The first (and perhaps largest) challenge we are faced with in recreating Hostile Waters is how to fit it all in. The game's islands reached incredible size, taking several minutes to cross even while piloting helicopters. Scaling the game world down is the obvious solution but there is a limit to how big a single brush can be (the required skybox in this case) before compile times rocket and the game crashes while trying to load it. We are looking at small scale maps - very small indeed. This itself presents problems. Although making the game behave right isn't one of them mapping on this scale is going to be very fiddly and quite restrictive. Take for instance the now-relevant size of a 'unit' - each object must rest on the usually tiny grid formed by these units and unfortunately with maps as small-scale as Hostile's they are quite noticeable.

Fortunately making islands is significantly different from making standard Source maps. They are, more or less, large displacements surrounded by a water brush with props running around on them plus the odd trigger to keep things moving; thus the apparent modeler overkill you can see on the Team page. Past the technical problems making maps is easy, and more importantly fun. Slap down some models and you've instantly got a working island to beat the Cabal down on.

But there's a very important stage I've missed out which is making the island's terrain, or displacement geometry. It's easy too but most certainly not fun: time consuming and (at least with this build of Hammer) frustrating are better words to describe it; another issue is that simply making one displacement for your island results in a spectacularly low number of manipulation points (for more information on displacement geometry, see the excellent Snark Pit tutorials).

The solution we have arrived at at this early stage is a tile system. A prefab 512x512 displacement with a high-detail texture that can be inserted as is required, resized to cover large, open, flat areas, and even be turned into an entity. We also hope to see the eventual expansion of the tile system into a fully-fledged tileset, with a large number of designs that along with the sew command can be used to easily and quickly build an acceptable map for a beginner or a first draft for a pro. For now, if there is anyone interested enough at this early stage, we have provided the prefab for download. For information on inserting prefabs, please see the Source SDK Documentation.