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byteframe4-Pretty_Penthouse

This came out great! Good job byteframe! There's alot of new fun stuff for you to enjoy and the graphics are better this time! It's a penthouse roof type dealie with bit more of a Summit Pavilion outdoors-y vibe than I was going for but that's fine.

- I think I'm going to try to leave out at least 1 asset pack from my future selections as it enforces consistency, and helps speed, performance, etc, and paid off here. There isn't much stock assets to use until the new half life game comes out (which I have already played already, in the future, the gman is a nihilanth like the boss from half life 1 its so obvious.).

- Geometry was on point, though discipline and safe beveling and the cube cuts still aren't all 100%. I like starting with a flat quad and extending out 64 unit wide extrusions and making as much of the level as I can in all build engine mode, before I fill it up, and it worked out really well, allowing me to play and plan at the same time.

- I made alot of pots and props and stuff out of hammer geometry (that one in the corner kinda sucks though), Its so easy and useful, especially if you've never used a modeler before! You can export to and from models/brushes inside the editor, its great, as far as I know! Moving away from the ubiquitout Destinations props will be liberating, because the stock materials all PBR-y and stuff and you can make anything out of metal look good, hell I don't know, blah blah. I know I'll be dealing with less quad problems if trim/siding/ and that stuff that hugs the walls is all made up of brushes.

- Texturing was made easier by finally figuring out how to select faces by material. I saw that button early on but could never find it again. I didn't figure non-quad surfaces would sheer the textures like lighting and blending and they do, so after the geometry/bevel fix ups, I was glad to easy realign textures via this implicit grouping (seeing ass faces get removed from selection sets if they are extrcted?)

- I aped the turret singers tutorial and put on of them on the roof. Without the offical sound I had to go to youtube, but the result is pretty good! Nice lil bot on the roof that I hope I can iterate on. First dip into trigger volumes and soundevents (which should be merged with soundscapes, cmon), it was easy and fun.

-I think I learned and important thing about lighting. Im trying to go for these dark scenes with high contrast lighting, simple, cheap. I need to go a lil brighter for the sake of the HMD, but also try to rely on changing the intensitiy of the color value instead of brightness of the light? For the environmental light it was the only way to get it to be 'night time' as it were, but I think I'm going to go easier on the brightness property. Just have to kept practising until I get better at it, and I think theres some areas of this map were the lighting is pretty nice.

- Overall lighting setup is some various point lights without too much tweakage, and a dark purple Bat man Env_light with perpixel and indirect baked @ 0.8 or something. Ambient occulision too, and i fiddled with one of those knobs. Id like to think I notice this effect sometimes! I also tried * but was wary) of the ambient light setting to add some purple tinge all over. Or at least thats what I think it does. I dont know.

- I turned as many static props in this level into destinations props and that really addds to the fun and immersion. Some props dont work though and chug or barely respond when you move them. Some good ones get stuck in things, but over all most of it is now dynamic props, wooo! Futhermore I added the desintations tools entitites with their assosicated scripts so there is actually a set of usable stock tools that dont dissapear

- I added fog and lots of particle effects everywhere. Rejoice!

- Upgrades to the script werent too bad. Up until the very end I though I could only play the 'win_prop' sound with the EmitSoundOn/EmitGlobalSound functions, but actually those call sound events, so I made it a sound event, and now there is a spark particle AND a spark sound when you click on a fortune. Grabbin the fallout props is more festive and funw now too. The panarama form is also prettier, and the fortune responses are stored more aptly in the localization file, but a portion of them dont translate for some reason.

- The technical white whale of this map was the water. You kept reading all that boring stuff up thar so you could hear me talk about the water. There is none. As far as I can tell water isnt really a thing in this engine, which I kind of assumed, but I never made a water in source1 so I wasn't sure what to look for. This one genius has a pretty cool script for water from his ocean level, but I did not try it, as my pool was so small, and I would take just about anything that could make 25% of the illusion complete. Coming from and with the summit pavilion pack/map they provide a splash effect with a trigger volume. I quess the sound for that is stored along with the particle? The particle for it also way to big, and maybe I might try to modify this 'entity script' for a later lake, but its understandable to me, which is the most important thing. I then added a flat quad with a moving water texture on top and turned off the collision. There is just this only one water texture to use really. There are some others, but they flicker in an odd way, maybe because you need a cubemap below them? I have one now, but did not change from the pavilion texture to retest. I added some splashing particles and jet particles and it all looks fairly good! The splash sound is ok, and with that trigger down deep into the pool the awkward ugly splash effect stays in the water. Ill take it!

- There is talk of using the trigger-push to make the objects move (float) to the suface of the water, but I was not able to get that working, but I assume it works. So if you throw stuff in my pool it splashes and sinks to the bottom. If you throw in a beach ball though, the otherwise fairly decent illusion is broken and I do not offer refunds. Overall though I got the water performing much better than I though I could.

This game out pretty good for me, I'm quite proud of it, and it runs ok too, actually!