It’s been a little longer than I had hoped since the last blog post. I got sad and distracted for a while there. However, I’m back and working on a new project with a new group of people! Or, at least, I’m working on a new project for a new group of people.

I joined a small group within the Team Fortress 2 community a couple of months ago dedicated to playing a competitive version of the PASS Time game mode. There’s a map they almost always play on named Arena 2. Functionally, it works exceptionally well for the competitive scene of this game mode. Visually, however, it’s a little lacking; I thought it was in need of a coat of paint.

So that’s what I’ve been working on for about two weeks now. I codenamed the map “Dugout;” it’s being fashioned to look like a dug-out quarry in the middle of the desert.

Right now, I’m on beta 2 of Dugout. Beta 1 was an earlier version about a week ago, compiled just in time for the group’s Friday PUGs (pickup games). It was lacking in a few areas, and one key detail kept it from being played that night.

Surface Props

In Source games, each texture, or material, has an assigned surface property. These surface properties define what sounds play while walking on a piece of terrain with that material applied to it, as well as that terrain’s friction, bounciness, and other slightly less important properties. As it turns out, these surface properties are hard-coded into the game. You can’t make the wood $surfaceprop behave like stone while sounding like wood.

Anyways, The original map had stone materials nearly everywhere, but I turned a lot of the walkable stone into either wood, metal, or dirt, which all have other $surfaceprops. The problem arises when you have any projectiles in play, which unfortunately involves the Jack, the primary objective in PASS Time. The ball bounces differently off of the dirt, metal, and wood $surfaceprops than they do off of the stone. I either have to change the materials’ $surfaceprops, which would mean they’d behave like stone but also sound like it, or come up with a complex system of filtering out the ground for projectiles and have a separate invisible version of the ground only blocking projectiles while behaving like stone. Otherwise, the Jack and Demoman pills bounce differently, and everyone playing (most of which have hundreds of hours on this map) would be thrown off by the bounces.

In beta 2, I haven’t actually fixed that yet. Oops. I’m getting around to it today hopefully. But I’ve improved the lighting and texturing even further from beta 1. I’m going to start decorating properly pretty soon.

Image Compares

And now, since I just discovered you can do this, here are some comparison sliders between Arena 2 and Dugout Beta 2. Please ignore the weird hole in the side of one of the goals; I forgot to compile it since I fixed that issue.

I still have quite a lot of work to go! You saw how behind the goals are, especially. Soon I’ll finish with texturing and will be able to move on to some pretty cool decoration within and outside of spawns. I’ve also got a 3D skybox working on it now, which is going to take a lot of my time. I’ll be implementing spectator cameras, wind, additional func_dustmotes, and anything else I can think of. Props are definitely the hardest thing for me; I’m not the most artistic person in the world. That’s going to be a learning curve.