Outskirts

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Do you see those pictures there. There pictures of a very early stage of a map called "outskirts" for reddawn multiplayer. This map is very young, in fact less than one week old. This is also the first set of pictures for reddawn that has ever been released on the net. However these pictures are not to show you the coolness of reddawn, or any of the cool new features, but this whole topic is here to show you this map develop and become a grown, detailed and up to the high standards of reddawn map. Its also here for you folk to discuss and suggest/express any of your thoughts or ideas which could make it to the final version of this map. In the next update you can compare and see what?s happened to the map, discuss what you like or dislike and make any suggestions. We can also talk more about the background of this map. So lets get stuck into it.

This is a multiplayer map, its team based. Red team are the attackers and they spawn in the lower area of the map, the slightly more damaged, slumish area. You'll know your there where it looks like the kinf of place where people might live. Red team have access to various weapons that the blue team will have to risk entering the red teams base to get. The Blue team are the
defenders and their base is at the top of the map. They also get some weapons that the red team have to risk their lives to get. There base looks like more of a commercial area or business.
area. A landmark for the blue teams base would be the three trees. But you don?t have to play teams on this map, you could play free for all or any other games modes.

As you can tell from the maps design, it looks human. Maybe a City? Well it is actually a human city. Reddawn is set in the year 2263 so there has been about 250 years of human advance and as you can maybe tell, angular architecture is the new black. But what?s interesting about this area of the "un-revealed city" is that its built on top of a lake. And there will be signes of that
throughout the map.

Most reddawn multiplayer maps are of areas or locations near where you visit on your quest through campaign mode. So you could play a multiplayer game and say " Wait , hay I know this
location.". And this map is no different. This city is very important to the storyline of reddawn and you can be sure you will be visiting this city in single player. Some might say I have already
revealed to much information?????

But as I said before this map is very young (it only has one light entity, a light environment), but already it takes roughly two hours to compile. There is hardly any detail in this map, the polygon
count is low, there are no decals and most textures in the map are place holder material. But you will see this map, in a short amount of time, go from just an average map for half-life 1 to a very nice and detailed map for reddawn. This will give you an idea of what the true power of the half-life 1 engine is. So here we are, you have been informed, feel free to say what ever you want. And look out for the next update with a fresh set of pictures and some more information about the map.

P.S- When this thread dies, it will be saved onto my computer and be added as reddawn development material, which is basically documents, videos, audio and pictures of the development of reddawn, so you may be famous :smile: .

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Aaron's Stuff

Look at me, I'm famous.

Well it's what I'd expect from one week's work (unless you're talking about the Base map competition, that thing is like virtual steroids).

It is a good start. From what I can tell, it's solid, but that's all it has going for it right now. Add some detail,, most notably street props, trash cans, light poles, trash, things like that.
Judging from the low res of the textures and the the framerates in the screens, I'm not sure your computer can do the Source Engine justice. I'd root around on the forums for your thread about computer specs, but I'm lazy, so...

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Also change the texture of the dock. Docks are rarely tile. -Facepunch
As I Lay Dying

Well ofcourse the map is lacking in detail, I'm walking you through the prosess of a map becoming a reddawn multiplayer map. Look out for te next update for this and you'll see a big difference :smile: Props will be coming. And actually the framrate is high. 60 fps is the highest that it will go, sometimes the fps will go to 30 on the dot because of the lighting but I'm not going to let it go lower. And I can run source, my machine is:

2ghz, 512 ram and 256 grahpics card. Yeah, thanks for the reply.

edit: oh yeah the res on the textures is actrully pretty good for half-life 1, most of the textures are 512x512 including that place holder brick texture that is so common in the screenshots :smile:

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Aaron's Stuff

Oh, right, it's HL1, that changes everything!

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Also change the texture of the dock. Docks are rarely tile. -Facepunch
As I Lay Dying

Haha couldn't ya tell by the way wpoly's etc. were pu on the screenies :biggrin:
Was wondering what you meant by Source :wink:

Anyways Aaron, Looks like a pretty neat base map, i think some decals, and maybe models would do your map good, but the base architecture looks pretty solid.

You should also try spicing up the lighting a bit more.

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

I just guess it's been too long...lol, though.

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Also change the texture of the dock. Docks are rarely tile. -Facepunch
As I Lay Dying

Hehehe, i'm sitll getting used to source to be honest.

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

Looks solid, indeed. I'll wait for more progress before posting any comments.

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Why snark works.

Thanks for the replys everybody. I have worked on outskirts a bit more and I have a fresh batch of screen shots and some background info to tell you guys. I'll wait to the morning though. It'd be for the best.

edit: Eerghh, I just had a glimps of the old screenshots and I just realised how empty the map was.

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Aaron's Stuff

:biggrin: that's called work in progress :razz:

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

yeah, but i'm also walking you thorugh the process of this map and it may be the only public-input map on reddawn, meaning you guys can make suggestions that can make it to the final version.

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Aaron's Stuff

Not bad at all! First off, I'd say that you need to go easy on the rock/brick texture theme -- add some metal and trim work into the mix, and you'll do fine :smile:

Oh and, in screen 2, if you look close, the top of the railing needs to have its texture realigned :razz:

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Breaking the laws of mapping since 2003 and doing a damn fine job at it

Thanks for takeing intrest in mabye the only user input multiplayer map for reddawn. Look out for the next update.

I just wish the was a way to override the max_patches area. ahhhhhhh !. My map is to big for the Half-life 1 engine, how sad is that. The null texture cant help me her, i'm just gonna have to delete that monorail that I put in. OOOOa said to much.

Seriously though, I never knew that sky counts towards the patches. Thats just stupid.

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Aaron's Stuff

Well, first off, if you haven't read this already, then read this http://www.slackiller.com/tommy14/errors.htm#maxpatch.

Basically, the first thing you can do is start scaling your textures up. If you notice in Half-Life, Valve stretched up the textures by quite a lot, quite frequently. You may want to try to scale up ground or ceiling textures, or anything texture that looks very vague or generic.

I believe you can also add in a -sparse line* or something to enable a compressed vis matrix, which will essentially break the 65535 limit on patches. You can also disable it completely, though that will usually result in your compiles taking years to finish :razz:

*Firstly, I don't know my commands that well, so there's a chance that the -sparse command I fed you won't work. I use a batch compiler, which adds in all lines and commands for me. I highly suggest hunting down Nem's Batch Compiler, as it allows you to easily toggle compile commands and features on and off.

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Breaking the laws of mapping since 2003 and doing a damn fine job at it

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Posting And You

@G.BallBlue: Thanks for that reminder about stretching the textures, I forgot about that one. Anyway I should really check out my list of commands for the zhlt tools but you say you can compress the vis matrix and break that limit. By compressing are you in anyway reducing the quality of the textures or lighting and so on? And the compile times are a bit of a worry to, will this compressing of vis matrix effect the compile times. But if all else fails, its nice to know that I can disable it. Thx

@Omegaslayer: The map is massive but not in that sense, its the sky. You cant really tell by these (old) set of pictures but the sky is extreamly high. One or two of the buildings have been hightened and I have added aditinal buildings on top of those original buildings. The map is quite large, but not huge and its a very open map unlike bootcamp which is hard to navigate around and has many rooms and suchlike. Outskirts just has a very big scale, i'm not going to be indimidated by Half-life's limitations, i'll just find a way around them, otherwise reddawn will suffer in that department. It also doesn't help that half-life dosen't have any 3d sky box technology. But than again if you think about Halo1, very high poloygon limits, gigantic maps and no 3d skybox technology and yet its able to run on a 733mhz 128mb ram machine that is the xbox. I think that halo and half-life have very diffrent ways of rendering and running the maps. Half-life1 was probley built more for indoor style maps and valve have had to take certin measures. Kinda sucks seeing as in reddawn youre more than half the time outdoors.

And yes I am using some half-life 2 textures, but I scale down most of them for that reason. I rearly need them at there full size and anyway, textures scaled down in paint and then added to the WAD look much better than adding them, full sized then scaling them down in Hammer.

But about porting the maps over. I Have thought about it and besides the hard work that would be needed and my vast knowlage and experience of the half-life 1 engine, I think that the monsters in half-life 1 would suit reddawn better than the monsters in Half-life 2. The next update is coming this weekend hopefully, so look out for it.

edit: Thanks for the advice peeps :cool: .

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Aaron's Stuff

Sorry about the dely of the next update. Its one week late now. I have had this major problem but as you can see http://twhl.co.za/forums.php?pgt=1&action=viewthread&id=13986&pg=1 where working on it.

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Aaron's Stuff

wow this pictures are very old. bloody hell make some new ones aaron you nipple ring.

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i like drinking coke with my pizza

Am I as confused as the rest of the SnarkPit right now?

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Also change the texture of the dock. Docks are rarely tile. -Facepunch
As I Lay Dying

Thing is do you really want to have a map that big? Something
every good level designer must consider is at what point does your map
become to big to navigate. Theres nothing more annoying than running
around a map and not seeing another soul for 5 min (aka:
bootcamp).

Have you SEEN a skilled deathmatcher on Bootcamp? That thing is
like a jungle gym for the elite. Once you start learning how to
combine the LJM with a gauss jump this thing becomes a tiny little
postage stamp of a play area. Everywhere is accessible from
everywhere. And if you're playing with some turned up headphones
on, you'll nearly feel like you're wall-hacking with the way you can
pinpoint the location of other players.

That said, I don't know what Red Dawn is, but it does not sound like
the kind of mod that lets you LJM/Gauss jump like an overgrown bunny.

And I read the link to your post of the compile log. I disagree
with all the people in the thread trying to theorize on why HLRAD
didn't run. I'm guessing the problem was not on HLRAD's end or
the map's end, but on your end. I don't think you told the
program to run at all. Did you do a full or a quick
compile? Quick compiles don't do RAD. The reason I believe
this is that you don't get so much as an error message out of RAD.

I'd fix the texture sizes too, because there's just no need to go bigger than 256x256 for HL1.

Well I would compile my other maps with the same set-up and that would work so its not or more it wasen't on my end. I just updated my compile tools from version 2.5.3 to the latest one and that fixed the problem.

edit: it was a normal compile, have a look at the bat file:

@echo off
"C:\tools\zhlt 3.2.1\hlcsg" -estimate -high -texdata 17824 -lightdata 17824 %1
"C:\tools\zhlt 3.2.1\hlbsp" -estimate -texdata 17824 -lightdata 17824 -high %1
"C:\tools\zhlt 3.2.1\hlvis" -estimate -texdata 17824 -lightdata 17824 -high %1
"C:\tools\zhlt 3.2.1\hlrad" -estimate -sparse -texdata 17824 -lightdata 17824 -high %1
pause

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Aaron's Stuff

Well here is outskirts in its current form. Its still far from being done and missing a lot of detail but its very playable now and sorta alright. Just keep in mind that this is HALF-LIFE 1, not source or another fancy game engine, for now " :shocked: ".

Now a Heroic dissicion was made about two weeks ago. The level has been cut into two bits and one bit was deleted, meaning the level was reduced and now its pretty smallish. This might explain it better, excuse the coolness of my artistic skillz


By aaron_da_killa at 2007-07-27

The purple line indicates where the level has been cut and the bottom half has been deleted.

When I finally pull myself away from campaign and finish this map you can expect to see more detail and some cool stuff like a monorail line and some futuristic buildings in the background. But for now tell me what you like, what you don't like and what you wanna see different. I may also post some old pictures of the deleted sections.

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Aaron's Stuff

Don't get too excited about the brick wall texture you used for pretty much every wall I see. You could at least use a different one for the far-away architecture for some more varied perspectives.

And... the car, the gun-model... did you do them all by yourself? That'd be quite a bit of dedication.

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Why snark works.

I would like to say I made the models but I didn't, the car and weapon models are place holder models. And there are a combination of about 5 diffrent brick textures in this map but youre right.

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Aaron's Stuff

Combining different types of textures that are almost identical but not quite can give an annoyingly subtle sense of inconsistency that I'm usually trying to avoid. Better use one brick texture and a totally different type of texture that is both fitting and a contrast to the brick.

btw. Does that sketch show that all that's left is 1 yard with a street?

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Why snark works.

lol, well the picture isn't quite to scale. And thanks for the tip about the brick textures. Does anybody else want to add anything?

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Aaron's Stuff

Ok, its been a while since I last worked on this map, however I am going to finish it and release this with an improved version of the sewer map in a nice little map pack.

In addition to the official map screen shots, here are some more:

Note: Map is for half-life 1 :wink:







Now the map has a long way to go, its at 30% now. What I am trying to achieve in this map is a futuristic city, that has kind of been built over and on top of, it dosen't really have the nice architecture a futuristic city should have. Its slightly also overgrown with weeds and over sized trees and such.

The next step major change that needs to happen in this map I feel is to make it feel more futuristic. I need to create some adverts to go in the map. Maybe even some electronic ones as you see in Japan and New York. Some nice subtle blue lighting maybe...

Also check out the story of this map and the sewer map and tell me what you think, if your into that thing.

So what do you think, give me some advice :smile: .

Sewer map

EDIT:

Since I'm suuuch an idiot, I accidentally deleted the map off snarkpit. I recreated the profile for it here.

Maybe we could get gwil or lachy to relink the map and the thread

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Aaron's Stuff

Some of the screens look really promising. I especially like the feel of this one.

The biggest problem IMO, is that the composition and prop choice (are those HL2 models everywhere?) looks a little random and messy. It sometimes feels like it's just sugar-coating decoration to cover up some aimless brushwork underneath.

Some of the walls just look too flat, which probably is a texturing issue. You use a lot of flat, repeating textures like bricks, plain concrete, etc, where you should probably look for fitting and more unique textures that have more large-scale structure. I know that's hard, but it's what I feel is lacking the most, aesthetically. You could also need some trims and transitions for the edges, wherever large brushes meet.

Also, I do miss lighting variation. It's too homogeneous and grey.

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Why snark works.

Screens look very nice for a work in progress. Unfortunately I don't have Goldsource installed, so I can't have a better look.

Thats some nice solid advice reaper47 :smile: . Thanks.

I am just being very careful at the moment in regards to prop placement and the amount of polys I have. Because of the design of the level, if you face the center of the map from any of the edges in the map, the engine can pretty much see the whole level, so I really have to be careful.

And in half-life 1, you can only have 400 models per map. I have already used up 22.5% of that limit and I still haven't massed out that apartment upstairs/cafe downstairs area which will need quite a few models. Not to mention all the junk and more models the outside will need.

And I do agree with you about the flat boring brush work and over prop placement to kind of hide that. Interesting and good brush work is something I deffinetly need to work on in the way I make my maps. I really don't want the map to be too linear. So I am going to have to use vertex manipulation on the road and maybe in other areas as well and do other adjustments to the brushwork to make it not so linear and "boxy" looking.

And thanks for the compliment Jium :wink:

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Aaron's Stuff

Ok, I have worked some more on the map. I'll show some screenshots of what I have done since last time.

I have worked on this covered area a bit, still need to add more stuff.



I added some stuff here:



Made some signs of the EGF trying to seal off the areas that the mutants will move through (read the story in the maps profile).



Added this little guy here:



I worked a tiny bit more on the downstairs cafe area, still a long way off:



As well as the upstairs apartment area which would make a good camping spot because it contains some ammo and health.



Here is a view of that broken windows from the outside;



Finally to finish up, looking upwards at a weird spot/angle:


I have also started to think about what I am going to do to improve my sewer map. Some of the improvements include brighter lighting, properly mass out the upstairs areas, more interesting architecture and a secret military base entrance. It will basically be a nice little hall way with a heavy futuristic/military theme. At the end of the hall way will be a nice big heavy metal green door.

Now back to the outskirts map, I am having trouble getting everything I want to. I am pushing half-life to its limits making constant sacrifice to avoid the evil "too many entities in visible packet list" error which will cause some entities (brush based and point based) not to be rendered depending on the angle your viewing the map on, I can't have this error in the map, its unacceptable. So I'm going to proceed with caution when I add any more entities to the map.

Thoughts?

BTW guys, if any of you use image shack alot and you don't have the imageshack tool bar, you should get it, you can easily upload multiple images, saving alot of time and tedious effort.

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Aaron's Stuff

How many -bounces are you using?

HAHHAHA, have you checked the time stamps on these posts buddy?

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Aaron's Stuff

These are looking quite nice and detailed, but... seriously, why don't you just go and make this for the Source engine? You have imported all these textures, all these models... It looks like a low-res version of a Source map!

I don't really know what to think of that. It's quite impressive to see a model of HL2-quality in the HL1 engine. But ultimately, you could say it's just fake. If you really want to do this map for HL1, that would be OK for a stylization/low-poly challenge, but you're not really taking the challenge and instead cheat by importing HL2 material.

If all these models and textures were custom ones, I wouldn't say anything, but just picking what you like from HL2 (and CS)... that's a little boring.

Don't misunderstand me, I see some very promising bits of architecture there. But instead of putting detail into the basic brushwork in the background, you're more or less "decorating" rather boring areas with an abundance of props. And it still doesn't look original simply because I know these props from HL2 for ages.

You really need to think of something here. :sad: First thing I'd do is hiding all the models, and trying to get more structured textures and more brush detail for the basic brushwork. Then you could go back to adding models etc, but right now, I think you should rather focus on the basic brushwork and texturing and - if you really want to go all the way with this project - more custom material!

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Why snark works.

I have to agree with Reap here Killa. This map has so much promise, based on the screen shots. It's a shame that it's going to vanish almost immediately after completion into obscurity, because you chose to use such a unique mod. Port this to Source. Dont be afraid!.

The thing I see here is modern propery, alot of source textures and the occasional oversized cartoony HL1 style texture. It's an odd blend. You obviously are spending a great deal of time exporting and importing stuff. Nice work so far.

(PS Thx for the crit on Striker also!)

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Quote from Nietzsche....God is dead
Quote from God....Nietzsche is dead

That was a reply to the part 2 thread, i have no idea why it ended up here...?

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http://maze5.net

Guys, I have really been considering moving this mod to the source engine. For a long time know. Here is what I am thinking, the positives and negatives of moving to the source engine:

+ All the new stuff (bump mapping, cool water, PHYSICS, HIGHER ENGINE LIMITATIONS!!!!!....)

+ Much larger community for source.

+ So many other benefits....

• I don't have any experience in source.

• I actually feel somewhat closed off in source. Like in half-life, I was able to change the water dramatically, add in new monsters and weapons, people have come up with amazing bits of code in half-life to do amazing things. Can you even access the source code in half-life 2 :S ? How easy is it to do these sorts of new things? I think maybe I need to download a few mods and have a look.

• Loss of all the coding work I have done for Red Dawn so far. Now I'm just going to say it, I wanted it to be a surprise for everyone, Red Dawn is a single/multi/CO-OP mod. Can you even do co-op in source?

• Loss of the agrunt. The agrunt was an important monster in my mod, he was actually tweaked quite alot so the colour of his amour determined his health and strength (ranks), his gun was tweaked quite alot, his bullets don't really bounce off walls anymore, and they shoot faster.

• And leaving the goldsource community. It may sound silly, but there is a strong and steady community for goldsource, maybe not on this website. The guys (well really only wolf) over at VERC and all the folks over at the SOHL fourms are really dedicated to the goldsource engine, there always coming up with new stuff, they made a gravity gun out of entities, many improvements on all the monsters, that awesome poison zombie that I used in my mod, aswell as there is a half-life mod in development with many of the features from source and other cool features that have not been ever done in goldsource, he even has vehicles! And twhl still has an active half-life help fourm with a flow of new half-life maps.

Anyway, I think I need to do some research, what do I use to make models, figure out this coding thing.

Well, thanks for your posts Juim and Reaper47, if I move to the source engine, I can actually give you credit for that for the words of encouragement and confidence! :smile:

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Aaron's Stuff

Oh hehe, well, not any so far, just the normal. For the final compile, I am going to to all that nice stuff.

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Aaron's Stuff

I'm not anti-goldsource here. I like the engine. And some of the best mods ever made have been done for goldsource. I always found the HL1 enemies more fun to play against. I won't recommend you going Source just for the extra props and high-res graphics.

What I'm saying is, that, if you stay in goldsource (which might be a reasonable option in this case), you shouldn't rely on HL2 material so much. It's more of a psychological issue. I don't really find the premise of a HL1 mod, that so hugely relies on HL2 props for eye candy, all that exciting.

It's easier to do custom material for goldsource than for HL2. I think that everything that's possible in HL1 can be done in HL2. But HL1 has less detail to care about (which doesn't mean graphics have to be less stylish!) and, most importantly, more accumulated experience by the community. 10 years of experience that is!

I think you should:

a) Make more custom content if you want eye-candy.
b) Strip down your mod to the bare minimum, so you can actually finish it.

Otherwise I'm afraid the process will become a little aimless...

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Why snark works.

Ok.

I tired porting this map to source, but it just didn't feel comfortable. So I have decided this. I will finish the outskirts map and the sewer map in goldsource and these will be my last goldsource maps.

During that 2 day port attempt, I found out just how powerful the engine was, and that maybe, just maybe, I could build the type of maps I want to build.

I am very excited to join the rest of you guys with the source engine. I have already started designing my first source map and I am going to start building it hopefully in 2 weeks time. That means that I have 2 weeks to finish outskirts and sewer, so I need to stay focused and do the best that I can within that 2 weeks.

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Aaron's Stuff

I was going to recommend you keep the number of -bounces down. The lighting is already a little washed out, extra bounces will make it even more so.

Ahhh.. I see. I'll experiment around with this :wink:

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Aaron's Stuff

Alrighty, here are some new screenshots, I'll just point out, that I have lowered the sun quite alot.





Now, I can probably say that the map is finished. Of course, we can always do more on our maps, and we can just reiterate over our maps, sit on them and perfect them and tweak every little thing, but, I want to make more than 1 map in my life, so I need to call it finished. I was a bit disappointed how the all evil "too many entities in visible packet list" slowed me down, and essentially nailed me to a wall and smeared vinegar on all my wounds, before releasing the hounds.... but I guess I am happy with how the map turned out.

One of the final things in all maps (or at least for me) is the sound. Now at this stage, I am just tweaking the sound, however, I am really happy with how the sound turned out, it really makes the playing experience in this map 4 times as good (so the screenshots aren't everything). Here is a short list of the sound effects I have in the map:

-Distant gun fire and explosions (north of the map)
-ominous, distant zombie calls (south of the map)
-Nice wind chime sounds
-Waterfall sound for the waterfall
-Various "hall way" sounds for different indoor sections
-Guitar music playing in the cafe
-Cicada sound

Now my brother suggested that I should change the map slightly to make it that its dusk (becoming night) and the monsters are starting to come out, because the monsters come out at night. Much like that level from gears of war just before the bats come out and you can't walk into the dark, you can see the bats flying around and some scary monster sounds. It would be cool, but I don't know, what do you guys think?

EDIT! : I need to change the sky :wink:

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Aaron's Stuff

And you are at the end(I think)upload in the NET

tnqwe said:
And you are at the end(I think)upload in the NET

Yeah, the map is complete, if you would like to download go here.

BTW, I can't close the thread because of the little stuff up I had, so please post any thoughts in the maps profile.

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Aaron's Stuff