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Here is a beta of my AD remix of e1m3, it got a little messy but I did learn a lot about Quake 1 SP gameplay and mapping. I would love some feedback on this, I have put monster setups for all 3 difficulties.
Feedback on just about everything is appreciated -> layout problems, lighting, technical aspects with triggers/entities, gameplay aspects like balance of monsters/items. And of course bugs. Thanks! Link here -> https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4sO-9thmVw8bzVLTzFWZlBTNVk I have had a very quick bash and so far it looks decent enough. I died a couple of times and I will give some proper impressions when I can properly play it...
Is this your first map? Looks nice :-) More boxes of ammunition, please. For players like me who save bad ammo.
Yea first q1 map, I've done small maps for Q2 before 1500-2000 brush limit (quark + q2 does not mix well). So the extended limits/engine is a little bit overwhelming at this point :)
More ammo yes, demos would be very helpful First demo: First run...dying at SNG trap
Second demo: Completed on Skill 1 with 3/5 secrets. https://www.dropbox.com/s/bxhkboqxtzsam1y/mjb_gift.7z?dl=0 First off let me say this is beyond impressive. This is how a remix map should be. It felt like an entirely new swampy dungeon map but sometimes I would say to myself: "Hey, this reminds me of the necropolis!" Visuals are fantastic, sound, atmosphere...just all great. I personally did not see glaring visual or sound issues...top notch! -Got stuck on a slope near the start where some shells are located...you will see in the demo. There is a sound load error (wood13?) in the demo as well. - SNG trap is FAR too quick to punish, that needs to be twice as slow in my opinion...even when I knew where the button was I almost died! -Ammo is a bit scarce at the start and I though I was being pretty gracious with the use of the ax. I found the overall difficulty on skill 1 to be quite challenging...could have passed for a skill 2 in my opinion. honestly, that's all of the issues I could see...although I am not sure what the ring key did...wonder if I missed a super secret! -Make the exit teleport a func_illusionary so Ranger doesn't start swimming before he exits. ;) -Be sure to add some neat info_intermission spots...AD can have more than one and can be cycled through! + That dark choir sound...is that from Duke Nukem? It sounds so familiar. + Lovely lighting, use of breakables are well implemented and inter-connectivity is full-fledged. I got a bit lost but I always ended up where I needed to be. +Like the secrets, missed two and I wonder how to reach that circular pool behind the bars! This makes me motivated that I have a LOT to learn when it comes to making maps. The amount of polish of this beta is outstanding in my opinion. Good job and looking forward to the release! Sorry, forgot to mention one more thing:
Developer 1 on console will show any little errors that may be present. windgust5.wav is not a looping sound. Sometimes got a message that the particle limit of 1024 was too low...could be because I was noclipping. That circular pool is where I was before...so scratch that. ;) This map is *A*W*E*S*O*M*E* !
My only complain, is the darkchoir.wav sound which I didn't even noticed in the game. Maybe it should be louder ? Here is a beta of my AD remix of e1m3
Wow! that is an amazing looking map, such crazy cool details everywhere. My feedback is part of the MFX mail, I think! :D BTW, please remix E1M4 as well!?! :D 5 tries and still didn't finish it.
Ammo is scarce as already mentioned. I think you shouldn't rely on people finding everything hidden behind breakables. Half of the times I couldn't see what I'm shooting at. Dark corners was shooting me, so I shot back. There was some clip brush (I guess) between some platform and a wall, that made it look like I'm walking on air. Can't describe the place, but it is in the demo. Difficulty felt quite hard. Don't have anything else atm. Going to wait for the next version, so I could still have a first run of the rest of the map. Here is my demos. Hope it helps. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3li06myS1r1ZDYtWnhKR3pwbTA Thank you so much for all the feedback, I have a pile of demos to review now. Although just by reading the comments I can tell the map is way too hard.
That is the problem of playtesting solo since you know everything, "oh this isn't so bad you just pick up these 2 secrets, avoid that shambler and go here!" Bloughsburgh I don't know where the darkchoir.wav is originally from, I picked it up from a Q2 map. It says volume is capped at "1", can I make it go louder somehow? I think, as you mention, a clear path is needed with the required weaponry and items to complete the map on skill 1. Then skill 2 can be the extra challenge. sock, yes the feedback is in the mail, and man e1m4 is such a great map.. don't get me started, my wife will divorce me :) Will start going through demos now, thanks to all of you, I'm looking carefully at your feedback. Got an error message while loading the map: Mod_LoadBrushModel maps/ad_e1m3.bsp has wrong version number (844124994 should be 29)
I am sad.... :( The final boss room don't allow exploration of the rest of the map. I suggest a simple hole bellow the final elevator to return back.
Ah, ok... will give it a try later... Thanks for the help ;)
And to concur with negke, would be better to make it a bsp map as far as possible :) Got it, switched back to normal bsp. On another note, a weird problem with colored lighting have occurred. I used this light setup in worldspawn:
Light Setup _sunlight 200 _sunlight_color 180 255 190 _sunlight_mangle 250 -28 0 _sunlight_penumbra 8 _sunlight_dirt 1 _sunlight2 50 _sunlight2_color 180 255 190 _sunlight2_dirt 1 _dirt 1 _dirtscale 1.5 _dirtgain 1.3 _dirtdepth 192 _minlight_dirt 1 Then to add some color to windows for a "glowing" effect I added yellow colored light, like _color 0.9 0.9 0.2 on a light entity But then the light entity emits darkness instead (no negative light value). It works fine with default color though? You should be consistent in using color values either between 0.0 to 1.0 or 0 to 255.
Try _color 230 230 51 instead. Not sure what is standard, but I think the compiler tries to auto detect what you intend, and probably got it wrong here. In a fgd file this is the difference between using (color) or (color255) on the key def. So it's still compatible we should change the default skin to a more "armoured" look so people can tell they take more damage than the dguard. But you can have a "dguard" variant that is weaker? Maybe just have a spawnflag setting?
Ah, that's from Severance: Blade of Darkness!
I knew it sounded familiar haha. Works well with the skull wizards and wraiths. Ah, that's from Severance: Blade of Darkness!
I played that game to death! loved it! pre-darksouls mechanics, crazy hard in places. I even made levels for it as the editing tools were released and easy to use. Checkout the lead artist website if you want some BoD style textures! Wow, that is pretty awesome. I could see The Island of Karum fitting the Quake universe quite well with its dismal fog and dark tones.
Took me two goes to get "into" the game, the first go ended up with the game CD in several pieces. Once I got into it it was great - the combat was very satisfying once you pulled it off, and guess what it was controllable with any config you wanted, obvi-fucking-ously. Also had great lighting for the time.
Also took a few attempts to get into the game as Sargon: the Knight. First run through was pretty bad and never took advantage of the combos (Lovely red swirls of death!). Second play was with the Tukrum:(sp) The Barbarian and fully utilized his ridiculously sized weapon's combos.
I even did a Let's Play of it because I wanted to share the passion that I found from the game's design. I recalled using that Dark Choir sound for an intro of one of the levels and sure enough I found it! Anyone got any screenshots of AD maps with phong shading added?? I reckon it would go real nice with all the other modern Quake effects....
I take it phong is a global switch? Can you override phong settings on a per func_ basis?
I did the shading on a func_group basis, idk yet if it works from worldspawn.
Gonna try this now. your bot should try making hyperlinks with <a> tags! And bundle multiple links in a single post :)
Love the func_bobs on the outskirts...really nice subtle details like that are the ones I appreciate the most!
My trigger_once brushes are sometimes slow/sluggish/not firing when walking through them. If they don't fire, I walk back and through them again and then they go. Sometimes! What could this be?
I use QuArk map editor, if that's of any relevance :) That's an odd one.
Is it any trigger_once brushes or a certain few. If it is all of the once brushes behaving this way, I'd look towards QuArk having some strange nuance. If it is just a few brushes, then try deleting and recreating...or moving the pesky brushes to a new room and test there. Remove the "angle" key from your trigger_once and _multiples, or set it to 0.
Bug in quarks conversion tools adds "angle" 360 as default. Needs a sourceport which supports colored lightings and skyboxes (not implemented yet but there will be) + darkplaces files included.
Since this is a mod, extract the What needs to be done: fix fullbright pixels on some textures + skybox. http://www.mediafire.com/download/kxhaw2l9nn9ft6t/schlossherr.zip A different feeling Quake map with some fun new weapons and monsters.
Skill 2, 3/4 secrets: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ly2yx4u24614xnz/mjb_port2.zip?dl=0 Very enjoyable map with good flow and a nice nighttime atmosphere. Secrets were well placed and some lead to new areas as opposed to just a quick item cache. Liked all of the glass window views and little mechanical touches like trains and rotating doors. If escape from your cell was your last map, then this sets the bar high for you! :) Couple of water brush clipping out of where it should be contained...I point it out in the demo. Square lighting has dark rigid square shadows. Perhaps moving the light a bit away from the source would help. Keep a high wait value close as a source of brightness but then make the actual fill light lower. I point it out numerous times in the map ;) Played on hard, difficulty was rather easy but very enjoyable none the less. Certainly wouldn't be a breeze for beginners! Start map was nice, NM difficulty was nicely tucked away and I liked the level transition. Looking forward to where this "train" takes us! Barnak, maybe this is because I accidentally added a config file inside the
Bloughsburgh, I'm happy with your input. That BFG bug is intriguing. I think it's because both the MegaHealth and the BFG use the same item slot. I have to look into that. config file no more + added a proper skybox as well as fixing the odd waterbrushes
skill 2, 2 secrets
I didn't like sound design that much, but gameplay is quite nice. Map left me wanting more. Imho rooftops are just asking to have some action there. Oh and atm it is possible to get stuck in quad exit door. Demo included. I think you can prevent this by adding clips to the sides of quad shaft. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3li06myS1r1NmJIc3JCVTVhczA *Fullbright pixels begone for dmc.wad
*Did clip brushes for windtunnels to better orient the player *Pushed maximum nail ammo to 250 *Added scrags on the bridge parts, keep the dogs for easy mode *Getting the BFG while picking up MegaHealth has been fixed http://www.mediafire.com/download/kxhaw2l9nn9ft6t/schlossherr.zip I'm not sure if fullbrights fixed in dmc.wad supposed to mean that there should be none of those anymore or one wad is fixed and few more to go.
I can still get stuck in quad door. Was a bit tricky to find it since my previous method doesn't work in this version. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3li06myS1r1ZFJ2Rko1NC01d0U Pushing player farther or closing door earlier might solve it I guess. Found gate#8 this time. *This time, no more fullbright pixels (I admit I got lazy here, only got dmc.wad but that's because TexMex's remove fullbright feature is wonky so I had to edit textures myself)
*Didn't notice this, but going to the belltower secret before going through the rotating doors make going back to the lighthouse a chore, so I added a trigger up there to open the gates if they aren't. Door seems to be dw-proof now.
Found few fullbrights and one z-fight. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3li06myS1r1Y0pxRC1KamZ2bUk Sorry, last time I started my search after finishing the map, while all doors were open and missed these
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3li06myS1r1ZWU4bzJfME5tWmM Aside from that I think you are good to go. Link for those who don't want to search in the thread
http://www.mediafire.com/download/kxhaw2l9nn9ft6t/schlossherr.zip Keep it up, also good work on the new guns. Especially the BFG, it's probably the best version of the gun I have seen in Quake.
The BFG's unfinished though. Not only did I not put in ammo consumption (I plan for 30 cells per shot), I need to make the initial impact sprite appear (which doesn't even though I literally took the original explosion code alongside doom's sprites, I can't find a solution to this, same goes to the Rocketman's rocket explosion sprites which doesn't appear even though it's the same explosion code as vanilla) and as for the sphere going through gibbing enemies, I have to find a way to destroy the initial projectile and make a new one while still using the first projectile's speed and angle (I have no idea how to do this).
I plan on adding a weapon similar to Daikatana's Shotcycler (but with more power to it, think actual 6 consecutive SSG shots) as well as adding a Berserk powerup (that will add a lot of IF in the code...) But since I'm using hipnotic's source code tacked on, nicely placed weapon HUD won't be a thing, since Preach told me I can't add nor change HUD elements, only modify the icons. A shame. I could've at least make an Infantry Gun, Gatling Gun and BFG9500 weapon icons if I used rogue's sourcecode, but I guess that's too late now. "You only have three options as to how the HUD works. You can have the HUD like it is in vanilla, or the HUD from mission pack one, or the HUD from mission pack two. You can customise the icons themselves, but there is no way of rearranging them or adding more than what the mission packs have. The mission packs got special customisations to the engine code before the source was released, it's not something the QC gives you any ability to change. "
Something like Darkplaces would overcome it I think, or hell, a port to a new engine to really break engine limits (which would mean no more bit slots and modifiable HUD).
But I want Schlossherr to be compatible with the most clients possible (yeah there's colored lighting and skyboxes but whatevs), so rendering it DP-only is a no-no to me. fourth method:
csqc can change huds however it wants. obviously this requires people to use an engine that isn't basically crippleware. fifth method: either svc_showlmp or tei_showlmp extensions. while limited and a real pain to use (on account of not knowing the user's screen size, these can provide simple additions that are usable from ssqc. oh noes! an extension! I shall surely burn in hell for suggesting that! sixth method: make a guess at the user's video resolution and spam centerprints at them, with enough new line chars that the visible text appears just above their hud. this one truely is evil. and hacky on account of not knowing their resolution, and can't do images. But hey, if your user doesn't want to give you any possibilities of using extensions, they'll be the ones to suffer by having to explicitly tell the ssqc what resolution they're using so that the mod can waste enough of their bandwidth with new lines to put the text in the right place. seventh method: directly hack an engine so that your mod stops working correctly as soon as the user tries to use an engine version which doesn't crash on the next limit-breaking map or whatever. yay hacks. I could try csqc but that thing's barely documented and is DP exclusive. Where can I get that/those extensions?
DP exclusive
no offsense, but that's bullshit. FTE's implementation is much more versatile. And if you want something more like quakespasm (and by that, I mean crippleware) then RMQe's implementation is sufficient for most huds. which part of http://triptohell.info/moodles/fteqcc/csqcsysdefs.qc do you believe to be poorly documented? Imho its better documented than vanilla ssqc was (but then I'm biased as I wrote that stuff and thus understand it perfectly). Yes it is also more versatile/complex than vanilla ssqc and thus does kinda need more docs, you can't win them all. That said, if 'use the source' worked for carmack, then I'm going to be lazy too... :P I'd be nice to add better/more complete descriptions to it, but I'm a) lazy. b) terrible at explaining things without getting annoyed at how verbose you need to be to fully explain things, and how fully explaining things does NOT aid with idiot-proofing at all and it being those people who actually need it to be fully explained. What can I say? Mutual exclusions annoy me. Anyway, once you know the name of something, you can generally search insideqc.com's forums and get further info that way, and I'd like to think that most of it is fairly self explanitory once you know that the builtin exists. If you still have any problems, post about them (ideally on insideqc) and in that way the available 'documentation' will hopefully improve enough to help someone else, even if you yourself are defeated by it. here's my old poopy hud code: https://sourceforge.net/p/fteqw/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/quakec/csqctest/src/cs/hud.qc?format=raw you need some CSQC_RenderView function that called clearscene();setviewprop(VF_ENGINESBAR, FALSE);addentities(3); renderscene();Hud_Draw(...); and you should have something that looks somewhat like vanilla but is fully defined by qc. I'm sure you can find nicer examples out there if you look. basically, use getstatf to read the various STAT_* values (clientstat in ssqc to define custom ones starting at 32+), then call drawpic, drawfill, drawstring accordingly to throw it all at the screen. DP requires some other functions, which you can provide stubs for easily enough. RMQe is a bit more basic in that its qcvm requires a very specific defs layout, and has multiple omissions. Additionally, here's my attempt to repeatedly insult anyone who complains that csqc is poorly documented: https://sourceforge.net/p/fteqw/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/specs/csqc_for_idiots.txt?format=raw - once you have a basic understanding of the various concepts, the entire thing becomes much more aproachable. if you want nehahra's svc_showlmp, then: WriteByte(MSG_ONE, 35); WriteString(MSG_ONE, "slotidentifier"); //just a name/id, not visible to the user in any way. WriteString(MSG_ONE, "gfx/foo.lmp"); //the image to display WriteByte(MSG_ONE, xcoord); //might be a short in one of dp's other protocols, good luck guessing what it'll expect. nehahra used bytes. WriteByte(MSG_ONE, ycoord); //yes, this means that the image is probably limited to the top left of the screen. you have no idea how big the screen is either, so that's probably for the best. you can then move/replace it by using the same series of writes. To remove it completely: WriteByte(MSG_ONE, 36); WriteString(MSG_ONE, "slotidentifier"); note that while the extension is called 'showlmp', engines will probably also support tgas too, but they *might* still depend on the lmp to determine the proper image size (hurrah for the lack of width+height args). Or they might just display your high-res image at a really really high resolution... yay engine-specific behaviour. this particular extension should exist in nehahra (of course), dp, markv, and fte. you can find documentation for tei_showlmp2 in http://triptohell.info/moodles/fteqcc/fteextensions.qc but there's no real descriptions. this extension came from telejano, hence the prefix. there's a bit more functionality to it, in that it has a 'zone' argument, so you're no longer limited to only the top left of the screen, and you no longer have to guess the screen size. the coords can be a bit weird though, as tei opted to require 8000 to be added or something like that rather than use signed offsets. its also utilised via builtins rather than having to guess whether the current network protocol is using shorts or bytes. however, it only exists in fte+telejano, and its been years since I heard anyone else even mention telejano. shame really, but oh well. as the original showlmp works in fte anyway, you're probably best focusing on that prior extension and only using this extended extension if there's a compelling need for something that'll only work in only one current engine. looks like I wrote another essay... meh, screw proof reading. My mistake on believing it was DP only.
Though while it looks interesting, I don't really understand how it works, nor its functions. I guess I should've said instead of lacking documentations, more like it lacks tutorials, since I don't see many people use it that much, so I don't really get what does what. Still, I'd like to know more about CSQC. Maybe after working on that HUD stuff I could see if I can move the weapon viewmodel around the screen, like nQuake did (though purely for cosmetic reasons, sometimes I like me some side weaponmodel, better if I can switch that on while looking at demos). when you start using extensions - any extension - you can find yourself tempted to use just one more... CSQC's versatility makes this so very tempting.
There really is no harm with just making a hud and stopping there. I keep thinking that I ought to write a patch for quakespasm or markv to provide hud-only csqc support, except that I'd probably end up overcomplicating it or something, plus I've got enough other stuff demanding my attention. Here's a fixed start.bsp derived from the vanilla GPL release:
Download I've fixed all the texture misalignments that annoyed me, plus some brushwork. Also added _dirt -1 to some light entities and compiled it with -dirtscale 1.25 and lit liquids. fixed textures can make all the difference in the world. thank you mankrip. misaligned textures in original q1 are terrible with hd textures.
- jakub I've modified some things in the chiaroscuro lighting, because the models were getting too bloody dark when they shouldn't: Explore or Die - map gameplay.
I've died in a humiliating way in that video, but the video as a whole was nice to watch so I've not re-recorded it. A really cool map, one of my favourites. The video looks really dark on my screen, maybe try a YT filter or brighten it up with Video Editing Software like Windows Movie Maker.
I'll re-record it with a higher gamma setting in the game. It looks really good when playing, but YouTube compression is really bad on dark areas.
I'll try to find out a good balance between dark areas and YouTube compression; one of my goals with these videos is to learn how to make the game look better on YouTube videos. Video compression is really bad for a visual style built around per-pixel grainyness. On a side note, it's curious how this video didn't suffer from the same hiccups of the previous ones. I don't know if playing a heavily colored-lit map in an engine that doesn't yet support them was the best idea.
For the purpose of testing the image fidelity between the engine and YouTube, that's enough.
Right now I'm focusing on gamecode, there's a lot to do. Looking good, but I think you should stick to the skybox you used in your original map, it suits the textureset better than moorise.
Hi guys,
Just thought I'd announce that I uploaded a small project I'm dubbing BloodQuake to the quaketastic ftp upload site. You can download it here. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/bloodquake/bqalpha.zip It's playable, but buggy as hell. I'm mostly uploading it here for safe keeping, but I'm open to any feedback you'd like to give. It comes with one custom level I made (not the same version which was reviewed on quaddicted.com) and comes with a bunch of new monster models, weapons and items. I'm including the source code for anyone who wants to tamper with it. I'm terrible at coding, and so I credited a lot of the code I'm using from other sources (like the X-Men ROA code, which has been drastically modified) There's still plenty of junk to clean up in the code and gameplay, but I thought I'd upload it to make sure I wouldn't lose it. Thanks. Good idea, Daz.
Love your YouTube vids. Here are some pics. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/bloodquake/bloodquake20160531201021-00.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/bloodquake/bloodquake20160531201046-00.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/bloodquake/bloodquake20160531201145-00.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/bloodquake/bloodquake20160531201233-00.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/bloodquake/bloodquake20160531201308-00.jpg I just tried to load the mod in Mark_V and I got a crash to desktop error. "Bad FOV 180"
I tried in Quakespasm and I got a crash to desktop error saying that "progs/cyborg.mdl is missing". I'll go back and debug it as much as I can in order to have it run on other engines.
Thank you all for the feedback! I tried this out last week in darkplaces and encountered several visual bugs and a ton of console spam. I've been meaning to tinker with it and try it in other engines.
I dig the project and am looking forward to the debug! I'm in the process of making my first map, and could use some advice especially with regard to texture choice, lighting, etc. It is meant to be dark.
http://s33.postimg.org/91n9tf8kt/quakespasm_sdl2_2016_06_01_13_03_14_83.png http://s33.postimg.org/5pvwq9ve5/quakespasm_sdl2_2016_06_01_13_04_20_83.png http://s33.postimg.org/qpx58zk8d/quakespasm_sdl2_2016_06_01_13_03_31_97.png http://s33.postimg.org/o1h1qxgrx/quakespasm_sdl2_2016_06_01_13_04_07_22.png http://s33.postimg.org/rfna7c3sd/quakespasm_sdl2_2016_06_01_13_04_45_35.png http://s33.postimg.org/5tiu3wyst/quakespasm_sdl2_2016_06_01_13_04_33_45.png You use the floor textures as walls and ceilings rather freely, nothing particularly wrong with that, but it did make me think that this is another map like "the fly" from 1997 by Markus Klar.
For now, I'd say you should focus on texture alignment rather than choice, quite a few of little pesky errors in the metalwork from the last shot. Looks like a vertical and multi-level map so far, keep the Z-axis going! First map process, that is some pretty decent lighting and the textures are not too shabby either. It is a bit mish mashy with the textures so I would work on making things a bit more consistence. Looks like a pretty foreboding map!
Keep it going! Damn, it's been a while I passed through here, and I never posted before, but these screenshots are looking mighty fine. Makes me want to make a Quake map soon :P
Thanks for the tips y'all. I can see the misalignments otp was talking about it, and I've found more elsewhere in the map. As for the wall/ceiling textures, I kind of just stuck those on there based on the color palette I was going for without much regard to what they're normally used for in Quake. I had initially used a different wall texture (from ogro.wad) but decided it didn't look good in-game, plus some of those textures have nasty fullbrights. I'll have to experiment a bit with different wall textures.
My all time favorite Quake theme takes the floor and uses it as the wall and the ceiling as the floor, it's great. Limbo map from the first mispack, h2m5 or 6 I think.
So don't worry about it. Your skeleton textures seem out of place though. I'll think about it... honestly the textures just look like brick to me, I don't really register them as floors even after it's been pointed out.
while the roots had their issues they looked evil which went well with Quake. This ones need more work on it to look like rocks (too geometrical i guess), right now they look like leaf barnacles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollicipes_pollicipes or like quartz crystals.
The original dark meat tendrils looked interesting and unique.
All this design-by-committee stuff is just watering it down to something bland. There's doing something new to break a pattern, and there's a detail sticking out like a sore thumb, which the meaty parts did.
I prefer the rocks much more than roots. partially though because the white bricks just ended instead of kind of crumbling into the roots.. regardless I think I prefer rocks.
I also want new screenshots from Kinn. And from Than. Maybe an entangled oldone root would like good.
I made a static of three oldones to obtain a pool of slime. And also I want more selfies from the Oldone. And from Pulsar. And from Drew. And from Than. One third down, two ore sections to go. Still some fullbright pixels to fix though. Also first ever medieval map I'm making (even though there's some tech buildings).
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651327-schlossherr20160611151446-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651332-schlossherr20160611151454-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651334-schlossherr20160611151509-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651330-schlossherr20160611151525-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651336-schlossherr20160611151555-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651334-schlossherr20160611151633-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651340-schlossherr20160611151718-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651339-schlossherr20160611151746-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651339-schlossherr20160611151837-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/23/1465651341-schlossherr20160611151917-00.jpg Great shots Daya, they make me feel souls of evil! A bit weird by the fluorblue, but I guess that is mapper's own right.
Sure pronounce the dark atmospheric effeckt. Sixth shot is really good. https://twitter.com/VoiceOvNephilim/status/741567623238799361
Coming soonish with the next AD update. Rockwork is better...makes me think some enormous arcane force has levitated the structure, foundations and all.
also trying to figure out how to make a proper gif. these are ~2.3mb, so that kinda sucks... need to work on that.
water & caustics energy (Disclaimer: I am a Quakespasm user, with gl_nearest and square particles. My only real sin is that I don't turn model interpolation off).
It's not that hard to make DarkPlaces look fairly vanilla. Even the default settings in a fresh installation aren't that bad; once you've changed filtering to gl_nearest (which one would have to do in most engines anyway, I guess?) and turned off the blood stain effect, you're not that far from a vanilla aesthetic. Most of the garish bells and whistles aren't enabled by default. This is what a default DP installation looks like where I've only changed gl_texturemode to gl_nearest_mipmap_linear" and adjusted the resolution to my monitor's; nothing else. And using DP doesn't mean you're automatically using "high res" replacement content. Every instance where I've seen DP look "bad" (from an old-school purist point of view), it's been where the user has enabled all the optional extras and used replacement content. I know it's possible to make Darkplaces not look completely offensive, but I've never actually seen anyone go ahead and do it...until now I guess.
DP supports basic (single stage) q3 shaders, that's what you're seeing.
The engine isn't perfect, I have my own short list of bug fixes and feature additions, but I never quite understood the hate it receives. Given that it's free and fairly easy to use I'm inclined to appreciate its existence :P Same goes for FTE. Cool/pretty shit has been made DP (xonotic, steelstorm, etc.) However, DP is more of a developers/hobbyists engine than a quake players engine IMO. An update on my 8-bit color software renderer:
This is what 8-bit textures made with Floyd-Steinberg dithering look like. And this is my approach, using the same texture resolution as the above picture. Usual dithering algorithms for creating 8-bit images works per-texel, which is bad for scaling the texels afterwards; the intended color definition gets lost. My algorithm compiles the textures in a format that allows for per-pixel color definition at any texel scale. And this is an example of the texture quality I'm going to use in my game. The palette isn't final, that skybox wasn't made by me, and I'm still going to implement better support for TGAs with 8-bit alpha channels, so some things should improve. Shambler - shhhh. It's a journey of discovery to learn, pixel-by-pixel, why graphics cards were invented.
I don't even understand what you're doing....but I want to.
Oh okay comparing the two same images side by side, yours looks a lot better. Why do they both show a fine grainyiness that one presumably doesn't see in game? Why do they both show a fine grainyiness that one presumably doesn't see in game?
It is seen in the game. The first one has 8-bit textures quantized with Floyd-Steinberg dithering, plus 4-step lighting dithering (including color correction and brightness correction), which is combined in real time with the texture. The texture in it is mapped using a hi-res kernel with 16 levels of dithering, like the one in PrBoom (but smoother). The combined T&L kernels can smooth texture detail up to 32 levels, which is higher than any software renderer I know of. Some people like to compare my dithering to the dithering in the software renderer of Unreal and UT99, but those games uses a 4-level kernel, which is much less smooth. The second screenshot was rendered using the same techniques, but instead of using 8-bit textures quantized with Floyd-Steinberg dithering, it's using 32-bit TGAs compiled into the 8-bit data format I've created. It's all rendered in real time, in 256 colors. Take a look at the palette of those screenshots. Of course, the engine has cvars for disabling most of those effects. Color & brightness correction can't be disabled yet, because it requires significant changes in the code, and to disable it I'll have to implement a secondary codepath that works in the old way. Concept Map - The Bridge Crane
Music by Devastus and cool cameras by QMM 1.7! Ever since 8 bit graphics became obsolete graphics manipulation programs have lost their dithering options. I remember having numerous different colour reduction options available to me. I remember being able to mark a certain region(s) and prioritising the colours in that region over the others.
Your work reminds me of those days. Thanks. The main purpose of this is to make texture creation easier, because I'm not a very good artist.
http://stainless-software.com/quake/horror-nailgun.jpg
Beta tester wanted - mostly to make sure I've packaged this right, it's been ages. Apply within. Or below. Or something. I Remember That On Q3w, that was some sort of demo map only no?
Yes, it was just a concept map I made years ago which I recently installed again. I thought it would be cool to create a video of it and learn some new camera stuff at the same time! This is the version I hope to release for QExpo, should everything turn out to be bugfree.
Dropbox link: https://db.tt/vvXGPDnv Yes, I finally worked out how to compile the thing for windows too. Here are two wood textures I made. I think I probably wasted a Saturday morning because I don't like them much. Better than wizwood1_8 maybe but they don't look enough like wood to me. The closer you are, the worse they look.
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/wish_rk_wood1.jpg (gamma corrected but forgot to rescale before uploading, sorry) Looks ok Rick. I think it may be a good idea to work at a higher res than 64x64. Try 128x128 and add some more variance here and there.
Well, those are 128x256 actually. I may go ahead and use them. For some reason though, they really look bad on steps. Maybe a separate version with narrower planks would look better, 8 pixels instead of 16 pixels.
After looking through a lot of texture wads I've decided that most wood textures depend heavily on context (how they are used). If not for the seams that divide them into planks and a bit of curviness to the pixels, most could pass for metal. There are many variations of wood in the RTCW and Kingpin wads. nice texture, maybe adding more variance as fifth said might make it nicer.
Maybe try making each board a different length so it's no perfectly symmetrical. Perhaps add more woodgrain to reinforce the idea that it's wood and not metal or stone. I did a texture test similar to this a few weeks ago, this is my result. Not great, but a step in the right direction. Maybe it will give you some ideas. 32-bit mipmaps, 8-bit alpha and external glow textures
No gamma correction yet. When can we download this awesome kripquake or mankuake build of yours mankrip, whatever it is you call it? ;)
I've modified the stippling patterns for 8-bit alpha, so they combine better with dithered filtering: screenshot.
The previous screenshots of this scene were taken with r_fullbright 1, by the way. Qmaster: I have no idea, there's a lot to do. Also, right now I'm only doing some work in this engine because I'm recovering from some injuries, but my current priority is to solve some real life problems. Yeah, I noticed the post about the release right after asking that question... Thanks anyway, Shambler. Not too fond of base theme but that doesn't mean the maps can't be great: Crucial Error is the perfect example, and the pictures look very nice indeed.
Hi.
Here is direct link to current test version: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwxYkKdSD855TUFHRTVTRHZRd3c Requires quoth mod, yet better to replace the ones that are in, if that is possible (I'm not familiar with this stuff yet). Jam7: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61347&start=44 or Quoth: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/quoth.html I tweaked balancing, ammunition (feeding player more), and fixing trigger_counter mistake I made - now easy mode works, but it would be great to hear from others too. You can record or just tell how does it feels now. I have to say, because there is only 3 main skill levels I want to satisfy even skillful players. So I'm not quite sure am I giving too much ammunition or not, so let me know and I will try my best. Also if the map is still too dark, just let me know. As long as the darkness doesn't make the map unplayable - I intended my map to be dark that player can't see everything and enemies can hide in darkness (sometimes). Fixed one flickering light I placed in place, doors don't block lights, and light comes through on ground level if you know what I mean. So it that bothers here is same test version without that flickering light thing:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855TWJ2cV9nYUdiRDA/view?usp=sharing Just played your new version. Lighting looks great! I'm seeing so more much detail in your brush work that I missed before. There are a lot of Mega Healths out in the open on Normal difficulty I'd replace those with just regular health. Loved the new ambushes.
Screenshot - This method has near zero impact on the framerate. Still needs some tweaking.
And I've been really missing out on the newest releases. The Back To Base jam looks sweet. how different is this going to be from super8? and linux binaries / source? (I may have asked the latter question before)
This is what 8-bit color translucency usually looks like. As explained in some previous posts, the scene in this screenshot is a worst case scenario.
Now, the same scene with brightness-correct & color-correct lighting, color-correct & gamma-correct translucency, gamma-correct per-pixel dithered quantization on mipmaps, and soft-depth transparency on blended liquids (the "glass" in this map actually uses a flat-colored liquid texture, which is why it's also rendered with soft-depth transparency). Gamma correction on color blending makes the resulting image more smooth and colorful, avoiding saturation losses across different hues. This is actual gamma correction, based on the gamma scaling techniques implemented on computer monitor hardware. Here's a practical explanation. This was how it looked without gamma correction. The colors were more dull (as in the example from the link above), and less smooth (as can be seen in the wall at the right side of the image). Does Quakespasm support translucent_gamma? Those windows looks much better with that on.
Though I'm a bit confused because:
correction_5_translucent_gamma.png has much cleaner window frame look kind of, but in correction_3_translucent_on.png you can see color of water better.. is it even bit higher. Does that map has blue fog or something, because window clearly wants to color everything blue that is behind it? Thanks for the heads up. I've investigated this, and found out that the pre-gamma screenshots were taken with the slime alpha set to a different value.
This screenshot was taken back then with the glass fully transparent. Now I've used it to adjust the alpha value for the slime, and found out that the value was 0.6. The slime alone is a little less greener now due to gamma correction preserving more of the background hue, which is mostly brown. With a slime alpha of 0.6 and soft depth disabled, this is a more accurate screenshot for comparison. By the way, this made me notice that the shape of the slime texture is also preserved a lot better now. And Retroquad doesn't support fog. I've thought a lot about fog rendering, and still can't confirm if I'll try to implement it. My second map for Quake (first was a quick, minute long map I have no intention of releasing...), thinking of uploading a beta version in the future to see if the gameplay is okay.
imgur album I can't believe I've been working on this since ~July... Thanks, glad to have such a positive response already. The texture work is a huge time sink, finding the right look and breaking up brushes to make them fit properly is a large part of why it's taken me so long to get this far. But the more I do it, the better I get at it, with better results and efficiency.
A lot of these screenshots are from more recent parts of the map, in part because I feel that the earlier sections aren't quite up to snuff. I'll probably take the time to touch them up a little after everything else is done, but they're passable, at least. Looks good. I love the soft blue/greenish color of that light. I can see a pyro, are you making this for AD 1.5? If you need beta testers, I'd be happy to oblige.
These look great Pritchard! I especially enjoy the base architecture molded with the rocky walls.
It's a Quoth map, actually. Mostly because that's what someone suggested to me first when I wondered how to expand the base-themed enemy selection a month or so ago. Now i'm married to it for this map, since I can't give up my beloved Edie! ;P
I'm not sure when i'm going to do a beta, but it probably won't be a private one; I'll most likely end up whacking a changelevel in the map somewhere that isn't really the "end" and posting that version of the map here. I'm mostly interested in player experience, as well as how long it takes people to beat what's there. I tend to blitz through the level, so I find it difficult to judge how long it actually is for regular players... Ugh, I hate Edie! I mean he's a challenging enemy and that's a good thing for base maps, but I think he belongs more in Q2 and doesn't quite fit in Q1. Still, I'm looking forward to playing this.
My playing style is more slow-paced and methodical. I often take 2 to 3x longer than the average YT playthrough to complete a level. Pritchard, it's looking great indeed. Lots of variation, curious to see how environments blend together.
As of me, this thing is developing: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/Jam7/jam7_wannabe_02.jpg Those looks great, eager to play them when they're finished! I must be the lowest person compared to you guys*
If someone is interested I have been extending "IceCore" a little bit (mostly just thinking). Here is work in progress images (pretty hard to take pics because I haven't finished ceilings and so on): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855TVJDMWlSSGo4VlE/view The actual 'IceCore' I haven't started yet.. but it should be near the tower (bottom left). It is going to be basically much bigger cylinder shaped room.. etc. Adib, love all of the detail work in that hallway section.
NewHouse, you are bringing that cold vibe very well! I was testing something.. it is a bit dark but that is part of atmosphere also in the end:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855aWRBa1piYTdWS2M/view?usp=sharing Cool looking hellish screenshot there!
I can't think of a yellow liquid but you can make one yourself. Use TexMex, export a liquid you want to be yellow. Then open in a Photoshop program and change the color level or what have you. You wanna build a river of piss? xD No idea if such a texture exists but you can always take a previous texture and recolor it to your needs. The standard id tex for water should do fine.
Okay.. now it is turning into bee queen's palace or something..
Mugwump : not piss -> liquid honey (it is golden/yellow like a lava or something) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855b3BUdEhWNDdKRjg/view?usp=sharing Damn you Bloughsburgh, you beat me to it! ;)
NewHouse, I saw your new pics. Did you desaturate your blue lights? They seem to have lost much of their hue. Part of yes.. and no, since I'm still working on lights. I kind of came back to original ones, because blue wasn't that much as present. Too much white and it kind of lost the whole mood totally.
Yeah, I loved the intense dark blue of your MJ7 version.
Yellow Death: Hey, if it isn't good ol' hskl07_1! I've just used the exact same texture for some stairs I made. Is that a new map? There is a very yellow lava texture in AD_lavatomb, maybe it will do? Also, when you're in need of textures, make sure you visit this page: https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/
It has a whole bunch of Thanks buddy, this is just the concept. I really have to finish up first my IceCore map.
It feels so great to know.. actually when it is finished - I don't want to sound rude or anything, but it is sure couple people will start posting comments like "buhuu it is so dark, I can't handle this darkness" yet "it is so hard, I can't handle this madness".. it really makes me wonder why brightness settings aren't implemented yet for quake (modern standards). It is impossible to make everything work for every person screen settings, when dealing with colors a lot, and that is fact. About difficulty.. if you remember playing doom maps, difficulty was often just pure evil (almost even impossible), and my map wasn't even in those levels. Just couple projectiles to be able to dodge, shoot precisely not wasting cells etc. basic stuff. And some people starts almost demanding/expecting that hard difficulty it shouldn't be that hard.. what do you expect sincerely? Next difficulty after hard is nightmare already yet we don't live anymore in 1996 when even couple shamblers was too much to handle. I personally appreciate hardcore players, which love even unfair situations and ammo limitations. Normal mode will always be just enough, it will be a bit harder than normal mode in original episodes. But even though if I appreciate many opinions, and try my best to make it appeal as many people as possible, it is unavoidable that surely some people will dislike it no matter what you do. That's why I want to do what just feels right to me in the end. Amen to that. You first get into mapping because you want it, not because the others want you to. It's good to take advice from the community but when you aim to please everyone, you expose yourself to losing your identity. I love it when mappers have their own style and personality. A Sock map doesn't look and feel like a Necros map and that's how it should be. Hell, even the original id mappers had their own styles! If your style is intense colors, so be it! We don't see this kind of stuff much since Unreal and I enjoy it. People say it's not realistic but since when Quake is supposed to be realistic? It's one of the most surreal FPS I've ever played.
And if people really find your map too dark, they can easily adjust it with QuakeSpasm's new contrast setting. I've used these settings: contrast "1.5" gamma "0.85" and it was perfectly fine. I still need to play it in Darkplaces though. I haven't tried it on darkplaces either, even though I had downloaded it long time ago.. it has that a bit shiny-look, if you know what I mean. Also I need to consider writing down on readme something about those console commands.
I think Quake's light map is gray scale 0-255 if no lit file is used, and I don't think screen shots are affected by the gamma setting. If so, you can probably tell how well a map is lit by looking at the RGB values in a photo editor for screen shots taken with r_lightmap 1
And if people really find your map too dark, they can easily adjust it with QuakeSpasm's new contrast setting.
Literally the opposite of "good advice for lighting". Literally the opposite of "good advice for lighting".
"Nothing wrong with my map, must be the player's fault" seems to be a running theme in the Cumdump and PooHouse show lmao :D Rick: I have been doing that, but it is not that easy in practice.
onetrupurple: Not the best advice & I highly try to avoid it, but in the end "some" people might need to use them. ayy lmao: you aren't spammed already? Srsly tho. Look at Quake. Make your maps a comparable overall brightness to that. Then it will work for almost everyone. It's not complicated.
Okay? Then what do you think about these pics I sent earlier (I haven't received much feedback about new lighting attempts):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855V0RmZHBFNENRRms/view?usp=sharing Instead of acting like complete jerks, why don't you guys be constructive for once and share your own brightness settings?
That's a lot of effort to work on light levels so kudos to you on that.
I would say something in between the two examples you are showing in that grid picture. I definitely think some of the images on the right are much too bright and detracts from the atmosphere you are so purposefully trying to achieve. On the other hand, some of the darker images on the left do not display any detail at all and I find that to be simply too dark. I know that cold is a theme so if some dark areas are absolutely vital to your design then keep them, but the fact you are taking these steps to fine tune light is a good sign! Picking a suitable lighting level for a quake map is not some incredibly obscure alchemy, comprehensible to only the most wizened mappers - it is literally - like Shambler says - a case of comparing your maps with other known good maps like the original id maps and just making sure you're not far off that.
You won't get any useful information from knowing what gamma settings people play on - you may as well be asking them how their monitor is set up, and what the brightness of the room they are playing in is. This might be too much to ask.. but could you or some people actually mark pics which are too dark by "x" and some what are too bright by "y". And in the end I could actually analyze results. I could use this for my future maps too, to check good brightness for every color. After all, I can't adjust my screen's brightness level any lower, and it is still bright and colors are showing well, I should do something else to my screen to make it work like every cheap acer laptop screen.
This is maybe too much to ask, but I have been playing with values you guys (Rick/ericw) has sent to me. And also listening you Bloughsburgh how to use wait etc. Maybe I haven't found the right combination yet. The new lighting looks fine. I don't think there are any pics that look too dark. Some of them may actually have a bit too much light (mostly the L shaped corridors) - maybe use a different delay setting.
MugWump, if a map is too dark with gamma 1, then it's not lit properly. Should I use gamme 0.9 or gamma 1.0 while compiling? Or should I rise up it even, when using colors as main light source?
they look good newhouse, you've put a tonne of extra work in since the jam, that is pretty obvious. the results look like they're paying off.
Honestly, looking back at the grid I think the very bottom dark pictures are perhaps a tad too dark. Those are probably the only ones.
As OTP said, I think a lot of the pictures are a bit too bright (Especially the far right examples) Admittedly I only ever played your very first offering of the map so I don't have much reference to go on. I'll have to try your newer version at some point! ;) You know I'm a bit slow when it comes to learning basics.. I'm more visual person, I almost need people to go hand in hand showing me how things should be done.
L shaped lambs on top indeed are so bright that even my eyes are now burning. I have to decrease intensity a bit* I was only thing on make focus much more clear - but then there is also part "not too clear". It should be a bit more tender touch there. Inside joke "I have a headache". Kinn "You won't get any useful information from knowing what gamma settings people play on" At least knowing which settings people generally use can give some kind of reference.
OTP "MugWump, if a map is too dark with gamma 1, then it's not lit properly." As I said, my gamma is set @ 0.85 with contrast @ 1.5. Not just for this map, but as a general setting. I may need to pump gamma up 1 or 2 notches on certain maps, like Khreathor's Sewage Farm, but NewHouse's Ice Core looked fine to me like that. Sure it's darker than the usual base map, but not to the point of not being able to see shit, and also that's what gives it its distinctive atmosphere. So, what are you people's gamma/contrast values? As I said, my gamma is set @ 0.85 with contrast @ 1.5. Not just for this map, but as a general setting.
http://www.monitorsetup.com/ http://www.displaycalibration.com/brightness_contrast.html It's very bright and vibrant. It looks great. Mostly because my laptop LCD screen is very bright and looks completely different to my other LCD screen, and also I don't Quake play in a bright room.
Really, just knowing what gamma people play on tells you like maybe 25% of the story. +1, your settings sound wonky, probably trying to compensate for a not so good display.
Mugwump, having a properly calibrated display really is crucial in general. Calibrate it and use it for a while so your frame of reference can readjust. Then, light your maps using gamma 1. You'll get the desired look in the ballpark for most users this way. OTP I'm not talking about the monitor's calibration, but the in-game settings.
Kinn And do you use the default contrast with that or do you tweak it? On my rig, Quakespasm's default settings make a slightly too dark image and I've found that playing with the new contrast setting gave much better results than gamma. For me, Gamma 1 looks perfect on 99℅ of quake content, IF all the following are true:
- on a calibrated LCD - in a pitch dark room - in full screen. If I am not in those ideal conditions, I need to raise gamma/contrast to compensate. Btw just switching from windowed to Fullscreen makes a difference, because typically stuff on your desktop is a lot brighter than quake. This is why screenshots look so dark even when the pixel values are the same. reset to 0's and try again. black will probably appear washed out, which sucks, but that seems to be the nature of your display. boosting the contrast and dropping the gamma or brightness seems like a fix, but it really isn't (I used to do this too).
And do you use the default contrast with that or do you tweak it?
Default I guess. I didn't even know QS had a contrast setting. So, I can see all color changes all the way through that top 5 (pure black) on my screen+settings, can I use this as a tool somehow? http://www.monitorsetup.com/
Yes the -gamma option for light.exe is a real gamma, applied on the floating point light map before converting to 8bit and saving. I just added it because it was easy and could be used as a bandaid fix to tune lighting globally.
I forget how -range works but it's not the same as gamma. This is something I should do a series of screenshots of on my site for light. Since 1996 I've played quake on all manner of different monitors under all manner of different conditions and used all manner of different gamma values. There isn't really a "correct" gamma value. On old CRTs like in the late 90s, my gamma has been set a lot lighter than I tend to set it today on LCDs.
I've been using -gamma in light because after I added bounce everything became too bright. Worked pretty well, far easier than changing the values of every light.
black will probably appear washed out, which sucks, but that seems to be the nature of your display.
I'm an idiot, ignore this. I assume your display seems too dark. CRTs generally have deep blacks and rich color, so boosting contrast seems strange, I would boost brightness first then mess with gamma if you want to brighten up the low end. Of course I'm not there and able to look at it... Why the fuck am I attempting to deduce what someones monitor looks like from across the world based on contrast and gamma settings in quake? I'm a fool on an errand. Anyway, I still think it would be worth your while to re-calibrate, reset quake to gamma 1 and go from there. I forget how -range works but it's not the same as gamma. This is something I should do a series of screenshots of on my site for light.
This would be great to see! Yes the -gamma option for light.exe is a real gamma, applied on the floating point light map before converting to 8bit and saving.
Okay, good to know. I always assumed -range was just some kind percentage increase. I somehow got started mapping with low light values years ago. Instead of fixing them, I would just bump up the -range setting. This is how it looks in game:
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lx3BB5zDt78/V9hBdNVR9vI/AAAAAAAAAjo/fnhGnkx8qD0Mgo3dCVOPWG14IgKugR_8QCLcB/s1600/screen2.jpg Make your maps with a similar brightness to this. This is how it looks as an unedited screenshot: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BNDUeY5YyV8/V9hAKNsrEAI/AAAAAAAAAjk/VLKdTt-T544OLLOBKwjS8VQ84u6KzDsNwCLcB/s1600/screen1.jpg Don't make your maps this dark. That is on Quake gamma settings that look perfect on 90% of maps, and on screen settings that look perfect on 99% of other content.
Killpixel Well it is a bit dark, but instead of having gamma wash everything out, I found it better to tone it down a bit and ramp up the contrast. Also, I don't see a brightness setting in the QS menu.
Kinn Yes, since 0.92 QS has a contrast setting. OTP & Kinn It's nice to have constructive and non-aggressive replies from you guys. I hope things can stay this way. Bury the hatchet? IN THE GREASY FLATULENT ASSHOLE THAT YOU SPRAY OUT ALL THE SHIT YOU TALK INSTEAD OF USING YOUR MOUTH LIKE A NORMAL HUMAN BEING??
(i.e. yes good idea) Judging by your oh so "normal human being" intrusive response to something that wasn't even addressed to you, you must be talking - I mean shitting - out of personal experience...
I have learned now many good things about mapping "gamma", "contrast", "range". So thanks for your patience and honest in the end.
But still, try to chill out a little bit? I might sounds childish time to time (bad grammar maybe), but I never try to make people get triggered over 'these things'. ...but apparently for some people, conflict is more interesting than cooperation. And to think that they're the ones trying to lecture you on being normal... Fail.
I use gamma 1, I also configure my monitor using this site - http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/
A good litmus test is to just compare your lighting with vanilla Quake. In the monitor i am using right now (switched to TFT from CRT recently), i am seeing Quake practically like your second screenshot (QS with gamma 1). From what you wrote, does that mean i have something badly configured? Even though, personally i think the first one is too bright and bland.
TFT monitors are something arcane for me and i resigned myself on making them look well, but i even considering that I don't get what you say. Aside form that, about brightness configurations, it does matter a lot when there is several ways to change it and the range oof the available changes is wide, like in Quake 2 where it can be a pain to map, as some maps can look cool in some settings and lame in others. In this game it doesn't matter, its just a matter of comparing it with other maps like said posts above, and it is a big relief when mapping. ...I'm digging that vibe. Yes, it drips atmos. I think you are pretty close...now to concentrate on gameplay ;)
Adib: Great looking corridor, can't wait to see the rest of the map.
NewHouse: Egyptian themes are always cool, though egyptian-themed textures are hard to work with because they usually looks too flat. Using non-square angles as much as possible on the geometry can help a lot (multiple ramps instead of steps, reclined walls instead of straight walls, etc). Hmm.. color world might make it look like part of "Egyptian", even though those tiles are from hipnotic wad, large white marble tiles/bricks. To be honest it reminds more of "White Greek Marble Temple/Bathhouse", I got couple small souvenirs from my family and all these Greek soldier figures had this white/yellowish theme going on.
A new screen.
My mouse has become very flaky over the past week or so, i'm going to be returning it under warranty soon but for now i'm using a crappy wireless one I found. Progress was slow until I switched mice, as by the end of my last one's life it became impossible to click/drag anything, including in TrenchBroom. Anyway, that (half, behind the camera is a mess of untextured brushes) room is all i've really done since I last took a screen, but it was a fair bit of work cutting it all up for the texture details and so on... Which, again, is quite hard with a bad mouse :( Thanks guys :) still working on it.
Pritchard Wow, loving it. Rock and base, nice mood. NewHouse Try a texture called *firecoal It's in "lavacity" wad. Should be finished within a week or so, provided my high-functioning ADD doesn't screw me again.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5ubevjSCiEYQ1RDOS1jaVN3LVk The sky is a big light source in that area, although you can't see it in that screenshot. I'm not decided on any other sources yet.
I just released a new Q1 map titled "Infernal Ascent". It's nothing special, but screenshots and a download link can be found on my blog:
https://ubiquitousgame.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/quake-map-infernal-ascent/ Yes, I did run -extra4, though I agree the lightmaps look a bit aliased in places.
The different themes started as an experiment. The map has 3 main areas (plus a central hub) and the idea was that the hub is a military base on which is built three macabre tests/gauntlets, each constructed around a different theme. But the thematic differences in the original version were far too stark so I toned them down by at least using broadly similar colour palettes in each area. Very strong 90s vibe, but in a good way. The mixture of themes is executed really well; gameplay was well designed.
If you want some critical (nitpicky?) feedback: There's a clipping error here -- you can pass through the wall at the top of the ramp (you don't have to try hard; I did it by accident) and skip a large section of the map. The twisted and broken bars near the start of the map feature some dodgy brushwork and would look a lot better if aligned correctly. The last section of the map (after you jump into the floor teleporter) is way too dark, imho. Thanks total_newbie, this feedback is very helpful. The clipping error and misaligned brushwork were bugs that crept in during construction. I have uploaded a new version where those errors are fixed. I also added a couple of additional light sources in the last rooms of the level (though not too many, so as to maintain the intended atmosphere).
As before, the file is at https://ubiquitousgame.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/quake-map-infernal-ascent/ Thanks again! It's not in the news, so here goes.
Yes, strong retro vibe. Combinations of enemies worked well for me. Best part of the map was the button sequence puzzle room. That shambler + ogre room could be improved, I easily worked it around. Dogs gave me a nice scare. My criticisms are about lighting and signaling. Lighting felt kinda caotic to me. Spotlights not highlighting anything special; pitch black darkness at some points, worse being that section after you fall thru the funnel, where you navigate completely blind. After beating the map I noclipped and "r_fullbright 1". That's when I could appreciate your brushwork. I had no idea that I fell thru a funnel, for example. Shadows are supposed to enhance the environment as much as light, right? One last bitching: you hint attention points with textures as well, but without anything special around. If you choose a white light fixture set, a yellow fixture draws player attention, for example. I think you managed to create that classic unsettling feeling of danger that iD maps used to give. Also, passing thru the same room from different levels/sights is something I love and value, you're putting the environment to use. Hope I could help someway. Thanks for this release, it was good fun :) Skill 2, 2/5 secrets 64/65 kills (Glitched zombie!)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ggljkzaht0wh1t/mjb_infernals.zip?dl=0 Nice map to play on a Sunday afternoon! I like the theme of rising into different realms of Quake. The transition is done nicely through the use of broken bricks and the base textures. Game play was fun with lots of knights to ambush you in the shadows. I would say a large thing I noticed is the lack of source lights being illuminated properly. So when I saw a light source, the actual lamp texture would blend into the background. Placing a light with a high wait value (7-8) can really bring that nice touch home! Also I agree with adib about lighting in general...bit all over the place. This is a unique map and I am looking forward to seeing more! Thanks guys. The light surface textures not being properly illuminated has been bugging me too. I don't understand why id made light textures that don't use fullbright colours. Rather than do as you suggest, Bloughsburgh, and use a high wait value, I implemented the simpler (for me) solution of making custom versions of id's light textures that are fullbright and therefore appear to illuminate properly regardless of how much light falls on them. This fix is in a new version that i have just uploaded on the same page as before:
https://ubiquitousgame.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/quake-map-infernal-ascent/ Sorry to hear that you found the lighting to be chaotic. I'll be the first to admit that I am still learning the fine art of lighting, but there were, at least, a few elements of the lighting in this level I was happy with. Hopefully, what I learned through this experience will inform a more nuanced approach for my next creation. Thanks a lot for the demo, it's valuable to watch how others get along with and interpret the level. I saw the map showed up on the front page news (http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61352), so it might make sense for further discussion to be consolidated in that thread.
Here :)
At first, 8-bit color translucency was like this. Due to the limits of Quake's 8-bit color palette, straightforward blending of color values was very lossy.
Then I've figured out a way to apply color correction on both translucency and lighting. The colors improved a lot, although the results were very grainy (see how the shape of the slime texture became completely unrecognizable after being blended twice). After that, I've decided to try implementing gamma-correct translucency. The blending became smoother, color hues became more faithful and the shape of the slime texture could be recognized again, but a few details were lost in the darker areas of the image. Now, I've also implemented gamma correction on the lighting. This helped to recover those lost details back, and then some. Now the slime texture is fully recognizable, even through two passes of alpha blending, and details such as the pipe texture on the bottom left of the image are more faithful than ever. For a final comparison, see this 24-bit truecolor mockup I've made in GIMP (which doesn't use gamma correction). If you convert this 24-bit mockup back to Quake's 8-bit color palette using popular error diffusion algorithms such as Floyd-Steinberg, my results are still smoother. I have one more thing to change in Retroquad's color management, but I'm skeptical about further quality improvements. This "one more thing" will be just to simplify some calculations. Because of dithering.
Exactly. The only workaround would be to convert the whole renderer to 24-bit color, which is what the Pixomatic software renderer in Unreal Tournament 2004 did.
Just found this - might be useful for you:
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/howto/dither/jy/#Appendix%201GammaCorrection Take a look at the whole article. I pasted a link with redirection to "Gamma correction" by mistake, which is least interesting part of this page.
Thanks, I've read all of it (minus the code, because I'm on a smartphone atm).
So far I've not used any iterative color search methods, only straightforward calculations. But that article may give me some ideas on how to improve TGA skyboxes and external textures. Skyboxes such as "Interstellar" and "Violent Days" still looks pretty bad in Retroquad. Another idea on how to improve external textures is to perform topological analysis to scale the error diffusion in a non-linear way. This is in my mental list of things to try sometime. As mentioned before, this is the best result I had achieved.
But after testing the translucency on several maps, I've had one more idea. Now I've modified the gamma correction algorithm on the blending, turning it into adaptative gamma-correct blending. This helped to give the resulting image an even more natural look, with even more details being recognizable now. Both this screenshot and the previous one were taken with exactly the same settings (r_slime_blend_alpha 0.6; r_wateralpha 0.5). Thoughts?
I want to use a skybox in my map (before now it was regular boring old blue sky) but i'm struggling to find the right one that matches with the lighting. I think this one kind of works. Any ideas for other good ones? Also, it's alright for me to use it, right? It's taken from AD, but it's uncredited in the readme so yeah. I'm sure no one would really care if I did or not, but I still feel like I should be a responsible citizen and check first. Not bad. You should ask Sock if you wanna do this by the book. Check this page http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-help/general-help/10727-definitive-hd-replacement-content-list.html for links to a bunch of skyboxes.
In Photoshop, I would pick the color in these rocks, invert it (Ctrl+I) and start from there.
Interesting changes.
I notice a bit of graininess has crept in in the shadows. You're able to recover quite a bit of detail on the crates, where prior they were almost flat. Is there a method you could apply to selectively remove dithering where it is going to appear grainy? The areas in particular I'm thinking are where the biggest shadows are, or will that ruin the glass transparency effect? Is there a method you could apply to selectively remove dithering where it is going to appear grainy?
No. But while playing the game, the grainyness isn't as noticeable. The area in those screenshots is a worst case scenario, translucency effects usually looks better than that already. So I pasted the id metal skull texture over some fucked up overlapping brushes and it resulted in this weird conjoined twins effect where the overlap occurs. I think I'm going to keep it.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/conjoinedskulltex.PNG It looks cool but the effect is only in this particular place. All other skulls look normal. Now you need to fuck up the rest of your wall! xD
That's Quake's normal "natural" texture alignment. You'll have to scale/shift the texture on the angled wall if you want to fix it. Even if the alignment looks okay, I sometimes still scale so that the pixels aren't stretched. Depends on how noticeable it is.
I think I'll keep it, it's only in one other place but it's amusing to me. Who knows if it'll be noticeable once the map is lit.
Anyway, here's a speedmapped layout I think I'll make into Qonquer map (originally supposed to be a coagula level). Might make a whole pack of these for kicks. Dunno how the rest of the community feels but imo there aren't enough good Qonquer layouts. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/qonquermet.PNG If those all are in grid (no half pixels and so on), there has to be some extreme math going on behind all this madness.
I've added a last step to improve the color blending.
In the previous screenshot, there was still some weirdness in darker areas. Now, in this new screenshot the contrast is more faithful. Now I don't see anything else to improve in this specific test case, and in all my tests through several other maps this algorithm also seems optimal... except for one thing: I've found out that it's only optimal at 50% translucency. I'll have to do some tests to figure out exactly what needs to be compensated from one blending level to another, but I'll leave that for later. Also, I want to thank MFX for his Clean Cut map, which was really helpful to test and improve the color blending. Those flat-colored gray color windows served as a good neutral ground for figuring out which properties of the colors were being distorted, and how. How in the hell you did that? I expect you ported it from another program to the editor, if not, i can't see how.
It can be done in an editor, and quite fast. Took me just 2 minutes after realizing how.
It reminds me of something that happened in 1997: my oldest brother did a 16 steps per round spiral staircase on the grid with just the carving tool that looked awesome and left me wondering for months. And in the end the trick was easy and fast to achieve. What's impressive on Mfx's screenshot in the end is the results, and the goal this achieves: something impressive with fast done brushwork and good ambience, completely the opposite of what i did in the starting areas here. Well, thanks to it i toned down a lot on difficult brushwork, and Mfx's screenshot reaffirm my conviction. I tried using rotation tool to make same kind of result, but only problem was that face's texture alignment started acting weird flipping directions and so on. Did Mfx actually calculated all those broken face's texture rotations manually after rotating brushes or am I just too inexperienced when it comes to using TB? I used 22.5 degree steps because 22.5 x 4 = 90 degrees..
What is carving tool? I think TB2 doesn't have anything like that. Or do you mean clipping tool, where you cut slices by choosing 3 vertex points? I've seen people talk about different types of texture alignment, such as world vs. arbitrary--to pull off the effect mfx has one would need to use arbitrary alignment, by my understanding (not 100% sure). Also I don't know how to actually implement that sort of alignment but it would be good to know. Calculating texture rotations manually? Doable, but have fun with that lol.
To be honest it is not fun at all calculate manually something like that* but because I haven't figured out other ways to correct these when things doesn't went as planned. Maybe J.A.C.K handles these better atm.. maybe.. but I'm not that used to J.A.C.K's interface yet.
read that you had problems with brushwork instead of problems with texture alignment and realized just now.
For texture alignment in those circumstances, align them bit by bit when you have the first cylinder brush done and use texture lock for the rest. I use the map format 220 from HL which has enhancements to texture alignment, but i i am not sure if Trenchbroom supports that or just can open those files. I've not really touched it, but TB2 seems to support the 220 format, at least for creating and loading. Not sure how stable the support is though.
Speaking of which, is there any tool that can convert between standard quake and 220? I'm interested in seeing what difference it makes (if any) for my work. You would have to use the Valve 220 format for that kind of texture alignment. The basic orthogonal (align to world) projection would never look right.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Texture_alignment So basically I should use J.A.C.K for those kind of brushwork/rotation practices. So I highly doubt mfx was able to pull this off 100% in TB itself. Unless he took like 3 months manually calculating messed up faces or just using Valve 220 format. Not sure how does it work in TB, what are differences.. have to check it out after this noir jam.
I've had issues with texture lock in the past when rotating brushes. One thing I've tried doing in the past was making a cube and then rotating it with texture lock on so that one of the diagonals was parallel to the z axis, but after I did this the textures were completely warped.
I'm a bit of confused about what I have done.. what does this remind? (possible gameplay section in my noir jam map) : https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855LTE2dS1wSXJHUDg/view?usp=sharing
HL2, not episode 1 or 2.. that tech tower section? Also I think it reminds a bit of Duke Nukem 3D's episode 2, latest maps.
I think in Australia we say "Baby's bottom" which is like half way between the two on the creepy/gross scale.
I really dislike how vanilla WinQuake's "gamma" cvar makes the colors washed out, so I'm working on a new system using two cvars: pal_darkness to define the minimum brightness, and pal_brightness to define the maximum brightness; the resulting value is normalized between them.
Default settings (same as gamma 1). Maximum brightness scaled up. Minimum brightness also scaled up. Now, a question: Does the resulting image looks fine for everyone here in this personal settings test? Afterwards I've reduced pal_brightness a bit, to 2.5, but I don't know if this is still too dark for most people. Anyway, one of my goals with this is to improve the image quality for YouTube videos, since YouTube compression is bad for dark colors, and WinQuake's brightness control makes the colors too washed out. I think 5 might look good. Doesn't QuakeSpasm allow you to set brightness and contrast in the options menu? I have my contrast turned up a bit, it seems to boost brightness a little as well.
Also, how'd you move your HUD to the corners like that? Looking at your personal settings test on my phone in a dark room, it looks good. Dunno if it's enough for YT vids though. And yeah, the new contrast feature in QS is very useful to have a brighter and more vivid image without washing it out.
Hmm. I've tried increasing the brightness, but this time in another map:
E1M1, default brightness E1M1, pal_brightness 3.5 E1M1, pal_brightness 5 5 seems to distort some colors too much. 3.5 seems to be the maximum that doesn't distort the colors too much, at least for me. The below shots were also taken with 3.5: E1M1, well lit area. E1M4, dark area. sevin: This HUD is custom coded. Still on my phone, but this time with the lights on, I agree that 5 might be too much. E1M4 dark area looks nice but the brightest parts of E1M1 well lit area seem a bit overbright. Maybe you should try 3 again but it's hard to judge how it would look on video, though.
On video it always looks a lot worse, which is why I've lost the motivation to record gameplay videos.
Worse as in darker, I assume... Well maybe 3.5 would do, then, I don't know. There's really only one way to find out: make a video.
sevin: This HUD is still the same as in the Makaqu engine. Qbism's Super8 also uses a slightly modified version of it.
If you want video to look good, don't let it within 10 feet of any web-friendly encode or YouTube. Maybe just upload files to a host somewhere for people to download. Not sure what kind of encode is good for HQ gameplay though...
Most of what you want to recover in these situations is details in the shadows, instead of stretching the entire palette, you probably want to shift the shadows slightly higher. Of course whilst keeping the blacks black.
I do a bit of photography and when I edit the exposure of my photos I often use the tone curve tool that adobe lightroom has. Opening an image and playing with that will give you an idea of how much you can separate tones whilst retaining a good "realistic" looking image. The HD really lets you savour the artfully-crafted nuances of the vertex swimming, whilst the mushy blur of the texture filtering adds an evocative, dreamlike quality to this visual feast.
So I'm not only one who thinks this is nowadays a bit of.. outdated when it comes to cutscenes artistic look.
Unfortunately, even DarkPlaces and all its shiny-pretty can't do anything about it... Was good for its time, though - except the vocal "work", that's awful no matter the period.
http://i.imgur.com/elqml3q.jpg
This thing took me far longer than it had any right to. First I had to recolour the texture for the plant itself, since the background wasn't index 255, then I had to figure out which format TexMex felt like importing today (please tell me there's something better than TexMex), then I had to edit the texture again because it was really tall and dumb, followed by reimporting it again. Then I set it up in the map so that it looked like a decent plant in-game. Then the real fun started! To build a decent shaped potplant pot in TB I first had to find a crash bug in the CSG tools, followed by trying to figure out how to work around it. Then I had to copy it back into my actual map, try and select all the tiny brush fragments I ended up with, group them, align them with the base of the pot, texture them and then spend another few minutes getting the plant itself to line up in the center... Finally, I have a really ugly potplant pot and a decent-ish plant! This is really how I wanted to spend my evening mapping. Better be critical to every aspect of your map. I'm talking linked to 4 secrets, key to open 6 doors, and spawns massive hordes.
It is a nice potted plant. Double the Fun!
And here's a small album of general shots from my Jam map. Not too many enemies featuring here! I don't want to spoil the surprise of playing it. One of my favourite things about the map is the boxes. They're all breakable, except for the really big ones, and some of them have stuff inside. Getting really half-life right now, I guess. The shots are taken with the jam palette loaded, by the way. It's pretty effective! wip screenshot
I've never used those textures, but in my general experience, it's crazy that you managed to get any textures to curve so well. Wow!
Kids love the Teletarbbies
Looks nice! Hopefully gameplay is also stunning and not just the brushwork* Would you make the whole spaceship explode at the end.. cinematic ending. Killtarget everything.. then turn on copy of everything and kaboom. Epic ending for Arcane Dimensions. Then people keep writing 10/10 reviews "the best Quake map ever made". Sock gets mad and punches you in the face, and every other top mapper joins to the battle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFkAAvDkj9k But no seriously, looking very nice mfx! <KinnyCrumbles> squelching around bouyantly in my jizz-soaked office chair, kept afloat by aching, swollen testicles, bobbing on the surface like space hoppers bouncing in a vat of molasses. <otpffs> KinnyCrumbles <otpffs> http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/spasm0003.png <Shambler> u just seen mfx's screenshot too then <KinnyCrumbles> yes 1. mfx what are you doing
2. when are we having beers again (stopped smoking though) 3. he never said he used TB for this I need a purple one and itll get thrown into every map i map in response to the "does everyone hate tarbabies?" Thread on quakeone.
Maybe i can take a poke at it myself to throw in my first offering... Screenshot.
I've found that compatibility with standard _luma textures will be a pain. It seems that standard _luma textures have lower dimensions, plus no alpha channel, and are rendered by overdrawing the opaque textures with additive blending in realtime. This makes sense for hardware rendering, but it's a bad, bad approach for software rendering. It's much slower than the standard "color shading map with fullbright colors" (aka colormap) approach of the software renderer. In the scene shown in this screenshot, I've manually adjusted (upscaled and alphamapped) the _luma textures of the top side of the boxes with GIMP to see how they would look using the colormap approach. I'm not happy with the idea of having to implement an algorithm to convert the _luma textures like that, so manually editing the _luma textures may be required. Also, I'm not sure if support for non-power-of-two HD textures will be implemented, as that would require huge surface caches. Also, I've gotta make the engine save the compiled textures to disk, as compiling HD textures takes a bloody long time.
Are you writing your own conversion code? What part of the process it time consuming (at runtime)? is the code just unoptimised?
All of the improvements I'm implementing are custom coded by me. External textures are pre-compiled into a special 8-bit data format I've created for per-pixel dithered quantization.
The texture compiling routines are very optimized already, but due to the very complex nature of the process it takes a long time. So you'll just convert the textures on the first load of the map then? Seems like a fair approach.
Out of interest does the conversion prefer a single thread or parallel processing? I haven't implemented any kind of parallel processing yet; will do after the core architecture of the engine is complete.
In fact, this engine is still compiled for first-generation Pentium CPUs. It could probably run (unbearably slow) on a 486 too, except for the memory requirements. I'm following Michael Abrash's philosophy of "the best optimizer is between your ears". Compiler optimizations, CPU-specific compiler flags, multi-core processing and so on will only be implemented after all the possible manual optimizations are implemented. There's tons of code refactoring going on, I'm trying to rethink every single routine of the engine. Even when properly formatted, some _luma textures still looks bad. Oh well.
Personal tastes aside, it's nice to see Retroquad being able to support such high-res textures. (Waiting for someone to say "Now you just need overly saturated colored lighting, N64-thick fog, obnoxious specular lighting, myopic bloom and abyssal normalmaps to make everything caked in vaseline and raise hell.")
Now you just need overly saturated colored lighting, N64-thick fog, obnoxious specular lighting, myopic bloom and abyssal normalmaps to make everything caked in vaseline and raise hell.
Happy? A bunch of new screenshots at QuakeOne (and Twitter).
HD textures does have some significant impact on the framerate. d_mipscale 2 helps to recover the framerate, but anyway, those textures are huge. More mipmap levels are needed. <Shambler> finished solus project
<Shambler> made no sense to me at all <Shambler> nice to see ur name in the credits <Shambler> it was okay overall <Shambler> some interesting vibes, some good mysterious / creepy bits <Shambler> but far too long and far too many hexagonal rocks <Shambler> i'm going to see a neurosurgeon to see if there is someway they can burn all visual acknowledgment of hexagons out of my mind Plenty of it in Iceland. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=iceland+columnar+basalt&safe=off&tbm=isch
I knew the famous Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland (pictured on Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy cover art) but I thought it was a unique formation and I wasn't aware of similar sceneries existing in Iceland as well.
Link: http://www.moddb.com/mods/strogg-empire
Version 2016/10/11: * Added support Variable FPS on clients/servers based on Q2Pro (crussial for Plasma Beam and Chaingun) * Plasma Beam ported from Ground Zero (Rogue) with the following characteristics (to see the weapon model itself, please, copy pak0.pak from "rogue" folder into the "empire" folder with name pak8.pak): - Rate Of Fire: 2400 (per minute) - Damage: 4 per shot - Ammo Consumption: 0.5 cell per shot - Range: 768 units - Behavior at Q2 10FPS ordinary server/client: 16 damage per shot, 2 cells per shot consumed * Health behavior: - Initial HP is 125 - Health reduced by 1 every 1.0s, provided that current HP value is greater then 100 - Reduction rate is delayed by 1.5s after Stimpack (item_health_small) was picked up - Reduction rate is delayed by 5.0s after Mega Health (item_health_mega) was picked up - Absolute HP maximum is 200, none of health items can be picked up at this value * Armor behavior: - Armor reduced by 1 every 1.5s, provided that armor value is greater then maximum value of current armor type (situation with Armor Shard) - Reduction rate is delayed by 1.5s after Armor Shard (item_armor_shard) was picked up - Absolute armor maximum is 150% of maximum value of current armor type, Armor Shard can not be picked up after this value * CG (Chaingun) changes: - Damage value per bullet is 7 now (was 6) - Spread is reduced by 10% * MG (Machinegun) changes: - Damage value per bullet is 6 now (was 7) - Spread is reduced by 60% * Added auto-jump ability * For testing purpose (like DM in Warsow, FFA is totally another thing there), all players are spawned with all weapons (except BFG10K) and ammo Current build is coming with Q2Pro built with Variable FPS and Anti Cheat (Server-Side) support. Both, x86 and x86_64, builds for Windows are provided. To launch game, please, use ".CMD" launchers instead of ".EXE" directly. To install this version, please, delete your previous "empire" folder. Version 2016/10/11: * New hit sounds based on damage amount or kill * Announcer messages Version 2016/10/07: * 125 points of initial health * Lowering the level of health points to 100 if the current level is greater than the maximum, not only when a player has a Mega Health * Quick weapon switching * Hit sounds for better feedback to an attacker Are the graininess and sieve effect caused by your 8-bit conversion? The grain could be cool, like a filter of sorts, but the sieve looks weird IMHO.
hey boys doing my yearly 1on1/2on2 map creation. Here's what I have so far:
http://i.imgur.com/kNhUBo6.jpg http://i.imgur.com/mJcdK81.jpg http://i.imgur.com/SQ3tAJu.jpg http://i.imgur.com/0POm7Fq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/NUuxIWK.jpg quakeworld.nu forum thread for download: http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/topic/7023/105506/pipe-up-1on12on2-dm-map Any critiques or suggestions are welcome! mfx: Thanks, I feel a bit unsure about the quality of the alphamasking.
Mugwump: The graininess is caused by multiple stages of dithering from several different parts of the renderer. The sieve effect is due to the palette. The closer to the palette a 32-bit image is, the more balanced the colors gets (example). #14014: I've tried this once, and it didn't look good. At first it worked well, when I was using only one 2x2 kernel for the texture and another 2x2 kernel for the lighting, but once things got more complex it got too distracting. @mankrip: I might be wrong, but that sounds like it might be due to the noise distribution. You perhaps could try "blue noise" as described in the two articles below. Though I have no idea how well that would map to software Quake's case, looks great either way :)
http://gpuopen.com/vdr-follow-up-fine-art-of-film-grain/ http://gpuopen.com/vdr-follow-up-grain-and-fine-details/ The noise in those articles is for modifying channel intensity; this requires a RGB framebuffer, but Retroquad's renderer operates in 8-bit indexed color all the way (all RGB color operations are precomputed upon loading).
Even if I were to try implementing that as a brightness modifier only, all the different dithering kernels in Retroquad must stay aligned in a very specific way for all the different blending and smoothing operations to work properly; some of the kernels took me weeks to figure out their best layout. And shifting the layouts of all kernels together gives abrupt results, which doesn't look good when animated. The most effective way to achieve an animated grain look would be to blend an animated texture over the framebuffer; this way, the kernels would still be static, and kennel alignment would be preserved.
But of course, this would slow down the rendering some more. "i should post a screenshot. first im gonna do some touch ups"
repeat ad infinitum ill try and break the cycle in the next few hours... Don't be shy.
This screenshots thread is for unfinished stuff. To get feedback about unfinished stuff, there's no need to finish it. I conquered a massive design block the other day so my confidence has gone up quite a bit.
I think i bit off more than i can chew in regards to scale. Ive only two out of five areas done and im already 5k units in size...i thought my whole map was gonna be this big.. http://imgur.com/IlLznKN
http://imgur.com/WWkCW9S itll be a bit before i get some compiled shots. AD mod, of course. Necrokeep inspired, if ya couldnt tell...:P That looks fantastic man, nothing to be self-conscious about!
The front facade looks great, if you are looking for criticism perhaps add some background brushes past the rock wall so it doesn't just cut to skybox. Look forward to more of your progress! Really good looking, interested to see how you're going to use those wide-open areas, a lots of flying monsters I assume* (If I can see correctly, there is one soulless placed already).
Thanks everyone!
@bloughsburgh exactly whats in store once the main bits are nailed down. the rockwall will get some hefty vertex manipulation as well. trenchbroom has given me a lot more confidence in my brushwork with the clipping tool and vertex manipulation. all my prior experience was in hammer, and as great as it is, I always felts weighed down in some ways. I imagine it was that I was trying to map for Counter Strike and it requires too much "realism". Every room had to have a purpose and a rhyme and reason. Quake has been a breath of fresh air to map for. A big thanks to the Sock and the AD development team for all the fun stuff to play with! Also, sleepwalkr for Trenchbroom! Thanks everyone. Im looking to get this finished up by new years so i can utilize some free time next year for my next offering.
The rockwall was a placeholder so i didnt pay it much attention. Now that its been pointed out, that texture is horrible as it tiles way too much. MFX: cant wait for the release...is it for AD 1.5? Are editor shots the new normal? Should Tronyn release further maps or just fuck off? Will Trump or Hillary win the election?
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/River_of_Fire.png I'm mainly just trying to demonstrate that I'm not dead yet. The "final Drake" may resurface yet, with the help of God (or Satan, if you're one of those who hates my maps). Nice one guys. MFX looks ace. Tronyn looks very cool, hardcore textures going on there. Love your maps, hate the drake mod tho (well, tolerate it I guess).
I know the maps tend to be more like the doom slaughter map style but it's at least different from most stuff you get in quake.
I did have a drake map in development ages ago... assuming I finally do get around to "finishing" it (my projects are like the freaking Tower of Babel), I'd be interested to know what features should be changed. I know lots of players find the bosses too hard and the monster AI annoying (at least they don't dodge like in Nehahra, lol). I do want to preserve dragons though, as they are a pretty key enemy in wide open maps. I'm hoping to finish it next summer, if no sooner, so at that point I'll probably make a thread for feedback/issues/suggestions.
Glad you guys liked the shot. Other shots posted here look awesome too. MFX you are insane in the best possible way! I'm trying out a bit of aqua/neon style when I get further with this map. Also want to see how does the lighting works under water.
That doesn't require fucking with the default palette, 5 different versions of texture packs, or whatever else.
Jams should be very inclusive and have no barrier of entry. Oh, it is hard to tell when it is joke or not. At least this film noir jam came out of nowhere for people that aren't hanging out that much in terrafusion or other quake chats*
Pick any two words that sound good to you:
Arch/Arched/Arches Ascent/Ascending Attic Bent/Bend Box/Boxy/Boxes Bridge/Bridges Cantilever Cavern/Caverns/Cavernous Cellar/Cellars Chasm/Chasms Derelict Dock/Docks/Docking Enormous Fort/Fortress Ledge/Ledges Rooftop/Rooftops Ruined/Ruins Tall Tower/Towers/Towering Truss/Trusswork Tunnel/Tunnels Underground Water/Wet Yeah, that was something like I was thinking. I didn't really spend that much time coming up with the words, I'm sure there's plenty more possibilities.
I tried to avoid words that were too style-restricting such as Gothic/Medieval/Egyptian and those that might require new, or a specific type of, textures such as Fire/Gold/Frozen. No reason they couldn't be used though. Void maps. Isn't that what "Coagula" maps are? I've always liked those for some weird reason.
I made a ctf space map for Q3 once. Never got around to putting the final polish on it though. Egyptian/temple could be fun. But hopefully there is a little more downtime between the last jam.
... unless there is a total Blood, Gore and Gibbs, Texan Style Fest !
I've been bangin' my head against the wall for months trying to think of a unique(ish) theme.
I feel like every theme and its permutations have been done to death. What was the last really strong, original theme you've seen? IMO, BioShock was the last one, nothing else since then has stood out to me (aside from that niche beksinski themed game). It seems one of the major challenges of visual design is simply finding a concept to move on. I struggle to think of anything that isn't derivative of tech panels or bricks. "Temple", maybe. "Egyptian Temple"? No way.
Too restrictive of style. Of course, one could simply place a single obelisk shaped pillar or ankh texture somewhere and say, "There you go. Got that Egyptian part covered." Purple Theme. Or Green. Or Green and Purple.
You know, not just the done to death colors like brown, blue, basetan, terracotta, metlbluegray, etc. || (this means OR) Perhaps maybe a Liquids Jam. At least 50% of the map must be underwater (either 50% of gameplay time or 50% by volume). || Topsy-Turvy Jam. Whatever theme/location you want but it must have some or all of it upside-down, sideways, or otherwise topsy-turvy curvy angled twisted. Must include spikes. Use nailguns. Can use Spiked Quakespasm features. Evil mood recommended.
Don't be too restrictive.
Temple etc etc hasn't been done much and it's a real strong style - or genre of styles. Well, that's a good reason for being non-specific. If you want to make your temple jam map in a techno Gothic style, then cool.
However, somebody that doesn't like that style could make their map in an Egyptian style. Or as sunken, medieval ruins, or whatever. The more words it takes to define the theme, the fewer maps there will be. That's what I think anyway. A Jam with an actual deadline that mappers have to stick to. You can create anything you want, but you MUST do it in the allotted time. No ifs, no buts. Definitely no extensions.
The best part is that if no one gets anything done we can call it cancelled and move on with our lives! :D I thought that people wanted to wait for a while before having another jam.
I would sit on it for a bit guys and work on your own stuff. I can always respect a map that can make textures that are themed one way look like they're themed in another. Not sure if it's intentional, but great use of the egyptian set to build something medieval-feeling.
Simon's Egyptian set yeah, but I'm just using them for the grey stone and blue highlights, and less of the symbols... just like I did with my Jam5 Qonquer map that no one played.
http://imgur.com/UorFgo8
http://imgur.com/eWL9NWa Im all about editor shots. Leaves more to the imagination...or something. Wanted to play around with knave.wad, maybe make a couple rooms. 2k brushes later and I think I might actually have my first map on my hands. All rooms are complete just need to commit to my weaker area of expertise and set up all the entities/triggers. Awesome man, congrats on nearing the homestretch! It is more of an achievement than you may realize.
I am also working with the knave texture set for my personal map and find that triggers/entities are my strengths where as making things look pretty is my "needs improvement" area. Mugwump: "Red shadows" is a good description. I've just used the color shading map from the emitter shading instead of the one from the lighting.
Dwere: Yes. mukor: The layout seems blocky, but fun to navigate, and the rooms looks well detailed. @mukor Yeah, what Romero said. Details on your walls seem good but that ceiling needs some too.
This seems to be one of the models included with Makaqu, also by mankrip. Thanks dwere, I'm gonna have to check it out. Always found the blockiness of the original too... umm... blocky. Oh, and nice job with it, mankrip. Looking great! Always love the knave set.
Like the others said, the ceiling in that room looks very flat. Either decorate it more or add another vertical layer (this is good for connectivity) because it's rather jarring with the rest. My days of Natural Selection mapping have spoiled me greatly because I often put more effort in detailing ceilings than floors (since an alien class could walk on all surfaces). http://imgur.com/6RhvxDa
Heres the spawn. For what little experience I have with lighting, this looks really good to me. The bland ceiling in the previous screen shot will get a similar treatment as seen here. I always make my best attempt at adding depth to all my surfaces. Ive got most of the entities chained, should be able to wrap this up within the next week. Seems a bit flat to me, the lighting that is. Are you using fill lights? Try toning down the light value for those. Otherwise, looks like a spiffy map and I am looking forward to playing it!
I'm liking the looks of your map so far, Kinda reminds me of that one map I made for Map Jam 666 :P
Looking forward to seeing it released! "What Romero Said"
That would be too conservative for most mappers I'm sure. I really liked that quote though, because it explained something that I'm sure I wasn't alone in noticing in the original Quake levels (after all, Ziggurat Vertigo...). That may be too vague a theme for a jam. It could be a required rule of the jam, but I feel like a theme needs to be tighter. But shhh! We've already been told to stop cluttering the screenshots thread with jam talk, so if you wanna discuss it further we should do it in General Abuse.
@mukor Did you delete your previous screenies? I wanted to look at them again but I can't access them. The first ones are still there. @mankrip
Blocky yes. It was an effort to remain simple as one of the biggest things that prevents me from ever releasing anything is that I try to do too much at once. @bloughsburgh Ive got a light with dynamic 2 32 units under the texture and another with dynamic 5 about 64 to 96 units under it. It might be a directory issue. I havent been keeping it too clean. Ill have to look after work tho. @breezeep Ill be honest, i havent played near as many custom maps as I would like. At the moment, work and dad life eats a lot of my time but as of the New Year Ill have lots of freetime. I hope to get around to playing more custom maps by then. Most of my exposure is thanks to Dazs playthroughs/commentaries. An invaluable tool in helping me catch up to modern Quake aesthetic and gameplay. @mugwump Im not sure what the deal is. All the links are working for me. Thanks for the kind words everyone! Ill get another screenshot in once i get my lights working properly. https://twitter.com/muk0r/status/794837715275620352
sorry for filling this thread up so much lately, im just really excited! Don't apologize for using this thread for what it's made for! Plus, I think everyone here likes getting their appetite whetted...
... been hanging with Gotshun while he finishes up his next level. I'm kind of the alpha tester, woohoo! AND, going over tonight to snag his old levels off his ancient PC, haha. If anyone here remembers the days when you HADDD to have both a 2D and 3D video card yup... this is what we are talking about. Good ole 3DFX Voodoo baby.
I'd say he'll be finished... soon(TM) :-P The fog adds a nice ambience. I wouldn't pay too much attention to those who say ita too bright. You are going for a certain theme and mood, don't let them force you into a corner of darkness only.
Nice pic Mukor and please fill this thread with as much shots as you want, it is one of the more exciting threads to have new posts in!
I think the second shot after Daz's reply looks the better of the two. The fog does add a nice touch! been hanging with Gotshun while he finishes up his next level.
Cool, I'll be curious to see what he comes up with next. don't let them force you into a corner of darkness only. I don't think that was their point. As I understood it, it was more about being mindful of not having a too flat lighting. Bright areas are just as fine as dark areas, providing that you keep your lighting interesting. Colored lights help with that too, which is what was missing from mukor's previous screenshots. https://twitter.com/muk0r/status/795028502722605058?s=09
Ligting is mostly figured out. Ive got all the entites chained together and the map is playable up to the gold door. Im still working on ideas for puzzle for the final sequence. Sorry Daz but youre gonna have to jump. :) This map uses AD. So far its just custom keys really. Id like to use breakables but to match the knave brick, Id need to retexture the existing brick breakables included with AD. I believe i could learn this in a weekend. Id be using QME and Wally to do it...correct? Nice new pic. Though if I may voice a little nitpick, the small archways on the sides of the large one look a bit weird without pillars or portions of wall to support them. I think adding pillars would make them at the same time more architecturally correct and nicer to look at.
Agreed. They are just flying. Maybe high corbels instead of pillars, so you don't steal space from player, on the ground.
Them floating is kind of why I liked them. Makes em feel "otherworldly".
Ill take it into consideration and Ill design something to swap and see how it looks/feels. Ive a couple ideas in mind. I figured out breakables. A lot easier than i thought. really happy to offer "custom" content in my first map. http://imgur.com/zHU1laz for the curious/uninformed, heres the excerpt from the AD readme: "To create your own custom rubble the new bmodels should be setup in sets of 4 (roughly 8/16/24/32 units in size) and specified with the brkobj1-4 keys. There are plenty of example map files under the 'maps/brk' directory which can be re-painted to suit your needs. Always create any custom bmodels in the map directory so that they can be grouped together with the map files. It is recommended that all new bmodels be compiled with minimum lighting using the following command line (tycompiler\light -light 150) The light value (150) should be changed to suit the location of the breakable." Them floating is kind of why I liked them. Makes em feel "otherworldly".
Alright then, it's your map after all, we wouldn't want to dictate your style. Still looking forward to it any way! Looks sweet, I'll have to remember how it easy it is when I am ready to include those in my map.
Is there any interest in book textures made from the books on the shelves in the Knave textures?
http://imgur.com/q3tW7dJ I think a better question is...should I ask Kell before doing so? is he still active in the community? I checked the other day and his last login here was in 2009? :\ perhaps he uses a different moniker? My reasoning for making it is to make it easier to make books protrude from shelves, without having to stretch the shelf texture, which can prove a little awkward at times. I also wanted to add a "paper" texture to the side of the books. http://imgur.com/M4c0LXc Want to actually share something to help with the motivation factors/just to showcase.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/mjb_jail.jpg First pass on lighting, only really detailed room I currently have haha. I already made paper texture that's tan. Book textures wouls be cool. Would make interesting rubble for a custom bookshelf breakable too.
+1 for tan paper. i think imma switch mine. is yours a piece of paper or the edge of a book? link to your textures perhaps? id like to check em out. ive seen you reference them a couple times now.
Thanks Shambler,
I am hesitant of releasing WIP shots due to my own unfairly strict standards I set for myself but I personally really enjoy what I have here. The good thing is even though I spent a fair amount of time working on this single room, I now have a template for lighting that I can easily reproduce in future areas! Looks great Bloughsburgh. Lighting and fog looks good. i dig the ceiling and the walls. Maybe try and spruce the floor up a little. Add a border...or maybe a "path" down the middle.
I finished the books last night. Well, mostly. i might rework the "paper" part. https://twitter.com/muk0r/status/796301088924303360 Theres 29 total. I did them all in one 128x128 but im thinking it might be better to go with 4 32x32s. Its a bit hard to work with at 128 units. The paper would be best scaled at I believe these are easy enough to make sense of? Can you guys easily tell which part is the spine and which is the cover of the book? Ill likely include a sample First of all mukor, the amount of effort you are exerting towards the small details makes me look forward to your release more and more.
They look great, I'll be sure to inspect that book texture goodness. Great idea about adding detail to my floor, I seem to always forget about that aspect of a room. I believe I know what you mean, like create a center aisle with a partnering texture. Ive probably been mapping way longer than I care to think about so its about time I give back to a community that has given me so much.
Im one of those guys with a Quake tattoo, if that explains anything. I wasnt sure how to acheive that while keeping the total number of textures low. My thought process was to do it like that, id need individual textures for every book and I feel like thats just too many textures for some books.
The way I was using em was to use 4 brushes to make a book. One for each cover, the paper and spine. http://imgur.com/LlfOVHv First texture, btw, so Im definitely open to all kinds of input. At some point after I finish this map, I plan on using these textures to build a breakable bookshelf or two. an explosion of paper, wood, and bits of books. Too much workload for right now, though. Looks good. So these are jail cells? They remind me of some famous parisian former wine cellars: https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2826/13223588323_d68cc899a6_b.jpg
I wish I could say that is where I got the reference from but actually I just diddled with brushes to make things look purty.
Being an otherworld jail place, I give myself creative liberties to do whatever haha. Trying to steer away from standard cell block expectations. After your MJ7 map, I have no doubt that you'll steer away from expectations... which reminds me that I need to play your first map sometime.
Awesome, super cool to see new maps being made!
I like the water on the ceiling, giving me some E4 vibes. Thanks, glad you like it. I'm planning to use water as an alternate means of transport, replacing lifts etc.
Whole map feels like it's upside down (in a good way). Looking forward to seeing what you do with the theme :)
There are 15 levels(plus a skill/episode select) and everyone was designed with hipnotic entities.
Does pretty much everyone have "hipnotic"? I'm planning to use water as an alternate means of transport
Cool! It's one of the things I loved in Liquid Despair and I wish this kind of stuff was made more often. Looking forward to playing this. Pulsar and I are almost done with our collaborative effort, Leptis Magna, and hope to have it released in about a week.
http://imgur.com/a/C5Dvv I know this isn't really the right thread to ask in (but when has that ever stopped anyone here?), but what do people do when they're collaborating on Quake maps? Just take turns working on it? That's all I can think of.
Pulsar and I worked on this map 'chainmap' style, handing it off after working on it, sometimes multiple times in the same day. We each had our 'main' areas, and occasionally pushed forward into each others area when inspiration struck.
Ha, BIG indeed. A fine way to enjoy this map. You'll probably need more than one album. Our vertical building styles are on full display here. The textures are mostly from Hexen2, with a lot of augmentation from custom textures from Sock and Pulsar. Ha, MFX. For those interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptis_Magna @Ionous Did you guys take some architectural inspiration from the actual ruins of the city? That title was actualy selected at the stage when the map was almost built. I googled 'stone city' searching for a good title. And I think it's really a good title for such map.
Another screenshot for those who haven't seen it on twitter: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CxEq22CXEAAbraC.jpg:large discouraging new mappers everywhere and disheartening the veterans.
That or its inspiring, not sure which. http://i.imgur.com/oY0lzmh.jpg
been working on a quake4 remake for qw. it plays really nicely. check out this thread for details. http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/topic/7063/105681/ravage-2v21on1-map#105681 let me know if anyone finds shit wrong with the texturing. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/texture_wads/knavebooks.zip
As a reminder, these are based on Kells knave.wad so a big thanks to him for those! http://imgur.com/UOB54UY Ive been making my books out of 4 brushes. Texture the sides of the book before you cut or clip it so you dont have to line up the insides of the book as well, if that makes sense. Scale the paper at once you have a book built, you can just move the texture up and down to go through different books. Sometimes youll need to make the book wider for different spines but it works pretty well. I suppose i couldve included a small Im interested in seeing someone use these for breakables. A bookshelf exploding into books, paper and bits of wood. Currently, I have them set up so you shoot or hit them and they disappear. Find all the books and get a reward for the final room! your booktextures are lovely.
https://i.imgur.com/8rEVmwK.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cxk99TrWIAEdtFP.jpg Thank you! Thank you! those look amazing!
These are my first ever textures. :) They wouldnt exist without Kells inspiring spines he created for the knave.wad shelves. I like that you made different-sized books. Awesome attention to detail as usual.
Libraries using these book textures will look much more realistic than a simple flat texture, however good it is. I wasn't sure at first but it turns out that it's a great idea you had there, Mukor! Heres my progress on breakable books with Arcane Dimensions. Download this and put it in your ad/maps.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/breakablebooks.zip http://imgur.com/a/wukRA So far its just three books(red, orange, green). They "break" into one of two "types". One being three seperate pieces; orange-1.bsp, orange-2.bsp, orange-3.bsp. The other being the whole book; orange-whole.bsp. The pos1 property controls the particles. Each books emits particles to match its color! Let me know what you guys think! every page of every book has its own brush
Make them breakables as well, so that pieces of shredded paper can fly all over the place! Next 1,000 brush jam, the whole map consists of ONE book. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/mjb_cloudy.jpg
Another random WIP of my personal AD map. I might look into the QS Spiked rain effects even if it is only for those who use the engine...it sure looks like it is about to pour! I would appreciate any comments or criticisms even though this is entirely up to change and nothing is final. *Oh, and ignore the random floating square >_> Looks great, as moody as they come. If you implement rain for QSS, you should also do it for DP.
random floating square Make that a giant meatball for a cool pop culture reference... ;) Thanks man,
If I do go with rain official I will certainly attempt to enable it for DP as well. http://wwwtyro.github.io/space-3d
It is a free Space Box generator that uses random seeds to generate a sky/spacebox. I think I found it from FifthElephant's twitter a long while back. Seeing his groovy green spacebox made me save the page...glad I did! If you need some guidance for DP implementation, check this tut by Seven: http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-help/quake-clients/6869-tut-creating-rain-snow-fog-darkplaces.html
Thanks Nitin, I am definitely okay with this vibe.
Thanks Mug, I will take a look...if I do it would be at the very end of the map's life cycle. this is something I whipped up in the past day and a half. I'm moderately happy with it, I guess. Same texture set as another map I've posted about before, but no other relation here.
Question: How far along have you gotten before giving up on a map before? My previous map in a similar style was/is quite long at this point, with a lot of effort put into it (months). But i've lost my motivation to work on it recently, so I did my noirjam map and then started working on this one instead. Not sure if I'll ever go back to my older map, but it's the first time I've ever "abandoned" something that was so far along. You're talking about the map with the lava pit? I was looking forward to this one. Have you considered a collab with another mapper? Some of the greatest maps around were made from scraps.
It might still happen some day. If this map ends up getting finished though I'll probably release the source map file + wads publicly. I wouldn't mind someone else finishing it, but taking the effort to specifically collaborate isn't really my style of doing things. I'd be more interested in seeing what someone with free license to mess with things hacks out of what I've made.
This is crucial to finishing a map. I thought this video was pretty good for layout creation ->
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUwcX5Hbdng&list=FLdR9SxCXvkZjZfBdpQEUkyA&index=1 Granted it's CS:GO but as a general principle it works for level design, You can skip to 08:00. The hurdle, I feel, is fleshing out a full layout in the editor and refining it. This is time consuming and at least for me it's not a lot of fun. Your map also looks like crap and it's hard to imagine how this blocky layout is going to look good eventually :P Here is a video on this process, the making of the CS:GO map de_piranesi. As you can see the designer spends a significant amount of time refining his blocks and playable spaces before adding art! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--FxLX1RhuE It's not easy but if you can persevere through the layout stages without getting caught up in too much detailing, you stand a good chance of completing a map. Greyboxing is good, but it's a lot easier with small maps for multiplayer than it is for larger singleplayer maps. Maybe if/when I find myself with a better eye for scale it will get easier, but throwing away large parts of a level because while it might have worked "on paper" but didn't in practice is exactly the sort of thing that killed my motivation on that last map.
Also, the "missing texture" texture is ugly as heck. Does anyone know if it's possible to replace it? The screenshot looks nice. Dark and dank is how I like my Quake and I can appreciate the shoreline blend you did at the edge of the water. I also think you do well with infusing rock into your brushwork.
I made my first serious attempt at the greyboxing method for my Blood level. Started off as an experiment to get a solid layout down and its design stage didn't happen until a start, middle and end had formed.
Several areas changed over time for the better; the library section was originally three separate rooms (bedroom/bathroom/library) before merging the space together and moving some places around. Working in this way really helped me out and wish I had tried it way sooner. Was easier visualising level flow and could change anything on the fly if it wasn't working out. No time wasted adjusting visuals. Definitely sticking with method this going forward. I never give up on maps. A Roman Wilderness of Pain came out ten years after it was started. Lol.
But I know what you mean about layouts, my problem is the opposite though: I sketch out a gigantic layout, and then it takes forever just to finish the architecture, and even then plenty of other mappers have maps at a way higher level of detail than me. +1 for the collaboration suggestion, that's always a good idea. Playing on Darkplaces it is much more darker idk why. On Quakespasm it is much brighter for some reasons.
was just relativating.
:P There are many mods on what Quake can handle. They all have their own atraction. Telejanos - great metal light shine. QbizQuake - original dos quake on new engines. DarkPlaces is developped by LordHavoc I thought and one of the populairest stars for modding. The name relates to the dark and desolated places quake can be. By means of what you cannot see won't say it doesn't supposed to be there. There are a lot of ways to clear your view with the manual of the options. So your first dark insight might be, that you had the wrong view options. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/npdmdv3hlkbdyd7/pritchard1-alpha-1.zip
Built for AD 1.42 or whatever. Just throwing out the first 2 minutes of the map to see if i'm heading in a good direction or not. Some screenies: http://i.imgur.com/ax4hVg0.png Don't expect to reach that gun without cheating. http://i.imgur.com/ZZ2ppnl.png http://i.imgur.com/LbuW9I3.png Take the elevator into the dark texture to end the level. Small feedback from screenshot (I've not downloaded or played yet). It is a fair bit of work too, so take suggestion with a grain of salt.
Make 3 borders around the edges of the dirt on the tiles, make the outermost one 80% opaque, the innermost 20% and the middle one 50%. That way you'll have a nice gradient of dirt over the tiles that looks more "realistic". OR around the edges of the tiles use textures generated by: https://www.quaddicted.com/files/tools/quake_texture_tool_v0_1_0.zip Otherwise looks awesome! A noble idea, I suppose. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to get QTT to behave with my source textures :( one's 128x128 and the other's 64x64, and the result = total mush. Here's what I got out of it, scaled down to 50% size in-editor: http://i.imgur.com/fFU3WtE.png
Never mind that the dirt is facing the wrong way right now; there's so much lost detail in the floor tile texture it's just not possible to use. I hearby leave the task of figuring it out to whoever wants to make it into the credits for the map. Here's the source textures. That area is so small, why not just playing around with vertices? It must be the artistic choice to create opaque textures, slowly changing to an another texture.
Or sculpt the individual floor tiles and have them lie on top of the ground in the center (maybe 4 units high), and then some dirt heaps on the sides, slanted faces towards the outer walls.
give these a whirl, I made them in gimp
You might need to remove the fullbrights if the gimp derped and decided to use them when reducing the colours. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/108695968/pritchard.zip Meh, I just replaced the mdl with another one.
-Cool brushwork and rock/base infusion...you do very well with that. -Gameplay is fine, base enemies are fun to pulverize but a very linear trip...being that it is alpha I am sure that's intended. -Some rooms had too much fill lighting in my opinion. I want some more contrasting shadows...the first room being the largest offender. The last room however is the most impressive room I think. -I didn't care for the fiend trap, I rather be able to backpedal out the door since that is my first reaction...I almost am guaranteed to get leaped upon. Again, just my personal thoughts. Keep it going, a really unique style being created here and I would say you have brushwork down quite well! I knew I was going to forget something. The field.MDL is from a post on Preach's blog iirc. It's not a big deal but I'll have to remember to include it in the future...
Thanks for the feedback on brushwork, I'm glad you think I'm heading in the right direction. I do need to work on the lighting in some areas like you said, I struggled at the start with deciding how I wanted to have the map look. I'm conscious of having the level be too dark to play properly in, especially. That was my biggest concern for the final room, actually. The level is quite linear, I'd like to open it up a bit and I have some ideas for how that could work on the future. I'm intending on using a bit of backtracking, I think it'd work well to have the player use some of those areas in reverse. But aside from that I want to have some more blocked off doors like the one at the start, and have the player work their way through segments of the level again rather than just having them turn around and head back or anything like that. The fiend trap is a tough one. Second try it's very easy, first try i can see it being a really painful experience. I suppose leaving the back door open could work to help that, but that undermines the experience of having a fight with a fiend in such an enclosed space... Maybe I'll just replace it with a dog on easy and normal :P http://i.imgur.com/ZnRqTQ7.png Thanks Shamblernaut, they were a bit of a pain to put down since I had to cut up the floor quite a bit but the end result is quite nice.
They're definitely my favourite textures to use for this sort of theme. They're pretty versatile, and they're a lot better for building darker, grimier areas than normal base textures are.
I love that set. There's a really nice set just released that could be adapted into the set with a bit of tweaking -
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=54248 I've been working on a very similar set for Doom 64, but, sadly, I've abandoned it.
That tekwall is pretty sick, but I wish it would tile. In honor of AD 1.5, here is another progress shot from my upcoming map. I am going to incorporate some of the new toys from the patch so that will be fun.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/mjb_cages.jpg Looking good Bloughs. Looking like a sizeable map you got going on there. Dig the caged lighting. You gonna add some broken ones on the ground? i see some ropes with no cages/lights at the end?
I still need to finish the books for my map. bleh. Gonna focus on getting the gameplay done first so i can get a beta out to you guys. Itll be ~15 minutes of playtime. I didn't think about adding broken cages on the ground...that's a good idea! Yep some cages do not have flames or have other forms of lighting instead to produce some sort of asymmetry. The map is sizeable but it isn't of gargantuan size...today I hope to start adding game play to see just how long it takes to beat so far.
Looking forward to your beta Muk! Thanks NewHouse and Shambler! http://i.imgur.com/zhOxLhn.png
Increasing the size of some rooms and repositioned the gold key after some feedback from skacky. Ill make some more changes and get a beta in here in the next day or two. Yeah its for AD. Some custom breakables in there too. Ill likely use a custom key for a secret as well. Not too many AD monsters aside from crossbow and hogres.
https://twitter.com/muk0r/status/807963099974238208?lang=en
Update to Gold Key Room... I was told I needed "more verticality"... has almost become a trite buzzword. I'm not saying the suggestion is invalid, it just seems to be the go-to critique in any given level design forum.
cool looking map, btw. The trick is to pitch the level 45 degrees so that you cover the most of each axis. That way you have plenty of verticality and horizontality.
which is 1) probably terrible and 2) probably already been implemented at some point and proven to be terrible.
the idea: an fps with normal player movement with the addition of being able to rotate the entire level. can't get to a switch beyond your reach? rotate! trying to get to a hole in the ceiling? rotate! is that wall just a skoshe too high? rotate! Sounds like a migraine inducing pukefest. I hate myself for even thinking of this. and you should get to making it before some numbnuts steals the idea and turns it into the next Portal and makes a ton of money.
I imagined the same thing for a game based on Escher's drawings. Hipnotic and AD do rotations. Would it be possible to rotate an entire map? That would probably be a mapping nightmare.
While not being rotation per se, Cube had the possibility of shifting gravitational direction so you could walk on walls and ceilings to a similar effect. Funny that you mentioned Portal because I remember playing a puzzle game (not first person, though) on the PS1, I think, where you had to escape a series of cubic rooms which you needed to rotate to reach the exit. The name eludes me.
Of course the best implementation would be to "fake" it by simply rotating gravity and camera orientation - the level would actually be (mostly) static - no need to make it literally rotate.
Dynamic entities in the level would need to react to the shifting gravity though - that's where all the work would go. Not sure if you're implying I was only talking about vertical because I wasn't - the gravity vector can be any orientation.
I can see this being an aesthetic but not a functioning mechanic. His art works because it's a fixed perspective in which he manipulates the perception of depth. In a 3d game you have a variable perspective and actual depth. I remember seeing a 2d escher game on steam that looked pretty nifty.
simply rotating gravity
Quake supports this? I can see this being an aesthetic but not a functioning mechanic. His art works because it's a fixed perspective in which he manipulates the perception of depth. Yeah, I should have mentioned this idea was mostly inspired by his maze-of-staircases stuff. I realize that his optical illusions would be harder if not impossible to pull off. Makes me think of an old map from "the jedi returns". There was this spacecrft that hung diagonally, where the player hangs downunder.
A strange experience, for all elevators work arcangle. I created hc2 a couple days ago and this is the beginning part of it with some ceiling detail. Map still in development.
Screenshot download: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/hc2withceiling.jpg Cool man hexcalk, this is how you do it! Displaying WIPs and collecting feedback.
Looks like some spiky ceilings, a medieval map in the works? Keep it up! This level that I recently took a screenshot of was named "hc2" because a map titled "hc1" was created prior to the release of Peripheral. Both are still in development. hc2 is generally E1M2 influenced, while hc1 will have Japanese themes and textures from Daikatana.
Then again there is nothing wrong with boxy rooms or areas if those are intented to be that way. With extra details boxy-like areas, can look like they're not, even though they are. Maybe in details there is something they care so much that they doesn't care about the actual shape of area and are more focused on purpose than anything else. Hopefully this makes sense, when making more areas in the future.
Last area...
http://i.imgur.com/SBUK8jV.jpg Hi there, total newbie quake mapper here. we're putting together a mapping project for newbies, hoping to get together 5 or 6 maps. If anyone is interested, we have a google doc here, just add yourself in:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zlfb2U2VCeS70uS6Klc2ZEOC9KtnYyCyBXEmeetjh0c/edit?usp=sharing We're kind of running this through /vr/ s doom/retro FPS threads so you can head there, or questions in the google doc. A screenshot of my first quake map ever: http://imgur.com/ln2wqrI HexenMapper, you can add my map to the collection once its complete! I'm also a newbie mapper and im building my first map!
Map Name
Shadows of our forgotten ancestors Builder Naitelveni Description? Castle cortyard in they skies difficulty: medium/hard Lenght/size: 5-15 minute (small) Status Almost finished my first build, and after that I will make an check up for fixes and bugs and fix those and then I'll be ready. Link - Cool, I added you in Naitelveni. The deadline will probably be April 1 so plenty of time. I have a lot to learn and my map is only just started.
It's good to see a project that aims to get complete beginners to release a first map. I completely understand that even though this is partly what map jams are also for (the requirements of a map jam are basically just an info_player_start and an exit trigger), newcomers can find the quality of most jam maps intimidating. Likewise, I understand the lax deadline: a couple of weeks may be plenty of time for a seasoned mapper, but when you still need to learn the basics, that's a very tight deadline. So basically what I'm trying to say is: sounds like a great idea, HexenMapper, and I fully support it...
No offense intended to HexenMapper! Anyone is welcome, the aim to give noobs an excuse to try to build something, but if you want to build a map and include it you're more than welcome!
@Total_newbie All good man, cheers for the support. No one is tied to this thing, its just for fun, not going to be released anywhere important, probably post a link on the /vr/ retro FPS thread and thats about it :) Thanks alot! I'll be giving you guys another version of my map within 10 minutes. um going to post it in the mapping help topic.
I want do something very simple for this, since I am kind of working "too seriously" one bigger fantasy map, this could be a good opportunity for me to relax and be noob myself. Bloughburgh you're gonna Join too? ;)
Nope,
I agree that although there is no barrier to entry, the jam entries usually would intimidate me if I was a brand new mapper. Having the project be exclusive to completely fresh mappers seems to be the best direction. Yeah, maybe it is better leave space for the actual new-comers, I was just wondering how many would be interested. Also in jams, even in retro jams there seems to be quite high expectations about the entries, I was just wondering whether or not this might be good opportunity to try out something without those expectations.
Well its all pretty casual at this stage, I dont know what kind of quality us newbies will be able to produce, we'll try our best and we have a bunch of time so hopefully something alright.
You're all more than welcome to put something together, I dont mind. Some casual maps by seasoned mappers will help keep the quality up. What we need mostly is help with things like linking maps together and answering questions about how things work. I have a grasp on basic triggers, and was able to set the music for my map, but I've yet to attempt to make a working door... Thats about my level of knowledge. I've done a bunch of mapping for doom engine games, and made a 15 map wad for Hexen at the start of this year. I'll need help organizing the maps into a file that people can run, I dont really know how to do that - how to combine a bunch of maps into an episode and link them together, and what format to save them in so people can run them with quakespasm or their chosen port Oops, didn't read the last paragraph. Making an episode out of maps by various authors would require a fair amount of coordination between mappers. Maybe it would be best to keep it AD style and make an episode when entrants are more seasoned?
...but just to clarify, an episode requires to decide the map order and when to give a new weapon. This implies balancing combat in each map according to which weapons are available.
count me in
i will release at minimum a bad but playable map with no leaks and vised. Map Name Don't know yet. Maybe Wizard Tower. Or Scrag Tower. How all of you call that monster? scrag or wizard? i don't like wizard, i think hexen wizards, robes, etc. Builder Topher Description Medieval tower, partially submerged. Inspired in E1M4. Old-School. Smallish. Around 50 monsters in hard. Maybe some AD monsters and breakables, if it's ok for a newbie map pack. I think 1-APR is enough time to put some breakables, even if they not affect the gameplay. i want to use those crossbow knights Status Nothing yet... total newbie. regarding names topher
there is ambiguity between the death messages in quake and the entity names scrag - wizard vore - shalrath demon - fiend tarbaby - spawn if you want to dig into the code and have a look for yourself, the death messages are in client.qc Maybe some AD monsters and breakables
AD content requires to use the AD I call them:
scrag vore fiend spawn death knight I think those are the coolest names and that's my reasoning. Your map overview sounds promising! I wonder if it would be play if I threw in my first map? It's very short (2ish minutes) but it's also by a person who was a noob at the time :)
Good point about the balance, a hub might be the best way to go, is it possible to have each map as pistol-start when entering from a hub? that way everyone can balance from scratch.
As for Breakables, I'd probably try to avoid them, keep it vanilla. Perhaps a more experienced mapper could do the hub map, or someone can claim it. Topher I added you in, Pritchard your early map is welcome too! You should create your own thread for this project, in order to avoid cluttering this thread with off-topic.
BTW, you can count me in too. I think 3 months are enough for me to make something. Most probably a runic/metal map. is it possible to have each map as pistol-start when entering from a hub? Yes. I don't remember how exactly but it has been discussed recently, most probably in the Mapping Help thread. Go there and do a search for "shotgun start" or "strip weapons". Thanks mugwump, I made a new thread, and I'll look into those shotgun start posts. Also added you in :)
Hello everyone. I make my first map for Quake and I am looking for critism.
Screenshots: http://imgur.com/gallery/55Fyq You might wanna join the QUMP project here: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61385
Judging by your screenshots, your map looks very 1997: blocky and undetailed. You might want to refrain from using riveted metal textures on large surfaces, it doesn't look very good. Welcome to Quake mapping! It appears you know your way around the editor. I enjoy the sewer screenshots the most.
From glancing at the screenshots I find the lighting to be overly too bright and flat. Try adjusting light values to create a bit of darkness in the rooms. When I said riveted metal textures don't look good on large surfaces, I was talking especially about this one (metal2_6, I think) and met5_1. They're more suited to small details. A texture like wizmet1_2 looks much better, as evidenced by id's start map.
And yeah, forgot to mention the lighting. Good to see a new mapper! Thanks for posting screenshots.
I agree with everything Bloughsburgh said. It looks like a project with potential, but a couple more suggestions: The proportions of the map seem a bit too large in a few places. Examples include the raised Quake sign on the floor in the third picture, the wall-mounted lights in the first, fifth and last picture, and the stained-glass windows in the first and fourth picture. The raised Quake sign will probably make movement around that room a bit more annoying than it needs to be. It's not high enough to block line of sight, so it's bound to just impede player movement. If you lower it so it's just a couple of units high (and maybe turn it into a func_illusionary), it will probably look and play better. This goes for intricate floor details in general. As for the stained glass windows in pictures 1 and 4: I would suggest letting the textures lead your brushwork a bit more. It looks like you've scaled up and stretched that texture to match your brushwork. Instead, maybe try creating brushes that match the scale of the textures. That way you'll end up with slightly better visual proportions. Also think about what the textures represent. A raised stained-glass window that casts a shadow (picture 4) doesn't really make sense -- so either use a different texture for that kind of object, or make the stained-glass window flush with the wall, or recessed (sunk into the wall). A related point: in pictures 2, 3 and 5, you've used a door texture that is rounded on top, yet you've placed the door brushes inside a rectangular opening. Here, again: let the textures lead your brushwork: if your door texture is rounded, turn the doorway into a corresponding arch. Or else, use a different texture for the door. Also related to texturing: pay attention to all sides of brushes. The ceiling lights in pictures 3 and 5 have the same texture (the light texture) on all sides. That texture should only be on the bottom face of the brush; the sides should have a different metal texture. The rooms themselves seem a little too large for the sparse detail they have: the ceilings are high, and the walls are pretty uniform from floor to ceiling. This tutorial might be helpful in learning to avoid that sort of thing: http://isoterra.co.uk/quake/tut1/ I look forward to seeing the map develop further. :) There are two things I don't agree with in that tutorial, namely the recommendation not to use stock textures, and the suggestion towards the end of using minlight: stock textures are fine, especially the runic/wizard textures you're using; it's how you use them that counts. And DON'T use minlight.
But the basic ideas about using non-rectangular shapes, height variation and texture variation to give more character to a room are all sound, I think. I don't have critism,
I only see "for the joy of the game"! Go on! And let the good advice help you. Dude this is dope as fuck! every new mapper should read this!
this will instantly remove all these awkward flat ceilings, floors anw walls. It's a fucking sexy tutorial and I love it.
I'd lost it, thanks for finding the link for me again ^_^ I made this in a couple hours today:
http://imgur.com/a/IBKNq The map is tentatively titled Aaa, which is the hawaiian word for "lava tube" (seemed appropriate). I shall strive to keep the same creativity standards for the rest of the map. I hope I won't disappoint. I wanted something reminiscent of E1M6 and the start map's entrance to episode 3, but different. I think I succeeded. What do you (and the others) think of the title?
I would advise against keeping an "intricate" look like that for too long. Certainly use it in sections, as it is quite nice and it has its effect, but it's quite "dense" and aside from probably not playing well with monster movement, I think it's too visually distracting. I would personally tend towards a solid face for the endcap to the "tunnel" shown here, but in general I would reserve it for interconnecting segments and keep it away from combat areas.
Perhaps it could work as an upper-wall/ceiling detail as well, I don't know. You'll have to see what works, but be wary of creating anything too visually dense. Maybe the tubes could be used as hallways or transitions to rooms...still way too early to make any assumptions but I like the initial idea of it.
The name is cool and pretty original...I can always appreciate it when a map title has relation to the map's theme. It also has the benefit of being almost at the top of a lot of lists, if it were to ever be released seperately.
Although, has anyone tried releasing something that starts with 0? Releases that start with 1 currently sit at the top of Quaddicted by default. Don't worry, I won't keep this level of intricacy for the whole map. In fact, I was already planning on making this starting tunnel lead into a more solid room. I just wanted an opener with a bit of a wow factor.
Glad you like the name. So it's settled, then. I initially found it funny but it's growing on me beyond that. It can be viewed as a cry of panic or pain, plus the original meaning is aptly fitting to the architecture I want to build. Funny thing is, I stumbled upon it completely by accident. I've just remade the main arena. Hope it looks better.
Screenshots: http://imgur.com/6Fqxmao http://imgur.com/v50gh5n Nice screen, lots of detail going on in there.
2 things: The rivets texture looks a bit skewed maybe due to texture scale increase? This looks worse on the slopes sections up above. If that center blue section is meant to be a pool of water, then consider lowering it by 8 units to give it a bit of a lip. This make it appear more realistic rather than directly aligned with the floor. Keep going! Yeah, what Bloughsburgh said. And maybe add a border to the pool. Also, you could try to make the vertical girders protrude more from the wall with the Christ, like they do from the other walls.
That looks pretty decent, but my only complaint so far is that the room looks a bit too bright. I'd suggest toning down the brightness and it will look much better.
The water texture just sitting on the floor looks a bit strange to me. You may want to make it more of a fountain with a perimeter.
http://parentseyes.arizona.edu/placesinthesun/photos/today/places_fountain.jpg Your lighting is pretty bright and flat as others have said. Windows in Quake are usually set into the walls like this: http://pirat.snotboble.net/quake/pics/hip2m65.jpg There are a lot of great touches too - keep going - you are well on your way to a good looking map. Hail hail the gang's all here!
What if you could pick any enemy from Quake ever for your map? What if there was a mod that provided every feature under the sun? What if there was a mod that said the mapper is always right? Many have created awesome content in numerous mods. AD is the closest to combining the most goodness in one package...and still...sometimes you just want a gug to beat up some poor crossbow knights. Sometimes you want a scragmother alongside mummies. Sometimes you want a vermis with lost souls. What if...? Now, if only I can get permission from all the mod authors to upload this someday. (Please note that content shown in picture above is actually coded and fully functional except where certain bosses are only visible when angered in which place I have used a misc_model to show them as non-angered.) I don't know about everything... Where's my X-Men total conversion monsters??????? or weird 1997 porn mod reskins?
/s What if you could pick any enemy from Quake ever for your map?
What if there was a mod that provided every feature under the sun? I've been wishing for something like that. I don't think you need permission for AD content but good luck for Quoth content. Sock had to basically harass the Quoth team for months and was only able to get permission granted for some monster models, for which he had to rebuild the code from scratch. The beauty of including everyone and their mother is that the mapper gets to decide which are "the shit ones", since this is highly subjective.
Just what I was thinking. If only there was a recent, highly polished mod which also did this but included just the good ones. Hmmmm.....
Said recent highly polished mod was used as the basis for including new content and the older enemies now had AD features?
Perhaps it would have been better to go rogue with this one and anonymously release without permission. Chances are that's the only way it'd see the light of day. Which is a shame, since doing that would probably piss a lot of people off at the same time you made quite a few happy.
Oh well, too late now! With all of the cool powerups from Quoth and AD?
Locked and Loaded! You mean like Ken's map there.
You see, Quake is so versatile that anything can be made in it. I'm of the opinion that the mapper is responsible for the new and different. The mod is there so that the mapper's vision isn't hindered. AD did this the best, I only want to continue to improve and build on what has gone before, to continue what has been started. everything... mmm... i don't know about that...
part of the appeal of AD is high quality. not quantity. but... there are some things that i like, in any case: a) seven SMC and improved quake 1.5 style of monster AI only in nightmare skill. a real nightmare to win. i check those two mods a few weeks before the release of ad1.5 and i like most of the AI features in the old monster. and nails that bounce! awesome. the only bad things is that it can break the gampeplay in some maps, and make others very very hard. b) extend the particle system. optionally, it may involve too much heavy processing. examples: blood, when you hit a wall with a shotgun, lava, slime, explosions. the idea is: dots with different sizes and colors, instead of dots with same size and color. there are other things. but they're very hard to implement. moving liquids. changing gravity (prey 2006). ...at least the Uber-scrag from Travail would've made it into that group shot. Lun's enforcers are pretty cool too IMHO. Mind you, if I ever fire up an editor again, I'll be using AD for sure.
Looks ace biscuits but I think the phong shading is making the lighting look too flat where the columnar uprights meet the flat parts of the wall above the arches.
Yeah, it's nice and possibly a slight Sen's Fortress vibe. But I must admit I got a bit of a Honey/Sockstyle fatigue over the last couple of months.
Looking good, not sure I agree with Kinn though - assuming I'm talking about the same place, I don't think phong is really making a difference. I think it looks fine, but if the goal was to spruce it up I'd go for a bit more brush detail (perhaps an insert or something sticking out slightly. Just to break up the texture a bit.
But personally I don't think it's necessary to do anything like that, I think it looks fine
Yes it's a minor quibble at best - a quiblet, if you will. To put it in perspective, a quiblet (in Standard Pedantry Units) is roughly equivalent to about two-thirds of a nitpick. Sock Has Spoken, No uber mod for you. Oh well. GO MAP WITH AD!
I did not say no to your uber mod!?! I said - Please stop patching AD, create your own mod and use the devkit! This means creating your own uber mod in your own "uber" directory! I did clearly stated this fact in the readme file Line 34 -Do not use the AD (Arcane Dimension) name for your own mod Are you sure you got the Drake monsters in that screenshot? :P I'm planning on calling it the Keep mod anyway. Because you keep what you kill (and kill with).
In that case sure. And yes it is only a start. I haven't got quite everything just yet. All must be subsumed into the continuum. The collector's Keep must be filled. Any mod differences must be accounted for and easily accessible by the mapper. For instance, the zombie has umpteen different abilities that have to be included such as crucifix dismounting, laying, necrosprinting, etc. Better to do something like an easily accessible (and compilable) bestiary like Realm667 has for Doom like suggested some time (years?) ago - where people can create their own collection of enemies from a database to include with their map.
I can see how someone who only wants to add a few new enemies would want to be able to add just those new features to minimize map download size.
However, devkits aim to provide one dowlnoad for the kit. Then maps don't need to include their own mod in the downliad at all. People download the kit/mod. Then download maps for it. I may do Preach's idea of making the Keep mod inside the base ID1 directory where the only requirement is for people to add pak0 and pak1. This way any maps that want to add something not included in the base devkit can have an extended mod with their features. If only there was an engine that had support for multiple progs.dat where any added progs were simply to include extra functions.
FTE_MULTIPROGS... Its basically FTE's oldest extension :)
that said, you generally have to tread very carefully around the base progs because very few mods are clean enough/designed for it, which makes simple things like eg changing the obituary (when some new monster kills you) really painful. Its also kinda too much of a pain to set up on a per-map basis, but meh... And yeah, its still fte only, and not enough people around here are hip enough to use it. Reading thru recent discusion in the AD thread has me thinking I should just stick to the tried and true method of putting it all together in one package as a standard mod. Full multiengine support (though QSS is recommended), no muss, no fuss, best support for the mapper.
Obituary should rely on a specific Systems. Better systems allow for flexibility and the best power for the mapper. That is why I use AD as a base for any added content. All the enemies you see above use AD code structure. I really should create my own dev thread rather than clutter up the screenshots thread. :) I had some free time the afternoon and, once again, found myself admiring Doom3's art. I loaded up some assets in darkplaces as I've never experimented with anything other than diffuse layers.
I also generated some normal maps for my 2D pixel art using nvidia's texture tools for photoshop. The results were pretty bad, though I didn't have high expectations. Using higher rez assets yielded some pretty good results but the art was of organic stuff (stone, wood, etc) and the plasticy look of the normal maps is pretty lame. It really takes a bit of fiddling to get it to look good. On that note, it occurs to me that the design of Doom3 is perfect for showing off the tech it used. It seems all these nifty shaders and texture maps work best with hard surfaces and dramatic lighting. Doom3 texture set is really easy to map with as well. That's some good designing! My player scale is different though. Mine being 128u and Quakeguy is less then half that, IIRC. Also his eyes are in his chest, making him feel even shorter.
Does anyone here know of a tool that will invert the z of existing normal maps? If you notice in the video, they're inverted (shadow where light should be and vice versa). turns out each image channel (RGB/XYZ) is actually grayscale, making it simple as pie to invert. Neat!
trying out bump/specular maps on low res assets. i'm happy with the bioshock inspired water, looks good for a first draft. the splash/puddle are placeholders. there are specular map on the blood and both bump and spec on the metal trim of the chest.
i played with giving everything a specular map but most surfaces had to be toned down so much that they may as well not have one. i think having select glossy surfaces, namely liquids, is a nice touch though. they stand out against the otherwise matte world without having to be overdone. i think it's pretty neat too. the hard part is figuring out an aesthetic that isn't bricks or tech panels :/ still looking for that "eureka!" moment...
@khreathor - custom stuff currently running in quake/darkplaces.
@Barnak - Not that I know of. I'm not associated with the QS team, I don't even program :P Water sheet looks awesome, I wish we had something that good looking for waterfalls in Quake, to complement DP Pretty Water.
I have been working on and off on a map for AD since the middle of October. I originally planned to release it by the end of the year but RetroJam 6 got in the way (and totally fine with that!)
In order to keep the mojo going, here is a random WIP shot from the map. It is entitled Ruiner (ad_ruiner) I really have no idea on the release date, but I hope to get beta testing going soonish! http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ruiner.jpg *Taken from not my desktop at home so the resolution is lower but meh!* this is the last one for a while, i promise. waterfall, now with refraction. and something that's been on my to-do list for a long time, dp_water. i prefer this over my previous water test.
I wish we had something that good looking for waterfalls in Quake, to complement DP Pretty Water. well, you can. this is basically quake in darkplaces. if you or someone else wants to use it for quake i'll upload the source files for the tests i've shown. i recommend making your own, though, as you'll probably get better results. these assets were made hastily for the sole purpose of getting it working. the waterfall is just noise with a directional blur and some squiggly lines to break up the uniformity. the normal map used for the dp_water was generated from an image created with the "render clouds" filter in photoshop. technical question, probably for the engine folks you may have noticed the bright seam along the edges of the dp_water caused by the reflection distortion revealing reflections that should be obscured by geometry. this is just plain awful with fog and/or skyboxes. can anyone point me in the direction of a reasonable "fix"? I have some pretty hacky ideas map-side, but they're just a band-aid. another strange thing, that's not something that needs "fixed", but worth noting. when reducing r_water_resolutionmultiplier value, you have to increase the offset of decals else their reflection will z-fight. you could try stretching the water texture a few units out on each side. I've used this cheap method to hide texture seams in other engines. Unsure if it will work here as shaders are involved but worth a thought?
are you talking about the weird artifacts seen in this screenshot?
http://quakeone.com/~files/water_dm3_9NC.jpg The reflected image has weird cracks along the waterline? setting r_water_reflectdistort to 0 will solve the problem (aside from a hairline seam, which is made more obvious by linear texture filtering and AA) but at the cost of no reflection distortion.
I thought about using cubemaps instead of realtime reflections but AFAIK you can only have one cumbemap per level and you can't link specific cubemaps to specific water brushes. You would still need realtime entity reflections too... and light styles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgDPSnZPGMA
in this example, by knowing the depth of the water you can find the edges and alphablend the reflection/refraction distortion. this is similar to my janky map-side solution which is to use water "trim", i.e. water brushes without distortion to run along the edges of geometry. yeah, the only reliable solution is to compare the depth values from the refraction fbo to the water surface.
if you're trying to do nice sandy beaches, that distance in depth can also be used to determine how much surf to include (which is even better for obscuring any boundary issues). of course, that gets a bit fancy. the other option is to just copy the current framebuffer and use that as the refraction image, then any seams are much less obvious, but the refraction can still show parts that are not from the water areas. the only reliable solution is to compare the depth values from the refraction fbo to the water surface.
interesting. thanks for confirming that. I'll look more into this. I have a question, though: the other option is to just copy the current framebuffer and use that as the refraction image, then any seams are much less obvious, but the refraction can still show parts that are not from the water areas. could that be enlarged slightly so as not to reveal any unwanted areas? that might look pretty bad though. Maybe a parallel frame rendered at a slightly higher rez/aspect ratio so the scale and pixel density is the same but you have "extra" image on all sides preventing unwanted reflections. this is probably pretty resource heavy :/ using the current backbuffer as the refraction image is generally sufficient to hide the glitches that you're referring to thanks to them normally only being a few pixels anyway. the 'new' glitches appear from the viewmodel etc overlapping water, giving a sort of halo. Copying the backbuffer like that is actually more efficient than re-rendering half the scene, so if it wasn't for the viewmodel and opaque water vising this would probably be the preferred option.
another possibility is to try nudging the refraction image up by a few pixels, you might get some boundary clamping at the bottom of the screen (or you could extend the size of the refraction texture offscreen, assuming you're in to engine modifications), but it should help hide the cracks a little better. if you or someone else wants to use it for quake i'll upload the source files for the tests i've shown. i recommend making your own, though, as you'll probably get better results.
I wouldn't know what to do! If no-one else is up to the task, having the source files would be a first step towards learning the know-how. setting r_water_reflectdistort to 0 will solve the problem but at the cost of no reflection distortion. I talked about that with Seven once, his answer was not to set this cvar to 0 but instead to lower both this one and r_water_refractdistort. But... Found A Solution If you've really found a way to fix it without modifying the cvars, once you implement it in your game it would be super mega awesome if you'd be so kind as to update DP-water with your fix for all us quakers to enjoy. @spike - hrm, interesting ideas. it seems using depth values is the most correct way to do it.
@mugwump - here's the source. You'll probably have to tweak the shader for q1, or at least the texture paths. Looks at existing shaders created for q1, like pretty water, to get an idea. Here's the q3 shader manual for reference if you get stuck on something. update DP-water with your fix for all us quakers to enjoy. This is on the to-do list, but not the top, so it's a ways out. But, when it's done the source will be publicly available. Ok, I'm done spamming the fuck outta this thread for a while :P And some of the background designs look a bit bland in that E4 corridor sort of way. But it still looks well built and some of the ideas look very cool and promising - the floating rune things especially. Keep it going dude.
It's too early to give you an estimation since because it really depends on how much free time I have and right now it's not all that much :)
I'd say the map is about 30% completed. Two info_player_starts?
BTW, you know you can make albums in imgur, right? You don't have to post one link per screenshot. If you're using tyrutils-ericw compilers, you should check Surface lights. Might be useful in this case.
Surface lights.
Does this mean what I think it means? What I think is: compiler deciding light value (and color) automatically from the light textures without the need to add light entities. Surface lights are just a "Hack" (not to put a dampner on the awesome stuff ericw achieves) as far as I understand it. What happens is that you set up a light entity with a key that has the name of a texture in it, and at compile time that entity is duplicated repeatedly over all surfaces with that texture. It's the sort of thing you could do yourself, if you had the patience of a robot. It's pretty effective though with the caveat that if you wanted some of those textures to be lit and others not to be you'd have to have two of the same texture with different names in your map.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about how it works, it's been a while. In case I didn't make it clear, the light that's emitted depends on the values given to that original entity, so there's nothing picked out from a texture or anything like that. (For picking colours from a texture, I like to use shareX's screen colour picker, it can give you the numbers in a format that you can just paste into an entity.)
Yes, it just duplicates one light entity over faces with specified texture name. Saves time when you have to edit lots of duplicated lights.
you set up a light entity with a key that has the name of a texture in it, and at compile time that entity is duplicated repeatedly over all surfaces with that texture.
Wow, good to know, this is gonna save me heaps of time! One thing though: would it still allow lightstyles on specific lights, like a neon blinking while others don't? I tried surface lighting on lava but found it to be very erratic, I think because of how the surfaces are chopped up. Some lava looked fine, while in other places didn't seem to emit any light at all.
What it's really best at is light emitting textures that have an obvious source in the center. You save having to place many lights, and they are all consistent throughout the map for color, brightness, etc. I'm pretty sure light styles work, switching the light on and off definitely does. Targetnames are retained by every duplicated light.
If you want some of them to do one thing and others to do another, then you'll either have to do ugly things with your brushes/textures or handle the lights manually. As far as I know there's no way to edit the individual lights that get created, they're only added when you compile. (Maybe if you decompile your own map... but seriously?) "−surflight_dump" command line option for light.exe saves all of the generated lights to a file "mapname-surflights.map", so you can then paste the copies into your map and edit them individually.
http://imgur.com/a/p6jZt
From this screenshot you can see how i light my maps, hundreds or thousands of low emission lights that i tweek after i have vised my map, i move them change the values, and its difficult. How do the Pro's create lighting in maps? compile often. take your time and compare diff setups.
in the end you will get a feel for it. I am not a pro but try this out:
Place a point light near a light source texture with: light: 400 wait: 3 After that, test your map and you should notice that the light sources appear to be the source of light. Now add some fill lighting around dark sections of your map (Darkness and shadows are important so don't go crazy!) Light: 100 - 200 Delay: 5 *Keep in mind these are just numbers, you'd have to adjust and play around to get to where you want to be* That should give you a good start. There are many different advanced techniques and better ways to do things depending on the situation but try that out! Like MFX said, you'll just get a feel for it after testing things. Enlightning Techniques for the masses.
I found this Sock mail i think it is helpful for you: * Never place symmetrical light sources in a room * Never use global ambient light, learn to light maps properly * Place strong light source first before placing additive fill lights * If a room lacks strong shadows, tone down fill lights * Consider shadow area contrast when placing source lights * Understand the advanced features of wait/delay * Try to keep light/wait values consistent for light source types * Always sync light entities to actual light sources * Always Illuminate the primary path * Light Flicker (style 1) can be useful for focus in a room * Play with up lights for ceiling detail focus * Lights can use mangle/angle parameters for directional spotlights * Lights should always create interesting shadows * Place strong lights for large shadows, fill lights to soften the edges * Switchable lights are perfect for creating dynamic detail * Place identical light sources at the top and bottom of platforms so that when the platform is in both positions it looks right for the light source Got it? Good. I gather they have something to do with how far the light reaches and its intensity at the source, but I need to learn how they work.
Yes, I already had this pic, but it's not as clear regarding which param does what as Skacky's link. Plus, it doesn't showcase all scenarios. It's still a good immediate reference, though.
If there is a way to edit the first post in a thread, this kind of useful stuff should be "stickied" in the mapping help OP.
Yes, it could be better, but the top two rows were all I actually made it for.
Notice how the appearance changes with light constant and only delay changed. Then below that the delay is the same but light value is changed. It allowed me to see what those parameters did. I would actually urge mappers to build a similar map for themselves. Some things are more easily seen if viewed in game, such as just how ridiculously far one light can extend using delay 1. this is good stuff, i've been playing around with the "wait" value and it makes things alot simpler, i no longer place a million lights.
That light test game screenshot, is it using white textures? I want to create own and test different sized room etc.
About this fill lighting, it is not intended to come from "real" light sources (like lamps, flares, fire etc.) But doesn't it look weird if there is bright random ball shaped lights in every corner. How do you blend fill lights professional? Don't know is it possible to give certain areas minlights (well func_wall, maybe it is possible to give the other funcs too). Then again, what is good minlight value even, 25,50,75,100? Seems like this requires a lot or trying. But doesn't it look weird if there is bright random ball shaped lights in every corner.
That's not what "fill lights" are. Fill lights are low brightness and designed to lighten shadows, simulating ambient or bounce light. Before ericw implemented procedural bounce, they were used liberally. So it seems like answer is.. never use fill lights if possible? Never use minlight if possible. Minlight is ugly and flat. Fill lights are good. Although now with the bounce functionality, they might not need to be used so much, I haven't really tested the new bounce stuff out though. Newhouse,
Those are not textures in the screenshot. That is the actual lightmap. You switch it on and off in game using the console command r_lightmap as seen in the picture. You can also bind a key to toggle it on and off in your autoexec.cfg @Kinn
Thank you, so fill lights are okay.. I assume I need to start using them in a darker areas. I know they aren't as bright as main light if set to be weaker, what I tried to ask was "how to make it blend well together with main lights / be smooth) what delay is good for fill lights? @Rick Thank you. Really didn't notice that it was just the lightmap (I must be blind). It's not like there'd be any difference between lightmapped white textures and displaying the lightmap directly.
Maybe it's too late to complain, but where are the screenshots? This is becoming another mapping help thread.
http://i.imgur.com/uSLqXZD.jpg
playing around with lights, color blends, wait values shadows and highlights... It looks good just the way it is, just keep playing around with lights and it will turn out great*
(It's been a while)
Lighting has been an issue for me as I haven't really experimented at all. Having read https://shoresofnis.wordpress.com/guides/lighting-basics/ & https://spawnhost.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/quake-1-lighting/ I found I kinda get the basics but pages like the abovementioned http://quaketastic.com/files/LightTest.jpg and especially the images on http://ericwa.github.io/tyrutils-ericw/ are exactly the kind of things that I've been looking for to better understand what to do where. its a skybox from AD, i had a difficult time on thinking about the surroundings, its still a working progress, i was thinking about building structures in the background... we shall see...
Especially since this is evolving a bit as compilers add features like phong etc.
Also re: #14455 ericw that's a very cool feature. I've used surface lights a lot, being able to tweak them is going to be great moving forward. How is the lighting looking? These are going to be default lights, then depending on situation there will be lights from other sources too. But making sure that if I create darker places, there is still enough light to navigate without problems.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855MVpBU25EVHVvRzQ/view?usp=sharing Looks really good man, I admire the amount of pre-planning you do for your creations.
The light in the glass looks really nice. Everything else looks good too. Thank you! These are elements that should have that consistency, especially moving platforms. I don't want to make peoples life harder than what it already is. My retro jam 8 map was a mistake in that sense.
Thanks to dumptruck_ds for helping me with door lights. I'm planning using them for doors that has lights attached (larger doors). I want to give different doors different purpose when to use them in a scene. Larger doors are like the biggest goal (depending on the scene), and also has this wow light effect. Giving a little reward for the player in a mental state. Then every larger door also opens slower than smaller ones, but I really need to play with timing, since players don't want to wait too long (yeah, it is a big deal, just come on open already). Glowing window(s) is kind of.. focus point(s), where player immediately looks at, because it has the strongest contrast in brightness compared to other elements. Naitelveni since you're already nailing it, I would go further and dare more contrast. Backup your work and light up this lava, make it look hotter. You could try a little stronger and darker sky light as well. And I would choose a skybox that matches the color you chose for the sky light.
Newhouse, it looks great, but don't you think the doors should have light fixtures? Maybe the doorway could have a texture like this one you used on the open door. Sorry I'm still noob with these lighting techniques, what is light fixture? I just placed on back and front these delay 0 lights to high-light them a bit.. also I tried that surface lighting, I put on sides of doors surface light textures and they worked tbh. If light fixtures will look better, then I gladly would like to try them out.
Also that glowing window used surface lighting. A light fixture is a lamp, for example. What I mean is: your light is more believable if it looks like coming from a source. The surface lights you made are perfect: it's lamp textures "emitting" those lights. That metal plate full of little spots make perfect sense. But when I look at the doorways, where is this light coming from?
I wanted to do a lighting thread for a while now, I have an idea for it but I'll have time in a month or so.
Yes, indeed I didn't use this door light logic yet in that scene. But basically I will turn on lights when door opens. It will not be as pretty as in modern sci-fi bases, but at least something. I have couple ideas how to make it look natural yet cool (we will see).
Also I added couple lights inside those slots where doors goes in when opened, I wanted them not to be pitch black.. maybe I just need to turn down values a bit. Of course for some doors I will add extra lamps in front and back. But it really depends on the scene I will set up. So finally, I just have this map almost complete. It has Daikatana textures and is Japanese-themed.
Here is the Quaketastic download link: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/hc1beta.bsp hc1beta screenshot at Quaketastic: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/hc1beta.png
Map is super bright and textures have fullbright pixels. You should fix this.
Map need some balancing for sure and exit portal :D Other than this it feels like Shadow Warrior :D I have a demo if you want. http://khreathor.xyz/tmp/demos/hc1beta.zip
btw, try removing fullbrights with this: http://quaketastic.com/files/tools/windows/wad_editors/defullbright-v0.1.zip Please redownload this demo zip. I'm an idiot and I packed bsp instead of a demo... but link is fixed now.
Please relight your map. It is very bright :(
And add some ammo and item_healt in the area around the "pyramid". Please some light rays now reveal teleport destination
@Bloughsburgh - thanks! I wasn't happy with my previous portal tests and I've been meaning to tinker with some particular shader stuff, so this was a good way to kill a few birds with one stone. Thanks for showing us how "modern" effects can blend nicely with a "retro" feel.
what you're doing shits all over modern effects on classic maps. see: https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/screenshots.html Thanks man, looking forward to whatever you end up releasing with this engine / mod. This is where I'd like to see indie games go in the next few years. The kind of tasteful fidelity that is offered by modern effects, blended with the aesthetic of "crunchy pixel art" and low polygon counts.
If I ever made a game, that's how I'd make it look. also, that light inscriptions in the walls looks like the gates of moria (LOTR).
cool stuff with those light rays i want to see something like this too. but that looks really hard to do. http://www.psychicsuniverse.com/sites/default/files/styles/250x250/public/stained%20glass.jpg Well said! I agree completely.
This aesthetic is so appealing. The low-fidelity abstracts things to the point where your brain is forced to read between the lines a bit. When things are crystal clear, it's almost impossible to suspend disbelief... I've spent 20 or more years playing games, and like most of us, i know what particle effects and skyboxes look like, and can spot the polygons in the highest polycount models. But reduce the resolution and render fancy effects in software, and it's so much harder to figure out how the scene is created. I can't see behind the curtain so easily with this, and that subtle haze, that slight mystery makes the world so much more engaging. So great work so far! Really excited by this project. @khreathor - thanks!
@Shamblernaut - I appreciate that. Those shots are a good example of what I'm trying to avoid. Funny, it's the same engine, same code, same tech. It really isn't about the tools, but how you use them. @Pritchard - I agree, I'd like to see more stuff like this. @topher - The doors of Durin were certainly an inspiration. That and Wayne Barlowe's work is what I drew from when designing those. I was slightly annoyed when a Doom4 gameplay trailer released and revealed the keyed hell doors that look very similar. Oh, well. Regarding the light rays: it can be done. I did some stained glass tests a year or two ago and it looked pretty good. Rays are easier if they're right angles. In half-life ep.2 they did angled rays like the ones you linked and they looked pretty darn good. @starbuck - I think you hit the nail on the head. I liken the pixelated look to reading a book: a book gives you key information and a general outline but allows your imagination to do the rest. This makes the world so much more rich and interesting and gives the reader (or player) a certain authorship of the world they're in. It seems that the closer we get to the uncanny valley the less immersive and engaging the world becomes. What you described is a core concept of this project. "every brick is at least one brush" is the new "every brick is a brush"
No but seriously otp, what makes you think it's unplayable? Looks fine to me. with that cruel stories about metal caches and corpses that were moleshed with rasping flesh cutters and fired daggers and examples of foto's of cathedrals after making them first in quake scaring the hell out of me.
you are the bigger fuckface, can we agree?
Didn't want to twiddle your knobs that bad, your screenie looks rather nice. I once played around with those textures myself, maybe i send you my extended textures of stone1_7 one day ;) No beef here dude. I love you and you know it. Hey guys. I've been messing with my retrojam5 map lately, trying to make it into something more playable.
I still need to make the lighting better (removing leaks too) and tweak the encounters and ammunition. I also need to do some detail geometry in the "outside" area to cover the ugly rooms below. I need some opinions of the gameplay thusfar. I also need some suggestions with what to do with the "blue room" in terms of encounters and the starting area in terms of aesthetics. dropbox link to zip file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/108695968/rj5_shamblernaut.zip Thanks in advance :) -Snaut Hello everyone, newbie here.
I've almost finished my first map (www.quaketastic.com/files/libraryA_almostcomplete.zip) and wanted to share it. It uses knave textures and needs Quoth 2.2. It also has the custom sky (is it called like that?) from ericw "etacarinae". It's compiled with vis fast and light extra, tested on Fitzquake 0.85 and I believe all of the bugs are fixed. Suggestions, critics and opinions welcome. Sorry, here they are: http://imgur.com/a/agvPt
Looking at the shots, good structures and design, perhaps an over-reliance on book textures tho. Keep it going man!
Hi Redmisao, had a playthrough, and some suggestions followed by the bits I really liked.
First, try running your map with developer 1 to get the debugging messages. There are a few items which fell out of the level. There's also a Quoth specific message "X has spawnawake flag without teleport flag" which I should explain so that you won't worry about it. When you make a teleporting monster using the spawnflags, you lose the ability to trigger it to wake it up. The spawnawake flag fixes that, it really means "wake up when you are teleported". So it does nothing if the monster isn't teleported in. Does no harm either though. Where you have the nailgun right now, it's too easy to miss. Not having it makes the double shambler fight nasty, and eventually you run out of shells and need to find it to progress. If you can put something else down there as a reward for exploration (a bunch of early rockets?), and put the nailgun somewhere unavoidable, I think that would be best. I found two secrets, and one was the yellow armour. My trouble with that secret was that you can't discover it until right after you just picked up a fresh green armour, so that goes to waste too easily. Perhaps the green armour could be on a different floor in the area? In that same areas, on the ground floor where the 45 degree wall meets the floor, there's a gap between the floor tiles and the trim where you can see the skybox (If you can't find it I'll post a screenshot of where) Did you mean to have a trigger_drolejump for the first drole? I was seriously expecting one! He just stayed up on his sniper balcony, even when he was enraged. Maybe it could be skill setting controlled? While I didn't actually miss either of them, I worry that both the silver and gold doors are very well obscured by the rooms containing them. Is it possible to open up the obstructing geometry a bit so they are really obvious to a player exploring the map first time? They are the most important landmarks for progression so you can't afford anyone to not see them. Around about the point I was opening the silver key door, I found myself wishing I could turn health packs into shell crates. A few more of the latter and few less of the former! The ending was quite abrupt, I was admiring the view from your last screenshot and suddenly I was whipped away to the scoreboard. I thought that there was a nice 45 degree angle motif going through the map, the vore-filled room being the best example of that. Any place you can add a bit more of that to would be great. I thought this map did a good job of showing you spaces you'd like to go to before you can access them. You could see the second floor atrium of the lava-ogre-ambush room, before you could get there you saw through the grates into the vore-pillar room, then when you get to the former you unlock the latter. My favourite combat in the map had to be the arena below the gold key door. What I thought worked really well was the way that naturally you had less and less cover to work with, and less and less armour and ammo (but never too little) - kept it ramping up nicely. Cool stuff, look forward to the final version! Cool, I'd only suggest adding a trigger with a message saying something along the lines of "Enter the long room to complete the level". That way, people who like to go back at the end of a map to find the secrets they missed know that now's the time.
I have (since the release of hc1extndagain) been working on a new Quake map. It is called hc3, and it will use sock's tp-industrial.wad. Guaranteed quality assurance there will be curved walls and a unique aethestic.
Screenshot (Quaketastic): http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/hc3devlop.png Tony Hawk Pro Skater?
Holy shit. I never saw that texture wad used before so that's something to consider. Thanks for your assurance on quality curves...we all love them curves. I did play the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video games back in the 2000s, they were fun. The Warehouse level in the first 1999 installment bears similarities to this custom one for Quake (hc3). For example, the industrial light fixtures of the room shown in the hc3devlop screenshot here look close to the metal columns from the walls of Warehouse.
Looks great Sock! As you know I particularly love maps which feature both the inside and outside of a large medieval structure. I'm hoping in a couple of months I'll be able to sink a lot more time into Quake and catch up on all the amazing maps I've been missing out on (haven't played AD or RRP yet, and those are just the start).
haven't played AD or RRP yet, and those are just the start
Wow, that is a crazy amount of new content to play, especially if you love hunting for secrets. It should also including the countless jam events that have happened since as well, as there are plenty of new mappers and styles to check out. @Shambler, sorry that map was rubbish so I deleted it! I've made enough Quake content, don't need to release anymore! :P I have to lit up main areas well then, the town center itself is going to be a bit stylished and dark, but then again I will set up areas where actual fights are going to be.
I took the balrog from the Ring trilogy and converted it for quake.
I'm just such a bad skinpainter, and I thought to use the lavaball for its faceless void. I was searching for a way to transpose it to a statue, like in the hipnotic mod.
After changing the pauze code of the hellknight and adding a grey skin, the model didn't appear in game. It looks as if the code is only awarded to the knight and hellknight. Now I end up with a weird model I'm not sure the animated skin was possible. I started this as a speed map, but then thought that I should actually finish this. So far I have play tested it with my friend, but I would like to know what you guys think about it.
It is on beta state, starting path about 50% percent done. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/newhouse_runic1_beta1.zip I need to add music to the next beta then, what would be a good track for these runic/maya type maps?
I played your map. Everything works well. My crittics :
1. Map too small. Not long enough. Need more exploration and discoveries. 2. Not enough geometrical details and architecture. The map feels too retro old-school to my taste. 3. Ambiance/atmosphere is weak. 4. I don't like the bones piles. They look fake. Thank you for your feedback. It is indeed made to feel like old maps without too much details.
1. It is second half of the start path. It is first beta, like I mentioned. I wanted to see is the beginning working before I start extending it more. 2. I can always add there more, but it has to follow some rules how I made these areas. It has to feel retro as much as possible. 3. I need to select good ambient track, adding possible ambient sounds, maybe considering using fog. For lighting I purely used delay 0 mostly, in couple parts I added delay 5 but I tried to prefer vanilla quake lighting as much as possible. I'm not experienced with that lighting style yet. 4. Bones indeed looks a bit fake, but personally I don't think it should look too real, always I could shape it differently. Did you accidentally make a skin group?
There's a functionality in the Quake engine to continuously animate the model texture. Much like the frame groups work, except with skins. I meant by beta actually short alpha. I haven't been using these terms that much. Sorry I confused them.
Nice work, looks like an E3 map with some unique details. I especially like the broken walls with the bones, but I have to agree that the texture looks odd used to stop up the doorways near the beginning. I would at least put a little more work into the shape of those blocks.
Gameplay seems fine, hard to judge based on the beginning of a map though. The traps I could go either way on, though I like how you used the crumbling pathway over the lava to signal to the player what would happen when they pushed the buttons. All I'll add is that I hope you expand the map vertically as well as horizontally! id1 may not be filled with towering monstrosities but they worked with the z-axis for sure. Demo: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/nh_runic1_beta1_lp.dem Thank you*
Yeah, I just quickly sealed map for "alpha" testing, those bone walls aren't going to be there, instead there will be other passage ways (possible non-lineary) and surely more stuff in layers in z-axis too. Thanks for the demo as well! I think this iteration of hc3 is complete now. The full version will be available soon.
Quaketastic download link: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/hc3test.bsp I didn't play the map, just noclipped around.
Pleased to see it's sealed for a change! Don't really like the textures, but nevermind that. Picking up on my earlier Tony Hawk joke: much like a skate park is a playground for skaters, this map seems like a playground where you try different styles and architecture, which is good. Some interesting bits like the curved walls and the girders. Although the latter are used somewhat excessively in certain areas, you might want to break it up with other stuff for more varied visuals. The lava texture is broken, you can see the tiles. Just use the standard Quake one, or better yet, something more in line with the (base-ish) setting like slime or water. I think you should primarily focus on improving two things here: - Lighting. It's very bright/flat and makes the textures look even more washed-out than they already do after the conversion. There are many (possibly too many) light sources next to each other -> experiment with lower light values or modify their attenuation (by adding "wait" key >1, provided more recent compilers are used; e.g. "wait" "2" halfs their range). Try to create contrast. Also, be sure to run light.exe with -extra or even -extra4, at least when doing the final compile, in order to get smoother shadows. Currently, in some areas there are shadows with ugly jagged edges. -Random monster setups. Like in your previous levels, there are rooms where you just threw in a random bunch of monsters and items, simply to fill the space it seems. While this can work in certain circumstances, more often than not it feels weird and doesn't play into a map's atmosphere. Try to create interesting encounters. For example, don't let the monsters appear all at once (standing around next to each other waiting for the player) rather than making them appear in waves, killing the ones in the lower part of the room makes some more rise up from a pit in the upper half, and when those are dead, the vore appears. Or something along those lines -> variation. http://imgur.com/a/tkRX5
I'm a total lightweight, by the way. It's easy to get me off-balance. If the screenshots in the album look really fucking dark, click on them to make them bigger. Even after the expanded view is shrunk back down they look a lot better. If the screenshots in the album look really fucking dark, click on them to make them bigger. Even after the expanded view is shrunk back down they look a lot better.
Weird, that actually works. Looks promising, good theme and the rocks in the last shot are real nice. Looks good but I really think you need to use some brighter lights. I'm not saying make everything brighter but use spotlights or something.
I see you expanded on the rock stuff since the alpha :)
I agree with Fifth and it was an issue when I ran through the prototype, the source lights need to be more obvious...not brighter but more intensity. Otherwise this is shaping up really nicely! Screenshot:
http://imgur.com/a/Aao5Z Download: http://www.mediafire.com/file/26rl2cg4bnlr9xu/LuLz.zip Buildtime: 1h 30min vistime: 60 sec monster count: about 150 Type: ID1 map Influenced by Hexcalk I didnt want to post this as news because this map is really stupid and ugly, but its fun. There is a demo in the folder if you are having difficulty with the map. I've been working on a map for AD
here are some screenshots: http://imgur.com/gLoUo3w http://imgur.com/JeRpnmx http://imgur.com/AT7AOtY http://imgur.com/UtbjGZ5 That is shaping up great. The tech-castle combo is still a bit weird but the designs look very impressive. Nice one.
Screenshot:
http://imgur.com/a/yjPPM Download: http://www.mediafire.com/file/u8y08daj9vudp22/LuLz2.zip Whos got the record for map releases within 24h? Sock zero naitelveni two! ;-) Another trollish map, with about 200 enemies. about 5 minutes worth of gameplay with filthy quad runs that will make you drown in gibs. buildtime: about 6 hours Type: ID1 vistime: 2 minutes i didnt get any crashes, what is stack overflow?
I'd like to see some demos people playing these crazy maps. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/lulz2_lp3.dem
Gave it a few more runs. That particular error hasn't repeated itself, but I got other bugs while playing it. Note the fiend that glitches out in the demo! I think you may be running against some engine limits or something. Anyway, I actually unironically like this map, and mean to record a full demo (can't promise 100% kills). It reminds me of Doom II slaughtermaps in a way. Savescumming your way through it would be a grind, but to play it through without saving you have to really think about the best route to take, the most efficient use of available powerups, etc. The demo I uploaded was the best of 6 runs, and my main problem was that I was hoarding rockets and should have used the quads on the lower level shamblers. If you make more of these you should release them as a pack. No weird glitches. Missed one kill somehow. Fun stuff!
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/lulz2_lp4.zip http://hrimfaxi.dk/Basepics/sm73DLC.html
It started with a speedmap in 2005 so 12 years old! Maybe it will be done in 6 to 7 years. Maybe! i unironically liked lulz1, more than lulz2
a quake slaughteramp! and it's fun! now i want to make one too It is fitting that LuLz expresses the feelings I have for Peripheral Fundament (considering it's a joke map series "influenced by Hexcalk"). When I look back into hc0, I laugh at how insane and awful it is, which is what LuLz is trying to recapture. I've moved on to distancing myself away from problems in my Quake maps.
Your maps are great, by the way. I like HC0 because it was fast, short and brutal.
and thats where LuLz series gets its inspiration from. ofc HC0 was unpolished but i dont really mind it. HC3 had a much better level of polish and consistency in style. Where's LuLz 3? I enjoyed your LuLz maps positively, but you said you would release LuLz 3 one day after LuLz 2. Delays?
Screenshot:
http://imgur.com/a/CKT8u Download: http://www.mediafire.com/file/cl1kda6w453d2w6/LuLz3.zip Buildtime: on and off 3 days maybe real work done is 7-10h vistime: 10 minutes monster count: 300+ Type: ID1 map background story: It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a postdialectic capitalist theory that includes consciousness as a paradox. If cultural nationalism holds, we have to choose between postdialectic rationalism and premodernist dialectic theory. P.s. Mapping in 2k17, shoutout to baker! LOLMAO THIS IS PURE QUAKE MADNESS, TEXAN STYLE !
What a wind of fresh air (and pure monster ass smell) ! You should also put some love on the geometry itself. Better, modern style, architecture (sock style ?). Awesome geometry with a pile of 2000 monsters could be incredible,with full quad on and ligthning gun ! (was awesome in the zombie cave!) thanks dude! :D
I did put alot more effort into the geometry in this map, i should do a polished map with 300 monsters because the gameplay is alot of fun. Heya, cross-posting this here from quaddicted. This is my first "complete" map meaning some challenge and an exit portal. It's really short, just a couple of fights and three weapons.
http://i.imgur.com/TWVNbzt.png http://i.imgur.com/OWHXa1e.png I realize my understanding of texturing is pretty off, still learning what they all mean out of context. Block.bsp: https://www.dropbox.com/s/axu3dw8way541yg/block.bsp?dl=0 ...better than anything hexcalk will ever achieve. So that's something. Themes and designs look promising in both shots, keep at it man!
Well, I've had a mixed reception overall with my maps, but "block.bsp" looks beyond what I could achieve so far.
I'm sure that anyone who's tried to use it before will agree that the idbase texture set is an utter pain to use accurately. id themselves didn't set a superb standard at first.
However, the two step program is 1. Admit you have a problem 2. Sort it out And you're half way there! The bit that sticks out to me in that second shot is the big platform in the lower right, the textures are getting completely cut off around the edge. The thing that will make your life a lot simpler is having an appropriate texture in mind before you build a brush, and set your grid to multiples of the texture size. That doesn't help sort out existing problems though... So what you need to be prepared to do is make modifications to the geometry in order to get the textures right. Try and find a more suitable floor texture. I suspect that no single texture will perfectly fit that space, in which case you may need to carve up the brush into more pieces. If you carved the inside rectangle where the texture tiles nicely into a separate brush, you could probably texture the leftover edges with a trim texture like tech04_3. Im taking a small break from mapping my tech castle, i want to get some distance so i have fresh eyes to see it with.
Now im working on a ID1 map. Screenshots http://imgur.com/a/pUjhN You are a mapping machine lately! This all looks really awesome man! Keep that up will ya please.
I love those yellow light columns and the wood and iron trim you have there. Looking good. I want to jump in there now!
shipshot1
shipshot2_flat shipshot3 Quaketastic seems to to have a hickup because of some outdated certificates and shit. IDC. I'm not sure how to put it in my map atm, but only as misc_model or sth. We'll see, right?
i know of the waypoints (path_corners) to change direction and movement. I need to talk to eric. But my ship has interiour to move in. So...
I plan to to have the player inside of it, which restricts me to linear movemovent, as in a func_train/door. Or i do some magic with moving skip func_walls. IDK yet. The animation in tfuma was pretty easy to setup, just a bit of trial and error to get the right angles on the waypoints. The two func_rotate_trains (one for the solid and one for the glass parts) can share the same set of waypoints which is nice.
If the player can be inside while it's moving, I guess you could try func_movewall's (I've never tried them, not sure if they work with func_rotate_train?), or just make it a linear func_train.. I thought it just was someone calling out Shambler for being a massive jong. Rightfully so, one might add.
Thanks to Preach's help with the blood splattering code, I'm happy to announce my first mod release.
It's called NewHell, and it's a single player mod with the goal in mind to make single player vanilla Quake gameplay more interesting. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/mods/newhell.zip This is a small, 3mb download. It features basically tons of blood/gore improvements, along with additional weapon/monster animations. I hope you don't mind that I've uploaded it to Quaketastic. If this is a problem please let me know. Thank you. Pretty neat, I found myself getting tired of the shell sound pretty quickly though. Also noticed that I could fire the nailgun while drawing it. Certainly interesting playing through a few levels with more "doom-like" guns.
I had to use 999 protocol because I quickly got visedicts > 512.
While testing on my map, when I shot the dog I got error: ADD_F 1039(?) 1027(mid_bouyancy) 1.2 1040(?) gyro_physics.qc : Gyro_RunPhysics_Bouyancy gyro_physics.qc : Gyro_RunPhysics gyro_main.qc : Gyro_R The error isn't regular: I killed about 20 dogs before get it. Hope this will help you to find bugs and glitches. If you had to kill a certain amount before getting it, I wonder if it is an overflow error.
Is your map available for me to test on quakespasm? Not my cup of tea (particularly not a fan of the changes to the weapons) but I appreciate the work you put into this.
In case you're interested: Tested it briefly on some id1 maps (using Quakespasm 0.92.0 on Linux), and encountered missing textures on the following models: The hurt/dead Ogre The hurt/dead Rotfish The gibbed heads of the Enforcer, Death Knight, Rottweiler, Fiend, Vore and Shambler -- basically all monsters except Zombies and Grunts (and Rotfish and Spawns, obviously, since they have no head models). Examples of what I mean: Fiend and Death Knight heads Dead Ogre When I activate noclipping, my forward key (mapped to "w") is stuck until I press jump (spacebar); then I can move around normally. Not an issue during normal play, but odd and somewhat annoying nonetheless. Also, any reason why you included a config.cgf in the download? It messed up my video settings. Most of my other settings were the same as in the config file anyway -- but they could have been different, which would have made it even more annoying. I mean, it's not hard for me just to delete it, but it seems like a good way to scare off potential players of your mod (e.g. people who don't know what a config file is or does, and will just see their settings changed and decide not to bother anymore with the mod). Several other errors:
- The weapon models don't show on Winquake. Not that it would be very playable anyway due to excessive packet overflow. - The weapons generate "NAN velocity on edict #, muzz, progs/s_explod.spr" warnings on every shot. - When switching weapons, there are "No such frame 13 ('shot1', 13 frames)" warnings. - Most of the head gib models reference the wrong skin number as total_newbie says. The default skin is 0, not 1. I need to obviously do testing on more engines. Quakespasm and Fitzquake seem to be the most popular.
Right now, I'm using Darkplaces (I know I know) which seems to be a very forgiving engine as it didn't list any of the errors that are mentioned in your comments. So not ideal for bug testing. What I've worked on since the initial release is cutting the amount of blood splats, and adding more splats to the model itself. This should help eliminate a lot of the packet overflow errors. I was aware of the missing skins on Quakespasm, but kind of at a loss on how to fix it. I'm not a very good coder. I've known releasing a mod with a cfg is a big no-no, I just forgot to delete the automatically generated one. So yeah, like I said, I will definitely need to test on other engines. Hello all, been a while. I've been going through old files and found the bits of my Quake projects that survived my harddrive crash years ago (which stopped me mapping because I had most of an episode blocked out and playable and lost 90% of it because backups are for sensible people).
http://i.imgur.com/8BODDCt.png http://i.imgur.com/uHYsQV3.png http://i.imgur.com/aK9o69N.png http://i.imgur.com/xpGuzmh.png http://i.imgur.com/qW5cHOd.png http://i.imgur.com/xUfzoNx.png http://i.imgur.com/0hNvIIH.png http://i.imgur.com/Iakz4nj.png Gameplay is a little different from normal Quake. Bits of it are a little Half-Life inspired with scripted silliness and a linear layout, and it's got a fair number of arena fights too. It is playable from start to finish, if you want to try it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fdpeclsqdowij7m/ZqfLostColony.zip?dl=0 Start on zqfarrivalintro Monsters: 247/291/490 Secrets: 11 Notes: > Requires Quoth 2 and limit removing engine blah blah blah > There's a bit early on where some geometry doesn't have any collision for some reason. You need to jump/noclip onto a ladder. > Lighting is awful, sorry. Feel free to throw the lit file in a bin and set it on fire. > Hard difficult is brutal and assumes you know Quoth monsters already. Easy/medium introduces them more slowly, and gates you less aggressively. > Map will auto save to 'zqfcheckpoint'. Probably something to ditch. > It's full of little filler moments where two monsters attack you when a door opens. Somehow I didn't notice just how many times it does that. > Negke, you've played this version already so feel free to ignore it :p Now I'm going to see if I can get Worldcraft working again. Do I remember correctly that the map source was lost? Crazy idea if it's the case: plug the missing bits and polish the barren/unfinished parts by (ab)using Quoth's external brush models feature; it works with -onlyents.
Do any map editors support the viewing of
Thankfully I have the source for the two maps I've shared here. It's right at the vertex limit and I was having difficult with external brush models (hense the no collision bug early on) but if bsp2 is a thing now that shouldn't be a problem and gives me a lot more freedom to rebuild some dodgy parts. If anyone feels like giving me a hand with the lighting sometime that would be cool.
Quark can open BSP29 and you can copy some stuff from it into a fresh
Like Stupid QuArK features.. (runs for cover...) https://imgur.com/gallery/AQkfi
It's obviously unlit. The greatest achievement is that I finally found some textures I feel comfortable with. And I wasted my life constructing a circular staircase. It could take months until I release it. Looking good brassbite! Lots of fun having ogres bounce grenades down a staircase like that! ;)
Looks like you'd constantly bump your head when running down the stairs. Be sure to leave enough vertical space for players and monsters to move.
If a Shambler doesn't fit then neither will an Ogre or a Fiend, they share the same bounding box size.
There are two bounding box sizes in Quake: 32*32*64 and 64*64*96 - there needs to be enough room for the whole box to fit plus a couple of units leeway. So in order for a monster to be able to walk the stairs, there must be enough room above and in front of it. To examplify, make a brush of the same size and try to move it down the stairs without it touching or intersecting anything.
Try r_showbboxes 1 to get an idea how it looks in game. Giftmacher in da house:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8Wql_dXkAAZOFT.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8WqqdJXgAAT04t.jpg Hi, this is my first map, looking for at least 1 person to look for bugs before an "official" release. The map is Id1 with a skybox, the readme has instructions, a story and more.
Map Beta file: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/redfield1_beta.zip Some screenies: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/redfieldscreen001.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/redfieldscreen002.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/redfiedlscreen003.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/redfieldscreen004.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/redfieldscreen005.jpg Thank you everyone, I look forward to feedback anyone can give. My email is in the readme for bug reporting. Congrats on almost getting ready for a release!
Nighttime terracotta with some lava is a nice mix! Thank you all for the comments and especially the demo Daz. I'll be making whatever changes I can according to feedback before I post the map up officially.
Thanks again! Before releasing, if you're using ericw's light compiler, won't you try to apply some Phong shading in these columns? Check this out: https://ericwa.github.io/tyrutils-ericw/
Anyways, I love when people dare on brushwork. Looking forward to play! I made some statues as details/fillers. The sphinx-like ones are cute; as for the other ones, however, they kind of look like penguins or pidgeons wearing ties?! Maybe if they carried crates on their heads....
...it turns out that they worshipped penguins. Who would've thought it?
I made a Quake Team Fortress map using Trenchbroom. I thought I might add a SS.
http://imgur.com/OZEspcg It's hosted over at tastyspleen.net::MegaTF Classics (74.86.171.201:27502) Tip: make the top of the mountains a large rectangle, all back edges running in a straight line, in order to have only five sky brushes with smooth surfaces. Saves some polys.
Sorry SS = screenshot.
Your best bet on finding a TF game happens on Fridays. I made the sky that way so to give the towers the honor of being the tallest object in the map. The mountains are shorter so the sky had to be extended to accommodate the towers. Kinda makes them look bigger or maybe helps to focus the eye on them a bit more. I've been practicing some mapping.
screenshot I've noticed the seam, and the texture alignment hasn't been worked on yet. Also, I've raised the brightness a lot for this shot; in-game it's darker, which makes the grainyness less pronounced. Yes, but the cave's brushes aren't triangulated yet, so there's some vertex inaccuracies affecting the smoothing.
Also, so far I'm concluding that there's still a number of texture alignment tools that could be created to ease map development. Manually editing the texture coordinates for all brushes in the map takes an astronomical amount of time. World vs Face:
World causes stretching on angled surfaces but allows for perfect alignment of, for instance, brick grout across bevelled corners. Face allows for perfect representation of the texture on any angle of surface but makes alignment difficult. JACK/WC allow for Alt+RightClick to carry alignment across from selected face...tedious and still affected by... NPO2 divisible face distances cause textures to end in the middle where edges on textures fail to line up with edges of faces in many cases. The right-click in Jack doesn't really align the textures, it just copies the projection. This helps in some cases, but it's completely useless for wrapping a texture around a cube, for instance.
There really isn't any tool that properly wraps textures around brushes. To properly wrap textures without changing their projection, the rotation, scaling and scrolling offset must all work together to make the edges of textures with different projections match around a single axis in 3D space - of course, this doesn't apply to textures whose projection has a normal that matches the aforementioned 3D space axis. Such a tool would be a complex task to develop, but it's sorely needed. From the experience I'm having with mapping, proper texture alignment alone takes days to do manually. With a properly semi-automated tool, all textures in a whole map could be aligned in minutes. And another tool that needs to be developed is to automatically rotate a texture to match the angle of a user-specified edge in the brush. By the way, this should be implemented in the QuArK has a "wrap around" feature. Right-click a face, select "tag face". Then right click on an adjacent face, and choose "wrap texture around pillar" (or something similar). I think it does what you're describing.
TB has an alt+right-click shortcut which also copies the projection, but it's not wrapping around a shared edge between the selected face and target face. That could be useful. Hmm... that looks really useful! The "Fit texture Across tagged" tool seems to work exactly as I described, I may try it later.
But this sounds bad: Select tagged list [...]. This can be useful if you want to make a multi-selection of faces from different brushes, since [...] (if you have a face selected, to select one from another brush you have to select that brush, which looses your face selection). So, the FTAT feature in QuArK may be not helpful enough after all. All I want is a way to make textures smoothly wrap around cylinders in 220 format. Something that can re-align every face on a brush would be a godsend...
QuArK is unbearably slow and counter-intuitive. Using it for texture alignment won't make mapping easier.
align a texture the way you want it to tile across the cylinder, select that face in texture application mode and then alt+right click the next face along and it will align perfectly to it. Repeat the process as many times as needed. This works in Hammer and JACK.
In JACK/Hammer, select face adjacent to the edge, use Alt+RightClick on face you need aligned.
This: http://www.interlopers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20367 Trenchbroom users you are so screwed. You can follow the alt+rightclick with a leftalign, topalign etc. To get the texture positioned quickly after getting the angle right, though this isn't necessary if you already did this to the touching edge.
Thanks, that helps a lot.
It isn't perfect, because very often a texture needs to be scaled to properly do a full wraparound, but it already helps on a number of cases. A good implementation would be to select all faces that the texture should wrap around, and alt-right click on the selection. The tool would calculate the full distance that the texture should cover, and scale the texture to make it fit. I think my biggest wishlist items for texture work would be:
1. Click on the texture name when a face/brush is selected to find it in the viewer 2. A better way to wrap textures around complex geometry such as cylinders 3. Being able to completely hide textures with conflicting names that have been overridden I should probably be posting this in the TB thread... I posted some screenshots of this a while back. I set it aside due to work and real life. Hoping to jump back in very soon. Started in TB1 and will continue in TB2 RC4 as soon as possible. Work is slowing down for a few months - finally. Some screens.
http://imgur.com/a/YxGs8 Looking great! I like the use of blood as the liquid here.
I can definitely see e1m3 here! thats exactly what a vehicle like that should look like in the Quake universe. Spot on, great work!
func_train, the wheels don't rotate and when it "turns" on its path, it doesn't rotate at all.
seriously though that's some amazing work mfx, it's epic watching you continue to push the envelope. ...And Failed
The greater the number of assignments that are due in my course, the more progress I make on my map. Procrastinating is easier when you can tell yourself you're working. Telling a small story there.
Quake mapping can be finished at any time but your projects have a due date. Get em done! Can we go inside, even if it's stationary ?
Could be cool to get ammo and weapons from inside... And a vista where the player approaches it from a slightly distant and elevated position to be able to appreciate the whole thing, because from it looks really huge in game when being close.
my plan is to start from the vehicle, reaching a far out outpost which has gone silent after finding that evil stuff....
Notice mfx is still leaving us wondering what the inside looks like. Dirty rascal...now we must play it.
tire.map
check it out https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz_-bxPhC7gtY2RJZHBndDRNbzA you need to rotate it yourself. A Deadly Drainage Pit
Despite all the mapping I've been doing, I'm actually still (mostly) on top of my coursework. I think they call this a "work/work balance". Awesome man, keep sharing the progress...love seeing these!
And extra points for staying on top of your coursework...yeah buddy. Pritchard: Holy crap, that's jawdropping. Great texture choices.
At first I thought it was a corridor, though; didn't pay attention to the link name. mfx: Amazing work, that vehicle looks like something out of the Alien movies. First, here's how the vanilla slime looks in Retroquad's 8-bit color software renderer, with translucency and lighting enabled:
screenshot Now I've also implemented support for HD textures on liquids, including luma textures, mipmaps, and properly scaled turbulence: screenshot The slime's QRP HD texture in this screenshot was manually edited by me to make the luma texture more subtle, because by default all QRP lumas on liquids are too uniformly bright. Will Retroquad support bsp2, protocol 999, and enhanced limits?
Or is that too "modern" for Retro? BSP2 and enhanced limits would be nice.
Specific protocols from other engines will likely not happen, and I'll probably develop a custom protocol tailored to Retroquad's specific features. Also, hardware-accelerated engines will always be a better choice for multiplayer. The only part of the BSP renderer still missing HD texture support is the scrolling sky renderer. There's also a bunch of usability improvements and some other stuff to do in the texture code, and the texture format still needs some changes & additions. The palette management subsystem needs some big changes that will allow the implementation of a new color selection algorithm which should be more accurate in some cases, and also allow for colored lighting. Decal support?
Also I was thinking that the tech that you've got in retroquad would make for a great 8 bit paint. Not very many programs let you paint with a palette with opacity. Proper decals would take a lot of work to implement, and would slow down the renderer even more.
A more possible alternative would be to implement stainmaps similar to the ones in Darkplaces, but it's not in my plans yet. Hmm, I didn't think about using it for 8-bit painting before. Nice idea. The closest I had thought about was to create a modified version of the texture compiling algorithm as an alternative dithering method for quantizating standard 2D images (converting TGAs to PCX, etc.). It would be interesting to compare against usual 2D dithering methods such as Floyd-Steinberg. if you're still using a surface cache, you could try painting your decals into that. That should make them free other than for adding/removing them(or when dlights are around).
I believe this is the way halflife did them. (stainmaps suck) regarding 8-bit painting, increase the lightmap resolution and just megatexture the entire map! Retroquad's surface cache only contains light levels, not texture data, and because of this there's no way to paint a decal texture into them. Lighting & textures are combined in realtime, per-pixel.
Also, decals aren't strictly necessary to achieve a cohesive visual style - they're an addition, not an improvement per se. Part of my main focus is on making the engine easier to produce content for, not on raising the amount of content to work on. But it will always be possible to use sprite-based decals like the ones in Scourge of Armagon. that's a clever use of soft depth effect, i've usually only seen it for liquids/smoke.
question, does it look good in motion or does the parallax give it away? Mankrip I mean, will you be able to see that the sand is either floating over the floor or sunken beneath it, due to parallax?
Are here any worthy screenshots:
http://i.imgur.com/90sPB7K.png http://i.imgur.com/bW9vqW2.png http://i.imgur.com/cXuLMWp.png http://i.imgur.com/kHITt10.png http://i.imgur.com/CTVbjrE.png ? Looks very interesting. Unique geometry and feel to these. That rotunda in the first few screens reminds me of a roulette wheel.
That is some crazy central cylinder thing you got going there. I also like that sewer shot with an apparent gold key door. Nice work, keep us updated!
Yes, it looks a bit floating over. But if you look from an angle parallel to the floor, the sand will look fully opaque, because there won't be any surface near it from behind. The depth is calculated from the view plane.
I have an idea for properly multitextured surface blending, which would be way faster to render, but it's also too complicated to try at this moment. drow: It looks good, but you could use different texture themes for each side (medieval/metal/etc.), instead of changing the colors only.
Kres: Really bloody good. Water in Quake doesn't look good enough in pitch black areas, though. It may look better if you try to align your rivet textures in the floor grid in the first shot: they should follow the angle of the metal pieces that make up the shape (dodecagon?).
Other than that, it is looking good. I'd be more inclined to use a more basic texture to avoid filtering seams and sliced rivets. There's a metal texture that's the same background but without rivets that might work better. Or is that one I made myself?
I've got no time to finish this at the moment, but I'd really like some opinions:
download screenshots The floor on the exit to Shub-Niggurath's Pit is crap, I was doing an experiment that turned out bad and scrapped it. Also, the lava texture is wrong because there was a custom texture wad in the BSP compiler path. Two obvious things:
1. the painted-on doorway trim in shot two does not look good (and Shambler hates painted-on trim), and the trim itself doesn't fit the width of the brickwork 2. in shot four, the brickwork of the transom is wrong on the left - the last brick on the left should overlap the pier below it (as it does on the right) otherwise it has no bearing strength 2: I agree, but I didn't want to change the proportions of the geometry too much to fix that.
Those columns are connected to the iron bars of the ceiling, and the fireplaces are centered between both columns, so to fix that I'd have to move the fireplaces and change the relative proportions of the wooden areas of the ceiling. But I'll play around with the proportions to see which looks better: extending the transom, or shortening it. 1: The thing is, the design of the original doorway from the main hall to the episode 2 corridor is almost impossible to salvage: screenshot. It was likely supposed to represent a toroidal arch, but Quake's BSP format doesn't support the kind of texture projection that would be needed to perfectly align the texture on all edges of such a thing. So, I decided to reshape it using a mix of curves and square angles, keeping the textures continuous along the curves, and changing them along the square angled edges. With that in mind, I've also shaped it in a way that allowed most of the doorway to retain the original texture. I'm not sure what you mean by the trim not fitting the width of the brickwork, but its proportions are exactly the same of the original doorway. In the original, the tiles in the lower steps were also cut in half by the doorway. There's no way to fix that without making the tile alignment change across steps, and I don't have a better idea. There's a great challenge in trying to figure out what exactly some of the geometry in the original maps are supposed to represent. Trying to achieve a clear representation without deviating too much from the original design is a really interesting exercise. The area where I took the greatest liberty was the path to Shub-Niggurath's Pit. The original was just a bland underground corridor with the same texture everywhere, but I thought that turning it into a proper underground cave would be more fitting. I've added wooden beams to make the steps of the staircase more noticeable, used a darker texture in the inside of the cave to give it a heavier atmosphere, emphasizing its "hidden underground" nature, and made the shape of the cave start wide and short, and end thin and tall, to emphasize the transition from the realm of humans to the realm of an elder goddess. I've also raised the ceiling of the room with the portal to Shub-Niggurath's Pit to put it in pitch black darkness, thus matching the ceiling of Shub-Niggurath's room in the end map. I did not remember how bad the original texture alignments were until I looked again just now. Oh, my word, they're bad.
The bit about the texture not fitting the brickwork is that the texture is based on circles and the circle is offset on the column. It just grates the eye; neither the circle, nor the enclosed diamond shape is centred on the brickwork. I guess the brushes were created without reference to the texture that would be used, and then the textures applied later at the default alignments. Also, now I look at it again, it is a totally inappropriate texture for a doorway anyway. If I had decided to rebuild (not that I would) , then I would automatically correct those types of errors. ('error' is my choice of word as no builder worth his salt would choose to use an eighth of a brick with seven-eighths; they would use two four-eighths or one whole brick. Although Quake is a fantasy world, the architecture must still make sense.) Nevertheless, good luck with the rebuild. Although Quake is a fantasy world, the architecture must still make sense
No. Maybe it's more believable to some but not necessary at all and limiting to have to create "realistic" architecture. Think about void maps like HipDM1 or the space maps of Quake 3 Arena. Those really defy all logic but they are fun. I only play Q1SP.
When I say it needs to make sense, I mean that an ogre who can make a chainsaw capable of slicing your head clean off your shoulders, would not be so naïve as to not lay his bricks in proper, off-set, courses to ensure good bonding and load bearing strength ;) But I suspect that we may have to disagree on one point: I don't think that 'making sense' is necessarily the same as 'realistic'. The best maps (imo) have fantastical architecture that, nevertheless, makes sense i.e it won't all fall apart with the first grenade explosion. I see you've been reading "Better Caves & Crypts" magazine for those Orge bricklaying tips and tricks. Cheers!
Because I stumbled into this awesome conversation I would like to say the following:
In one of the levels I've been working on, and maybe this is just a form of narcicissm as my theoretical builders suck at modern (Quake) design techniques, I think the builders, even if they were Ogres, did such a good job building, that it is kind of a shame to kill them. Alas, that's what the level is there for. Maybe I'll try to incorporate a merciful "no kill" alternative gameplay where a Ring of Shadows is always available within proper timing, if you can find it based on hints. But I swear at least some of those Ogres really can do infrastructure right... I just watched the Daz stream of your Zerstorer Jam entry the other day. WTF was that level?
Amazing... that's what. I digress... I think we should refrain from culling the Ogre herd until we can be sure there will be enough for the species to survive. I've read at least one theory that those chainsaws were originally designed to cut bricks. Makes sense to me. Grenade launchers were originally "mortar" guns that spewed uh... mortar. In a bureaucratic mix up, the term mortar was confused and explosives suddenly were introduced into their construction routine, to catastrophic results. The rest, as they say is history. You're right about Better Caves & Crypts, I was given a subscription as a retirement present a few years back, and it has had a bad influenced me over me ever since
And I love the ogre chainsaw theory - mortar/mortar - brilliant. Tronyn: having used some (plenty) of your mapwork in some of my released maps - A Roaming Wildebeest in Spain comes to mind - I would describe your maps as great examples of fantastical architecture that always makes sense. Please keep mapping. Sliced rivets always look very wrong to me. I've never seen less than a full rivet in real life.
Any time a texture with rivets spans across two surfaces and rivets fall on the seam, then it should align perfectly. If the texture ends at a seam, it shouldn't end in the middle of a rivet. This is not always possible to avoid, but should never be allowed in an obvious location. Hidden in darkness or where a player is not likely to see is okay. I'm using a ton of the rivet texture in my current map. Trying to avoid "splitting rivets" is challenging. I've been tempted to fire up photoshop and make a rivet-less version of the texture to use as a clean-up for those edges. With content aware scale - this might be possible to do without too much pain.
It doesn't remind me of E1M3, but that's fine.
I'd put some stone faces in the walls. Well, inspired is the key word there. ;) There are tons of stone faces. One directly behind the player in this shot. I still have a few weeks to go but looking forward to wrapping this one up. Almost finished with the first pass at gameplay. This will be my second SP map for Quake - I've learned a lot. How did you recreate your start map BTW? Did you do it by eye? If so, very nice. Well, I've just opened the GPL version released by Romero and started overlapping the original brushwork with my own to get the proportions and the positions right, deleting the original brushes afterwards. There's also a lot of brushes where all I did was adjust the position & scaling of the textures to align them. It's not a full remake.
Oh, I have the map sources. I thought GPL meant something special about the file he has, but I guess it's just referring to the GPL license?
Alright so here's a beta of my second proper map, for Arcane Dimensions. Some info:
- Metal/tech theme with some otherworldly bits. - Coagula style, with horde- and vertical arena combat. - Skill 2 is meant to be pretty chaotic and hard. For warning... if I did my job right, anyway. - Final area could probably most use some additional balance and tuning, I think. Link: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/lpspad-beta.zip Couple of screenies: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/lpqsp2b1.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/lpqsp2b2.png Any comments, advice, aesthetic insights, and pointing out of dumb shit I overlooked are appreciated. Hi, I sent you an email with a 1st run on hard. Good looking runic oldschool feel to the map. Difficulty is very very very hard, could not complete even the first room after a dozen attempts. I suggest deleting a few monsters, or giving them a delayed, staggered spawn. Or create more line of sight blockers to hide them from all aggroing instantly.
Couldn't complete the map because I got stuck in a room after the plinth floated up when I pressed it... Looks very promising overall. Thanks for the demo!
One thing I want to make clear is that skill 2 is meant to be very hard, for people who normally find skill 2 too easy--I will make this clear in the readme. Obviously knowing the map inside and out it's hard to judge myself what's fair, so I'll keep that in mind. Ideally, if people could try skill 0 or 1, that would be great--if *those* are too hard, that's bad. In any case, I already noticed some important mistakes--you are *not* supposed to jump straight into the gold key elevator! Also, the I realized part of my last comment might make me look like a dick.
To clarify, I WANT skill 2 to be harder than most maps on skill 2. But I also want it to playable. Not trying to make a map that only speedrunners and Ubermensch can play on skill 2. I get what you're saying. You can make it really hard as long as there is some way to beat it I suppose. I did find normal much more manageable. I would definitely include a warning about hard mode.
The map does look really good though, I guess I should have said "coagula" as opposed to Episode 3. I would consider making the sky pure black as in coagula because the stars warp at the horizon. Or use a skybox in space/nebula maybe, because it is Arcane Dimensions and skyboxes are the thing to do. I suggest you check out Kells Signs of Koth page for some great space skyboxes. Also check out that second teleport I mentioned, I should have recorded it because I was trapped in that area... Nice work:) Pretty cool map. We need Qoth to play this map ?
Played in nightmare with God more on. Found a few bugs : once a button activated in that funky floating space (after a teleport), I returned there to see again and wasn't able to return back. Had to noclip. That floating place in space is ugly. It's really weird to be able to walk on a space full of stars. For the last button (below a crucified zombie), I got teleported back into (inside !) a zombie crucified on a wall. Was stuck there, inside that zombie, and had to noclip again. Got several cool monsters from Qoth as a surprise. I love those weird looking tentacles monster. They're so hilarious ! |
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