Hi guys, just a quick update for you.

Been working on this for a few days, still kinda trying to decide where I'm going with this building I'm (re)creating. It's much different than it was before...

Here's what I have as of right now. It's still evolving quite a bit though...

Screen 1 from the front corner. The building's pretty damn destroyed. :smile: Should soon be a bunch of fire all around here, and tons of rubble and concrete.

Screen 2, a teaser peek at the inside.. firelit stair/hallways, mostly. Smoke fills the whole interior of the building, and I got it to join up pretty well with an env_smokestack pouring out of the front door for nice effect.

So that's just a quick look... comments are ultra-welcome as always, but this probably doesn't represent too well what I'll end up with.

Thanks for reading!

I managed to make some progress today. Nothing worth screenshotting yet though. :smile:

My plans for this building are pretty big. It'll be dark inside (not dark enough to ruin the Deathmatch aspect or anything - just not bright). I'm planning for all of the lighting to come from flickering fire scattered throughout the building. Interiors will be dirty/burned in places, and hopefully very smoky overall (maybe smoke pouring out of windows/doors). Should be lots of shadows and debris. Lots of broken light fixtures, maybe a few of them sparking and lighting up the room intermittently. For some reason I really want some swinging, sparking ropes/wires as well.. we'll see how it goes.

That's it for now.

Progress!

I finally got around to cracking this map open again last night. My first intention was to touch up a couple things and pump out a beta 2. As I was tweaking, I made the decision to rebuild the "destroyed building", for a number of reasons. It wasn't lining up right with the other building I wanted it to, the interiors made little sense architecturally (even if they were pretty cool-looking, IMO) and it was just a tangled mess of brushes and decals.

So I've started over on it completely. This time around I'm building a 100% feasible, workable layout inside - floors, stairs that lead up and down, and doors to rooms on each floor. (Nearly done with that.) Then I'll start busting down a few doors, blow out some windows, smoke, sparks.. we'll see where it leads.

I'll probably work on this all day (hey, mid-winter break!) - so maybe you can really expect some preview shots later today. :smile:

Good to see you didn't abandon this :smile:

Hi guys :smile:

I've been taking a little break from mapping over the past month and a half or so. Residential isn't dead, I just wanted to take some time to relax. I've recently had a bit of interest in mapping again, so I'll probably get back to it tonight.

Hey, it'd be nice to have a beta2 on new years, huh? :wink:

Gotta run, just wanted to poke my head in before I did. Hopefully an actual map update in a few days!

They are seperate points but I think the bigger scale meaning of "cleaness", the actual buildings, are more important and need to be looked at earlier!

Ah, I understand what you mean - I thought "cleanliness" and adding unintended/additional architecture were two seperate points in your original post.

And technically I still have the treehouse hidden in a visgroup. :biggrin: Maybe I'll come up with something.. no ideas yet. Thanks.

Again, when I say I find the map too clean, I don't really mean the dirt, I mean the basic, big architecture. From the sceenshots now it looks like a city that was finished yesterday. Adding some dirt could be a good idea, but more important I think is adding some solid stuff, something that actually changes the shape and layout (not necessarily gameplay-wise, just form) with parts that look like they were built years later over the current structures... and over each other. Just like someone adding an additional floor to his house, or a shack in the backstreet... or something.

Hard to explain :biggrin:

And getting rid of the tree house... it's actually pretty brave. Which can be a good sign. Just remember that you deleted the map's center point. Something more funky than a simple bus station would be good!

AtM:
Thanks - we'll see how these new buildings turn out. It's maybe a little hard to see how the multicolored building is structured right now without wandering around the map. Expect some retexturing and touching up to remedy that. The construction site represents very little total work right now, so the things you mentioned are most definitely on the to-do - thanks for bringing them up, though. Gotta get to that soon.

Reaper47:
Yay - I was hoping to get a reply from you. :smile: Point-by-point:

Cleanliness: This map is actually looking pretty clean when I think about it. It's not really how I plan the final version; expect more dirtiness, garbage props like bottles and boxes, stains.. much of the cleanliness is attributed to my new street/sidewalk and multitextured building textures. I'll be adding more dirt and detail to these (and on the building, Finger has suggested some floor-divider lines between windows, which I like and should help). A lot of the detail/dirt touchups will come toward the true end of the map.

'This building': Thanks for your comments. As above - I'll be breaking up the window textures a bit with some dividers and detail. The arch should really be deleted at this point - if I keep it in any way it'll be vastly different. It's merely placeholder right now.

Construction site: We'll see if I can pull it off. :biggrin: I have some ideas and a LOT of reference around - hell, two buildings going up within a one-block radius of my house, one near my school, several on the way home - lots of cool ideas to snag from those which I pass every day. I'll try my best to de-square it with lots of.. well.. construction-site stuff.. materials and supplies and equipment.

Windowless floors FTW! I'll see what I can do about this. A shorter retextured top maybe lined with rails, having some visible vents and exhausts, iunno.. I'll play with it.

Lighting and shadowing: I much appreciate your and AtM's comments on these areas. For a while I'd worked on lighting but really never spent much time perfecting it. Recently I did a lightmap pass in which I ramped up the detail on some important lighting areas and it really worked out in the basement and in the destroyed building, and on the construction site. Looking forward to more of this. (Actually, the basement is looking really stunning now IMO that I've removed the pile of sand or whatever - tons of shadows crisscrossing throughout. You'll see soon!)

Treehouse: It was its time! :wink: I don't know if I'll manage to bring it back - I don't really feel like using that massive tree, it's pretty overused and leafless.. and it gives the map a feeling of clutter or something to me.

Again, thanks to both of you - hoping to start up with regular updates again for a short while until I get a beta 2 out.

You're going for a much cleaner look now than with your original version. I like clean mapping (check out the great, over-clean mapping of SI).

But be aware it's much more difficult because there's no detail to hide even the tiniest mistake. Also for a HL2 theme (which no city-based HL2DM map can escape) you should add some 20 or 30% more chaos to the map. I mean there's no need to cover the streets in puddles of vomit... but consider some "added" buildings here and there. Something that hadn't been planned by the architect and has been added later. A little storefront, a wooden hut in the park used by the gardeners, a little garage in the backyard, an additional balcony, ect ect

Some more thoughts regarding the screenshots:

This building looks very good. You should try something with the textures, though. Especially the bright one with the horizontal lines breaks a bit with the smooth walls around it. Also the slanting parts on the top of the red and yellow parts look a bit strange. The black arch could work but only as a model. As a brush it looks too solid, too artifical for a structure like that.

Be careful around the construction site. Again, the great lighting alone sells it... but filling places like this with enought interesting things later is mostly impossible. Try to cut off large parts off the rectangle-shaped form of this room. Make it intersect with another large block or something. Make sure the squarish layout of this is gone as early as possible.

I don't know what gave you the insane idea of adding a window-less floor on the top of this building (:roll: ). But honestly, now that I see it, I think it should be smaller. And maybe not using the same texture as the rest of the walls. Maybe it should. But it definitly needs to be shorter (1/2 or 1/4).

That's why I like your mapping. You have a hand for lighting. This is so simple and easy, yet I don't remember ever seeing shadows used so well for effect before. This looks at the same time natural and "unplanned"(in a good sense) and unusual, perfect for this map. Same for the basement.

and...

Ahhhh!

No...

The tree house... The tree house! GONE! That bus station stole my tree house!