Irish Taxi Driver's Development Journal

CA CAW!!

2011-10-05T04:27:00.001-07:00

Dear blog, I know I haven't written in a while, but its for a good reason. I got an internship at Raven!

Its incredible and fun and everything I hoped for. The people I work with are amazing and crazy talented, and its the first job I've had where I haven't gotten up in the morning and dreaded going to work.

Unfortunately this means that nearly all of my mapping projects are on hold, except for my "declared inventions", which are:

KOTH_Mill
CP_Upland (working with Mark Sinclair, dude owns)
Cold Blooded
The Box
Dead Light!

(All of which, save CP_Upland, can be found on my portfolio site.)

Of which the only one receiving significant attention these days is CP_Upland, which is a 'steel' type CP map set ontop of a plateau in the grand canyon. Mark and I have been hammering out betas for the past month and a half. Theres some delicious eye candy of it below. B4 is the latest, and it is here.

Adventures in Radiant #1: In which we talk about two brothers with different fathers.

2011-05-04T13:41:00.001-07:00

I started learning Radiant a few weeks ago to apply for an internship at Treyarch. So far I think I've got the hang of it, its pretty close to Hammer but different in a few key areas. Stuff like decals are a bit less mindless. I think its the same idea behind them, but Valve streamlined it a bit more. Areaportals are two brushes, not one. I can't figure out how the sky works, etc.

The biggest thing thats really bothering me is that there is very little documentation. Radiant itself refers to the level editor for a VERY. WIDE. SELECTION. OF. GAMES. Not limited to:

Quake 3 and 4
Elite Force 1 and 2
Doom 3
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Call of Duty 1
Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Call of Duty: World at War
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Wolfenstein

And those are just a few off the top of my head.

The problem with this is that the documentation is as diverse as the games that use idtech 3, 4 and 5. Treyarch's wiki itself is pretty good for learning the basics, but its a little sparse for anything past that. I hope it changes when the Black Ops SDK comes out this/next month. The Source SDK community is so thriving and massive that anything that doesn't make sense will get fixed in a few hours, here I'm finding problem posts from 2 years ago that are unanswered.

I think the lack of clear documentation is the biggest negative of Radiant. Otherwise its pretty good as a next step for people who conquered Hammer and are looking for the next thing (or vice versa if you're from a bizarro world). Compiler is much more streamlined and I don't even have to sacrifice an animal when I use it.

I'm not going to post anything I've been working on in it right now, I'm still trying to replicate Treyarch's style. It looks like bad poser screenshots right now.

I can't even get real drugs here!

2011-04-15T19:47:00.001-07:00

Just a quick post to show that my site is up and running now with some content. I'd like to expand it in the future and move all this content over there too.

http://danmerboth.com/

Let the spirit of the noble sucker punch guide you to victory

2011-04-10T03:00:00.000-07:00

This'll be a somewhat short portfolio update.

I bought a website, still working on getting it up and running. The foundations been poured, wood framing is going up. It'll be a week or so before its furnished enough to post here.

As for portfolio pieces, I'll go through the current plan.

KOTH_Mill

Mills doing fantastically so far. Everywhere its been tested its getting positive responses. Theres been a bit of a performance issue but I've fixed in in beta 4 with the help of Shmitz, of tc_meridian fame and all around cool dude. I ended up redoing the optimization from scratch as well as a whole bunch of other things.

Mills doing so well that the next version will be the first release candidate. There are a few things I'd like to do for this version.

1. Rebuild a lot of it from scratch. A whole host of the map is fragmented to hell from me constantly slicing and manipulating brushes. I'm hoping to simplify it a bit. At the very least the respective side's buildings will be rebuilt.

2. Get more competitive feedback. They gave me some great stuff for beta 3, and I don't want to ignore them.

3. Fully hint/skip the map out, CORRECTLY this time.

Thats more or less my checklist. I hope to work on this after I explain a future option and the website.

Get KOTH_Mill b4 here. Thanks to everyone whos been helping out, like Kessel, El Mole, Shmitz, artisticmonkey, En Ex, Francis, FLOOR_MASTER (and everyone at 2fort2furious), and everyone else I forgot.

Cold Blooded

Cold Blooded 0.3 was released on the 28th of March. I know I haven't mentioned it for a while (except to declare every now and then that its on the backburner). The current version is for Left 4 Dead 2. Theres still tons of bugs in it and the navmesh blows but it is actually working start to finish now, minus some nagging bug in the finale that causes it to sometimes not trigger. Still figuring that one out.

Speaking of the finale, it'll be getting some major open-map surgery in the next version. I hope to decrease the amount of wierd areas (between the fences and the barricades) and some restructuring of the finale area. I'm also exploring a little new interpretation, with CEDA's presence. I think they could add some interesting shapes and spawning areas for zombies.

Get the newest Cold Blooded here. As always thanks to everyone of team Chilly Reception. I'd link the group that has everyone's names but the steam sites being fussy.

Dead Light!

Nothing really new to report here. Still doing tweaking of item placements with the new stuff that L4D2 brings to the table.

Portal Maps

I started working on rebuilding my old Portal level Test20 yesterday, and after about 5 solid hours of working on it, its in pretty nice shape. Check it out compared to the old one below. Old Maps on top, new maps on bottom.

I wanted to make the puzzle pipe more visible and remove the ugly framing I had to put on it. A lots changed in my understanding of level design in 4 years, and I hope this map will reflect that. I'll be building 2 more puzzles along with this one to give a sense of progression with the puzzle mechanic.

The OLD MAP can be downloaded here. Extract it to your portal/portal directory and play it by going to Bonus Maps on the main menu, then selecting Irish Taxi Driver's Maps.

So there, thats a pretty good idea of what I'm doing right now, excluding playing through Arcanum. Elves ain't got nothin' on me with my bullet deflecting top hat, mechanical power armor and exploding axe.

The quiet dignity of a circus clown in the midst of a thunderstorm

2011-01-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

I wrote a mutation for Left 4 Dead 2 to learn how the system works, more will be coming after this:

SPIT SHINE

-Allowed spitters increased to 12 at a time.
-Spitter health reduced by 50%.
-Spit range doubled.
-Spit velocity doubled.
-Spit spreads immediately.
-Spit interval reduced by 75%.
-Spitter speed increased by 100%.
-Only commons are Riot Infected.
-Riot Infected health reduced by 95%.
-Only throwables are molotovs.
-Grenade launcher removed.
-All defibrillators converted to pills.
-All first aid kits converted to pills.
-Removed special ammo.
-Removed survivor rescue closets.
-Removed item glows.

Its really hard and ridiculous, and thats the best part.

DOWNLOAD IT!
Place it in your left 4 dead 2/left4dead2/addons folder.
Run by typing in console: "map (mapname here) spitshine"

While the rooms are scale models, the Tom Cruise doll is life sized

2011-01-08T21:12:00.000-08:00

This week an idea was concieved and seen through. It was glorious.

I participated in a game jam sometime in December and had a ton of fun, and I wanted to see if I could bring that to level design. I've seen Map Jams before (2fort2furious did an "IronMapper" with the creators of CP_yukon, they built KOTH maps.) but not for Left 4 Dead 2.

The goal was to create a fully functional, working campaign in about 18 man hours. Four people (myself included) were given 4 hours to build a map based on a template that I had created. The templates had saferooms pre-built and working as instances, and the mappers had to build around them. The participants were: Dukka, Jetsetlemming, Neko and myself (Which also happens to be the order the maps are in).

Once the 4 hours were over, I took all the maps and built navmeshes, fixed bugs, etc. That took me about 2 hours. We just played through it and it worked perfectly. It was a lot of fun and everyone got to see how well we can create levels under strict time pressure. I livestreamed my entire mapping (Which can be found here along with a lot of other videos of me mapping.) process.

Thanks to everyone who participated! Unfortunately the result is campaign only, but we're planning a 4 Map Jam: Session 1 Remastered version for next weekend which will include a versus version (plus stuff like panic events).

Download it here thanks to Goon 4 Dead! Also thanks to Dukka, Neko, Jetsetlemming, anyone else who pledged to participate but had to drop out, and the SomethingAwful Left 4 Dead Goons for being great sports!

(Also thanks to SA goon muscles like this? for the title)

I agree, I'm an angry gorilla and that makes me angry

2010-12-27T00:21:00.000-08:00

Since I've recently discovered I can kick my college in the testicles and graduate early, my mind quickly shifted from "AWESOME!" to "Holy shit I don't have a portfolio!" So I've started on a couple of portfolio maps. This'll be a serious challenge to my ADD like design modus operandi of bouncing between several projects to keep the ideas fresh. I really need to quit doing this or channel it into some other endeavor.

The current idea is to build 5-6 maps in a variety of different Source games. My list is:

Dead Light 2
KOTH_Mill
CP_Valley
PL_Salvage
Untitled HL2EP2 Map
Untitled Portal Map
Maaaybe a UT3 map

You might notice that this list doesn't include Cold Blooded, and thats for a very good reason. I did end up releasing that public alpha of Cold Blooded, and while reception was great, I feel theres too much work still to be done on it for it to be included in a portfolio. I'd like to be able to put the love into it that I want to without a time or pressure constraint. So, officially, Cold Blooded is on hold for the forseeable future (It'll be shifted to a L4D2 campaign too thanks to the recent The Sacrifice update).

You also might notice that a few other maps I've talked about or been working on aren't on the list as well, like CP_Sugar, PL_Import, CP_Upland, CP_Supply, CP_Shale, CP_Industrial, and artpass_irishtaxidriver and probably one or two more I'm completely blanking on. These are also for perfectly valid reasons. I'll provide screenshots and explain what happened (and in one or two cases is happening) with them.

CP_Sugar was going to be a control point map of some kind (seriously, I didn't get far on it) set around a Hard Rain like sugarmill in a state of disrepair. I never really touched it again after that initial session, and the ideas eventually worked their way into artpass_irishtaxidriver for the final point. I was thinking about pulling out the last point and figuring out some angle of symmetry and fully realising those ideas, but I literally just thought of that.

PL_Import (which I've also just learned I've been mistakenly referring to as PL_Export) was actually going to be a remake of thehunted map for TFC. It got about as far as the layout before I lost interest. My "twist" on it was going to be a shipyard, with the giant initial sniper building being a warehouse with a train track through it, and the giant wall opposite the road being a docked ship, with a one way water route connecting the spaces. I was also going to play around with some fire particle effects and have the ruined building be currently on fire. I love the idea of what dynamic spaces it could create. I marathoned Dexter Season 3 while working on this one and I'm getting flashbacks of it right now while looking at the file.

CP_Upland as far as I know is still very much alive. Honeymustard is busy working on a map called PL_Boundary which is starting to get a lot of attention. He totally deserves it and has been paying dues for a very long time. I've done a little more work on it trying to lay out the points though and figure out how the room restriction mechanic is going to work.

CP_Supply is dead for reasons that I should've seen and fixed when I was building it. I made a fatal mistake of relying on instincts instead of science (like some eagle eyed readers might remember the distance chart of 5 cap maps I built a while back when working on ye olde map CP_Shale) when doing the base geometry so everything came out scaled up. Plus the things I really liked about it, people found to be depressing and fatiguing (the rain and the darkness). When I have more time (I really need a dime for every time I say or think this) I want to revisit it and do some serious open map surgery to fix the size issues at least.

CP_Shale just... I don't know. It had layout problems. I used the distance sizing to great effect here, and it got some great feedback from some 2f2f playtests. I didn't like the direction the map was taking and I felt it was deviating too far from the original idea of mining town.

CP_Industrial... man I really liked this one. I still do. All the problems of CP_Industrial can be explained by saying Collapsed Heap. I spent so much time on CP_Industrial and learned so much over its development that I was going back to the original brushes I laid and fixing things. This cycle continued constantly and just made the source a complete mess. Also at least 3 of the control points were gutted and redesigned, so elements ended abruptly, design felt wierd, etc. I forget where it was mentioned, but someone referred to CP_Industrial as the last TF2 map from that initial period of wonderment and discovery that occured after TF2 itself came out. I really liked that quote and I feel really disappointed in myself for not being able to reach a level of quality I'm comfortable with internally to release it.

With that depressing garbage out of the way, I can talk about new developments and maps.

Dead Light 2 came about when I was figuring out portfolio stuff and what I should include given advice from the actual games industry people over at SomethingAwful. The portfolio should be varied (but not too varied), specific (but not too specific), and ultimately, it'll be shit since I don't know anything about professional level design and won't until someone takes a chance on my potential. Anyway, I was looking at what I had that could be worked on and improved and I came across Dead Light, a survival map I built to learn the Left 4 Dead Authoring tools (as opposed to Blood Orange, which I built to figure out Left 4 Dead mapping, and still gets a scary amount of people asking me to work on it again). I sent it to Valve as an example of things I am using the L4DAT beta access to build, and they ended up liking it, and I got some critiques from their level designers about item placement and navmesh optimizations. I finished the map and released it and forgot about it.

With The Sacrifice update, Left 4 Dead 2 now completely includes everything that Left 4 Dead 1 had, and even opens up the ability to use the L4D1 survivors in custom campaigns with L4D2 improvements. I came back to Dead Light to port it over for the survival versus mutation, and while I did that pretty fast, I realised that it should have the L4D2 items and stuff as well. So I'm busy tinkering with item placement to keep things saturated but not too saturated. Its a lot of fun to test and really easy to iterate on. I will post more when I have more.

KOTH_Mill was born when I saw a picture of the Haughton Mill on some completely unrelated tangent. My mind exploded with the possibilities the building had as a TF2 map, and I quickly settled on a KOTH map, since I've never tried to build one before. So I started building a map based on the idea of the cap building being in the center of a donut shaped play area. It quickly took form, and with some critiques from Zoolooman, was late night tested on the Lost Continents TF2 servers. People enjoyed the map but pointed out things that sucked or needed to be fixed. I'm currently fixing up stuff for a beta 1 release sometime soon.

CP_Valley actually comes from a point idea I came up with for CP_Upland. I started building and it quickly became a 5 cap map perched over a raging river with a lot of height variation. With how terribly CP_Supply turned out, I remembered the distance chart I made and I went back to it, adding stuff and expanding it. I've used it for the distance measurements in CP_Valley and I really like how the spaces have turned out, but there are still a good deal of things I'd like to fix before I really talk about this map in depth. Right now, I'll leave you a picture of cap 2. (The purple and black checkerboard in the above and below screenshots is due to the lack of cubemaps. They're typically a late stage building thing since they don't affect gameplay at all, just ignore them!)

PL_Salvage is an old map from around the time Fishbus was making CP_Freight. The current joke around Knifeback Mountain at the time was his next map would be in a pit of trains. That joke made me think of a map set in a train graveyard. I started building and got to the second point before I ran out of ideas. It laid dormant for a while before I picked it back up and built it out completely. The layout was then tested at incredible length on KM, and a lot of people really loved it. I dragged my feet on detailing it, originally making a deal with Heyo (of CP_Junction, CP_Egypt, and KOTH_Harvest fame) for him to detail it. At the time, he had just begun work on CP_Tidal and decided he wasn't able to do both maps at the same time. Once I started working on it again, the Artpass contest happened and I switched gears to work on that. NOW, FINALLY, I've finished the rest of the detailing and released Beta 1. We played it a few times on KM and it did really well, but I want to see how it does a little more before I start tinkering with major changes.

Untitled HL2EP2 Map, I got nothing on this one yet. Still planning it. Probably a map or two with the player infiltrating a hamlet via the sewer system and disrupting some sort of Combine suppression device and escaping. Primarily I want to do this because I haven't done any Half Life 2 mapping or mapping for a single player.

Untitled Portal Map is still in the concept stages, but will most likely take the puzzle mechanic from my very very old map Test 20 and expand it into a structured 2 or 3 map puzzle.

Hopefully, if all goes well, I'll have time to learn Unreal mapping, which explains the 7th item on the list.

Success and nothing less

2010-10-04T17:31:00.000-07:00

TF2maps.net Artpass Contest

I built a map for the Artpass contest (which has been over for about a week now) and I fucked up horribly.

I read the time as Saturday at 10 PM EST, when in fact it was due Saturday at 10 AM GMT, which is 5 AM. Queue me waking up to about 5 people yelling at me I missed the deadline.

Well fuck.

Theres nothing I can really do about it but I'm still in kind of a funk from it. I haven't really been able to map since then. I'm really bothered by it because I clicked really well with what I was doing and I felt it came out incredibly, and I ended up fucking up really badly on the deadline.

This is my entry: http://ftp.davejk.net/itd/artpass_irishtaxidriver.zip

Cold Blooded

Haven't gotten anything back from Valve. I contacted them mid-August to see what they thought and they told me they got swamped, but I should feel free to send a new version. I took a week, rallied the troops, and we fixed a mountain of bugs with the alpha (like making it playable) and I sent it over.

Still nothing.

I'm probably going to release this one publicly so I can start working on it again. I did some minor detailing on map 2 yesterday, mostly building related, and started on open map surgery for map 3 to cut the highway down.

Salvage

I was in the middle of detailing Salvage when the Artpass contest struck, and from a quick runthrough a few days ago its about 90% done but I don't like the direction its going in and I don't feel the map is particularly good. I'll just sit on it for a week and figure out whats going to happen with it.

Industrial

Definately dead. I'll write a post-mortem on it and why its dead.

Upland

Upland is a map I'm working on with Honeymustard, a good buddy and a great mapper. Upland is a Steel style CP map set on a plateau like Upward. Our idea for the center revolves around restricting the center room's entry points, rather than extending bridges to an isolated cap.

Its okay, Abraham Lincoln. Thats just how the future is.

2010-06-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

Valve Visit

On June 13th, 2010 I visited Valve's offices. I'm kind of pissed off about it.

It wasn't anything they did. Everyone at Valve was fantastic and it was incredible to meet the people behind the games I love, enjoy, and rip apart.

My plane ended up being late and cut two hours out of my visit time, so I was only able to be there for an hour.

Despite this, My girlfriend and I were greeted warmly by the receptionist and Chet Faliszek (Old Man Murray, valve writer) walked down to meet us/give us a tour. We were at Valve's new offices that they've only been in for a few months, so there was obvious construction still happening. Heavy statues in various states of being painted were around the lobby, along with a few statues of the special infected from Left 4 Dead 1/2.

Chet showed us the Left 4 Dead content team's working space, and announced our presence to the members there. I got a nice warm greeting back. Everyone was working/playtesting on stuff I probably can't talk about. I gave Chet the campaign and we talked for a bit while he installed it. We didn't get time to play through it due to my plane being late. As a consolation prize, Chet had us "playtest" the L4D comic that'll be coming out soon I think. If I had to guess I'd say with the OSX port and/or the third content patch for Left 4 Dead.

Can't talk about the comic. Chet had Jay Pinkerton (spiderman comics, former Cracked editor) monitoring us while we were reading it, and we answered some questions about it afterwards. I liked it, it was very well done and I think people will be satisfied with it.

Chet walked us through a memorabilia closet (that was strangely unlocked, he noted) and picked out some shirts for us. I got a Bullshifters T-shirt (the one Ellis wears) and my girlfriend got an "I hate vans" shirt. The closet was packed with shirts, and contained a puppet of what appeared to be Doc Brown from Back To The Future.

With the hour closing, Chet let us out and promised he'd play Cold Blooded and email me everyone's thoughts on it.

Cold Blooded

CB is going great right now. Everyone hit their deadlines for the Valve submission and I'm very pleased with the quality that we're attaining now. The work is getting done and there should be an internal beta ready by August, with maybe a public one after in September/October.

I'm playing with ideas in regards to the finale, trying to make it more dynamic and keep the survivors moving. I'll mess with the randomizer scripts I built to handle other stuff in the campaign and see how that goes.

I'm also working on getting a webhost together so we can finally have a public face for the campaign.

I'm scaling back my role on Cold Blooded so I don't get burned out for a week or so. I was working non-stop on it in April and May. I just need to switch gears so I can get some fresh ideas.

TF2

Started working on Salvage again. Hoping to have a beta out by this weekend-ish. I hit a roadblock in regards to some design so I took time off to play and beat Uncharted 2. Its about half detailed now, I'll have plenty of time to finish it.

Company

I'm working on setting up my own games company to handle asset sales and stuff. It makes sense from a business perspective and it'll be nice to have the business experience. Still working on the name though. Also I need a catchy blog title name.

April Updates

2010-04-13T08:25:00.001-07:00

TF2

I've been mapping on CP_Supply a lot lately. We've played the first two betas on Knifeback Mountain and the results have been positive so far. I've decided to ditch the competitive idea because the weather effects aren't conducive to competitive play, and the map came out 1.5 times larger than badlands (with running times between points at least 2-5 seconds higher). So, thats a good thing for 12v12 and up, as engineers with teleporters are good additions to teams.

Heres what it looks like now:

In general news, after Jamie 'Fishbus' Manson showed me how not to suck using slice I've been building iterations of new levels much faster, which is a good segway into...

CP_Sugar, a concept map (Its CP but I don't really know what it is yet, maybe KOTH or Arena). I wanted to try and create a new setting based on Hard Rain in Left 4 Dead 2. I think the ruined sugar mill (hence the name) would translate fairly well into TF2, and the ruined buildings could create all kinds of interesting pathways and gameplay elements. The only cap I've built so far is inside a ruined brick building with trees growing all over it, plus some loading docks and the yards around the point. I'm very optimistic about it, but because its not on the list in the previous blog post I'm forcing myself to work on my projects at hand.

CP_Industrial, will probably get a new version in a week. I have done some work on it and I'm fairly out of the loop with its problems, so I'll probably run it on Knifeback in a few days.

PL_Salvage is going to be mine to detail. Sean 'Heyo' Cutino got caught up in a new map and that whole collaboration idea fell out the window. I don't blame him for getting caught up in a new map, I do it constantly and I'm trying to get out of that habit, which is why CP_Supply is getting so much work. I'm aiming for the next beta to be layout complete and then the beta after it for detailing/optimization, then release.

Anyway, PL_Salvage is mine for detailing and I've started work on it already, I'm working on re-theming the first yard right now.

PL_Export I haven't really touched. Probably will save that one for over the summer to work on.

The Cool Thing that I was talking about in the last blog post might still happen, and its related to...

Cold Blooded News

I'm working on getting a website set up. I've got Supernorn building some nice graphics and I hope to have a teaser up soon.

Bionic_Badger is making monumental progress on the fourth map. From what hes sending me back it looks like map 4 will be the first map that I'll post promotional stills from (disregarding the 2 or 3 from map 1 or 2).

Milkman has map 3 and stays mostly silent until hes got something really cool to show off, last time he sent me pictures it was preliminaries of a plane crashing into an interstate overpass, and a street of the town covered in snow.

MaNiAk has map 2 and has been having computer troubles of late, but he is working dilligently on his map. I've been working with him closely on developing new assets for everyone to use.

I've got map 1 and 5 and they're going swimmingly. Most of the work was doing the base brushwork (which I did for all the maps) and then the scripting and optimizations once that was finished. Map 1 and 5 will need detail passes by someone else though, I've been staring at them entirely too long.

In terms of the deadline, I feel I'm doing pretty well, and barring a horrible disfiguring accident, I should have three TF2 maps and a Left 4 Dead campaign for valve to play (and rip apart horribly).

THE DEADLINE

2010-01-18T22:57:00.000-08:00

I have a hard deadline of June 3rd, 2010 to finish EVERY SINGLE PROJECT I HAVE.

Why? I'm going to visit the den of the beast itself, Valve's offices in Bellevue, Washington. I would like to bring as much material with me as I can. It'd be pretty impressive if someone showed up with 4 TF2 maps, a L4D campaign, and a L4D2 scavenge map all done, right?

So heres the list of projects I'm going to finish by then.

Current Project List

Team Fortress 2

cp_industrial - The white whale, its three fucking years old. Its about time I finished the map.
pl_salvage - I've sent the final layout to Heyo, so my work is done for now.
cp_supply - A 5 cap map set in a train depot during a thunderstorm. I love the weather effects I've set up and I'm itching to show the map off to people.
pl_export - A remake of a classic TFC map that I haven't seen done. Its coming along nicely and I'll have more details on it later.

I hope to actually do something cool with the four maps above, I'll have more details if it'll happen.

Left 4 Dead

Cold Blooded - Although only just over a year old, the sequel is already out and interest in L4D is waning. The maps are actually a lot farther along than most people think. I've just obtained two experienced mappers to help detail, so it can only go faster now.

Left 4 Dead 2

Pier Pressure - When Left 4 Dead 2 came out I asked Valve if they needed any more help testing the SDK this time around and they replied yes. I started Pier Pressure to learn the new L4D2 Hammer and its pretty far along. The problem is, it got bumped back due to me losing interest. It will be finished. Pier Pressure is a scavenge map set on a boardwalk.

Its all gotta go! Its a beginning of the year firesale! Go go go!

Industrial Final, Salvage, Cold Blooded

2009-09-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

Industrial

Again thanks to Knifeback for helping me figure out the majority of the bugs and gameplay issues in Industrial beta 7. I've posted it at the Steam Forums, TF2Maps.net, and Interlopers.

You can download it by clicking this link.

The major changes in this beta were mostly gameplay issues and preperations for the final. I'll go through it round by round and break it down:

Round 1 got a few improvements, and I re-themed a few buildings. Theres now a gate outside the one way door upper route to prevent sentries from pinning down and killing people who just walked through. It also opens the suprise caps back up.

Round 2 saw probably the most improvements. I cut off the dropdown area onto the gravel and removed the lower setup gate on the wooden building, the only lower exits now are at the bottom of the area. Cap 3 got a reduction on the large building directly infront of it. The problem was that the area was too large and too defendable to really assault it. I've cut the building down to half of what it was and added a loading dock to one side, opening a new path for the attacking team.

Round 3, last but not least, did see significant improvements as well. I've removed the back corridor to cap 6 due to the problems it caused being more numerous than the benefits it offered. It destroyed the flow of the round and it had to go. In its place I've added a new explosives route into the building between cap 5 and 6. Scouts can actually get up there too with some clever jumping, its designed that way :) . The defending team lost a respawn gate facing cap 6, and the ledge with it. Turns out sentries there were way too overpowered and couldn't be assaulted correctly. I've also added a window in place of the metal barrier in that spawn so people can see the point.

The skybox saw an addition of a moving train (positioned behind cap 4, can be seen in rounds 2 and 3) and I've replaced the skybox Fishbus made for me with the pipeline one by his request. It halved the filesize and is probably for the better.

I've also made some new textures for the brewery, notably the BLU team logo and a GREY GRAVEL CO. type sign.

For the final version I'll be re-doing all the func_details, hint/skips, areaportals, occluders, LOD, and no-drawing EVERYTHING.

Salvage

Salvage is a badwater style payload map set in a Scrapyard. It started out as just the first area, which I mapped out three or four months ago. I just revisited it on Sunday because I thought of a way to finish it. I've been talking with Heyo (creator of community maps cp_egypt, cp_junction) about him detailing it, and we came up with a plan to do a "Sniper vs. Spy Update"-ish competiton with the map. We're both contributing the layout of a map to the pack, and we're both detailing a map. The change is, I'm building the layout for pl_salvage and hes detailing it, and hes building a map layout and I'm detailing that.

We're also going to create a bunch of new content for it. We need some rusty models and materials to match the setting. I think it'd be fun to push a payload around some decrepit and falling apart fuselages.

Cold Blooded

Cold Blooded is currently on hiatus, but not cancelled! I'd like to finish industrial and get it out of the way so I can focus more on this. My other projects at this time aren't as large as industrial is and don't require the attention it needs.

Dead Light!

Dead Light! has been released to various places, you can grab it here.

And heres the final poster:

Thanks to KelpPlankton for fixes to this poster and giving criticism on the Industrial promo above.

Industrial Beta Seven, Left 4 Dead Improvements/Design Information

2009-04-10T00:25:00.000-07:00

I'd like to thank everyone who stuck around on Knifeback Mountain on Tuesday to give me an extended debugging session for Industrial beta Six. You guys really helped, I pulled maybe 30 changes from it alone! Everything from some subtle design changes to outright bugs I can't believe I missed.

Also apparently it does not work at all in tournament mode. I have no idea why this is or how to fix it. I'll have to do some research and look around. I doublechecked dustbowl and it doesn't have anything extra assigned to the caps, so I don't know whats going on. I did not check egypt.

Someone finally beat into my head that the second defending spawn is located in a really dumb location. I'm moving it to the blue building to the right of cap 4, and adding a new back way in. This new spawn replaces defending respawn 2 and attacking respawn 3. I figured due to its location it can kill two birds with one stone and save me some entity budgeting later on.

Yep, non-source engine stuff. I've been trying to branch out in regards to level design, my technical knowledge is limited to Source and Goldsrc. I've started learning UnrealEd and Radient, probably not the smartest move to learn two wildly different tools at the same time, but I'm shocked at the complete lack of documentation I can access for UnrealEd UT3. Everything I've come across links back to Epic Game's pay-for documentation. Its a complete change of pace from how Valve and id handle documentation, and its a bit offputting to me. The only reason I'm still persuing learning it is due to its frequence of use. Sure its like bashing my head into a brick wall, but eventually the nerve endings die, right?

Left 4 Deads been out long enough now for everyone to have their own ideas on how to improve the game, from outright disregarding Valve's level design philosophy (lookin' at you deadcity), to new weapons and infected types. Yes, I agree with new weapons and zombies, but heres what I want most as someone whos been working with the tools:

Items being spawned via the navmesh rather than set locations. Right now you specify locations for items to spawn in, and the director makes a binary decision about them. To me this just creates the situation Valve experienced with the original zombie spawning system, just in a different package. How the game works right now is survivors navigate from item spawn to item spawn, looking for whatever they did happen to get. If the items were moved to the navmesh, it would go a long way towards making the game a lot more dynamic and less choreographed. The only downsides I could see to the system is that items would probably require a new navmesh flag, better navmeshing in levels (which could lead to flow and pathing problems), and having the director keep track of survivor's stats and items. I'm not sure about the last one because I don't know how the director handles the load of zombie spawning, but it might have been significant enough to turn Valve off to the idea.

I'd also like to see more infected types. Right now there are regulars, hunters, smokers, boomers, tanks and witches. At least, I'd push for more regular infected types. Shambling infected and already maimed infected would be excellent to have, to break up the infected. I'm also a bit dissappointed at how the tank is handled as a character. Right now you hear the music and immediately book it to a chokepoint or a large open area and he doesn't pose a threat. I'd like to see someone expand the tanks role to something of an undead serial killer. My test idea for this is mimicking the signs of a tank in a map without him actually being there. Screen shaking, tank grunts, etc. The survivors are traveling through the interior of an apartment building, while a tank is harassing them from outside, dynamically (not really) changing the path they take to escape the building by throwing cars and debris through the walls. They escape and supress the tank enough to get away from him. The super necromorph from dead space is perfect. That's how I'd handle the tank to get the feeling down.

With this restructuring, the first part of the finale would be killing the tank, for good. For No Mercy, he could take a plunge off the roof when the building piece hes standing on collapses. Blood Harvest he'd get run over by a combine harvester, Death Toll he could be trapped under debris underwater and drowns, and Dead Air he could be hit by a plane or something. Obviously at this point Valve wouldn't make these changes, but the great thing is, level designers actually could! The apartment idea is completely within the boundaries that the SDK sets for you.

Another idea that could kind of be tacked onto there would be a real boss infected, something that blocks their path until they take it out. The most obvious problem with this would be familiarity. The 10th time through the level the survivors all know what to do, completely dodge the stationary boss and continue on their way. This one needs a bit more time in the oven, honestly to think of a way to fix that problem.

My first campaign was dev textured because I wanted to get it out of the way for the community. My biggest beef with Team Fortress 2 is that orange maps recieve so much playtime its ridiculous. People would rather play those than well designed and themed maps. I wanted to create a baseline for the next orange maps to be compared to, so they wouldn't be as widespread as they are in Team Fortress 2.

At this point I'd like to deviate into my generic ruleset that I've been keeping in mind when doing Left 4 Dead stuff. Whenever I start a project I create a list of rules that I abid by while creating. Left 4 Dead is no different, and a lot of my ideas that I had concerning level design have been holding up.

"Our first maps created specifically for the game were giant non-linear city sections. The idea was that the survivor team would have to find their way through the zombie infested city. Playtesting quickly revealed that keeping track of your teammates and fending off the hordes of zombies completely consumed player's attention. Adding on-the-fly discussions of which way to go were slow and frustrating. More importantly however, was that the teams quickly found their favorite route, and tended to always run the same way every time, minimizing their on-the-fly decisions. By trimming down the city to a reprisentitive and fairly linear route, we could better spend our limited resources making that area highly detailed."

Keep the levels linear. Valve tried it, it didn't work. Doing it under the guise of "Hard mode" or whatever in my eyes puts you in with those pro-Portal people. Just don't do it.

Don't be afraid to be innovative with panic events. I've been seeing the gate panic event everywhere. I used Valve's panic events in Orange because I wasn't concerned with making my own. Cold Blooded has a roster of panic events already, and none of them overlap with what Valve has done. Honestly its not difficult to script a new panic event. Valve's stuff looks intimidating because they do a lot on the side during the panic event. In reality it just requires an entity to send the director a PANIC EVENT input or something. Also, keep in mind that panic events can only be triggered by the game once every two minutes.

When designing your levels, try and think about how people in this area would've dealt with a zombie apocalypse. In this situation, I would've found a suitable hideout and started fortifying it, probably grabbing a radio to keep in contact. The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks would be perfect for this stuff, a lot of it lines up fairly well with Left 4 Dead.

Industrial Beta Six, L4D SDK, TEAR, and a Zeno Clash bump!

2009-04-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

Industrial Beta Six is out, you can grab it here.

It looks like the level 3 teleporters really screwed up the respawn waves, I'll have to tinker with them for Beta Seven. Still following my original plan, Beta Nine should be the final.

So on the changelog for Beta Seven so far:

-Respawn wave tinkering
-Replacing 45 degree stairs with stairs that look more like stairs.
-New bridges by Cap 3.

In other news I've been building levels with the actual L4D SDK. A german gaming magazine company named Computec Media wanted to distribute Orange on their monthly disk, and I wasn't sure about the legal agreement they sent me. I sent Valve an email asking if it violated the Source SDK's EULA and TOS and whatever other legal acronyms I could think of. Chet Faliszek ended up responded and confirmed that it didn't, but in addition he played the maps and asked if I'd like to help test the L4D SDK.

He got me in contact with Phil Co and Yasser Malaika, and between the three of them they've been very helpful in solving the last few puzzles I couldn't figure out.

So, Cold Blooded is back on track, and in addition, I've been building survival levels. I've got a few designed out now but the only one that I've been playtesting is Intersection:

Ignore the cubemaps. Something might be wrong with them right now.

The basic idea is that the survivers have a heavily fortified intersection to defend. I like the layout and its been well recieved by the playtesters on Knifeback Mountain's L4D servers.

Since no one is really sure of the structure of the survival levels right now I've been building them as finales without a rescue vehicle, so after the two tanks everything goes to hell. Its worked out pretty nice so far. Some more ideas I've built for survival include a convenience store (with attached laundromat), a warehouse, and the Orange finale. If I can come up with another idea I've got a 5 pack of maps ready to go when the next patch drops.

I started doing some level design for a polish medieval Dark Messiah-ish mod named TEAR:

While yes they are polish, they do speak english. Tepico is a cool dude and he knows his level design. My first project for them is the town square for the demo:

I loved Dark Messiah and I think it catches too much flak. Medieval is a setting I've never mapped for, so its a nice change from Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal. I've been playing through Painkiller again to get shots of the medieval levels to have something as reference material. Otherwise I'm using google image search and pictures of Prague.

Zeno Clash is still cheap as hell on steam right now, so pick it up and play it on April 21st! I'm definately gonna be messing with level design for its unique setting after I beat it!

Industrial Beta Five, Cold Blooded Overview, Orange

2009-01-22T13:57:00.001-08:00

Industrial Beta Five was tested on 2f2f recently. I missed a nodraw wall that was z-fighting with a regular brush, as well as a blocker for the new bottom exit from red spawn 3. I did a recompile to fix, but too many people have the old version for it to really matter. I just won't post this one to FPSB.

Next beta the teams get switched back and it undergoes some retheming. Round One should be mostly untouched, just some touches to show that RED occupies it now. As BLU gets farther into the base, RED's changes become more appearant.

I started working on a Left4Dead campaign called Cold Blooded. Someone on the Something Awful forums came up with the idea and I agreed to work on it. I was going to make a campaign anyway. Supernorn whipped up this awesome poster:

Which really needed a campaign to go with it.

Cold Blooded One takes place on an icebreaker, which fellow mapper Pfhreak built the basic layout of and I took over from there. Its playable, but still ugly. I'm having a big problem with the skyboxes included though, by default they do not allow fog blending, so you get a really defined line for where the play area is and where the skybox starts. The two ways to solve this are:

1. Ditch the fog.

2. Custom skybox

I'm more partial to 2, as the boat is supposed to crash into some frozen coastline, which could either be through no navigator or navigator error due to fog.

Cold Blooded Two takes place from the icebreaker to the "Research Facility". Basically the survivors get lucky, exit through a crack in the ship's hull, and escape into some ice caverns, which means lots of displacements. The Research Facility is a cold war relic US Base, built to act as the first line of missile defense versus the reds.

Cold Blooded Three is the above ground sections of the facility, and weaves in and out of the building, going through office space, cafeterias, high-clearance areas (theres a panic event in there somewhere) and eventually the path goes straight down.

Cold Blooded Four is the underground section, where (if I can get the atmosphere right) the more freaky stuff will be. Skeletons chained to walls, and discarded in corners will hint at the "black operation" nature.

Cold Blooded Five has the survivors reaching the bunker, a secured location where other survivors are holed up. They must open and defend the bunker door long enough to get inside, and then close them again.

An early idea to lead the survivors to the bunker is a radio operator, telling them where to go or general information. I still need to find a voice actor for this part, but I'm purposely holding it off until the end.

L4D is mostly workable at this point, the only things I still don't understand are boss infected spawns and ladders. A quick google search shows everyone else is stuck here too.

EDIT: I forgot to mention one of the things I was doing for this campaign. There was a musician named John Cage who kind of pioneered a type of music called chance music, in which he flipped a coin to determine notes and stuff. I opted to give it a try for picking a path down the tower on the icebreaker, and came up with a nice, slightly complex path of open and closed rooms. Basically, I flipped a coin to determine if a room stayed open or closed. Not really as noteworthy as other things I've done, but it was a nice fresh take on level design to me.

EDIT #2: I also entirely forgot Orange. It was mentioned on the survivor's diary podcast here, and can be downloaded from here. Its just a test campaign for me to work out the bugs ahead of time for Cold Blooded, so it won't be getting textured unless someone else wants to do it. I think its too nonsensical personally.

Recent Happenings and Mapping

2008-12-16T02:53:00.001-08:00

Hello.

I took a large break from mapping after industrial beta four was done due to scope of the changes I was considering. During that time I realized that while level design was something I wanted to do, it wasn't something I could do all the time. My grades were falling. The choice was save my collegiate career, or finish Industrial.

This break lasted until November 30th. I was driving back to college when I was involved in a nearly head on collision on the highway. I came out of it with a bruised knee and a few chemical burns, and I realize how lucky I was considering how bad it could've been. My beloved car was totaled, and I spent the next four hours at a truck stop somewhere near Cortland, NY waiting for my dad to drive up to take me the rest of the way. During that time I had a lot to think about and realized that I had to stop screwing around. I didn't want to leave so many projects half-done and waste my parents money like I had been.

Since then I've been doing a lot better on work, and re-approached level design with a new zeal. I've re-opened a lot of my projects and re-evaluated them. I've started sketching again, nothing noteworthy, but mostly building designs for industrial, shale and whatever is next.

I did start working on a Left 4 Dead campaign, but without the real SDK I can only do so much. Quite a bit of my previous post was right and wrong.

1. Safehouses

Couldn't find a brush entity or something related to this in the FGD I found, which doesn't mean it exists or it doesn't. However, the nav mesh seems to be able to designate the safehouses.

2. Zombie Hordes

Wrong. The director creates spawn locations based on hiding spots determined through the nav mesh generation.

3. Weapon locations

Right. The mapper specifies several locations for the placement of items, and the director chooses which to use.

4. Rescue Closets

Right. The mapper specifies point entities in a closed room and the use of the door triggers the spawning. The director handles when and where the player spawns.

5. Panic Events

Right and wrong. The director will create panic events on its own, but the mapper also has the option to specify special panic events, like the cars, metal detectors, or the mini-finales.

The only real hurdle to mapping is the nav mesh. From my experiements with it, it wasn't good at determining some pathing, but I was pleased to see that it is fully editable in the game, the only thing I wish is that it would be more descriptive than "MAP CANNOT PLAY, NAV MESH BROKEN" when something goes wrong.

Industrial picked up from where it was left off. I've made a few changes, and everything here will be in beta five:

1. Displacements

I've redone a few displacements, mostly in the first outdoor area, based on what Valve did with Badwater to reduce unused visleafs.

2. New path to cap 4

I previously mentioned that someone suggested an easier path for the attacking team to get to cap 4.

3. Downstairs exit for defending respawn 3

The defending respawn for cap 6 was located in a spot that made it hard to get back and resupply. A good downstairs exit was pointed out and I built the exit there.

4. Minor model tweaks and some lighting errors

I noticed a few problems when implementing #3. I disabled a bunch of shadows on the door models.

The teams switching won't be in beta five, this is a monumental undertaking, and I want it to be a beta by itself. I've already started thinking of new designs, but for the most part I won't be changing a lot of the brushwork.

As for Shale, it did get tested on both 2fort2furious and Knifeback Mountain. The general consensus was the idea was sound, but a little small. Neither games stalemated on the last point, so I feel pretty good about the current layout. The only thing I need to do is extend the distances between Cap 1 and Cap 2R/B.

I've mentioned a few oddball level design ideas around to the various forums and IM chats I frequent, and with Shale I'm actually working on implementing them.

1. Play Area

Theres no doubt that I think Valve does this. What I did specifically was define the boundaries of the play area first before actually constructing the level. This leads to both sides having the same play area, but with radically different theming. Basically 2fort in a 5 cap map. I've built a visgroup in Hammer for this specifically so I can toggle it on and off.

2. Flow Analysis

One of the paradigms of level design that has been drilled into my head is NO DEAD ENDS. I've pretty much taken this to the extreme for Shale, and you can see a little bit of it in Industrial too. I've been considering building a 3D model of the play area of shale and flooding it to figure out where the congestion points will be located. Perhaps over the summer when Industrial is done. My goal there is to create areas with little congestion, or direct the player to specifically designed battle locations. I realise this won't be the end all answer to congestion, and will really only work for flat designs. Shale is mostly a flat design, with a few raised sections.

3. Node Analysis

I went through the official 5 cap maps and a few popular custom maps to try and determine the correct distances between nodes. Nodes are important locations in the map, like respawn rooms, capture points, and ammo locations. There are distances between the nodes, and there must be an ideal distance. From my observations, I've determined this:

I realise there are flaws in the analysis but the real test will come when I find out if it works or not. If it doesn't then I've failed, and can scrap the idea.

4. Behavioral Psychology

This is where it starts to get Orwellian. I don't know if I actually want to take the steps to implement this fully, because it very clearly falls under brainwashing and removes the player's free spirit to roam the level. There are limits to this, yes, but quite a bit can still be done.

Left 4 Dead Mapping

2008-11-07T19:54:00.000-08:00

I've managed to get a custom map into the Left 4 Dead demo, but without creating a nav mesh its unplayable. I assume this is either done through a console command or a tool that Valve plans to release with the SDK update in two weeks.

Anyway, the mapping itself, its not going to be as automated as Valve says it is.

1. Safehouses must be done during construction, its been mentioned.

2. Zombie hordes spawn in picked locations. Going through the demo you can see a few areas where zombies come storming out that you can't access. I'm unsure if this is a brush entity or the director just likes the locations for spawning.

3. Several locations for the advanced weapons, extra pistol, pills, molotovs, and pipe bombs must be chosen. There are 4 locations in the subway map where the advanced weapons spawn, for example.

4. Rescue closests must be designated, there are quite a few small empty rooms in the two maps where survivors can spawn. This is most likely a brush entity.

5. Panic Event triggers must be designated, like the car alarm and the switch.

The beauty about Left 4 Dead is that even if you're playing a shitty map, the director handles all the zombies, so it'll still be fun.

Hopefully.

Class wraps up next week so I'll be continuing on cp_industrial_b5 and cp_shale.

Beta Five Continued

2008-10-27T20:33:00.001-07:00

Beta Fives been taking a while because I decided I needed a break to refocus on schoolwork, I was spending too much time mapping. Now that I've had a good break I can come back and look at the map with fresh eyes.

First thing I revisited was the ramp to the catwalk in round one. I've added a giant machine to one of the bottom areas, I thought it looked too empty.

A lot of the angled roofs have been improved. I've gone back and redone them in a more efficient method and tried to bring them in line with how Valve does them. There are still a few that will probably remain unchanged because of their locations (detail areas, skybox).

I've also nerfed a few more camping locations, a major one was a ledge overlooking one of the exits by cap three. The position was too hard to assault from what I saw.

I'm on the verge of making major changes to cap six, and the entire map itself. For a long time I was pretty adamant about blue defending and red attacking, but its proven too confusing for new people, so I'm internally debating re-theming the map to be a red base and switching everything back around. I'm thinking this will end up happening in beta six. For a while I was planning on making the final after beta six, but it'll probably end up postponed to be beta eight being the final.

The problem I have with cap six is the "point clearing crit rocket" that caused me to change the original cap four. On one of the playtests for an earlier version (beta two I think) I killed three people with one crit rocket who were on cap four. I realised it was too small and needed to be made larger, and given some cover. The same thing happened in a beta test of beta four on 2fort2furious a few weeks ago, and there are some general complaints about the cap as well, mostly about some unfair demoman locations which I agree with. I've also changed the clipping on the tower so it can no longer be stood (and built) upon.

I've also been asked about a better route for the attacking team to cap four, and I've liked a suggestion I've gotten, so I'll modify that internally and see how it holds up.

Shales on the backburner for right now, I don't like my design decisions for the bases so I've been going back to the drawing board.

Beta Five and Shale

2008-10-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

All too late I realized I fucked up the compile for beta four. I accidentally compiled it with clips, hint/skips and areaportals off.

Beta five doesn't really have much changes, mostly just more clipping and optimization. I've been putting off working on it for some reason. Beta 6 will probably be the final.

With the work on industrial winding down, I've been thinking of follow up maps or projects, and so far the top contender is shale.

Valve's maps fascinate me. They're perfect blends of gameplay and design. I've been going through the vmfs learning all their tricks and secrets. One of the things I've been doing with this is node analysis.

What node analysis entails is measuring distances between nodes. Nodes are respawn rooms, control points, and ammo locations. What I looked at specifically were distances from respawn rooms to their respective control points, control points to other control points. and so on. It looks like badlands has the best distances, and total the map is around 17000 units long, so I'll probably be mimicking its distances.

Another thing I'm going to be doing is using skip brushes to determine the playable areas. I've never really been a fan of maps where both sides are mirror images, and with shale I want to fix that. Blue's side of the map is located half-in/half-out of a mine, and Red's half is a semi-abandoned railroad. I've got sketches of the same geometry, but dressed up in both red and blue's schemes.

I've also been interested in seeing if there is an application for fluid dynamics in level design, but I don't know how to approach that short of building a 3D model and filling it with water.

Beta Four

2008-10-04T01:24:00.001-07:00

My apologies for skipping posting about beta three being released. I've posted it here. Kinda dumb that I get around to posting about it when I'm compiling beta four.

Beta Four Major Changes:

1. Round 1

Due to idiocy or whatever the problem with the beta three one way door was the func_door's texture. I had them set to clip when they should've been metal and not rendered. All the new model doors added in this version are set to this standard.

The concrete detail building to the immediate left of the first courtyard was rebuilt. It was one of the first things I mapped out and looking at it again it had way too much detail and brushes for a building you couldn't get near. The old building was 20-30 brushes or so, the new one is 5-10. I've also gone around the various detail areas and deleted props that were barely visible or easily missed.

I've re-looked at cap 1 and made a few changes that were warranted. The cap's area has been shrunk and the jumping paths to the shelf its on are now inclines.

I was asked by a number of people to make the catwalk more accessable to non-explosive classes, and while scouts could get up there with clever jumping, its now open to everyone. The door to it is located in cap 1's room, and opens when red caps cap1.

2. Round 2

A few playtests on 2fort2furious pointed out some problems with cap 3 that have been changed. Specifically, the upper path that dumps out to the point has been removed, as it was really just superfluous. I've also axed a potential demoman perch that was pointed out by FLOOR_MASTER. Some new playerclips all around for cap 3. The lighting inside the "control room" building has also been looked at and the dark corners are gone.

The foreward resupply room is now exclusively red and they can use it to switch classes, but all spawns are in the previous red spawn.

Blue spawn was supposed to get a door to the new passageway added in beta three, but its been pushed back to beta five. There are potential entity limit problems I'd like to address first. Otherwise I've added a sawhorse in the room directly next to blue spawn that points to the currently assaulted control point. Hopefully that will help directional issues. The old no entry garage door also now connects through to the passageway to cap 4.

The staircase to cap 4 gets disabled for round 3 now, to try and focus people towards the doors. I've also gone around re-lighting black props with info_lightings. I've probably missed some in the map and they'll be done for beta five.

3. Round 3

I've redone the two detail areas outside of cap 6. The room to the lower path was rebuilt and a nice sexy curvy window was added with a revamped detail room. I skipped over doing this room for beta three because I wanted to fix the major problems first, and it got forgotten. The other room to cap 6 also got a new false cieling and a maintenance detail area, as well as improved lighting.

More signs have been added, especially in the factory/warehouse room between the two previously mentioned detail areas. The sawhorse in the warehouse detail room now points to the currently assaulted control point. You also cannot place buildings within the boundaries of the metal doors in blue spawn.

A few people have voiced their distaste for the shortcut to cap 6. I don't think its much of a problem but if beta four shows it to be a weakness I'll remove it. I'm unsure if cap 6 is balanced without that side passageway.

4. Brush doors replaced with standard setup model doors.

I've replaced all of the mesh doors with Valve's standard setup doors. The lighting isn't perfect on them but I'll tweak it for the next beta. I didn't replace the garage doors on the lower exits in round 2 or the "Well" doors in round 3.

5. Skybox improvements

The skybox has been touched up a little bit again. I wasn't happy with some of the shadows I was getting with the trains behind cap 4, so none of them cast shadows now.

6. CFG

I've completely brainfarted including a CFG file with the previous two releases. It'll get added now.

I'll post a new update when beta four is done.

Beta Three Post Three

2008-09-24T01:45:00.001-07:00

Work list is done. I'm fairly confident that all the rigging is good too. With the major obsticles finished, I've demolished the minor obsticles list, except for the skybox.

I've just started overhauling the skybox. I was never happy with it, and I'd like to get something with some natural terrain. Its pretty hard conveying landscapes and such at night, which is why I'm sure professional designers avoid the midnight oil hours for setting.

On the early builds for beta two when I overhauled the skybox I was getting clipping problems with some of the indoor areas of round one, there'd be wierd lighting and stuff. This new skybox keeps all displacements outside of the bounds of the level, and will hopefully, when its done, look like a desert. I'm just hoping for something other than square cliffs.

I'm shooting to get the beta out and on fpsbanana/servers by Saturday.

Beta Three Update

2008-09-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

I figured I'd update how things were going on the worklist:

1. Getting Blue To Cap 4 Without Following The Same Route Red Is.

Done, I made a new path out of Blue's second respawn leading directly to the point. I've re-themed the respawn as well.

2. Cap 2 is really hard to cap with people who are good at what they do.

I think this one will be solved with the one way door on the upper path. Before I actually release beta three I'd like to try it out with and without stairs in the loading dock room.

3. Its damn confusing.

I've placed directional signs at every major intersection, and before beta three gets finalized I'm going to rig the signs to change colors depending on points capped. I don't think the "steel map" is a good solution for a attack/defend map. Also, this ties directly into...

4. Round 3 is structured oddly.

Blues got a new respawn for round 3. Its next to cap 6 and removes that odd 45 degree angle path to the bottom level. I've decided that the bottom level is fine as is and cut that side route off. I've also added one way doors in that central staircase room that are for blue to get out, which disable when cap 5 is taken. I'm not really happy with the test doors I made so I'll make some new ones.

The minor things have all been put on the backburner until I've got these four solved. I'm about halfway to three quarters done with them, so I'll be getting to those in time.

Industrial Beta 3 Work List

2008-09-16T00:20:00.000-07:00

cp_industrial_b2 is out here: http://www.fpsbanana.com/maps/62995 Some new screen shots are there as well.

Its got good scores (mostly left over from b1 I think) but is still really untested.

Beta 2 was tested with quite a few people on Knifeback Mountain a few weeks ago, where the general consensus was "confusing as all hell". I've been adding signs left and right for beta 3 to hopefully make things easier, and I'm looking at redoing parts to make the map easier to digest.

The main problems I'm looking to fix for beta 3:

1. Getting Blue To Cap 4 Without Following The Same Route Red Is.

I've changed things in standard push maps for industrial. Instead of the defending team's respawn being located at the last point, I've put them in between. I've been gutting Blue Spawn 2 to add a back way to cap 4 and removing their upper spawn route, so far its looking good. Also with industrial, Blue has the same respawn location for round 2 and 3. It was a wishful idea, but with how I've made the map I don't think it'll work. I'll see about giving them a new respawnroom for round 3.

2. Cap 2 is really hard to cap with people who are good at what they do.

A japanese gamer sent me a demo of a 26 player game and that helped quite a bit in assessing problems for the first round. It seems cap 2 is hard to cap with a team that knows what they're doing. I've added a one way door to the new upper enterance to cap 2. I'm thinking about putting stairs in the loading dock somehow to get other classes up there to take advantage of it. Cap 1 looks great though.

3. Its damn confusing.

The only way I can tackle this one without doing some major open round surgery is placing signs. I've been doing that, but it can only help so much. We'll see how beta 3 does with the signs, and if thats not enough, beta 4 will have some drastic changes.

4. Round 3 is structured oddly.

Also my fault because of the respawn room thing. I'll be doing some major work on it. Round 3 took 30 seconds when it was tested on Knifeback Mountain. I think this was because defense didn't really get a chance to learn round 3 before it started, but that might just be wishful thinking.

Minor things now:

1. Sky/3D skybox needs work.

Jamie Manson made the skybox for me a while back, and while it kicks ass, I'd like to change a few things with it. I've been unable to convince him that these changes need to be made.

1.A.moon off the skybox texture and orient it like the sun is in ctf_2fort.

I can achieve this using an alpha mapped texture. A lot of the problems with the skybox stem from it being a night map. Things are coming out way too dark, and not getting lit properly. Particularly the area behind cap 4.

1.B. The 3D skybox in general needs some improvements.

Right now its a flat plain with a few buildings in the distance, supposed to be cp_steel. I'm not much of an environmental artist, but I'll try my hand at it.

2. Round 2/3 cameras are non-functional.

I've just been lazy with this one. I've been changing a lot of geometry and screwed up the entity names.

3. Spooky I/O errors

I've been spotting a few I/O errors. I haven't had time to really look into it. Its probably just some misnamed entity.

I'm gonna try and go through this list for beta 3. However I'd really like to get some concrete testing of round 2 and 3 done first.

As for alternate projects:

I've been working on an Onslaught style gamemode. Teams would have to capture all four points, then destroy 4 objectives (in this case, rocket brackets). My test map is complete, it just needs to get played. Last time I tried there was an odd situation where the server claimed the map was different when it wasn't. I'm chalking it up to corruption, but I was getting wierd problems with cordon compiles of cp_industrial_b3 changes before I redownloaded tf2, and that fixed those. I haven't had time to try a re-test.

Also I've been thinking about stealing another UT gamemode called Double Domination. I think it would be damn fun in TF2.

Arenas

2008-08-21T23:22:00.000-07:00

Since the Heavy Update has come out for Team Fortress 2, I've been messing around with arenas. I'm a bit intrigued by the idea of them, and I like smaller spaces, it gives me more resources to theme with and I don't have to worry about hitting entity limits unless I really screw up.

The arena map I've been working on is called arena_coalmine:

It was inspired by some of the Half-Life 2: Episode 2 maps that take place in the open strip mines. I went through those maps and took a few reference shots, and the started working on simplifying them for use in a TF2 map. Please ignore the floating rafters, there will be buildings up there when I get around to it. Arena_coalmine started life as a simple point design, and I've got a few sketches in my sketchbook of it as a CTF map, CP 5 cap, PL, etc. Arenas been a godsend to my abandoned point ideas. Arena_coalmine is the first of a few that'll converted over.

Cp_Industrial is still getting worked on too. Today I started going through and preparing it for compile. Round 1 is entirely func_detailed, areaportaled, and hint/skipped. I've decided to leave round 2 for tomorrow, as I don't really feel like figuring out the outdoor environment right now for optimization. The only problems left I can tell of are optimization related. I'm not entirely happy with round 3, but theres a point where I gotta get it tested before it gets detailed up more. It'll suck to have something completely detailed that turns out to be incredibly unfun to play.

I've been getting ideas on new structures and stuff from reference pictures of real granaries and breweries, as well as other maps. Cp_Steel is good reference point, Jamie Manson did a really good job mapping it and I can only hope industrial or any of my other maps will reach a level of perfection it has. I did a few textures for him for the map also, I made the D and E round red signs, as well as the combo signs in the same style, and the HUD graphics.

Someone talked about cp_oilrig on my FPSBanana page for cp_industrial, so I went to check it out. I found a very different map that was well designed, which was not what I was expecting. This was kinda funny to me, as the first TF2 map I was thinking about making was an oilrig. Christoph Manschitz (That cannot be his real name) did a better job than what I was planning. I think if he restructured the map into a gravelpit thing, it could be even better. Right now its a short dustbowl.

Introduction and down to business

2008-08-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

I'd like to open with a description of what I hope to accomplish. I'm looking to keep a developer log for my Half-Life/Source engine map making to assist me, and anyone else looking for information regarding any processes related to it. I hope to eventually attain a career in game design, and level design is probably my favorite aspect of it.

The first map I've made for Portal is Test 20, you can find it here: http://www.fpsbanana.com/maps/54808

Since December 2007 I've been working on a Team Fortress 2 map called cp_industrial. I've released a beta here: http://www.fpsbanana.com/maps/62995

Its sort of old (June-ish I think) and I've been looking to update it with a new version. Problem is, even though it compiles, TF2 crashes on load with no error, and no indication of what the problem is. I'm stumped, really. I've gotta go through with Cordon boxes to find the problem, and I've been stalling that because I don't know where to start.

A lot has been replaced since this build. I've gone through start to cap 3, tweaking various things, modifying stuff I didn't like or lighting objects up. After that, the changes get more drastic.

Cap 3 got nuked. I hated it because I couldn't figure out a good layout for it and just left the point in a corner. I've removed the building behind it and built a new one for the cap. Jamie thinks its a bit enclosed, I'll leave some pictures of the last build for whomever else to decide. I expanded the back out a bit more to try and give it more space.

The points inside to the left, theres a few sheets of metal infront of it protecting from direct fire. I'm afraid that a demoman or soldier could still fit projectiles into there somehow without actually being in the point, so we'll have to see when I get beta 2 together. Otherwise, it might be too much of a pain to defend. I really don't know.

Round 3 got nuked pretty much entirely. I disliked cap 5 because it was difficult to theme correctly and I couldn't get the skybox to integrate well. This new one is much better and I think fits the theme better. Heres an early terrible shot.

As you can see, its pretty dark and the walkways aren't clear. When I clean this up it'll be much better. The idea is that BLU comes in through the north there, and RED can come in through the south (the building on the bottom right of the shot there) and the top right north path. I'll be posting progress pictures as I work.

EDIT: Errors been fixed. The problem was a prop_physics_override.