Jest@ wrote:having said that, it doesnt look bad at all.
woah, WOAH, WOAH! I take that back a bit.
Pause. Take a deep breath, Fink. Ok, carry on.
I just played this.
this map is not 90% finished, it's more like 50%.
------LIGHTING------
I'm in a completely dark room. First of all, completely dark rooms suck to play in. mor e on that later. second of all, i didnt paint my nails or my knife with glow-in-the-dark paint.
Another example.
Same again. I'm looking down the stairs into a darkened room....and the rails are glowing all the way down.
Staircase from below.
I suspect you have very few cubemaps around, right? Source needs them to calculate the reflections. Otherwise it uses some kind of default cubemap that reflects the skybox. Hence the blue glow. You can tell something's wrong with it even in the daylight:
Look at the difference between the windows as they normally are, and the one i recklessly shot.
And even on a hossie's glasses. looks like he's wearing joke glasses.
-----DESIGN AND TEXTURING-----
ewww...bad texture scale mismatch
BAD texture repeating.
same again. that floor looks bland, quick and basic. Not to mention the random barrel!looks really out of place
UTTERLY DULL AND EMPTY. That reminds me of a reeeealy basic, quickly-made CS 1.6 map.
Similar.
Plain, boring to look at and unrealistic. Since when have roads just....dissappeared into rising ground? At least change the road markings.
some basic rectangles with unrealistic, unconvincing, repeating texturing.
texture scale way too high. looks pretty nasty.
looks a bit out of place and dull. Have some pipes cropping out there or something instead.
ooookay. First of all, just above the highlighted bit to the right there's a big concrete lump sticking out of a building. Why? I know it's the hossie room, but it looks crap from outside. And it means the wall to the left of it is just...a big, long, pointless wall. Maybe lower it, so you can see the lake from up on the road, add some buttresse and sewage pipes etc...take the HL2 water levels for examples. currently looks like a big, unfinished lump. not pretty.
Furthermore, the shadows under it (the circled bit) told me what it was i found wierd about your lighting....it points straight down. That only ever happens at the equator at mid-day. And it makes everything in the map look a bit wierd and unnatural
The second blob shows some bad texture-repeating. All in all, the displacement round this little lake is pretty good. But the two walls either side are big, bland, flat blocks.
So is this fence.
Really basic brushwork, looks way too CS-1.6.
Boring, plain. Bad texture repeating in background.
What, no door? no doorframe?
That's one bigass, oversized bar. and pretty bland.
big box with roof and a few windows cut into it. Since when have you seen buildings that look like that?. It's like the difference between these two:
Also, bad texturing on the wedge between wall and roof (circled) looks uuuugggglleeeeee.
Right. ok, that's the ranting bit over. First of all, let me say that despite all my harsh-sounding comments, i do actually quite like this map. but it's got a long way to go. I sound like i'm flaming, but that's just cos i'm being brief (okay, maybe i was flaming a little
but its for your own benefit!!)
Basically, it's just all a little plain. it's just big, textured rectangles. You need more detail, realism, visual flow, architectural touches. Some of its poor visual look is probably down to having vis and rad on 'fast' (fair enough for a WIP test distribution) but there are some basic lighting issues to be adressed as well as 'achitectural' considerations
-------SPEED/PERFORMANCE-------
Man, he wasn't kidding when he said this was for high-spec machines. i have never - repeat NEVER - got average FPS as low as this while playing a source game. It's reeeeeeealy bad FPS-wise. 2 reasons.
1) Everything's oversized. It's a common mapping error, we saw it a lot in CS 1.6.....it's a similar problem to what I have when i try and draw stuff. I invariably get stuck into drawing little details, mentally increasing their scale, so when i sit back and take the overview, the proportions are all wrong and a small A6 sketch ends up taking up most of the page. This means if you try and build a road with buildings either side, you end up with, like, twice the surface area you should.
Everything in this is just a bit too..BIG. The road's too wide, the fall to the railway track is enormous, the corridoors and doorways are made for 'the larger man'. There's too much plain expanse. Visually this makes stuff look pretty repetitive and dull, as i ranted on about, but performance-wise it means you've simply got more stuff to render than you need!
2) This is the big problem. Do not skip this. this is why your FPS is so unbelievably low: Type "mat_wireframe 1" in console, with cheats enabled. Tell me, what do you see? ALMOST EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!! At any one place in the map, the engine is considering almost every triangle in the map- including the relatively expensive water, steam, smoke and displacements - for rendering. No wonder its got low FPS!!!!
you NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED to read up about vis optimisation. Hint brushes, areaportals and detail brushes, dude.......otherwise you'll reeealy kill people's gameplay. Have you got a single detail brush in there??? I'm guessing this is your first major mapping project, right?
-------GAMEPLAY------
Running around this on my own, i think the gameplay might be pretty good. In fact, I think it could be very good. but.....i played with bots.......and every single game i played, the bots did exactly the same thing, and CTs won every time. I was CT and i was running around looking at shit, not actually 'playing'...so it was effectively 2CTs vs 3 Ts, and the won every time!!! and they won in exactly the same place every time!!!! This may be due to a poor navigation set - i know u said that wasn't completed - but it may mean the bots are taking the quickest route to the enemy.,...which means that one of your choke points is substantially faster to reach than the others.
Every single time, the T bots camped at the top of the staircase that leads to the COMPLETELY DARK bit. If they got the chance, they moved down to the bottom of those stairs. Theoretically the darkness gives thaem an advantage, but the CTS can easily pick them off as soon as they fire a shot, cos the gun flash shows them up. Also, the CTs can easily grenade them And when you're flashed in that small space, you're fucked. And the CTs only have to hold them around that staircase for a little bit, while a teammate goes round the other rout (over the road bridge, through the building by the power substation thing, and pick off the Ts from behind.
Also, once you've got the Hostage room unlocked...they're only a stones-throw from the rescue point. consider making them a bit further away? atm, if the CTs get to the hostages, they've pretty much rescued them. Or somehow add some kind of notification that they've unlocked the hossies (like a game message if possible? or a siren and flashing lights??) then everyone would know the hossies were rescuable, and they'd all head for that area...could be fun!!
Right, here's a summary:
-Scale major features down a bit to avoid repetition and dullness.
-Correct your texture scaling/variation
-Correct your lighting direction, ambient light, and add cubemaps
-Add more architectural realism and detail
-Learn about VIS optimisation, and USE IT!!! trust me, your FPS should be at least 3-4 times higher, it's easily done with hint brushes, detail brushes, areaportals and use of "mat_wireframe 1" and "mat_leafvis1 "
-Check timings between choke points are even.
-Lighten up that darkened bit!! it's terrible to play in.
-Improve waybointing/bot navigation (but you knew that
dude, please go away, read up on stuff carefully, go through your map, polish, polish, polish it....i'd love to see this finished off.
and please don't think i'm flaming!! i know i'm being a little harsh, but let's call it tough love
EDIT: Longest. Post. Everrr.
