One of the most fundamental aspects of level design is proper scale and dimensions. A door way that is few units too large or too small will ruin the illusion of your environment.
A building set to improper scale will destroy the immersion of the player in your environment.
Hammer Source has few key aspects of keeping your world on scale and proper proportions.
The tutorial covers: How to keep your map to proper scale and dimensions
Hammer Source character scale, wall height, door dimensions, stairs
Developer textures
Grid values
Hammer Source Map Construction Breakdown takes a look at what elements levels are made up of in Hammer Source. Knowing how a map is constructed inside Source helps you to understand your own process and what you need to do with your own maps.
The tutorial covers:
How the map constructed?
What elements are used?
How everything comes together in Hammer Source.
Hammer Source Interface Crash Course in 15 minutes. The tutorial covers the entire interface to get you started mapping in Hammer Source. Most commonly used functions are covered.
After watching the 15 minute video you will be comfortable navigating around the viewports in Hammer Source and you'll be ready to start mapping.
The position of the celestial bodies is dependent from season and clime. Right now the 2D skybox uses one texture with some overlays applied and a procedurally generated static mesh for stars.
All weather effects, daytime, clime and season are synced between client and server. Weather is randomly applied based on the current climate and the time of day can be read from the hosts computer.
Additional information:
The shadowmapping code is written from scratch and not based on Valves technique in any way. In my current build two shadowmaps at 3072² and 1024² are drawn to allow a shadow with a range of 10k units (the video just shows the former one though), all factors are variable and can be changed to the users liking.
During a second pass of the main view various information (worldspace normals, screenspace normals, depth, sky mask, sharpen mask) are drawn via MRTs to different textures at once to allow post processing effects like SSAO, DOF, edge detection and godrays. All screenspace effects can be individually toggled as well.
The weather effects include particle effects, fog, color correction and sounds, every weather routine can be assigned a weight to allow more variety. Particle effects are partially drawn in worldspace and a seperate view similar to how 3d skyboxes work.
Two cool scenes made in the Source SDK for Half Life 2: Episode 2. The first one was actually inspired by Dead Space, and the train scene was thought up by me with a little inspiration from Mirror's Edge and Split/Second. Enjoy, and I plan to make more! :P
I know somebody has already done this but they were being all bitchy about not telling how they did it. I, however, will happily tell you how it works. The whole this is an info_particle system, stored in the little orange box (hah, pun). The info_particle_system is set to trace all around it with a trace collision property.
Here's a download link if you want to play around with it. If you do it in GMod you don't need the particle_manifest.txt file.
The following video highlights the Detonation style gameplay featured in Colmar, the second of the two new maps offered in the free Day of Defeat: Source Summer Update coming this Wednesday.
The following video highlights the Detonation style gameplay featured in the Jagd map, one of two new maps offered in the free Day of Defeat: Source Summer Update coming this is Wednesday.
