PL coaldust

Map attempt number two, I've shelved “pl_Launchpit” for now in favour of something simpler but I shall return to it

This is the first stage of three, the other two are just on paper but I fancied taking a map to a more polished stage, just for the practice.

Known issues so far;

Quite a few objects still need clipping planes (the many, many windows for instance)

Lighting needs refinement in most areas.

Concerns over confusing the player, the line of freight wagons are the maps southern edge, I don’t want to put a more obvious barrier there but need to make sure people figure out its a no go zone.

Couple of lines of sight that may be excessive (from the engine shed to the coal hopper filling magig)

Not yet started sculpting the ground other than the spilled coal hoppers.

The world geometry wagons that make Blu's start gates are stand-in for some I intend to build in Maya or Blender, I’m familiar with Maya but Blender looks like it’s got more support, any recommendations?

[Godslayer57]

You have all these repeating windows which firstly is quite boring and secondly is very 'cluttery'. I think I just invented a new word

[Blobolob]

Good point ill edit them in the next version, there placement was more "Cover that wall in something" more than anything else

[Little Dude]

are those tracks in the first screenshot supposed to be angled?

[Blobolob]

Yes they are, though still a work in progress. I still need to make the curved sections or, more likely, burry the track using displacement geometry. I want the train yard to look very old and out of use. (Otherwise the bomb track won’t make any sense on top of the railway line track)

[colacan]

For an out of use trainyard, there are a lot of trains I must say. The filled "gutenwagens" can better be replaced by boxcars because loaded trains would not be put there.

[Blobolob]

You have a point there, though it would depend on how quickly the yard was abandoned, and what period.

Flatbed wagons might work, but then I don’t know why they would be there on a coal loading line? Boxcars don’t make sense to me either, unless they were pushed there to clear the main line I suppose.

The disadvantage of using boxcars that I see is it will increase the height of the walkway that the coal wagons currently form, if anything I'd like to lower that slightly, and it will add to the confusion that the boxcars are the southern boundary of the map.

[colacan]

I think I would be able to make empty versions of it. Put some planks on top to keep the walkway and done. I'll see if it's possible.

[Deodorant]

This is extremely detailed for an alpha. Normally people just make the basic shapes with dev textured block, occasionally throwing in a prop if it fills a specific gameplay purpose (partially transparent barriers for example) until they've reached the beta stage. I mean, you wrote that you're doing it for practice and it doesn't really harm the map in any way, but you'll have to be prepared to delete huge chunks of it and rebuild them from scratch.

I started out doing the same thing, by the way. I made a pretty much fully detailed map. I then realized some of the many things I had done wrong (no playtesting, no adherence to any decent scale, frightening misuse of proppery, et cetera), and had to build a completely new map from scratch with the same layout.
Ah, and I've repeated the 'scrap everything and rebuild the map from scratch' process... around 2.5 times since, I think. I was pretty glad I stuck to basic devcolored shapes those times.

[Blobolob]

I appreciate the offer colacan, but it’s something I’m hoping to do alone. I've been reading up on a few bits on the import process and things like that. Any help you could offer with regards to advice would be greatly appreciated though.

Bellow is hopefully an image of my first attempt, I'm concerned the polly count will be way to high but its unwrapped, I just need to paint it up properly. I thought I should priorities getting my mapping ability up to scratch before getting these done though



Actually, one major question, I'm yet to see anything about the scale of the models and how it’s done correctly? I'm worried I’m going to make something and import it only to find it’s either bigger than the map or the size of a shoe.

Thanks for the advice Deodorant, I know it’s allot riskier doing things this way and potentially quite frustrating when things don’t work out. I've already chopped out quite a bit of the map, that first area was twice as long on my first version, looked great as a rail yard but snipers had some lines of sight the full length so I had to cut that down.

It’s going to be a bit odd, but if this section is ok, I’ll be building the other two sections using the dev textures, mainly because I want to try something a little different game play wise, so it’s likely to be changing a lot. :S

With regards to scale, is there any mapping convention for the heights of rooms for HL2 the rooms were always 128 in your average house or something similar. But it looks to small in TF2 so I've been increasing that to 192 (one and a half dev textures if I’ve got the numbers wrong)

Cheers