Mapper Application [LUCIUS]

[Deleted member 3142]

In-game name on all servers you play:
(MRP) Redacted - 99

Steam ID:
STEAM_0:1:104045147

Age:
20s

For how long have you played on our servers?:
Over the course of 3 Weeks I have gained about 3d+ playtime on the Military Roleplay server.
The dates starting from 19th July - 5 August (Current Date).

What country are you from?:
I am from the United Kingdom.

Time Zone:
Currently BST (GMT+1)

Sun, Mar 27 at 1:00 am

GMT → BST

Sun, Oct 30 at 2:00 am

BST → GMT

Do you have a mic?:
I have a pretty decent Microphone so communication will be at its finest.

Is this your first application for Mapper? If not, link previous ones:
This is my first application for any sort of Mapping opportunity.

Have you received any bans?:
I have 0 punishments on record.

How confident are you with Hammer (Rate yourself 1-10 using rating guide):
According to the scale provided I am in the regions of 6-7. A strong 6 with my decent understanding of Hammer's tools and functionality with a 7 for map size work I am willing to dedicate towards Civil Gamers.

Do you have previous experience as a Mapper for GMod?:
I was going to publish a custom game mode dedicated to more in-depth roleplay and this lead to me creating my own map elements for myself. Within this project I had developed a Skyscraper with a custom elevator that had fail safe measures to avoid players getting stuck or break the elevator with players being inside of it while moving. The other project being a replica of the Big bank from Pay Day for a more in-depth and difficult robbery system I wanted to produce. This bank contained several layers of security that was apart of the experience when wanting to do a heist.

What source games have you mapped for and used the content of?:
Garry's Mod is mainly the game I have experimented and done projects for. The context involved is the odd prop I think is fantastic from the workshop as well as the default CSS textures most of Garry's Mod consumes these days.

How many hours can you commit to Mapping per week?:
The minimum you are looking for is 4 hours however, I would be willing to commit up to 16 hours a week depending on the work load and planning gone into projects needed. I work fantastic with modellers and asset creators who wish to push in the content they produce into map work.

Why do you want to be a Mapper? What can you help us with?:
I think that I can provide additional hands to creating more unique and fun experiences that the Garry's Mod community within Civil Gamers is looking for. Taking the public opinions of what the community is looking for and the ideas behind the scenes to Collab them together and produce the very best possible. Whatever the vision is, I will do everything in my power to ensure its met above and beyond.

Which server(s) on the CG Network do you play on and which ones would you most prefer to map for?
I haven given a few of the Civil Gamer servers a try and I have adopted Military Roleplay as my favourite for sure. I would happily do work on the other servers if needed but mainly looking to support the Military Roleplay experience even further.

Have you made & edited any map before? if so attach some images showcasing your map & edit
A project I was quite happy to produce was a Pay Day (Big Bank) inspired building. Here are some screenshots of what that looked like after several hours of work:


This is my first project that I started but never returned to. I was massively inspired by the series 'Snowpiercer' and wanted to create the train used in the series. I barely put any hours into this but this sparked my interest in the Garry's Mod mapping scene. Worth sharing even tho it doesn't contain massive amounts of skill nor elements of functionality. Below I have also attached my short plan process of understanding what will be involved in the map before I even started it. I always do a draw up of a super simple plan to know how I wish for things to be placed.




List any ideas of new maps/map edits for CG that you would like to work on.
As mentioned from Chad, a pacific inspired Military map would be an amazing concept to get involved with. I would happily take in community based opinion to produce just that. My personal interests would be to develop more unique based structures for the current maps so that they always add that extra bit of experience when using them for roleplay. This would consist of layers of security to more secure sectors, more training faculties for the factions to use during peacetime and encourage roleplay during the downtime of low player counts. This is just a brief introduction to the vast amount of ideas I wish to bring onto the team.

Pleasure as always to be apart of the community.
- Lucius.

 

[Lord_Fr3ze]

Looking at your screenshots that you provided, you do seem to have a good basic understanding of how Hammer works, being able to create buildings and interior that look good, as well as be able to create lighting that doesn't look too bad and out of place.

The problem we always face here when making maps is that we will always reach the limits of the source engine, whether that be the vertex limit or other limits. So I wanted to know if you have any basic experience in optimization methods? That can range from simple skip/hint to advanced stuff like using models or using propper to turn brushes into models to prevent further brush usage.

Obviously you will not be creating a full map from the start, it's just something to consider as we do need people to be aware of using as few brushes as possible wherever they can, and optimize it from the start so we don't have to backtrack later on incase there are performance issues in certain areas.

Regards,

 

[Deleted member 3142]

Looking at your screenshots that you provided, you do seem to have a good basic understanding of how Hammer works, being able to create buildings and interior that look good, as well as be able to create lighting that doesn't look too bad and out of place.

The problem we always face here when making maps is that we will always reach the limits of the source engine, whether that be the vertex limit or other limits. So I wanted to know if you have any basic experience in optimization methods? That can range from simple skip/hint to advanced stuff like using models or using propper to turn brushes into models to prevent further brush usage.

Obviously you will not be creating a full map from the start, it's just something to consider as we do need people to be aware of using as few brushes as possible wherever they can, and optimize it from the start so we don't have to backtrack later on incase there are performance issues in certain areas.

Regards,

Great question regarding optimization. Personally I am more experienced with using a skip/hint to optimize the visibility culling side of things. Although too many can and will cause the map to be slower. Alternatively, I gave model importing a go back at the start of the year and is something I will need to revisit just to ensure my knowledge is there for it. It didn't seem too hard so I'm sure given the opportunity I can accomplish this very easily over time. I always document progression so if the odd case of a unoptimized object/area was to come up I will know how to target that immediately to ensure we provide the best experience users get when being on the map even with a low end PC or poor connectivity.

Hopefully that helped answer your query.
- Lucius.

 

[Lord_Fr3ze]

Great question regarding optimization. Personally I am more experienced with using a skip/hint to optimize the visibility culling side of things. Although too many can and will cause the map to be slower. Alternatively, I gave model importing a go back at the start of the year and is something I will need to revisit just to ensure my knowledge is there for it. It didn't seem too hard so I'm sure given the opportunity I can accomplish this very easily over time. I always document progression so if the odd case of a unoptimized object/area was to come up I will know how to target that immediately to ensure we provide the best experience users get when being on the map even with a low end PC or poor connectivity.

Hopefully that helped answer your query.
- Lucius.

That did answer my question quite well, thanks for that.

I just want to inform you though, having too much skip/hint does not "slow" down the map, unless you mean compile, that then depends on how visleafes are cut, as skip/hint simply just cuts visleafes the way you want them to work, to roughly get rid of areas that are rendered because VVIS decided to have them render.

Talking about areaportals or occluders however, these ones are the ones you need to sparingly use, occluders are not to be used at all at best, because they do real-time calculations, while areaportals do not, though if you use areaportals too much in one area they can make your performance worse than improving them.

 

[Deleted member 3142]

That did answer my question quite well, thanks for that.

I just want to inform you though, having too much skip/hint does not "slow" down the map, unless you mean compile, that then depends on how visleafes are cut, as skip/hint simply just cuts visleafes the way you want them to work, to roughly get rid of areas that are rendered because VVIS decided to have them render.

Talking about areaportals or occluders however, these ones are the ones you need to sparingly use, occluders are not to be used at all at best, because they do real-time calculations, while areaportals do not, though if you use areaportals too much in one area they can make your performance worse than improving them.

View attachment 2352

Ah I see. I think I meant the compiling itself. Thanks for the notes, I have written them down just to revise and enhance them further. Overall, is there anything you would like to know or ask regarding this?

- Lucius.

 

[Lord_Fr3ze]

I don't have anymore questions, good luck on your application.

 

[Cloak]

Hi, please send me a DM on Discord and we'll arrange a time to talk about your application. Thanks!

 

[Cloak]

Accepted as Trial Dev