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these are some pics of the latest compile. i'm almost happy with the overall layout, but i'll probably rebuild the church, and possibly some of the surrounding buildings. there's still no damage to any of the buildings or streets yet. that, along with other street furniture, can be added after the initial vis optimization, when i know what areas can afford it in terms of framerates.

The broken factory is the axis spawn point, and will have another exit at the side, which can be used to get to the centre of the map quickly.

the building in the centre of the last pic will be the allied spawn. the road that leads up the left side of the picture will have an unassailable drop-off that makes it one-way. this should balance the quick exit to the town centre that the axis spawn will have.

i'm not really looking for anyone to spend any time looking for things that need fixing here. i can already see plenty of those myself. :/

*Internet connection groans savagely*

That last set, was awfully, unoptimized Fishman.

Anyway, the one thing I was going to comment on, you seem to be addressing already. In the first set of screens, the building tops seem cropped. The hotels/factory/house all seem universally the same height.

In the second set of screens, you have altered this some, but now they seem cropped, in sections. You have houses one height, motels one height and so on and so on.

Perhaps its just me that sees it as such. My only remaining comment is, the roofs all look the same. You seem to have but one architect in the village. Hire some more and add some metal siding or wood shingled roofs. Any village, no matter where has a mush mash of old/new projects going.

Every town I know of has two things this map is missing. A park, with kids playthings and a dilapidated empty lot. Build a place where no accounts put trash when no ones looking.

Another thing you might add, a building being built. You know.. pegs in the ground with string to mark the location of stuff.

*shrugs*

the sawmill was partially built, surrounding buildings were put in place, the little culvert where the burning tank was became a decent sized river, various other stuff like rebuilding parts of the train station were also done, and then hammer refused to open the file again. well, it sort of opened it, but would use 99% of my cpu for 4 hours before i could select a brush, and half an hour response time for every mouse click. that sucked. even the backups in the autosave folder wouldn't open, so that made it suck some more.

i hate rebuiling the same stuff after a loss, so the river/sawmill etc were abandoned in favour of a street. as the area is the exit from the allied base, i wanted it to be roughly the same shape and size as the exit from the axis base, which was the wide open railway station. so, either the street had to be a lot wider than i'd like, or the train station would need to be narrowed. the axe fell on the station, but i don't think it suffered too much, and might even have been improved a little, though it still needs a bit of bomb damage.

i know i've said before that the layout is done, but i think that this time it's true. i've 3 buildings to finish off the insides of, and maybe another 2 or 3 building faces to seal off some map edges. there's tons of little bits that need some attention, but nothing that's a problem. the skybox hasn't really been thought about, other than to keep it as simple as possible. a burning village on a hillside looked good in lostcoast, but would probably hamper performance in a large multiplayer map.

anyway, here's some recent pics.

and i've just noticed that flags 2 and 3 have their numbers mixed up.

? quoting Orpheus

Considering all the visual information contained in each screen , your FPS are holding up rather well Fishman.

In fact, I notice a noticeable increase between these screens and the preceding ones. Whats the diff?

there's some basic outdoor visblocking with sky brushes above some of the buildings, but it's incomplete, with gaps that probably make it only effective in part.
func_areaportals probably help too. i've started adding them to areas that i think could use them as i go. mostly sealing up buildings.
and this was a normal compile, the rest have all been fast shots, but that doesn't guarentee better fps.

i spent a lot of time optimizing a previous version of this, which turned out to be a waste of time because of subsequent changes, so i decided to build with vis in mind, but not spend any time building for it. now that the layout is all but done, it's time to see how playable i can make it. hopefully i can get the fps pushed up a good bit more. " SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">

most of that is planned for, but it'll be part of the final stages. paths to doors will be either displacement alpha-mapped paths, or overlays. some existing boundary walls are earmarked for demolition, and replacement when i start on a civic wall building program, which sort of covers point7

gutters in the street, i think will be detail that i can do without. same goes for the bird s**t. there should be enough debris to break up any streets that are too plain.

as for windblown rubbish in the streets, weren't the people too poor to have that back then?

stain overlays have been getting thrown onto buildings while i'm working in their local area, but cloning overlays, for quickness, has thrown up errors during map load, so i'll need to place them one at a time, which sucks, because i cant get new overlays to appear in hammer until i save/exit/reload the vmf. that's partly what's held up the paths too.

telephone poles and wires, sandbags, craters, vehicles, market stalls/shop front area, 2 blocked road exits, 2 bags of assorted overlays, a skybox, 4 bags of optimisation weed, and all of the other unfinished stuff that, in my head, will only take 10 mins, but in reality will probably take at least a week each, all need to be addressed, but will be worked on when i know what areas have the best and worst fps

ah well.........