Fish...

Fixed the link.

Thanks

Thank you very much. From you that's high praise.

I have tried everything I can think of. I am trying to get that "just at dawn on a cold morning at the beginning of spring", feeling and I can't get both the atmosphere thick enough and the shadows quite right. Perhaps you're right and I just need to reduce the light a bit.

Thanks for the feedback.

-LN

Korn....

Great feedback, thank you.

1) I have made snow models to be used as details, so that there is a bit more snow around, but they're a drain on the engine and I pulled them. I'll see if I can add some more.

2) I have lowered the light as Satch recommended, and it looks much better. If I can get the sky right now, I'll be thrilled.

3) The damage is a good idea. I"ll collapse a few parts of buidings.

Now, if you see the reference photo, the truth is, that this looks about right. I have others, and really, the villages aren't unmaintained. Individual family farms are unmaintained in rural areas. But generally, villages, which have a different economic model, are sloppy, but not necessarily unmaintained.

-Cheers.

I tried using snow overlays but they "flicker", and ruin the effect. Now that the light is lower, maybe I can try again.

The weather effects are wonderful, but they're also VERY expensive to render. CSS needs FPS, more than single player does, so while I would love to add mist, it's just too expensive.

Thank you so much for your ideas, you've been very helpful.

-LN

In oder to get what I"m looking for, I have to choose between displacments level 2 and level 3. At 3 its a lot more polys and it looks a lot better. At 2 it's a lot less polys and it doesn't look as good. It helps to remember that except for the buildings this entire map is displacements.

It doesn't look quite the same in game, because the mountain range is a series of steps, with the plain being the bottom, the village being the next, the mountains you see in the screenshots the next step, and then there is a really large set of mountains behind them, that are in the skybox. The fog effect obscures them, and the screenshots don't show them at all, but they're up there.

That said, I could fix this by splitting the mountain displacments along the north south axis, effectivley doubling the polys on those twenty displacments, and texturing them separately, and using the additional polys to smooth out the mountains. I thought I could get away with what I've got here, so I didn't do that. Fixing it, because the back side of the mountains is in the skybox, would be painful and annoyingly tedious. But if it's that big a deal I might do it. Let me think about it a bit.

Thank you very much for the feedback.

-LN

Yes, there are quite a few sounds, and I"m thankful that you can make your own soundscapes now. Which I did.

I am trying to find a sheep sound file. I have also planned an easter egg for the sheep, that I wn't disclose here. They are not animated as that's just way too expensive for CSS.

The CT's start by the helicopters and they're being dropped off. All CSS players will understand this.

They grow poppies, they raise sheep, they have an orchard and they had a mine, and they get support for terrorism from a neighboring country <g>.

But all that aside, I could place more props and make the map better. I think I would favor natural effects instead of man made objects, but you're right that it needs more 'stuff'.

To compile the entire map with full viz and rad is something like an hour.

There are only like 140 vis areas.

Mazemaster:

I just want to thank you for the quality of your feedback before I respond to it. Thank you very much. It's great. I don't know if it will come across in this posting, but I wrote down half a dozen ideas while reading your post. Thanks again.

No, the map is a series of 1024 unit cubes and the top of each one is a displacement. Below that is another cube that is textured with nodraw to limit vis. I did this just for the same reasons you stated. I just haven't gone thru and made ajustements because it "is hard to go back" when you start structurally modifying the map like that.

There is always the potential for someone to camp a map like this. I can't get the gameplay I"m looking for (which this map has) and avoid camping spots. Its actually much harder to camp than you'd think, but it can still be done.

I did this on purpose based upon the reference photos. It is part of what I'm looking for, so I don't want to change it. I have a slighly more stained and darker set. and I might add a lighter set, but I think that the map would be better served by models than by different textures. I need more detail, and I'd prefer if that detail didn't come from textures.