PN_Bridge (Need Suggestions!)

[TheMrFailz]

PN_Bridge is my first "Not a pile of ugleh" map for PNRP.

Current version: 1.0

PN_Bridge is a rectangular shaped map that is divided in half by a slightly radioactive canal. In the very center of the map is a medium-ish sized vertical lift bridge (That actually works) that can be opened to allow airboats to traverse the canal. It also impairs player movement because players have to choose between loosing some health via swimming (It's very low damage. It'd take a minute and a half of sitting in the water to kill you from full health), bribing who ever has claimed the bridge to lower it, or climbing either side and attempting to fight through to the other side.


Being 1.0, It's kinda basic. Please post suggestions so that I can make it better.


P.S. it includes a Nodegraph (for npcs's). It MAY be broken however because right before uploading and after noding I found out about a decent sized hole between the map and the skybox that would allow someone to literally walk off the map. I fixed the issue but the node might be broken now because of it.

Also, I don't know why but Zombies (Namely runners) act funky when on nodes. They follow the nodes like rails and refuse to attack players unless they run up next to them. HOWEVER, Regular zombies and combine for the most part follow nodes correctly and will wander off them to come after you.

Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/j8rji ... dge_v1.zip

Some pics: (Again, it's a little basic so suggestions would be really nice.)







Will make into day map if wanted.

[[TBU] CrazyKid]

Interesting concept. The map itself looks a bit small, perhaps you should enlarge the area by about double of what you currently have. Add more buildings, refer to google images for industrial buildings, residential, etc, and base your buildings off of what you find interesting. If you really want to go the extra mile, you should add in a secret area or two. If you have many issues with your map you can send me the .vmf and I can help you out, as I am rather experienced with hammer editor.

[TheMrFailz]

One bug, which isn't too much of an issue for PNRP, is that the land (The grass/sand, etc) is slightly messed up. Each side is one giant brush (Probably not the best idea.) that's displaced. However, if you noclip under it you'll see that the land is like a giant hollow mesh because the sides/bottom seem to have disappeared. I'll work on it some more.

List of stuff I'm going to try to do:
Make the map as large as possible
Make the map a day map. (I don't think I like night. I can't seem to make the lighting look nice)


Will add more to this list later.

[[TBU] CrazyKid]

No, it is not a very good idea to have your displacements be too big. You should split them up into smaller pieces where the grid is more flexible. Not too small, though. Do you mean that the underside of your terrain has no faces? Because that's the correct way to do it, you never want all faces of a terrain brush to be displaced. Only the face that the player can see / touch.

[TheMrFailz]

I thought I just broke the bursh... But ok. (Sorry it took so long to respond. Had a church picnic today)

Rail line I've added on the lower side of the map + New skybox/lighting:






And no, the gravel cars are not too small. They're about man titty height (The walls that hold the gravel in on the cart).

HL2 is reaaaaly spazzy for me at the moment for some reason. It uses ultra low resolution plus does this weird thing by default with alternate ticks that I have to fix every time I launch.

Edit: Also, this is just the very beginning to an industrial yard

[TheMrFailz]

ISSUE FIXED: Turns out it was one of my terrain brushes being too damn large. (Which is weird because I don't think it's bigger than any of the other ones. Must have hit a limit somewhere.)

Being the derp that I am, I seem to have "Broken" my map a bit. After loading it up into HL2, and exiting the spawn room, I get a bit of lag with the console message: Vis Decompression Overrun

I've done a bit of googling annnnnd.... I've basically got it down to 3 things.

1.) Displaced brushes being TOO DAMN LARGE. (I think I know which brush this would be.)
2.) Lack of optimization via Detail brushes. (Not sure if I can do this as alot of my brushes are able to be touched by the player without effort. Last time I used detail brushes everything lost it's hitbox. (Other map))
3.) Too many visleafs/too big a visleaf? I think I need to divide my outside space up a bit, Not sure how to though.


Being a SOURCE SDK Optimization narb I know jack s*** on how to optimize.

If you're able to, please look at my train wreck of a map (in terms of optimization) and at least tell me what I'm ducking up.
Everything that is my map (Excluding Nodegraph I mentioned earlier. ): N/A At the moment

(Also note, It's not done yet as to continue testing successfully I need to get this issue fixed.)


Edit: While posting this I've tried around 5 times to upload the bloody map to mediafire but it just refuses to upload.

Little bit of a preview before I wrap it up for the next version:

[Remnant John]

looking cool from that last pic, I wasn't too excited until I saw that one.

[TheMrFailz]

I'll admit it doesn't look too apocolypse-ish, but it has a southern feel to it. Do you think it needs to be a bit darker to go with the fog? I mean, my idea was that it's a warm morning and due to the soggyish ness of the area it's foggy. Again, post any ideas.

[[TBU] CrazyKid]

I suggest that you paste your compile logs into the error checker located on interlopers.net. The link is: http://www.interlopers.net/errors/?page=errors&params=

As far as the map goes, make sure your roads are wide enough, make sure you have enough areas to support up to 30 players at once, and make sure that you reference your buildings to real-world buildings by looking up images of buildings on google images. It's how I made my maps look so detailed.

As far as places, the only things that come to mind are industrial buildings, some commercial buildings, and some residential buildings. Make sure that they aren't too far spread apart, though.

[TheMrFailz]

I fixed up the error that was freaking out vis compression and causing an assload of lag.

Now I'm at a bit of a point where I'm not 100% sure what to do. I want my map to have a more southern feel to it (Along with some L4D1/2-esk to it) while still retaining the apocalypse feel to it. One idea for the theme of the map I thought of was that only the major cities got nuked and this was an outer area that's experiencing the plagues of fallout (Namely the rain, Hence the radioactive water).

I think I might go back to night time theme, as I'm currently testing what the map would look like if it was dusk and raining with storm clouds overhead.

Edit: Also, I've been using only HL2 content all this time because I don't know how to put other source game content into the HL folder. (I've been loading hammer directly from the HL2 bin because SOURCE SDK is broken as duck right now due to the steam pipe update)

I'm going to find out how to get the other content on there. (I have HL2+Episodes, CS:S, L4D1+2, TF2, etc)