...now wouldn't that be cool?

Hang out at Valve for a week, learn all the tips and tricks and just general utility of Hammer, rub elbows with some of the Jedi Masters of the business.

I know this is just fantasy, but in a perfect world wouldn't it be neat to learn this thing formally instead of just fumbling along with OJT! LOL






....or we could all just crash in on Fuzzdad in his basement. Road trip!

So you waste your time posting similar threads everywhere instead of mapping??? BAD PADAWAN !!!!!! ;)

DAMN YOU! Thought this was real! :mad: I'd fly to the states and steal all of valves tricks for my use!

Originally posted by Furyo
So you waste your time posting similar threads everywhere instead of mapping??? BAD PADAWAN !!!!!! ;)

LOL -- oh master, forgive me, but I am at my day job (so I have a good excuse!)

I'll do a podcast while I work on my new map: "Ok...I'm moving the displacement up here...and now down...and OH...that barbed wire needs some adjustments and...Yea...thanks honey...I'd love a beer..."

Originally posted by FuzzDad
...beer..."

.

That's actually all you need to know about quality mapping.

Does it really take anything else? :)

You should broadcast that Wes, I'm sure there'd be those trying to find a secret code in it....:)

You should sign up for the Valve Developer Conference. You get loads of presentations from Valve guys explaining techniques and such and they usually give your DVDs with films of all the presentations and various notes and samples . :D

Hmmm.....

If you need the guys at valve to teach you hammer then it's time to give up mapping...:p

How about a College Degree in Mapping while we're at it :rolleyes:

Originally posted by Dash
How about a College Degree in Mapping while we're at it :rolleyes:

That would so rock... and when you give it a deeper thought it's really not that absurd, is it? Mapping is pretty much a combination of art, architecture and CAD, and the result sometimes makes it into a video game for which people pay $.

So why not make level editing a real job with a degree? :p

Originally posted by Dash
How about a College Degree in Mapping while we're at it :rolleyes:

I think there already are some colleges that offer degrees in this?


...but getting a diploma from ValvE University would look pretty good on the wall, eh? ;)

Originally posted by Trp. Jed
You should sign up for the Valve Developer Conference. You get loads of presentations from Valve guys explaining techniques and such and they usually give your DVDs with films of all the presentations and various notes and samples . :D

Pani -- how do we sign up for such conferences?

...sounds like a good way to spend your summer vacation, eh Furyo?

Originally posted by FuzzDad
I'll do a podcast while I work on my new map: "Ok...I'm moving the displacement up here...and now down...and OH...that barbed wire needs some adjustments and...Yea...thanks honey...I'd love a beer..."

LOL -- Airborne, you funny guy.

Actually, a live video feed of what you're doing with a voice over would be all we need. ;) Of course, you would have to black out the 4-views since your project is uber top secret, which might detract from the training a little....

Originally posted by [AoS]Albatros


So why not make level editing a real job with a degree? :p

I want to be $1 paid PER POLYGON!

:D

Originally posted by Dradz
LOL -- Airborne, you funny guy.

Actually, a live video feed of what you're doing with a voice over would be all we need. ;) Of course, you would have to black out the 4-views since your project is uber top secret, which might detract from the training a little....

Remember what Patton did before the invasion of France...

Originally posted by FuzzDad
Remember what Patton did before the invasion of France...

now I am totally cornfused....

In the period leading to the Normandy invasion, Patton gave public talks as commander of the fictional First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG), which was supposedly intending to invade France by way of Calais. This was part of a sophisticated Allied campaign of military deception, Operation Fortitude.

so, your secret project is nothing more than a foil, a ruse, a red herring to throw us off track!? ;)

Dradz, this is seriously starting to look like this thread on CoJ that went on for 5-6 pages....let's not go that way now :)

Thanks for the hints guys. :D

Originally posted by Dradz
now I am totally cornfused....

In the period leading to the Normandy invasion, Patton gave public talks as commander of the fictional First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG), which was supposedly intending to invade France by way of Calais. This was part of a sophisticated Allied campaign of military deception, Operation Fortitude.

so, your secret project is nothing more than a foil, a ruse, a red herring to throw us off track!? ;)

It is what it is and nothing more nor less than six in one hand and half-a-dozen in the other with an occasional ying and yang. But yea...I am working on something...just gonna hold it tight to the vest for a while.

Mapping itself is easy. Its the sitting down and finishing a project and putting the blood sweat and tears into it to get something really worthwhile that eludes most people. Its something we all struggle with time to time, but once you learn to use the program you either put the time and energy in or you don't.

Originally posted by FMPONE
Mapping itself is easy. I beg to differ. The easy part is the imagination. The hard part is finding out you have been doing all the wrong things and having to fix them ALL to make it right. There isn't much out there in the way of guidance when you start, it's only reading things when you have a problem that allows you to fix it. Or....if you are with the "in" crowd, you might get the help.

BTW, I give all you guys out there that have made some super good quality maps serious props. I'm envious.

Originally posted by Formologic23
I beg to differ. The easy part is the imagination. The hard part is finding out you have been doing all the wrong things and having to fix them ALL to make it right. There isn't much out there in the way of guidance when you start, it's only reading things when you have a problem that allows you to fix it. Or....if you are with the "in" crowd, you might get the help.

BTW, I give all you guys out there that have made some super good quality maps serious props. I'm envious.

Mapping with hammer is as easy as it gets, my friend. Its only downhill from there. There is plenty of help, but you have to know the right places to go to get it. Considering where we're talking you're on the right track, Interlopers and other similiar forums also offer good help.

And hammer also has one of if not the largest collection of documentation for use, rivalved only really by the unreal engines. Of course you get confused and make mistakes, but thats part of the deal. Most people have had years to do that though, with Source becoming ever older.

edit: For the record if you have any specific problems I for one would be glad to take a look.

Originally posted by Formologic23
There isn't much out there in the way of guidance when you start, it's only reading things when you have a problem that allows you to fix it.
Agreed. There are a lot of "guides" out there that just dont make any sense. Trial and error is all. For me it was a learning experience the entire time. By the time I finished my map, I was doing things completely different than how I did them at the beginning. I found myself constantly going back and changing things. There's tons of I stuff I would do different second time around.

The map I'm working on (dod_brevands), I am trying to get everything right before releasing. I tried doing a compile for the first time (full compile, not fast) and it made it just past 1...2.. on BasePortalVis (after at least 6hrs of compile time). Come to find out after looking around, I had a crap load of brushes overlapping each other. Not sure if that was the problem, but we will find out. But that's how the mapping progress is exactly. Trial and error. But hey, makes you a better mapper the next time around, or if people need help, you may be able to answer their questions.

Originally posted by Dustin Diamond
Agreed. There are a lot of "guides" out there that just dont make any sense. All the tuts on Hints are horrible. They all seem to be for indoor mapping, how about making one for outdoor maps (like mine).

Originally posted by Formologic23
The map I'm working on (dod_brevands), I am trying to get everything right before releasing. I tried doing a compile for the first time (full compile, not fast) and it made it just past 1...2.. on BasePortalVis (after at least 6hrs of compile time). Come to find out after looking around, I had a crap load of brushes overlapping each other. Not sure if that was the problem, but we will find out. But that's how the mapping progress is exactly. Trial and error. But hey, makes you a better mapper the next time around, or if people need help, you may be able to answer their questions.

A technical question?!? Forwarding this to Dustin.

There is also, of course, something to be said about knowing people :P

Originally posted by FMPONE
Mapping with hammer is as easy as it gets, my friend. Its only downhill from there. There is plenty of help, but you have to know the right places to go to get it. Considering where we're talking you're on the right track, Interlopers and other similiar forums also offer good help.

And hammer also has one of if not the largest collection of documentation for use, rivalved only really by the unreal engines. Of course you get confused and make mistakes, but thats part of the deal. Most people have had years to do that though, with Source becoming ever older.

edit: For the record if you have any specific problems I for one would be glad to take a look. I check out the links at the other place visited by all the mappers, and they do help, and don't get me wrong, I am by no means complaining. I personally have never used anything else, so being a n00b I don't know any better. It's all been a great experience so far. I know many of the great mappers here are pretty busy with their project or have other mods that they work on, so if anyone has time to fit looking around at things, I welcome all the help/crit as possible, because I won't release garbage.

Make sure to check out Zombie's optimization guide: http://www.student.ru.nl/rvanhoorn/optimization.php

If you haven't visited the site in a while, it has been rewritten and many things are much clearer. Still, it takes experience to figure out a lot of the stuff. The best resource is someone else's brain.

Originally posted by Formologic23
All the tuts on Hints are horrible. They all seem to be for indoor mapping, how about making one for outdoor maps (like mine).

There arent any because large outdoor maps are generally a no-no in source. For the other outdoor types, you have to think of them like indoor maps. Technically it's not open, since everything is still contained in the skybox. If you pretend that your sky is just another wall, it might help in relating your map to the tuts.

Well, we can only hope that there is an engine update that will allow such a thing. Until then, I'll keep pluckin away. If I can't ever get my map optimized properly due to open areas, I guess it'll have to wait until the Source engine is outdated. :P

There aren't outdoor hints tutorials because they'd be the same as indoor. It's still the same application. You want your hints to cut through the corners of your houses, the same way they would cut through the corner of your hallway wall.

You should think of the outdoor map as you do an indoor map...the hills are your "buildings" and the valleys your "roads". It's a tad tricky to do it without having exagerated hills but it's doable. You then just use hints just like you always did. The biggest problem with outdoor maps isn't the distance you can see...it's the player models (and large numbers of physics/static models) that you see. That is the major issue with large open maps in source...you can see too many models at one time.

What it means is in order to do a large open map you have to be tricky...you need to put large nodraw blocks under the surface that closely match the above-ground terrain folds, you need to use hills and occasional buildings to block viz or to occlude models (placing occluders in a hedgerow with hint on top is an example of how to "hint" a open map). A large horizontal hint across the entire map is smart too...at about 120 unitsl or so above the normal game surface. This limits your players bounding box from "seeing" all the way to the top of the map. The other major goal you want to try and accomplish w/open map is to create several open combat zones that you can close off from the other. an example of this would be to have a valley map with hills on the left and right and in the middle is a saddle (the lower part between two hills. This way your two teams start low and climb to the middle. You can hint off each side from the other. In each combat zone you might place a solid house or two with a few minor outlying buildings...you can then occlude those houses so if you stand behind one the engine doesn't draw what's on the other side.

Look at it this way...you can make a large map that looks open but in fact it's really a visual trick designed to make you THINK it's open when in fact it's just like the others.

So, does that mean that if I place the horizontal hint brush over my entire map, that I can make everything above it func_detail (that the player cannot access), such as the roof and attic of my architecture?

No, that wouldn't solve the problem. Turning them to func_detail would automatically make the engine think they don't exist as far as Vis is concerned, and you'd be back to square one.

Think of it that way:

__________ |__________
|
_______X__ |____Y_____



In this example, X and Y (two props) are separated by a wall. The hint above crosses the wall, making the engine separate Vis along the wall, so that everything on the left of the wall is one vis leaf, and everything on the right is another. One can't see into the other, so one side is never rendered from either side of the wall

edit: bleh, screw my code, you get the idea, that bar on the far right on the second line should be in thje middle

Originally posted by Formologic23
So, does that mean that if I place the horizontal hint brush over my entire map, that I can make everything above it func_detail (that the player cannot access), such as the roof and attic of my architecture?

not necessarily. You should use func_detail for detailed brush work so it doesn't create unnecessary planes. That said entire houses in Kalt are func_detail. What you can do is use less detail and liberal use of the no draw texture on those area's the player cannot see. Some folks also will rebuild their area's above which the player cannot go as models and use the skybox to put them into the map (harder though).

Do this...decompile Kalt and look how Valve did it.

I think this is covered in detail on Day 3 of the Valve course.....(or could be ;))

You really are taking your dreams for a reality ;)

Originally posted by Dradz
I think this is covered in detail on Day 3 of the Valve course.....(or could be ;))

Shoot, from some of the things I've seen, even some of the Valve mappers could sit in on a course. Especially about hints and whatnot.

That said, i dont think any amount of tutorials could teach you what you could learn by trying it out yourself. "mat_wireframe 3" is your friend, same with "mat_leafvis 1".

"A man can dream, A man can dream..."

Originally posted by Sword
"A man can dream, A man can dream..."

QFT baby!


...of course, the next best thing is the Federation!
http://www.dod-federation.com/