It is finished! I am considering this map finished for now and will stop updating this page. I added a radar with working floor switches now, and as I am writing this I am compiling the map to upload to the workshop. I plan to upload it tomorrow.

Thankfully, RadGen exists so making radar overviews is very intuitive and easy. Unlike the old way of making a radar, this method is a lot better and way way faster.

There may be a few lighting bugs in a few small areas of the map, and some classrooms may be slightly empty (some are entirely empty still), but I think I've added enough for now. The map is perfectly playable and adding props here and there will simply be something that I work on long term.

These last few days have been crunched down into one post as I have not had the time to post each day. I am in the last few days of wanting this project "finished" and I've simply not been able to document each individual day.

A lot of progress has been made to lighting, prop placement, gamemode adjustment, small details, bug fixing, etc.

I have finally changed the gamemode to defuse. I wanted to do this for a long time but I never knew how I would do it. Now, I have placed the two bombsites on the first floor which I think makes most of the map still useable. T spawn is at the school entrance, CT spawn is on the top floor at the back. This does allow CT's to have a big height advantage over the Ts, however I feel that it will allow Ts to get sneaky inbetween all the possible routes available and take the CTs by suprise, meaning you can't just sit on the top floor and hope to snipe them.

I have added a bunch of mementos around the map that remind me of the time there. These include:

• Computer screens that are on displaying some things we would do during our breaks

• A knocked over bin

• A lone shoe on the second floor

• A thrown chair

• Cigarettes and a gun

• A phrase graffiti on the wall

As well as a bunch of other things.

Second playtest done. I managed to sort out the lighting issues. Turns out you need to optimally place the lightmap brushes around instead of just one big box which I thought might have been a brute force method for it to just work without being optimised.

I have added a lot more props around the place, modelled very roughly the science table and populated the science area rooms with props finally. I also populated a few rooms that were previously empty.

I got slightly off topic and made a memento, specifically of a computer screen with a music video on. I haven't figured out how to add custom sounds but when I do then I will add it there.

The deadline is approaching fast and I need a completed build in less than a week. I have this weekend to add as much as I can to this. As long as I have the rooms populated, a skybox, lighting all around the building, then I'll be happy to finish this project. The rest will be simply small details that don't entirely matter.

I closed the map up today. However, closing the map up did not fix the obvious lighting issues. I also added the lightmap + cubemap entities everywhere in the map and that also did not seem to help. I'm currently out of options and the deadline is in 1 week. Tomorrow I will try again to fix the lighting issues but I genuinely am not sure what direction to take from here.

I will attempt to use the lightmap texture as I remember last night that the cubemap things that I thought were combined didn't have the lightmap texture and were just an orb with an area.

Today I have mapped out the first part of the outside area. Aligning all of the floors with the angled walls was a bit of a tedious task. This is in part with the broader plan to seal the map in. Hopefully, sealing the map will help with optimisation, lighting issues, and render time.

I've encountered some issues with lighting in game. More specifically, I knew the issue existed, but I didn't think it would remain after adding the necessary light entities. I believe the issue is now that I don't have a specific light entity that you should be placing in each room / corridor. I presumed this was just for cubemaps but it may have something to do with the lighting of entities and props too.

Currently, there are few tutorials online on how to truly fix my specific issue, but there are some that point me in the right direction which I will be following.

Today I made a pink variant of the cafeteria chair and populated the front area of the school. I also added lamps across the scaffolding supports above the gymnasium which help a lot with bringing light into the building.

Also, elevator doors are now in the correct areas on one half of the building. After talking with my friends about high-school, I was reminded about an incident regarding a bin, so I added that as well. I do plan eventually to add a bunch of things relating to events that we remember.

I have added some more doors in places that need it, as well as adding some more tables and desks in the hallways where needed.

I also have worked on the stairwell. Unfortunately I couldn't find a round light that the original building used, but these substitute lights work fine for now. I would model the light, its only a simple circle light, but I'm not sure how to make it glow.

Before today, I didn't actually have any custom textures to use as I didn't know how to. So, I managed to add custom textures, including the pink, blue and green walls that are unique to each floor. I also made a custom texture for the perforated walls around each floor as there was nothing similar by default.

Green doors have been fitted to the whole top floor (aside from the top gym). Parts of the first floor have been fitted with blue doors as well. The roof has also been textured simply. The first floor also now features blue pods at the front of the school, and the second floor is now populated with green pods.

Today I have filled more classrooms with desks and chairs, added some useable doors, added lights, some basic textures, and TVs and a few whiteboards.

Surprisingly, there was no default round table that was usable for the cafeteria. I made a model for this quickly in Blender and added this too. I also made a green chair so the colour of the cafeteria comes to life. A lot of the map is still dev textures and placeholder textures, but it shouldn't take long to prop out each floor room by room.

I also made a pod model. A small room that teachers would use to either speak to students 1 on 1 or to just do work in when not teaching.

This is the first port to Source 2. From now on, I will only be working in the Source 2 engine. Today, I have messed around with textures (figuring out how they work) and adding some basic prop arrangements for classrooms and hallways.

I attempted to make a second table variant of the hex shape, but it seemed to be too much hassle and I was simply able to arrange the hex desks in a way which still looks faithful to the original.

The final editing I will do in Source 1 SDK. Today, I added all of the outer windows that I felt were relevant. Some rooms do not have full windows from left to right, but that was due to it being easier with vertices alignment and the size of some rooms would mean I'd have to seriously stretch some window frames which I did not want to do.

Aside from the angled pillars that go around the bottom of the outside of the building, the inside is fully blocked out and detailed with brushes. I am eager to move onto texturing, which is why I have decided to move this over to Source 2 now. All of the main brush work is done.

I have now added the final rooms to the best that I can. There are a few phantom rooms that essentially will not be accessible in game, they may not have a door either. They are essentially empty spaces that help keep the scale of rooms that I know exist intact.

I have also added the final two front roof windows and a scaffold at the front area. Almost all of the structural details are in place, aside from one.

My next task will be to make the outer windows for the building, something that will likely be very long and time consuming.

Today I worked on a few more pillars, some brushwork detail that was doable around the building, and I made my first prop for the map.

This prop is important because it will be copied and pasted around the map possibly hundreds of times, and since it's a desk it's a simple shape so I could create it easily in Blender.

I aim to make a variant of this desk and two sets of desk chairs, one purple and one green. Then I need to make a green standard chair for the cafeteria. They are all the props I need which will populate a large chunk of the building.

The roof and scaffolding were implemented in this part. I added the main support beams to the top floor and the roof above the gymnasium.

The roof nor the scaffolding are perfect by any means, but they are very serviceable. It is difficult to make these very intricate cylinder brushes proper when there is a lot of visual clutter in the 2D planes. It is also difficult because Hammer (especially source 1) is not very friendly when it comes to making things like this.

I also added the ceiling window gaps into the roof. I originally was going to sloppily carve them into it. Then I tried to quickly slice the roof. Then I settled on properly moving the vertices so the window panels lined up with then. The result is a lot cleaner than what I originally intended.

The scaffolding does not touch the roof in some areas, but it doesn't bother me too much. I'm just happy that it turned out rather well as you can see in the screenshots.

The first playable build of the map is finished. I have managed to port it over with Source 2 and it only took a few minor adjustments, such as adding spawn points, light entities and a game mode. The game mode for now is Hostage because Defuse, while it is more fun, ultimately makes large areas of the map pointless. Hostage allows for a more spread out playstyle that compliments the map well. Unless I make two versions of the map, one Hostage and one Defuse, I will simply make it Hostage to begin with.

Today I worked on adding a bunch of rooms to the map. No props or doors yet, just open room spaces. I also tidied up some unfinished areas and kept the vertices as clean as I possibly could.

Today I finalised a bunch of walls around the school and did a lot of work off camera. 

I also attempted to make the arched stadium style roof, however it didn't go to plan and I now know that the roof will be a big challenge.

This section was quite a tedious part to do. I was fixing the vertices and properly laying out the brushes for one half of the first floor. I replaced some of the old single brush curve that I used as a guide with actual grid snapped brushes which makes aligning floors and ceiling far easier. This will also allow the rest of the building to be detailed properly as every wall is snapped to the grid.

On top of the timelapse, I worked more on adding as many floors and ceilings, as well as proper walls to the classrooms, to the map as I could.

Today I was mapping out the left first floor by memory. Unfortunately, there are no images I can find of this area, so I can only go off of memory.

The scale is not exactly perfect on this wing of the building, but it is serviceable and hopefully once this map is finished then it will look convincing enough.

I worked a lot on the exterior walls and the scale of the building as a whole. It is now pretty good in terms of scale, however there are one or two areas (such as the stairwell exits) that are not going to be quite accurate to the school. The rest of the maps is still very accurate, the layout will be extremely recognisable if compare side by side photographs of the interior.

After recording I did more scale adjustments and managed to port it over to Source 2, it took about 20 minutes just to render on fast settings but it did work. Walking around established that the scale was mostly accurate which is good.

Today I worked on the front area of the school, getting the proportions and scale as best as I could. I messed around with the scale of the whole building so much.  I didn't get it perfect, but the exterior won't be accessible when finished, it will be interior only.

I also did some of the walls and first floor after finishing recording.

The curved walls around the building did initially seem very intimidating. Getting the correct angle, scale and seamless integration appeared challenging. However, since the building is oval shaped it means I can use a cylinder and hollow it out to make some good quick walls. Later on I can fine tune and properly implement the walls with doorways and stuff.

Some parts of the building I couldn't find any images or videos at all of like some hallways. For this, I have tried to use existing images that partially show the area and estimate the scale and width of the areas / doorways. Unfortunately, some areas I don't have any possible way of estimating, so for these I'm going purely off memory.

I have begun by collecting as many photographs of the interior as I can online and trying to map out the rough scale of the building. That is one of the main challenges is scale, and I spent a long time adjusting the scale so it is as accurate as I could possibly get it.

I am quite anxious about the curvature of the building as it extends into the interior as well. So far I have got the gymnasium and the surrounding corridors to scale, the size of the cafeteria, as well as the height of the first and second floors.

See to the left a timelapse of me starting this project!