Quote from josepezdj on July 27, 2013, 4:36 am

Dr.Toaster Waffles wrote:

Also what do you mean by building on the grid?

I sent a pm to you in order to avoid all this offtopic spamming on your map's thread

Quote from HMW on July 27, 2013, 9:53 am

Just played it; as I said on the workshop page, it's a good start and especially the main puzzle is very nice.

Jose already covered most of the things you can do to improve it, but let me add two more things:

1: try to get rid of the huge box surrounding the map, and make sure that all world brushes are aligned properly so they don't cause leaks. This may be a lot of work but it really pays off in terms of looks and performance. (Right now, the entire map is always drawn regardless of what room you're in, because it's not optimised.) Hammer's "align to grid" option may be able to help you out a bit. Try it with different grid sizes so it takes care of as much of the map as possible, so you have to do fewer things manually.

2: As for texture alignment, Jose's method should work fine after the brushes themselves are aligned to the grid. When you do this, in addition to the position and scale, make sure that the angle is set to 0 degrees and click on either the "world" or "face" boxes, regardless of whether they are checked or greyed out already. That should take care of most of the textures; the rest you'll have to fix manually.

Oh and lastly: make a backup of your vmf file before making any big changes. You'll thank yourself later

I hope that you find the time to improve this map. It is worth it.

Quote from Shakky on July 29, 2013, 10:30 am

I'm late for the party and most things I was about to say have already been said but here goes.

It's pretty good for first puzzle. It has flaws mainly visual ones before the actual puzzle room but I liked the puzzle itself. The map has a lot of leaks and ways to get out of bounds also. You can just go through the holes in the puzzle room and get outside the map.

Here is a solution exploiting the way the map is not properly sealed:
[spoiler]PrAlJzgxXnM[/spoiler]

I trust Jose has given you some good advice but if you need help I'm happy to provide some.

Good puzzle but there is a lot of room for improvement mapping wise.

Quote from Dafflewoctor on July 29, 2013, 10:20 pm

Thanks for notifying me about that...I was extremely hesitant to put the introduction in in the first place, I knew it was visually lacking, but I decided to put it in anyways because I thought it would be fun to toy with the player by [spoiler]mixing the chamber so it was impossible[/spoiler]and because I knew I could make it cleaner later.

I need some people's opinion here, though; I am considering remaking the whole map so that the textures are completely aligned and so the detailing is much better. Would this be a good idea? I started making this map when I was much newer at Hammer and learned much through the process so it would probably be much faster. I have everything so compact in this version that I would have to redo a lot of things to re-size all the walls, floors, etc. So would it be faster for me to just redo it?

Quote from Shakky on July 30, 2013, 7:11 am

I personally would recommend you do that. I had a same kind of situation with my second map. I entirely remade it and learned so much in the progress. Ultimately I never ended up releasing it because as I finished it I felt the puzzle wasn't up to my newer standards but I can say that the experience was very helpful. Atleast for me.

PS. As for blocking my out of map move in the first room. Always have a brush below your door.

Quote from protoborg on July 30, 2013, 9:38 am

josepezdj wrote:

...
4. Open the Face Edit Sheet while everything is selected and introduce the following values:

- Texture Scale: 0.25 for both, X and Y.
- Texture Shift: also 512 for both, X and Y (512 units is common multiple for all textures' tile size).

...

Actually, you can't simply shift all the texture 512 units. That will just make the misaligned textures move 512 units. They will still be misaligned. You have to align each face to its neighbor separately. Also, 512 is NOT the best number to use. You have align each face based the face's size and shape. That is often NOT 512 units.

Quote from josepezdj on July 31, 2013, 7:58 am

offtopic >.<
[spoiler]

protoborg wrote:

Actually, you can't simply shift all the texture 512 units. That will just make the misaligned textures move 512 units. They will still be misaligned.

Well, no, a misalign texture should have already weird values like 66 or -328 or whatever... Entering the value 512 for both axes should do, but ONLY IF:

- you already built up your map following the grid guides (as you should)
- you made brushes also sizes according to general mappers habits >.<

Try it

protoborg wrote:

You have to align each face to its neighbor separately. Also, 512 is NOT the best number to use. You have align each face based the face's size and shape. That is often NOT 512 units.

You are wrong. ALL textures in the game have an image size that's power of 2: 64x128 / 512x512 / 1024x256 etc. All textures fit perfectly to brushes with a 'normal' size... For example, 32x32 hammer units (the smallest tile in Portal) is 128x128 'real' pixels, ok? Just make brushes with a size multiple of 32 hammer units at the 3 axes... actually, keep 32 units as thickness for all of your walls, ceiling and floors... Normally, Portal2 textures files for tiles are 512x512px or 1024x1024px size ALWAYS. You can use them to texture whatever brush that has 32 units as multiple in its size, and use 512 units at the Face Edit Sheet 'Texture shift' feature, and you will see that I'm not wrong.

I've made a quick (and ugly) map with a variety of textures where ALL of them are shifted at X:512 and Y:512... please check out if there is any misalignment.[/spoiler]