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PC Gamer issue 150 came out today, including the second part of my CS:S mapping tutorial.

The past week has been quite interesting in respect to the conversion of various HL1/CS1 maps to the HL2/CSS Source engine equivalents.

Ever since being told my writing was ‘pompous’ 5 years ago during my English Literature A-level, I’ve had a bizarre interest for the real meanings of particular words, so I can ignore them and use them how I like.

In my efforts to bring ever new groundbreaking material from the behemoth that is my crazy mind, I present to you, The Happiness Cycle: This charts how happy I am with a map throughout its lifetime, and generally applies to all my maps.

Ever since Quake, I’ve tended to follow news about mods quite closely - it’s really cool to see what’s being developed.

I remembered that before I had even laid a Dust-textured brush of Dust PCG, I played around with HL2’s mapdev materials and sketched out a rough plan.

Another one of my pet hates in level design is how some maps consist of obstacles right in the most annoying places.

My favourite maps are always set outdoors, usually at some prominant part of the day where shadows are king.

Dust PCG has been out nearly a week now.

I was going to post this in a few weeks time… but while the map’s still hot… Below is a conflict map for de_dust_pcg… this shows the rough path points at which ‘first-contact’ is made by both teams (assuming all routes are taken).

A reminder that the current issue of PC Gamer UK has a tutorial on the making of Dust PCG, explaining the planning process up to building a simple defusion map.

A complete and fixed version of Dust PCG is now available, with all the annoying skywalking ironed out and a few small changes.

Time for a short lesson on how to release a map in complete and final form.

Due to popular demand, I and PCG present the overview of Dust PCG: Simple, you might think… so go speculate and conjecture!

Wow, what an amazing (and varied) response to the announcement of de_dust_pcg!

Some more… Remember, de_dust_pcg is available on the June 2005 edition of PC Gamer UK (in shops on Thursday).

It’s actually illegal in the UK to reveal you’re releasing a new Counter-Strike map without providing any screenshots.

So, the news is out - a new Dust map from myself, designed specifically for PC Gamer UK to go alongside a series of tutorials they’ll have in their June and July 2005 issues.

I get a lot of e-mails about CS:S.

Occassionally I like to download a few amateur CS maps, just to see what people are up to with the game.

Quake 2 grew on me very rapidly.

Following on from Doom, I went through Heretic, Hexen, Quake, Quake II and Heretic II.

In the interest of history, I felt it would be appropriate to post up a few shots of the first ever map I released onto the internet.

I came across an interesting blog entry by Luke Muscat who, having examined the layouts of Dust 2 and Cobble, has concluded that they bear a surprising amount of similarity.

I read or heard something the other day about the problem people have with doing something (yes, I’ve forgot entirely what that ‘something’ is or was, but bear with me).

Here are the current statistics for all my official (well, originally at least) CS maps, according to ServerSpy: Counter-Strike: Source 1 de_dust2 5231 1262 22.8% 2 de_dust 3236 1475 14.1% 6 de_cbble 1147 441 5.0% 13 de_tides 163 59 0.7% Counter-Strike: C…

Right, just for fun, csde_bridge is now available for download.

Earlier in the week it occured to me that there was a precursor to de_sienna that I had made, basically to experiment with a few things.

Two things about [this Slashdot post](http://games.slashdot.org/games/05/04/17/1539254.shtml?

After further playing with Blender and the SMD exporter, it’s apparant there are a few problems.

I discovered today that it’s now possible to create models for Source from Blender, which is great, because I personally prefer it to Softimage XSI.

Sunday is typically spent sleeping, eating, lounging, drinking, starting fights, enjoying the company of family and friends, shaving animals, more sleeping, and concluded with a pixie dancing contest.

A while back I was asked by PC Gamer (UK) to write a couple of articles for them, introducing mapping for Counter-Strike: Source.

PCGamer UK are running a feature next month on de_dust.