Admer456's Personal Mapping and Modding History blog

It all started in late 2013.

I fell in love with a girl from my class. Being quite stubborn, I couldn't accept the truth that she rejected me.
6th grade went terribly as my grades dropped, as well as my overall behaviour. In 7th grade, however, things would change forever.

October 2014
Trying to cure my depression, trying to find myself a purpose in life, I downloaded Sledge Editor and started studying some tutorials.

I learned how to make slopes and very simple terrain. "Crater" was born:

8th Jan, 2015

Instead of having a single, environmental light entity, I placed a bunch of regular light entities in the map.
What actually inspired me to make this 'crater' map was a tutorial at the SCMapDB. It was about creating craters.
Interestingly enough, I used a completely different method while making the map. Lol.

12th Mar, 2015

I published it on GameBanana, and that 5.86/10 rating was something I was quite proud of. Considering the quality of the map, I'm quite surprised now that I hadn't received a lower rating.
I continued working on the 'crater' map family and I soon made de_crater:

28th May, 2015

This is an older version. The one which was released has a bridge with somewhat breakable crates.
It's when I first tried entity triggering. A func_breakable would, when triggered (i.e. broken), trigger a separate entity. In my case, it would trigger an env_sprite which was a smoke puff.

However, before de_crater, I was still stuck on the ramps in 'Crater 2015'.

(side view)

I wanted to make the descent better-looking.
Little did I know, my faces had planarity errors:

They should've been something like this:

Therefore, whenever I compiled my map, it would look like this:

(the light bulbs on the ground are actually light entities which I used instead of the environmental light)
Therefore, I got rid of that 8-sided descent, and I kept the classic 4-sided one.

Let's go back a bit.
Very shortly after I made the first crater map, I started working on my "school_distroi". I had a great idea about making a map of my school where everything is destructible. I wanted to make it for my classmates, basically.

In the eyes of 13-year-old me, this looked like something. To be precise, it looked like:

In May, I was quite close to making a fairly playable map, where you could plant a bomb and everything.

13th May, 2015

It was around this time I switched to J.A.C.K., which was called Jackhammer back then.

Somewhen between Beta 1 and Beta 3, I switched to VHLT compilers, after which I soon discovered the special textures like NULL:

Before (Beta 1, 27th May 2015)

After (Beta 3, 25th Jun 2015)

While these faces would get removed anyway in the compiled map, this really helped me improve my in-editor performance.

Other than my school map, I also tried mapping my own house. Or at least the living room:

30th Apr, 2015

And not just that. I had an idea about a very open map where the CTs would spawn in a crashed airplane, and the Ts had to find and kill them.
It was at that time I discovered how to make a bit more complex terrain. Let's call it project_action2.

(earlier version)

7th Apr, 2015

The 1st project_action was essentially a couple of houses with breakable rooftops:

27th Mar, 2015

Eventually in June, after I had finished version Beta 3 of my school map, I started working on my first full-terrain map.

18th Jun, 2015

That's when I started using the infamous Vertex Manipulation tool more and more. The cliffs I made for project_action were made by skewing brushes in the Select Tool.
Next month, my brushwork skills skyrocketed.

22 Jul, 2015

At some point, I decided to make a FNaF map because it was getting quite popular. It was an excellent opportunity to learn more about entities and how to make toggleable doors, camera systems etc.

24th Jul, 2015 - dm_5nights Pre-alpha 1
29th Oct, 2015 - dm_5nights Beta 2

12th Nov, 2015 - dm_5nights Beta 5

dm_5nights was my most successful map in 2015. The new skills which I learned paved the way for my future maps.

I spent my summer working on a couple of Sven Co-op 4.8 maps. I was really fascinated by automated train sequences, so I decided to make a car chase in the desert.
I didn't get far, of course.

As 2015 was getting closer and closer to an end, I decided to start quite a few new projects, including stctb_facility. (Stealh Capture The Briefcase, what a long name :p)

31st Oct, 2015

And project_oldcastle:

14th Dec, 2015

I really love destruction in games, so I made many parts of the map breakable. It felt so satisfying in-game. :]

In 2015, I also started developing my first and probably last Half-Life mod.

"Join [LP]Admer456 (the protagonist) on his epic quest on saving LoG (Land of Gamers) [...]"
I consider this mod to be a bless and a curse. Curse because it was extremely embarassing and it was of low quality.
But bless because I learned so much from it.

30th May, 2015


29th Jun, 2015

24th Apr, 2015

It made me start learning. I started learning modelling, texturing, sound and music production, I even tried coding. (and failed incredibly)
Doubtlessly, the most fun part was coding.

12th Sep, 2015

Changing little details like these was something that really amazed me.
You could change the HUD colour by typing hud_red 100, for example.
There were also smoke puffs wherever the projectile would hit.

But there was a catch. I had literally 0 prior programming experience. I didn't even know what an integer was, let alone studying the HL SDK and the engine functions!
It's like a faint car trying to pull a literal truck load.

I paused its development in the end of December. I picked it up again in February, and on the 1st of March:

I also did more of my 'coding', which at that point was just copy-pasting from tutorials:

11th Mar, 2016

This is actually the last photo on the mod's page. R.I.P.
Even though it's a Pit Drone from Op4, I called it Spitspike. That's how it's referenced in the code and in maps. CSpitSpike and monster_spitspike. :P

I wanted to make music for the mod, so I installed FL Studio 9 and GoldWave. I used GoldWave to convert sounds into 22kHz 8-bit WAV files. That's when I also tried voice recording. There's no other word to describe it than cringy. Utterly embarrasing. But it made me learn things about sound production. There were a couple of exceptions though, as a few of my recordings weren't embarrasing at all, but still not that good.

As for music, I'm not sure which was worse, the music or my voice acting. I could describe the music as repetitive, and almost always performed on one instrument. Probably the best piece of music I made for the mod was a 2-minute-long accordion melody.

2016 is the year when I pretty much stopped working on the mod. It's dead, but I hope I'll find the time to work on it one day.

The first couple of months in 2016 saw the start of a few more mapping projects for CS 1.6.
Most notably fy_rknsand. I started developing it around late 2015 but focused all my attention on my mod.
It's still not released.

I also tried some Source mapping, but didn't bother too much. I made a couple of test maps for CS:S but never got far.

A new game caught my attention.
I started mapping for Far Cry (2004). It was my childhood game and I really wanted to see what it's like to map for it.

2016 was destined to be my Far Cry year.

Start of 2016

I was making the map for GameBanana's "Jungle Wars" mapping contest. I didn't finish half of the map, because I was also working on a Sven Co-op map at the same time, for the same contest.

22nd Jan, 2016

My lack of organisation was the cause of my failure. :P
Eventually, I started working on Far Cry maps even more.




Summer 2016

A lot of info from this time period is missing, mostly about Far Cry. I tragically lost all of the map sources. :/
Around this time period, I restarted learning modelling. In mid 2016, I made a small vehicle test:

I also started developing my dream Far Cry mod, Quest for Burek. It was sort of like a sequel to my now-deceased Half-Life mod. I wish I was free enough to finish it. :] (and I wish I had good enough hardware)

There aren't many screenshots of it. All I could gather is this:

28th Aug, 2016

Ugh, back then I didn't know about smoothing groups and normals. xd

For the mod, I managed to make a weapon, and three vehicles (TestCar, QuadBike, QuadBikeNew).
It's when I got a bit into Lua coding for Far Cry. It was very cool to see what scripts can do for a level, too. E.g. a player walks into a room and the script calls a function to change the material of the player's viewmodel.

I also made some props and I got better at modelling. The weapon I made was a shotgun.

It was my first, so don't mind those invisible, ULTRA WIDE super-shoulders. :p

The best part about the mod was the story. This time, I was not the protagonist, but rather one of my classmates from elementary school. He was known IRL for really liking burek, and he was a good character for the mod, because at the start of the mod, he would go to a burek place, and then some terrorists start wreaking havoc in the town, destroying the burek place.
The universe the mod is in is actually the same as in my HL mod. At some point in the mod, the protagonist goes to the teleport station to get to a parallel universe, or it's a location outside of our observable universe. Not even I know all the details of it. :P
In the end, he kills the final boss, the leader of the organization that caused troubles in the first part of the mod.

There would've also been co-op, and some multiplayer gamemodes in the plan. I'll probably return to the mod once I get a new PC.

As 2016 was coming to an end, I decided to spice up my map collection.

10th Dec and 24th Nov 2016

This map, mp_verycold, was also made for a contest. The 2016 Winter Mapping Contest on GameBanana. This is perhaps my best FC map to date. :P
I didn't win the top 3, but I got far enough and I managed to breathe some life into Far Cry. :)

mp_verycold was also the first map where I reached more than 3.5 million polys!

(kinda cheated there - I turned off the terrain mesh LOD)

In 2016, however, I had also made a map for The Specialists.

17th Oct, 2017

I'm quite proud of it. ^^
I'm looking forward to updating the map and porting it to CS 1.6 someday.

I also worked on a Sven Co-op map series after ts_untergrund.

29th Jul or 23rd Oct, 2016

At around this time, an update for Sven Co-op 5.0 came out that removed Software rendering. My laptop had huge issues with OpenGL in SC5.0 for some reason, and it ran at 1fps. Literally.
So, I switched to Obsidian Conflict.

As you can see, I was really having fun with the normal maps in that map.

I cannot determine the exact date, but this screenshot is from late July, so the upper ones probably were taken in the month after:

Then I got bored of it. I quickly switched back to Sven Co-op after seeing that they fixed the OpenGL performance issue.

15th Nov, 2016

In-vehicle sequences have always been my favourite. <3

I also tried making a short Far Cry SP map, sp_simple.

1st Nov, 2016

2016 ended with mp_verycold's finalisation. That chapter finally closed, as a new one was about to begin.
2017 was the year when my maps actually started looking decent. mp_verycold and ts_untergrund were part of a transition between these two stages.

It was the 31st of December, 2016. I was waiting for New Year 2017 to start in the GameBanana chatroom.
A new face appeared, someone I haven't seen before. He was looking for a mapper. Some members that were present at that moment pointed at me.
At first I didn't want to do it. I thought my skills weren't enough for the job. Eventually, I accepted it because no-one else was applicable. :p

The development started on the 1st of January (hah, I knew it from day 1: it's a lucky map).
I was given a WAD with a bunch of de_storm-style textures and some info about what I'm supposed to make.
I had to remake de_cbble, but in de_storm's aesthetics. Also, I had to make the Mid from CS:GO's Cbble, and use a bit of de_forge's layout bits.

I downloaded de_forge and css_cbble so I can take screenshots of their layouts. I eventually merged the layout into something and it looked alright. :)

I saved it as a 512x512 bitmap for the map editor, and a 1024x1024 PNG for future references.

1st Jan, 2017

I worked hard on it until the 23rd of January. That's when school started again.

'de_kobbl' was born. It's the map that almost made my laptop fry itself during the compilation process. Lol.
I originally called it de_flint, but I don't think it sounds good.

I started developing it in May again. I released it at the end of June, and the last update came out on the 15th of July.

It had 4 versions: day, night, and low-poly versions of both
Each one took about an hour and 30 minutes to compile.
It didn't achieve much as a competitive map (probably because it had a night version), but I don't care about that. I'm more into fun maps anyway. :p

It was, however, my most successful map of 2017. It reached a few thousand views in just months.
That's when I tried promoting things. I made a beta-test thread, got quite a few people hyped for it, and some of us eventually gathered and played on the map together, analysing the bugs, trying out how it's normally played, and then the most fun part: low-gravity exploration of Easter eggs. ^^ (and there were quite a few)

My 'flame' didn't stop burning after its last update. I felt like I owed everyone a fun version of the map, so I decided to make fun_kobbl.

fun_kobbl 0.0.6, 20th Jul, 2017
However, I hit the map limits. Clipnodes and lightmaps, precisely.

I had to move on to Sven Co-op. The clipnode limit stayed the same, but the lightmap limit was raised from 64 to 512. I managed to optimise the clipnodes a fair lot, and improve my compilation times.

22nd Jul, 2017

At one point, the map would take 4 hours to compile. I optimised the map a lot with HINT and SKIP brushes, so VIS (visibility) time reduced from 2h48m to just 4 minutes. RAD (lighting calculator) stayed the same, of course, as lighting requires heavy calculations.

28th Jul, 2017

This time I was safer from the engine limits. I still hit the clipnode limit, but I optimised the map's collisions soon enough.
Sadly, my laptop was the limit this time. I just couldn't keep going at constant 7fps in-game and 10fps in the editor, and 2-hour-long compile times.

At this time, I was capable of making terrain in as much detail as I want:

Then I tried switching to lighter maps.

The map was about some space bikers with augmented bodies. They could superjump across these rocks and they had to exterminate all the aliens in the map, eventually escaping with a ship.

4th Aug, 2017

8th Oct, 2017

I even tried rebuilding my school map for Sven Co-op. I tried making a reboot of it before for CS 1.6, but I lost interest in it.

I guess that's all you're going to see from it. The original map is finished, there's not really a need for a new one.
Or there may be? I don't know.

They're all abandoned for now and there's a chance they will stay WiPs forever.
I also tried some more modelling. Not too bad:

In December, I started making a map of my high school:

In early January, when the winter break started, I returned to mapping and continued working on my school map.
I also made this:

I was testing how detailed lightmaps can get in GoldSrc. :)

A couple of days before New Year, I made this:

Last update: 1 Jan, 2018

Before that, I also tried some more CS:S mapping (once again, a New Year map):

Last update: 2 Jan, 2018

In January, I made my second-ever map for a clan. It was aim_stadium_gsu.

12th Jan, 2018

It's where I finally got into making my own textures again. I started texturing in 2015 for my HL mod, then I made some textures again for some maps and my FC mod in 2016. I hardly made any during 2017.
I made the grass texture myself, I made the wall textures myself... Yeah. I was always kind of limited by the premade textures that came with the games I modded. But making my own was a pleasure. :)

Then, because I was bored, I wanted to reimagine Half-Life's tram ride for CS 1.6.

29th Jan, 2018

I also tried some Deus Ex mapping.

22nd Jan, 2018

It took me some time to calm down from the shock that 80% of it is based on subtractive geometry (carving :p).
But still, it's nice to learn new things.

In January, I repurposed my old ASUS monitor, so my productivity increased.

;)

I also mapped for Quake and Doom.

Doom

I actually made just one map for it, just to see what it's like.

Quake

I started at the end of March. I got into Quake mapping because I wanted to see how far I can go in terms of mapping limits.

7th Apr, 2017

14th Apr, 2017

I took a break in the meantime to work on de_kobbl in May.
After de_kobbl was done, I returned to work on the map in September.

4th Sep, 2017

6th Sep, 2017

I stopped working on the map a day after high school started (5th Sep).
It was one hell of an adventure.

Now it's 2018, and what have I done?
Well, not much. Made a couple of new friends online, wrote this blog, am writing a tutorial which I'll release on 1st of April.
I'm not really working on anything specific in mapping and modding. I might pick up my high school map and work on it, since I took some more, new photos of it. ^^

Thanks for reading and congratulations if you made it to the end. I started writing this on 17th March at around 19:30 and right now it's the 23rd, about 23:25.
I hope this will be a productive year like the past ones. :)
Have a good day.
- Admer