Warning; Mapping Nerdness

Prepare yourself those of you who are not extremely nerdy and interested in computer games. Cover your eyes for this post is dedicated to some ultra geeky; Counter-strike (CS) mapping. Now I won’t get into CS other then to say that it is an online first-person shooter and is known for the non-stop action and speed, and about a week ago I decided to dabble in mapping, meaning making a map for the game.

I was nearly put off from this endeavor by the comments of a friend, stating that it would take at least 40 hours of work. Even though I was slightly put off by this I still determined to have a go. I downloaded a program called Hammer which is basically a map maker and tried to get it started. An error came up stating that I hadn’t got the game list working or something which was quite annoying and I was afraid that I had downloaded this almost 1GB file just to have it give up on me. After a little fiddling around I managed to get it working was quite a relief. I spent the next hour or so desperately trying to figure out what each of the buttons do and was getting nowhere before I decided to take the coward’s way out and search the net. After finding a nice site that gave a series of tutorials on how to make a basic room I began my quest.

After about two hours I had finished the bunch of tutorials and was wondering what I was going to do next, after some deep pondering I decided to impress my CS crazy friend and make a map in a much shorter time then 40 hours.
I took the basics of what I had done and began to add on various rooms and textures and blocks. I worked on it for another 5 hours or so and was very happy with the result. I sent the map to my friend and he quickly jumped into the game. Needless to say my map totally sucked and there was nothing at all good about it. Except one small window I had placed in a wall. Pretty good for my first map eh?

I nearly started an entire new map but changed my mind as I thought about the time required and instead decided to improve the map. I added a top floor, outside areas, and ramp, more boxes, another ramp, and tons of graffiti. It was an epic struggle between me and, well…um…a struggle between me and fate itself. Yeah, that’s sounds good. It took me another 7 hours or so before I had finished the map to my own approval and I was feeling extremely proud. So I had spent nearly 15 hours making the map and finally got my friends approval, great. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if he hadn’t asked me to play against him on my map and filmed my humiliating loss. Well, I don’t actually play the game! I just made the map for it. And it is one fine map if I do say so myself.

The final part of the story was when my friend decided I was good enough a map-maker as to make his dream map.
Tired and weary I started up Hammer the world maker thingy again and slowly began to fiddle around. All my enthusiasm had been drained from me, as I felt the excitement that had once encompassed me when I was making my own map dissolve. After an hour or so I had barely accomplished anything.

I guess the life of a mapper is not for me, or playing the game for that matter. Yes, I think blogging about my failed adventures is the life for me. But still, my map does pwn l33t nublets. It's a contradiction but it sounds cool.