Streetlevel Remake - Ports

Ok, I checked this map out again and also looked at it in hammer. There's a lot to say about this map both good and bad. There is also some improvements you could make for optimization. I will critique this map on a number of attributes.

Overall/ you created a very big map for gold source to handle. It takes up practically the entire grid in hammer. It is surprising that the map is playable with as much detail you achieved throughout such a large map. One thing I noticed in hammer and in gameplay is that the layaout is pretty flat. There is some vertical movement in some of the buildings but the entire map is based on a flat surface. This is understandable in that it is "street level" but in real life nothing is flat "even roads" and different height variations would have been nice. Vertical relief could have been achieved with tall plain buildings and other things that grew beyond the flat sky roof. None the less, the flat layout allowed you to achieve a very "wide" map which allowed for very far away areas which was nice in a city scape environment.

Textures/ Here's what you should do. Take all of the half life textures, throw them in the garbage where they belong and never, EVER look back!. Ok you can use some of them but generally try to avoid them as much as possible. They look super horrific and totally nullify many parts of your map! There are tons and tons of nice textures out there, it just takes a good ammount of time to put some wads together. What I do is place every wad in one big wad file and use it in hammer and then when I am finished with the map I make a single wad file only including one's used in the map. Some areas however had nice textures that actually worked very well. From what I can remember, the "crack house" wall and ceiling textures were nice. The floor was ok too. I think the back alley with the ladder was nicely textured, and the bank wall's bricks looked ok. I noticed that one building's facade had windows cut out in it but no window textures inside them. Maybe you missed it? Also you tried to make some windows appear lit but the effect didn't read at all as such and was very wasteful on entities. You should try using text lights instead. Also same goes for some of the signs, unless it was because they were all models. And I understand why you did it for the arcade sign to look somewhat broken but the same effect could be achieved using text lights. And you could have gotten away with only two lights on the sign. note: I did appreciate the nice pictures you made. But make "everything" custom lol.

Scale/ Some parts had scaling issues like the doors being 6 inches thick. And stairs, only 4 steps to get eye level high? Thats like 18 inch step heights. Average step height is around 8 inches. Just be generally aware of scale and you would be fine. The terrorist's base in general has lots of potential becaause of its verticality. Even though the stair's scale is off it still looks nice besides the horrible textures.

Brushwork/ In most cases you did a very wonderful job on the brushwork! You achieved nice looking shapes with minimal brush usage. Ie. the street lights are very well brushed out. I think in certain areas you did too much unnecessary brushwork ie. the rooftop wire tubes for the lights. Although it looks nice, the player doesn't see it enough for what it's worth. Perhaps you could just make it by altering the textures/ painting the tubes over the textures. Some of the lights were nicely made but could have been made by one brush rather than three by using the clip tool and maybe vertex manipulation. Also in many places cylinder brushes overlap other brushes which is a huge no no unless pretty neccessary. The ceiling lights could be lowered 1 or 2 units from the ceiling. And i'm not sure about func_detail because I usually use func_walls but i'm pretty sure that brushes within an entitiy carve into themselves so for the street lights, the lights should be their own entities or not touching the rectangles. It was nice that you grouped many entities together rather than making them their own. Architecturally, there wasn't anything really astounding. Everything worked pretty well and looked pretty nice but nothing really stood out as over the top or unprecedented. Your architecture was nice but a rendition of vernacular design. This is ok because your level is simply depicting a few blocks but it could always be more developed. You did develope some building's facades but you kept it pretty minimal. This i'm sure too is because of gold's limitations.

Optimization/ I also noticed you placed many ambient generics right next to eachother. If any of them are the same, just place one in the middle. In my map de_dust_thunder, in the mosque between the two fire dishes on either side I only placed one ambient_generic on each side of the mosque rather than four. Also, it seemed like you wanted to make everything a func_breakable. This is fun to shoot but you lose shadow detail in doing so and waste entities.

Other notes/ The arcade had a lot of potential. It was pretty cool but was confusing to tell what you wanted with it. It sort of looked abandoned but sort of didn't. And the ladder was sort of unrealistic. Just imagine how cool a little dark stair well cut into the wall that took you to the second floor would look. And maybe some candy for sale or prizes at the clerk stand. The building also had potential vertically, just open the facade up to the design you had going on the outside. If you did these few things it would be nice.

The train station was really nice. It could have been larger scale but at the small scale it looked ok. At the scale it somewhat depicts a poorer area but that's ok. I also personally didn't like the "shell" because I always get bad gass from them but that's totally personal. The gas station looked cool inside and I loved the music as I used it in my dream mod.

I really really liked your over abundance of ambience and especially music. On top of the night club is an awesome place to camp with an awp or scout. And you also did some cool work with lighting even though it could be optimized. The feelings you portrayed were nice as I think you were going after.

Forgot to mention, the t base building's court yard had a lot of potential and could be developed more ie. height variations, garden features etc. The models however were really bad. The half life plants look like big green tounges. Just use your judgement on what models you use. Here's a good site for some models: http://hl-lab.ru/eng/goldsrc/Models

hmm, what else. Ahh, I loved the secret! Secrets are always fun. You must know this too neing that you are also a fan of Hondo. Though the round start thing might mess the trigger up for it. Just rem, gold compiles extremely fast. That's why I constantly compile and test play my maps. Test play it and get a feel for scale, and omit things that look bad. Like the super fat doors and weird half life models.

I liked the chairs in the courtyard t base Though those textures! Eww.

Hmm, I liked the real life coke machine. Do they give you health? I really liked how you had a health charger, this is un common in cs maps. I like anything that is un common, once again try to be un precedented and add "new" features to the practically dead game. Who cares at this point. Hmm, makes me want to come up with a new gameplay for cs like the 35 hp knife maps.

As i've mentioned before, I liked how in the train station you fall down but cannot get back up that way. If I had done it I would have added stairs, so it is nice to see something unnexpected that drastically alters game play. This idea could be further developed in other areas.

Oh yea, the middle construction area seemed a little odd. I think this was due to the fact that it's practically all sheet rock and not frame. I think at that level of construction it would be all frame. And it seemed a little brush heavy, I know i'm telling you do it all frame but less brush heavy. The gates around it creating the area itself was cool. At second glance it actually looks really nice, just needs less sheetrock/ insulation somehow. Maybe plywood?

The pendulum door in the office looked a little strange. There's wind inside? This effect I often use for hanging lamps. Maybe if the door was outside.

To sum it up, at first glance the map looked nice and huge but the overall effect was horribly nullified due to the textures and somewhat because of the flatness. I think hondo did a street like level, check it out for vertical relief. A few things could be optimized. And a lot could be further developed. None the less, a nice map. Perhaps this calls for a streetlevel 3? hehe.

Hey thanks for the full on review. I would've developed a lot more with certain aspects. For one I hate how the maximum for building's height is 384 but this was done to avoid going overboard with GoldSrc. As for brush work, it seems that I am at my limits with this. It also makes testing harder due to the fact that fast -vis isn't usable with this type of size, however though I can compile it without -vis for testing(which I did a few times, the lag was a nightmare). Another issue was optimization. I tried to use as little brushes as possible but like you said, it still is a bit much in a few areas. I also believe that I did leave a few unneeded textures in use which not only makes the file size bigger but affects speeds and such. I must admit, I did change little to the construction site from the original. This section was actually copied and modified from the original(I believe it does use less brushes though, can't remember). So I do blame myself for getting lazy with a few areas like that. The arcade I would've liked to do so much more but I just felt limited and I had to use simple machines that are just copied and retextured(not to mention the exteriors lack any detail besides one single color). I didn't want to use a quantity of custom models just simply due to the large size. I was already uncomfortable with the amount of models and sounds in this release, I couldn't imagine any more to be included. Speaking of which, I agree that sound was a done poorly in terms of optimization. In some areas it wouldn't be heard when I tested the map, so I did an unnecessary abundance of ambient_generics. My main problem was due to the large scale map and the amount of time it has taken, I did start to be a bit sluggish with optimization. I do wish I did take more time into Streetlevel, but it what it is. I think someday there will be a sequel to Streetlevel, but on another engine(and no, this doesn't mean Source). As for updates, I am leaving it at 1.1 and anyone is welcome to edit it and do what they please(as long as credit is given). One last grip I would say is that even though I credited my usage of items, only one or two of them were actually used with permission. I wished I asked some companies or individuals themselves for permission(such as Mindmotor Studios). Anyways thanks for the well-written and great review zeeba, keep on mapping!