Pripyat for CS:GO, In More Detail

Pripyat, a Demolition level for CS:GO, was published on the Steam Workshop on 26/09/2013, and has been subscribed to over 17,000 times.

In this blog I will go into more detail about the level and the various components that compose it.

The buildings consist of BSP geometry with textures applied to each face. Invisible faces have the 'nodraw' texture applied to them, which prevents them from being rendered in-game.

The ground was created using the terrain tool and has two textures blended between each other - pavement and grass, with the grass having a script that spawns grass detail sprites on its surface, which I specifically created for this level.

Several areas of the level are restrained by clip brushes - essentially blocking volumes that prevent the player from leaving the level or accessing restricted areas like balconies and rooftops.

The level is populated with static and dynamic props, some placed to provide cover for players in a gunfight situation, while other props are there purely for aesthetic purposes - normally around walls or unreachable areas to prevent clustering the screen and player path.

The BSP geometry, props and terrain all have lightmaps of varied sizes, where small objects generally have lower res lightmaps to save performance, and larger objects have high res lightmaps to make the shadows on these objects crisper.

In total the level has over 5000 Solids (BSP geometry) and over 1300 entities (props / decals / geometry with scripts).