The Hive by Smoke

Map Rating

  • 0
  • unrated

Map Download

Map Info

Map Description

The Hive is a single player map based in and around the events that took place in Resident Evil the movie. Comments, critiques, ideas, are welcome.

Discussion

Posted by Smoke on Thu Mar 11th 2004 at 2:44pm
[Author]

Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:
fraggard said:
I can tell you with enough confidence that it probably will play bad. I see a room FULL of carved cylinders and pointless detail (the wall lights). That's enough reason for me. Fix it, or prove me wrong. And No, "My GEFRCOE FX5900 pwns j00000!!11" is not a valid reason.

Like Vash said: "Welcome to the snarkpit. We'll eat your legs"

User posted image
Carve isn't part of my vocabulary, and I appreciate the advice!!!, thankyou and keep it coming. This pillar was made at 24 sides apiece, I could cut the w_polies in half if I switch down to 12, that would bring the r_speeds to about 1500 w_polies. I could also cut the amount of wall lights down. Smoke a J and relax a bit guys.
Posted by Gollum on Thu Mar 11th 2004 at 2:11pm

Smoke, you can take my advice or leave it. It happens to be very good advice, from someone who knows about pushing a game beyond its normal limits. But it's up to you.

Go ahead and prove me wrong; until you do, I maintain that this method of mapping is a grand waste of your time.
Posted by fraggard on Thu Mar 11th 2004 at 1:39pm

Hohoho! This should be interesting rubs hands with glee Let me be the first.
Smoke said:
First off, porting HL1 maps to HL2 maps should be fine. Read the VERC faq on the Source engine. All you have to do is re-model and re-texture the map. At this point the map has no models, or point entities, and needs to be re-textured anyways.
Have you seen the engine? Do you know how to retexture the map? Heck, we don't even know whether the texturing works the same way. Heck, we know NOTHING because it hasn't been released yet. And no, a leaked alpha is not the game.

And besides, texturing is probably half the work in a HL map. So you have less than half complete...
Smoke said:
Its rather like taking a rich, detailed photo of a concept, and then "port" it to Half Life, different media that compliment each other.
There are certain restraints to computer games. Things like "We don't have an infinte number of polygons to work with" and "Games cannot compute mllions of photons working at the speed of light". Little things like that. It helps to know the capabilities of the engine before starting off on making something look more "realistic". So You can't port a "rich, detailed photo of a concept" without losing some of that richness and detail. You really need to learn how to work with HL for making the best maps. You can't port reality.
Smoke said:
Secondly, this map works great within the constraints of HL1 as long as you have a post 98' computer. If not you can probably pick one up for under a hundred pounds.
Simple question. What are the r_speeds in each of the pictures? Anything greater than 1500, and you're screwed. Because no matter what, the engine can't handle it very well. Games are not designed to scale infinitely based on GPU specs.( And a hundred pounds is a huge lot of money to play a game.)
Smoke said:
Realistically you have no idea how good this map plays for HL1 because it is just a beta, and you havn't played it. Your basing your comments on a couple of very early screenshots.
I can tell you with enough confidence that it probably will play bad. I see a room FULL of carved cylinders and pointless detail (the wall lights). That's enough reason for me. Fix it, or prove me wrong. And No, "My GEFRCOE FX5900 pwns j00000!!11" is not a valid reason.

Like Vash said: "Welcome to the snarkpit. We'll eat your legs"
Posted by Smoke on Thu Mar 11th 2004 at 12:12pm
[Author]

Gollum said:
sigh

I really don't think it's a good idea to make a map for HL2 before the game is released. It's unlikely to transfer well.
First off, porting HL1 maps to HL2 maps should be fine. Read the VERC faq on the Source engine. All you have to do is re-model and re-texture the map. At this point the map has no models, or point entities, and needs to be re-textured anyways. :smile:

Its rather like taking a rich, detailed photo of a concept, and then "port" it to Half Life, different media that compliment each other.

Secondly, this map works great within the constraints of HL1 as long as you have a post 98' computer. If not you can probably pick one up for under a hundred pounds. Realistically you have no idea how good this map plays for HL1 because it is just a beta, and you havn't played it. Your basing your comments on a couple of very early screenshots.
Posted by fishy on Thu Mar 11th 2004 at 12:02pm

i do believe that its only the basic world geometry that you will be able to port to hl2. all of your textures will need to be re-done, as will every entity(point and world)

so if you were to delete all your point entities, and move all your brush entities back to world brushes, then retexture everything with aaatrigger, you will be left with what can get ported.

which wont be much. :sad:
Posted by Gollum on Thu Mar 11th 2004 at 11:13am

sigh

I really don't think it's a good idea to make a map for HL2 before the game is released. It's unlikely to transfer well.

It's rather like trying to make a rich, dark painting in watercolour and then "port" it to oil paints. They are different media; they require different techniques.

Either make a map that works within the constraints of HL1, or wait for HL2. What you have at the moment is a bad map for HL1, and realistically that's all it will ever be.
Posted by Smoke on Thu Mar 11th 2004 at 10:59am
[Author]

The Trainstation and Dining Hall B are going to be the largest area's with alot of detail. Since this is probably going to be transfered to Half_Life 2 I'm not to worried about the r_speeds. Right now I'm shooting for about 2500 w_poly, the main station in the pics is about 3000 w_polies, but I am going to try to optimize it the best I can. My computer is an HP 500Mhz, 256MbRAM, with an Intel 10Mb Video accelerator and it runs smoothly in GL. It however, will not run in software mode. Does anybody know of some good train models??? That would lighten the w_poly hit quite a bit.
Posted by diablo on Wed Mar 10th 2004 at 10:10am

I'm a fan of Resident Evil. Good luck to you! Hope it works out well. :smile:
Posted by JFry on Wed Mar 10th 2004 at 10:00am

I can only see the 1st and 3rd but they both look great. The first one could use some cool graffiti on the wall and have 1 of the lights flicker if you can afford a dynamic light there. The third pic looks great. In fact it looks too perfect. Have something to break up the linearity of it perhaps. Also some subtle highlights with colored texlights like a very light blue might look good here.
Posted by Yak_Fighter on Wed Mar 10th 2004 at 4:35am

Oh man, I can only bet the r_speeds are sky high. What you have looks good, but I can almost guarantee you this will not be a playable map.