www.cryotank.net/remote/thwc_hl.zip

They are the stock HL textures, but tweaked and sized 'properly' to avoid looking blurry in-game. This explains why:
http://www.cryotank.net/maps/tutorials/hints.html

I can't remember where I got that special wad from, I think someone redid it for a mapping contest years ago. Note that if you switch to those versions of the textures, some will be different dimensions and you may need to re-align or resize them in the editor again. You will also need to include them with the map, just like any other custom texture.

Just a hint, I saw some pretty bad blurry stuff going on in some screenshots

Also, I would try to keep r_speeds below 1000. Even though new machines can handle high r_speeds, and your FPS readout may be high, you start getting "engine lag". Basically, the HL engine isn't designed to handle high-poly environments and it has trouble keeping up with drawing everything (it feels kind of like a high ping).

If you look at the r_speed readout you will see a reading for "ms". The higher this is, the more 'laggy' your map is running (the longer it takes HL to draw everything once, I think..?). After 4-5ms you can start to feel it. I think special effects, transparencies, moving brushes, etc. all probably effect this, not just the wpoly, so keep an eye on it and watch how the map feels when you run around in the more complicated areas.

[edit] I think only most of the textures in the wad I posted above were resized. They also seem to have tweaked the contrast and sharpened them slightly. Anyway, they look better than the stock versions.

Good points, all of it, though refrain from double-posting next time.
There's an edit post button. ;>

That was intentional- they were two different subjects, so I thought two posts made sense. I wasn't sure if there was a character count limit per post, either, and I do tend to run on and on...