Forum posts

Look at the Combine mounted guns, like in this tutorial:

http://www.interlopers.net/tutorials/25687

VDC notes that sdk_d2_coast_12.vmf should have one which you can reverse-engineer, too.

Good quick explanation of modular setpiece creation. One aspect I was hoping you would touch on which I didn't catch much of (aside from masking the 'seams' in modular pieces with a corner/extrusion bit) which is essential for anyone creating modular environments, is an explanation of scale when it applies to modularity. Artist Thiago Klafke has a brilliant tutorial which outlines the concepts of scale on a modular level.

Thanks Daubster, and Blitzkrieg!

Grim is correct; we are licensing Source for this project (it runs on the same engine as CS:GO and takes advantage of their new lighting/shadowing system) - the original Insurgency mod is still available on Steam to play for free (although at this point it is basically unsupported and unaffiliated.)

In response to your question, Scotch: It blends the basic proven FPS mechanics of every game of it's kind with more 'realism' options without being too over the top - there are controls for leaning and stance changes but they don't impair your ability to fight, there are no vehicles, or environments that take several hours to traverse. The focus is on the cooperative infantry combat. Extra attention has been paid to the gunplay, weapon handling, damage balancing etc to make players who demand 'realism' comfortable without excluding those who don't want a really 'hardcore' experience (although there are options for that as well.) We're also a very small, independent development team that is committed to supporting our community by releasing frequent content updates and patches to address their requests!

Perhaps some of you remember the Insurgency mod for HL2? For about two years now, a team of very talented developers (and myself) at New World Interactive have been working on recreating and reinventing Insurgency from a gameplay-first angle, trying to make an indie FPS that is competitive yet fun as well!

Last Friday, we released an 'Early Access' promotion for Insurgency, which allows you to get early access to the game and all future content updates for $19.99 - if you're interested, the game looks up your alley, or you are just passionate about supporting independent game development that's evolved from mods - we'd really appreciate your support!

You can get more information at Our website including some screenshots, feature and purchasing information. The whole point of the 'Early Access' system is to allow players to get into the game early (right now this would be considered an 'alpha' build) and to not only see how the development process changes and shapes the project into something more polished, but more importantly, it gives players the chance to provide their insight and feedback so that we may tailor and modify the game to the community's desires.

If this sounds interesting to you, please check out the link above! I will be happy to reply to any PMs or questions about the project, as well!

I think that's the brilliance of it all; though ultimately the onus to choose a task is on the individual employee, everyone is free to suggest or point out where your talents might be best put to use. Your go-to guy is anyone else in the office or the project you're working on!

Valve is such a unique company so it makes sense that their managerial structure is going to be equally unique. Nice to see we're getting more information lately about how they operate as in the past they have tended to be rather secretive!

The key to scoring a job there is to have a specific skill in some aspect of game development that they can apply to future projects in a production manner. I doubt it matters if you're the biggest Half-Life fanboy out there, or have been developing games/mods on their products for years - what matters is being able to contribute to another Valve-quality release. Here's
a pre-interview sheet from their booth I snagged at GDC. Two questions isn't so bad, hmm? Certainly different from any other employment pre-interview I've seen.

Joking aside though, I like the way you think Striker. A truly invaluable person to get on board would be Rabid Monkey because he has all the experience of working on Black Mesa and can tell us how to avoid the pitfalls they've met which have prevented them from releasing for like 7 years.

While I dont have much mod-time available anymore you guys are always free to pick my brain about Source modding and leveldesign related things!

Congrats to zeeba and skals! Nice to still see some goldsrc love in 2012, and even moreso maps that can hold their own (and even outmatch as there are some pretty awful CSS dust remakes out there) visually against ones built in a newer engine. Props.

It's a Hammer alternative

Decompile the models ( http://www.chaosincarnate.net/cannonfodder/cftools.htm ) then import them into max ( http://www.wunderboy.org/apps/smdimport.php )

I could see clean hammer perspective view shots like that making for some pretty sweet large abstract prints. Hm..

Haha, this is pretty cool...

They are rather expensive to render like all particles which use a lot of screen-space, but if you don't have too many sprites emitting per second you're okay. That means some playing with the right scale/emission values to get something that looks ok without raping your fps

Posted my entry on the mapvault for anyone who wants an early look

func_dustcloud or func_dustpuff?

Or use fog_volume if it's a l4d/2 map and make it use a fog_controller that has a very close range...of course this will only appear when you enter the room itself unless you have several fog controllers and volumes set up.

Anyone have any hints on custom overlays?

Mine were a little off-centre even though I used the exact offset values (I thought I screwed them up the first time so I printscreened them the next and still no good.) I think the camera's position relative to the radar/overlay map is just abit skewed.

Yes, navigation meshes are the same thing. It's the same method that Left 4 Dead/2 uses for their bots' navigation. But yea it takes some time to get the bots working properly...

adding info_nodes to try and get my hosties to move, but still no go.

You have to use the nav graphs in CSS (what the bots use) for hostages too.

I know the GamerNode guys all have press accounts..and TechConnect too I think. If your games/review site is relatively well known it seems easy enough to score them Steam games...

My WIP for the competition...inspired by cs_backalley but the layout is more concise and simplified to promote combat and shorter rounds seeing as it is a hostage rescue map. Had to spend a lot of time getting the environment lighting correct so you can see some of the pictures are still abit lacking in detail (notably the basement, and outside of the buildings). I spent almost half of the competition time working on another map before scrapping it in favor of this layout so there are still plenty of loose ends to tie up before the deadline

Seconding what Jeffmod is saying; the lighting is mismatched - to me it looks like three different layers of light settings...it could either be sky fog, the tree materials themselves, the lighting parameters....whatever it is you should work on getting them to blend with each other a little more.

Yes, easily, in Hammer you can replace textures with a few clicks. This involves decompiling and then recompiling the map which you are trying to avoid which is why I mentioned the alternative. If you don't want to recompile the map, it's going to be tedious work.

I would really suggest some different textures, perhaps it's just me but I can't stand most of the Source textures. At least the retail ones anyways.

Have to agree on this, the HL2 ported textures look absolute shit in GS (way too fuzzy) - even some of the HL textures look better because they were designed for lower resolution. Might just need to sharpen the Source ones after down-rezing them to avoid the extreme fuzziness, but still...

Source's lightmaps are higher resolution than GS too so baking rad can take longer on older PCs especially if you have a big, open map or lots of surfaces which catch light. Other than that they should be faster across the board than stock GS tools. The BSP process is sped up and combined with CSG so you only have to run one process before actually crunching the complicated stuff (vis and rad)

Find out what materials you want to make green then replace them? All local files in /cstrike will override the ones in the package files.

I usually work on textures as I'm working on a mesh and tend to save in .tga out of photoshop so I don't have to worry about selecting proper VTF options (or running thru vtex if you don't use the photoshop export plugin)

Format doesn't matter as long as the filename is correct so if you work with vtf plugin it works too

A few notes about exporting from Max...

*If you're making a staticprop you can omit the SMD sequence export (modelnameREF.smd) - you can use your reference mesh as the idle sequence in your .qc file instead. Infact you can always use your reference/base mesh as your idle animation if your model isn't going to have any movement/skeletal animation.

*Guistudiomodel is always broken for me but you can use studiomdl.bat for your mod/game if it has one (or studiomdl in /bin) to compile .qc files (just make a shortcut on your desktop to the .bat file and drag+drop) - if you don't have a .bat file you can make one as long as you append the -game parameter to studiomdl with the path to the game you're making models for

Last, but not least:

THE NAME OF YOUR TEXTURE YOU APPLY IN MAX IS THE NAME OF THE MATERIAL THE MODEL WILL SEARCH FOR!

This means if you apply texture2.tga to your max mesh, the compiled .mdl will look for texture2.vmt in the materials location you specify in your .qc! So make sure to name your materials properly before exporting.

If you did this and your materials were still not working, you can use a tool called MdlTextureInfo (http://www.wunderboy.org/sourceapps.php) to print all of the model's material information for debugging, so you can see exactly why it's broken.

Materials with broken paths or incorrect locations usually show up as white or checkerboard in-game for me while wireframe indicates either a material or shader problem, but can sometimes also indicate a missing asset (this usually happens to me if someone else is hosting and I join their server) - but mdltextureinfo will help you if you ever have models without materials that you can't figure out, for whatever reason

So much whining about Source. Are your guys' computers really old or something? The tools work just as well as they always have (there have been points in time where they were buggy but I've been working in CSS config for weeks with 0 problems. I work in the licensed version of Portal2 engine at work all day and we have more issues with that than we do the free SourceSDK)

Hammer crashes constantly and always has...especially if your hardware is old(er). Set autosave to 1 minute and hope for the best...

Saying goldsrc > src is just laughable....yeah, you arent having any crashes because you're working with an engine that's over ten years old Compare the features of Source to Goldsrc as well and you can see why there are more problems - because there are plenty of additional entities, engine features, etc....Not saying the engine is without it's problems, far from it, but you need to work with it for a while and learn WHY it sucks before calling it horrendously broken or inferior

Regarding the competition I'm a little confused on how much I can deviate from the theme. I've tried to maintain some of the original theming of the map, but what exactly are 'coherent deviations' that remain within the contest rules? In terms of theme are you looking for a remake maintaining the same color scheme, visual elements etc, or are you looking for a remake that doesn't necessarily maintain the same color scheme, but is still generally recognizable as being themed around the original map.

(Basically, I've tried to maintain some of the same thematic elements and the feel of some areas from the original map, but have tried to tie them all together, to make the map feel more 'real') - I guess what I'm trying to figure out is what 'defines' the theme of the map and should be retained to stay within the boundaries of the competition?

I'm making a cs_backalley remake if it helps - as an example one thing I've changed is avoiding the use of red bricks everywhere and using different colors to help distinguish different areas of the map (compounding the layout problems in the original was that every exterior part of the map looks the same...)

EDIT: Cs_a380 isnt a bad idea if you're going to base the map around the entire plane. I was thinking of doing a cs727 remake as well (note 727 so it focuses more on the airport as opposed to multi-level plane) but making a good-looking plane in Source, not to mention all the other assets required, is a lot of work....

surface is too big to have a lightmap

Your displacement is too big. your only option is to shrink the displacement or split it up into smaller ones.

A hot dog cart for an urban setting. 5102 tris, 256x and 1024x maps (seperate map for umbrella), though not textured yet.

Are you sure you can append parameters to applaunch shortcuts like that? The only way I've gotten things that run through steam shortcuts like that is to append the +map command to the 'launch options' tab in Steam.

Humorous/Reference-filled store signs included.

Props for the starcraft reference...

I thought you could do sub-unit mapping if you turn grid snapping off?

Doesn't matter because if there are off-grid verts they'll get snapped automatically during compile (or perhaps when reloading the map, hammer likes to fuck with vertices that are off-grid)

The positioning of the actual entities doesn't matter; they're universally applied to the map (the light_env casts light from all toolsskybox textures in the map while the env_sun just positions a sprite in the sky) - you have to keep their angles values close, though, if you want it to look believable (otherwise the light won't be coming from the direction of your sun/moon!)

The VDC wiki is valuable but not everything on there is completely accurate as it's community-built (usually minor inconsistencies or errors, but still...) I guess the advantage is that if you find anything wrong you can just edit it yourself

Man, if only I'd have known about that a few months ago, would be perfect for something I'm working on at the moment. Perfect for natural curves...

Not many other people would.

Because you would know

Are you using tripods? :/

It's going to be free, but that's neither here nor there.

I'm all for it, it means we get to play new, innovative and creatively designed games which are ultimately more fun than more CoD clones.

I may be abit biased, though, I work on one such project that used to be a mod

Is there a way to print the compile log to a text file?

It should already, look for yourmap.log in the same folder where your .bsp file is created.

No custom tools for Source yet; the L4D2 tools are the most up-to-date and fastest compiling tools that are available.

I think it just needs more detail. Specifically this screenshot - there needs to be some detail on the roofs I think (vents and such?), and along the buildings - bushes, trash bags, that kind of stuff.

Are you reading this and have you all figured out that this could very well happen and if it did then we would ALL be left in the void without any idea of how to reconnect with anyone.

There are other platforms of communication other than a forum y'know

themaptrap.com?

it's a trap!

the mighty atom =/= atom?

Seemed abit inevitable as doodle said...

And what's a dudv map?

Texture map used for refractions. Think of HL2 and the frosted glass doors or the strider's viewpunch effect.

Which part of the image are you talking about? I don't notice anything as pronounced as the other bump examples

I don't see what so-called special feature ssbump offers, as it does practically the same thing. Only it is smoother, looks better(less cartoony like the "normal" bumpmap), and as Valve says, it's faster to render.

Your example doesn't demonstrate it as well as, say, a brick surface or a bumpy rock wall lit from one specific direction with a bright light. The more diffuse your lighting is the less apparent the selfshadow will be. Also depends on the bump you are using and how strong it is.

100 textures is a lot! In order for a competition requiring single-wad/single texture set to be a challenge shouldn't it have few textures? like, say, make a map with only a set of wall, floor, ceiling, and trim/glue textures or something?

projectedtexture is dependent on what game you're working in, though. HL2 limits it to you just for the flashlight overlay, for instance.

Can't you generate a new scene.image with Faceposer?

Did you know that you can place entities in your 3D or Camera view in Hammer?

You can also manipulate things in 3D view by pressing 'x' and using the selection handles that appear in 3D view. (Turning on the 3D grid helps for this.) Copying and pasting things in the 3D view is a much easier way to work with props...

Droid X

Want or need nothing else. Notifications for everything Google-related? Yes please.

Should work in any Source-based game.