The wall in front of the new building looks really huge, but the building itself looks good. It's memorable so should help orient players right away.

I like the new version of the hotel.

The lightmap changes in the basement really make it pop. I like this area tremendously, especially how it contrasts with the rest of the level. It seem very real.

The construction site needs a lot of work. I feel like you'd be seeing a lot more girders, rebar, and concrete at that stage.

Glad you're still working on this map!

Surprise! This map is not dead! :biggrin: About time for an update - it's been over a month! I've been working on it a lot since then. I think the changes include two new buildings and lighting tweaks (sun and ambient are about the same, but streetlights and building illumination has been tweaked and added).

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Our new building! This replaces the yellow one with the accessible roof and winding staircase interiors. It'll have a lobby interior and you can get on that ledge with the planks across the gaps for navigation. I worked off this building a few blocks away from me to build this.

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On the ledge described above. Bright spotlights abound! A slight disadvantage to being up here... and very little room to move.

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Moving on. The hotel. Added illumination from the top, and extruded windows along the front as well.

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Another new building - this one across from the hotel. The kiosk and combine walls used to be right here. This is easier to block visibility and adds more gameplay. It's a pretty basic building that's being added onto (the accessible area is the construction site). It'll seam with the skybox and go on farther into the distance. Lots to do with this but here's how it currently looks.

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Shot from atop the construction site. Should be more supports, more work materials....

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Destroyed building with a bit more destruction than before. Still lots to do as well.


A glance inside the destroyed building - delicious, sharp lightmaps!!


A glance inside the basement of one of the apartment buildings, also have some nice lightmapping going in here.


And then just an overview of the map from the top sniper position in the destroyed building. The park has been changed - tree + fort are gone (replaced by bus stop), stairs removed, RPG positioned down there...

Okay, so that's it for now. I got to do another look around with Finger on this map last night and his suggestions pertained to the flow of the map which I completely agreed with. So this is pretty much how the final shall look (unless someone's got any complaints) - there should be some flow changes too (removal and addition of a room, more routes, etc). Expect some changes in the next update on the WIP buildings too. Maybe a skybox? :eek:

Any thoughts? :smile:

Thanks. Yep. :smile:

I got to have a run-around on the latest build with Finger a couple days ago and he had a lot of suggestions and comments to give.. one enjoyable paraphrase of a discussion snippet:

Finger: [referring to the wide stairs leading up out of the park area] "These stairs are too narrow, you should move them or get rid of them." [suggests a few alternative positions for them]
Me: "Well, if I get rid of them, then it's like a dead end. Nobody would go back there."
Both together: "Well, unless there was something worth going back there for..."

The RPG has a new home.. :biggrin: I'll toss the stairs, so the only way out of the park from the back wall is to run forward quite a ways and around the railing. I'll move the sandbox and playground crap over and put the RPG inside the sandbox.. loves irony. It should be really cool since that area's like the middle of the map, all the sniper locations have a clear view of it.. it's a risk to snag it. :smile:

Also I'm going to try and COMPLETELY redo the building in the corner (you know, the yellow, boxlike one?). I don't really care for the honestly quite boring, winding stairwell and barren hallways indoors. I ran out and snapped a shot of a building a couple blocks away last night. I love the design of it and I'd like to incorporate it into the area where the old building was. I can't honestly say that I expect it to work out, but I'm going to try it, and even if it doesn't, Finger had some useful suggestions for cutting down the size of the old building and adding some cool gameplay to it, so expect some major changes in that area one way or another.

Also the alleys behind the corner building are going to be blocked off/removed as a gameplay element somehow, especially since they're as mundane as ever at the moment.

So just lots of work is piling up and I can only attack it at a slower pace right now.. should certainly be worth it. :smile:

The street looks much better with the greyer color. It blends better with the pavement now. I still think it could be dirtier.

Alright, I haven't really done much work but last night I did do a lot of work on the textures: I redid the street one and also created a new "crosswalk" decal to replace Valve's which was a bit too cracked.

New textures ingame. You can see the crosswalk one as well as the street one. I'm not really done with the street since it should be a bit dirtier but at least it's looking better now.

Also, tweaked some ambient lighting. It's slightly lighter now and has a bluish tint. Subtle difference, but I like the way it looks.

As I wandered around the latest build this morning (where I took these screenshots) it kind of just hit me on the head that.. I'm ready to release a beta 2. I mean, gameplaywise and mostly visually this map is ready for a beta 2. I do need to tweak and work on a couple things, and those couple things really need to be done first, but this map just feels ready for a b2, even if just to put the old b1 out of circulation since it's so much different.

So yeah.. expect a beta 2 soon, I can say with 95% certainty that I should put one out sometime next week.

Thanks for your reply, reaper47.

I'm happy with the lack-of-parking lot, yeah. The (smaller) park still allows for some sniping and ranged combat but it doesn't feel needlessly large like it used to.

About the new street textures.. :smile: I honestly feel pretty embarrassed. When I created the textures initially they were too light and gray, so I went to make them darker and then just became obsessed with making them this dark black, freshly-paved concrete. I really love the texture but it clashes with the map. I'll work on it later today, I think. Nice ref pic, btw, I was searching for some before I created the texture and didn't find anything that nice.

The red building.. yeah. I don't want to have the same-style roofs all over the place, so I cut it off - maybe another segment of non-windowed red building texture would work out well indeed.

I tend to overlook the treehouse during gameplay, I think because I rarely "notice" it. I like the way you mentioned it was kind of the center point of the map, I never thought of it like that. I'd like to add to and build more on it, I've always considered adding a second level reachable from a ladder linking it to the first level, giving it more of a man-made shape, etc.

@ Screen 6, yeah, the columns are round. I'm not particularly worried about performance now (around like 15fps more in the "bad" areas since beta 1, e.g. looking down the road from the far end) - but I certainly have it in mind. I've considered changing these to larger, square pillars (concrete probably) instead of these metal pipes, ever since I made this area.. I'll have to get around to it and see how it works.

I haven't done much work at all on this map in the past two days or so, I've been watching way too much Seinfeld! That and I bought "The Ship" last night, I only got to play it for like half an hour and loved it, so I'll waste some time on that today. :biggrin: I'll work on the map tonight and probably put up a few screens the next day or so. Again, I appreciate your suggestions, reaper47. :smile:

I think it was a good decision to get rid of the parking lot, the map is still very open.

About the new street textures... right now they just don't work :/ I too find the default ones a litte strange but now they not only look clean, they look... painted. It doesn't fit with the rest of the map. But I think this is very easy to tweak. First I'd add some structure, some unevenness in the direction of the road (just for the texture, although making the brush itself a little uneven could be a good idea, too). Then I don't think the white stripes are necessary. The street isn't that broad anyway. Leave it as dark if you like but I think you should make it look a little more used. Try googling some photos (like this for example) and look at the contrast between the pavement and asphalt and the surrounding buildings. Also look how the asphalt is split in rectangle-shapes oftenly where parts of it where added and rebuilt.

Also the red building on the right needs something on the top of it. A roof, some structure or little rooftop buildings. Or maybe just a meter of window-free walling on top, try that first. It looks like it's cut off.

One last thing: I like the tree-house in the middle of the map. It could be what most players remember this map for. A good central point. Add as much detail to it as you like. Especailly where the wood is connected with the tree. Maybe even a ladder made of planks nailed right into the trunk. A less-quadratical shape ect.

PS: Screen 6 looks near-perfect now! I'm not sure but are these columns round? It would be better performance wise and probably even look better to make them simply rectangle-shaped.

Yeah, a freshly-paved look was how I intended the texture to be.. I was just so caught up on creating a texture that fit that description to see that maybe it wasn't exactly ideal for the map. :smile: I'd still like to give it out for anybody who wants/needs it though..

/me agrees with textures being too clean, it's like they just came through and repaved the street and sidewalk, and left everything else in disrepair.

Definitely. :biggrin: Appreciate the suggestions.

Something I forgot to do on my initial post of screenshots tonight, a basic todo list:

• More custom/tweaked textures.
• Do the skybox (deleted the last attempt as soon as I reshaped the map).
• Some layout tweaks (condense things a bit more if at all possible).
• Interior de-boringness-pass. I've got mixed feelings about the corner building's interior, it's rather a maze of hallways and corridors and a bunch of closed doors - basically an excuse to have an interior way to get up to the roof. Although this is definitely the longest-standing building and overall "feature" of the map so far I'm getting closer and closer to deleting it ENTIRELY, and rebuilding it up from scratch with a completely different design (split roof with different height levels, more building detail all-round, different interior design if at all). Dunno exactly what to do here, but I'm thinking about it..
• Optimization.. is.. almost entirely done. Map runs quite well now - nearly as good as e.g. Overwatch - and compiles as fast as I could ever possibly hope to ask for (20 minutes total, non-hdr). Some tweaks, but.. we'll see.
• Some work on the destroyed building, with more broken interior walls to give more of an impression that this was a residential building with rooms..
• A new interior for the hotel that connects to the apartment buildings with the extrusions. This links three different interior rooms together with at least two ways out of each.. I like the idea.

That's just a quick list.. I'll update it if I think of anything else. :smile: Thoughts on these thoughts are welcome as well!

Also, I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm strongly considering releasing the full VMF along with all the textures I've created for this map in the end - regardless of how/if I've used them. It's likely. :smile: