I've finally managed to get displacements to make my map look roughly the way i intended (well, its on the way anyhow) and I wanted to look at the empires mapping guide thing that was about at one point to check how to put refineries etc in (I also need to learn the alpha blending thingy as currently its mostly one texture and its ugly - and currently i doubt it'll compile but thats more likely to be my set up which the wiki thing also had help on). downside being when I've looked for the empires wiki thing its 404 page not there. is the information about anywhere else?
Go here for general hammer things like the blending and other useful things for great maps. But I don't know anything about the empires wiki.
Interlopers is the best Source mapping site on the interwebs, and I believe Supaste put an Empires mapping tutorial up there.
Thanks for the links. Is there also a props package that someone or other has done (with trees, burnt out apcs etc)? I vaguely remember something like that but couldnt see it when i had a nose around looking. hmm. maybe a search would have been better than looking by hand I've now tried compiling the map (I was assuming that it wouldnt run properly with empires as no doubt i've got a few of the bits wrong in there with parameters and things and also I haven't worked out the resnode things yet) and its failing to make the bsp. Interlopers doesnt recognise there being any errors in the log but there is this "numfaces == MAX_MAP_FACES" which I guess is a problem. does anyone know how I've managed to get that or what I could do about it? Sorry for asking silly questions lots oh I fixed that one - huzzah for trial and error. now it just crashes on launch (more like I expected since its not set up properly).
I started mapping not that long ago, so i made a topic here in which i asked questions. http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=2411 There could be some solutions in that topic to future problems.
I'd looked at that (and read it from time to time anyway) but my questions were much more basic :0( fortunately I've just remembered the google cache so can have a look at the empiresmod wiki again briefly. I remember it going down and then some hoohar and I thought it was back up again - obviously not for long. Does anyone know of a cunning way of increasing the detail of displacements when you realise that you've spent ages making a map from too few (so i have giant triangles even when on power4 displacements)? If not then I'll just have an ugly map since i've wasted long enough on it already without redoing most of it.
Could you post a screenshot of the map ingame, and one from hammer maybe? That would make it easier to see what can be improved.
umm, i'll try shortly - I accidently just told the map to compile with vis and lighting so it'll be a while before I can do anything involving hammer or the map. I'm hoping the reason it crashed last time was me setting the resource files up wrongly, but you never know i may still not be able to open it. I'll update this post hopefully with a screeny later when/if it works. The map is still very much work in progress, I've yet to add a small village (well a few buildings) and I don't even know if the pathways out of one of the starting bits are too steep for tanks etc. Thanks for any help with this. pah - I still get an error on running. Fairly sure I've got the resources right (but you never know) so its probably more serious: Anyway, here are the shots from hammer to show how badly I've mapped it )its not quite as bad as it looks since hammer is cutting out a load with its view distance making it look like it ends rather strangely at the edges This is the front end of the map, showing the NF starting position, the slab where the buildings should go and a winding path up to the central mountain area This is the back end of the mountain, with more winding bits (hard to get up the height without having tanks than can drive up vertical walls). I wanted a llighthouse but havent spent the time trying to make it look nice. the water will rise up during the game, forcing people onto the higher ground (which they could take earlier but it wont be as good for resources as the medium height ground to the sides or the town)
'Scuse the double post. I've looked around on all the tutorials and on the interlopers forums and can't find anything that looks to split down displacements further so I guess I will need to re-do it at some point to make it nicer. That said, what on earth does "sub-divide" do? I couldnt find much info on it. Could anyone help work out whats giving me the memory error please (its the same one someone's had from starting the wrong game thing for empires (310 rather than 215 or something) but I get the same error regardless of whether I start from hammer or from empires 1.071)?. After that I may redo the map with more displacements - maybe only using 16 was over simplifying it. I'd need to redo it anyway to add the underground base I'm thinking of (over ambitious, me?). I may also make the height changes less to give more room for water around the edge. Whats the most displacement surfaces I should use to keep a map running properly? I don't want to over do it to make it curvey but slow. edit: hmm, i made a simple box map and tried that (renaming it to emp_isle) - it worked (although the level finished as soon as I spawned, which was odd). I've tried deleting everything (including displacements) piece by piece and creating it as a HL2 map and it still gets the same error. I planned to try doing that on the empires settings but hammer is refusing to load on the empires bit now claiming it has a mountfilesystem(305) error that no content servers are available. which seems odd.
I've got to get to my work so i'll be very short: 1) I'm often double posting in my topic 2) yes, if the displacements are at lvl4 already and it's still not good, you need to have smaller brushes (you could just cut an existing brush with displacements in two (or three, whatever) doubling the amound of detail). 3) i can't help you with the memory error. I had errors like that for almost a year and couldn't solve it. One day it just stopped crashing, no idea why. 4) when you've got too many displacement surfaces, the compiler will tell you. However in my map i'm just under the maximum limit, and my filesize is huge, + physics is at 518%. It works though, and fps is very nice. 5) To test a map ingame there are a few empires entities that MUST be in your map. I can remember something like emp_info_params and emp_info_map_overview. I think u'll need at least one spawn for both teams (emp_info_player_imp and emp_info_player_nf) 6) a few examples of subdivide can be found here, in short it makes edges smooth: http://www.snarkpit.net/editing.php?page=tutorials&game=HL2&id=124 http://www.snarkpit.net/editing.php?page=tutorials&game=HL2&id=123
Thanks again for the help - although the memory problem is still there, I started on a basic map adding a few parts at a time and only managed to get to a small room with commanders in and a sky box around the main room (so i couldnt see it) and everything was fine, i added some water and that seemed to go ok but it crashed with the memory error when I spawned. pah. My main map still crashed with the memory error without the water so I doubt its that. I may try making it without any empires entities or textures and make it work in HL2DM or base or something and then try and convert it - if I can do that. yours looks a very nice map btw, will be interesting to try it out once the new release is out and final (assuming it doesnt all drag on forever allowing you time to get it made official etc...)
Have you checked for leaks? Immediately after compiling go to the hammer menu and click on 'load pointfile'. Hammer is currently compiling so i can't give the exact menu or name right now, but it should look like load pointfile. If it finds something ,there's a leak in your map.
hmm, there is no pointfile from what I can see. that sounds like a bad sign or a good sign, depending if i should have one. it doesnt shout "LEAK" at me during compile like it does sometimes when things go wrong. check for errors comes up with "no player start" and a complaint about props not having a skin field entry (which shouldnt be the problem as I've added them (trees) since not being able to run the map anyway). while I'm here, am I using water right anyway - I've got a big old block of it which I made into the func_water_analogue entity and then told it to move upwards etc. I've tried with and without the water lod controller entity being in the map. Also, what do I need to do to trigger the water to start moving? I can't remember what it was in the original halflife and I've not mapped since really. I've (possibly) uploaded the map, if anyone has a spare 5-10 min to waste, could they give it a quick download, compile and run (longer than it could be as theres all the empires file bits to rename unless you rename the map to something else I suppose). Anyway - someone else having the error would make it not just my setup, which is one vague possiblity. I'd be grateful if someone tries but wont cry if not. http://rapidshare.com/files/66536383/sinking4.vmf.html
Ok, i've downloaded it and opened it in hammer. I'm gonna be honest: there are many reasons why this would give problems, and i'm afraid most of them will have to be solved before you'll be able to play it. I'm going to change the map to something i think should work, and put a link up here for you. The changes i'll make will not be according to what you want to do with the map, but they should solve the problems (if i'm able to) so you can learn something from my examply to improve your version the way you want it to. This however will take some time (but i'm in the middle of my vacation, so no problem). I'll try to finish it before i go to bed this evening (it's 19.25 here in belgium) end put it online. Some things i've seen so far that i want to mention: 1) there's a huge gap between the actual map and the bottom of the skybox. This doesn't give problems, however even empty air will take some time away from your cpu. So i'll be moving the bottom skybox brush up 2) your map currently uses 16 square brushes (4X4), and even on level 4 the displacements surfaces will not look good for 2 reasons: a) the size is simply too big, you'll need to at least use twice as much brushes if you want to do it this way b) all these 16 brushes are flat, and you've moved the displacements upwards. This means that some part of a displacement surface is used as ground, while another part of the same surface is actually a cliff side/wall. This will stretch the displacements even more because the displacement surface is a lot bigger now than the actual brush. In same places it's moved up higher than the length of the brush itself. 3) water needs to be ... terminated by lack of a better word. I mean on all 5 sides of the water you'll need a brush to end it. Think of it like a mug filled with water: the top side of the water is free, but all other sides stop exactly were the cup begins. Since the water brush is square, you'll need 5 other brushes at the edges of the water brush 3.1) a water brush only needs a water texture on top of the brush. All other sides have to be the "nodraw" texture Water tutorial: http://www.type3studios.com/SdkNutsTutorials/Water1_wiseWaters.php (the link to the valve wiki is also very usefull) 4) part of your map is outside the skybox. This makes me wonder why it would compile, since everytime when i accidently had something outside the skybox i had an error or a leak when compiling. 5) the plateau in the middle of your map only needs a texture on the top side, since that side is the only one you see. As it is now i can see the side texture going on from above all the way down to the bottom part of your map. Making the brush a lot less big (only the top 10 inches are enough) and applying the "nodraw" texture on the othe 5 sides will increase performance. This i what i've seen so far, i'll start working on it now. About point 2, the huge displacements. I believe the best thing to do is have more brushes, and use these brushes in height already, so that you can actually use the vertical side of a brush as a vertical surface, instead of using the top side of the brush for everything. However this would mean you'd have to do everything over, so i'm gonna do it the short way. I'll be clipping your brushes. Clipping a brush once will double the amount of detail, without changing anything to how the displacements look now. Offcourse the newly added movable points of the displacements surface will be on the line between it's 2 neighbouring point, so you will not see that there is more detail untill you actually do something with the new points. Also sorry, but i don't know how to make the water change. That's it for now. Looking forward to play this map once it works btw.
ahh, the sky was way down at the bottom to let me have a very big block of water - so that it could move upwards without ever creating an air gap at the bottom. I messed around with the water incase that was causing my problem actually running it. Thats my excuse anyway - I think in that version the water isnt the entity I'd mentioned before as I brought it back to being a world brush. I do plan on entirely re-doing the displacements, just not now - particularly as I don't know why the map gives me a memory error. If I'm doing something wrong with the water thats sort of a comfort as it may be that somehow (even if it still doesnt work for me when deleted). I plan to put in an underground base to give more ways to the high ground for infantry, that in itself means redoing the displacements. Its a shame i managed to get the shape to roughly how I wanted as that took a while, but I think I've learned enough to be able to do it better next time - particularly if I make the shape out of blocks a bit (with vertex editting thrown in) and do displacements after that. I'll aim at having a good number more displacement surfaces and just not stick them all up to full. Having finally noticed how to make the points move in other directions will help too, could make things more natural looking. I appreciate the effort you're going to. The textures and displacements may be silly but they shouldnt be causing an error? the skybox maybe I suppose, but nothing outside should be an entity (i think) so no leaks proper. I'm not 100% concerned about fixing things that are wasteful at the moment (although thanks for the pointers, I'll try and do it better next time from the start), I want to know why it wont run :0). Could you let me know if you tried to compile it (despite being horrified at how inefficient and ugly it was) and whether you got a memory error please? I'll read through the tutorials you've linked to, the ones I've seen so far like on sub-divide have been rather nifty. Thanks again Edit: Crumbs, I should have read the entity description on the valve site before using moving water: That could have been something to do with it. I think the surrounding the water with brushes should have been ok due to my giant skybox.
I know how you feel, i've got a map with multiple smaller islands, and one of them has a hill covered with trees and paths between them. It took me a month to get it perfect, not joking. Unfortunately i did what you did, and used flat surfaces for everything by just moving everything around. This has been giving me so many problems that i simply started on a new map. I don't want to redo it all again, but neither could i fix all the problems i myself created. I'll go back to it though once i've learned enough to fix my error without too much work, no doubt about that. I've just started compiled, i'm now gonna make all the necessary files (you only put the vmf online), and we'll see if it crashes or not
Compile done, and i've been going through your map ingame. I compiled it for 1.071, and tested it in 1.071 btw. 4 screens: http://users.telenet.be/samhannes/mapping/sinking_silk/ There was an error with vrad though, but i forgot what it was, sorry. http://rapidshare.com/files/66581858/sinking_silk.rar.html This is what've used to test it ingame, it includes the map itself, the 2 files needed for the minimap (i've used a minimap from another map), and the .txt file from the resource folder to make everything work. Just extract it to the empires folder, and it will put all files in the right place. I've renamed the map to 'sinking_silk' so it wouldn't overwrite your own files. Important !!!!! This rar also includes the text file in which i've written down everything i've changed, including messing up some things, so you really should take a look at what i did, since your problem might still be there (although if it is, you should now know what causes it since my version works now). Most important part of the file: The water entity used in the map caused a leak, so i removed it, however i made changes to the water first, and i don't know that water entity so i might have caused that leak myself by changing the water. Not sure about that. At least this should be usefull information for you anyway, and you should have a working version of the map. http://rapidshare.com/files/66582724/sinking_silk.vmf.html This is the vmf file i compiled. I'll be going to bed now ... it's not that late but i want to get out of bed early tomorrow (yeah right).
It's probably wrong to keep posting in the same thread with different questions, but that seems better than cluttering up the forum: Does anyone have any idea how to make a movable fog bank? I was going to use a dustcloud around the centre of my map (partly to help the map seem taller and partly to stop people seeing places I dont want them too) but I felt that I should make it move (adding to the sinking feeling) which it can't from what I can see. I'm guessing that the fog texture doesnt do much so painting that on a movable thing wouldnt achieve much. Having lots of different fog banks and turning one on and another off would look silly and/or hurt performance I guess? that said, if an island was sinking, could it somehow pull clouds down with it? I've been guessing not. My earlier problem with moving water creating memory errors turned out to be to do with the brush sizes, large ones wouldnt work but small ones would - so I'll end up splitting the water into lots of bits I guess. I've found an article on moving clouds, but thats as props. If there is no way its not a big problem, I can get rid of the fog and maybe put a cloud in a corner of the map moving upwards gently.
