Resource PF Billboard Materials for Mappers

o.O

he send me this:



i used it already

anyway, its just fine also
but if you want, i can change it

I like the B-rate horror movie poster looking ones better to be honest. :whistling:

nice billboards!

Can we put more blood in it. We need more blood, and heads.. Oh yess heads.

I personally dislike advertising in maps for several reasons. The biggest one is it detracts from the playing experience on the level. people come to play the game, not be force fed adverts. In the worst case scenario, it can be done improperly (worldspawn brushed based lettering) which causes severe performance impact in-game from the visleaf rape. It also highly limits the distribution of the map as a whole because other communities don't want another community being advertised on their server and detracting their user base. This either leads to each community releasing re-edits of the level (which you have at least a dozen different versions of the same map with different advertisements in it) or them simply refusing to run it on their servers.

I think the worst case of advert spam I've seen in a map is zm_tx_highschool. The entire outside area of the level is covered in advertising and other image trash that inflates the BSP size and looks generally terrible.

Depends on how the mapper implements it. Since the image is provided as a raw JPG/PNG, the mapper has to convert it to a VTF themselves. If they make the poor choice to convert it as a raw uncompressed texture, it will probably be 4-6 MB, as compared to DXT1/DXT5 compression which will make it 200-500 kb.

Code:

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "Documents and Settings/Administrator/My Documents/Downloads/lighter"
}

You have a few problems here. First, nobody stores textures in My Documents. You need to make a material folder in the cstrike\materials directory (call it pfadvert or something) and put the materials in there. Then you'll have to modify the $basetexture to point to "materials\pfadvert\mytexturename". Second, the path can't have spaces in it, or you'll end up with problems with the texture not being found in certain situations. Third, the path isn't Linux friendly; If you changed Administrator to administrator, it would be considered a different folder in Linux since Linux is a case sensitive OS.

While I would prefer not to have to advertise, most of the maps we run have advertisements in them for other servers and I would prefer to use the map create than edit them and chance more errors. I only wish to level the playingfield. I highly doubt that most people would visit a different community because of a graphic they see on a map but I still have other communities ground into my head so well that I can name them very easily not that i'm going to.

There's a VTF plugin for photoshop that's much better.

this is what i used on beach map (btw, its 256 x 512 uncompressed)

this is for shiny glass looking:

(sometimes its bad after cubemaps are builded)

Code:

"LightmappedGeneric"
{	
"$basetexture" "moon/pf/billboardpf"
"$surfaceprop" "concrete"
"$translucent" 1
"$envmap" "env_cubemap"
"$envmaptint" "[.3 .3 .3]"
"$nocull" "1"
"%compilepassbullets" 0
}

and this when its to bright and reflect to much:

Code:

"LightmappedGeneric"
{	
"$basetexture" "moon/pf/billboardpf"
"$surfaceprop" "concrete"
}

anyway, the material does no matter, since i use always
func_brush what is not solid (yes, i learned - no more func_illu)

this protects against bullet decals and overspray xD

***edit

the first vmt is not a vis blocker,
this means it makes a leak when its used on outside wall.

i just re-add a working link here

http://s1.bild.me/bilder/030611/5806810pfbill2.png

wow, not bad

nice work