For lighting it might be worth checking out this guide, it's a little out-dated -

https://shoresofnis.wordpress.com/guides/lighting-basics/

This has some stuff you might be interested in -

http://ericwa.github.io/tyrutils-ericw/

and this isn't for quake but you may find the general advice to be sound -

http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/wold-members-tutorials/magnar_jenssen/functional-lighting-magnar-jenssen.php


My own advice when lighting is concerned -

If you have a light (like a spotlight) then put a bright light near the source, like something that is light 300-400, but make the "wait" key 3 or 4. Then use a fill light. That is a light that is lower brightness, like 100-200, then use "wait" of a sub-decimal. Maybe 0.7 perhaps.

Doing the above gives you a nice bright light source but fills the room with a nice level of ambient light. You could even double up on the spotlight effect by having a bright light near the ground where it would hit.

You could try messing with the "delay" key, mappers like Sock tend to create fill lighting with a delay of 5, a wait of 2 and a light of 1000. This will ensure the light will fill an area nicely but wont look super bright due to the way delay works.

Another thing with lighting is shadows. Having the interplay of light and shadow is always good. Think about how you can obstruct a light in interesting ways to cast shadows with interesting shapes. It's not practical in a realism sense but Quake is a very abstract world.

Lighting takes practice, and I would say copying is the best way to achieve your goals. Try and emulate nice lighting scenes, look at other maps that have good lighting and emulate it. The key to making maps and getting good at it is making test maps. I guarantee that every mapper here has 5 times as many test maps than the amount they release.


That's lighting.

When balancing weapons and powerups I find you need to ensure that a player has to work hard to dominate. So make weapons spread out as much as possible. Some weapons you will need multiples of, like the super shotty and nail gun. This enables new spawn players to be able to arm up against players with the rocket launcher or lightning gun. Put powerful items in more dangerous places, this gives you a risk/reward scenario where taking risks net you a reward. Like putting a Quad in a tricky jump over lava, or a rocket launcher at the bottom of a central atrium (moving into an open area makes you a sitting duck but if you get the gun then you'll be powerful).
Put powerups in secret out-of-the-way areas.

I used to love making DM maps, getting the gameplay balance right takes a lot of thought. 

A nice little way of adding extra depth to your lighting is by adding -dirt to your light.exe command. It will add fake ambient occlusion and make corner areas darker. You may want to bump up the brightness a little to accommodate for this but you will find that scenes "pop out" a bit more and add extra depth. 

oh man I would love to see someone try to fit E4 into a mega-map, but I have no idea how anyone could go about it. My plan was to just stack the e2 maps and/or use them as different sides of the same giant structure in a swamp, calling it "The Tower of Black Magic." I'd love to win the lottery and dedicate 6 months or a year to that. But if you were picking E4, it's hard to say what the meta-environment would be; certainly not a swamp. Much of E4 is indoor without even a sense of any outdoors existing, which is part of why it's so strange. Maybe the meta-environment could be piles of dark stones, ancient ruins, or just void? What's "outside" The Tower of Despair? 

your tools are fucking amazing. texture alignment actually matches what is in radiant. surface lighting is going to make lighting maps so easy. thanks man. 

Where can I upload a beta of my map for some of you to test? 

I would suggest Quaketastic:
http://www.quaketastic.com/ 

i had started on something like that but at the time bsp2 wasn't common and it was well over standard extended limits... now though....

my plan had been to use the nameless city map as a hub and then glue the major parts of each map around it.

the nameless city would become a more outdoor area and you'd eventually be able to explore hills and such around between all the other maps. i never really got far with e4 (little more than taking the sky brushes off of it) but i do have an e2 which has a decent start but I got sidetracked with trying to do some weird base monster vs demons war thing which ended up being dumb :P 

Make a 6 megamap remake of id1. One of the levels becoming the hub / filler for all the others is cool as well. I wonder if it could be done removing all the end/start level teleports and using some sort of extended key system.

The RMQ map scraps have could be useful... just sayin. 

the big problem which made me stop completely on the e2 remix was there's not enough room in +/- 4096.

the way I wanted the e2 one was to have all the maps connected by terrain as if they were on giant world. you could explore each map separately in whatever order, but there were not gates that would stop you from finishing any one map without visiting at least another.

but yeah, you'd need at least +/- 8192 to really get it done nicely. 

Was this back when you were asking about building scenery beyond the limits? Seems to match up, although it was quite a while ago.

My approach would be to use the entire 4096�3 volume. So some of the e2 castles would become dungeons, and others maybe floating the the sky, Eyrie style.

Then again, it sounds like what you want is something more Dark Souls in terms of free roaming. Which makes me think of The Demon King...

But thats not a Ep2 remake :) 

The RMQ scraps wouldn't be much use considering the size restriction. Each individual map used most of the 4096 footprint. 

no, that was unrelated :)

i had planned to continue working on that goofy rpg mod i started, so i needed a huge map where you could spend time leveling up and such, have more difficult areas you might go back and visit later, that sort of thing.

now i hadn't considered converting some maps into dungeons... that's an interesting idea, but i still prefer the idea of a big sprawling map with canyons and rivers connecting everything together. 

If you could fit in all of E2M2-7 in with some trickery like ijed said, but there was no room left for the lost E2M6 entrance. 

http://imgur.com/a/nEUE4 <-- 4 shots

got to play with ericw's tools. only have 1 light entity now. pretty awesome makes changes so much faster. feels a little overbright but pretty happy with how it turned out. 

Noice. Make sure you slap a bit of AO on that gentleman too. 

foogs, kinn is right. If you're using ericw's fork of the compiling tools you can add -dirt to the command line. Or add it to the worldspawn. Either way it will add some extra depth to your scene by faking ambient occlusion. 

Yeah and you'll want to goon around with the various dirt settings. Here's a handy visual guide!

http://ericwa.github.io/tyrutils-ericw/ 

Moved a few items around and added an extra room after getting rid of the big ramp.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/94w8mbq7alssjy6/spz1dm1_14Oct15.rar

After this I vote I'll need some help lighting spz1dm2 

I like the addition of coloured lighting, looks nice. Map looks a lot better now. Still a few things I would clean up, some of the trims near the lava need to go all the way to the end of the platform edge for example.

But my quibbles would be minor at this point. 

i just realized i was doing lighting with gamma 0.5. no wonder why everything is so bright :(, But it's what I play with though :( So I guess I should do lighting with default gamma in quake? 

gamma should be 1 when mapping because that's the default. 

disagree, gamma should be used to make the stock ID levels look correct on your monitor, then you should make your levels similar to the brightness of the stock ID levels. 

 

Just had a look at the map and no idea how I missed that. Thanks for the heads up. 

The last time I asked for help with Screenies I was told to put it in the screenshot thread instead of Mapping Problems so here goes:

I have two different compilers on the PC: Txqbsp and Tyr_qbsp(renamed so that I could differentiate).
Both of them are giving me texture alignment issues (IE they don't match what I see in TB)

With Txqbsp this happens:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/spz1dm1_txqbsp.jpg

and with Tyr_qbsp this happens:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/spz1dm1_tyr_qbsp1.jpg

and generates 5 warnings:
"*** WARNING 12: New portal was clipped away in CutNodePortals_r
*** WARNING 12: New portal was clipped away in CutNodePortals_r
*** WARNING 10: Reached occupant at (-720 -688 294), no filling performed.
Leak file written to spz1dm1.pts
*** WARNING 22: Healing degenerate edge (0.000000) at (208.000 -1264.000 512.000
*** WARNING 22: Healing degenerate edge (0.000000) at (224.000 -1248.000 480.000"

leak being here (my teleport entity might be extending outside map, I'll check)
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/spz1dm1_tyr_qbsp2.jpg

1) Why? and...
2) What do?