A day of mapping

>Rainbow-colored sewage water

>Looks nice

 

Medium-sized. Certainly larger than the map this post started off with.

 

Eventually.









In Valve Time.

 

You've improved

 

I love this.
Anyway, replying to your Brushes > Meshes
Not always.

Do you know how GPUs work, or anyway game engines?

 

I broke the Hello World script... 7 times.

 

I kinda expected that from your overly confident "Brushes > Meshes" xD
(No offence intended x3)

 

Brushes = no modelling skeels needed

Meshes = hardcore modelling skeels needed


Argument is invalid.

Does not compute.

Deleting system files...

Completed.

 

Seriously, and I thought I was good at mapping... God damn it, I wouldn't be able to make that "kinda good" map in only one day. Heck, I wouldn't even make it as good in like... 3 or 4.

I can map, I can think of building design (more or less), I can't do outside for sh*** and yet all my friends said that it was "pretty good". And now, seeing that this is considered bad and was only made in one day comparing to what I'm able to, I feel like poop :L

PS. Does anybody know any good map design tutorials? :L
PPS. That includes buildings inside, streets/alleys outside and possibly natural environment like forests using the EP2 assets.

 

If at all possible, steer clear of filling your maps with ALL Episode 1/2 content.

 

EP1/EP2 have a lot of important models and textures, you know. That's why they're so commonly used.

And Niker107, I started out on www.interlopers.net. Outdoor maps aren't really that difficult to make look nice, you just need to do the lighting right. Make sure to align the lighting with the skybox. As for layout, just a few boxes and curves work just fine. Then slap on a 3D skybox or just add some displacement cliffs if you're feeling lazy. Interior buildings? Just add prop_physics and prop_static ents. Everywhere. And add branching hallways. And stairwells. And interactive stuff. Another good website with some tutorials is www.halfwit-2.com.

A good way to get an idea for what you want to do is enter the magical magic world called "The Outside". Then observe the architecture and landscape. Draw inspiration from it and incorporate it into your map. However, do not spend too much time in "The Outside", as your computer may become infected by the murderer of LCD screens - The "Sun".

(Helpful tip: for smaller outdoor landscapes, displacing your main brush is a great first step because A. you can make hills and mountains with relative ease and B. it automatically populates the top face of that brush with foliage bits.)

 

I'm not talking about skills, I'm talking about optimisation and game engines.
I use Unity, and if you were to make it all brushes, the map would lag like 50 times more than the same map as a mesh.

 

As far as I'm concerned, Unity is a joke. I can't recall a single major title developed with Unity, and every time I try to use it, I'm stymied by its horrible interface.

And this is coming from a guy who learned hammer by self-teaching and through what limited resources came offline with the wolrdcraft 3.1 engine that shipped with HL:GOTY.

Also try to remember meshing and modelling is much more difficult to learn than brushwork. If you're not good at it, you have less to work with, and then you get bethesda syndrome, where everything indoors is Duplos, the mapping system.

 

Unity is actually quite prevalent in the Indie games community. Just because AAA companies don't use it doesn't mean it's terrible.

Yes, you can self teach Hammer because it's easy as fuck. Did you really expect to use Unity right out of the box? Unity is an Engine, not a mapping tool, of course it will take time and tutorials to use it.

 

I love Hammer for it's simplicity. Unity intrigued me, but the interface just looks so... clunky. IDK, just a personal pet peeve I guess.

 

I'm in an AutoCAD class and I hate it. Fucking boring.

 

Autodesk Inventor ftw

 

I am fully capable of making my own engines, but to be honest I'd rather use an already made one, because I am a game developer, not an engine developer.

And you still keep bringing difficulty in.

I am just saying that on the optimisation side it's very bad.

What do you think maps do when they get compiled?
They stay brushes? :3

 

Dude you're 17. I really don't think you can make a game engine.

And I'm not talking about stuff like Unity. I'm talking about flatout DIY C++. You can't do that, lol.

 

Without adding to the off-topic deviation, I'd say you did well for the work presented for only one day of mapping. It takes days to weeks for me to get elements to work properly and be suitable together, I go through several revisions and am constantly cross-referencing with written work to ensure everything is adding up. My advice to you, is to keep experimenting, take your time and remember that speed means absolutely nothing (especially if you are not getting paid), if it takes you many days or weeks or even months to make a quality area, then do so. Quality over quantity always wins and is always much more rewarding for both the player and the author.

If you are into any of the dystopian forms of architecture, look up brutalism (especially the style of buildings used by I.B.M during the 1950s-1980s). Gattaca is one of many films to incorporate this style (see some of the images below, not all present in the film):




The first thing I ever created in Hammer was simply a full out brick room with a single, lonely washing machine, added with lighting that was worse than those awful, disgusting, repulsive lights you would see in a public classroom (which by the way, make everyone look ill).