A map in progress{gortesco}

Generally iam trying to improve my mapping skills i would be gratefull for abit advice on the map. Ive just started making basicially its plains are to be a supermarket callled tesco. It consists of a car park underneath the shop and elevators and lifts up to the shop floor. At the moment ive bult a basic structure of the car park and need to work on it further just send your ideas and advice.Also if you know slough thats great youll know the setup of the tesco building.

Glad you've made a work in progress thread for your map. I'm
about to set off for a full day of classes, but when I get back I'll
write up something for you. Don't stop working on your map
though... develop it enough to give us a couple more shots.

Generally iam trying to improve my mapping skills

That's the spirit :biggrin: .

Looking forward to seeing how this evolves.

Judging from that screenshot your walls aren't touching the floor or ceiling.

You need some light fixtures to explain where the light is coming from.

You need texture and geometry variation. ReNo pointed me in the
direction of his tutorials a while ago, and now I'll do the same to you.

Read this: http://www.snarkpit.net/editing.php?page=tutorials&game=HL&id=10

And this: http://www.snarkpit.net/editing.php?page=tutorials&game=HL&id=93

Good luck! Show us more screenshots as you progress!

1st off, do not get discouraged, we will be tough on you but you will benefit from it.

2ndly, any map can find people to play it. That is not a good indicator of how well you made it. It is an indicator, but not a reliable one.

3rdly, find some maps you think are examples of what you wish to accomplish. Mappers have big heads by default and when another mapper copies his style, it swells exponentially.

4thly, once you found the maps that look like what you wish to create, note the popularity and scores. They are indicators as well of your possible success. Not a guarantee but an indicator.

5thly, if you come out of this thread no better than you are now, its your fault.

Good luck

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Generally iam trying to improve my mapping skills i would be gratefull for abit advice on the map. Ive just started making basicially its plains are to be a supermarket callled tesco. It consists of a car park underneath the shop and elevators and lifts up to the shop floor. At the moment ive bult a basic structure of the car park and need to work on it further just send your ideas and advice.Also if you know slough thats great youll know the setup of the tesco building.

Obviously you can build whatever you want, but I think recreating Tesco might be a bit too much for a first map. You'll need a bunch of custom models and textures for all the assorted crap that a supermarket contains. Impressive that you didn't just pick your house for your first project like the rest of us. :biggrin:

Mapping realisticly requires a bit more thought and consideration, and I feel you might get bogged down getting all the trolleys and checkouts angled perfectly. If you just get creative with hammer and build cool looking areas, you don't have to worry about wether they'd collapse in the real world.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

Oh, and don't neglect the vertical axis. From the looks of that basic
structure you've shown us, the map's pretty flat-out. That's a
major no-no many mappers, even experienced ones, make.

Great tutorial thanks for telling me about that A.d morphine Reno did a dam good job of that. Basially iam slowly working though it and its a good step by step tutorial and ill be working on it more. Heres my progress on a corridor using the vertex and chop tool. Its first efforts but hey it is alot more interesting using this exciting tool iam learning alot more thx.

looking at new screen

Be careful. You will fall into "the right side looks like the left side" trap.

We all have been there. Its not the best hole to be in.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Ive improved the corridor by working on the front entrance and tested out some light texture. But it going slow but its getting more exciting and for too. Ive also alighed the right side wall bringing the arch up higher into less curved corridor. As you see my progress on the corridor and depth iam trying to give it.

Thats the stuff Gorami! Keep at it :smile: Just a thought though - architecture like that doesn't really fit your" tesco" theme. If you want to continue playing about with this sort of architecture, I'd suggest going with a more abstract theme, like many of those generic deathmatch map style affairs. Making a map that truly fits a theme is tough, and making nice and interesting architecture is also tough, so trying to do both at once is a tall order. The Half-Life texture set isn't really suited to a theme like a supermarket either. If I were you, I'd make things easier on myself and just focus on the architecture this time around, and forget about a particularly strong theme.

Also, don't feel you have to follow the tutorial to the letter when it comes to your designs. Both of the pictures you have shown use, effectively, the same design as the one I built in the tutorial, and if you use it too often then it will become repetitive and eventually, just as boring as a regular boxy corridor. Get creative and make new shapes, or make wide corridors with pillars in the middle, or whatever. Just have fun with it I guess :smile:

Anyway I'm really glad to see you taking people's advice on board, best of luck with it!

---

[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting gorami</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>Ive just started making basicially its plains are to be a supermarket callled tesco. </DIV></DIV>

Lawsuit beware! Call it Tesko...

Also that entrance you made looks kinda DM like. If you're aiming to build a supermarket try using textures/utilities from CS- I think theres quite a few HL1 and HL2 supermarket maps.

Also establish what kind of supermarket this is- Inner or outer city? Architect designed or just a shop drop in (did an architect design a nice front and insides etc in other words)? What does the supermarket sell? I'm guessing because you wanted to call it Tesco that it is a food supermarket- I'd suggest strongly against this as commonly you can see from one end of the supermarket to the other, something that can't really be done with the HL1 engine.

Heres a layout plan of Sainsbury's for you to see the idea.



And here below is an American store that sells multiple items- books, furniture and food, with toilets and food court area in the central position.



.

My personal advice is that you copy the architecture of the following picture. That means don't put the people, chairs, tables, food, plants, store signs etc. Do build the store fronts though with glass, and the pillars, roof detailing including the lights and thier fixtures. Get the textures as close as you can including the pillars with orange and blue, and also the vents you see dead centre of the picture slightly to the right.



The outcome should please you if you get it as close as you can. You can later add in the chairs and tables with models that we can help you with later.

Now GO!

---

-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

Hey MYRX that be a challedge iam trying to improve my skills then by then i looking at this complex map of that supermarket and work round it thx for the advice i try working on that thx MYRX. Reno your right i cant really set a exact theme at the moment iam working though getting a better mapper. Then by then my map will change completely its only early.

what I did to improve my skills -- not saying this will work for you --
is I just made craploads and craploads and CRAPLOADS of tiny little
projects on the side (my RMF directory has roughly 465 projects in it
:O). I'm just now working on my first two DM maps. One of them is
already complete and awaiting release; the other is still being tweaked.

Good luck on your ambitions, however

Rather boring but abit atomoshephere has been added learnt abit slowly working though artucultural tutorial but heres a tiny abit work on the map. Iam getting a picture now idea are coming.

Good improvement, you're clearly beginning to get to grips with the architecture side of things. The other main problem you seem to have is with texturing, and if you work on it a bit things will look much better. Avoid using the same texture across more than one surface; eg. don't texture the floor the same as the walls, or the walls the same as the ceiling. The huge light you have is also a worry point here, as the texture repeats far too much and it looks bad. Break up the fixture into several smaller fixtures, with only one face using a single instance of the light texture, to illuminate the room instead.

Keep it up man :smile:

---

[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

Looking at the second screen you've added to the map profile, it looks
like the walls aren't lined up correctly, and they don't touch the
floor or ceilings. Are you working on a small grid size? It
might be easier to make your walls line up if you're working on a grid
size of 32 or even 64 for all the basic geometry.

Looking forward to more updates.

Watch your placement. The solids do not seem to be matching well.

Those textured lights. Each one counts as 6 entity lights when you compile. So, the map will compile longer with each addition. I hope you have a big machine.

Its always best to have a texture in mind when making creative architecture. Its not imperative to use it right off but make sure it will fit eventually.

As previously stated, try some variety.

Keep it up. I wanna see more.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Bascially we can tell they don't line up because of those tiny dark shadow lines around the edges of your manipulated (edited with the edges)/clipped (cut) solids.

Now might be a good idea to tell you about vertex manipulation and invalid solids... Check the tutorials for clipping, vertex manipulation, and you should learn everything about it. Basically the lowdown is that you can't have concave shapes, only convex. No point of 1 solid can go inwards on the solid. If you find yourself in the situation, use 2 convex solids to make the 1 would-be concave.



Highlight the pic to reveal the text (originally on a white background page).

---

-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

Abit of changes to the area hoping to make into the tesco car park which is underneath and the building is supported above. As you see i need to get rid of the repetiveness in the lighting and do something to the general texture.The tutorials are sure helping though.

Hey give me some advice you all ran alway but i suppose theres alot maps in progress well anyway.Still spicing the area up hoping to be car park soon which looks interesting.

You've created too much minor detail- in particular the lines on the sides of the roads, but also the pipe holders. Most of these problems are consistent with mapping large, open, indoor areas.

---

-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

But its improved at the moment iam working at the ceiling creating something interesting but iam going to start doing the chop vertex tutorials when i can.

The new shot looks good, but try this.

With the pipe supports instead of making them curl round with loads of verticies, make 1 block that is a func_wall, and make it going through the pipe verticie, I'll try and show you with lines...

Currently:
.........__

---

---

.........--

What you need:
........__
------|---|------
------|---|------
.......|__|

---

-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

Seriously bud, please read this tutorial.

I'd kinda like to see the images too.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Gorami, it looks like you have a lot of brushes poking through one
another, particularly the angled walls in the second shot. With
vertex manipulation and the clip tool you shouldn't have sloppy
brushwork. Also, it seems like your solids aren't aligned.
What grid size are you working on?

Being having problems with hlrad telling me too many patches MAX_patches something to do with to many surface which does my head in.How do i go about this because you know its tesco by time on work on the building theys going to be alot of surfaces and sides etc. Any advance or tutorials for this fault and what causing the compiler like hlbsp to say inlegal operation the most god crap ever.

Check up on the HL editing forums search - i'm pretty certain max
patches has been done before. AFAIR, it's to do with face counts OR
light_ entities on a solid surface.

As has been said you're handling architecture nicely, in terms of
creating a nice looking room - now its all about reducing that room to
the smallest number of shapes possible.

Clean, and efficient mapping is second to architecture control in my
view, because it allows you the freedom to add minor details (ie 1/2
brush size).

adding -sparse to the hlrad paramaters should fix the max_patches error

---

i eat paint

The max_patches error is easily searched and resolved.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Nothing that exciting but i did muck around with the chop setting on hlrad.exe in hlcc compiler and sorted something out.Ill looked on a good website ttp://www.zhlt.info/command-reference.html which help with some of the setting and commands in hlcc.Ill also have a look into this sparse setting in hlrad.exe. Thanks for the advice abit of work hads been done its starting to look abit like i want it to now got to keep exploring and trying.

Is there a download link yet?

and, I assume you are using my HLCC tut?

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Coming along now abit parking bays its looking more like a car park all the time.But it needs something dont you think.

What caught my attention in those shots is that there's a lot of odd brushes there. A lot of oddly angled brushes on those support pillars. Their texturing isn't great and their lighting isn't either.

I feel there's too much detail put in the support pillars but the rest of the ceiling has to do with virtually nothing. That's outbalanced. Some air vents and support beams would fit there. As for the parking space, I think most detail can be achieved with textures there - sinkholes, drawn lines and arrows, that sort of stuff. Some signs here and there and not to forget: cars.

And change the lighting. I can't remember having seen such a bleu underground parking lot in ages. They're usually either yellow or whitish. Bleu on grey looks washed out, too (or however you say it).

Good luck with this. :smile:

---

Create-ivity - a game development blog

Capatain thanks for the advice i worked a tiny bit on the supports on the ceiling and changed it and had a fairly good outcome. As you said the connection between the supports and ceiling need sorting.Changing the texture going to help and some pipe work should work.