Everything Wrong with TF2's Dustbowl

17 minutes of TF2 Dustbowl problems that you probably didn't know...
0:00 Intro
0:24 Clip Brushes
3:14 Displacements
6:16 Overlays
7:23 Textures
8:36 Models
9:53 Lighting
13:30 Occluders
14:01 Miscellaneous
17:00 Outro
▶ TF2's Door Problem: • TF2's Door Problem
▶ Capture Point from Underneath: • You can CAP this point...
▶ My other TF2 stuff: • TF2
▶ My TF2 shorts: • TF2 #shorts
▶ Source Footage 1: • Team Fortress 2 Engine...
▶ Source Footage 2: • Team Fortress 2 - Dust...
⚠️ DISCLAIMER: This video does not contain every example of every problem. If it did, it would be way too long!
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💬 Discord: / discord
#tf2 #teamfortress2

[@dragonfluf]

You forgot the mention the insufficient amount of dust and the complete absence of bowls.

[@LEDs]

Like how Badwater doesn’t have any water

[@YorhaEnthusiast]

So true

[@dankali735]

Maybe the real bowls were the friends me made along the way

[@propangasschnuffle]

@@LEDs it's not called goodwater is it?

[@TheRealNTM]

@@LEDs Badwater Basin is based off of and named after the lowest point of Death Valley, so I think it does become filled with water when it rains. I don't think it rains there often, though. And Dustbowl was named after a series of dust storms that occurred during the beginning of the Great Depression, so it could be a location that was affected by those storms.

[@Cob-Kay]

Going the extra mile to show examples on how you could fix each problem is very commendable

[@LEDs]

It's only fair to offer solutions when bringing up a bunch of problems

[@ArchDornanOfficial]

@@LEDsyou could be the second developer

[@blockwearingman]

@@LEDs🐐

[@manitoba-op4jx]

i bet if you uplod the fixed one to the workshopit might get added

[@lootrat4556]

Playing dust bowl with the item servers down actually felt pretty balanced and fun when playing on either side which I found kinda funny

[@starmaker75]

Again dust bowl comes from a era of TF2 where little to no unlocks

[@Vaniity_Velvet]

Hey bud, are the item servers still Down? I've not played TF2 since August of last year, but if the item servers are still down I may give it a shot. I really do want to play stock only. Phlog and Vaccinators killed my patience.

[@flintycave5634]

@@Vaniity_Velvet their back up again i started playing tf2 while the item servers where down, and it felt like a pretty nice introduction to the game

[@Contentdeleted99998]

Dustbowl is from an era where tf2 wasnt a thing, of course it would work better with default loadouts.

[@Vaniity_Velvet]

@@flintycave5634 Fucking hell. If I was Valve I would have left it down for a while and let players know it's on purpose and they will be back up later.

[@quentonsmith4174]

The stairs in the rock were for the ‘Meet the Heavy’ SFM It helped the Heavy walk up the rock smoothly.

[@darylchua2168]

That's hilarious

[@pablox2143]

Its beggining to look a lot like dustbowl

[@owouwu9032]

Sentries everywhere

[@Saarlaender.]

we are trapped inside our spawn

[@yardenar2717]

We have Uber so move *ON*

[@TeamCraftable2004]

Truly a dead workers party classic

[@TeamCraftable2004]

​@@yardenar2717there are lots of snipers so beware

[@Rex-sy8ye]

The grass line is due to UV wrapping and mipmap quality, when a texture lowers mips it usually ends up touching the edges of the texture and then the very top shows the bottom slightly because of interpolation (unsure if TF2 uses bilinear but thats the most common interpolation method I know of which does it) In english; Its tiling the texture when you dont want it to and the quality level bleeds over the edge.

[@GeneraliskYT]

I was about to explain that myself but you beat me to it, thanks!

[@LEDs]

Thank you 🙏

[@Aarmastah]

The issue can be completely resolved by ticking the box "Clamp T" in VTFEdit

[@iplayminecraft2248]

I was thinking it could be some sort of texture wrapping, but I didn’t think about the mipmaps (I got no clue what those even are)

[@masonbarber871]

​@@iplayminecraft2248As far as i know, mipmaps in games are prerendered lower resolution versions of textures. This is used so that far away textures look like the average of colors in a part of the texture, instead of highlights/shadows/details aligning with a pixel and making the whole pixel a different color than it shpuld be. They are precalculated with a nice blur/averaging effect that would be too costly to recalculate every frame.

[@YorhaEnthusiast]

Valve should just hire this guy

[@Nuniixo]

Just to indirectly force him to work on valves newest vr project nobody cares about

[@chxrripop]

tsk tsk tsk

[@biggreen1456]

@@Nuniixothat’s not how Valve works, they let the employees choose what to work on, their problem is everyone they hire want to work on these VR things

[@TwistedFireX]

@@biggreen1456 Not quite

[@StationaryGamingReal]

​@@biggreen1456 You become a social outcast in Valve working on TF2. It's just not cool to do it.

[@zer0her048]

If Valve just had 2 or 3 people like you, TF2 could live forever. The amount of things they neglected in this game is astonishing.

[@fojisan2398]

Like the item server, lol

[@MasGaskTheFirst]

@@fojisan2398 oof

[@LEDs]

I'm not a great mapper by any means, but I agree that as long as there's somebody who shows passion and dedication, they can help the game out a lot.

[@oblivion_2852]

@LEDs you and Shounic are great for technical tf2 content

[@joe____]

​@@LEDsYou sure fooled me, you seem to know your stuff

[@latortugacocainomana5533]

The janitor an a guy who tought that this was a fast food job watching how to fix dustbolw:

[@LEDs]

watching this video while eating lunch after mopping the floors

[@klinxium8627]

@@LEDsmopping the keyboards and accidentally typing “update sized update”

[@stormmalm7049]

you're ruining my immersion pixel by pixel

[@RandomJD]

Played Dust Bowl for like 10 years. AND NOW! I realized those little things I used to call strange tf2 magic was just the map having issues. MY GOD, thanks for the enlightenment

[@brokendoop]

I wonder if the Block Bullets brushes at 15:13 were supposed to be used as a staircase to make walking up the rock easier but they used the wrong texture.💀

[@DumbArse]

Oh my god...... This is a map from 2007, how come nobody every bothered to fix these?

[@shitlordflytrap1078]

​@@DumbArsethat's precisely why. It's from 2007.

[@gangswagster]

Isn't this the rock the heavy walks onto in Meet the Heavy? .. yeah

[@DemsW]

That is a really cool video, and I imagine it can be quite fun going problem hunting and finding solutions.

[@LEDs]

Most of these problems were accumulated on a list I made over the course of many months. I saw it the other day and thought, “you know, I think it’s finally time I did something with this.”

[@vintagememelord8168]

This is video is the opposite of the 'Everything great about BadWater' except you tired to improve DustBowl but Casual TF2 didn't talk about how to make the map bad@@LEDs

[@AParticularlyPointySoldier]

Hiding stickies on the dustbowl starting wall is crazy. Never knew.

[@Bookslayer10]

The fact that people still care enough about this game and engine to learn all this incredibly niche stuff, and apply it for free, is something really special.

[@leonardo9259]

It means this game has been abandoned for 6 years, stop the cope

[@Bookslayer10]

@leonardo9259 I'm saying the community is really special and dedicated. Valve certainly got something right when they made TF2, but they certainly haven't been as dedicated.

[@Gahanun]

I think a few of the unlit out of bounds areas are deliberate. They include the lamp for decoration, but they use lighting to guide the player away from there. When you light them up, they seem like a place where you could go to.

[@LEDs]

Then they can be dimly lit. Source doesn't handle dark areas well, so even a tiny amount of light would make it look better without being distracting.

[@coffeenair]

You should submit these fixes on the workshop, love your vids dude!

[@LEDs]

Appreciate it!

[@rmod8]

6:34 This issue is because textures get truncated, which make them repeat when the polygon used is bigger than the UV cords, and the polygon which represents this decal is a bit too big, so it starts to repeat the bottom section at the top. To fix this, enable the Clamp All flag in the VTF file to make it so the texture never gets truncated, and therefore, extends the last pixels around the edges forever. This could also be used to fix the spawn red icon, and i use in in my minecraft gmod maps for transparent effects like fire.

[@unluckyrat3961]

Are you okay honey? You've been quiet. My brain:

[@djelibaebi4147]

ive never done map editing work but the tiny fixes you're doing remind me of some of my favourite parts of 3d modelling with all the little problem/puzzle solving

[@jordanalmady2145]

I work with 3D models daily so seeing all the fixes u have for this and how many valve missed is very fascinating

[@pchris]

I’m a amateur game dev and 3D modeler and I know why you get that line on the grass overlay. First, let me explain some basics: The overlay seems to be made of 3D polygons that are just flattened onto the surface. These polygons will have UV coordinates that specify what part of a texture is drawn on them. UV coordinates are stored as two numbers that represent an X and a Y position on its texture. These numbers are values between 0 and 1 with (0, 0) usually representing the top left of the texture and (1, 1) representing the bottom right. These values can be negative or greater than 1 though. When they are the texture typically repeats. So if you have a surface where the top left UVs are set to (0, 0) and the bottom right are set to (2, 2) then the texture will repeat once on each axis with 4 copies of it visible total. Texture filtering is where a low resolution texture is sort of blurred or anti-aliased to make it look less block. Each pixel draws color data from neighboring pixels and creates a smooth transition between them. And now the problem: That overlay could have incorrect UVs but what I think is more likely is that it has texture filtering on and isn’t clamping it to the UV bounds. This means the pixels along the top edge are trying to anti-alias themselves by smoothing out the transition between them and their neighboring pixels including the pixels above them. There are no pixels above them since they’re at the top of the UV map but UVs wrap around so they’re smoothing themselves with the pixels on the bottom of the texture. You can fix this by either moving the texture up one pixel in photoshop, disabling texture wrapping/changing the repeat mode to clamp, or disabling texture filtering. Let me know if I need to explain anything better.

[@LEDs]

Got it, thanks

[@paulmann8570]

God, this takes me back to when there were six maps. I miss Hydro being popular.

[@morphious86.]

i love to see these sort of analysis videos!!! keep it up!

[@LEDs]

🤙

[@singleNim]

@@LEDs How about Borneo next? The gap between the wall and floor next to the third point is utterly egregious, it bothers me every time I play that map. Or Goldrush, so many little spots up on the walls where you can stand and shoot down from.

[@KperaOfficial]

when i saw a musical parody about dustbowl, i open tf2 just to play this map and on the second/third round my team built a spawn camp on the blu team. i still love this map

[@SirYodaJedi]

6:16 - You can the Clamp T flag in the VTF to clamp the vertical UV coordinates, avoiding the wrapping. (this should probably be done as a new VTF and VMT to avoid breaking a potential weird existing edge case where it's actually necessary to wrap the texture vertically) 10:52 - Ignoring surface normals when lighting static props results in pretty bad lighting; it's best reserved for stuff like foliage. Really, it wouldn't be too difficult to fix the model itself (although it would certainly take a little longer). 15:09 - VBSP has a CSG process; among other things, it decides which part of any coplanar faces should be kept, as long as it's the same bmodel. Worldspawn will automatically take priority over func_detail in such situations.

[@fantastikboom1094]

I love how you fixed the map, hope to see more. 6:48 That happens because textures are blurred to avoid being pixely. But textures also tile. Stack 2 tiles of same texture on each other and blur them to understand it more.

[@EpicParsnips]

We need this man working for Valve

[@bshap495]

15:06 I think what's happening is that when Hammer compiles the geometry, brush faces are chopped if they don't touch visleaves. So maybe when you have two z-fighting surfaces, only one is considered to touching a visleaf, so the other is chopped. In cases where there's still z-fighting, it may be because one brush is a func_detail, and the other is a world brush. Both brushes that are touching need to be the same thing in order for chopping to occur.

[@LEDs]

Thanks for clearing that up

[@Krzaczor34]

how are you not a valve map designer

[@PomsonGamingII]

doubt they need much soul for deadlock

[@Xesh]

I love this because it's also a tutorial for how to fix things in other maps! This is awesome dude

[@LEDs]

🙏

[@DrPeeper]

The problem with the grass overlay is that it's a combination of textures looping around edges and textures filtering. The game thinks that the bottom of the texture is adjacent to the upper part and filters the bottom to here, it's solved when you move it up because the game doesn't think that the upper pixels are adjacent to the bottom colored pixels and doesn't filter them as such Edit: to fix this issue press one of the "Clamp" checks in the vtf parameters(i forgot which one)

[@CustomsByOrangeH]

I never knew about the demoman being able to hide invisible stickies behind the Occluder brush on 3-1. I feel like thats something I would have seen everyone doing back in the day, and learned it just by observing, like the asshole sniper spot in koth_sawmill

[@crispx19]

Huh, this video was far better than i thought, going into a map and fixing those issues is like doing a old thing restoration, very satisfying.

10:52 ok, if enabling "ignore surface normals" fixes it the problem probably is that the higher detail model has flipped normals (normal is a direction that is perpendicular to the face of the surface) light shouldn't shine through face to its other side and that's why it would look dark

[@XradicalD]

I just love seeing map videos for TF2, it's always good to re-check the basics.

[@MrGermandeutsch]

I'm almost jealous I haven't made such a video myself. I'm genuinely impressed, well done and very informative!

[@LEDs]

Thanks!

[@vaughnrudy8084]

why do you know this

[@OffTheRailsUK]

"Cracks in the walls" Oh dear, it's Doctor Who series 5 all over again

[@JoeDejacque]

Great video! Would love to see this on the other classic maps like 2fort, Well and Gravel Pit

[@creeperwolffe3898]

this is very useful for a new mapper trying to wrap their head around textures and displacements!! thank you very much for making this :D

[@gonzalolog]

6:44 you have to use in your texture flags clamp v in order for it to not repeat vertically, it's one of those 3d engine shenanigans

[@UndeadAlex]

8:23 using the map leak, the model for the lower and upper door are 002 but in the model viewer you look at 001. for me 002 is still distorted in the model viewer, ingame and when ripped. but 001 and 003 are both fine, the reason why they dont use 001 is because its bigger incase anyone was wondering, Edit: the issue with the door_grate002_bottom model, is a uv issue where the UV's coords for the corner isnt stretched out as far so it causes that strange distortion

[@rosariobono438]

Please make more of these, they are so good

[@vencislavnikolovski9053]

keep it up dude! As a new TF2 mapper all this explanations are much needed! Subscribed

[@LEDs]

Thank you!!!

[@digitaltoaster4956]

New Team Fortress 2 Update: Summer Tidying. -Fixed a bunch of small errors in maps.

[@Stefano--]

Wow, this makes me appreciate the source engine more. I always thought those were just engine bugs, but actually you can fix most of them if you take an extra care. Thank you, great work.

[@toastietart]

i love how he points out some of the things that youd never find, even after years of playing keep up the good work!

[@LEDs]

❤️

[@uksz1]

Valve should offer you a job

[@penguinimptheinsane774]

I would gladly be bored by anything extra you'd have to talk about, this video was so fascinating and I loved learning about the little intricacies you've found. Any chance you'd consider breaking down more maps like this?

[@LEDs]

I'm happy you found this video interesting! I made it after building up a list of a bunch of problems I found over the last couple of years when working on stuff in the map. Unfortunately, there probably won't be a sequel featuring other maps, at least not anywhere near the extent as in this video

[@youriami9411]

more videos like this need more recognition, great video!

[@ward648]

I had this exact same line on the grass texture bug in Unity, it's probably caused by repeat-style sampling where UV 1.0 gets wrapped around to 0.0 You might think you could avoid any issues with that by just keeping one row of pixels at the bottom transparent but mip-maps ruin this again, so you need a fair amount of space at the bottom to prevent anything from bleeding trough.

[@TheSuper966]

Finally, it's beginning to look a lot like dustbowl

[@benedwards5317]

I think I speak for most when I say these issues make dustbowl completely unplayable.

[@remilia20xx78]

Fun video going into detail about the jank of one of the first maps I've ever played. Regarding those no-build sections at the end, I feel like they may have been onto something because there's a section in the last round of pl_goldrush where an engi can build a sentry in a window (or there was, I don't know if it was fixed) between the first and second points of that round. It's very hard to destroy from there too, so overkill is needed for these no-builds it seems.

[@Fatsaver]

Now make your 78 hour long video stating everything RIGHT about Dustbowl! 👌👌👌

[@TinyDeskEngineer]

The grass overlay's texture probably doesn't have vertical clamping enabled.

[@chips_lol9537]

Honestly you should do this with more maps, like wutville

[@000marioshi000]

Imagine your game being around so long that one of the small overlooked issues from back then can now be fixed with _AI_ Amazing vid, very interesting! I really wonder if, should the map be "fully" fixed, players would complain about the removal of clip brush gaps allowing them to stand in funny spots...

[@LEDs]

That's a good observation. "Fixing" the map would require some parts to be significantly altered, which could be perceived negatively. At the same time, though, some of the problems exist because of how the map was constructed, and cannot be fixed without changing the way it looks.

[@LerilayRelyable]

Guys, am I seeing things? In the middle of the video the map he's talking about began to look a lot like dustbowl. Sentries everywhere

[@LEDs]

you should get help, I recommend drinking the water on 2fort, that should fix you up 👍

[@commanderboom2626]

1:00 ah the lawful evil style of stair clipping

[@raubana]

That issue where the bottom of a texture appears at the top (or any other opposite side) happens because the textures are all looped, but this is made more apparent due to mipmaps. You will notice this effect more if you move the camera further away or view the texture from the side.

[@HaxxorElite]

Dustbowl is a map with zero flaws

[@stealthiestboy]

This is the kind of content we need more of. Subscribed.

[@LEDs]

❤️

[@whiskeywolfgang]

This man is really doing all of Valve's work for free.

[@krishnavandewalle9459]

The passion of this community is amazing. If only valve would let it run the game since they don’t seem to care anymore

[@Eeevonn]

6:16 the UV map for the grass texture has the grass going past the defined mapping of the UV which causes it to loop to the top.

[@HumbleBeeUK]

It'd be nice if valve had trusted creators fix things like these in existing maps, so they can just import the fixes like this.

[@clamdeity]

17 minutes of hammer tips disguised as a dustbowl video edit: thats the whole channel. i was wrong. this is exactly where i need to be

[@Vaniity_Velvet]

You know, I wonder... What if the minecarts moved? Like, one of Dustbowls biggest problems is it's a giant sightline with little cover. What if Blue (Or Red, I suppose. But, there aint much of a point behind it) could push the minecarts towards the points with the carts acting as mobile cover for them? Similar to how players sometimes treat the payload carts.

[@c0nk2879]

That could actually be a really fun gameplay dynamic, though I feel like the only way we'd get something that new is either with new maps or with Team Fortress 3 - Source 2: Electric Boogaloo

[@aur.31]

​@@c0nk2879 True, I'd love to see it

[@aur.31]

@@c0nk2879 True, I'd love to see it

[@jacksonw4132]

The damn dustbowl detective Great vid btw

[@blockwearingman]

1:10 these clip brushes are essential for trolldier

[@AkumaGaoru]

Those remnants of old exploits is interesting to see. Nice video!

[@0Blueaura]

reminds me of days making maps for these games, good times binge watching kliksphilips tutorials and learning them while going to elementary school.

[@toadboydude5015]

LED just dropped the hardest Dustbowl edit and thought we wouldn't notice

[@ChronoSquare]

oh wow 2:19 I literally just saw somebody get caught on that this past week if I have seen that spot being perched upon in the last 15 years I have no memory of it occurring

[@TheShadyShepardShow]

Itd be cool if you put this on the workshop so people could run community servers with the new and improved dustbowl

[@OsholitloTF2]

Valve, hire this man.

[@NeedsMoreBirds]

The grass overlay's bottom row of pixels winding up on the top probably has something to do with UV tiling.

[@sniper7303]

thanks a lot for making me notice every single little detail that valve was to lazy to fix very fun to watch though

[@1000kingconker]

I used to goof around on hammer and seeing someone really use it on tf2 maps makes me wanna get back into it you make it sound so easy XD

[@LEDs]

It can be easy depending on your level of experience. There's a lotta stuff that you need to know about just to get a map to compile, let alone be optimized

[@astrosthefox]

I’d love to see videos like this on other maps, idk why but this is just so interesting

[@demogaming8895]

I didn't even notice any of these, but now I definitely will. Dustbowl ruined...

[@ChampionOfDummies]

This content is pure LOVE 💕 THANK YOU SO MUCH!

[@Filippen]

What a great video man this makes me want to get into hammer again

[@CamC159]

The issue with the line texture is the wrap mode. I don't know how you would change the source engine equivalent of it. But in my experience with unity, you would usually set it to clamp since by default its set to repeat

[@steves5476]

6:50 you have to set the sampling mode of the texture to clamp (at least along vertical). I'm not sure how this is done in Hammer, though, but it is a feature in most 3D engines.

[@anguishedcarpet]

99% sure the issue with that overlay is a uv issue with whatever object it was being applied to

[@meltpack8876]

The bit with the overlays is caused by just how games sample textures. Some surfaces are set to repeat their textures, so that super thin line is an area where the texure is just repeating. dragging the grass up in the image would be the fix here

[@bukachell]

I believe the overlay error is caused by texture filtering. I've had this issue personally in 3D modelling, and if part of the UVs are too close to the edges of the texture, the texture filtering causes the bottom of the image to bleed into the top a little, creating those thin lines on the opposite side of the object, and the only fix is to keep around 2-4px at the edges of a texture clear for a decal

[@Konjo316]

Valve gets told what to do exactly to improve the quality of life in the game and still refuses to do shit about TF2.

[@disrupter8318]

You did not bore me this video was amazing and interesting

[@Redbr34]

6:17 you can just disable the texture lock, and scale the overlay down so it hides the line without actually stretching the texture

[@LEDs]

I tried, it didn't work

[@UndeadAlex]

8:11 oh boy i cant wait to comp the map and spend my time figuring this out

[@boneafide]

can’t wait for invisible stickies to show up in every dustbowl game for the next 2 weeks

[@spooky6408]

I'm surprised this video is not twice as long

[@retrolinkx]

My man ending the video with "I don't wanna bore you" when I just watched 17 minutes of how to fix Dustbowl and would gladly watch more.

[@LEDs]

❤️

[@evansgate]

and here I thought I was the only TF2 player who loved Dustbowl... pure obliviousness on my part

[@gtbpr_00]

the grass texture is most likely a "texture wrapping" issue. kinda like how if you expand a texture with repeat texture enabled... either the mesh/texture_box is off set, or the image was offset during the render

[@lukasrainbow8275]

Man your version of hammer sure is handy for all of those issues