I was reading the wiki changes and saw JJ45 giving up the rights to his idea for a tropical map. Which is a shame, when you consider the fact that there ARE no jungle/rainforest maps. The nearest thing is emp_isle. So I say unto you, mappers, craft for me a jungle map the likes of which none hath seen before! Yeay, and there would be much Incan influence, and foilage, and giant trees, and flowing rivers, such that Jekotia doth quake at it's influence, and Brenodi be stymied by it's grandeur! The towering grasses shall conceal the mightiest of armies and the thickest of fog shall hide the fiercest of tanks! And lo, there shall be tapirs and parrots and sloths aplenty, for which the rifleman might strike down with bullets and sup upon them and be merry. I havent read the mapping forum much, what with me not knowing diddly poop about mapping. So maybe this idea has been mentioned before. Idk. if so, sorry. Also, the animals probably are more trouble then they're worth. I just like the chickens and fish in counterstrike maps.
I think you haven't seen the community map project yet, which is pretty much a jungle with ruins in them.
Um... Or see the link in my sig. Progress is slow at the moment, but I know that it'll pick up after 1.08 is released. There are a lot of technical difficulties in creating a dense jungle environment, but with the team we have I think we can overcome them.
lol yeah someone in CW made a map with a hill covered with trees.. He said his fps dropped to 1-3 when looking at the hill and everywhere else on the map it was 40-50..
Too bad source engine wasn't built for forests. Is there a way to make trees render while retaining high FPS?
I made a thread on this a while back. I think the conclusion was various LOD's for the models, fog to obscure a near z-clip plane, and intelligent level design to keep the number of leaves (of the BSP variety, not the tree variety) visible from any one point to as few as possible.
I just tested it. I have 95 fps when looking away from the hill, and 12 when looking towards it. BUT there's no optimization yet whatsoever, and it's compiled with fast vvis. And broccoli, i used fog the first few compiles, but that gave A LOT of very annoying problems, like: - misalignment between fog in the map and skybox - trees disappearing on the left and right sides (because the fog edge is linear so you can view further on the left and right sides, while the draw distance forms a circle around you) - while the view was limited due to the fog, the water reflections were not, so you could still see a tank/building reflected in the water eventhough it was 5 times further then you should be able to see. You could even see the sky in the water, this really made everything pretty ugly. - and lots of other problems as well So i removed the fog. I'm gonna have to find another way to make it playable. I'll find my old thread and post some pictures i posted on our forum.
All of those problems you mentioned are solvable, the water one being the trickiest (involving custom textures). If you want to push ahead with it, I'm sure some people here could help you out.
Once i've finished the map and start adding effects and optimizing, i'll be asking a lot of questions. It'll be a huge challenge though! And i'm kinda hoping upgrades to come with episode2 will solve some of them already.
