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Skyline X from Murder Miners

A year or so ago, after porting my map City from the game Murder Miners to CS:GO and Garry's Mod, I decided to port Skyline X from the same game into Garry's Mod. However, Skyline X is a pretty big map, and I decided I didn't have the time or patience to remake a map that big by hand.

A week ago, as I was going through hammer, looking through all my unfinished maps, I saw the barely worked on Skyline X. Being the deranged and borderline insane autist I am, I spent the following week remaking the entire map, basically block by block.


I ask myself that question every day. Honestly though, Skyline X was and still is one of my favorite Murder Miners maps, and as I have a lot of free time on my hands I decided it'd be cool to play in Garry's Mod. But the real question is, was it worth it? On one hand, it's cool as hell seeing Skyline X with lighting and all that, but on the other I have PTSD-like symptoms whenever I open the hammer face edit sheet. So, maybe, I'd say maybe.


The short answer, is with blood, sweat, piss, tears, and an ungodly amount of tiny clip brushes.

The longer answer, is that you probably shouldn't. There's no .exe file you can drag a MM map into and get a hammer map from. Trust me, I've looked. But, if you really want to port a MM map to Garry's Mod, here's a few somewhat simple steps:

1) Prepare a file full of Murder Miner textures. You can get those from one of the block atlas png's in the Texture file of Murder Miners. Those won't work in Hammer though. so get a program to convert those bad boys to .vtf's and .vmt's. I'd recommend VTFEdit, but anything works. (Sidenote: To save yourself time, actually name them what they're called in Murder Miners. When I ported City, I named stuff like Brick05a, and Windmill02, which seemed like a good time saver, but it actually wasted me time while making Skyline X. As for why I wouldn't just give a link to my texture folder, most of them are badly scaled as I updated them while making Skyline X, and it's not complete anyway)

2) Start blocking out the map. I would recommend making a (private if you aren't a masochist) MM match on the map you're porting, and using the building tool or whatever its called to measure different parts of the map. Because the map is gonna get scaled down anyway, use 64 hammer units for one MM block. My advice here would be to just start working on it. Start with whatever; walls, roofs, bushes, anything to start the map off. However, maybe leave the floors til the end, especially in a mostly flat map like Skyline X, just have one big brush for the floor. Also, whether or not you want to texture as you go or at the end is up to you. I'd personally texture as I go, just so you don't run the risk of forgetting to texture a spot and leaving that in the final map.

2A) Do the floors. For some maps, like Skyline X, some parts of the floor will have a checkerboard pattern made of two blocks repeating. Instead of using two textures and a ton of brushes for this, you could just make a new texture named like "texture1_texture2_checkerboard" with both textures in that kind of pattern. Just make sure to line up the texture to how it is in Murder Miners.

3) Place clip brushes. If you've used hammer before, you probably know about them. But most maps don't need clip brushes, other than just for QOL. Murder Miner maps NEED clip brushes. Be liberal with them too, if there's a 1 block difference between two brushes, place a ramp or step clip between them. Also, since they're gonna get scaled down, steps don't have to be 18 units high or less. I made mine 32 high, but whatever works for you.

4) Make most of the brushes into func_detail's. If you don't know how to do this, just ctrl+t to tie a brush to an entity, and boom, func_detail. Func_detail's work by not getting factored into the map's optimization when compiling, reducing visportals. Make geometry that isn't gonna obstruct the player's view into func_detail's. Stuff like the floor, walls, roofs, and other big parts of the geometry, keep that as-is. Do that enough, and you can shave off a good 10 or 20 minutes from the compile time.

5) Scale the map. Make another map file for the scaled map btw. If you've compiled it, you may have noticed that the map is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ huge. That's why you're going to open up your calculator like it's math class, divide the number you want each block to be snapped by (in my case 36) by the number each block is currently snapped to (in my case 64), and write the number down (in my case 0.5625). Now, select the whole map (remember to turn on both texture locks so the textures don't go all ♥♥♥♥♥), go to Tools > Transform, and in scale set each axis to that number.

6) Playtest it. Run around, shoot stuff, do whatever. If something doesn't feel right, change it. Maybe make glass into a func_breakable if it's destructible in MM. This is probably when you're gonna realize that you forgot to clip half the map, or maybe a room is too dark, or maybe you can't fit through a doorway you fatass. Go back to the unscaled map that you're really wishing you would've saved by now, fix whatever you wanna fix, and scale it again. Keep doing that until it plays well enough.

If you followed all those steps, then you should have a decently ported map. Just remember to texture the bottom and outer sides of the map, if it's not fully enclosed. Also, good luck porting a skybox over. Murder Miners uses .xnb files to store the skyboxes, and the only program I know of that can extract them is called ninja ripper. It costs a patreon subscription, but to my knowledge you can download older versions for free, so maybe do that if you want an MM skybox.


- AW Lost Soldier for Skyline X

- JForce Games for Murder Miners (and the textures that really didn't want to work sometimes)

- Penial for saying that porting this map would be a good idea (he was probably wrong)

- My brothers and sisters at i'm .45 ACP you for idk existing I guess

- My therapist who you already know is gonna hear about this