Empires Theme This is an excellent point. Because I'm a total amateur, I've given this a low priority, but now that I'm getting close to finishing my map, I would like to make it look as professional as possible. Someone mentioned that the textures clash, which is true. I've looked at streetsoffire, urbanchaos, and glycencity for design ideas, but they mainly depend on duplicating the same building and texture over and over again. Is there some way to make everything match without making it monotonous? Or is that just the way Empires cities go? Any advice on this concept would be greatly appreciated.
Empires style sucks. It is just gray blocks on gray blocks. Well, District at least has some looks. Make a city how you would think is futuristic, but no trills. Simple and effective architecture.
because it is a BE city that works. if you change the plot and start locals to a NF city you can do what ever you want due to a lack of precedent.
I don't think you intendend this, but, it looks like a once great city is now run-down and dingy. Very...Jekotian. I kinda like the look of it, but, it uses too many of the HL2 default textures.
Looks nice, definitely going somewhere now. About the light levels though, the ambient light doesnt seem to match the skybox, make sure you sort that before spending a lot of time on your other direct lights.
i think it looks fun to play, but kylegar is right. Right now it looks a little too much like a css level, swap a few textures and it'll be sexy.
http://rapidshare.com/files/167929456/emp_homeland_b1.rar link to working files. tested and functional for svr use. and its on the the noob server.
Napalm's server... oh, wait, EMPIRES 4 ALL server ran it yesterday, and it was well recieved, although the server crashed (nothing to do with the map) a few minutes later, so I can't comment on gameplay. Issues that did spring to mind however are the lighting - it looks a little too close to fullbright at the moment, and I would suggest making the ambient levels a LOT lower. The map would be darker yes, but you've got enough spotlights and other light sources to make up for it. At the moment, it just looks a little strange. Early evening esque light perhaps, especially since the map uses a lot of stock HL2 textures, and HL2 was predominately set in the evening. I would also suggest placing a lot more clutter around the map, and trees, (the orex tree would probably look best) just to make it look a little more... natural. The water in the harbour needs the texture size increasing, and as the pretty obvious seams between one block of water and the next need removing. Otherwise, it is a very, very good map... and for a first map, bloody incredible. Nice job.
Good to hear that it's in circulation a bit. Hope more people get a chance to play around with it. Thanks for all of the suggestions, Omni. I'm putting everyone's feedback to good use and working on beta 2 every day. I think you're right about the ambient lighting - I always pictured the map to be set in early dawn. I'll find a HL2 single player map with the lightstyle I want and see if the sdk has a vmf for it so I can copy.
Err, wait, the download worked and I put it into my Empires folder, and I got everything where it should be, but somehow it's not showing up... I'm going to re-download it. EDIT: The map file is incorrectly named; it's not a .bsp, but when I change it to a .bsp file, the game says it's not a valid .bsp file! HELP!
There's no .bsp AFAIK so I changed a .bsp.something file to a .bsp and it was invalid. It showed up, but it was invalid. And yes, I put it into the maps folder. EDIT: It's a .bz2, a file I don't know how to open. So, how do I open it? EDIT 2: I was able to open it with GCFScape, but can the file be extracted and included in the download? EDIT 3: OFC, being the first release, it has a few glitches, and two of the three things I didn't like raised questions. 1. The broken down truck near the NF spawn point has its lights on and its motor is running, while missing three wheels. That raises questions... 2. The doors at this one point near the middle of the map will open if touched! And that raises even more questions. 3. The entire map seems to be slightly bumpy, especially at the beginning, when you first spawn. EDIT 4: Forgot the image!
Hey man, .bz2 files can be extracted useing the program 7zip. just google for it, pretty easy to find and use.
Hm, now what doesn't make sense is how you converted my model so that it would work on Empires 2.1... because there's only two compiling modes for ol' studiomdl so... how did you do it?
