Models take color and brightness values from the lightmap of a world brush beneath them, so make sure their center/origin isnt stuck in a wall, i think you can manipulate it with using a single "bone" or whatever theyre called in models, also make sure the origin isnt even a bit off a ledge, because itll take values from the bottom of the pit which is probably dark. The max height models can take values is limited too, so maybe u could modify it in the code if its there, itd probably be better for those sentinels to take values from surface on top of them rather than beneath them
Compilers will cut it for you and discard all faces that arent visible, cutting it manually so that things arent stuck in each other could help avoid some bugs and lower poly count but what you did is still a pretty good way to make random interesting shapes, nothing bad with it
what about making a limited but reasonable set of construction materials, prefabs like beams, pillars, pipes, lamps etc, pretextured probably, and giving everyone the freedom to build anything they want out of it
I think there are MMOs made on Source, don't know if they are open world but it's possible I guess, Lineage II has a huge world and is built on a variant of Unreal 2 engine utilizing what is called "map streaming" to seamlessly join maps, however that would require big modification of the engine or a great deal of reverse engineering. Your best bet on Source would be a non open world, with perhaps faking the distance like someone mentioned before, using multiple servers or something like that.
"bevel the edges without being off grid", what you mean? you can extend them inside the wall a bit further, so you wont see them, or you can just make use of floating point coordinates, ive heard Sledge does have "sub-unit" coords, right? U can also do sub-unit stuff in hammer by building it huge and then downscaling to the required size, which preserves the preciseness, but you need to patch hammer with vluzacns float enabler, so .rmf is converted to .map before compilation without converting the floats to integers (units) or smth
That's very cool Alberto, though you'll probably reach light data limits pretty soon. Btw, since you got that stained churchy window, you might wanna try reshaping those doorway arches into gothic arches?
So you are an one armed mapper? Well you should start with one of the things you described, like an elevator. You will also be able to make the rocket in a very similar way you would make an elevator. Learn how to put monsters in a map and how to control them, like monster_scientist in your case. Play with env_sprite to learn to make the flames and smoke effects. The earthquake (env_shake?), roaring (ambient_generic) and so on. Don't try to make everything at once, make many small maps and learn how to create certain things then it will be way easier to make a larger project. I suck at mapping but well that's my advice to a beginner. Good luck =P
How to rotate a world brush perfectly: haven't tested throughoutly but think should work. First find vluzacn's modified 3.5 hammer which converts .rmf to .map retaining "float" precision coordinates (like what 32-bit or something allows, one millionth of a hammer unit i guess), then u turn the texture lock and rotate it manually in the grid viewport with those circles that appear when you click a few times on a brush. Not with ctrl+m because that snaps coords to 1 grid (useful too), if u hold shift it rotates in 15deg steps, i think you can change this in hammer options if u wanna a specific angle. Also you might want to manually subdivide intersecting brushes, turn certain surfaces into triangles (like terrain) to avoid flashing pixels and stuff when compiled. btw I think Jackhammer, the hammer clone, can rotate with ctrl+m without snapping to grid. U might wanna turn the whole mess into a func_detail. Oh and.. whats that ... hm.. theres some kinda parameter to bsp.exe?.. or csg?.. damn. like -tiny or something, like tiny 0.01?.. that removes faces smaller than that.. you should make it smaller if u get tiny see-through faces after compiling. Oh this was for another topic.. for scaling objects down. Basically same way you can scale world geometry to thousands of a unit, probably to the precision of models.. original hammer's scale fuction doesnt snap to grid tho yey! blabla
i might be wrong but vluzacns tools might be able to cast light correctly off that first texture in your first screenshot, without any additional invisible stuff
Penguinboy, if those columns of yours would be all cut diagonally (made of triangles) and skew lock worked well then you would be able to distort it the way you pictured it, in quite a shaggy way though, there would be a huge distortion on the line where triangles join, however the pixels would indeed be seamless and if wisely divided into triangles it could work quite well, probably for organic textures the most, I think I've seen this on many older games. Might be good enough to make truly seamless curved water flow and stuff like that
valve doesn't even really admit they made a game called half-life, though you sometimes hear about cs and team fortress, which they didn't make well nevemrind
wow orange youre such an idiot. thats the whole point of func_detail - not to contribute to visibility/not to seal maps. do you know why maps have to be sealed? so visibility can be calculated lol
If VHLT doesn't help then make the pillar with less edges or of larger diameter or scale down the texture, because lightmap grid size is 16 units for texture with scale of 1 so you want faces no smaller than 16 units to avoid smoothing bugs
anyway better not map your school u can get arrested ^^