Blog on johnsto.co.uk

I’ve been playing a lot of DoD:S in the past couple of days, and naturally having been used to BF2 (and the aggravation that comes with it), I’m hooked (again.)

A lot of people don’t know this, but Dust wasn’t my first Counter-Strike map.

I’ve mentioned enough times before how most of my maps have been entirely unplanned.

Did quite a bit of work on pa_fact this weekend, including making the inside a lot warmer, making the outside a lot colder, and completely removing a couple of bits so I can redo them properly.

If my months of research, quantum physics knowledge, Excel spreadsheets and wild assumptions are correct, then most of the people who read this blog are modders with a passing interest in level design.

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Trackmania Nations recently and it’s pretty good fun.

After you’ve been playing games and designing maps for a while, you tend to get a good feeling about what works and what doesn’t.

Well, it’s Saturday 4th February, and as everyone knows, Saturday 4th February means I have to post some screenshots.

One of the cool things about Source is the skybox feature.

A bunch of simple considerations when texturing your maps.

If you’re like me, designing maps on paper leads to large swathes of forest disappearing, graphite stocks depleting, and a slow increase in aggrevation as you are forced to redesign large portions because it would be a pain to erase.

So, this is the mess we ended with last time.

So, Casbah was proceeding nicely (actually, “mideast” was, because it wouldn’t be named Casbah until much later.)

With traffic from digg slowly residing (8 gigs of traffic in about 48 hours!)

It’s almost Christmas, and since it’s hard to escape it, I suppose there’s little option left than to embrace the season of good will, merriness, happiness, joy and other fluff.

Right, so you’ve got your map.

One of my favourite things about HL2, one of the things that set it apart from so many other FPS’s, is the lighting.

Since dumping Battlefield 2 due to its bugs and irritations, I’ve started playing CS:S more.

I’ve finally reached it.

On my journey home tonight in the absolute freezing cold, the train passed the same old industrial yards, lit up in the otherwise black outdoors via their bright yellow incadescent bulbs and bright white flourescent floodlights.

I was pointed to an article on Gamasutra yesterday, covering realistic level design for Max Payne from the 2002 GDC.

Just a heads up that johnsto.co.uk has been updated with a new design and even some new content so if you’re excessively bored, give it a visit and see if you can locate the main navigation buttons… Quick tip: heavily patterned textures (i.e.

Nothing’s coming to mind to write about, so instead I thought I’d post a couple of screenies of something I did last Sunday and a few of the things in it that I think work quite well.

Part of the fun with level design is in trying to find solutions to simple gameplay problems.

Just over four years ago, I wrote that ‘Detail versus Design’ essay/article/rant, which basically said, “Gameplay first, geometry second, perfect texture alignment third.”

Ever since I first got my hands on the DTP/art programs when I was about 10 (things like TimeWorks Publisher ST, Calamus 1.09n and Arabesque), and started printing out my own A5 newspapers and mags, I’ve loved doing design work.

Right, I’m back.

Now settling in to new flat.

Modern FPS engines can do all sorts of remarkable things, from radiosity lighting to HDR lighting and reflections.

It’s quite interesting how level design has evolved stylistically throughout the past 10 years.

It occurred to me how the mapping world is very different to how it was when I started out 10 years ago (when I was, err, 12).

Tonedef made this comment to my post from last week: It is stuff like this that made me stop mapping….I could never do that good :P.

Whilst my mind is empty of any real content, thought I’d let slip on a couple of stupid things I put into ETC2.

Another busy week… I must admit being very excited about Black Mesa: Source.

There’s nothing more satisfying or enjoyable as a level designer as stumbling across a photo like this: And then, a few hours later, find you’re staring at this: What I’m doing here is principally establishing a theme - what you see here is pretty much all

Something that came out of the Quake 2 versus Unreal battle of years and years ago was the obvious distinctions between both engines.

A popular expression from NLP is the phrase, “the map is not the territory”, neatly describing that a particular description will not entirely reflect the details of some object or concept, but will act as useful information nontheless.

As I sat on the train home yesterday out of Waterloo station, scaring my fellow passengers by snapping photos through the window of derelict industrial buildings as they whizzed by and making frantic drawings on a pad of paper, I wondered how one would ac…

One of the hardest bits about creating a map is actually starting one.

No matter how much level design I do, there’s still one thing that I have huge problems with - height changes.

Whilst redesigning the main site (not live yet) I’ve been streamlining the content and removing some bits and adding others.

The terrorist attack on London yesterday was terrible, but as always, us British continue as normal.

There’s something strangely enjoyable about looking at the creations of others, whether they be established at the craft or merely trying to make that first, fundamental step.

It occurred to me that most of what I post here is common sense.

I made a promise to myself never to let this blog stray from being about level design to being about my personal life so I’ll keep this short: yesterday I found out that, after four years of University, I now hold a first-class honours MEng degree in Soft…

Just a quick post while I have some form of web access (I’ll be back late next week when normal service shall resume).

Inspired by the mammoth success of my post from last night, here are a couple more little things I’ve picked up along the way.

There are quite a few handy tricks one learns during the course of learning how to map.

The past year or so has been a great time for level design aesthetics: finally, adding purely aesthetic, non-gameplay elements to maps is affordable.

Having finally getting round to playing de_port a lot last week, and a bit of BF2 in the last day or so, and then cross-referencing this with my many years of FPS experience (haha) I think I’ve finally found the single thing that I enjoy most in any of th…