Alex McGilvray

Just found out PCGamer did a mini article on Firearms|Source this month. Gotta run to the store and pick up a copy!

The portfolio was getting severely out of date so I took some time the last couple days to update it.

Check it out here:

http://www.levelism.com/

Found a working copy of the second map I ever did.  Had a blast testing this and playing around on it with my old FA clans.

Now if I can only find my first map : ps_CityConflict

Finished up Akumamatata the other night. This would be the first full library and game I managed to make without having to constantly resort to a book or reference somewhere. I’m finally starting to get a grip on XNA, at least the 2D portion of it.

Over the next while I’ll be doing a handful of 2D projects this time with original content drawn by me and some friends.

Anyways here’s a vid of Akumamatata, no download link of course for obvious reasons

Here’s a map I’m working on for FAS. It attempts to do an outdoor forest scene in Source which is a little rough.

I learned the value of modulation blend textures from this map, the quality increase from using them on your terrain blends is huge. The tree model is about my 4th attempt at doing an evergreen, I’m still not entirely happy with it but it’s improving every time which is good.

It became apparent this map had some serious bottlenecking issues so I completely redid the red side of the map opening the path to the main area from one tight route to 4 routes. Blues side was also opened up considerably.

This map was also changed from 5 flags to 3 flags. I really look forward to playing the new version.

Well we’ve been playing ps_crossfire and it is maturing as a map but it was suffering from a set of narrow hallways that had a lack of identity and gameplay value. I went through the map and tried to turn these narrow hallways into rooms, when I could find a way I would try to find some way to attach it to a main route. An example would be turning a long stretch of hallway into a garage so that there can be some width and crossover to the main route.

Hopefully these changes will make it so that new players will be able to learn the map much faster.

Over the development of Firearms|Source quality control has gone up exponentially. If I were to count every map that was ever made for the first release of FAS it would be probably be between 20 and 30 maps. The reality of the situation is we have about 8 really really polished maps. Many maps died in the process that had good gameplay but didn’t stack up visually. My remake of ps_river is one of those maps.

Dont worry though, there should be a supplmentary mappack shortly after the release of FAS that will include this map among other classic remakes that didnt make it into the official build. I will have more news on that in the future.

in the meantime here’s some screenshots:

Yet another old Firearms|Halflife map I made. This one marks the first time I ever started doing my own opacity materials. This was back with the old method of flagging one color on the texture palette as transparent. I believe in GoldSource it’s full cyan.

This was a map I made for Firearms|Halflife and also had planned to port to Jungle Mist. Looking back now it’s a very rough approximation of the central area. I couldn’t model the roads out of the area because of the FAGoldSource limitations of 800 polygons in the scene at any given time.

I made textures from photos I took on my 0.4 megapixel camera during the time I spent in Sayulita.