Back for more, nearly a year after the last update! This update mainly focuses on optimisation and lighting, with some layout adjustments sprinkled in for flavour.
- Removed an entrance to mid on each team's left side. This entrance was underused, awkward to leave through, opened up a problematic sightline and hit frames hard, so it's gone. Entering mid from this area is still not too difficult, as you can simply go around the wall or go over, so it hopefully shouldn't impact player flow. I've added an arrow sign to indicate the existing route into mid around the wall.
- Added a truck prop in that left side area to give a bit more interest and opportunities for spy and teleporter play to a now sparse zone.
- Added an internal ramp over the barbed wire wall at mid to make moving through that area more streamlined.
- Changed the floor texture of mid to something less visually noisy but still in the same spirit.
- Changed the most controversial part of this map - the cart explosion now explodes both carts instead of turning one into a phys object. I fully expect public outcry from this decision.
- Changes to spawn: right internal exit is now wider and more direct, and left external exit has been pulled back along with the internal exit being moved slightly to make the cave transition more direct. Restructured the inside slightly to accomodate these changes. The spawns are still completely undetailed, as these changes still need testing.
- Lighting improvements over the entire map, and lots of general ghost lighting, to hopefully make many areas more clear, especially where fog would help to hide sentries or players against dark walls. Have also brightened the ambient light colour to help problematic shadows a bit.
- Moved back the start of the fog a little bit for the same reason.
- Minor visual improvements, mainly to add more interest to sparse areas and better denote team side ownership at a glance.
- General clipping and geometry improvements around the map, mainly continuing the aim of having less weird spaces to get stuck on or in while fighting, and balancing sniper/engie spots.
- Turned a few fences into world geo where them being transparent was unnecessary and just worsened optimisation.
- A LOT of optimisation (hinting, occluders, areaportals), especially around and across mid, which should hopefully make a positive difference!
- Added fade distances to most smaller props on the map.
- Slightly tweaked the explosion particles.
- Many, many minor tweaks n fixes to weird stuff from 2018.
- i tried to add an env_sun but every time i did it broke my vmf.
Read the rest of this update entry...