Wednesday, June 14, 2006
5 ways to add detail to a CS:S map quickly
Game levels are good when they have great gameplay and great when they've got great game gameplay and they look amazing. Here are 5 ways to quickly add detail to make a 3D game level look amazing.
1. Make all your doorways the same size and give them a frame. Often all a frame needs to be is three blocks that set the frame at a different level than the door. The best way to do this quickly is to make sure early on that you create all of your doorways the same size and that the walls are the same thickness. Then just create one doorframe and copy and past it to all the other doorways. If you've got 20 doorframes in a level which is easy to do in an urban indoor map, this could save you hours of level creation time.
2. Only create one light with the right settings and copy it everywhere. In the Hammer Valve editor, you can use the default light entity but the draw distance for the light isn't far enough so you have to place a lot of them and HDR is disabled by default on them. So create one light, set all the properties how you'd like and then copy and paste them everywhere. You can always go back later and fine tune the lighting but you'll probably be happy with using the one light everywhere if you tweaked it to what you wanted early on.
3. Find the "Center on object" shortcut key and use it! The Hammer editor uses Ctrl + E as it's shortcut key combo. This feature will center all of the views onto the currently selected object. Once a map starts getting populated with items, sometimes an item can be selected in a window and there are so many things on screen you can't even see what's selected anymore which is where this comes in handy so you're no longer having to guess.
4. Physics objects fall to the ground. Just place them anywhere in the air near where you want them to start the beginning of the level and they'll drop to the ground when the level loads. Don't waste the time to position each one one or two units above ground level. The objects all fall to the ground during the paused moments when no one can play on a CS:S map so they'll never notice if it takes a little bit extra processing power to calculate 50 physics objects all falling at once.
5. Place a prop and then leave it! No one really is going to care if the trash can is rotated 87 degrees or 72 degrees off axis. Just give it a little twist and move onto the next prop. Props a lot of times are like the nuts on an ice creme sunday. Most people care that they're there and that they're relatively dispersed over the sunday but their exact position on the sunday isn't important. The same goes for props. Use them liberally and don't worry much if they're not exactly evenly dispersed. ¶ 10:42 PM
Game levels are good when they have great gameplay and great when they've got great game gameplay and they look amazing. Here are 5 ways to quickly add detail to make a 3D game level look amazing.
1. Make all your doorways the same size and give them a frame. Often all a frame needs to be is three blocks that set the frame at a different level than the door. The best way to do this quickly is to make sure early on that you create all of your doorways the same size and that the walls are the same thickness. Then just create one doorframe and copy and past it to all the other doorways. If you've got 20 doorframes in a level which is easy to do in an urban indoor map, this could save you hours of level creation time.
2. Only create one light with the right settings and copy it everywhere. In the Hammer Valve editor, you can use the default light entity but the draw distance for the light isn't far enough so you have to place a lot of them and HDR is disabled by default on them. So create one light, set all the properties how you'd like and then copy and paste them everywhere. You can always go back later and fine tune the lighting but you'll probably be happy with using the one light everywhere if you tweaked it to what you wanted early on.
3. Find the "Center on object" shortcut key and use it! The Hammer editor uses Ctrl + E as it's shortcut key combo. This feature will center all of the views onto the currently selected object. Once a map starts getting populated with items, sometimes an item can be selected in a window and there are so many things on screen you can't even see what's selected anymore which is where this comes in handy so you're no longer having to guess.
4. Physics objects fall to the ground. Just place them anywhere in the air near where you want them to start the beginning of the level and they'll drop to the ground when the level loads. Don't waste the time to position each one one or two units above ground level. The objects all fall to the ground during the paused moments when no one can play on a CS:S map so they'll never notice if it takes a little bit extra processing power to calculate 50 physics objects all falling at once.
5. Place a prop and then leave it! No one really is going to care if the trash can is rotated 87 degrees or 72 degrees off axis. Just give it a little twist and move onto the next prop. Props a lot of times are like the nuts on an ice creme sunday. Most people care that they're there and that they're relatively dispersed over the sunday but their exact position on the sunday isn't important. The same goes for props. Use them liberally and don't worry much if they're not exactly evenly dispersed. ¶ 10:42 PM
