Aaron & Others Map Help

Ok, I have a map project in the works, but I am not sure how to approach it. There are two ideas in my head that are at war with one another.. in Seattle WA there is a park there called gas works. I was thinking of trying to recreate that park.. but I am not sure how to enclose it. Also that would be pretty much a huge open area with hills and a gas pump thing in the middle of it.. so I worry about lag issues. The other idea is to do a more Japanese garden idea.. with ducks in the pond and a bridge and trees some oriental lanterns.. that kinda thing.. but how do I make that into a multi-player map for Counterstrike. The theme behind this either way is DUCK POND. Its for the Seattle Duck Soup Server.. maybe you all have some suggestions?

Aaron why I addressed you by name was because you have that woodsy like map with the water.. I thought maybe you would have some ideas from that map to share.

Ok well the first idea, Gas Works park, I suppose you could put a fence around the whole park or use the good old clip or a push effect. Another idea that you might like to play around with is the idea of setting up combine turrets around the perimeter of the park that fire at the player if he leaves the park. Ofcourse, you would have to make it so that the turrets can't be destroyed or moved and there would have to be quite a few of them and they would need to deal a fair amount of damage. If your prepared to actually modify the park when you make it, you could always add a cliff or a steep drop off to keep players inside the map.

In regards to lag, that could be an issue in such an open map. Remember, you can fade out models (and possibly brushes) at a certain distance so that they aren't rendered. What you could also do is add fog to the map and fade everything after the fog. If you have a look at the HL2EP2 type of forest environments, they look pretty convincing but there aren't actually that many tree models to create the environment.

The Japanese Garden idea would probably be a more 'fun' map. Large open spaces and lots of ground to cover aren't really fun for Half-life games, unless you want to put vehicles in the map. I imagine this idea is going to have to require a fair bit of custom made content. For the ducks, you can make a duck model and use the func_fishpool entity for them. This is how I made fish and dragonflies in my dm_backwash map.

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Aaron's Stuff