New Map: cs_bank Created 20 years ago2004-08-11 16:40:12 UTC by metawera

This is my first map. I think it is nearly complete, but I want to know what things I should adjust/fix. There's technically room for ten on each team, but it would probably be better 5v5. Some features I want to make sure everyone knows about:
In the security room (2nd floor, the "Security" door) there is a lightswitch that disables all internal lights, then dimmer "emergency" lights are turned on. Also, there are three terminals in there, each of which is tied to a trigger_camera. I think they track an invisble object, but not always. The custom wad is just for the sign out front. Hostages are in the president's office (adjacent to the security room) and in the basement vault. (Stair access in middle-south, bank faces east) The stairway the T's start in goes up to the roof, and the skylight can be shot through, of course

This was compiled with -fast vis, because I have 62 direct lights (I know, a lot).

Let me know if there are any inconsistences (i.e. brick texture on an interior door) or improvements (to put in ambient sounds, etc.)

Other than the bank.wad, you need the standard halflife.wad. Don't forget your nightvision and flashlight when the lights go out!

http://cariad.co.za/twhl/mapvault_map.php?id=1803

I'll try it first thing tommorow.

62 Direct light's really isn't as many as it seems.
If you are releasing a map for people to comment, it helps if you put forward your best work....

Good Luck with it...
You will find some good layout ideas for CS mapping at this site: Dave johnston

You shouldn't use entity lights, you know. You can use the trick mentioned in the last paragraph of this section of the ZHLT readme to make the texture lights switchable. They'll look a lot better!

I just played it for an hour with some brilliant bots that jaardsi showed us/me (thanks man :)). Really fun, great layout of the lobby section and I like the glass windows at the back.

You should definitely recompile though, and run vis -full. Yeah, it'll take awhile, but the wpoly count at the CT spawn is 3800. That means 3800 little triangles are being drawn for the map. HL never went over 800, and figures over 2000 usually start to get sluggish (HL just can't cope with that many).

• Nice shiny-looking glass windows, but too many of them I think. Hard to imagine the front part of that building staying up!

• You should tie one or two bits of decoration to the func_wall entity, as they are breaking up surfaces that they're touching (hence the nasty odd lighting around the table in the vault and a light hanging from a ceiling). You need to do that to the large pillar in the lobby too. That'll lower the wpolies and speed up your map too (a bit).

• On the left, as you go through the lobby toward the counter, there's a railing. The handrail doesn't meet up; I suggest reading this tutorial.

• The small door by the counter a) moves too slowly, and b) has an unpleasantly stretched texture on the top, possibly on the side too. If you're not sure how to texture single faces, read this.

• I like the boxes in the safe room, very authentic even though they're obviously HL prefabs. Still. I think that there should be more doors, more security getting down to there.

• Please please make the hostage rescue area bigger and cover the whole CT spawn area! I was running around with hossies not finding anywhere to put them.

All in all, a very fun map, nicely laid-out, but the lighting lets it down a bit. Sort those bugs, and the lighting, and it'll be great :). You could probably spruce up some of the walls too.

#Louisiana, Louisiana, they're tryin'a wawsh us away#

Thanks for the info. I'm working on reshaping the front, and I'm going over my textures face-by-face; thanks for picking that one up.

I'm looking at using that textlights feature, but I'm having trouble having a light switch activate/deactivate it. I downloaded that new .fgd (cs_expert-tom793c.fgd) but I don't know how to trigger it. I've tried setting the textured brush as a func_wall, with a button_target targetting the "wall"'s name. Nothing. Also, how can I have a textlight start off?

Right now, the light is stuck "on," so it is illuminating.

The Grouped setting is essentially a hack to allow your texlights to be switchable. To use it, create a brush entity with texlights on it, and set its style to Grouped; then create a light entity with the same name as the brush entity.

HLRAD will now pretend that the light emitted by the texlight is "really" being emitted by your light entity! In other words, turning the light on and off will now turn the texlights on and off, too.

You'll probably want to set the brightness of the light entity to 0.01, so that it emits no light of its own.

In short, you should target the entity light, same as normal with switchable lights.

All right, but how do you set a brush entity to the "group" style? I tried creating a light with a name, then grouping it to a brush, but that didn't work.

I also updated the map to have more reasonable door heights, cleaned up the short door on the counter and got rid of all but a few of the door sounds.

Ah, sorry, I shoulda said, you need to add something to the FGD. If you don't know what to do, send it to me and I'll do it for ya, if you feel okay with doing it yourself (try opening your FGD in Notepad if you're undecided) then the bit to be added is in Courier here.

Look forward to the update.

Holy crap! Now that's cool. All right, I have all of the interior (white) non-spot lights coverted to texlights. It appears to mimic the light_spot effect, so I've had to bump up the luminosity on the smaller stairwell lights. I'm going to modify the front to have two vertical windows with side supports (so the roof doesn't look like it's going to cave in) Hopefully it will lower the wpoly count at the spawn (it shrank from 3800 to 2797-ish)

However, it appears the majority of the high count comes from needing to render through the doors.

cs_bank mark III will be full textlights, modified front and vault access, and if anyone has good alternative textures for anything (must come from halflife.wad) post back here or in the map vault on the cs_bank page here with the texture name.

May I ask why only halflife.wad textures?

Well, I would prefer keeping the custom textures someone would have to download to a minimum. Also, I want to make sure the textures I use haven't been lifted from another wad. I should have said: only textures that I can use without explicit permission.

I've only made one map and played CS, I don't know a lot about the courtesies and such of sharing prefabs and textures.

Okay, just that you can use all the default CS WADs as they are property of VALVe. These are:

ajawad.wad
chateau.wad
cs_747.wad
cs_assault.wad
cs_bdog.wad
cs_cbble.wad
cs_dust.wad
cs_havana.wad
cs_office.wad
cstrike.wad
de_airstrip.wad
de_aztec.wad
de_piranesi.wad
de_storm.wad
de_vertigo.wad
itsitaly.wad
n0th1ng.wad
torntextures.wad
tswad.wad

<phew>

These are other texture sites/artists that offer decent custom textures and reference pics which might be useful:

http://planethalflife.com/wadfather
http://blaz.csbanana.com
http://www.planethalflife.com/crinity
http://planetunreal.com/undulation/
http://www.pixelmap.com/
http://www.morguefile.com
http://planetquake.com/bighouse/textures.asp
http://www.johnsto.co.uk/

hmmm... Obviously, my walls are too tall to have the trim in part of the texture, unless I want to stretch them (ha!) I'll check those out, I thought those wads were all contained in halflife.wad's entirety.

Right now, I'm compiling with nothing but texlights, so I'll check to make sure the brightness is fine... incidentally, why does the compiler say there are over 400 direct lights? Is it summing up the total surface area, because I didn't add any lights, just replaced them.

400 direct lights isn't much. The reason it's higher is to do with the texlights' surfaces areas, as you said.

hey i just played your map and it was really awesome but i noticed two glitches, so to say. one is that at ct spawn if you look at the bottom left of the bank there are black streaks its prob jus my comp but it might have something to do with wc or hammer. the other is possibly a leak but probably not. under the staircase in the back corner there is a white line. its probably not a leak, just a gap. thats it. once again i really liked your map, especially considering that this is your first map.

I just checked out your map about 10 minutes ago and it's good, especially for your first map. If I could just add one suggestion though, I noticed how the sky environment was the standard desert. For a bank map I'd suggest switching that environment to city or something that seems to fit a little better. Otherwise that's it, keep it up, you're doing great. And just in case you don't know how, try out this tutorial I found on this site http://cariad.co.za/twhl/tutorial.php?id=6. It worked for me.

-Koozie

I'm pretty sure that the glitch squrel is describing is because the filing cabinet is too close to that thin wall.

You should probably make the vault wall and door thicker too: you can shoot straight through with the M4.

I noticed how the sky environment was the standard desert.

Ever seen the movie 'Scorched'?

But you're right, it would look better in a cityscape, nice eye for that . Never would'a noticed, tbh.

Wow, there was a flurry of replies just I was doing a full compile. However, I've gone through the map again and here are the changes:

The sky is "space" - City's brownish color made the map look weird
The cabinet's etc are a few inches off the walls
The upper hallway to get the final hostage is wider
The vault is now protected by a nice 20 in. vault door.

As far as security goes, davideo59 suggested lockpicking and lasers, but I thought that adding another layer of difficulty to getting those hostages would make the CTs job impossible. I added another set of doors right at the bottom of the staircase.

However, there are still a number of questions I have:
1. On the second floor, in the hallway before the security door, there's light seeping through the floor (the emergency lights make this obvious) can I get rid of this with dramatically raising the r_speed?
2. While running in gl_wireframe 2, I noticed that the engine is still rendering the levels above and below through the floors. They are all func_walls, and is there some way to prevent this needless rendering?
3. The hostage is now stuck in the floor on the ground level. How can I get him back up there when the entity says he's in the office?

1 - HL engine issue. Ive seen it in many maps, official and non-official.

2 - Hint Brushes could solve your problem if used correctly. If I read correctly, you say your floors are func_walls? If that's the case, un func_wallify them.

Hint brush tutorial: http://cariad.co.za/twhl/tutorial.php?id=71

You can also get a few good ones on Google.

3 - No idea on the hostage situation, sorry.

2: to un-entity the floors, click "To World" underneath the texture panel.

3: Maybe lift him up a little further?

PS: one unit x= one inch. There's no real-life scale for HL1.

Where are the SKIP and HINT textures located? (Which .wad?) My halflife.wad doesn't have them.

in zhlt.wad who comes with the Zoners Half-Life Tools (links page)

ah ha! Did not include that wad in my configuration.

I read the tutorial and he always had these brushes arranged floor to ceiling. Does anyone know if spanning them across doors (a kind of wall to the engine) will be helpful? The reason I ask this is the main foyer has a 2800 wpoly, and I'm looking for ways to reduce. (The 800 limit is shot to heck, so right now I'm trying for any kind of reduction) Please, if anyone can suggest where to place the hint brushes, I'd really appreciate it!

And RabidMonkey777, thanks for the unwall thing. Did the trick. Took about two hours to compile, but... it did!