KotH Country Hills

DA_DuckDiarrhea

L1: Registered
Feb 20, 2012
15
0
Here is my entry for this contest: Country Hills. You can look at the pictures and tell what you think about it. Now before you say anything, here are some notes:

1. I took the pictures in Garry's Mod, so even thought the medkits, ammo boxes, and control point thingy aren't showing, they are in the map. You can download the map itself if you like to see where they are.

2. Can someone tell me how to get rid of the shadows on the displacements? I have no idea how to fix those :confused:
 

zpqrei

Theme Changer Extraordinaire
aa
Oct 19, 2008
1,067
1,150
The problems with the shadows are because you have shadows turned on on the crops and the fences, and by default, lighting is calculated by collision mesh, or if no collision mesh is present, the bounding box (I could be wrong with the bounding box, if I am, please correct me). Now, these don't fit with the 'style' of the prop itself, for example, light wouldn't stop once it hit that fence, most of the light would travel through.

In order to achieve this effect, you can do two things:

1) You can disable prop shadows. You can do this in the properties of the prop, and it's as easy as changing it to 'Disabled'. This is quite easy, but needs to be done for all of the props.

2) You can enable certain compile-time settings, outlined in this fabbo article YM wrote here (and you should give him thanks for it here if it helped!). Disadvantage of this is that it ramps up your filesize quite a lot! Maybe it'd be best to put up with weird shadows in alpha, and compile with these in beta.

Hope this has helped you with your shadow woes!

EDIT: Also because I can, here is a brillo tutorial for taking screenshots in TF2, so you can get all of the items in the screenshots looking good and professional.
 
Last edited:

phi

aa
Nov 6, 2011
832
1,815
Why would you take the pictures in Garry's Mod when you can just as easily take them in TF2 with all those things you mentioned actually there? (To get rid of HUD and viewmodels just use cl_drawhud 0 and r_drawviewmodel 0)

Anyway, the map.

It looks a little open, actually a lot open now that I look at it, snipers should never have "decks" looking over the entire map with no cover from them. That's what your map's doing from what I can tell, and it's not pretty.

Also, figure out how to make those stairs on either side more interesting. They're too long and high, they will be annoying to climb and are aesthetically displeasing. Change the whole outside "deck" areas to something more balanced and interesting.

If you are not going to do that, I suggest putting the point in some sort of building to at least break some of the sightlines.
 

DA_DuckDiarrhea

L1: Registered
Feb 20, 2012
15
0
Why would you take the pictures in Garry's Mod when you can just as easily take them in TF2 with all those things you mentioned actually there? (To get rid of HUD and viewmodels just use cl_drawhud 0 and r_drawviewmodel 0)

Anyway, the map.

It looks a little open, actually a lot open now that I look at it, snipers should never have "decks" looking over the entire map with no cover from them. That's what your map's doing from what I can tell, and it's not pretty.

Also, figure out how to make those stairs on either side more interesting. They're too long and high, they will be annoying to climb and are aesthetically displeasing. Change the whole outside "deck" areas to something more balanced and interesting.

If you are not going to do that, I suggest putting the point in some sort of building to at least break some of the sightlines.

1. Oh, thats how you take proper map screenshots in Team Fortress 2. I only how to do proper screenshots in Garry's Mod. So, thats why I used Garry's Mod, sorry.

2. About the sniper thing, here's what I was thinking. The hills (hence the name "Country *Hills* ") actually have a tunnel inside of them, which can be an ideal area to hide from snipers as well as a good place to build your sentries since there are concrete blocks blocking behind (I took engineer buildings into consideration in this map as well). Even if you aren't going under the hills, I tested the hills by playing sniper and find myself having a hard time getting temporary bots on the control point, behind the hills, and on the opposite sides of the hills depending where you are shooting from on the deck. From the decks, I have crates and metal walls as barriers from the sniper bullets as well as a good place for snipers to hide from when they aren't shooting. And, I somewhat based the whole sniper pad from the official maps 2Fort and Turbine (If they are official, they must be sniper balanced as well in my opinion :O ) So, I didn't think snipers were going to be a problem. In fact, sniper balancing were the more critical aspects I was aiming for when building this map. But I guess I will try to balance it out even more somehow; don't know how to improve that honestly at the moment.

3. Yeah, I figured the stairs leading to the top of the sniper deck was a bit weird. But I thought I was using way too many ramps and just thought of using stair props. I don't know how to make custom props, so that's why the stairs look awkward and clipped up.
As for the whole deck editing, I'm not sure if I should make a building for the control point since if you were to test it or observe it a little more, it would look a little tight and small in width. I could just add more land, But I think it would cause too much open land and cause sniper imbalancement around the 'dirt' mounds. I'll probably edit the deck, but not sure how; I'll probably play some maps and find out what I can do ;)

Whew, lot of info for a reply :bored:
 

DA_DuckDiarrhea

L1: Registered
Feb 20, 2012
15
0
The problems with the shadows are because you have shadows turned on on the crops and the fences, and by default, lighting is calculated by collision mesh, or if no collision mesh is present, the bounding box (I could be wrong with the bounding box, if I am, please correct me). Now, these don't fit with the 'style' of the prop itself, for example, light wouldn't stop once it hit that fence, most of the light would travel through.

In order to achieve this effect, you can do two things:

1) You can disable prop shadows. You can do this in the properties of the prop, and it's as easy as changing it to 'Disabled'. This is quite easy, but needs to be done for all of the props.

2) You can enable certain compile-time settings, outlined in this fabbo article YM wrote here (and you should give him thanks for it here if it helped!). Disadvantage of this is that it ramps up your filesize quite a lot! Maybe it'd be best to put up with weird shadows in alpha, and compile with these in beta.

Hope this has helped you with your shadow woes!

EDIT: Also because I can, here is a brillo tutorial for taking screenshots in TF2, so you can get all of the items in the screenshots looking good and professional.

Thanks for the info on the shadow error as well as the link for getting professional map pictures. That's one fix on me to get more points for technical section.