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Dusty City [DEFINITIVE EDITION]

After FIVE YEARS (somehow) I've finally touched up the map I started on many moons ago. It was a passion project for me, never meant to be competitive but something I could learn and have fun with; and boy did I. I'd never before felt so engrossed, so absorbed by what I was doing and the fun I had making it, and it was a great solace in a rough time of my life. I opened this map every once in a while and smile, thinking about the good memories I had.

So why a definitive edition?
I uploaded this version seperately because I wanted to make a few key changes, namely graphically, but I wanted to keep the original map still uploaded for the sake of nostalgia and preservation. I actually lost the original map files many years ago, and a few years back, decompiled the map to fix the largest problems with it. Unfortunately this broke the (already poor) optimization and made everything more difficult, and I never finished all the changes I had wanted to make. Now, I have.
The largest changes were:

-Better Optimization
I didn't know what I was doing-- this was literally the first time using hammer for me, not just my first map. I still don't know what I'm doing, but it should be better now. Previously the whole map had almost no nodraw textures, being made up of hidden dev textures and tiled low-res original Dust 2 textures. I have gone through and nodrawed almost everything I could find. I've also broken up worldbrushes in a way that makes more sense and generate better visleafs. Previously a solid wall would be broken up into tons of little pieces from my overuse of the clipping tool. Additionally, I've finally added fadeout to many of the props and models, which weren't there before, and added hint clipping along the sky to make it run better. On my rig, at 1440p 4x MSAA, I'm getting a mostly consistent ~300 FPS.

-Better Graphics
Now this map isn't a looker. I'm still aware of many messed up and missing textures that I either couldn't be bothered with or that I only found after compiling. I did, however, update it with many HR Dust 2 assets, as when originally working on this map (back in 2017,) I knew a Dust 2 update was coming, and wanted to use those assets, but finished working on this map (and lost interest) before it came out. This is my way of making up for that. I also added some extra small details, tweaked the lighting, and massively increased the skybox in a way that looks much better than before, even if the skybox still doesn't look great, admittedly.

-Navigation
Bots had a terrible time with this map. They still don't have a GREAT time, but I went through and fixed many of the awful jump spots, so hopefully it's actually possible to play with bots this time around, even if they rush A every round.

-Radar
The original map's radar sucked. This one is mildly better.


And that's it! I hope you enjoy this definitive edition of Dusty City. Now, in celebration of this, I present its story:

"The year is 2031. Much of the world is going about its business, paying no mind to the sinister plots that have been building, deep in the sands of the desert.
In the 1930s, archaeologists discovered a large, open negative space in the desert where very little plant life grew. In this space were few, poorly constructed and geometrically primitive buildings of great interest to researchers. Since then, a city has grown around the temples, and there have been efforts to refurbish many of these decrepit buildings. Many locals dissaprove of this, as they find the temples to be buggy and poorly optimized, and it makes their framerate drop when going near. So, armed with a bomb, they're going in to blow up the temple, and end this restoration project. Also there are some missiles."