A CS:GO map making exercise [Part 3]

Hi! Welcome to the third week of this exercise. In the last post I showed some 2D designs. Today we will look into the 3D progress I made in the Hammer Editor.

Initially, when I was writing up the analysis of the current maps in CS:GO, I did not plan on referring to a guideline or anything of that sort. But recently I thought about looking it up to see if I missed anything of note. And oh boy did I miss! There are a lot intricate details in the levels that I did not notice until I read about them. Mapcore.org has an in depth level design guide to making maps for the game (Steam version of the guide is here). Mapcore is a game development community which focuses on level design, modelling, concept art and programming. I am reading through this and noting everything that I missed, for example, Staging areas. These areas are just in front of choke points, where the attacking team can plan and prepare the assault. They generally have an open roof so that the attackers throw their grenades over onto the other side.

Overview

I have completed the 3D block-out of the whole level. I have placed the player spawns and bomb sites and made the level playable. I have followed the 2D designs as faithfully as possible and made necessary changes where needed. For example, I made the objective rooms a little larger so that the players can walk around without stepping into the bomb 'plant zone'.

Bomb site A

Ground floor under Bomb site A

Mid lane (defender side)

Attacker route to Bomb site B

The great thing about the CS:GO SDK is that it auto generates the navigation mesh. This means that the bots already knew their way around the map the first time I tested it out.

There do seem to be a few limitations though. The bots were getting wedged between the staircase and the floor above. I fixed that by putting a wall there. Also, the bots don't seem to acknowledge ladders. Maybe there are some things I need to do in the editor for that work and I'll look into it soon, but for now there is a ladder-accessible catwalk section in bomb-site B that was never used by the bots.

I did not get a ton of time for testing but I quickly realised that my map is too short. Honestly, I do not know if that is a bad thing or not. I noticed that I was reaching the objectives faster compared to other maps, especially on the Terrorists' team (the attackers). When I was making the block-outs I was worried that the attacker-side lanes were being too long, but now I know that is not the case and they need to be even longer. I do not have "staging areas" either and I need to make some changes to accommodate those. As mentioned in the Mapcore guide, will need a space with an open top. I will also need the bomb site to have an open top for the grenades to come through. I have not yet put pieces for cover on the map, without which the map feels very empty, especially Mid lane which looks like a vast open desert right now. Climbing the ladder by B site provides an unexpected line of site to the path leading into Building A. I feel it may be too powerful a line of sight but I am going to wait until further testing before I do anything about it.

The guide also provided with two console commands that can be executed when testing out the level. the first one is "bot_show_battlefront 1". This shows all the places the two teams would meet if they ran with their knives out. The second one is "bot_show_occupy_time 1" which shows in real time where the teams would meet. These two commands help me see where the meeting points were and how I can adjust them and the choke points.

Here is a comparison between my map and Mirage (I couldn't zoom out any further else everything goes black, sorry). In Mirage the defenders are able to extend much further past the bomb sites before they encounter an attacker. This isn't happening on my map, which means in a typical round the defenders will have very little time to prepare for the upcoming attack. By making the attacker side of the map longer, I can hope to solve this.

In conclusion, I have finished blocking out the level as a whole and will now proceed to populate it with smaller objects as obstacles and cover. The players are meeting too close to the bomb sites therefore I will need to move the attackers further away. Staging areas will need to be added near choke points. Lanes and rooms will need more fleshing out by adding cover and variations in height.

The next few weeks look like I will be testing a lot before I can start with beautification of the level. I still don't have a name for my level. I was thinking of Data, since I wanted the level to be in some kind of research facility and the bomb sites would be massive server rooms, but there is already a de_data shared by someone on the Steam workshop page. My other candidates were Research, Facility and Institute (very original :/).

That is it for today! Thank you very much for reading through today's post. I hope to see you next week! Take care.