HL_Ivory

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Well hello there people. I see some familiar faces here (Pericolos0, and i know most of ReNo's work as well) but most people won't know me yet. I'm Daan "DaanO" van den Heuvel, i've been mapping for about 3 years now - most of my work can be found on http://daano.mapdesign.nl (last, unreleased stuff can be found here http://forum.counter-strike.nl/showthread.php?t=418&page=143&pp=10). Besides that, i'm 19 years old, and i'm currently studying Game Design at Hollands finest art school :smile: .

I'm just about to release my first HLDM map, so naturally, i thought i'd post it here on snarkpit. (Suck up, ye) Recently i got a bit more into making textures with Photoshop, i've been wanting to make a small map with all homemade textures for a while. I had a picture in mind of some kind of ivory tower (explains the name), which was what this was built after. The map is quite small, filled with teleporters, many things are in motion, map even has a soundtrack. (Which doesn't even annoy me after listening to it for half an hour - yay!) Anyway, i made all the textures (skyline), models (animations, skins) for this as well, so i'm kinda proud of it. People have asked me what it is, but i don't even have a clue myself.

I think it'll be released tomorrow, or even tonight, whenever i get the time to do compile, and when the last small entity stuff has been fixed. So, whatcha think?

Screenshots:

I kinda like this ... good lighting, and the atmosphere is ok. GJ !

I'd suggest giving us a beta and letting us give you some feedback on that before releasing it. It's hard to say much useful from just a couple screenshots.

But I'll try anyway. Hard to tell without seeing it in action, but all those glowing sprites might get annoying. Also, the textures don't look very... textured..?

Btw, if you are making textures for HL you should keep them in dimensions that are powers of two- 16, 32, 64, 128, 256. While you can use anything that is divisible by 16 (eg 80, 112), textures that size get sampled down to the next lowest power of two and look crappy. ie a 112x64 texture will get sampled down to 64x64 quality, then blown back up, and thus look blurrier that it should. Best to size the uneven dimension up or down.

regarding soundtracks: if it's a huge wav file of some stupid Korn song I'll rip your lungs out. no, really. I'm so sick of downloading a 12mb zip, of which 11mb is some s**tty 'nu-metal' band and of which 1mb is a horrible killbox. There will be no more mercy!

Roger that. Soundtrack will be "only" like 1 MB zipped, would that be ok?

Anyway, i know all about the theory of HL texturing, and the textures are all powers of 2 as far as i know. I'll name the zip file i'll put on tonight prefinal and we'll see what happens, ok? I wanted to keep the textures quite vague, especially for the towers. And besides that, i'm no nu-metal fan so don't worry :smile:

:wink:

I probably won't be around myself to get to it tonight, but I'm sure some of the others will give you a hand. Betas = good!

www.angels.again2fast.org/daano/hl_ivory.zip

Known bugs: Satelite rotates way too fast

Also, a question: somebody just told me that my zip is messy for Steam use. I let winzip put everything in the /valve folder automatically, but apparently (according to the guy) that folder does not exist anymore. Any suggestions to how i should set up my zip file?

Very interesting architecture/layout. But I do think you want a tad overboard with the sprites. A few hanging around in inaccessable areas gives a nice atmosphere, but you sent it to a level of annoyance and it might even cause noticable performace problems in more archaic computers.

Overall though, the texturing was done well and the layout was pretty cool.

I think the sky could be a blue-scale version of what you've got currently and it'd be a great theme.

I'll think about that, thanks guys. I will remove some sprites, just put that on my fixlist. I'll consider what to do with the skyline as well. Thanks again for the feedback.

Aren't you a mod on the CS forums? It's an honor.

Haven't tested it, but just from looking at the shots, I'd say it needs some trim first and foremost - some emphasis to sort out all the form. Odd-shaped floating arenas are fine by me (check out Ribcage ) but the theme needs to be a little more coherent - you've got stairs, you've got spires, you've got glow sprites. Even if the theme is abstract, how do they all fit together? - especially with your skybox.

I'll play it later to see what it's like ingame.

Yes, i am :smile:

I've got some more complaints about the skybox, so i'll see what i will do with it. I'm not to experienced with Photoshop yet, so that might be why the textures are not top-notch yet.

Have you considered entering this into the contest? It just seems you've about finished it and the contest deadline is tomorrow (well, today now I guess) so it might be worth a thought if you have the time to complete it

Hey man, i'm not really sure what contest you are talking about :S. Anyway, there's about half an hour of work left so i could finish this any day.

Ack, just re-read my post, doesn't sound too friendly hehe ^_^

I might just know what contest you're talking about, and i'll think about entering it, ok?

Good effect with the glows :biggrin: But the map needs alot of work. The all blue theme doesnt work out to well. Have some something a little more spontanious (spelling).. I little more bizzar to spice things up.

I made an entirely new skybox (although i kept the planet at the bottom) which makes it all look kind of different. It fits the map much better now, also sparks things up a bit. Call it spontanious if you want :wink:

Besides that i fiddled around a bit with textures, did a small lighting adjustment, and fixed the rotation speed of the satelite. I'm compiling now, i'll post the map whenever it's ready. Thanks for the feedback guys

mm i just had this idea. What if you make a huuuuuge rotating skybox using an animated model.

Now that would be pure sweetness

yeah

rotating models = the pwn

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too late, it's finished now:

Download HL_Ivory

Good to see you made it an involved process.

ARGH! Read the forum guidelines mate :razz: Keep screenshots 800x600 or below, and below 100kb each (easy to do with any graphics program, or something like irfanview).

Cool satellite daan :kitty:

Minotaur0 said:
Cool satellite daan :kitty:

OMAI! Its MINO at the snarkpit!!!~~!~

so basicaly all the rspeeds are sucked up by the sattelite (not sure if its brushbased), but definately from the loads of stairs you h ave. Seems incredibaly linear, dead ends, dunno if I'd like it or not. Gameplay would be incredibaly stale.

/me lix cjack~~

fetter: its not brushbased, its a big model :smile: Daan wouldnt be so nub to make this brushbased D:~~

TS Forums invasion. God save us all.

Ferret said:
so basicaly all the rspeeds are sucked up by the sattelite (not sure if its brushbased), but definately from the loads of stairs you h ave. Seems incredibaly linear, dead ends, dunno if I'd like it or not. Gameplay would be incredibaly stale.

You should actually go play this map before making comments I guess. You would have seen that the satelite is a model, that the stairs do not ruin r_speeds (they're within limits as far as i've seen), and that those dead ends actually hold some teleporters. I played this map with a few friends and once they found out where each teleporter goes to, the gameplay was incredibly fast. Enemies could come from everywhere. The low gravity (combined with gauss gun) worked quite well with that.

@ReNo: Oh, sorry about that man. Never thought any forum would have a limit to that as long as i host those pictures myself. I linked those directly from my homepage, and on there all screenshots are 1280x960, so that explain. Do you want me to change it after all, or just be a good boy from now on? :smile:

yeah, smaller screenshots are the preferred ones, we have a contingent
of 56k users ( i was one til a few months ago!) in our midst :smile:

theres a jpeg optimising tool here http://www.irfanview.com/ - good for resizing and optimising file size in Kb as well.

:smile:

I know irfanview, just didn't count on those rules.

read me before posting:

Posting map screenshots? Please make them at most 800x600 in size, and as small a filesize as possible! Try irfanview for a program that'll 'optimize' your image size for faster downloading.

from the top of the new topic page

Hes the type of person that complains to the hotel hes staying at after walking into a door that has PULL written on it... hehe

Looks like a nice map, although as Reno said I think or maybe ferret, it does look stale. Theres something about the lighting too, its rather plain and mono, try adding some red bits here and there or something, or putting some red in the sky to contrast.

not really, i never complain really :smile:

anyway, i am very sure that red would kill the color scheme in this map (i'm an art school student, trust me on this one :razz: ). i am not changing this anymore.

i submitted the map for the contest, but it was a little late so i guess it has not been accepted. i wish good luck to all contestants, voted for paralaxation (sp?) as winner, runner-up reno's flatshaded map. have to admit, both are better than my map, but since i only spent about 12 hours totally on this map, that's no shame. so yeah good luck, and hopefully some of you will enjoy this map after all. try it. when i played it it was far from stale. everybody's circling around, jumping like crazy, gauss-boosting all over the place. the pool in the middle heals you a bit, so some people did try to stand there and defend the place but that's quite hard. beh just give it a try.... please

:smile: