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gm_cyan_dreampools

Big thanks to all who have engaged with my map, whether that is positive or providing advice. It's taken many years for something I have made to be so noticed and I am touched and humbled to see people from many places and your words of encouragement.
I put my all into this map and it will be difficult for me to surpass, and I have responsibilities to many other things both creative and not, but I will try to honour you again someday with such a thing.


gm_cyan_dreampools is a sprawling, interconnected complex of around 100 rooms and corridors of many sizes and shapes, arranged to disorient and inspire exploration.

There is somewhat of a puzzle, but it's mostly just exploring, interpreting what you see and hear and collecting stuff.
I was inspired by demos of upcoming games such as Dreamcore and Pools after being impressed by their photorealism and environment design, but something that stood out to me that could possibly be improved on by the Source engine was how these use real-time ray-tracing and how it can lead to odd artifacts sometimes. I wondered how doable it would be to try to create such a photorealistic experience in Source. Knowing where to get very high quality textures and the best possible mapping tools helped with that!

But let's be real: if you're here, you probably already know what to expect.

• Large complex of interconnected rooms and corridors of a variety of shapes and sizes
  
• Significant amount of verticality
  
• Very high resolution textures and careful selection of higher lighting quality in many places
  
• A light puzzle element and stuff to find and collect
  
• Custom soundscapes (i.e. setups for ambient sound) which reuse base HL2 assets
  
• A handful of vanilla sounds warped beyond recognition into unsettling ambiance
  
• AI nodes & nav mesh (though not manually tuned)
  
• Color correction
  
• A lot of cubemaps
  
• No entities
  
• Easter eggs
  
• Optional soundtrack using QR code links with in-game fallbacks
  
• Some parts of the map converted to models (not the railings as you might think though, those are displacements) to free up resources so the map could be made larger
  
• Surreal lighting model subverts standard Source environment lighting for a unique vibe

A common problem with Source in poolrooms maps is that you can't have more than level of water height on-screen at the same time without the graphics bugging out. I've had to structure the entire map around trying to avoid this without having large, boring expanses or contrived winding and dry corridors all over the place. Combined with trying to avoid having dead ends, this was a challenge. There are a couple of places where you can experience water rendering problems still, but for the most part you have to go out of your way to find this.

I've been mapping since 2007 so know how to work with Hammer well and do stuff to get out that extra 10%, like setting advanced VRAD settings and deeper .vmt editing with detail textures and such. This map is very close to the Hammer limits and these are even already extended by the tools I'm using, so until these can be worked around further there isn't going to be any kind of V2 which would extend the map. The only updates at this point would be ones that don't involve significantly changing the map geometry.
The development of this map also spans a PC upgrade, I went from an i7-6700k/LGA1151 to i5-14600KF/LGA1700 which is no slouch! This helped a lot with being able to compile with the high lighting quality, at one point the map compile was just terminating early and unfinished with no error message because of too much lighting data because I made it so high quality. This illustrates that it got to a point where engine limits were more of a problem than time taken to compile.

• Tools
  
  • ambientcg.com - textures
    
  • github.com/koerismo/PBR-2-Source - PBR to VTF texture conversion
    
  • ficool2.github.io/HammerPlusPlus-Website/index - Hammer++
    
  • knockout.chat/thread/992/1 - Slammin' Source Map Tools by slartibarty
    
  • github.com/tuxxi/propper-2013 - propper/converting map geometry to models
• Testers
  
  • Dry - foxdryeternal
    
  • dDefinder - BakaKemono