I've been out for a while due irl stuff and I'm back now
Sorry if I didn't reply earlier.
I give it that it looks... adequate. Not great, but good enough and serviceable, especially for a 2nd attempt. Not sure why people say it looks great or impressive...
Well, I'm aiming for a "good enough" maps. You learn a lot when you're making new maps, but you gotta start small, for me, I've always wanted to bigger, cooler maps even though I don't have knowledge or experience with mapping (as I stated, this is my second map).
Swimming is usually considered bad due to how slow it makes the player and thus open to attacks. However, using it like this, I can get behind this idea. The alignment of the waterfalls could be a bit better, and the texture doesn't match with the pool either
I agree, but It's a quick way to get to the bottom floor, I think. Player won't use that road that much since, for now, there's nothing there of value (like a Damage Amplifier or Big Keg O'Health). The texture is kind of tricky like you said but it can be fixed. (the water fog doesn't show in the level like in DM-ArcaneTemple, not sure why.)
you could try UEs inherent fog or try if particle effects could hide it a bit.
I never used particles, but how can I use them?
If you have similarly looking areas in a big map they could be mistaken to be in a different spot than they actually are. You have already taken SOME steps to prevent this through use of architecture, but not through lighting
I always make sure that every room is unique (I try to), with different angle, small, large...etc. As for the lighting. I wanted the outside to be yellow-ish, and the walls that faces the sunlight from the skybox to be even more yellow (like it's really hot out there lol). Looking back now, some places looks very horrible, especially the lighting. I also wanted to create "shadows", but couldn't do it.
Last for this first screenshot, the architecture. Some of it is already really nice. You could still break up the ceiling and floortiles a bit more by adding some support beams and lining and trim the doorways. Doesn't need to be a lot but it will add a lot to the overall feel of the map and make it feel less "cubic"
True, the doors needs some improvements. But the more the map become larger, the long it takes to build it up. It become frustrating to build everything everytime you wanna change something.
SCREENSHOT 2:
At the beginning, I wasn't planning on making the bottom floor (the lower area where you have to go to through the water area). But it happened. As you can see, the first floor with the pool is the one I made first, it looks squarish in my opinion, also 512 units high which makes it almost impossible to jump between floors even with the jumpboots. The floor with snake is my favorite as it has some good fighting scenarios even though some of the can be a little bit large.
The outside area(the one with no way to get up :p) has some, but true, but not a lot of them. I added the small "shrines" but I forgot to add the jumpboots there to get to the upper area. As I said, this was a mistake by me when I was designing the map.
For this map I encourage you to break up the floor here and there, place a plant in between the cracks, place a small podest here and there to make it less even. For future designs you probably want to see if you can break up the floor policy a bit. If I had to give an example
I'm not sure I get this, but if i'm correct, you mean that some areas are "large" and you need to break the empty space with decoration?
The skybox has outlines which hurt immersion. Could try to scale the skybox very slightly to hide those a bit (try 1.01 - 1.05 and realign).
Didn't know how to fix that until I posted it here. So, thanks!
SCREENSHOT 3:
The snake is a neat idea, I dig it.
First of all, the snake looks goofy (look at it without the lighting lol). and the brush itself is broken. I don't how to "revolve" the brush while going "up" at the same time.
if you use more than light per lightsource. Remembering the teachings of DavidM, he used multiple per source - 1 very bright very low radius for making the source look like it's illuminated, one medium brightness medium radius one for actual illumination of the area and one low brightness high radius (32 - 64 usually) to simulate light tracing around the room via ambient lighting
Actually, this is a good idea. I was going to "unlit" the fire surfaces to make the look bright, but i'm gonna try this!
Can also use general ambient lighting give your map a base brightness but that's something you have to be VERY careful with.
True. because in some places like complex brushes or broken floors looks very dim.
Lighting is complex if you want to make something good. I was impressed by some maps where the lights cover all place yet they don't look very bright. Same goes for botpathing. They can be very tricky.
I really apperciate the reply
You really had good points about the map now that i'm looking at it after two weeks. But the map got larger than I thought. I should've stuck with smaller maps until I get the hang of everything at a basic level. I started making maps in 2021, and this is all what I've released because I wanted to make the best looking/bigger map with little experience. It became really frustrating to change something in this map. same goes for the lighting.
When I started adding lighting, most of the brushes were "solid", after adding some lighting, the entire map broke. HOM everywhere. It's not a good idea to go after maps like these with little experience, like they say, "start small". I made a small map, not the best though, but focused on gameplay more than "looks" which i'm gonna post soon.
Auto merged new post submitted 17 minutes later
...although one of them was set a bit low so his feet are in the ground.
Is there a way to keep the Nali in "permanent" animation? (I want him to keep meditating forever) for the ambient sound :p
Yep, not botpathing, horrible lighting and design lol. I posted this map to get some feedback about the overall design of it. It didn't look it plays well imo...
@sektor2111 : Nice!
I thought the skybox was broken until you guys fixed it. Thanks!
You can use Tools -> Replace Textures (Ctrl + 4) for that.
Whoa! It worked!
That map has 63 zones. If it was only one zone more, zone properties would have been unpredictable.
The universe could've ended...Disaster averted!
Curious, what zones? If I added another one, what could've happened? :p I once added brushes takes the entire graph to try and break the game lol
These are the invisible walls I mentioned in an earlier post - the walls with the SeriousSam clip texture.
Because there was not point going from there, and you get stuck easily (there's nothing there). I've put those invisible walls to prevent players from going there.
The nearest invisible wall in the lower screenshot truncates the pillars as seen here
"Semi-solid" brushes surfaces becomes 'invisible' sometimes. You have to "build all" so they can become visible again.
I hope I replied to everyone
And thank you all! I really appericiate the feedback about this map. I probably gonna take a break from this for while as I'm completely burnt out from mapping (also irl stuff). As I said, I worked on this for months but didn't turn out the way I wanted. It's fine, will fix it the best I can when I comeback
