xc_bank

I' have just spent about 8 hours solid, thoughout the night on this map. Kinda got to a sticky point, where its turned into a laggy killbox :sad:

Suggestions please..

Screenshots for those fortunate not to have their computers infected with Cs please. :biggrin:

Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:Open Source. Wonderfull thing. RMF - You can open it in hammer.

The texture work is no where near even started.

But i'll go get some screenshots...

EDIT : Images removed, this map is old now.

Looks really bad in the screenshots. not so bad in hammer btw.

I assumed you'd be using CS textures. The prospect of looking at a
white .rmf in hammer is quite unappealing. I'd suggest finding and
applying some city textures. You can't really get away with making
everything with the same few generic concrete textures. A bit of
lighting would make the map infinitely better. Just stick in a
light_env for a few shadows if you havent decided what time of day you
want the map set at yet.

It looks a bit too open at the moment though, you won't get away with having lots of nice details. :sad:

Well, the origianal idea was a snippit of a city, but my mapping skills are no where near that standerd. I cant figure out how to make it feel like a city. The tall buildings, well, blobs as they are, at the moment, look absolutly terrible.

Ive tried to copy some of the architecture found in vice city. It obviously feels like a city, but there arnt towering buildings everywhere. I dont know how I should make my bank look like, either :smile:

Looks indeed a bit ehm ... fullbright and a lack of texture variation ...

I like the idea, but get yourself some prefab cars or boxes and put 'em on the streets, will look nicer.

Try to do some outdoor lighting too, will create some atmosphere.

Try some assault textures or even assault 2k textures[you need to get them out of the bsp, use textractor]put in an light_enviroment, some borders on the window would look nice.

hehe your snarkmarks say 69[er] lol.
/crawls back under rock

I think I might make it night. I do like those sort of maps... nightvision and all, may look rather spinkeh.

The texture work is no where near even started.

I wanted to get on with the brushwork.. didnt want to texture something I was going to delete.

snarkmarks say 69

Boogie on down to the general forum, you'll notice I only came back to this site after about a year, two days ago.

Think that one went right over your head.

If this is your first map, ever, then its OK. If not... well, if Vash were here, he'd eat your legs :biggrin:

I suggest you use more texture variations, the lights the same texture as the street just doesnt look right. Even though you say the texture work isnt done yet... you could at least do something before releasing screens.

Brushwork is... OK I suppose. What are your wpoly/epoly like? I see very little visblocking. Also I've noticed some distant faces are being culled (In Hammer, go Map->Map Properties and increase max viewable distance :wink: )

I think you should make it a night map. n00bish outdoor maps always look better in the dark...

Thats just my thoughts, agree/disagree if you want, I dont care, as long as you learn from it.

EDIT: Just looked at your first post:

I' have just spent about 8 hours solid, thoughout the night on this map. Kinda got to a sticky point, where its turned into a laggy killbox

That doesnt surprise me, for visblocking reasons I've stated above.

I have a horrible feeling that I'm going to get badgererd for this; I cant get the lighting to work. in hlcc, under params b, I cant find xc_bank.rad for the lighting. Is this what I need to do ?

Visblocking - putting something in the way to block things further away ? Yes, I definatly need to do that, but I cant really think how. The more buildings I put in, the more blockey its going to look.

Youve got the right idea for visblocking. If you make the buildings look decent, the map isnt going to look blocky.

I dont know about compiler frontends... but to make lighting work, you need to run HLRAD.exe. Also, this may sound stupid, but do you actually have any lights in the map?

Ive used the 'light' entity. Is that correct ?

Post the entire compile process of the map. I'm betting you have a leak somewhere...

Well, its not the best way, but at least it means you have lights in the map, so it eliminates one possibility.

Does your map have any leaks? If it does, VIS and RAD wont run, so your map will look, well, like it does in those screens...

I didnt notice that I had a leak :sad: I scrawled through the compile log, and found I did, obviously. Had an entity, about 1 nano pixel stuck into a brush, and that counts as a leak... apparently. anyway - its fixed now. But I've a new error !!!yaya.ugh.

Whenever the map is loaded it says 'cant load xco.wad'. Where is the list of wads that it wants ? Its not in the hammer wad's list. Not in the hlcc wad include list. Did a search on my hdd, and there is no xco.wad. I've reloaded the map, and if xco.wad couldent be found, then the textures would turn white, no texture. I did a 'check for problems', and found none.

sigh. Why do I get all the arsey errors ?

no, dont answer that :biggrin:

Make a copy of one of your existing .wads and rename it to xco.wad.

The editing forum is the ideal place for all your editing questions. :wink:

Sure. The thread just carried on though, so I thought I may aswell try and resist the spam.

I tried making a copy of one of my existing wads proir to this post. The game just completly frooze, and died. I would assume it got confused, finding the wad without the texture it expects.

That wouldnt kill the game like that.

This is really weird... hmm... Sorry, I've got no idea.

Which wads do you have specified in Teh Hammre?

It would crash the game. Its not expecting the error, because the wad has been found. I would of thought.

I cant see all the names of the wads, as the paths are too big, and the listbox is not wide enough. I'll try removing them all, and re-adding them.

Make sure that you only add the wads that you know you need - htere's several wads such as cached.wad which aren't proper texture wads.

Also make sure that you aren't adding more than 8 wads. More than 8 wads is known to cause some problems on some computers so it's best to rule that out.

if you do need to include more than 8 wad's, use wally to merge some.

Okey. Looks like I have gotten rid of that xco.wad error, yet the game still completly freezes when loading the map. I'll pop over to the troubleshooting section now...

Is there a way to find out which wad's are in use in my map ? I have rather a lot of texture work done now, and rather a lot of wad's, too.

It lists which .wads are used in the compile log. The editing forums
are there for a reason, and so is the answer database. :rolleyes:

True, sorry, its getting out of hand now, with all these errors. Expect to see some nice screenies soon, though. :smile: