emp_kingunderthemountain

fences are good too. on one side, to take away from the closed in feeling, add some fencing. then you can see whats beyond, but cant go there, and can tell that theres something in the way.

 

a small knee high wooden picket fence... just thinking how fucking irritating that would be if you're 150 tonne heavy tank couldn't go over it.

 

no. a 2 meter high reinforced electrified chain link fence

 

I'd still expect a tank to get through, you'd need a stone wall (a thick one) or better still a cliff

I suppose you could for a change have a big chasm for that uncrossable boundry feeling, but that may not work for aircraft unless you can have very strong headwinds

 

I started university this week so I haven't had time to do any work on this, and I'm not sure when I'll be able to pick it up again. I'd estimate it might be in a couple of weeks when I get my timetable sorted out and into a routine.

Just incase anybody gets curious.

 

Alright. We'll be waiting.

 

*coughcoughupdatecough*

 

Sweet, that looks very nice

 

that looks awesome...
cant wait to play it, and i hope we get more quality mappers like you coming in when 2.0 comes out : )
(not im insulting the current maps or anything )

 

ever considered adding water to the lower section of that (I thought it was water the first time I saw it :p).

 

The original version had water in it, I pulled it though because I couldn't find a good looking water that didn't reflect, because reflections would cause far too much lag, especially given what is hopefully soon to occupy the space between those two cylinders on the floor on ceiling.

It's also worth noting that this section alone takes five hours to compile because of the fade values on the lights.

Oh and in case you hadn't guessed, this is the core room, it also may have enough space in some areas to build a barracks in it, which should be interesting, although the nature of the room makes vehicles a bit impractical as weapons, but the odd APC might be of use to an attacking force.

Oh and you know that earlier suggestion of using func_tracktrains in the map in some way?

Well guess what...

 

Jesus that looks mind blowingly awesome!!!

Watch out for Valve or they'll steal you to map for them.

That really looks like a map which Valve could have done to show-off as much as possible.

 

Well I may have been somewhat inspired by the air exchange map from the beta, I saw a restored version of it, and I liked the really tall structures in it, and my university training that I've been doing has taught me about how lines help a picture flow, so I use the long spotlights and lines in textures to exaggerate the vertical aspect of the map, making it seem much larger than it actually is.

Also I'll be blunt, I'm hoping to include an underground cavern path with trains running through it. I hope nobody will mind if I use hover trains that shoot sparks from the engines like the hovercrafts on the matrix, it'll be much easier than trying to build a rail system. You'll be able to ride the trains from the core room to the city if I can spare the complexity.

Two of the numbered 'rooms' in the core will sport res nodes, and two will be access areas for the lift and trains.

Oh and are there any water textures with a cubemapped surface, fog, but no real time reflections? I'm sure there must be one somewhere but I can't find it.

 

I remember when i gave the vmfs of the beta air exchange to a guy from the Black Mesa mod a year or so ago.

 

I must say this is the map Im most anticipating. It looks incredible and gameplay should be a blast. I'm sure when you get it done we can make it an official map.

 

I'm flattered.

It will probably inlcude some CSS content though, I'm afraid it's far too good to ignore, will this be a problem? I know epsiode 2 uses a lot of CSS content so perhaps it will be included in that.

Oh also I managed to butcher the compile time into one hour instead of five, lightmaps and nodraw are a wonderful thing.

Edit: Hmm, the vmt files don't appear to have any lines in them to make water show fog from outside, or to disable it either. I guess it must be a quirk of non-dx9 water that it can't do that.

Now I just need a parameter that can be set to make expensive water non-reflective, I'd like to lose the refraction too, but that might be a bit much to ask.

 

You could probably make a custom water vmt. There are loads of parameters in there, I'm sure you could find the one you need :D I don't have access to them right now though, so I can't help you.
Also, I'm not so hot on the monorail idea. Grizzly tried to have one in SoF, but it was really laggy (netwise). If you can get it working well, that would be great, but I think it could be difficult.
Other than that, keep up the amazing work :D

 

I've tried editing the vmts but alas I'm stuck with solid, opaque water, or refractive water which lags too much.

I'm sure episode 2 has water in the caves which has fog but is cubemapped, maybe I'll have to wait for that.

Oh and I'm not having the trains be controllable by using the regular interface, just a forwards and backwards button, that should help with the lag I think.

 

Silk has a few water files. He's got at least 1 non-reflective one.

 

Yeah I can get non-reflective water, but it either has no fog, or an opaque surface.

Anyway I used the water from de_nuke for now, and I've finished the resource node areas, I spent today figuring out the lighting, I quite like it now.





I get 60 FPS looking from one side to the other with the static props turned off (I havent added fade to them yet, I'll do that last when I can just grab all of them with the entity report and add them in) so it's not too bad performance wise.

I'll make a start on the trains now, I've seen them using in GMod on some maps and it didn't lag terribly there, and if I restrict the controls that should help too, no constant start/stop traffic going to the server.

I'm a bit concerned about the minimap, the surface should work OK, but then I'll have the whole underground area to worry about, I suppose it shouldn't matter much but I'd really like to be able to provide individual minimaps for all the areas.