I think you need to work on the realism of the buildings. They look fine, but some of the destroyed pieces look incredibly odd and out of place. For instance, in image 5. One thing to point out is that the destruction of the cement over the brick is a different pattern than the brick. And those jagged edges don't make sense. Maybe if it were tiled stone or something that would break like tile, but concrete for the most part breaks like Styrofoam. It's also usually very thick. Take a look at the destruction models involving concrete in HL2, you'll see what I'm talking about.

On the same building the pieces that have fallen don't look right. I mean, a piece of brick falling right at that line while there's still an entire column of it up ... does not make sense. Not to mention how pristine it looks.

It looks very good so far, though. Just keep tweaking things.

Also, just an idea, why don't you make some of the lamp posts destroyable? Like, make them a physics object on a hinge, so when x amount of damage occurs it falls down on the power lines. You can make the lines "break" and be live and cut the power in that area. It'd be cool and not very difficult to implement.

Alright, eight new screens showing off new building textures and stuff:

Screen 1 - New building textures! Extrusion detail on one of the buildings! A new interior! (albeit too bright!)!!. :smile:
Screen 2 - another look at new textures.
Screen 3 - New textures again...
Screen 4 - New textuuuuures :smile:
Screen 5 - detailed building again, another look at its interior.
Screen 6 - blah.
Screen 7 - new interior (gonna be a basement). Way too bright, was just "guessing" on the light brightness values.. way off. :smile:
Screen 8 - park area. Now somehow with detail sprites! :biggrin:

The concept behind the new interior is that there's a blown out wall allowing access to the basement/downstairs storage/maintenance room of this apartment building and there will be a cave-in with a bunch of debris which you can work your way up through the cave-in into a destroyed apartment area, snipe out a window, or either jump out somehow (another broken wall into the park area) or get through yet another broken wall into the other similarly-textured apartment building next to it.

Also you probably haven't noticed but in screen #3 I tried a lightmap scale adjustment.. here is a comparison. This way it looks a LOT better with a "4" scale - with "8" it all looks too blocky and blobby, the lighting. Instead of having all the walls in here "8" i'll simply use the clip tool to cut out sections of the wall and make them individually either "4" for a segment that's lit from a lamp or "16" for everything else that's not directly lit. This way it should even be better performance than before but much better looking. Hoorayness.

Still working at it... getting closer though. :smile:

No, I mean triangle-shaped leaves.. since I have standard blocks vertex-manipulated to be slanted and follow the slanted hill, vvis'd probably go crazy and create a lot of triangular leaves joined up with plenty of boxed ones.. I've done it before. vvis hates it. :smile:

Mapping went GREAT last night.. retextured all the buildings and worked on the new interiors. Buildings look a lot better, even added some extrusions to one, I really like it. Everything just kinda worked last night. :smile: Screens soon..

Triangles??? This is source you don't need the triangle method to create terrain, you have displacements, much better and low poly.

Agreed, thanks. :smile:

Gosh, VVIS has skyrocketed since the last compile.. why?! Took 2h45m tonight (ended up canceling it on 0...1...2...3...4...5...6...7...8...9...)! Was only ~40 minutes before. Gonna have to do some poking around, if anything i've really optimized since then.. hm. :sad:

[edit]
Oho, I guess I found the problem. Un-func_detail'ed some of the stuff around the park so I could use the clip tool on certain parts of it (should have just used Ignore Groups, but didn't think of that til after).. forgot to func_detail it back.

It's the slanted-hill-stuff.. vvis would indeed create a fuss about all sorts of triangulated leaves along a curved surface.

func_details and recompiles

Ah, much better.

:biggrin:

Alright, so just a small update.. working on a few building details now.. finished the bricks that were busted out of the wall, here is a sneak peek at that.. doing plenty of little tweaks.. and I'm just about to start on new interiors (some illustrated on Morphine's flow chart thingamabob).

[edit]

Holycrap I just sewed two displacements. Cool. I've never done that before. :biggrin:

How useful!

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Heh.. well, I'm just a small fish in a big pool of talent here. Flattered that you know and enjoy my map, though.

Finger -

Wow, thank you. :smile: I'll take all the feedback I can get - I certainly did have those couple "maps before I came to terms with the craft" as you say (and accordingly "abandoned" them, thank god for that feature), and this is partially another... looking back I see plenty of things I should have done differently from the start that I'm kind of paying for now (redoing small things, etc), although when I started I clearly remember thinking "alright, I know what I'm doing now, I'm gonna do it right".. I guess I didn't know everything. :smile: I'll just have to move on to the next one when I finish and keep figuring it out. Hopefully the next one is a bit easier as far as knowing what to do and doing it right at first, though. I've learned a lot this time around and we'll see how it goes next time.

And... ouch, the carve tool? Glad I'm past that point (there was in fact such a point for me!) :biggrin:

BTW, I'm quite honored to hear this from the guy who made dm_swamplight, one of my favorite unofficial DM maps (used to play it quite a lot on a server I played on frequently for a long time). Great work on that map; nice to "meet" you, however informal or brief it was. :smile: Thanks again for your compliments and reassurance. :biggrin:

You're doing a good job man. It's nice to see new mappers who actually want and use feedback. Slow and steady wins the race - just keep working on it here and there and it will come together for you. You must also realize that most mappers go through quite a few maps before they really come to terms with the craft and can fully realize their creations. So don't get discouraged... there will come a time when you look back at this map and wonder why it was sucha challenge.

I remember when I first opened worldcraft back in 98. I wanted to create a rock canyon, so I made a big block, then took a little block and started carving into the big block with it... trying to create a staggered rock surface. Well, needless to say, it didn't work out to well.