Stormy's mapping notes

[Dementei]

beautiful can i marry her

[Black_Stormy]

Guys, check out these maps, they are extremely pretty.

http://cevo.com/custom/vote/cevo-gameba ... g-contest/

I know it's a difrerent engine branch but none of our maps have anywhere near this amount of polish. There are heaps of well placed props, uninteractable details and great lighting. If we had even one map that looked this nice DA would be so much more attractive to new players. Please have a look at these maps and try to incorporate some of the detailing concepts into your own.

[Ott]

Yeah all our maps really need a detail pass. Dementei, see if you can put some construction work on adjacent buildings, maybe have helicopters circling the play area. Make the ground look pretty.

[Black_Stormy]

I have been trying to really quantify what "make the ground look pretty" exactly entails in my write-ups, since our maps need more than a few days to get them up to the standard of those maps. They look pro as FAUCK and it's really hard to emulate that.

I opened up a stock map on CS:GO today and went into a nondescript hallway in order to see what they had that we didn't. Even our hallways need work. Here's what I came up with:

http://blackstormyonepointnine.blogspot ... imple.html

[Demolitions]

I'm always here to help It's actually kind of bothers me how the rooftop maps don't have alined textures. Little touches like that. Too blocky of buildings, not enough small touches. That's why I always do basic layout first for gameplay, then write down notes on a piece of paper for details to be added later to each area.

[Vino]

It's all here if you want to give it a go: http://sync.doubleactiongame.com

[Black_Stormy]

Everyone go and have a look at Neotokyo right now, starting with this video:



This is a long running mod that has had a great artist team working on it for a long time but it shows what a mod team can achieve on source with a little elbow grease.

I particularly want mappers to have a look at this stuff, I think it's safe to say the lack of custom props is my fault. But have a look at how they use low angle, sharp lighting not only to give dramatic light to a scene, but to give really nice shadows on opposing walls, create landmarks that players can navigate by and to show off their material work.

Speaking of material work, have a look at the tiles all along that trainstation. The normal maps have been set up so that the tiles reflect a little in different directions, to give the illusion of a more organically laid tile floor/wall. This is the kind of material definition stuff that you can't do by just converting an image to a normal map. I can do a video tutorial of how I would do it if you guys think it would help improve your maps. It's not too hard to make and bake world textures in a 3d program.

Another point is that they are using a lot of selfillum on their neon advertisements (which are appropriate given their setting, and can be appropriate in ours). But not just a selfillum and leave it at that, they have then used the selfillum textures in combination with some tricky light entities to give the effect of the sign casting light. Another fancy way you can light your maps.

The textures hardly ever repeat either. If you look at any of these walls they are often broken up into either extrusions, corners, bevels, steps (up and down) and building features. Breaking up the texture flow on BSP brushes is an easy and super effective way of creating detail and not boring the player. It's not about making an amazingly detailed environment, it's about preventing the player from noticing how repetitive the environment actually is.

Download the mod and have a look at their environments. Write down notes on what impressed you, then try to think how you can use it or something similar in your own maps. Try to figure out exactly what you need to do to your maps to take them up a notch on the plank of action quality. As small as the team is, we have every avenue we need to make some damn sexy maps.

Maybe when it all calms down a bit we should play some other mods together and talk about what we want to incorporate in terms of map quality. Our gameplay is solid, visuals is lagging.

[Black_Stormy]

Doublepost, just found this epic library of awesome reference shots that I need to save for later:

http://ricoromeo.wordpress.com/2010/11/ ... uzine-com/
http://ragpickinghistory.co.uk/

[Black_Stormy]

DA_STREEEEEEEEEEEEEEETS















I also did a little write up over on Interlopers.

[Demolitions]

DA_STREEEEEEEEEEEEEEETS

I also did a little write up over on Interlopers.

Looking good, but we REALLY gotta dump those stock HL2 cars. Ew.

[Ott]

Agreed. We need to escape from the generic HL2 artstyle.

[Dementei]

As long as we stick to the art set of da_streets for any new maps, we should be golden. I'd rather scrap every map we have or update the ones we have now to this quality that are worth doing so.

Lead the way stormi of darkness

[Black_Stormy]

Well I am poised to do Megachat next and then probably Jinkies after that but each of them are going to need more time then streets did. I am doing them in order of fun-to-playness so if there's one in particular that is more popular I guess I should detail it first. If we have any new maps that are super fun then I'll detail them too but for now we're cultivating the maps we have.

I'm also compiling props to where I think they would go in the normal file structure we already have, so it's kinda hard to use only the models I used here, other than look for them logically in the model browser.

[Demolitions]

Well I am poised to do Megachat next and then probably Jinkies after that but each of them are going to need more time then streets did. I am doing them in order of fun-to-playness so if there's one in particular that is more popular I guess I should detail it first. If we have any new maps that are super fun then I'll detail them too but for now we're cultivating the maps we have.

I'm also compiling props to where I think they would go in the normal file structure we already have, so it's kinda hard to use only the models I used here, other than look for them logically in the model browser.

Lol you're very welcome to detail my office map

Haha been working on other shit lately so haven't been mapping as much :C

[Ott]

Cocaine is the next most popular map, so we should work on that.