Crevice: Map is Done

The map is done as far as I'm concerned. At least I'm 95% sure. I still haven't had a chance to test the final build with people. It's kind of tough to publicly entice people to try a new map. I'll just have to round up a few friends at the same time.

TF2 Sims

Over the summer, I made Sim versions of the TF2 characters. I tried to make them match right down to the personality. You can check out the red and blu class pairings on my Sims 3 'Studio'.





Just thought I'd post something a little different. And 'yes', you can mock me for playing the Sims.

Crevice: It's a Bad Map

About a week ago, I had a 'not so decaf' decaf americano in the evening and could not fall asleep for the life of me. To make the best of it, I started sketching out plans for a map much like Crevice. Basically, it was Crevice with all the ideas I thought of while making Crevice, but felt were too late to apply. While thinking out the player flow and location of points of interest on the new map, it dawned on me that Crevice is a poor map.

When initially designing Crevice, I wanted to make a building that actually felt like a building and not a string of random corridors like many other maps out there. To that end, I achieved my goal. Crevice is an easy map to figure out and the forts' rooms, stairs and hallways don't feel too arbritrary. Sadly, this very same philosophy made Crevice a poor map in terms of game flow. For example, the spawn point and the main escape from the intel room are too close together. A respawning player gets no downtime before being thrust into the action of the map.


While lots of action may seem like a good thing, a bit of downtime plays to the peaks and troughs of intesity. Too much constant intensity leads to anxiety and frustration. The attempt to make a building like building also lead to other issues including claustrophic hallways and too many escape route options.

All of these initial flaws combined have lead me to believe that Crevice is not going to be a map worthy of a major release. I know this sounds negative, but a big part of making this map was to give myself the opportunity to become comfortable with the tools and make myself less nervous about some of the processes in map making. That has been extremely succesful. I plan to take the learned lessons and apply them to a new map. I will still mostly finish Crevice, but I'll probably keep it's release fairly quiet.

Crevice: Learning Stuff...That I don't have to

The map is basically done. I have to tweak a bunch of details and then do some testing with other people. Once that is done, I'm going to be finished with the map. I think it will be a fun map, but it has some flaws. Even then, I want to move onto other things.

One of the last things I was going to do was add 3D grass texture to the grass floor. For this, it is better to set up a script to automatically place the individual bits of grass, opposed to painstakingly lay out each blade by hand. I tried to look up how to do it, but any tutorial I found was either for a different mod, referenced arbritrary relations between textures and the model that pops up or referenced files that did not exist on my computer. Basically, I couldn't find a tutorial that explained the details I need.

So bland.

Anyhow, I was going to make a post about how I hate learning new things and how they make me feel a bit anxious, despite the fact I may know the task to learn is not that hard. To compare what I have and what I wanted, I went to my map and took a picture and then went to a Valve map to do the same. Lo' and be'hold! Valve doesn't use 3D grass texturing on their TF2 maps!


While they may not use 3D textures, they make good use of alpha texturing. Alpha texturing blends two textures together, like a grass and a dirt one, for more natural transitions (you can see one by the rocks in the above photo). That, I think I know how to do.

Crevice: Decoration

I started adding some interior detail to the forts. The storage room, control room and break room all went fairly well.




However, the basement catwalk layout needs an overhaul. Currently it seems kind of 'meh' and the spytech railing won't match my current stairs. I'm just going to leave the basement and mull on it for now.

Oh, I also added an important exterior sign.

Reading List

One of the next projects I want to do revolves around evolution and ecosystems. While I already have a fair bit of inspiration from the BBC Nature Series and Steve Grand's 'Creation', I want to research more, just in case I've missed some vital information. So, I picked up three books on evolution; 'On the Origin of Species' (Charles Darwin), 'Evolution for Everyone' (David S. Wilson) and 'How to Build a Dinosaur' (J. Horner & J. Gorman).

I am about halfway through Evolution for Everyone. Wilson is fairly pompous, but the book has many great examples and ideas. Thus far, I'd reccommend it to anyone.

Once I finish Wilson's book as a friendly guide in to evolution, I plan to read 'On the Origin of Species' to better grasp the core mechanics and theory and then finish it off with 'How to Build a Dinosaur' which discusses the reversal of evolution.

Odd how I want to read so much now that I don't have to.

Crevice: Displacement

The displacement is done! What is displacement? It's adding 3D texture to cliffs and fields to make them look natural and not cement walls painted brown and green. Doing the displacement for this map turned out to be quite a process that involved stripping down some old (poorly done) before putting on the new shiny coat.

As you may have noticed in earlier blog pictures, I already had some minor displacing done, but I had to delete it. Any brush (the 'slabs' that make up the majority of the map) that has a displacement can't seal the map. Sadly for me, many of my current brushes that needed displacement were brushes that doubled as sealers. So, I had to strip down my exterior and rebuild it.
The stripping down process brought an extra benefit. I found a bunch of poorly done brush and texture work under the stripped regions.

When rebuilding, the new sealing brushes were lined with a thin brush that would be displaced. This required lots of up-close work (actually worked with the smallest unit of distance in the hammer editor). Lining up the surfaces so they could be 'sewn' together took some planning.

I definateley think the map looks better with the rough grass and cliffs.
Left: Pre-Displacement
Right: Post-Displacement





















Next task: Decoration!