City Campaign

[Banshou]

Well, currently I have no screenshots as I am unable to work on maps until the SDK is released as I do not know how to set up textures and props and such. But, this is the general outline of the campaign:

The campaign itself will take place in another city that has been affected by the Virus, the campaign itself will be open ended, have multiple paths, and many maps. I think I may release updates as time goes on, IE, start with a basic campaign, then add branching maps and such. There may be duplicate maps too, for different entrances, and different areas of that map.

It in itself will be your average big-city, but what I am hoping to do is have a wide variety of areas to explore, many paths and map exits and such, so you aren't just going in a straight-forward path. Some maps will also require you to go through a certain map to get to, so you may not even explore them all in one go unless you backtrack a lot.

I do hope to have multiple finale though, that way every time is much different, and such.

A Few Landmark/Map Ideas I had:

Large Cemetery:
Pretty easy to picture, I think.

A Mall:
Another fairly simple one.

A Sky Scraper/Office Building:
Finale on the roof, like No Mercy, only different.

A Cargo Ship:
One of the finale maps I am hoping, you make it to the boat and think you're safe, but you find that the entire crew are zombies and such.

A few ideas I had:
Good, and Bad endings. Some may be in a random area, which means you may not survive, some may be in an outpost where it's safe, and others may be making an escape.

[SupremeHumanBeing]

Wow! Sounds really interesting! Are you an experienced mapper? Do you plan to make this? I ask because many ppl say they are but then lose focus or get bored etc.

I would love to see this!

[Banshou]

Well, I do plan to make it, but I figure it will take a great deal of time. I'm not all too experienced admittedly but I am a VERY fast learner, and I do know the basics and more of Hammer already. So, it's more then likely that I will make it.

[Spyder638]

You plan to make a boat and you're not too experienced? :S It's quite hard to make a boat you know. But I like your ideas, very, very smooth.

[Banshou]

If I make enough maps, it could have more gameplay then the actual game. xD

And well, despite not being experienced, I am very artistic. So in the worst case scenerio I can draw a concept, and have a friend or my brother just 3d model the whole ship for me. xD

[Spyder638]

A fully modelled thing would be quite bad to have in a map to be honest. The main part you would have to worry about with a ship would be how you are going to get around the smooth body without ruining the interior.

[Banshou]

Couldn't I just do Vertex Editing?

It's not all too difficult, and I think that'd be best for compile time, lag, and such o.o

[Otreum]

You're being a bit too ambitious, you may be able to make more thrown together maps than turtle rock did for L4D, however due to the lack of mapping experience and understanding of how to do certain things in mapping (mainly optimization), your maps would probably be pretty bland and blocky.

I am an author of an unannounced total conversion mod for STALKER, I started out knowing very little about modding, just like you, and now i'm mapping using a Autodesks Maya (3d modelling program), and doing every other aspect of modding on my own.
It took me about 1 year to learn the basics of 3d modelling on my own, and about 2 years before I really started to roll out some content for the mod. This 3rd year I have pretty much come to a halt due to health issues, however I have still been developing the mod as it is my key to a career as a developer.
The reason i'm telling you this is because I know that people told me that my goals were too ambitious as well, and instead of letting people tell me "you can't do it" I used their doubt as a fuel to power me along as far as I have gone.

So when I am saying that it is too ambitious, I am hoping that you will also use it as a fuel to prove me wrong, because I would like you to prove me wrong or anybody wrong who is doubtful in your eagerness to make something great.

On that note, I say good luck to you, and I hope that you will dedicate plenty of time to learning what needs to be learnt, because it's not easy.

Now onto some advice.

Start by planning, you don't have to be a whiz bang super artistically talented person to do this. The basic plan for your maps gives you a guideline to what you can do. Even if your plan involved a bunch of rectangles and squares, that is all that is needed. You also need to taken into consideration of the engine limits, which you can research yourself.

Once you've got your basic plan, or a small plan of just one level to start with, then you should go and learn what you need to learn from the many great/and not so great tutorial websites out there, chances are different tutorials use different techniques to different things and you will need to look at the same tutorials on different websites to see which technique you find would be best for what you want to do.

In source, most people develop their maps with 2 basic textures, they are the basic developer textures (orange and grey grids), you can also use the other developer textures if you want.
First you can make your map design, then texture it all afterwards.

OR, you can make little bits of the map, and texture as you go.

OR, you can do whatever other ways there are to do it.

Once you have your base map designed, you would then need to use the more advanced things called entities to make your map function properly and run well.
That would require things such as lighting, props/detail, occlusion points, nodraw textures, spawn entities, ai path nodes, level change points and so on so forth.

Now that sounds like a quick process, but it's far from it, because you will either be a lazy half arsed kinda developer, or you will be a perfectionist like me and not be happy with the smallest little things that the normal gamer probably wouldn't notice.
Take your time with development, make sure you have your plans, and take it step by step, if you get caught up with "oh i'm gonna do this that this and that and that and this and that" then you're going to overwhelm yourself and you may not know where to start.

So, first step is PLAN...now hop hop, get to it :)