New Map: Mountain Radar Beta

[panTera]

I had a look at the map but I could barely see anything in the outside areas, especially with that use of rather thick black fog.
When you say it's not that dark it is probably because you have your brightness settings very high ingame(?), however on my settings (r_gamma 1.2) it is just too dark. These images were also brightened in photoshop:





It's obvious you were going for a night theme and I noticed you used a soft blueish ambient light (which is a good thing) but without any additional pointlights (e.g. lightposts, lamps) it's very hard to see anything in front of you. Nonetheless the structural part of the map seems fine, some pretty nice rocks and terrain. The layout seems okay too, good use of heights and cover.
I don't know if you're still open to suggestions and of course the choice is yours but I really recommend adding some light entitys to get better contrast and make it easier on the eyes.

[Practikill]

I wanted to add a bright moon actually. but i havent figured out how to add it the way I want it yet. This would also give me shadows.If you know how to insert an image of the moon, and place it high in the sky, let me know. And thanks for your input, I do play with high lighting.Also all my doors facing one way won't open properly, always towards, or only one direction, all the others work fine with the alwaysaway "1" set.My only other problem is I can't get custom textures to work, I pak them with my map. scripts, and texutures in a MtRdr folder.They appear and work fine in the editor, but they won't show up in game.They are .jpg's, saved at 256x256.

[LiquorKraZy]

alwaysaway 1 doesnt really do anything, i believe you need to set the angle that you want the door to open...could be wrong tho...

[Practikill]

Here, I've fixed the lighting, everythings the same except I upped the ambient light. Please let me know how this is, I set my r_gamma to 1.2 for testing and it was clear, and it looked fine, not washed out, at my gamma of 1.65.Thanks to all for your input and advice I appreciate it.If this lighting works I'll do a final compile of both versions and re-release it.Thanks for your time on this.

http://saturn.walagata.com/w/bpark/obj_MtRdr.pk3

[panTera]

Well it's slightly better, but the main cause of the darkness is the high fog density of 2200. The higher the number the less fog. As for the lighting the ambient is now too high (75!) and leaves no shadows at all. May I suggest some settings?

In your maps' script try setting the farplane to 5000 or higher and maybe a color of "0.01 0.02 0.03" (which still is a pretty dark color). Also for a nice blue night theme you could use the settings from the first single player mission (m1l1).

Add the following keys to the worldspawn (optional of course) :

suncolor / 10 15 30
sundirection / -30 300 0
ambientlight / 8 9.2 20
sunflarename / none

---
To make it even prettier you might want to try this. I made a shader for a 'custom sky', in fact it's not really a sky but just a layer of clouds which will blend together with your fogcolor.

Copy and paste this in notepad and save it as sky_mtrdr.shader

textures/sky/mtrdr
{
qer_editorimage textures/sky/bocagenight.tga
qer_keyword utility
qer_keyword sky
surfaceparm nolightmap
surfaceparm noimpact
surfaceparm sky
skyParms env/idontexist 256 -
{
map textures/sky/talonclouds.tga
blendFunc add
tcMod scroll .005 .003
tcMod scale 3 2
}
}

Make a folder called 'scripts' in the Main dir and place the file there. (Don't forget to also include it in your zip if you want to use it.) Next in the editor select your skybrushes and press 'S', in the texture field type: sky/mtrdr

What you will see is a small standard editorimage (bocagenight.jpg) on the skybox which won't be used ingame but is just to see if the skytexture is properly applied. Ingame however, you will see a soft layer of moving clouds blended with you fogcolor. I think it's a nice effect and it doesn't require a custom skybox. Just give it a try and see if you like the effect:)

[Practikill]

Thanks! I will try them out as soon as I can.The reason for the 2200 fogplane was more to limit visibility, for gameplay, and performance issues, also I had some issues with the culling system where some things would just disapear, I tried putting farplane cull to "no" but it didn't work. I worry about the open areas being too visible, or do you think it should be ok?I'll try to apply some vis leafgroups, currently there are no hints or vis brushes or lod terrain, all just strutural,detail, or clipping.