I remember when I was making a map for Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight with a tool known as "JED" I tried to make a room about the size of a hall about 20m width x 50m length x 20m height that connected to a 2nd room through a 4m? doorway "corridor". Well the game engine couldn't handle it.

Why not?

This 2nd room that I created was big enough to fit the entire PLANET EARTH!

Looking back, I thought it was stupid and funny of me to think that I could run the map, start in the first room, go to the second room, enable the fly mode cheat and fly around at high speeds, stop somewhere and think, "this is where Asia would be".

Your experiences...?

I tried to make a map where you were a guy trying to make a map for a mod about making maps.

Some say it drove me mad.

Mad.

Mad.

I once made a room for Quake 2. It was the max size possible.

Then I filled it with as many guards as possible without it blowing up.

Nuff said.

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Dark_Kilauea
DVS Administration
http://www.dvstudio-production.com/

Wait a second. This thread seems to infer that killbox = ambitious? I must disagree on principle.

My first "real" attempt of mapping was quite a bit better at least in visual aspects than my first ever map (which was lost in a HDD crash unfortunately, the rest of my history I have.) The problem at that point was I had no idea of the concept of any sort of engine limitations and it had way too many brushes and open areas (engine-wise, not killbox-ish) and overloaded the compile process after I had like 1/6th of it mapped out.

Needless to say my next project was TOO heavy on the angled areas, but the combination of those learning experiences led to me at least at one point knowing the GoldSrc engine pretty damn well.

I remember making huuuuuuge outdoor maps for Q2 and HL1 with dozens of overlapping domes as hills and huge arenas with proportionally huge buildings, "brought to life" by dozens of ugleh func_tracktrain tanks and helicopters. And strangely, both engines managed to run my horrid creations although compiling DID take up to 8 hours (on a PI 150Mhz 32 ram). :heee:

Haha. Hmm. I wasn't going to post here, since I've done hardly anything that nobody's seen, but Andrei's story reminded me of something I did do before dm_residential.

I was calling it dm_industrial_warehouse. And dear god, it was pretty ridiculous. I created this massive... well, industrial-looking warehouse-type thing. And I put like two little rooms in it, and I spent several days basically doing nothing at all with it, trying to figure out how to fill all the space I had given myself. Just flying around and doing worthless little tweaks to what little I had.

Haha. It really sucked. I can't believe it. :smile:

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-- midkay

a medium space station with glass hallways (the glass was bulletproof).
The idea was you could see the other players but you could not always get to them because I made the layout with a lot of twists and turns.

It was laggy because you could see the whole map at once with hundreds of
glass panes and each hallway was made of many, many brushes. I actually met the max brush limit on that one.

I tried

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don't sweat the petty stuff,just pet the sweaty stuff.

If anyone recalls the quake map base 64 (its massive), I was on a project to make it for half life, called mesa 64. Needless to say it pushed the limits of the compiler, and the map had to be broken up into 3 smaller sections. It contained a dam, a resevaur, a track system, mountains, and lots of other attractions.

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Posting And You

the snarkpitcrew map, nuff said

maxed out almost every compiler limit possible and this was with ZHLT's much higher limits

If we're just talking making out the node size and all that, my map
Daydream rubbed up against most everything HL liked to limit. But
I won the struggle.

Most ambitious thing I'm working on is Momma Mesa -- my leaf count is sitting somewhere right around 91%, with a clipnode count somewhere in the 80's :/ The fact that Momma Mesa has some 7000 + brushes isn't making my life any easier, either.

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

Back in the early days, I remember I tried makeing a mod where you ride a train to hell. It had like lots of blood and 'torture tables' and it was kind alien theamed. I just didn't have enough skillz back then to finish it so I quit, but it was a good learning experiance. And actrully, true story, reddawn actrully was born from this mod. Many of the ideas from "neptune" the hell mod was used in reddawn, but as I grew and became a better mapper, the ideas changed, storyline changed, and now its turned into somthing very special indeed.

By the way snarkpit, the last post in General Banter was more than 20 hours ago. ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!! WTF happened when I was gone. Snarkpit is back to being quiet and dull again, hang your head in shame folks!!! Theres like hardly any new topics, OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Aaron's Stuff

Clarity of posts is much more important than number of posts.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

I wanted to make a fantasy-themed map that would be the basis for a mod: there would be distinctly-designed castles in three different settings - snowy, grassy, and volcanic - divided from one another by stretches of open terrain, from which side passages would lead to areas controlled by non-player monsters. Wildlife and herbage on the plains, as well as two dozen neutral NPCs per fortress, would be models. The strongholds would all be open-roofed and visible from the plains. I originally conceived this as an HL1 map.

I made this one map for HL2 that was the bridge section of a massive space battle ship. It had a massive glass dome with a number of floors, lifts, ramps, etc. all looking out into this huge sky box with other battle ships which were in a huge battle with each other. far off ships would shoot lasers at each other and when ever a laser hit the ship that the players were in the gravity would turn off for a few moments.

The only failure was really on my part, I rushed it so much because I was so excited to see it in action. Once I did get it running it was nothing like I had expected. There was no sense of space and the lasers didn't work. The gravity was a cool effect but never really came together.

Thats how it has been for many of my maps, well build stage that never really lights up how I expect so I drop it and never give it the time it needs.

Also the map in my collection dm_cliff, that was ambitious. Map set on the edge of this huge canyon. Really a nice map to take screen shots of but not a cool map to play.

I worked on this HL1 map with three or five other Snarkpit members where we each passed the RMF around and built a section or two. Problems abounded: missing lights.rad, missing wad files, bad visblocking, no planning...

The SPLA map may be a shared 'most ambitious mapping project' for several of us : )

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This signature text is probably longer than my post.

I once made a map using green textures on some walls and yellow/orange textures on other walls... After messing around with the lighting I compiled it and... it was purple and pink due to the lighting.

I colored the lights black. Kinda like you would find at a dance hall. Ya know... the lights that make your white shoes purple :wink: .

Needless to say I released it... op4_cottoncandy.

The name came from the appearance of the map. Looked just like the pink and purple cotton candy you would see at a fair.

I don't think blacklights work that way.

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

the map mosaic project was very ambitious and while it workers pretty well I had to go to college and was never able to get the web site automated well enough. There is still a place for it I feel, perhaps I should find someone with lots of time to do the grunt work for me.

I just remembered a map that I made for Spirit of Half-Life back in mid 2004. After reading through the Features guide I thought the Movewith ability would be very useful and so I started up Hammer. I made a corridor about 8m? stretching the maximum length possible. I made a func_tracktrain that started at one end of the corridor that had an indoor control center with front windows and an open area at the back surrounded by railings (like a pickup truck but about 2 1/2 times bigger each dimension). You had to climb a ladder to enter the train from the open area at the back and the railing style gate(func_train) had it's own set of path_corners so it would slide in then along. There was a func_tank set up at the back and a func_door with glass to the control room.

At the same end of the corridor, there was a huge door that you could open from the func_tracktrain and theoretically, once the door was open the gargantua on the other side would chase you as you travelled along the corridor in the train.

What went wrong?

Well, I forgot to turn all the walls in the cockpit into func_walls.

The simple light entity in the cockpit didn't movewith (Not even after SmartEdit Off).

The railing door path_corners didn't movewith at least not properly.

As a result, the control room minus the floor was left behind.

After fixing that, I was left with wierd lighting inside.

The garg couldn't be bothered chasing the train despite me using the turret at the back to provoke it.

The railing door was all over the place.

It was just a huge mess, I just gave up.

I wanted to make a map for cs 1.6 where everything in the entire level had a sort of ripple running through it (seemingly) so every building, model and everything i made had a sort of curve to it (almost s-shaped).

When i finaly finished most of the architectre, after days, weeks, months of vertex manipulating, i lost the map in a hdd crash, i think i might have cried tbh lol :biggrin:

But it would have never worked, try algning textures on 500000 triangles, and get the hl1 engine to properly light and run it :biggrin:

I should re-try it in source, should be way better with the new displcement tool.

God damn that map drove me mad with vertex manipulate errors.

But it did teach me how to properly use the tool, at the time i'd been level designing for hl1 for about...3 weeks, so it took me sooo long to create and learn everything.

the map mosaic project was very ambitious and while it workers pretty well I had to go to college and was never able to get the web site automated well enough. There is still a place for it I feel, perhaps I should find someone with lots of time to do the grunt work for me.

Loved this project, i think if you could fine a couple of people interested in running it / organizing everyhting, it could work out great!

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

the map mosaic project was very ambitious and while it workers pretty well I had to go to college and was never able to get the web site automated well enough. There is still a place for it I feel, perhaps I should find someone with lots of time to do the grunt work for me.

Loved this project, i think if you could fine a couple of people interested in running it / organizing everyhting, it could work out great!

I think I'll try and re-create the web site, if I can make a form that will allow people to get map chunks that will be great.

I believe there are web-based project management apps that can do something along those lines, most likely a few free/open source ones. Don't ask me beyond that, I've never used anything of the sort, but hopefully that'll be a good place to start searching.

If you got the map mosaic started again I'd definitely build a chunk or two, I always liked the idea.

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o

I have good memories of a mapping project I participated, that I think was very similar to the mosaic. Would love to see a new one, too.

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Why snark works.

i didn't partake of the last mosaic, but I would definitely do it if it's started again

The first map for the source engine I tried to make was a hogwarts map, however I sucked with forward thinking and it didnt turn out well. I think I may just use it as a castle style map!

Hiya lads, loved reading all the stories! I have a nagging question-how do you know how much a brush is in metres? I thought the Hammer measurements were in units!

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Just Kidding

Just Kidding

That's a pretty weird jump in topics, but a Hammer Unit is 1 inch which is about 2.5 centimeter.

Don't map that way. Hammer needs powers of 2 for brushwork to look clean and textures to align. Mapping in exact meters usually ends with a horrible mess.

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Why snark works.

And it never lines up with real world measurements anyway, the scale ends up looking weird.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

While the game can render and 'understand' the real world measurements, the actual player representation in game is very bizarre. The view is warped with a wide FOV (Notice the corners of the screen still have that stretching effect ... or artifact, depending how you look at it). The "Gordon" character has some odd properties as well, so looking at all this properly built stuff looks plain wrong.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Basing your brushwork on real-world measurements would be sure to give you headaches aligning textures and even just working in such small grid snaps, and like Crones said it'll look wrong in-game to boot. The best way to go about it would be to base brushwork off of power-of-2 dimensions and design your level by what 'feels' right, the more experience you have the easier this gets.

I think it'd be nice if Hammer had a way to put an image as a viewport background, have support for cameras (complete with lens and FOV settings) a la 3D modeler that don't move unless you move them, and add transform widgets (especially in 3D view). That way if you wanted to build an area from reference you could set the image as viewport background for a camera, match the FOV and whatnot to the image, and point the camera where you want to build it and line up your brushwork according to that.

I'm a dreamer, I know.

My most ambitious project is DM_Soylent, hands down. It's months of work in the making and still months of work away from completion. It's about twice- maybe a bit more -the floorspace of DM_Lockdown by my estimate, and I'm planning on having custom props and textures everywhere. I'm determined to finish this one, too, I think the floorplan is balanced and interesting. Anyway I've got to complete a map eventually, I've poured so many hours into this one so far it wouldn't make much sense to throw it away or otherwise abandon it at this point.

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o

I just thought of it and you actually end up being 80cm wide in the HL(2) engine, from head to foot. I don't even think the rectangle turns towards your movement direction so you're about 113cm wide when walking diagonally. That doesn't make much sense for any real-world proportions.

... alright, back to ambitious mapping projects :rolleyes:

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Why snark works.

Now this is crazy. For my mod I am trying to make a massive highway bridge (like in hl2) but in real time, its about 2 km long. Gonna span over several levels. A bit crazy but I can do it.... for gold source.

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Aaron's Stuff

What do you mean "but in real time?"

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202