I began working on this map in late July/early August in hopes of properly re-creating my favorite GE64 multiplayer map, Basement. A release was made on December 26 2008, but that old version of the map is nowhere near where I wanted it to be. I had just been working on it for so many months I had the illusion it was done.
So since the Beta 3 release I've been leisurely working on this map in my extra spare time (I've been working on learning to model properly in my other spare time), doing what I love best about mapping, adding little details and constructing areas which don't tell just what an area is, but what it's for, how it's been used, why it looks how it looks(how its aged), all that fun stuff.
Along with detailing, I've been working on completely revamping all the lights in the map. Originally, the map was full of blobs of white light shining at a 90 degree angle along all the walls. Now, I've been attempting to give each room its own lighting style, such as fluorescents, incandescents, and strategically using vrad to bounce light to where I want it.
As you can see in the screenshots, I've made the 6-pillar room into an employee lounge/cafeteria area, in which you can also see the new way in whch I'm doing the wall lighting:
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/7138/gemilitarylibrary0011.jpgAnd I've been trying the make the 16-pillar room more interesting with texture variety and improved lighting without changing the gameplay:
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/6273/gemilitarylibrary0012.jpgPersonally, I think that the spawn text in Runway looks awesome, so I added some to Basement. The difference though is that the text is tied to a trigger_once, so unlike Runway, the text will only show up the first time you spawn and then never shows up the rest of the match. (Apparently people don't like it showing up multiple times on Runway.)
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/5/gemilitarylibrary0013.jpgLet me know what you think, and I'd love for people to give criticisms/comments on what they think of the map so far.
