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I can't rotate textures to 63.5 degrees in Quake
I'm pretty sure I have a QBSP that can handle floating point rotations for texture alignment, want to try that? p.s. you're fucking awesome for even knowing and wanting that. I finally got a chance to organize the other images (small/medium/large formats available) for your viewing pleasure and I quickly wrote a bit of waffle about the map for anyone that is interested.
http://www.simonoc.com/pages/design/concept/bridgecrane.htm If anyone has a favourite image from the above page, I would be interested to know. Even I managed to hack in floating point rotation in qbsp.
It's just replacing an int with a float and an atoi() with an atof(). indust_f13 and f14-- that's where I want to be! :D
f01 is nice because it's an angle shot and also has more depth because it lets you see a little down those two side corridors. also, any shot where the camera is down in the pit looking up. i don't know why but they look cool to me. Just the compiler, that's right. So anyone working on modified tools should add that little sucker. It'd be nice if it was a standard feature!
wouldn't matter too much for me since qe3 clamps angle settings to integers. :)
do other editors do that too? What a pain in the ass. Yes, the editor needs to support it too. I forgot about that. GtkR didn't support it either (no surprise) so the version I'm using had to be modified as well.
Hopefully newer editors like Willem's and Sleepywalkr's are allowing for floating point rotations (if not, please add it!) only thing i'd add there is some dirt on the ceiling windows, as for the factory they're too clean atm ;)
not as much as here: http://ztdavis.blogspot.com/2009/09/factory-window-damen-at-rascher-2009-as.html but maybe something like this: http://www.dcoh.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Broken-factory-windows-in-Detroit-300x238.jpg http://www.worldofstock.com/slides/ADT7761.jpg I'm willing to try anything once, maybe twice!
From what I see, GTKR 1.5 While this is certainly cool and it would be great if someone could add/change that in BJP's Txqbsp code, I'm also a little sad that Scampie, the lazy fuck, gets away this easily for being with his first Q1SP.
Just let me find that sucker. I'll email it to you, assuming the address in your profile is valid. I'm sure mine isn't... hah!
I'm sure you're right in that the
If I recall correctly, in 1.4 and earlier builds, the editor would let you set a rotation of say 26.5 and would write it out to the Of course, I could be completely wrong about all of this stuff, this is going back > 5 years and my memory is hazy. Anyone got a super temporary location I can upload this crap to? I have some personal webspace somewhere but I don't even have an ftp client. 2012 and I don't even know where to upload shit. HOW DO I INTERNET?
Gtk1.5 supports floats; even forces them on angles and offset when using texture lock or fit.
Frib: You can upload to quaketastic.com (pw: ilovetheshubhub). You saved me from rocking ye olde command line ftp.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/tools/windows/misc/Qbsp.zip http://www.jumbofiles.com/ is a fantastic free file host for random crap and stuff.
I'll try that one next time it's just a temp thing like this. I'll have to ask to have that file nuked later (this is Willem's site yes?)
Info on the above file: It identifies itself as TreeQBSP v2.00 -- Modified by Bengt Jardrup It may or may not support floating point texture rotations. I believe it does, but I didn't test it to confirm this. If anyone finds out either way, pleast let us know. I didn't modify the code myself, I had a friend do it years ago and I don't have the source or any other documentation to go with it, sorry. (If the change is as simple as czg suggests then I suppose it doesn't matter). @necros, I assumed the crane cabin would be popular because it has such an interesting central view. I don't understand the looking up thing, it was mentioned on other sites as being popular as well. Maybe it the light contrast of dark going to light.
@vondur, yep good point, I forgot how dirty the windows can get but then I would be missing the sky! I was tempted to put up some signs around the place, telling employee's to tidy up after themselves! :) sock, i think it's more about it being an angle that is abnormal.
first, you're in a position you would not normally expect to be. second, you have all that crazy ominous shit looming over you like it's going to EAT YOU. @necros, it is certainly odd because I created some screenshots looking down and most people who saw them complained of vertigo and did not like them. As soon as the looking up one's came along people actually said a comment. There is something about the looking up angle and the human brain, but what exactly I don't know.
well, just guessing here, but it's like that thing how humans used to live in savannas or whatever, so if you have a wide open field and you can see far, you feel safe vs when you are surrounded by shit and everything is towering over you.
http://imgur.com/u9w3C
Previously, that bottom edge shown here was far too long to get away with not rotating exactly correct. Thank you so much Fribbles! Negke: first q1sp... but would be my 19th released Quake series map... not to mention speedmaps (many of which were sp!) I think one of my favourites of yours was the dark woods themed SM, with the tricky bridge key scenario.
You should do a celebrity SM for the next pack. wtf, i'm a celebrity?
it was actually the mention of speedmapping, and me attempting and failing to finish one in 100mins a few weeks ago that started me on my q1sp. well there's celebrity and then there's Quake celebrity. It's all relative, you see.
Interesting screenshot, btw. But speedmaps and deathmatch maps don't count, and neither do non-Q1 levels! So it's your first *full-size* Q1SP, which makes a cute little noob. Awww :3 So exciting, feels like 15 years ago!
i made this table to refer to for when i was buggering around with my doom 3 shite.
Sorry about the formatting but this messageboard eats spaces i guess opp adj angle 1 1 45.000 1 2 26.565 2 1 63.435 1 4 14.036 4 1 75.964 1 8 7.125 8 1 82.875 those gradients are the only ones i really end up using, but the maths is trivial to get a texture angle for any arbitrary gradiant - just do an inverse tan on the gradient, e.g. for a 1/2 gradient, it's arctan(1/2) = 26.6 (ish)
But I'm lazy so this is welcome.
I was thinking to add an alignment option to TrenchBroom where you select one of the edges of a face, and it makes the texture's x axis parallel to that edge. thanks kinn, i totally CnPed that. :)
sleepwalkr: i think that would be great. i mean, obviously i haven't used your editor, but i think texture alignment is the least developed part of q1 editors. we've got decent vertex manip/clipping and such, but alignment is then left up entirely to you. it would be great if you could align by a face's edge too (cycle through them) or align across axes (you know how texturing in quake is planar from the x, y and z axis, so you could 'link up' texture alignment from x axis onto the y axis eg: terrain that slopes past the axis) Your first suggestion is what I meant and the second one also sounds good, so I'll keep that in mind.
Yes, with rotational and dragging texture lock working 100%, texture alignment tools would be a great focus. If there's anything that slows down Quake mapping, it's aligning textures.
Worldcraft has some great tools in it but they aren't complete by a long shot... I agree that it's been neglected in many editors. If you have any more suggestions, let me know - I'll put them on my ever growing list ;-).
Agreed x 1 million that aligning textures slows you down way too much. It's worth doing, sure, but it's still depressing wasting so much time on it.
I do love the shortcuts in radiant though for copying, pasting and aligning textures, those are very handy. It would make it so much easier to build a map... if the texture lock feature actually worked. (In the build that I use, it does work but there's precision and rounding issues, so as you copy things around it drifts further and further away from what it was, until you realise half of the map which you thought was aligned properly is off ever so slightly and you go insane...) @Kinn, there was a UV texture plugin tool for GTK (worked like UV display in a modelling package) but sadly most of the Q3 scene hardly ever had programmers (unlike Q1 which is the complete opposite) so not much was developed. Bobtools were popular but they mostly dealt with clean up of problems in map construction.
Which does bring me to an interesting point about this place, it's full of programmers! which leads to my second point (highlighted by Tim Schafer recently in a video he did) that designers are really programmers who like to play with visual toys and tell stories! I still use this ancient editor because it was remarkably full featured and easy to use and I'm too lazy to set up hammer to work with Quake. Anyway, aside from having absolutely shitty broken texture lock (works on non-rotated textures on brushes that are translated, but nothing else works) it does actually have some nice texture dialogue features that don't seem to be standard in all editors.
You can select as many faces as you like with multiple textures and any parameters that are shared across all faces are displayed, those that have differing values are shown with a blank box. You can then edit individual parameters across all faces without upsetting any other settings. I don't know if this was possible in radiant, which I used to make a pretty big Wolfenstein MP map, but I only remember being able to set all parameters at once across a multi-face selection, which is a bit shit. Not sure how TrenchBroom works, but some flexibility in this regard would be nice if it is not already supported. Obviously I would comment further if I could run it :) I should try on my gfs Mac like I said I would. Does let you select (tool name - paint select) multiple faces but all changes affect/reset all selected faces. This does work different for patches, you can shift/move stuff around without resetting every face selected.
@than, I know what you mean about editors, I still use the SD version of GTK because it is stable and has all the tools I need. I was going to upgrade, but a programmer decided to change the selection process of groups in 1.4+ and ruined it for me. It is surprising how one small change can interrupt the workflow so much. I think I remember your wolf MP map, did you ever show it to SD? In TB you can also select multiple faces and edit their properties using the face inspector. No problem, if the values differ, it displays <multiple> in the text box.
I'm in the process of porting it to C++. Once that's done I can get going with the Windows and Linux versions.
Same here, I can't upgrade from 1.4 and I know it's the same for some of the other ladies here.
1.5 onwards was such a huge step backwards in terms of speed and productivity that I couldn't possibly accept it despite the other enhancements it brought to the table. I've no idea what it's like these days, for all I know it has been completely revamped once again. Is it even still in development? netradiant is what i currently use, they still support it and upgrade it.
http://dev.alientrap.org/wiki/7 Hey V, are the basic brush manipulation controls like 1.4 or 1.5 (or something else?)
Of course, I can and should try it myself, just wondering what your take is on it. I don't want to upset anyone, but shouldn't those discussion go to the "Mapping Help" thread? I'm happy when I enter here and I see everytime 5-6 new posts and I always hope to see at least one screenshot, but then I see only this discussions about map editors :(
there's all sorts of little wip-py stuff in that shot i need to finish before i'd present it as pimpable :}
But not too long to return to the map and fix those very obvious misaligned textures in the screenshot and elsewhere. I take it you're not using multithreaded WVIS? This should or would have made it much easier, well faster.
Protip if you're enjoying watching progress updates: run vis with -verbose. Woot i'm pretty lazy, but it kind of bugs me that you've posted screenshots several times of those curving pipes yet have never aligned the textures. :\
@negke - The map was made playable and only had the textures unfixed. Last testlevel4 was 12 houres, so I thought it would be a short job. After three days today there's no change.
@necros - I almost pearced my eye out getting textures fixed, but I howl on a 3d fucking quark viewer. I remake the pipes in QRadiant. It seems a pretty sharp carve editor. The more I use it the more I get frightened from Quark. except Trinca maybe. And Spirit?
ps - I'm a luddite too, stuck on WC. someone seriously needs to build a faster vising program. 65 hours of having that shit running on your computer is enough to put off any newbie mapper.
someone seriously needs to build a faster vising program. 65 hours of having that shit running on your computer is enough to put off any newbie mapper.
Or someone needs to get better at mapping. 65 hours, to me, means the map was built in an incredibly non-Quake friendly way.
If your map takes days and days to VIS, using a modern VIS program and a decent machine
.. 1218 hours ? And what if the result is worth doing it ? Basically, the result is more important to me than the way to achieve it... though I admit it is better to ease our life sometimes ;)
It almost says, to me, that you're mapping for the wrong game. You want something that Quake wasn't designed to do!
some of the most acclaimed maps in the last few years have been 100+ hour vis monsters, and i'd argue that the vis-unfriendlyness of the layout was worth it for the final effect.
I'd hate to have been denied the masterpieces of tronyn, necros, and the like just because of some arbitrary (and utterly inconsequential to the end user) constraint like how long a compile tool is allowed to take to do its job. "utterly inconsequential to the end user"
By that I mean: does anyone here even have trouble running a map in fitz at anything less that 72fps? No matter how big/complex it is? everyone is free to map whatever they like. i's just my opinion: if you use certain engine you ought to follow its limitations. i choose this way because it's more fun to map having such limitations and no restrictions on user end. ^_~
... despite with CDA, I decided to say: "fuck the limitations"... well, Quake can be happy I am patient, and the map deserved it at this time
http://lambert.jeanphilippe.free.fr/Screenshots/CDA1.JPG http://lambert.jeanphilippe.free.fr/Screenshots/CDA4.JPG http://lambert.jeanphilippe.free.fr/Screenshots/CDA5.JPG Globally I think limitations suck, but with such "old" game, it is obvious the mapper need to deal with it... i was a too young mapper at this time to think about that... hence now I know to occlude in better ways my maps... though... the next project I have is also "wide open"... but far away to be completed actually :P split the map up, does it really have to be so complex and big? Most of the original ID maps are short and sweet. Also the texture alignment in that top down screenshot is horrible. You don't need 100+ compiles to fix that, it can be done in the editor!
@JPL, your screenshots are way too dark and flat in contrast. Taking good screenshots is time consuming and most people spend little thought to the process. A screenshot is the selling point, it should grab the viewer and make them want more! Is there any consensus on what wpoly count is acceptable these days?
It strikes me that this entire issue can be settled if we know what our poly budget is, i.e. what r_speeds numbers are "too much"? It is rather hard for me to gauge if something is too complex when playing it, considering I can run (the accidentally unvised) Arcanum 4, or the open-plan madness of Unforgiven 1 and 3, on this 5-year-old laptop without it ever dropping below 72 fps in fitz. Was gigantic, and took 12 hours to vis. TBF I was using multi-threaded vis on a 5Ghz quad-core.
DirectQ is super-super fast anyway :) to have tools made to optimize content for 90s computers grind to a halt when a modern computer could most likely display the entire map more efficiently if it wasn't touched by those tools...
Heh, I've often had that thought.
Have any modern Quake engines ever tried just ignoring the VIS tables and just throw every poly in the BSP at the card each frame - compiled into buffers and whatnot for efficiency? some numbers:
interior map in ne_ruins takes 3 hours to vis on a dual core 1.8ghz. it also hits the absolute maximum # of faces allowed in standard bsp format. size (and even detail) != vis time also, don't forget, cda was vised on a single core system, so vis was nearly ~1.75x slower. AND it was released in 2005 so cpus were slower in general. might be interesting to see how long cda would take to vis on a modern (>3ghz) 4 core system. but anyway, remember to take into account tech differences. :) oh, re 8290:
i believe darkplaces doesn't make use of (or at least, does not requires) vis data. it culls stuff on the fly and is actually pretty darn good. i've loaded unsealed large maps in DP and the culling does a great job even with non-optimized areas (rooms open to the void allowing pvs into areas that it wouldn't normally). one issue with the darkplaces method is i think it adds quite a bit to the map load time as it generates the necessary data. I think I suggested to LH that he cache this on disk somehow, not sure if he ever did that.
in standard Quake, it is 32768, but the true maximum you can have is 65536 (this is the one i was referring to). after that, you must change the bsp format itself.
Final screenshots of my library scene
http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/concept/library_f01hd.jpg http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/concept/library_f02hd.jpg http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/concept/library_f03hd.jpg http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/concept/library_f04hd.jpg If you need more pixels and a larger download size, try these http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/concept/library_f01wd.jpg http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/concept/library_f02wd.jpg http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/concept/library_f03wd.jpg http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/concept/library_f04wd.jpg If you are interested there is the usual waffle about what happened http://www.simonoc.com/pages/design/concept/library.htm Willem is right insofar as, indeed, Quake tech isn't designed for large open areas with lots of detail. Not only can the compile time grow exponentially, there's also the chance the map will not run as smoothly on some machines - from what I understand, the engine is not optimized to render so much at once so it can it will choke in situations of excessive polycount and run poorly on machines that can run more modern games just fine. Case in point: this happened to me when playing the unvised versions of Arcanum on a P4. So the claim that nowadays VIS is irrelevant is wrong. DirectQ (and RMQ) apparently use improved rendering techniques that allow for more excess than standard Quake does.
Of course, it doesn't mean people should refrain from making large areas if they think the map benefits from them. Many of the excellent maps in the past were pretty large and open, and it worked. People who tend or like to go large aren't mapping for the wrong game, of course - they just have to be aware that it comes at the cost of (sometimes greatly) increased VIS time. Kinn: I don't think there's a new concensus. Couple years back people would say 800-1000, at least in non- or low-action areas. Today I'd say 1500-2000 maybe, even though many maps surpass this by far. Real skill shows where maps look great and detailed (and not overly constrained) but still keep r_speeds within a relatively low margin. Case in point: this happened to me when playing the unvised versions of Arcanum on a P4. So the claim that nowadays VIS is irrelevant is wrong.
But I would wager that it's for the wrong reasons. If an engine is parsing the VIS data lumps and using those to determine what to draw and blah blah, rather than just throwing every poly in the BSP into texture sorted buckets at the card - it's probably going to run slower than it optimally could. A map should be sealed, no question, so the extra cruft outside gets removed but I still question the need for the VIS structures on modern machines. Is there any consensus on what wpoly count is acceptable these days?
If I can get hold of a Raspberry Pi, I'll try using that as my low end test system. If it runs well on that, ship it! @Scampie, it is looking good, I love the attention to detail. I just wish the rivet shadow on the pipes was the right way and the metal seam was on the poly edge (pipe in foreground) not in the middle.
Scampie: it's looking good, but the theme *seems* wrong. Industrial or metal would be much better, those base textures and pipes don't fit together.
looks great, i wish 90% of the surfaces weren't covered in the same brown color though. (i realize this is idbase.) Maybe the pipes were textured with a contrasting color (like the quake2 red pipe texture, or maybe a darker grey metal color) it would pop more.
Agree with metlslime, you do have too much of the same colour. Maybe try the white that's goes with that set? Plus you don't have to bother with the texture stuff I mentioned, it is only me that gets bothered by that stuff.
I will try and reduce the brown... not on the pipes though, I was finally happy with that texture after searching and trying a million other textures!
Personally, I though the pipes in the first screenshot were MUCH better. Infact, I prefered the first screenshot more. Sure there's a lot of brown, but it actually looked really nice and had a better 'feel' to the room. Kinda warm and I wanted to be there. Current shot loses that. Too much contrast perhaps and now it feels very cold. Texturing also feels 'tacked on' this time.
I think the texturing on the first pipe was spot on, the seam down the middle works. I love idbase, but I love them even more when the texturing is done well like you originally had it. Personally, I would stick with the previous version but try to ensure that there's some other kind of style variety/contrast in other types of sections (ex. cold and wet lower work areas with more contrast, maybe using the style from the current screen?) ...who has to cut the angles on those tiny bits of floor tile where they meet the edge-trim ;)
...so make sure it's not your money.
"Straight bits, guv, I can do pdq, but those nasty angly bits, well... special tools, two man job, sharp-pointy-bits, health'n'safety; all adds to the time, and you know what time means, guv'nor..." those pipes look nice, though I agree with Quakis on the first shot looking somewhat nicer. I think I'd reduce the texture detail on the pipes and revert the floor back to the old one. The other changes look good though.
last night I wanted to work on something to take my mind of apsp3, which is a bit stuck at the moment, so I started making an sp remix of Romero's(??) dm7.
http://i.imgur.com/J5nnc.jpg Looks shit at the moment, but I wanted to avoid the dm4 style textures and try something more similar to e1m5. Very very very rough atm :) Always liked those textures and shows early promise.
But please fix the trim - it should look like an actual physical trim that covers an edge corner, not just painted on one side! @scampie, I think I was confusing in my feedback, I meant just move the single trim line on the first pipe image. The new pipe looks odd, I like the first screenshot pipe design better.
The colour balance in the first screenshot certainly looks warm and Q1 cozy, while the second feels more bleak and industrial. I like the colour changes in the second, just not a fan of the blue square tiles. http://i.imgur.com/zcZj1.jpg
that's where I'm going to sit with it for awhile. only a few small changes (i properly rotated the damn rivets simon), but overall I'm happy with it now... also built the final area today (no spoiler screenie!), after which FitzQuake informed me that I am over the standard map model limit! huzzah! almost finished... /me passes out Turn the triggers for the monster teleports into point entities (don't forget to give them the 'silent' spawnflag!) - that should bring the model count below the limit, assuming you didn't exceed it by far.
Are the floor tiles stretched or it just a widescreen fov effect? I thought that was Quoth only? scampies map is quoth?
Is there a hack to do it in id1? :) Every type of trigger can be made a point-based entity as well - just like the counter. Naturally, it will then only touch at that particular point, which is fine for monsters in spawn closets as they just stand in one spot until teleported.
Fun fact, did you know the "notouch" spawnflag also works on trigger_secret? It only gets into the field of hacks if you make the point triggers borrow bboxes from other point and brush entities. I will do that thanks! I had actually already cut a bunch of func_illusionary and trigger_once that were little details and etc fun texts which got me under, but I'd love to put them back
I knew about the only entity flag, but didn't realise the trigger still worked as a touch trigger without the brushmodel.
Quoth has point triggers that allow you to specify dimensions from a corner position, and thought you were referring to that. Nice. Clean, simple and very "Quake" looking. Altough I don't understand why everybody is using "pipes" in all maps.
Wow that is much better :D but I do love all things Gothic / medieval / stone / metal and wizard like! :D
Now I just need to get all my Q1 tools setup I don't really like the whole "OMG it's a mapper let's force him to make Q1 stuff", but if mr Sock does happen to dabble then I'd be very interested to see the results.
Guess what map this is ! ;-)
There's a pack of 60 suckers in there. Time to sell the bear's skin to the chineese... http://fsgregs.startlogic.com/Public_Files/Cham/Pictures/crazy.jpg Nothing special, but i guess ok for my first try with q1.
http://i.imgur.com/5PEUx.jpg http://i.imgur.com/2HOvI.jpg Could also post some screens of my old q3 maps, if someone is interested. But on the other hand they can be found on lvlworld anyway. just wanted something medieval in the map.
Sometimes saw similar crosses as gravestones. Does it have a special meaning? Not bad at all, it's simple, but it has a special feeling and it's something different. Try adding some more details (maybe some boulders, some dead trees) and make a map, it could be a really good one.
have already something in mind, diablo like.
Means some crypts, undead etc. Details will be added, when i finish and polish the map. Here some screenies of my other maps: http://imgur.com/a/5yUhS#0 Still working on the sp remake of dm7 I started to give myself a break from my other map. A lot of work left (rocks, lighting, most of gameplay and polishing...) but it's taking shape, and the flow is figured out at least.
The original dm layout has been butchered quite a bit to make sp gameplay fit into it. The r_speeds are also pretty high since the layout is open. Then again, who cares about r_speeds these days? http://i.imgur.com/ptxRx.jpg Wow than, that looks awesome! Personally I don't care too much about r_speeds in Q1 anymore, most modern machines can cope.
I am not sure why you are bothering with the rock walls, open it up so it is atop of a giant rock. Turn the sky to light cream colour and add fog so it fades into the distance. Place small rotating rocks in the sky space so it looks it was ripped from the ground and transported here. Could even put huge teleportation beacons around the citadel to show how it was transported to this strange void. That's looking really nice Than. Don't really see many maps using this theme, reminds me of Gloom Keep actually.
So, we can play it in 2019 yes? ;) I would wipe my knob on that map :)
Also Don't really see many maps using this theme, reminds me of Gloom Keep actually. Maybe because it's the Gloom Keep texture set?? :O Nice shots ! Really nice architecture. As suggested, fog would definitely help to break the flatness of the huge rock in the back-ground...
Keep it up !! Reminds me a little bit of Tomb Raider (please dont hit me).
Sock's idea is also great. Would give it a little touch of Cardigans Estatica imo. Anyway, cool idea! I find them the easiest so slap shit together with quickly, so I use them a lot - not that I produce stuff this nice that quick. It looks really good Than.
Not sure I'm into the rocks though - they don't seem quite right to me for some reason. Maybe with lighting etc though. 2c yeah, I think when I posted the first pic a little while ago someone mentioned those textures being overused ;) They have been used quite a lot I think, but I never tried to use them and thought they would work well.
Sock: that's a really awesome idea! I should perhaps give it a go. Making rocks is pretty damn annoying, so maybe your idea would work nicely. Would really need a skybox or a plain texture + fog though. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do with Q1 by the way! Your Q3 stuff is awesome and I hope you can get your way with Q1 too :) Drew: the rocks in that pic are temporary rocks I put in to seal the map and provide a route to the silver key. I am going to change them :) I hope to have it finished in the next week or two, then I want to go back to working on my main map, or maybe I will finish my 70% done remix of dm1. Optimization tip: if you make the vertical poles of the fence/gate an individual func_wall, it'll probably save you quite a few polys. Check out the difference by using r_showtris. The idea is to seperate brushes (either world and func, or func and func) so they don't 'touch' and cause qbsp to split the faces.
Just to be clear: I love those textures.
good luck with the maps. I've been looking forward to all of them - every once in a while I'll go back to your page and look at the WIP shots, and get all bonery. So yeah. super excited. Oh - is Satan's Caramel Surprise still a possibility? You mean this ancient page? http://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/than.quaddicted.com/index.html
I've actually got a real urge to map a lot lately, so I went back through those maps and took a look to see if they are worth finishing. *APSP3 has a lot of flaws, but I really want to finish and release it, so I will at some point this year (hopefully in the next couple of months). *DM1RMX is simple, but I want to make a full dm->sp episode eventually, so it's worth finishing. *APSP4 (Satan's Caramel Surprise) is probably only about 1/6th done, but it has some interesting ideas, so I want to see if I can finish it. I suspect it's been done by someone else (Negke?) by now, but the gimmick is that you get route and weapon choices and can take entire areas in reverse depending on your choice of weapon. The spawning is supposed to be adjusted based on your choice. Could be a fun map to make. Whether I'll get around to doing the other DM conversions or not, I don't know, but I hope so, because making them is a lot of fun. I also wanted to do a Rubicon 2 map (I LOVE BASE!). I wish I had infinite time. Hope you are still mapping! Will we ever see a full map from you? Wow, Than you have a webpage! Must bookmark that, hopefully you will update it at some point. With your citadel thing, try deleting all the rocks and adding a white/create sky texture and fog. It might be a cool direction to try.
I remember that...
APSP3 - Bound by Oath (Quake SP) Those 2 screenshots look stunning, please try to finish that map. that website.
and no. not ever. I'm super excited about the idea of APSP4. Not only because of the gameplay idea, but because I don't think I've ever played a metal themed map by you, and I'm sure you'd handle the style interestingly. Anyways, whatever you do - looking forward to it. http://i.imgur.com/Ht1QY.jpg
taking a little break from my q1sp to make a q3 20 brush map. this is day1. unlit. 4 patches, 5 brushes at the moment. It's a curve cylinder with the verts pulled into a sphere. Then I cloned the sphere and enlarged it *1.05, since I don't care if it's on the grid, and put a cloud shader on it.
The pipe tut was a good easter egg, scamp.
The making of the pipe wasn't that bad, untill I started texturing, and as all sides had two texture counters I'm seeing metal4 for ever. http://members.home.nl/gimli/pipv.jpg http://members.home.nl/gimli/pipy.jpg http://members.home.nl/gimli/pipx.jpg I lost my patience in texturing them as Quark has such a bad ass 3D viewer. I succeeded to make the pipe as small as possible without sliding. Well almost as the inner space is 64 units. You should try this:
1/ select a face of the pipe 2/ tag this face 3/ select an adjacent face to the tagged one 4/ apply around pillar feature Then you'll get perfectly aligned textures around the pipes, and even in between pipes junctions if you repeat the the procedure. I made some experiments some time ago on pipe texturing, and it gave interesting results Experiment ! madfox the problem isn't on quark
sorry I saw lots of maps made in quark and they look just fine with all textures alight try to make your work perfect from start to end, don't try to fix then all at the end... this is to much painfull for you and anyone that work this way. You rock, please keep trying to finish stuff, I and plenty of others will definitely enjoy anything you make :)
Madfox, looks promising, I like the mad pipework, please fix the textures and get the map done :) @JPL - I made the pipe with GtkRadiant and the texture was straight aligned, but when I imported into Quark I had to make the parts of the bending line with each side apart.
And as the sides are not trunked (\_/ in stead of \/) I got mixed up with double texture. Is your advice for Quark or Radiant? @drWho - right, I never had problems with quark, only when I have to texture and the texeditor as wel as the 3D screen get meshed out white with every movement. @shambler - thanks for your support. Just chiming in to say that calling Anon!Trinca "drWho" gives me some hilarious mental images.
Looks like a caveman searching for zombies.
Pics are a little dark to see, but then again, quake is dark. I always turn up the contrast and brightness for showing screenshots. It can ruin the impression but also better to have a better view. Almost part of the vertical map. that is so awesomely oldskool; it looks like a long-lost relic from the cdrom.com era. love the dark shadows. can't wait to play it!
And it probably took you a second to do that too :p
The third shot (original post) bothers me. I feel that any depth/shape in the ceiling is lost because of the lighting or texturing. I can see that it curves, but everything just blends together so well that it feels like a wasted visual aspect. Something needs to break up the texture or something, while possibly also following the same curve could help? shots look fine on my monitor, pretty moody stuff but brushwork looks a little too basic.
Calibrate your monitor jpl! how different people's monitor setups are. The ones that rj posted look way too washed out on mine for example whereas the originals show up fine.
I envy you mappers trying to get lighting right. The original screenshot are indeed a bit dark, but only a bit. The modified screeshot looks like sh*t, they are wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy washed out.
But I think the map will be nice, it has that oldschool feeling and it might be very creepy. Can't wait for it :) the original shots were just pure black with flame models in them.
thanks rj, couldn't be bothered to run them through gimp. :P also: of course they look washed out after rj's brightened them; there was hardly any colour information to begin with. the best way to calibrate a screenshot in a scientific way is by looking at the levels in proper image editing software. ...thanks in anyway rj...
Else the shots are washed-out indeed, but at least they are not dark anymore. Shot 1: looks nice, just need more details: I would have put light_torch_long_walltorch Quoth like stuff instead of small torches on the wall... Maybe small torches on the central pillars.. though...could be better. Shot 2: wow, really weird... walls are too flat IMHO. You should add more details to make them more "real" like visible broken stones, horizontal impaled dead bodies, etc.. or just hide the flatness with a little bit of fog.. Shot 3: This area is kinda cool ! I would see it with some fog, and plenty of Zombies... You could also want to add details on the ground, or simply add a little bit of water there (like in a underground drown cave).. Madfox: keep it up ! i actually like the lack of modernisation (details, quoth models, fog, attenuated light etc) purely because it's been a long while since i've seen a new map that really evokes that 1996 lost-in-the-past feeling. i wouldn't judge every map by those criteria but for this one in particular, the unpolished look suits it.
Calibration in terms of this stuff is not that hard. Tweak your monitor until the id levels look right to you. Then make your levels look good on those settings. :)
ppl always complained about my maps beeing too dark. I just love it, imho it gives atmosphere ^^
My Monitor is set to max brightness, wile the rest of the room is dark, guess thats the reason. But it isnt final, i will tweak it later on. I'm not yet sure how much detail i will add, want a mix of quake/diablo/dungeon keeper feeling. quakis: thought that too, any ideas? The map is not too dark, only the shots are. There's a considerable difference between in-game lighting and how it looks on screenshots.
As a rule of thumb, screenshots of any remotely dark area need to have their brightness and contrast (<- important to keep them from looking too washed out) increased by 15 and 20% (in PS anyway) to work better on darker monitor setups and CRT. TFT screens are often brighter by nature, so it's not obvious until people start complaining. yeah I don't know if it's luck or pure skill, but those shots, 1&3 particularly, really evoke the best kind of weird old quake feelings in my heart.
Either way good luck! yeah, I am still making stuff!
dm7rmx is still in development and I have completed most of the main architecture and figured out exactly how I want the gameplay to flow, though I haven't put in all the monsters yet. The main thing that remains is sorting the shitty rocks out. I hate making rocks in Quake, but I have to get it done. I will aim to do them over the next couple of days and will post shots when I do. Oh, and lighting is going to be a pain because I have currently got a minlight of 50 for testing. When I set that to 0 the map will look like shit until I light it. Still a week or so of work left in total I guess. The other maps haven't been touched and won't be until dm7rmx is done. I'm busy for a week anyways - strikes at our uni = extensions = me bogged down with paperwork.
good luck with the shitty parts, thanks for all the effort(and skill)! Non-shitty rocks shouldn't be that difficult unless you're aiming for ultra-realisic looks. Something along the lines of roundish tops, half-circular and intersecting. Can't explain too well. Just something that looks smooth and natural, a bit like this, but with some height and depth varation at the top.
Just don't make it a tower in a foggy void - it's DM7 after all, and you're not Tronyn. Also, since the map exits to DM1RMX, I'd love to see them both released at the same time. ;) I already read the first bit of your post, and I was about to stomp in raging "what do you know about rocks negke! your levels (awesome as they are) are always "artificial" (yes you know what I mean as opposed to "natural).
My rockwork, as in nsoe3 say, is just a bunch of messy shit that'd be better at home with the Unreal engine (I'm surprise vis even survived it). The best rockwork I've seen in Quake is by Mike Woodham and others (rubicon2 was great) who use a similar style, although in a way a combination of the that and messiness would be best of all. My Travail maps featured a lot of rockwork actually. The second one in particular was pretty 100% rock caverns. Too bad you didn't play them (and left them out of your UWF review). But it's true, I don't seem to do that very often.
UWF did the UWF review. I admit I focused most on the first part when I did my review, mostly because I was a big fan of Scragbait, and I still am. I didn't do any further reviews, at that point, and it's true I did get a bit lazier regarding the project as a whole.
I'm now going to play all the way through, and I won't try to think who designed what. Fuck that. Anyway Trvail was one of the #1 orgies since Quake was released. So I'mma a play now, and I apologize for being gayer earlier.,
Caverns full of spiders in Travail. That was you, Negke?
Travail was fun. Make another one! By the way, dm7 will probably sit between dm5 and dm6 as a secret map, though it might just be that last map. Who knows eh? :) It won't be the first and exit to dm1 though. dm1rmx is the easiest map so far (of the 3 I've nearly done). They're all likely to be stand-alone releases at first anyway, then if I get them done it might be called dmrmxrmx :) Your first thought should have been he was a fan of the concept of the underworld and everything ghoulish within (hence the Quake reviews). I suppose he then joined the army and died in one of the middle east crusades. RIP :(
He did a real life first person shooter? cool.
Speaking of which, I've emailed Neil Manke's personal email addy a few weeks ago. Never heard back. No one has heard from him online since 2008, where he was reportedly very sick. The game he was making was never finished. So my guess is he must have died. i've always wondered that about people i've previously known online. they could have died suddenly, at any moment, without anyone outside real-life circles ever knowing. depressing thought
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=24251518
nobody seems to have heard anything. Surely if he'd died there would be someone that knows and would tell people. I enjoyed his work for hl alot, and I'm sure he had plenty of fans. There were others working on the game with him (einar saukas). I looked up a couple on Facebook, was thinking about messaging them...
His email didn't bounce back, so someone got it but chose not to reply. Neil was always good with updates and loyal to fans, so I think if he was able to, he eventually would have put an announcement on his website. Someone on some forum also mentioned cancer. Not sure if that was true or just Chinese whispers. But if he did die, I guess that could explain why no one he ever worked with wants to announce it, as it's kinda a big deal and they might not feel it's their place to say. yeah it's a scary thought rj, many people in the past we would never know about. I think Tronyn managed to contact him once about the gmsp2 sources? That was around 2010 though.
And since this thread took a turn toward the depressing, have an appropiately shitty WIP shot: http://i48.tinypic.com/34gvcz9.jpg Call me a hopeless optimist, but whenever a modding luminary disappears from the scene I tend to just assume they were swallowed up by some faceless dev studio and nolonger have time for their humble roots.
Looks good, but try roughing out a layout before getting caught up in details. If it's just a decoration test then cool - look forward to seeing the finished map.
Ok, so I've spent the past few evenings slowly putting in rock brushwork. I'm still only about 2/3 done. Not sure why I am so slow at doing this... I think it must be partly psychological.
Anyway, here is a very rough in progress shot, which also shows some of the other changes. Final will have a little more detail, textured rocks and hopefully better lighting (still using minllight 50.) http://i.imgur.com/CisIo.jpg Ricky: Thanks, I have a huge hardon for texture combos so it made sense I gave it a try too.
than: Yeah, I was going to do more detail work but then I ran into the same rock problem as you. So I guess I'll just block out instead. DM7 is looking swell, glad you didn't listen to sock (sorry sock :(). The rusty metals are interesting, what wad is that? opt: it's a good start, but i'll reiterate that you shouldn't do too much detail early on.
than: there's terrain in that shot? i couldn't see any as my eyes were glued to the _awesome_ castle in the center. ;) In cath, did you use Hipshot's stormydays skybox as is, or did you resample it? I could swear it looks different my current map.
i used rle compression on the TGAs, but that shouldn't affect anything in the way it looks.
nice choice for a sky btw, hipshot's skies are awesome! ... but the Castle, OMG ! Go map and release it ASAP please. Can't wait to play it !
I never did the layout before detail. I'd just map fully detailed, wall-by-wall, and the layout would just form however it wanted out of that. I felt doing the entire layout roughly firstly, it would then make detailing everything feel like a chore as you fill gaps.
Re: Glassman
Yeah a couple years ago I did get in touch with him and asked him to release his scraps... he looked around to see if he could find them, but was only able to confirm that they're lost for good. Too bad. http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/
These shots look awesome! Looking forward to seeing more. MadFox: You're always posting weird and interesting models. What are you working on? madfox: that is strangely hipnotic. *_*
than: everyone's making maps lately, i wanted to join in. :P i think i can have that last shot released in may! necros: FFS, send me your Doom 2 map. If you're not going to finish the final detail pass, I will. Also, Dragons!
It came up to me when I started the energy cell generator and I needed some new bolds.
I could get away with progrefs from mh but that are a lot of entities. I was working on the coil model, http://members.home.nl/gimli/coil.gif when I remembered the tesla coil frpm C&C. So I warped accidently something like this, http://members.home.nl/gimli/tesla.gif thought it too lazy without parms and skinfile so turned my witz on it and pointed out to some shambler's addon, http://members.home.nl/gimli/tesle.gif that could also co inwards of course... http://members.home.nl/gimli/tesli.gif that lightning really is hyponotic too... every time your eye tries to figure out how it's moving you get confused all over again, heh.
I have 1 week holiday at the moment, so I might actually finish this. Spent most of today mapping because the weather sucked.
Would have liked to try some of Sock's ideas, but decided to keep it simple. It's subtle, but the fog makes a big difference. http://imgur.com/0qjZO r_speeds have gone crazy. Was hoping to put some more detail in, but maybe it's already too much considering the layout is annoyingly open and impossible to vis. Getting the gameplay tweaked is probably all that remains (probably should do gameplay first, huh?) It is really nice now. It changes everything having good rock texture, decent lightning and smooth foggy effect.
I can't wait playing it ! JPL I see no sense in criticize the old classic style Quake skybox..
Instead try and change clouds color.. I've obtained good results with azure & blue(I hate standard purple though!) I just shared my point of view. You disagree.. fair enough... I was not really thinking to purple sky either, rather to any of Kell's skybox, such as Labyrinthus, or Dust skybox..
I think it would render better... that's just my humble opinion. Good castle, than!
I keep the reminding of Alice'mcGee in the screenshot. Can't you make a giant gammabuster out of the top? I've tried changing the colour, and I think grey fits with the fog best, so that's why it's grey at the moment. Having a different fog colour looks a bit cheap, and I don't really want to use a skybox because then I need to include it with the map. Quake's default sky texture is ok, the main problem is simply that it's insanely low resolution and looks total shit when you can see it against something that is far away - especially if you look up a tall shaft to a small patch of sky. I think it looks ok in the map though, so I'll probably just leave it. Might be worth trying a skybox though...
Madfox: What do you mean by gammabuster? Some kind of giant cannon? Not sure I really want to do that. Maybe an observatory would look cool. Not sure I want to change all that stuff though. I was loooking at the top of the castle and thought of a big coil of light raising up to the sky.
and I don't really want to use a skybox because then I need to include it with the map.
If you're aiming for a fitz/qspasm audience, hardly an issue. 1. Added to pipeline.
2. The gray sky texture is nice. Skyboxes are overrated but one would be good if... 3. The map was a badass Quake observatory. Do not add other people's images unless you have permission to share them.
I may as well do it, I think? Note how I didn't post the lunsp2 screenshots that weren't posted anywhere.
Thanks for adding. Func is public so that is not what I had in mind with that sentence. It is just meant to make people not upload shots they were shown in private or if they are playing a beta.
#tf is not public. Except people have no control over the screenshots once they are mirrored. They can't delete them if they wish to do so.
yeah, there is much more control for anyone compared to eg func. while users cannot delete the image file (just mail me if needed), they can remove its display.
I am very interested in how maps come to be so I thought the page was a good idea. http://pablo.kotogoto.com/fok.png
i am the fastest mapper ever! this will surely go into the scraps folder that i'll never finish. with me, its big start area-corridor-room and then i give up and start again :) you should just glue all your bits together, irregardless of textures and theme. that would be wild.
Fully agree with necros. Quake maps with all types of textures are cool, that strange and "not real" feeling is what defines Quake.
That makes me think, I have a few small DM maps, maybe I should glue them into one SP map... i dont know. the scraps i have are just as boring as they get. sure i could work on them and glued them all together and make it playable, but i dont know. it doesnt help that most of them are pretty much the same thing too.
I always thought it would be awesome to make a Rune level that was a glacier that looked like this:
http://www.bidorbuy.co.za/item/30341565/Arthur_C_Clarkes_Chronicles_of_the_Strange_and_Mysterious_Hardcover_1987.html (that's Arthur C Clarke's Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious, the cover image, since there's multiple images there). Unfortunately, the Unreal Tournament engine, as I found out, can't... really.. do that.. lol (and I wasn't even trying to have the ships!) Been updating my previous Duke release (Done & Dusted) into version 1.1 which should be just around the corner now. I'll update the existing thread then. Touched up on things I didn't get around to first time and fixed some bugs. This should be the absolute final version and I wanted to get this out of the way before my upcoming stuff.
Below is a small teaser comparison screenshot from an area I modified; Original | New Version did you get the links mixed up? because the original one looks far better than the new one to me :) looks good so far.
always wanted to do some blood maps, but i never got into the build engine. it felt so weird to me. Textures of models get a bit rough compared to the HD brushes.
I did all I can and decided to start playing in Qubism58 old 256 style. http://members.home.nl/gimli/tormo.jpg Or rather was wondering about a massive IKBASE set you were working on. Still in progress? Figment of my imagination?
Can this shot be added to quaddicted's WIP paige Hrim? I belive it is this map your talking about!
http://hrimfaxi.dk/prew/index.html I went to Win 7 over a year ago and my old editor (Worldcraft 1.6a) didn't do well with my new system, so I had to change to Hammer 3.3. Well Hammer3.3 don't like the IKbasemap much 8-(, so I haven't been able to work on it for over a year. But I intend to take an old PC I have with Win XP and finish the map some time. So mabe I wil finish the IKbase map this year! If time permits. JPL: Thanks! The map isn't that huge. It's the first map in the episode I'm working on. Map two and three is at the same state as this one . All three maps just lack some fixes and tuning. I have one or two maps more in the pipeline for this episode, all about 90% done so with some luck I will release something this year! This is the screenshots thread man, don't leave us hanging here!
Simon that looks fucking amazing. ... it is kicking ass ! VEry nive sense of details, just missing some torches here and there... cause only 1 torch for all this vast area is not enough IMHO ;)
Keep it up !! Awesome work sock!
Mine is in a very very early stage but already have 1000 brushes need more 6 month of work and less lights! :\ http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/qdq000009.jpg very nice, excellent brushwork and texture mapping. I would say try to make the lighting moodier. Right now you have a room that is nearly illuminated in every corner and crevice, looking into two other rooms with very similar lighting levels. I think quake looks best when there are alternating light/dark rooms, and also, within a single room there are bright patches and dark shadowy areas.
@metlslime, yeah the lighting is very bright, first attempt at trying to create glowing stain glass windows. Plus I also increased the brightness of the screenshot in PS by 50%. Quake lighting is certainly not easy, I keep getting weird solid black triangles in upper areas of the roof. Its a shame no coder is maintaining the light compiler anymore.
For those that like to look at screenshots of "maps in progress" I have updated my site.
Go here for pictures of many of the maps I'm working on: http://www.hrimfaxi.dk/wip.html Echo's of eternity is looking hot, especially this shot http://www.hrimfaxi.dk/images/echo7_big.jpg
Skybox looks utterly fucked though, not sure what you've done there :P I love the screenshots, but I wish I could scroll through them instead of having to open and close each one individually. :(
DaZ: Well I'm not sure what's with the skybox, I don't remember doing anything with it. The shot is 6 years old though, so my memory fails me here! 8-)
Text_Fish: Yeah! I just made this as a start. The site is still under development. [Kona]: I don't know when some of it will be done. Some of the maps has been under way for over 8 years. Most of the shown maps are almost done though, (Echoes, Painted Steel and the Black as the sun pack) so I hope to finish a few of them this year. Besides the maps shown at the site I have 4 or 5 more in development 8-) Hrim you are a true dedicated man to level design!
:) good for us that is for Quake! Hope to play then all some day! that's a tone of maps to look forward to! I especially liked the Runic and medieval stuff!
Echoes of Eternity in particular looks great. Hey guys, I just registered on this board but I've been a silent lurker for many years. Some of you may know me from Mapcore.
During my free time I've been working on a 3-map Q1SP episode named Haunted Realms and using Kell's excellent Knave wad, trying to create variations on this theme (meaning that each map will have a distinct atmosphere while using the same set of textures). Enough talk, here's the first batch of pics from the first map, Darkwatch. http://i.imgur.com/O2irg.jpg http://i.imgur.com/bvfyZ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pJ5RM.jpg http://i.imgur.com/6M1m5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/30IEB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Zb78o.jpg Oh and Sock, nice to see you do some stuff on Q1 again. nice dark atmosphere and unique take on the Knave design style.
2012 is shaping up to be a really good year for Q1SP more amazing shots! How long is this one off?
Scale in map 1 looks slightly too large though from those screenshots. Quakis: Yeah I'm the same person. I'm still working on my other Thief map at the same time but I paused its development for now.
The pics are a bit dark indeed, my screenshots seem to disregard my gamma settings for some reason with FitzQuake. The level is quite brighter in game but still pretty gloomy. Thanks for your comments guys, very appreciated. Really nice work skacky, enjoyed all the pics!
All these screenshoots made me map much more then usually Love knave. Big scale is just fine. Dark shots but prolly fine in game. Not a fan of the trim as it is in lava shot. Half submerged skull. Opinion. Last one - vein this look too regular/ inorganic / pipey maybe?
Shadow Politics was a good ride, so I'm definitely looking forward to both the new Thief and Quake projects.
skacky: Nice to see you here at func, hope you enjoy the stay, a different crowd to mapcore, much more game play focused..
It is hard to go wrong with the Kell texture set (beautiful artwork) but the greatest strength is also its greatest weakness, books books and more books! The spiral bookcases always look amazing (screenshot 4) and towering bookcases in some of the screenshots look epic. I like screenshot 2 best because it has nice variety of floor heights and it feels like the fight with the ogre/fiend could be interesting. I like the additions of the flesh and mouth in the last screenshot and it is certainly a better direction than every wall being books. The lighting seems to lack any kind of hotness and is either very dark near the sky (screenshot 5) or the central areas (screenshot 3) have a high ambient light making the center of the room look flat. http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/sp/its3.jpg
(large image 1.86Mb) doodling on my start map, any feedback on lighting? things you don't like? nitpicks? all are welcome The lighting looks like a big improvement - much more sourced, gloomy, etc. The ceilings, especially in the last shot, look good. Style looks like a very tight expansion on classic Quake theme with no distance at all between concept, textures and architecture. My only request is for there to be one outdoor area in that theme, even if it's a secret area or only at the end.
Not sure I am sold on those which house that fiend. Prefer the thinner bars found in honey etc perhaps. I think other than that my thoughts are identical to those offered by tronyn.
That looks awesome! I like the Fiend cage and I don't mind the thick bars as well. The architecture looks mighty complicated, especially in the first and third pictures.
About the Knave texture set, I agree bookcases are its greatest strength and weakness, and I got a bit overzealous with them at times since I tend to dislike 64*64 tiling textures. :P I'm trying to break that, though. As for the lighting it's still very basic for the moment, I haven't used a single light spot for the moment and man do I love these. I'm trying to pinpoint the style as much as I can before working on the lighting properly. I'm also using a 35 minlight but I'm thinking of lowering it to, say, 20 or 18 to have deeper shadows. Thanks for your feedback everyone! Sock: those black triangles can be a real pain in the ass. Sometimes they go away as the map grows. Other times you have to use a sledgehammer: force QBSP to split the face differently. Try if making the conflicting brush not intersect with the adjacent geometry works. If not, you need to ,anually split the face/brush in half (but not in the same way as QBSP does - check with r_showtris) and use a slightly different texture offset or scale (something invisible to the eye, like 1.0001). This often seems to fix it.
this tends to be my approach to mapping. doesn't bode well for prolificity
I'm also using a 35 minlight but I'm thinking of lowering it to, say, 20 or 18 to have deeper shadows.
If at all possible, try not to use minlight at all or use local minlight if you must have it in some areas. :) I just finished playing through Fear Perseus Mandate... some great gameplay but the amount of horrible flat ambient light is shocking. Really is something to avoid :E
I wrote a review for that a long time ago. Sure, the maps were lacking in flair but I enjoyed it more than the the first EP.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/fear-perseus-mandate/reviews/reviewerId,39185/ It's cool to hear people like Perseus Mandate, I did a couple of levels for it. FEAR is such a great toolbox for making compelling gunfights.
So much of the art in that game was designer art which is why it looks less than stellar compared to other games from that era. Your review is really accurate erc :) You should be proud of working on it :) Superior to it's parent game in gameplay and pacing which is the key thing. I wanted Fear's combat cranked up and I got it :D
Also the much lower number of horror sequences + the extra length of those that were there meant they worked well as changes of pace and atmosphere, rather than whiplashing you better the two styles like the original does. I've added this little area this afternoon. It's actually the starting area. My map has more than 7,500 brushes no I may need to scrap some ideas and carry them other to another level. I haven't even made the silver and gold key areas yet.
I've also changed my image hoster since imgur blurs my pictures for no reason and they look like ass. http://uppix.net/1/e/2/6162d433fd88317f079225969d3a0.jpg http://uppix.net/c/6/6/f56a4e56184b90d4d838889a3af4b.jpg brushes aren't really a measure of how close to the limits you are. check out the stuff that qbsp outputs right after compiling (or use bspinfo on a finished
18087 planes 361740 65325 vertexes 783900 29085 nodes 698040 1743 texinfo 69720 56641 faces 1132820 58573 clipnodes 468584 15487 leafs 433636 64691 marksurfaces 129382 236371 surfedges 945484 127066 edges 508264 447 models 28608 96 textures 2493028 lightdata 1639628 visdata 863654 entdata 193675 vertices, clipnodes, faces and marksurfaces are usually the ones to max out first, but sometimes nodes can too. it depends on how you map. in most (all?) modern engines like fitzquake, the limit for vertices, clipnodes, faces and marksurfaces is 65536. limit for nodes is 32768. these limits are actually a limitation of the limit for nodes is actually: nodes + leafs together must be less than 65536. (in some/most high limits engines)
Thanks for the info guys. I'm used to Source and its brush limits so I've been quite careful with the complexity of my brushwork since the level is quite big and has a lot of detail.
It compiles well for the moment and I've only reached the node limit because of a leak, so I guess I'm good for the moment as long as I don't make it twice as big. sealing the leak will usually net you a lot more room to expand a map because the compiler can remove all the extra faces outside of the map which lowers all the counts (verts, nodes, etc...) quite a bit.
also, hl2 has an explicit limit on the number of brushes?? Yeah there's a certain threshold with HL2 you absolutely cannot go past, otherwise you'll get the awesome MAX_MAP_BRUSHES error in your compile window. The limit is something like 8,192 as far as I remember. This happened to me a couple of times, and there's also the t-junction limit that's pretty annoying when your map is full of func_detail.
As far as I remember displacement surfaces are counted as brushes with HL2 but I might be wrong on that one, I haven't used those in a long time. I always wondered why hl2 maps tended to be so small, I just figured it was to speed up loading time. I wonder why valve put in an artificial brush limit like that. Did the old id tools have a brush limit?
As far as I know, modern qbsp will accept any number of brushes, it will only halt when you go over a bsp format limit which would not be able to be loaded into an engine anyway. I don't know about the old id tools, but I do know that GoldSrc's tools had a similar limit, but 90% of the time you reached the MAX_MAP_CLIPNODES thing before hitting the brush limit anyway, if it wasn't the dreaded Allocblock:full madness that made me ragequit GoldSrc level design at that time.
It's great to hear modern Qbsp can handle a lot of brushes. clipnodes are one of the few things that you can reduce without impacting the map too much simply by filling in (or covering up) bits of the map that the player can't reach with clip brushes.
inset lights, unreachable terrain and such. that said, i've rarely hit max clipnodes before hitting other things like max vertices. if you do find yourself getting errors, http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/tooltips.txt is a great resource for figuring out what is causing them. someone post more screenshots!
I would but any screenshots I might post are from a map that's (hopefully) almost done anyway. tonynfish...
my maps as well are hopefully. my coiling waterfall goes well. http://members.home.nl/gimli/fall01.jpg then my mr big got too big. http://members.home.nl/gimli/big00.jpg my torment is almost done. http://members.home.nl/gimli/tor00.jpg bleh! shot 2: his ambient sound needs to be FEE FIE FO FUM, and trigger the earthquake effect when he walks!
It'll be interesting checking out all this new stuff, looks like way way more new stuff than your last release. Mike, screw your babies, have my babies ;) Those shots look fantastic, looking forward to playing it!
it seems today is the day for pixel pimping!
http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/sp/its4.jpg (large image 1.5Mb) Was messing with TROR in an old, unreleased Duke mod of mine recently. Wish this Eduke feature came years sooner when I actually required it the most. :(
Screenshot~ oic, tror = true room over room, so that is proper geometry then. i'm surprised it took so long to do... it was the main reason I went for quake mapping over door/duke3d. :P
I remember using sprites and sector over sector (which wasn't necessarily over, and could be in exactly the same place just entered from different angles iirc) in duke3d! the entire engine was hax!
nice and tidy looking shots. And thanks everyone for all the great-looking Quake stuff. It's indeed shaping up to be a great year. I think they're just slow to load - I just tried and it took some time but they displayed in the end.
Here's a video of my map played on Nightmare, if anyone's interested. Comments are very welcome since I'm not entirely happy with how the few last parts play. Lighting is still not perfect but I'm working on it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Qe864QxHI
Great pictures everyone, by the way. Mike, I played This Onion yesterday (I figured out how to actually launch it since the map filename was incorrect) and I really loved it, especially the blue key arena. Can't wait for your new map. Visually great, the view around the 1:12 mark was top.
But man, that is a lot of monsters to be taken out with only the shotgun! Reminded me a bit of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKKItf7datA#t=58s Maybe consider placing the double shotgun a bit earlier? Necros: you test your maps with impulse 9? That explains a lot ;-) dawn mike they look to sexy!
keep this babie alive, can't wait to play then! I've changed my post at work again... again lots of time to map :) brushes will flow! http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/qdq000009_01.jpg lights are crap was just to compile with a little contrast The maps name is going to be subterfuge. Designed for duel. Currently in alpha. Using a q4 map named monsoon's textures.
6 screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/YvcLj http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/palace.jpg
messing with sock's palace textures. kudos if you recognize the area. :P The textures (palace set) that necros is using are not publicly available yet, I only sent them to a couple of people to experiment with. When someone finishes a map using them I will release the rest.
Vis just crashed on this (I think) so it might not be "almost ready" as I'd hoped... thus a couple shots:
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/wshot1.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/wshot2.jpg oh whoops, i thought they were the same ones, sorry. :S
When someone finishes a map using them I will release the rest. Way to put on the pressure!! (kidding ;) Is that the tyrann inheritance? Looks fucking rad.
Skacky it looks great - nice and clean, with some nice vistas. gameplay seems pretty nice.. Might agree re gold key area. Cleaning up hell knights etc seemed kind of meh. Not sure I liked the organic tree... Final combat arena also seemed good but perhaps not spectacular. Sorry this is all super vague, Get negke and necros and others to play test and I imagine you will get lots of good criticism. Have to agree that a ng or something should be given earlier. Finally found some time to work on a map.
Please give it a try. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?79vmkxolwwlgut3 Trying a free host hope it works. Map for Quoth. Pak file. New textures, sounds, models and sprites. Built using Fitzquake 0.85 You will need 7zip to extract files. http://www.7-zip.org/ MechTech,
I tried your map. It's working well, except for the low gravity which is annoying, and the elevators which are randomly working. Personally, I'm not much in the Quake2 style stuff, but this is a great map anyway ! I had a HUGE surprise in the room with the spaceship pictures on the wall : I'm the author of that Discovery model (from Kubrick's 2001), as shown in Celestia !! This is great ! I've specifically made that model for Celestia some years ago, and NEVER though that I would see it in Quake1 one day ! LOL ! I finished my map. Here's the final release.
-- quakeworld.nu thread: http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/topic/5800/subterfuge-final-release -- screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/Y3tuA.jpg http://i.imgur.com/N1LIC.png -- http://www.mediafire.com/?pkg2vigmv3g5vp2 <--download the bsp/locs/lit/wad/.map/readme Oh Bessy
http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/sp/its6.jpg That image could use some better compression. Facebook did not even thumbnail it. I cannot see any difference (unless I manipulate further or zoom a lot) between the original or a 200 Kilobyte 80% JPEG.
Looks super sexy. I hope it is not too tight. ericw, thanks I am trying to make the lighting more dramatic as the default is no colour.
scampie, there are no secrets you can see in that screenshot. The X is a rune (particle) floating upwards from the book on the plinth. I have added a particle system to my MOD and various objects around the map emit particles based on player proximity. The books are used as a story system, like what you did with console screens in your map. spirit, I did not do much compression on the image. This map is designed to feel tight and underground so when you get to the next maps which are wide open they feel more impressive. Sorry to be off-topic,
Sock, did you published the Quake3 maps (?) you made, named "The Florentine Library" and "The Bridge Crane" (well, I'm not even sure these are actually Q3 maps). They're looking f**g AWESOME. I would love to visit them on my system. Any chance I could get them ? Sorry, I don't plan to release those maps, they are purely just concept stuff with crazy FPS issues. I made them as an experiment and they really shine only in screenshot form. Also they are certainly Q3 maps running on the Q3 engine, no special mod or extra code, just lots of shaders and high resolution textures. :)
O well, thanks anyway Sock.
Glad to see you're still on Quake1. I can't wait to play with your latest baby... if just enough people ask for it, Sock could change his mind.
@Sock: plz plz plz, those maps are just so delicious :D Looks interesting, but it seems very "unpolished" and it doesn't have any Quake feeling in it. Have you tried playing a little with the textures? Try another texture on wall, not the same as for the pipes, it's just a suggestion.
it doesnt have any Quake feeling.
Reminds me of Ep2 somehow. But the texture on this upper right pipe thing seems to be realy messed up. @raverx - I changed the textures some time, first it had the malice.wad.
In Quake there aren't many pipe texures so I decided to keep them as metal as possible. @wakey - I know, but if I scale them there's always a part that ends up blind. It is definitely Irish Ogre's brew... cause it is too green lighted !
Else architecture looks interesting, but you should have made an effort on texture alignment... though... it is difficult to align textures on rotated pipes... Anyway, keep it up !! Just another test4 for 20h and reached a magnificent Hom in the area.
Hartbreaker bumps me 30maps back. Texturing could be better, I know. Hard when faiths leaps me back to earlier states doing them over again. Feeling like an Ogre without chainsaw juice. Cool Sock, like the stripeyness. I'd change to a darker sky though, it's making the buildings go silhouette-ish with it that light.
I like the white clouds. Makes the whole place seem very cold. Can't wait to be there! I just love the contrast and the big pixels.
My only criticism would be that I don't like the way the mace knight isn't looking straight forward. I realize this is probably to make him seem a little more dynamic, but I find something quite menacing in the way the vanilla death-knight always stares forward, almost as if he might as well be an empty suit of armor or some sort of single-minded automaton. But that's just me being picky really. The lighting seems weird and blotchy to me. Actually, it seems like the white texture has a dark part on it that seems like lighting. It is visible over the arches for example.
Otherwise wow. Feel a slightly darker sky would look better. Textures/ architecture/ lighting and baddies themselves look fucking amazing.
Feel a slightly darker sky would look better. Textures/ architecture/ lighting and baddies themselves look fucking amazing.
I don't like the way the mace knight isn't looking straight forward
It's a random idle sequence. Also, agree with Kona, not a fan of that sky. :P Thanks everyone for the comments.
I can see the sky is going to be a love or hate thing. I designed it to work with the fog which has been removed from this screenshot. (I know not really a good idea!) It is not too bad in game just not the default dark cloud version. It offers a nice contrast to the very dark/bright stone work for the palace. All monsters swing left and right and some have extra idle animations (necros awesome work). The blue flail knight is checking out what is behind him, normally they look straight ahead. The lighting is a real problem for these textures, white light combined with strong white textures is certainly difficult to get looking right. I will have to experiment more and see if I can find a better setup. I can see why most quake textures are not white or black, having colour in textures distracts the player from the lighting. I like working with near-white textures. They are very sensitive to the lightmap. Maybe try it out with the fake GI light util I posted in the coding thread?
Very nice Q3 work-in-progress threads at http://maverickservers.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=23
Why do Q3 mapper caulk the exterior surfaces of brushes like that? Doesn't the q3bsp compiler remove outside faces?
It is not really necessary, it is just easier to start with caulk as the default surface. Also the clipper tool can be setup to caulk any new cut faces so you don't end up with stuff hidden on detail brushes.
Personally I find it easier to see quickly what stuff will be drawn in the editor, looking at a huge mess of coloured faces it is not always obvious. Plus you can filter caulk so it easy to work with small details. Thanks, that's been a minor mystery to me for a while. :)
Although, I think I would replace the blinding neon pink texture if I was using it that much. :P it's neon pink so it's easy to notice in editor if there is a seam.
cityy's map looks fucking awesome. RickyT23 - if you need tester for a Q1 map send me an email with the map and the instructions
I went on #TF last night and got 'hutty' to test it, so I'll fix some stuff and send you a copy later on today :)
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/qreate_start_001.jpg
Sadly it did not let me move props in the proper position, I have to use live fish. http://www.moddb.com/mods/qreate Bear may just be right.
Looks absolutely beautiful, makes me sad it's gonna be a map for a stealth mod and not just the usual run and gun. :( I advise either upping the slime's visibility or changing the texture to the lush teal slime (which fits medieval maps more anyway), because it may be hard to tell slime and water apart. I looks like a very good map.
Please, make this map standalone, not just in a Mod pack. The map plays perfectly well in vanilla mode (run+gun) and supports all skill levels but will need to work with my mod because of the extra stuff I have included (ai path finding and triggered skill spawning) My mod has two modes of play, I am pimping the stealth part because it is different to normal quake but the old vanilla mode still exists, I know not everyone wants to sneak around.
I mean, duh. The arches and angles and true-to-id custom textures all look amazing together. Not to mention those new knights.
However, I do think the rocks in image 3 look a bit flat. Maybe they could use some more vertical variety or something, if you know what I mean. also it looks a bit awkward where it connects to the castle wall. might not be noticeable in game though, maybe just due to screenshot position. now that I think of it - not sure if I personally enjoy the grass texture as is. I would prefer the darker one (though I'm sure you've considered both) or perhaps a newer one to match the more high detail rock texture.
That's all I can think of. Shambler won't like the trimless edges in shot 2. He will be vehemently opposed to their existence.
@drew, awesome thanks. Added extra trim, forgot about that good point. I will look at the different grass texture and see which looks better. The rocks are certainly annoying, with the lack of phong lighting it is awkward to get them looking good. The connection into the castle wall is certainly weird, I will look at some alternatives.
add my voice to the general chorus of hell yes. in terms of the custom-but-oldschool style, new textures, custom stuff and impeccable design, this looks like the medieval Rubicon 2!
....not TRIMLESS edges, but edges where the trim is only on one side of the edge so it looks painted on 2D, rather than an actual trim. Trimless would be fine with the right textures.
Sock, looks like you are managing this Quake mapping malarkey just fine ;) Sock, looks great. You make the brown palette look good.
About those rocks, have you ever tried q1rad? I think it'll smooth out gradations depending on the angle changes. Only downside I can see with q1rad is the chunky shadows even with the -extra option set. Apart from the general excitement of a new fr3n map, there's some cool new things to look at there - I particularly like the gold and black runic combos, it reminds me of the Kaaba at Mecca. The red and blue to go with it seems like one too many colours in my opinion, although I do think either could work solo.
The other thing is that the lighting is not really flattering the dome at the moment, emphasising the angles rather than smoothing them. I'm sure there is a switch for "anglesense" or something in some lighting programs which will try and fix that, maybe someone with more experience lighting can remind us. An alternative would be to use a http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/dome.zip the "story" behind this map takes place, at least nominally, in Tunisia so I'm glad you picked up on the architectural influence. ;)
i'm undecided about the colors - right now the blue is only used sparingly in "outdoors"-like areas so I think it might balance out. this will be a quoth map so the dome will probably be an external model anyway. thanks for the resouce. Love the theme! Feel good about the colours, glad it is quoth. Dodgy rock face on left though.
Love the theme! Feel good about the colours, glad it is quoth. Dodgy rock face on left though.
Love the theme! Feel good about the colours, glad it is quoth. Dodgy rock face on left though.
To get the stairs to look 'right' in a 3D environment, one has to use a trick that only works for the screenshot - the stairs have a different length and don't touch in the top left corner. I wanted to keep it playable, though.
Negke ! Publish that level, I'm an Escher fanatic !
Escher-like architectures in Quake would be totaly AWESOME ! You could try to show what happens when the Quake monsters are building impossible architectures : the architecture falls into ruins. Ruined impossible stairs, etc...
At first I thought about putting a stairs puzzle in the interior, possibly a copy of Escher's Relativity, but it'd be pretty messy and hard to do. His most Quakey works, my favorites, which I'd love to see mapped, are the Planetoids. My SM117 is in that vein somewhat.
I actually had a similar idea recently but more Serafini than Escher style (thin threads and filaments bearing weight and transmitting impossible force, etc.)
Might even try incorporating it into my current wip... link's dead: please restore, don't tell me I missed a good shot of your new project.
has there ever been a year in Q1SP history, that more tantalizing shots have been posted? maybe at the end of the year I'll tally what was previewed vs what was released, I'm pretty sure this is a great year for previews even though actual releases have slowed since the winter (understandable, not-winter includes other things to do). PS, anyone have any scraps? seems like it's been forever since a mapper released scraps. I wish mappers who are done like Kell or long ago, Glassman, would release the scraps they had. You can't benefit from our imagining how awesome these maps would have been if you're not around anymore. Might as well admit that, like the HL2 'demo' it was all just built for a couple sweet shots - and then let us finish the maps. Enjoy the extreme suckness of these.
http://www.suspenlute.com/stuff/fr3nscrap2.bsp An attempt to make insanely over-detailed architecture with curves. Had destroyed every compiler on my machine by the time I gave up on it. http://www.suspenlute.com/stuff/fr3nscrap1.bsp A self-kidding attempt to do the opposite of the above - making insanely over-detailed architecture using only right angles and on-grid brushwork. I should actually finish this one - it looks much cooler than I remember. every map could use some more secret areas eh?
haven't had a look yet but, don't sell yourself short. Especially after the last screenshot. Tronyn: mce.jpg.
Slipgateconstruct is down, I hope necros made backups of his stuff. If it doesn't go back online, we'll have no choice but to start Fern: The only thing that sucks about these is that you've never finished them! Do you still have the sources? well if the only result of me poking an anthill here is the last b&w screenshot, it's worth it. not that anyone will believe me after the fact.
oooah some kind of escherquake. sure! I don't think I have a recent backup... Ironically, a lot of the more info heavy stuff was in my recent posts. :P
I'll probably try to get my own hosting sometime soon. @negke, love the new screenshot (I am also glad you re-posted a new link), looks very good in black and white, would be very cool to play the whole map in black and white instead of colour. I know it is a perspective trick but I still would love to see it from another angle! :)
define recent?
Use the Google cache to rescue your texts at least, you bloody moron (everyone not having backups deserves that title). Find the URL you want to rescue, then google for cache:http://www.yougetthepoint.com Eg http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/utilities/light-utility-ne_ag_lightmhcolourr2/ I occasionaly archive sites, I might have mirrored yours a couple of weeks back, will check later. Publically released files should be at Quaddicted but I guess you did keep those locally as well. http://netload.in/dateiro2L9yv3yI/necros.7z.htm
Visit http://netload.in/index.php?id=16&file_id=jVUFQnshYtwsSbEEGk3uAIRIPKdHxz7B to delete that file. Be quick to download before someone clicks this. :> I back up my local stuff all the time these days. I guess I didn't take the online stuff as seriously. Lesson learned.
Also, thanks for the link. I had a backup of the database from a couple of months ago, but your copy had the lighting guide thingy. :) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backup-scheduler/ is handy if you do not have access to the shell and mysqldump.
I *might* have the source for the curvy map but it looks even more ridiculous in the editor than it does in the engine. If it's ever done it will have to be redone.
Yeah, b&w filter would be nice.
There's no trick in this map, but if you want to see how it's done properly, search for the Lego model of this picture. There's a site that shows an additional top-down shot where one can see how the trick works in a 3D environment. shots look great! Trees look just fine despite what others might say.
THe inside of the church looks great - nice pulpit! Not sure I like the benches though - too long? The ones in Honey are simple and perfect IMO. I wouldn't worry too much about trees, brush trees can work fine. They might cause vis times to increase depending on the outdoor areas though.
You could probably make them func_walls and then used a downward pointing negative spot light to make some kind of shadow on the ground though. In any case, could be fun to see a map like this. Wow, like the first screenshot, the scale look good with the knight and the doorway. I don't mind the brush/cone tree's, with the right lighting they could work.
Slitshot of demo1, http://i.imgur.com/uWakW.jpg
That looks great - I especially like the e1m2 style block with lightning and the area with water and candles.
How many maps are you working on, by the way? I'd better hurry up and finish my map before you release yours. "is that some kind of puzzle? weird floating cubes or something"
sorry, couldn't help it. Sock, that looks amazing. Are you like... REMAKING ID E1 AS A MEDIEVAL RPG, thus doing what id's original plan for Quake was? You badass! Thanks everyone for the comments, I have been working on this map for a while now and it was certainly a lot of fun to create. Luckily the map has proven to be a very good test map for my new AI system at the same time.
Here is another Image of the first room inside of the castle, hopefully it should be familiar enough that you recognize the area. something that is unfortunate about doing particles like that is that they don't scale with distance the same way engine particles do.
I can see why you chose to make them 4 pixels instead of 1, but it makes them look fat when you're close to them. :( I can only think of two ways to create particles like effects using the standard Q1 engine.
1) Sprites; They are a fixed texture size and cannot be alpha faded, but they can be controlled perfectly via QC to create loads of different effects. 2) Built in Particle command; can only be a dot shape, single colour and has a fixed life span. There is also very little control via QC besides the initial settings of origin, movement vector, colour and quantity. I know the sprite particles can look dated with their large size and lack of alpha, but I thought it was acceptable considering the style (original resolution) of this MOD. For clarification, by "Hexeny" I meant beardy-weirdy wizards and dragons stuff rather than Hexen-era or Hexagonal. It's just a preference really, I think the same of the health vials in RMQ.
Seems you are using some subtle orange tone on your torches. Looks really good. I always intentionally avoided coloured lighting in Q1, but I guess it can look good if you have restraint :)
if anyone has time to help test my map, please email me:
andyp.123 (I have a gmail account) I'll probably end up releasing very soon (this week) because I'm so sick of the map and want to release it at last, so I'd prefer people who have time to test today/tomorrow. @than, I have been using coloured light in all my Q1 screenshots, I only use pure white for fill lights. I am very careful to match the colour to the light source and to use subtle colour changes if trying to accent something. The screenshots have brightness and contrast filters (applied in PS) to bring out the details and make the blacks deep to create a better mood.
@Mechtech, I find these kind of things amazing to find in games simply because they look so cool and take so much time to setup. Getting all the right animation frames so that it looks like someone actually designed it that way, can take a lot of time. I am most impressed with the HK's because they are different enough in pose to look interesting. The only problem I have with this image is the lighting, the colour lighting is way too strong and heavy handed, it should be more subtle and maybe add some fog.
I have been adding some detail to a special event in one of my maps called 'The last stand' which happens in the Well of Bones. The local priests decided to hold the ritual of bones in order to quell the undead but the undead got a bit hungry and decided to eat them instead! The Last Stand mechtech: are these pose scenes going to be in a real map?
if so, consider making a little setup to remove and then spawn real monsters in the posed model places. You could make a big shootable trigger_once AND a trigger_once far away to simulate both waking up from shooting or proximity. then you killtarget the models and silent + noflash spawn in replacement monsters and wake them up immediately. would be pretty cool to see that. :) necros: The scene I made was a mock up of an idea for an in map setup. The lighting and brushwork will change. I may use it as a set piece for an intro demo or I could killtarget and spawn the monsters. I think you would need to hide the spawning from the players view. Don't think it would look to good. I will try it out first.
Sock: That scene looks Great but more pixels!!! Higher res screenshot please. Trinca: I had an urge to photoshop in a beer keg :) http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/ogrelunch.jpg
The Ogre models in this shot can be seen from a distance. The area is protected with a skip textured func_wall and trigger_void. (Quoth trigger_void does not stop the plasma gun bug?) When you get closer the models are killed and replaced out of view. that is so awesome, zombies for everyone, no need to fight guys!
Somehow it suits Quake, or at least the more Army-of-Darkness side of Quake. ...is finished but Vis is on track to take at least 100 hours and I probably won't release it right away anyhow because I've already mapped a significant portion of mission 2. :P
http://www.suspenlute.com/stuff/dom3m1a.jpg http://www.suspenlute.com/stuff/dom3m1b.jpg http://www.suspenlute.com/stuff/dom3m1c.jpg playing around with Google SketchUp and so far its fun. have no idea how to turn on the snap to grid mama, unless it doesn't have, so right now things are kind of weird. not like i care since i'm having fun making weird shit.
http://min.us/mCqySArr4qedZ have no idea how to turn on the snap to grid mama, unless it doesn't have, so right now things are kind of weird
You could always use a certain other service provided by the makers of SketchUp to solve that little mystery. i'll look for that. see, i had no idea about sketchup until 4 hours ago or so. thanks for the heads up :)
I'm not sure whether it has a grid or not. I've used it for a few carpentry projects and I've gotten along just fine typing the measurements manually and using it;s highly intuitive system of homing points
Damn, I was dreading someone bringing that up. I'll be honest - it has been on hiatus since last June or so - reason is, I'm so busy with work right now, that I just can't find the time.
In fact I'm so ludicrously, cartoonishly overworked that I can barely find the time to eat and sleep, and in fact the only thing keeping me from poopsocking at my desk is my convenient proximity to the bathroom. My promise that I'll finish it still stands, but I have no idea when that will be now. Yep, I'm afraid it's one of "those" projects :{ shots 1 and 3 look terrific. 2 and 4 look a little over-weird and boxy but still good work on all.
Are you using WC?
If you are, the squiffy textures on the fourth shot can be fixed by selecting the face in texture mode, and clicking the button in the texture tool-bar that says 'to face', then re-align ;) I Hadn't even recognised this map at first, it looks great! This may work in WC (or are you even talking about Hammer?) and its own map format, but after running QBSP it'll still like in the screenshot.
ta for comments chaps. When I've fixed some trigger and clipping issues anyone interested in testing it?
Not true. Aguire's QBSP has support for Valve 220 format and the 'align to face' feature works in conjunction with it. Sorry, just saying :P
Old software engines like winwarp load super complex unvised limit-breaking maps with no trouble whatsoever and play blazingly fast even on my low-spec PC - arwop, ne_ruins, apsp3, catatonic, unvised dom3m1, you name it. For me, speed issues only come into play when using modern opelGL engines like Fitz, spasm, and RMQ. So the worst case scenario is I play it without fog or colored lights and send you old-protocol demos.
If someone is up for it sure. But it's not finished and the last full compile I did it didn't have nearly as much detail and took over 24hrs.
But this was on an old CPU so I dunno :p I wish I could... really... but I can't anymore for some reasons...
24 hours? That's nothing!
I had a map that the beta took 300, and thanks to some suggestions the next version was down to 240, only 10x your vis time! but, vis crashed twice, so first I wasted 200+ hours, then I wasted 160+ hours, and fiinnnally it completed a 240 hour run. I'm almost angry reading your post. lol :) a 3.4 ghz processor with 8 gigs of ram. heh.
still, compared to back in the day, vising and compilation is a lot better. ... well, that's what I understood, no worry ;)
I was just spotting up my computer is broken and I have to buy a new one... bah, my shity business :( Started working on this last week. I've basically done the layout now, I just have to get the gameplay to not suck and put in dm and then it's done.
I kind of went overboard on curves - not very much fun to align all those textures :/ http://i.imgur.com/M0iLK.jpg I'm considering doing dm6rmx to release at the same time because the map isn't very long, and neither is dm6rmx. If I do that, not sure I will release this year... I wish I had the skills to make something like that good looking!
I vote for doing dm6rmx release simultaneously. coudnt recognize the map from the screen is it dm5rmx?
and what's the status of dm1rmx? it was partly finished iirc That is the plan. Not really touched dm6rmx yet though.
Spy: It's dm5rmx, but aside from sharing the layout and some of the textures, it's pretty different. The layout has been expanded a fair bit, but it's still kind of small. Negke: It's called Round the U-Bend http://www.gizchina.com/2010/03/11/wanted-smell-toilet-u-bend/ I think you should release dm5 and dm6 separately because dm3 and dm7 were seperate also.
Made some good progress with dm5rmx. Will probably refine the lighting and brushwork a little more, but it's pretty much done. Working on gameplay at the moment (probably should have done this FIRST)
http://i.imgur.com/vU5eK.jpg TL: dual layer corridor top TR: dual layer corridor bottom BL: inside the cistern BR: one of the new areas dmr3rmx is still the closest conversion I've done. I think it will probably stay that way; This one is pretty different beyond the original layout still existing amongst all the new stuff. I tried to give the feeling of bounced light a lot on this map, so I used quite a lot of low intensity lights with falloff values set between 0.125 and 0.5 to eliminate hard black shadows where they felt unnatural. Still don't want to use coloured light though :) If Negke's bad dark cistern sections of DM5 were like the rusty mechanical version, these shots seem to show a more updated hi-tech version. As ZQF says, the lighting looks great. I like the green/copper/blue palette.
I'm probably going to flip the sky from very dark to bright and use it to outline distant buildings etc. Lighting it is a bit of a git :/
looking cool. The lighting is quite old school and Quakey. Seems like it is a large map from the shots. What mod are you using for the forcefields? Quoth, Hipnotic or something else?
pretty sure maps with coloured lights work fine without the
looking forward to both these maps! Please play on easy or normal and tell me what you think. Hard is quite different and pretty brutal.
Copy this into your Quoth folder OH GOD DO IT NOW Map name is 'zqfarrival04a' -Issues- I cba fixing this shit right now as I want this final gameplay feedback :P > Second jumpy bit has barely been detailed and looks pants. > Only the first shield wall toggle makes a sound. > Quite a few areas have no apparent light sources. > Lots of random bits with wrong/misaligned textures, or flat out no attention given yet > Coloured lights clash badly in a few places. Pretty much every area needs a lighting rejig anyway. Delete the lit if it makes your eyeballs explode. > Several areas have an audible 'thump' as spawned monsters hit the floor. > Sometimes monsters take a bit too long to enter an arena. > Message texts abruptly stop after the first arena. I'm not sure how much I like it so I'll probably remove all of it. > Bunch of rockets in a secret fall through the floor. What an asshole. Oh, there's 11 secrets. I will try to add more. Heh I forgot to mention yet that version is fast vis'd and fast lit.
Here's the raw BSP file for Ricky :P http://www.zealousquakefan.com/beta/zqfarrival04a_rawbsp.zip ah okay. I've never compiled via command line directly just through tools :P
http://www.zealousquakefan.com/beta/zqfarrival04a_rawbsp.prt That throws an error. 'cannot read header' or something. Doesn't make sense. Email me the map file, cause I don't know why but those two files aren't working for me. Sorry dude
But it opened the prt like a txt file. Then I saved it from there. Right-clicing the link and saving like that however worked fine.
On another note, Chrome is pretty fast. Winged Doom is working on something http://j2h.ru/
What mod are you using for the forcefields?
They're just Quoth togglewalls with the particle effects on... which actually I think are just from hypnotic aren't they? :E Skill 1:
Really needs removing lots of superfluous enemies. I've lost count of how often there was a pair of Grunts/Enforcers waiting behind a door when only one would have sufficed. The togglewalls spawn so little particles it was hard to tell what's a forcefield and what isn't. Most of them can't even be toggled on/off so why not just use walls or railings? Stopped being fun around the respawning Quad+Cross area. Sniping with the puny nailgun while getting bitten in the ass by dogs is annoying. No SNG or PG, or even the Hammer? The early areas had Ruined Nation levels of detail and the late ones looked like boxes in comparison, which is weird since it's the late ones I remember from videos and screenshots and etc. All the scripting stuff was good. The crane was great, would have been much better if I could catch a glimpse of it beforehand, somehow. Gonna sounds harsh but I think you could probably cut everything after the GK door and you would have a much better map on your hands. hmm. Thanks for playing it I'll mull that over :)
A lot of the map, particularly the second half, is not what I initially intended because I've got very few vertices left. The two large arena fights at the end in particular were supposed to have a fair bit in between. As it is a minute after one big fight you enter another one :/ I'm definitely not gonna try making something this big again :p (ZealousQuakeFan)
haha, something for the quotes thread! :) I'm not necessarily thinking size in terms of scale but just number of areas and the general length of the map, but yeah, I'm sure I'll eat those in the end :p
btw did you find any secrets otp? I mean I haven't played it yet, but it's 80% vised.
I've stopped it of for now though, so I can do some gaming, but I'll resume it later on tonight. (BTW were you aware that BJPvis has an autosave feature?) A PAK for Quoth. Collection of map models.
http://www.mediafire.com/?amqka3ibkl1b0se well, they are very nice map models (mostly modern, but some medieval stuff).
But where are they from? I'd like to know more about the source of the models before I would want to use them. Are they completely original? I don't recognize any of them. I believe many of them come from http://www.md2.sitters-electronics.nl/models.html, although obviously the ogre with an axe in his back is not there.
I had a look through, and there's a real mixture of stuff in there. The modern stuff like the vehicles isn't all that useful for quake, and often didn't covert to the palette all that well. I would use the fire hose in a base map though, possibly after muting the red a bit! At the other end of things, the Egyptian stuff looks great and obviously there's a matching texture set. The medieval stuff is somewhere in the middle - stuff like the torture equipment could appear naturally in a quake map. It could all do with some new textures though - not because the textures converted badly. Rather because the wood texture doesn't really match any quake texture sets. It would blend in much easier if it matched dull wizwood, for instance. There's a few other places where I longed for different skins. The great big tech-crate is a lovely design but at the moment would look out of place in idbase, ikbase, spdbase. It'd be great to have a texture for one of them. The teleporter pad is a cool model but plain sliver gunmetal is basically never found in quake tech maps. Also little things like fullbrights would be nice - it's good that there are no unintended ones, but models like the branding iron could use proper ones (I'm working on a quick fix for this particular model). On a technical nitpick, quite a lot of the skins are 480x480 in size - maybe the source models were the same. I'd recommend reducing them to 256x256. One reason is that skins are best off in powers-of-2 dimensions, at the moment your 480x480 skins are being stretched to 512x512 in glquake. The reason I'd take the textures down in resolution is because often these models have much higher pixel density than the surrounding map. Moving them closer will again help them blend in. I know that's like 4 paragraphs of suggestions but I only bother with any criticism of things that I like and want to see being great. It's really cool to see new detail models for quake finally appearing, and I hope to see maps make use of these. I forgot to mention my favourite, the compass model, which could go straight into a Knave map unchanged.
Metl, have you got a link to that ogre picture you drew? I've tried searching for "metlslime ogre" but I just get every page from func_...
I found Noesis and got caught up into md2 conversion, it actually works well.
Spirit: Relax it's a beta. I put it on the free hosting so I could get feedback before uploading to quaketastic. I would like to add many more to the map. Preach: I know there's allot of ugly on those skins. I used Noesis v3.997 and converted to the largest skin Fritz Quake would except (mostly downsampled). Removed fullbrights and stopped there. Edit as needed. Do you think I should zip up the source skins into the file? I thought about editing out the non Quake style models but someone may have use for them. You are correct the models came from W. Sitters. I will of course include the proper credit and license file for his/her section of the map. "Copyright (C) 2004-2007 by W. Sitters This model is free software, and has an double licence. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation..." I have sent an email to W. Sitters just to make sure it's ok to use the models and invited him to join func. The ogre with the ax was something I did. More to follow.... Mechtech: FYI leileilol says many of the models on that site are ripped from other games and thus are a copyright violation. Avoid!
Thanks Spirit. ok if you downloaded the map please format your hardrive to make sure it's gone
Removing link :( Until further notice Too bad. I thought I was onto something good. All the models had a creative commons license in the zip files.
Finding low poly non copyright encumbered models is really getting hard. Spirit I have a question. Taking Original Quake models apart and recombining them ie Ogre with an axe in it's back. Is that ok or gray as to the art copyright in Quake Mechtech, Unfortunately some of those models are from Quake 3 community authors, I certainly recognize the teleporter. If anything I think that site you got them from is at fault, not you.
You should check the help/readme of noesis, it clearly states that you should not use it to convert stuff with copyright issues and then distribute it. But hey its the internet, stuff can end up anywhere without the original creators knowledge or credit. :( http://www.wemakemaps.com/
Yes I see. Teleporter needs to be removed from use. The website I believe to be legit. I will remove models that do not give specific permission to reuse. BTW is mm-tech1soc.zip yours? I appreciate the advice from everyone. I will keep on the hunt for usable game content. My hope is we can pool together as much Quake usable game content a possible. A non mod/QC specific SDK of sorts. See http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=47429#p47429
I would stay away from those. The guy is either ignorant or a crook; dangerous in any way. I'm hoping to have a new mapmodel up on my site by the end of tonight. I've also got a preview of a different work-in-progress model
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=292 average leafs visible: 746
max leafs visible: 2464 near (1344 1408 712) c_chains: 1028526972 visdatasize: 2117 kb compressed from 12259 kb Elapsed time : 17h 37m Session time : 110h 33m State time : 98h 41m I was using an i5 2500K, running at stock speeds, on four cores. Imagine how long that would have taken on a P200
I remember reading an interview with Carmack somewhere and he was saying something along the lines of
yeah, you will be able to compile quake maps, but we have this super special hardware and it still takes 15 minutes so on a regular computer it could take hours I am very impressed at the scalability of quake tech. Running Fitz 0.85 good news or bad.
The model zqfarrival_lift_meshes.bsp doesn't show. I did some experimenting using winbspc.exe. I decompiled the map model, created just a plain box to cover the bounding box and deleted all your brushes. The simple box brush has the same error. Next tried r_novis 1 same issue, That should have eliminated vis blocking it. Then I reduced the height, the box shows fine. Maybe 1184 units tall is too much for a bsp model? r_novis 1 only disables vis for world geometry, entities are still culled based on vis data, so r_novis 1 would not prevent it from disappearing.
I wouldn't be so worried about what is and isn't copyrighted. if some kid in a country on the other side of the world made a model and you used it in your map that all of like 100 people played, do you really think he's going to spend thousands of dollars taking you to court over copyright infringement, especially when they're countries apart? even if he stole it from a commercial game, the odds of them actually giving a shit won't be very high.
most of the maps I released used custom textures from other games, they were all copyrighted. necros I did not know that. Thanks
So I tried something else >bspinfo -cutvislight After removing vis info the model does display correctly. I don't care for copyright either, but being an artist I must admit a small addon, like a nick in a readme for the hard earned (!) contribute offered, isn't too much to ask.
---- WVis 2.31 ----
Modified by Bengt Jardrup Multithreading enabled by Willem File: build.bsp 16657389567856 portalleafs 4958568994670780758078 numportals State file out of date, will be overwritten testlevel = 4 Using 2 threads. average leafs visible: 784367785687568 max leafs visible: 132756784568978776 near (2864 -192 -2544), 1/2 c_chains: 195876876867847686 visdatasize: 3068784768768468 compressed from 56856873486 Elapsed time : FOREVER http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60531
Gave me an idea Screenshot http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/dead.jpg Map file http://www.mediafire.com/?f1xfa9dnjpfxac6 Used Quoth. Hammer/WC FGD may cause errors I used rotate_object as a point entity. Wow, that actually looks really really good in-game!
nice job on that, now someone needs to implement it! I went through my last attempt at a display map for models. I've removed models that restrict use. Included the creators readme files. Included the source image files to help in reskinning if needed. Included the source md2, obj, md3 files. Use Quoth mod.
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ama9i3i35pk16c2 New Ogre by Preach. Actual facial expressions on a standard Quake mdl.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/angryogre.jpg Go get it http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/ogre/ Yeah, you're probably right. I finished the skin long ago, so I can't remember if I ever tried anything beyond very faint highlights. Paintovers are welcomed! Meanwhile I'll pretend it's an attempt to capture the deathly evil of Rupert Murdoch... http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cartoon/2011/jul/14/cartoon-steve-bell-murdoch-bskyb
Is it too late to add the floating platform section from E3M4, except with the trains gliding on lava instead?
Wow that screenshots rocks! I love how you arrange models into cool looking scenes! :D Honestly you need to team up with an artist and animator and make a live action quake scene!
external textures don't have to be only for high res stuff. they preserve the original palette: http://mobile.sheridanc.on.ca/~jonescor/temp/pitsetup.jpg
what "external" textures? there's nothing in your zip but two bsps and a text file.
I just didn't realize my textures had different names from yours and therefore no associated TGA files. :P
http://mobile.sheridanc.on.ca/~jonescor/temp/desktop.jpg
just doodling with sock's awesome palace textures... I wish there were some circular trims in that set. I had to make that one myself and it's quite bad; I've never been very good with textures. :P are we running so short on places to upload Q1 files that everyone needs to put up with this mediafire crap?
@necros, I am really glad you are working on that map again, it has a lot of potential and some really cool concepts with interactive items and the best boss fight I have seen in Quake!
The vertical elements you have added will make it feel more fun for combat. I would suggest joining the stairs in the middle so you create more floor space for fights and break up the mountain of steps. Like this - http://www.simonoc.com/images/misc/necros_map1.jpg Thanks, yeah, that looks much better. The way the flights currently almost meet at the center is a bit awkward.
I'm about 1/3 of the way through the list of changes now. :) This looks awesome ! And I agree with sock suggestion: that will look better this way..
Oh, and for the sake of my knowledge: which texture set are you using ?? Old 'Trench' Fight has been Extended and opened up
Crane is gone to be placed in it's own level so I built this to replace it and the HUUUGE area that it overlooked I like the shadows being cast in the second shot and the girders in the third.
I hope you release this soon! Or any other language, because I'm clueless.. Is there a specific name for this kind of architecture?
A 'balcony' with a roof I *think* the structure in the screenshot could be classified as a turret. Nothing wrong with balcony either though.
Because the structure is placed over an already raised entryway, presumably for defensive purposes, it would also qualify as a brattice or "breteche" ( http://www.castlesandmanorhouses.com/castles/pics/breteche1.jpg ) but seriously if you're trying to figure out what to call it in centerprint messages, in English we'd really just call it a balcony. :P
@negke, wow that is beautiful, the scale and style looks amazing. I checked architectural sites and could not find anything specific, except maybe 'The Truman Balcony'. You could easily call it the 'Front Door Balcony' 'The Front Porch Balcony' 'Balcony above front door'. If you made the door texture something unique then it would make the location easier to describe. Also are those ammo boxes on something or on the floor?
@ZealousQuakeFan, I am not sure why you are doing more to that map, it really needs to be split up into smaller pieces. It is certainly cool all the set events you have created (trench, crane, turret corridor, final arena) done but it could easily be in smaller chunks. is oldschool and legitimate if it's done consistently. try playing sadlark5 or 8 and see what kinds of things are possible in such a style.
I'd say there might be something interesting in contrasting between tight spaces and huge open areas in a single map.
And it just looked horrendously sloppy. But my tight spaces were just alcove-like detours. I guess it could work more effectively if you were in some large expansive space and then unexpectedly thrust into a smaller space that had a good reason for being smaller (i.e. falling through a hole in the floor, climbing into a rocket or hilltop structure, etc. to proceed to the goal)
It's something I want to experiment with myself, after the green marble map I'm doing now (which is more traditional). Especially extreme height/width ratios like super tall but narrow passages or wide open but low ceilinged rooms.
Tight player locations should not be frowned upon, they perfectly contrast large open locations and can be used for 'down time' when the player is just exploring or recovering from the last fight. Not every space in a map should be filled with combat.
http://i.imgur.com/bGPH9.jpg
It's not obvious from the picture what map this is based on, but that's because the original dimensions were not right for what I plan to do with it. Which might be obvious from the picture... Yes, it's the main atrium of dm6rmx. Hopefully my take on cthon gameplay will be different enough to still be fun. For DM I will probably widen the top platforms a bit to get back some of the original feel. Texturing is a little plain at the moment, but I like the structure. Is this your Escher map? Also, no idea what you'd call a balcony with a roof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcony#Balcony_names
I want to avoid players confusing it with other balcony-like areas, e.g. the one on the left there (although I'd consider it more of a 'terrace' or a 'porch'). But, indeed, using any more specific architectural names probably wouldn't help in this regard.
Another thing I'm not quite sure about is which floor it's on. The building is elevated, so the floor at the bottom of the stairs is actually basement level. Then there's the 'ground floor' on top of the stairs, and one above with the balcony - would that make it the "second floor" then? IIRC there's some difference in the English way of naming. The map is very tight and cramped. It's acceptable for the most part, because gameplay is supposed to be slow anyway. Tight rooms and corridors aren't that much of a problem in general, but there are some bits, the narrow (64 units) doorways in particular, that make movement at run speed very awkward. It's the Escher map, yes. That's why I kept the texturing simple. Well, and because I've had enough of battling the limits for one map. Nice one, than, except a bit too clean and bright in my view. the 'first floor' is usually the one above the ground floor
could also be specified with direction? eg. 'south-facing balcony' I believe that numbering of floors is not the same in the UK and the US. Stateside, the numbering begins with the floor at ground level, the floor above the ground level is the second floor, and so on. In the UK, the floor at ground level is just called the ground floor and isn't numbered, then the floor above that is the first floor etc.
but it seemed a little too obvious, so i presumed the context was a message stating something like "the gold key is located on the balcony"
when you realize more than half of the people who will ever play the map have already seen this screenshot
let's make up a new word for this architectural feature. it will be our own jargon for awhile, but eventually, the whole world will know of it.
I submit for consideration: Front Roofcony Due to it being a roofed balcony in the front of the building. "the room from the screenshot that was discussed on func"? We'll all know what you are talking about then. More than if you use some weird word that nobody understands like "Jharoka" :)
gets my vote. From this day forward, every map or game I make will contain a Front Roofcony.
The roofcony is actually on the rear of the bulding. GK balcony would make it very obvious, too obvious in my view, besides sounding kind of silly. Well, and I suppose even if I called it that, you'd still not find it and stumble about lost and confused, so posting this screenshot as a hint was probably the optimal solution already!
If naming is still an issue; is there any special view/landmarks opposite the balcony, some kind of purpose it was made specially there? "Ocean View Balcony" or "Garden Side Balcony" ?
I prefer Negkony myself, actually. B) A cupola is just a dome-shaped ceiling.
Can't I just add a little goatee and call it Balcony? Well, I came across the word in Lovecraft, then looked it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupola Half-cupola? Or, of course: the room from the screenshot that was discussed on func Can't I just add a little goatee and call it Balcony?
surround it with ugandan children and call it the BalKony! How Negke is pronounced.
Not that I need to say it in reality (unlike Daz, "Ello guys. Today we have a map my Negkeky? Negekuh? Uhm...", but it would put my mind at ease. I apologize to pronounce neg!ke in another way my speech counceler could advice,
and I look forward for the moment he renames it back to its previous state. In the olden days I always pronounced it Ne-Geeky (neg!ke) in my head, never having need to say it out loud. The ! made me think of eek!.
But also, for those old enough, Negplingky would also make sense. And now I have a very definite feeling of deja vu... still hear a glottal stop, even though our friend has dropped it and it probably wasn't the correct symbol... neg_ah_ke
Hail NeGeeky, wot news from the front?
Is it a plane, is it a bird; nah, it's NeGeeky. I can even hear the crowd roaring as he slays the final Shambler with his axe, "Ne-Gee-Key, Ne-Gee-Key, Ne-Gee-Key..." pronounced neg-key
then again, every alias including my own is probably subject to "obvious" and incompatible interpretations ;) Experiment inspired by Sock's texture set and design for The Florentine Library at http://www.simonoc.com/
Trying to learn Gmax modeling. Made a few map models for torches (not very good). Down sampled a few models found on the web. Re-skinned a few. I think I have the modeling pipeline down as explained by Preach on his site. As far as making a real Quake level out of it, vis time would be too long. Recommend Fitzquake Mark V has Screenshot http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/lod.jpg Download http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?e2m52lju85lldv5 Wow ! This map works (slow to load, though).
I didn't tried yet with the DMtoSP yet. Should be cool. Do this to make shadows cast from your torches if you want: http://mobile.sheridanc.on.ca/~jonescor/post.php?postID=5
I will use that in the future. I may try to make a version that can be vised, func_walls hidden shadow casting brushes. I'm just bummed out about the hatred vis gave my map.
Does anyone know of QC mod or maybe engine that allows setting a static models light level? Lighting from the floor can suck. OK vis times are too much so this is what I tried. In Fitzquake with Quoth I loaded the level as a bsp model. Works looks good !!! ok just a model no collision no vis sealing. Next I took the level brushwork and reduced them down to simple geometry skip textured. Looks good, vis in minutes not days... loads but crashes engine :(
So next I had a pint seems better now Got fed up looking at the crappy skin on the silver/gold keys and thought it would be cool if they got an upgrade. I used a smaller skin size (64x64) and still got more detail on to the model! :D
New and old Keys I think I would prefer it if the spikes on the key were blue too, but otherwise that's an excellent skin. :)
those are models I've hardly thought of in Quake, though a few mods have replaced them (The Demon King, if I remember correctly, and RMQ).
personally I'm fine with the ends of the spikes being brown, but I think the main part of the spikes should be blue - a gradient, like the key-prongs. I always thought of Tronyn in Daz's way (the y as an i).
My friend wanted to make a call that most people would have understood the pronunciation of if it had been called Nexius, but because of his spelling/pronunciation issues he called it Nexuiz, leading gamers to pronounce the title "Nex-whiz." lol. I like the way you've unwrapped the shaft of the key to get a hard edge on the highlight all the way along.
first, they look really great.
But second, there's some subtle but noticeable UV distortion on the skull face. Is it mapped to a quad or do the triangles extend to the tapered shape below the skull? If the latter, i would suggest adding and edge across the bottom of the square shape, so that the skull isn't distorted. it looks to me like the skull face is resting on a raised vertex, making it pop out a bit but looking distorted when viewed from a shallow angle.
I can't believe the runes are all different skin sizes, I thought they would be consistent. I am sure preach will rolls his eyes at the skin setup for the runes. Here is my attempt to reduce the skin stretching and wacky skin size. Not much I can do to make them different otherwise they will lose they visual profile and not be quake runes anymore.
New Rune 1 Skin is 128x128, I did not realize they were such a high pixel density compared to other objects. Sort of got a paint method done for them, the next three should be a lot quicker. @Silver/gold Keys, For some reason the polys on the front/back face were being distorted in the conversion process. Re-done the skull face and it looks much better. Thanks everyone for the feedback. I hope you mean rolling my eyes at the original, because I don't think there's a way to remap that any better really. You'd have to distort the front of the rune a lot or disconnect it, and there's no guarantee that either would produce something that looks acceptable. Thumbs up!
@Preach, I certainly mean't the original runes, their skins are crazy large, but game production is rarely about efficiency and usually about just getting stuff done to tight deadlines.
More Runes I think the second rune has turned out good, it has a more interesting shape and the edge highlight painting across the top looks better. On to the next couple of runes and maybe some new one's. I concur, no one is ever going notice the texture is less stretched on the inside of a rune. Go map!
http://imgur.com/a/XgZGv#0
what was originally going to be a 'room' for Vigil's ill-fated Rubicon chainmap is becoming a map for me. Vigil took the screenshots because apparently everyone hates my monitor's brightness, and also decided the name of the album. I like the well defined forms and lines, and choose of colors.
The first shot reminds me of a mine, the other two of some sort of refinery. yeah I will likely change the water... as you can see it is just some square blocks and the pipe isn't even hollowed out and detailed... infact if the camera was turned 180, there would only be void to see, because the caves and such were made because I was far too lazy to finish that area so instead decided to make some caves
I've been faffing around with this map for about four years. I'm like a 5 year old kid pushing food around his plate in the hopes that it might just disappear, 'cause I ain't eating it. I'm just tinkering with it, never improving it. I work for a couple of hours and then don't touch it for weeks or months. Everytime I see it, I think something should be changed, added, removed. Bored now.
Some of the shots were released as FMB-BDG, a map from 4/5 years ago, and the others are from the other unreleased half of that map. It's come to the point where I am either going to release it 'as is' or dump it. Of course, I don't really want to dump it because although it is not finished, I have put a lot of work into it and vanity says I would like someone to see it. Hence the screen shots. http://s12.postimage.org/q2l55sakd/fitz0000.jpg http://s12.postimage.org/pecamubul/fitz0001.jpg http://s12.postimage.org/qhweyswhp/fitz0002.jpg http://s12.postimage.org/5ma4nk0al/fitz0003.jpg http://s12.postimage.org/nqd586xz1/fitz0004.jpg http://s12.postimage.org/6r8s6oc59/fitz0005.jpg http://s12.postimage.org/vlsa0qwzh/fitz0006.jpg http://s4.postimage.org/87uzvd0nx/fitz0007.jpg http://s4.postimage.org/ezley7pnh/fitz0008.jpg http://s4.postimage.org/vbvgny3z1/fitz0009.jpg http://s4.postimage.org/l32zi4fx9/fitz0010.jpg not sure how releaseable you consider it as is, but if its not quite there yet, maybe work the bare minimum required to get it into a state you consider releaseable (rather than a state you are happy with)?
@mike, It sounds like you are drifting and not sure what to do next. Get some people to test your map and give you some honest feedback on what to fix. Then mash together the feedback into a master list and it will be easier to see what to finish before you release. By the way, I have screenshots of this map in my quake inspiration folder, it has a gorgeous cave vibe going on.
looks good, I really like the corridor shapes you've made. the floor details in shot 1 would be a good candidate for a new texture. shot 3, I would continue the wall shape on the ceiling somehow. I think some ceiling details there and areas like it would be nice.
The basic brushwork and layout of the map seem promising, but there is a lack of memorable details and lighting seems flat. I think stuff like iron bars and such (like in Doom 3's Hell level) would go a long way (and make nice shadows too). Lighting could be more contrast-y.
Static meshes? The best thing IMO would be to put the lights between the struts at the top in screenshot 1 (killpixel). Probably use upward or downward facing spotlights.
I've not mapped for Quake for about 15 years, I have mapped for UT for a while and decided to give it a go... I have always had a soft-spot for blue maps, though the IK maps were accomplished I didn't like the persian feel, I'm trying to go for some more "elder world" with this. Hopefully this screenshots work -
[url=http://postimage.org/image/r5fobm28r/][img]http://s17.postimage.org/r5fobm28r/Quake0000.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://postimage.org/image/8r557mpy3/][img]http://s17.postimage.org/8r557mpy3/Quake0001.jpg[/img][/url] ... sorry for the spam
http://s17.postimage.org/68jg6y47z/Quake0000.jpg http://s17.postimage.org/5kalo05i7/Quake0001.jpg Looks good, feels like an elder structure.
Random thoughts; Is it going to be a void map? Be sure to break up the floor with different levels. Moving that giant spike as part of the level progression would be cool. Lava for contrast and +elder look? Those killpixel shots have some great detailing. They look a bit crampy though.
An extra 64 units of height and width would make a big difference to play and looks. Still probably going to steal some ideas from them though :) Maybe change those bricks for some from the Knave set.
Those rune (?) bricks always looked scaled to me. And hey, maybe it'll bring back your interest enough to make the final push and finish it... Don't think it's necessary to say, but you know everyone here wants to see the thing finished. I agree with ijed about the rune "bricks" but it's not just the scale, it's the huge contrast differences in the palette.
As for my blue map I was contemplating exactly all the points you made (yes all of them), making it a void map but not completely, more like an underground cavern fortress. If I have the willpower (I probably don't), maybe having a reverse episode (starting in elder world and ending in a base map), I mean... how the hell does Ranger escape from shubs lair anyway?! You're right about the floor too, the reason I put in a flat floor was so I could ensure the scaling was ok.
Here's what I have decided: no changes to any textures; I will finish the lighting in the last two rooms, but no other tweaks; leave the monsters as they are; full vis and release it.
The original map was 25K brushes, which I split into a 7K brush map that was released as FMB_BDG. I have just split this other section into two - I realised that there was a natural break between above and below ground. I have dumped the final arena battle as this was the least complete section and the last gold key door becomes the exit. I will full vis and level 4 light all three sections, and that will take around 200 hours on my Pentium4 machine. It's a compromise but it will see the light of day during March. birds eye layout http://www.mediafire.com/conv/0afac108f986454f4d6b79576fc2a5ca43dbed7cb1dc8e524b4ea1f9865f61906g.jpg
main atrium http://www.mediafire.com/conv/5deef9410e838333748ae48fb7e8414bca7eea659d2c7c059d40a89414ccc9d86g.jpg mega http://www.mediafire.com/conv/f93561c9748fb66318aa56c92680df2ccd2655ffab3affcaf97870308b656a766g.jpg ra http://www.mediafire.com/conv/8a7a965ccfe03e66525db4b511e162ea7f60213b6de1126c9b87df17d0d192166g.jpg ya http://www.mediafire.com/conv/b66a41592a313402d71b1e77bae441a2b40106c581fe7b67b773d40755d389d36g.jpg download exilea2r1.bsp http://www.mediafire.com/file/lr4z4ool532zsq8/exilea2r1.bsp I know this is a singleplayer mostly level design board but I've always been posting my multiplayer maps here anyway as I know some of you have dabbled in multiplayer maps before. It's a competitive 1on1/2on2 tourney level layout that's in alpha stages with just developer textures (an idea stolen from golden_boy) sorry eyecandy hunters. I've gotten some feedback that the mega room is a bit boring and also that the ya-rocketlauncher to mega path connectivity needs to be changed. I'm a bit stumped at what to do for that, any ideas? I'm open to any ideas to make the connectivity more interesting/exciting. I'm also not afraid to completely rework rooms to make the map better as a whole since i have no work at all put into the textures or details. Cheers. Can't say I've ever drawn up a layout in orange textures before detailing the level properly. Maybe that's why I rarely finish my levels. The one thing that strikes me as not great is having the mega-health and rocket launcher in close proximity. One of the things I always hated about DM6 when I played league games was the rocket launcher / red armour room. Seemed like an obvious place to turtle (and it usually was).
Only advice I can part with is that you should never have 2 powerful items together unless it's in a high-risk area (lava jump red armour and megahealth area in DM2, hardly anyone turtles here because the quad is in a different place) My 2 cents: Get it on a server ASAP for live testing. Also try to make the different entrances/exits look clearly different (size, shape of doorways, special textures or lighting) so it's easy to "get" the map.
Provide 1 or 2 more cover/ambush possibilities? It's very open. Cool that you're testing it with bare textures etc, but I suggest you put a different colour on the ceiling/floor. The Valve system was orange for walls and gray for floors iirc, which makes geometry stand out very well.
Also agree on not placing powerful items next to each other. I was intrigued by the orange textures that valve used... I tried to emulate them a little better. I've painted myself into a corner with my level so I'm going to flesh out the layout in orange first (in addition to my grid paper drawings).
http://25.media.tumblr.com/9867c768459a284b2f6f3ceba2e72982/tumblr_mikryv2oEs1rrpymyo1_250.png http://25.media.tumblr.com/74903748e7dc77eecc7eac9d0032bc17/tumblr_mikryv2oEs1rrpymyo2_250.png In case those links don't work, direct link to my tumblr post - http://fifthelephant.tumblr.com/post/43645609379/orange-texture-maps-for-quake I'm having a lot of trouble getting vertices to line up properly in the BSP procedure. In the editor it's fine but in-game it's screwed up... any ideas??
Before http://s14.postimage.org/gwnamj4u9/Image1.jpg After http://s11.postimage.org/72k9jf3rn/Quake0000.jpg I'm having a lot of trouble getting vertices to line up properly in the BSP procedure. In the editor it's fine but in-game it's screwed up... any ideas??
Before http://s14.postimage.org/gwnamj4u9/Image1.jpg After http://s11.postimage.org/72k9jf3rn/Quake0000.jpg I have, but I think it may be the vertices that are the problem or the way I split the faces possibly.
so it always compiles wrong even when making it from scratch? what if you change the shape, is it still incorrect?
Yeah I changed the vertices a bit and got a compile that worked. I still don't understand why the others didn't work, I thought splitting the face of the cube into triangles would have avoided any weird geometry problems.
I really wanted to get a lot more done today but instead I've spent the last few hours dealing with crashes and bsp errors. And I thought UED was stressful! it's hard to tell from that image exactly what is being done but i tried recreating it and when i move one of the verts out of line so it appears the same as your x/z & x/y views, it looks different to how yours does in the y/z view (i don't get clean 'X' cuts) which makes me think you cut the brush up differently
i have a 'vertex block' prefab saved which i made manually using six 3-sided spike brushes. not sure if that's how you did it? i can normally bend it any way i want though; it churns out compiler warnings if it's on too small a scale but generally works ok in-game The face at the back has been cut opposite to the face at the front (which when you see an X shape in the 2d view). Basically I split the faces of a cube to get a mesh to manipulate, I thought this would save me lots of time rather than making a bunch of triangle brushes.
Using your idea RJ I have found making a bunch of triangular/pyramid brushes seems to work without BSP faults. Though there is a huge amount more work involved than my split-face method. Choosing between more work and more "error solving" is horrible, probably going to go with more work and not go crazy with the outdoor part like I wanted to.
@FifthElephant, you are fighting the editor and trying to make it do something that it was not designed for. WC is old, designed long before people did tri-souping or terrain meshes. Valve got over these limitations by having displacement functions and lots of models.
You can easily do terrain or triangle meshes but with other editors. I have been work with GTK editors for years and have written plenty of tutorials. Have a look, maybe you should try a different editor? There are also plenty of tutorials for switch over to something different. Terrain Tutorials GTK Tutorial for Q1 I have tried to wrap my brain around GTK Radient but I suppose I went for WC because of the Q-Adapter, and convenience is a big plus. I'll have to take another look.
Using your idea RJ I have found making a bunch of triangular/pyramid brushes seems to work without BSP faults. Though there is a huge amount more work involved than my split-face method. Choosing between more work and more "error solving" is horrible, probably going to go with more work and not go crazy with the outdoor part like I wanted to.
you only need to do it the once. save it as a prefab and insert it at any time using the block tool; the brushes will be grouped automatically Gave up on trisouping for the same problems. I suspect its a problem with the compiler as well, getting muddled data from WC.
I was even getting problems with the 3-face pyramid cube method Rj mentions so started doing terrain in a different way. It is much more work as well. Mouldy Old Knight
I like the idea of a dual wielding knight with curved swords. The Quake Palette has lots of green/yellow and I wondered what it would look like stained on armour to show age. I prefer that flat sword to the runic one.
Two swords suggests (to me) that instead of having a ranged attack he'd be able to deflect player attacks - the non-hitscan ones at least... Maybe give him a fiend style leap as well? He looks more agile than a carapace armoured DK. Bad hair day? :) what makes them so impressive, other than the artistry of course, is the fact that they fit in so seamlessly and perfectly with the existing monsters, and of course are made with the limitations of Quake's engine and model format in mind.
All too often I see people making the mistake of putting too many polys in their models, and you just end up with a horrible mess because the verts just get smooshed around with the 8-bit precision. The mouldy knight doesn't look like a friendly fellow.. I agree about the yellow writing on the sword too, doesn't seem like a good fit.
The doom level seems a bit simplistic, nice lighting though. The texture scheme reminds me of the space levels in Duke3D. The mouldy knight doesn't look like a friendly fellow.. I agree about the yellow writing on the sword too, doesn't seem like a good fit.
The doom level seems a bit simplistic, nice lighting though. The texture scheme reminds me of the space levels in Duke3D. @ijed, interesting idea with the deflection of player missiles, not sure how to implement it. Would he be stationary or running at the player with swords crossed while deflecting bullets?
@kinn, thanks, they are designed for Quake Pixel Vision! @Fifth, the runes are only one side, I might fade them more into the sword but the surface certainly needs something to make it light up when moving. Any ideas? I'm surprised no-one has made a knight with a big mace or a spear yet. Or an ogre/knight hybrid, or two-headed super ogre. I should write all these down or draw them.
I wish I could help with the sword but I think the textures in quake 1 are usually too low res for fine details like writing, could be interesting to have him wielding shotels or yataghans. (also I like the deflection idea, like the airgun from PainKeep!) Was done in Quoth for the Death Lord - not sure of the method there.
We've got a version as well although it's a bit involved. Basically you add a global 'shielded' that turns on in the animation while its blocking. All the weapon touch functions then check for this value when hitting anything. If they hit it then reverse their direction; self.velocity = self.velocity * -1; And reset the owner field so it can hurt the player; self.owner = other; Or do something a bit more clever with scattering. It's a bit more work this way but you can apply it whenever you like - so running or doing a standing block would both work. You can also have him receive lower damage from hitscan stuff as opposed to automatically damaging the player with an unfair reflected attack. Not sure if this would work against the LG. I could investigate more. Vague idea with the rune sword - why not use framegroups? You can animate up to four skins. Yes, it's a lot of overhead just to make a small part of the skin psuedo-shiny or glowing, but it could look cool. If you 'group' multiple skins (max 4 AFAIK) in Qme it will flipbook between them automatically. You can also do this manually by just calling the self.skin = whatever. Which could allow you to make the runes glow when he's doing something special. Like blocking ;) Was done in Quoth for the Death Lord - not sure of the method there.
We've got a version as well although it's a bit involved. Basically you add a global 'shielded' that turns on in the animation while its blocking. All the weapon touch functions then check for this value when hitting anything. If they hit it then reverse their direction; self.velocity = self.velocity * -1; And reset the owner field so it can hurt the player; self.owner = other; Or do something a bit more clever with scattering. It's a bit more work this way but you can apply it whenever you like - so running or doing a standing block would both work. You can also have him receive lower damage from hitscan stuff as opposed to automatically damaging the player with an unfair reflected attack. Not sure if this would work against the LG. I could investigate more. Vague idea with the rune sword - why not use framegroups? You can animate up to four skins. Yes, it's a lot of overhead just to make a small part of the skin psuedo-shiny or glowing, but it could look cool. If you 'group' multiple skins (max 4 AFAIK) in Qme it will flipbook between them automatically. You can also do this manually by just calling the self.skin = whatever. Which could allow you to make the runes glow when he's doing something special. Like blocking ;) I've had good success with duplicating some of the mesh and pushing the faces outward a bit and then using alpha value.
Another trick you can use is to take that duplicated & enlarged mesh, and flip all the triangles in it. This creates an "outline" effect around your model, where the original model can be seen inside even without alpha.
I remember your (?) model that did that with an egg shape around an Enforcer.
This is how all cell shading solutions do the outline effect as well, duplicating the mesh and applying a 'push' transform and flipping the triangles, then applying a flat black colour to the newly generated mesh. Where black lines are needed they just get painted onto the diffuse layer. When it's done to extremes on low poly stuff you start to see artifacts: http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/93349-viewtiful-joe-gamecube-screenshot-starting-a-new-game-joe-and.png For a Quake forcefield, if you wanted to go nuts, you could export the entire mesh plus animations, push it, flip it and then attach it inside the Qc so that it would follow the animations of its owning monster. This would allow you to apply a Quouth Death Lord forcefield gameplay works very well.
Sock that's a nice model but I don't like the curved swords. To be honest I was not expecting to do anything interesting with this knight besides having two cool looking swords, but after what ijed said it got me thinking.
Personally I find bullet reflection abilities confusing to read and understand in games. There are plenty of examples of artifacts that do this function, empathy shield, cross of reflection, even the drake MOD has one, but I am not sure what it is called. So trying to implement a reflection ability is going to be tough because it has to be a certain state which the player can read and understand quickly. I like the idea of swords glowing with an extra large sword model over the top (insync animations) and the alpha value changed. Once the animations are setup then I will post a video to see what people think. Coding the reflection ability is going to be easy because I have re-written all monster projectiles QC scripts to go through one routine. That's why the method I mention is my preferred one, even though its more complex to make.
Visually you can see right away what's going on - the attacks bounce off the guy. The reason it works so well is you understand it immediately at first glance. I never knew what the function of empathy shield was and never worked up the curiosity to find out. Taking a small break from the blue map to mess about in Trenchbroom. Here's what I have so far, it's a remake -
http://s22.postimage.org/ei4s3ovtt/deck.jpg I wonder who will release the first fully trenchbroomed map? :D (not me, I'm only editing stuff made in another editor atm)
but I fear some other folk are secretly toiling away at it and might beat me to it. :D
I have the layout / connectivity finalized on the tournament map i mentioned earlier. Working on rebuilding the map from scratch using non-developer textures now. Starting on the most important part of the map, the main atrium!
http://www.mediafire.com/conv/c239e6971c2db654835d602641caef7523cd7c729fed97a5cbdef18b3272e2ed6g.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/conv/fc49244047926b9698e121464681c353638d0fcef547a83fde986a29cecfde7e6g.jpg Haven't really put much thought into detailing it or lighting it yet but just wanted to give people something to chew on and to assure them that I'm still working on this map. Looking for comments: http://www.quaddicted.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=500
The map is in beta now pick it up from this thread:
http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/topic/6042 http://www.mediafire.com/view/?5ul1k4t3cokbnmt http://www.mediafire.com/view/?7a5i7axts87dgdb http://www.mediafire.com/view/?c3cqmvk7lccufpn http://www.mediafire.com/view/?v1z61kah5hsqph2 http://www.mediafire.com/view/?fmxjkxrq3f1nrzu http://www.mediafire.com/view/?vsyybbmzod2og62 I haven't played it, but it looks beautiful, foogs.
The megahealth seems out of place. I guess I would've expected that the megahealth be on a platform or stylish place, and not just on top of a couple of beams. I noticed that you have some items placed right at the edges. Is this because to allow players to grab those items without actually landing there? Isn't that a little too forgiving? I've been out of the quake scene for some time, so I don't know if that's a trend now, to be so forgiving like that. That looks really good.
Are you sure about that black sky? I'd just put a ceiling there, myself. I wrote up a quick OBJ to MAP convertor program so I could do stuff in Modo and import it into TrenchBroom. First test - successful!
The little "S" shape was modeled in Modo and converted Granted, there's no texturing info but, hey, the brush shapes are better than nothing... https://dl.dropbox.com/u/161473/Misc/QuakeStuff1.jpg It's the simplest conversion possible so it isn't like it's breaking up a mesh into convex chunks
That is something that I keep coming back to for several interesting applications in TB. If I ever get it working, it could be used to turn obj into brushes as well I imagine.
More quick fun testing : https://dl.dropbox.com/u/161473/Misc/QuakeStuff2.jpg
SleepwalkR I tried for a long time to get it to work as I wanted that feature for ToeTag. I could never get it to work even remotely reliably. Now, granted, I'm awful at that kind of code so you may have better luck. If you DO ever get it working, it'll be a Quake editing renaissance. :) more flexible vertex editing. Would be great if you could push a vertex inward and magically create new brushes, and re-merge them when you move the vertex back out again. But yeah, it's very complicated.
Looks great! I've been mapping too, but not with Trenchbroom unfortunately. But with 1.05 now in my possession, who's to say.
addon =)
http://www.shrak.com/shrak.html Just wait, if phong shading support gets added to the compile tools we'll probably never see any other type of map ever again :P
I do love that map though, I should probably finish up mine... not Trenchbroom, but something I've been tinkering with for a while.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/editor1.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/editor2.jpg looks awesome as usual. You are good at what you do - looking forward to playing it somewhere down the line!
When you say you have to build it like you would in Quake, what does that entail?
Do you mean you have to make the equivalent of a "brush" in Modo, or do you just mean you can't leave any weird / concave shapes? Also, does it only work in Modo or is standalone and works for any program that can export That looks good, mfx. That first shot is nice, almost like from a movie.
But, fitz0001.jpg, looks good, but, something weird about it. About that control panel and the floor. When you say you have to build it like you would in Quake, what does that entail?
Do you mean you have to make the equivalent of a "brush" in Modo, or do you just mean you can't leave any weird / concave shapes? Right, you have to build with individual shapes that are convex and sealed. Like Quake brushes. Also, does it only work in Modo or is standalone and works for any program that can export It works with the OBJ file format so anything taht exports to that format should work... But, the nice thing is that you can work however you want in Modo (or whatever) and when you're happy with the mesh, you can then spend 10 minutes breaking it down into convex shapes for export.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0009.jpg
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0010.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0013.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/j.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0001.jpg Could do with a bit more contrasted lighting IMO. More bright spots, more dark spots, but overall less blandness.
I love this shot: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0013.jpg This is almost done. I have 1 room and a couple of ceilings to do, I've already started item layout and some small testing with Omicron bots.
Once I'm done I'm going to need a couple of volunteers for testing, when it's released it'll have the source Also, screenshots - http://s17.postimg.org/eigyp88j3/deck1.jpg http://s15.postimg.org/b3692gnjv/deck.jpg I haven't 100% decided on the SP version yet. I have a few cool ideas for it though. However it's not a huge level so I'm not certain how I can extend the gameplay time in it to make it fun.
It looks really, really small compared to the UT versions. Is navigation a problem with all those small spaces and gaps between crates?
I agree with Spiney also that is very dark, especially so considering it is a DM map. I like idea of a small 1on1 style D16 layout, I guess I'll have to see it ingame to really judge. In terms of level size it's around DM2/DM5 sized. I think the screenshots are deceptive, the walkways are wider than DM5 for example. The gap between the crates is between 64-128 units. The map is probably best suited for 2-4 players, it's very scaled down compared to the UT version but then again that game has a sniper rifle for a reason! ;)
As for the light levels it's definitely something I'm going to tweak a bit, but I'm of the belief that mappers shouldn't be too scared of having dark areas in their maps! :) thanks for considering the request anyway - I'm sure Negke could valuable ideas - he has a pretty amazing track record for wringing gameplay out of tiny dms
As for the light levels it's definitely something I'm going to tweak a bit, but I'm of the belief that mappers shouldn't be too scared of having dark areas in their maps! :)
this is true. however that doesn't mean sourced lights can't be brightened up to add contrast. those shots look fine to me, but it's normally difficult to judge light without seeing it in-game due to everyone's setups being different if you don't end up making an SP version, test it for DMSP2 :) I've always loved Deck16 it's a classic map. Sense of scale doesn't seem quite big enough but perhaps it has to do with unreal fov/lighting effects. But it's great seeing the detail you've put in.
mfx your shit is pretty dope man. I like your pipe work and how you're making your shit so futuristic. I bet you make some pretty cool looking shit for other engines too.
I have noticed when taking screenshots lighting varies allot when looking at the
Very nice style, I like the texture set and the fog combination, seems to have a good variety. Just work a bit more on the textures I think.
Looks spot on as a Quake Base Dexk 16 remix, got the style exactly right, neat build too. Could be pretty annoying gameplay with all those crates tho.
it's too dark... too many crates...
You guys are gonna cry when you play Q2DM8... or HL's Stalkyard ;) For serious though, the screenshots are deceiving here, it plays like a cross between DM4 and DM5 but slightly bigger. The layout of all the rooms is now complete, I have 1 ceiling to do now and a few lighting tweaks and cleaning up with some clip brushes (and some more crates to add, no joke) year of the base map!
Seriously, though. I'm working on one, one was just released by MFX, capnbubs is working on an e1m1 remake over at quakeone.com, you're doing one... :D So many base maps in the works. Spirit is going to turn in his grave!
Looks interesting, Ray. I hope to see more!
I think Scampie is/was working on a base map too btw, and hopefully Tyrann will one day release the mother of all base maps that he's had tucked away for the last 6 or 7 years nearly finished... Lol, I'm dicking around with the E2M1 source and slowly turning it into medieval style.
Why not try doing a 50/50 kind of thing. Mappers always seem to stick to a single theme for a map. Unless you're Madfox...
Base Is The Easiest Theme To Work With
Really? (not being sarcastic, btw) I think it's rather hard to make something *interesting* with the idbase set, because it kinda limits you to those wall panels. It's hard to me, at least. I have an easier time with bricks or concrete or something - you can build whatever geometry you want, it will tile no matter what and light/shadow will make it look interesting without needing the details drawn onto the texture. That's just how it is to me, though. But I guess idbase gives you some dots to connect, and is easy in that way, while using endlessly tiling stuff requires actual interesting brushwork and some attention to lighting to look good. I prefer brick and lightmaps. To me, mixing a very rigid feeling theme of pre-made panels with more organic stuff is the hard part.
Each style has it's own challenge I think. I dunno if it's easier to make a base map, I just thought it was the best suited to remake deck.
Base certainly has a really versatile Tyrann said its still in the works.
Whatever the theme, I'm down. Its exciting how much seems to be on the horizon. Does anyone know what ever happend to the medieval map Lun was once working on? Re theme... I don't think base is the easiest theme either. I guess I'd agree with gb on this one. Then again I'm not convinced that I know what I'm talking about; I find metal to be a hard theme to pull off (well) also. Base Is The Easiest Theme To Work With
I think it is partly to do with what details people put in maps, crates, pipes, girders, computer panels, wires etc. All these details are easy to create and visualize because they are modern day things. Also the ID base textures lock together like lego and they are easy to work with especially for scale. But to do other themes well is just as hard I think. It's all about scale. 128x128 is deceptively large. Sometimes I wish those textures were 96x96 instead.
32x128x16?!?!
More like 32x96x8 I think. If you know what I mean. Which you might or might not. Which is obvious. It just always felt to me like that.
I agree with sock. The textures are very consistent and compatible to one another, they pretty much fit like Lego. And it seems the base (sci-fi) theme is more immediately accessible to authors than the more abstract ones. I think that the toughest thing about a base level is that you're kinda limited in the choices of appropriate monsters to populate it. Grunts, Enforcers and Dogs (and Scorpions if you're working with the Hipnotic add-on). That ends up limiting the type and amounts of weapons and ammo that you can use without unbalancing the gameplay. Obviously for a DM only map that's not really an issue. In addition some items simply look "Odd" in a typical base level. For example how would a PoP end up being there in the first place? A ring? Even the Quad is kind of out of place. The Armor is also kind of weird looking when sitting in a base level (it's got more of a medieval type thing going on with its looks).
For example how would a PoP end up being there in the first place? A ring? Even the Quad is kind of out of place.
I know, right? And what's with the player being able to carry like 8 weapons at once? Totally unrealistic... I'm just saying that the overall base theme tends to limit the choices that are available. Those things that I mentioned can all seem appropriate to the other map styles in the game.
Hmm, I usually find that a small but very well thought out texture set gives strongest visuals.
I usually try to stick to 6 or so textures for most of the map... But I'm a bit of a less-is-more kind of guy so... That kind of mentality only works well in games that allow you to do very abstract floorplans. If you need a contemporary city you're going to need to throw a lot of diversity at it to sell. Usually prefer textures that are fairly flat in terms of color and reasonably light to show of the light and shadow. Then again Alien style corridors are pretty cool also, I prefer those to look very methodological, using repetition a lot etc. idbase is one of the best examples of a low poly modelling saying: Let the texture do the work.
A single flat surface suddenly becomes a detailed panel in a military installation, and there's a bunch of other little alignment reliant textures that you can use that really make the set sing. There's also lots of easy ways of filling empty space and creating parallax in that space, which brings a lot of easy visual interest to maps without being unnatural. All with what are basically a bunch of cubes. It's good stuff sock, though if I was in the model making business I'd be hella tempted to wait for capnbubs updated models to modify... :P
Could get those other ITS levels done in the mean-time ;) Totally badass. Guess all that's missing for it to be complete is some sort of halberd knight...
halberd knight What would a halberd knight look like? Crazy large sword manga style? two handed large sword resting on floor most of the time? Let me know what you think?
If you wanted to give a knight a crazy huge weapon without raping the knight's vertex precision, you could export the knight + weapon as two seperate
Something like this minus the goofy armor. Long range, stab and sweep attack?
Large sword sounds cool, too (for Aramis?). Perhaps like Pyramid Head from Silent Hill: large, heavy sword. Sweep and overhead smash attack - slow, but extremely devastating. Well the knight and weapon can be animated separate and glued together in QC to solve bound box problems. I certainly like the idea of a really cool range weapon and they would make awesome statues to come to life!
When I was designing Lord Aramis (shield knight) I sort of imagined him like the Tower Knight from Demons Souls. Demons Souls and Dark Souls are two of my favourite games, halberd guys in DeS always mess me up though. Tower Knight was scary when you first met him, what I'd love in Quake is that every theme had a proper boss... I want to meet some kind of Cyber Shambler boss for base maps (I drew some sketches for when I learn modelling), a bad guy I call "Arch-Vore" which is a beefed up Vore who can revive enemies... A King Ogre (with a crown) with a double bladed chainsaw and cluster grenade bombs. But I can't model or code... :(
I've got limited internet qbility right now, but search arne's kuwaiik drawings. Chibi style, but great stuff. I already made his exploding zombie.
Halbard knight? You've been reading fire and ice negke! I wouldn't make him slow though, instead give him knockback abilities like a q2 enforcer - it hurts when he hits, but knocks you back. If there's no room for you to fly then the end of his animation is the deathblow. Actually, I had Gothic 3 in mind, although seeing the screenshot now, they don't look iconic enough unlike the picture I posted earlier.
Do you mean Aero Hotah, Prince Martell's Captain of the Guard, the Norvish mercenary?
Yes....?
I ruined the books for myself by reading them all in one go, so I'm patchy on the details. But the way that character was introduced sticks in the mind - it'd probably be a fun challenge to code / animate such an adaptable fighting style. By which I mean the blade for chopping and the haft for defence. Probably not worth it in Quake either - I'm reminded of when indy faces the show off sword fighter - blam. fiends are great for that, their jump means it's easier for them to get into melee range.
I would think a spear knight would do a skewering dash at the player, which would serve much the same purpose. the difficulty is to differentiate it gameplay wise from a fiend without too many bells or whistles, as it's still really just a 'sidestep shoot' type of enemy. something really vicious that can behave like a gaunt or an imp in the air, BUT can land right near you and behave like a fiend/hell hound - and after that, take off again (lol).
I want an enforcer with a hitscan gatling gun like the heavy weapons guy in doom 2. He would have about 2-3 time enforcer health and be a little larger because of his heavy armour.
The gatling gun would take a moment to get going, but once it was going it would do a lot of damage if you didn't keep moving. He would shoot for about 5 seconds from when he started firing, and would not stop even if he lost line of sight. But actually, we have enough enemies, so it's not something I've ever really felt desperate for or anything. Would probably be a nice addition to the base enemies though. certainly that may be true in some regards for gameplay purposes, but to maintain a level of interest in the game it always improve the health if we get shiny new toys to play with. A good example is what the Quoth additions have brought to singleplayer maps. The additional base enemies have really helped to make the game more fun, really before quoth there were only 3 suitable base enemies (dogs, grunts and enforcers).
A chaingun/machine gun enforcer would be nice. But I don't know if I would like him as overpowered as you suggest. It would make him sort of a sub-boss monster rather than a normal class enemy. Two times as strong would be ogre level, three times hell knight level - all the while having a powerful hitscan attack (not to mention that five seconds is a very long time in game). So I guess this would be pretty annoying in practice, easily making the Quoth monsters pale in comparison.
I'd prefer something akin to the Doom chaingunner in terms of health and damage. I'dd like to see some enemies that have locational damage zones. Like a large armoured enemy with weak spots.
Another idea would be enemies that are large enough to pass through them, though that seems very tricky to code/construct. Something like a robot would be best for this due to a rigid movement pattern. why that q2 guy from kinn's bastion never been used in other maps beside the bastion itself
it's a very cool monster and would fit perfectly in the quake universe http://gunpowered.com/q2cheese/bugs/quake2_infantry.gif It's content ripped from Quake2, which makes it a bit naff to use. I didn't care back then, but these days I realise how crap and lazy it is to rip content from other games. We have the tools and talent to make our own - that's gotta be the smart move.
but these days I realise how crap and lazy it is to rip content from other games
i agree with that statement, but from 16? years since the game has been released there are only bunch of quality monsters been popup. Especially to the base settings. its just a retextured grunts and enforcers. otoh the eddie guy from quoth2 is awesome though Courtesy of leileilol: http://leileilol.mancubus.net/quackstuff/lmaoquakegal.png
thanx for tailing me,
scampie MadFox, please make a map with animated disco floortiles. I wanna dance with the drunk ogres!
Why no female ogres? And pool tables like in Duke3D? Someone code me a pooltable! I HAVE SO MUCH IDEAS. ... it's DM only. Just need to make sure nothing snags and maybe get some feedback... just email me or something with "map beta" in the title.
I think you are looking for Club Shub! Holy shit nostalgia blast :o
Everyone has nice screenshots, now go map! Yes even me too I guess! I'm not much of a DM player, but I'd like to take a look at the map nevertheless. For some actualy multiplayer feedback, you should post the beta at quakeworld.nu and quakeone.com, I guess.
of current work:
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0021.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0022.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0023.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0028.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/fitz0026.jpg Massive areas == massive beasties?
Just one minor thing - you uploaded your screenshots with names like 'fitz0020.jpg'. Should be 'mfxsp2_01.jpg'. Don't be lazy!!! I guess you are burned out from all that mapping ;) I guess it's worth it :) trying to figure out how to quoth in quark.
Have to finish this before starting trenchbroomin, and vanilla quake enemies kind of underrate this map... You can't really quoth in quark as quark uses its own "tmpquark" directory as game. You might be able to if you use an engine that supports the -quoth switch but I don't remember. You could also put the quoth files into the tmpquark dir.
Dude - I know you've been like stockpiling or whatever - but thank your for being super active and getting 2013 started with quality.
This looks even better than the (very good) map I gave a quick playthrough the other day. More feedback on that soon, btw. looks great, very monolithic. Very Quake. ...looks like the new mapping machine. :) Screenshots look sweet - still have to play that debut base map though!
Interested to see how your polished tight base design translates with the Kell theme, and the other base one looks great too.
I think they both look particularly interesting. More than-worship apparent in the kell one (not that that is ever a bad thing).I suppose the remix map also looks that way, evoking than's 1st dm remix in some ways. But it also has a strong Ricky T23 vibe going on... something a tad more loose there, it seems.
Either way. really good looking stuff... Skacky - you still working on that Knave pack? Drew: I got a bit carried away with other projects (most notably for Thief) and real life got in the way. Badly. I will resume work on it someday though, the maps are still there.
I'm not seeing anything here that I dislike, what is it you want us to compare? All these textures compliment each other beautifully.
@FifthElephant, I am curious to know what image people like the most. The first impression is important for an image, it can hint at what is the best view angle, lighting and focus of a scene.
21 and 23 for me.
21 is great because it is a castle and shows some big interior and has great atmosphere. Makes me wonder what of the possible locations in the image I can explore, the tower maybe? Maybe I can sneak on that ledge above the entry. What's in the bottom left corner! 22 looks "boring, just some random room". 23 looks intriguing and hints at some interaction with those evil guys. (The SK door looks out of place to me, too cartoonish and also flat. A more yellow/light or darker wood type might fit better. But this is random taste and possibly complete bollocks.) 24 looks great because it shows traps and I like that but the image itself seems so filled. Only one of the pendulums would look better I think. Then it would be more clear what it is too. Right now they look like they statically(!) barricade the item without moving. The item itself is not even really recognisable as something worth getting to a non-Quaker. Thanks spirit, that is awesome. Yeah shot 22 is an odd one, I love the architectural shapes but it does not present well as a screenshot. It sort of falls into the category of brushp0rn. The locked door in 23 is a lighter wood but the SK panel is stone which is odd. 24 is my homage to Mike and the nice use of pendulums. I remade the model to have a ring section at the top and beefed up the rest of the model to represent the weight better. I should do a couple of extra skins for variety reasons.
I pretty much agree with what spirit has said, except maybe his comments on the silver key door looking out of place, I think it's fine. I recognise the area of 22, looks fairly standard, not every room is going to be mind-blowingly awesome, sometimes rooms just need to be functional (but tarted up a little).
Needs to be blood on the wooden plank leading to the rune! All those shots rock though
Shots 1 and 3 are best for mass consumption, for some reason, shot 4 reminds me of the old Quake2 promotional screen with the gladiator on a bridge http://www.gameswin.biz/mr/figuras/quake2.jpg I have no idea why 1 and 3. SK door criticism bollocks.
Shot 2 is very nice brushporn, but yeah, not particularly compelling for non mappers - also courtyard visible doesn't have anything of particular visual interest as of right now. shot 4 what spirit/scampie said --sock
my favorite image is 23 by far of those posted. I can't really give much concrete reasoning as to why I like the image better than the others other than it's driving my imagination wild thinking what is at the end of those stairs or how high those stairs go. has been shown by capnbubs -
http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-mod-releases/works-progress/9573-authentic-model-improvement-30.html#post131716 I really don't like the new ligh huge block texture and it doesn't work well with city6_8. The rest is cool.
It seems I can't get away from Quake. I found this growing under the sink...
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/misc/DSC_0111a.jpg (Nikoin D5000, SB-700 @ 128th, f16, 60th sec, summer fruits cordial dropped into milk) Excellent picture you got there, Mike!
I tried some macrophoto's once, but almost screwed my new camera with the outstanding lense I needed for that purpose. It gives me reminiscense of my fluid projections I make with my diaprojector and a tumbling double glass coil. http://members.home.nl/gimli/pantharei.jpg who'se afraid of screenshots?
but nearly done.
http://i.imgur.com/LqWcXmN.jpg http://i.imgur.com/CvFKYfE.jpg http://i.imgur.com/p9ja2dX.jpg It is dm6rmx, but it doesn't really feel like dm6 at all because I had to change the size of the main atrium quite considerably. I also added a lot of extra areas and although the original layout is still there underneath, you would barely know it :/ ( :) ? ) You got me hooked. DM6 it's my favourite DM map and i can only see it in the third sc, which i suppose you took from the place the RA is. I'm still figuring which part are the other 2.
Image 1: I love the window design (diagonal bars) around the central arena, reminds me of E3M6 which is one of my favourite levels for architectural style. The ceiling looks like a blob of brown, maybe add some colour (grey/green) to the circular panel/trims?
Image 2: Got some lovely strong architectural lines going on with the bolt supports on the ceiling but the colours feel wrong. The ceiling is just full on brown and it would be interesting to extend the grey brick upwards to break the hard line separating the two sections of the room. Image 3: Looks like a good combat area with multiple floor heights and I love the style of the steps with the brown/green combo. This is certainly the best image for lighting, very dramatic. Looking at the pics again I think they only thing I would say negatively (and who am I to say bad things about other peoples maps?) is that the lighting is a little flat in the first and second image.
I think if the lighting has a lot of good contrast between light and dark then it doesn't matter terribly what textures you use. I've seen very well lit single texture maps that take a dump all over anything I've ever done. ;) just not that excited with those shots. i find the texture use is very bland. :(
the third shot in particular would benefit from some better hightlights, like the bright orange bricks for example (the 'city_*' small bricks). brushwork is very nice though and no complaints about that. i like the metal details. for comments and criticism guys. I will try and improve the lighting a bit more and tweak the colours.
The textures are mostly selected because they are similar to those used in dm6, but I think dm6 has slightly brighter lighting, harder shadows and a more obvious yellow ceiling colour, so maybe I should try bringing some of that out? The textures are mostly selected because they are similar to those used in dm6
If you have added a load of new areas I am sure you can add some nice new textures as well! :P My comments are about the brown you are using, lovely brown detail next to more brown detail = brown blob! Ignore that Than.
U-Haul used the same theme and it looks great. re lighting- I assume the shots were brightened, like all your screenshots, so as to avoid "too dark" comments. Yeah, I guess it depends if using different textures will move farther away from DM6 than you would like.
The original map is pretty boring though from a texture point of view, so I wouldn't hold to strongly to it. what I really like about the style you're remaking the maps in, is that it seems more "base," whereas negke's remakes of the same areas seem more... "industrial"? Basically his are 19thc and yours are 20thc or even futuristic. You always kick ass with angles, texturing, and lighting, and these shots just continue to confirm that ability!
the shots are not brightened actually. I'm using quite a lot of ambient light (not worldspawn minlight) in order to simulate bounced light.
Anyway, I will work on the gameplay now and tweak textures and lighting once it is fun. Also, I did try the red brick texture Necros suggested, but it didn't look good. Maybe on the main walls rather than the inset lit sections would look decent? I could give that a shot I guess. Helicopter from the Duke3d Hirez pack.
Used Noesis, Gmax and QME. Quoth mod. Gmax to apply skin ---> Noesis to scale skin, remove fullbrights and convert to Hirez skin using Fitz V. Used the original skin in the hirez pack just converted http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/chhirez.jpg Standard 480x480 skin Fitz http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/chstdrez.jpg and not working on finishing a map Remember that it's best to create skins which are power-of-2 sizes, and 480 is not a power of 2. You'd be better off making it 512x512 or 256x256.
I don't know if that's the case, but if when you have a skin which isn't a power of 2, then it gets stretched in older engines, and wastes texture memory in fitzquake. So 480x480 shouldn't ever be used.
hmmm i think that limit is only for the vertical size. i have had skin widths of 2048. (when i was merging models together in qme)
My opinion is probably subordinate to Necros' but I don't like the idea of the red bricks making an appearance- the blue and yellow bricks, with the brown copperworks, seems to provide enough colour and variation I think. I guess I would agree that breaking up some of the simpler, plain brick walls might be an improvement, but generally I think the relatively simple (as opposed to simplistic) style works well in the shots.
with Drew here... red brick would be really out of place in a DM6 remix, I attribute terracotta to the Gloom Keep style.
is definitely incorrect. I'm going to make a runic map made entirely out of arches and round things just to anger him.
if there's no pointed arches, then nothing makes the e3/metal style gothic and then it's just.... geometric.
I always found id's metal theme the least explicable (I don't know where they got the idea to make the texture set or apply it the way they did), but the gothic element seemed to make some (scary) sense of it, if any was to be made (the start of Satan's Dark Delight is so awesome). nothing makes the e3/metal style gothic and then it's just.... geometric.
That would make a lot of sense, given the following: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/single_player/allthoserunicarcheslookatthem.jpg I never outlawed octagons or 90 degree angles, as gothic, I just meant the difference between pointed arches and rounded ones has an aesthetic and atmospheric affect.
Aren't mutually exclusive.
The metal theme, for me at least, is about vertical height. Taking with Lunaran the other day and he mentioned a piece on how the entire Ep3 realm is some sort of giant prison for elder creatures. Lava always ruins places!
It is odd how large amounts of red/blue/green can exist in a Quake screenshot and it still feels alright! Is pretty robust. Colored light can easily ruin it if abused though, thanks to clamping, and it following rub instead.
That looks great by the way - and is that bar style from e3m6? There are no new textures in that screenshot, I used E3M6 exclusive (well except for 2 extra). I added colour lighting but only subtle values, I wanted to maintain the existing colour tones.
The Quake palette. That green. That red. That blue.
Honestly e3m6 always seemed visually like a hodgepodge to me. But why not. Bringing the real issues to the fore! Surprised that one slipped through sock's ultra-refinement.
Well to be fair I did add a flicker to the light! :P
The map is about only using a limited texture set and nothing else. It has been really hard to resist adding more textures but I am hoping people will just fill in the gaps and imagine it sparking and the light texture flickering. additional textures as long as they remain very id-vanillesque. So while I know you are not doing that, if you decide to compromise later on down the line, i'll be super stoked. I love new custom id1 style textures, and would be excited about using them in my own mapping (as I am about using the ones you've already created [once you're cool with that obviously])!
It looks as though the light entity is too far away from the window and therefore unnaturally lights the walls on either side.
If you make the window a non light blocking entity (I forget what it is) you can put a stronger light outside the window and get a better effect of light streaming into the room. You can use a func_wall as the window glass and put a sky brush behind it to seal it from leaking. Then put a not too bright light inside the sky brush, but give it a small wait value so it has some reach. Finally, put a stack of low value lights in front of the window to provide some fill. Otherwise the window frame will be pitch black.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/wish13.jpg This is basically the same thing as Mike mentioned above. Here is how one window from the previous screenshot is set up in the editor.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/wish13editview.jpg You should be aware though that I tend to use pretty low light values, but then I boost it during compile. So, my light values will probably be too low for most people. I used range 1.4 for the build that previous screenshot came from ( I also tweaked the sceenshot in PSP, I hope I didn't make it too bright). I know lights can. It saves brushes and marksurfaces if you use a sky brush to enclose the outside light and seal the func_wall window, instead of building a box around it.
This is because sky isn't solid, it's a liquid technically. The original qbsp would treat it as solid unless there was another solid brush behind it. But all modern qbsp versions will always make it liquid and yet also seal the map correctly at the same time, which is a very nice feature. (that's why a lot of early maps would have rockets explode when they hit the sky, instead of disappearing. Also grappling hook in ctf would grab the sky if it is solid.)
Yes please.
Probably my favourite Quake theme - love seeing it expanded, new textures added, new blends taken on (don't know if I've seen a 'wind tunnels' map in this style!). Looks pretty great architecturally as is, in my opinion. Lighting, I guess I agree with what others are saying. "If you make the window a non light blocking entity (I forget what it is) you can put a stronger light outside the window and get a better effect of light streaming into the room."
You can also use a func detail with a sky brush behind it if entity count is an issue. If you aren't using any sky textures (visible) you can also use the _sunlight in worldspawn to cast light through the window. Again a lower entity count and a consistent shadow from all windows. The only possible downside to this is that if you have windows on different planes (say 180 degrees opposite) then you won't be getting any light from one of them. Then again that's how sunlight works in real life so... Try messing around with the yaw if you have windows 90 degrees opposite from each other so that you can get the effect from 2 directions. I've been working on new textures for my map because most of the newer parts I've added are much more Gothic looking than the original level. The new version is suffering from metal4_4itis. Here is a screen shot.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/Wish13TexCompare.jpg While working on the new texture, I started to think my I still have to wonder, if you only have 256 colors to work with, why waste 5% of them on duplicates? is terrible in a lot of ways, mainly because so many of the colours are used just for multiplayer trousers / shirt colours and are hardly ever seen on environment textures or monster skins.
Still waiting for that purple texture set, come on guys you know it would be good. is a possibility I would love to explore, sadly I am no texture artist. I envision some kind of elder/void style (like a quakey version of Fez)...
Been spending most of my time failing to find a job and working on this but I cracked Hammer open again recently:
Big outdoor re re re design Slimy goodness I'm now just trying to finish architecture with the verts I've got left and solve about a zillion issues with my crappy excessive scripting (not helping that easy/normal and hard have a lot of differences in triggers, doors and such). ETA sometime this decade. Dunno if you downloaded my deck remake, but I rejigged & combined a couple of slime textures which I think looks nice... rip it and use it if you like (no need for credits etc), I find the stock slime textures in Quake a little bit flat and boring ;)
Looks huge. But i'm not fond with some of your texturing choices. That floor in the second shot for example. Looks meh
Lighting needs polishing too. Both of the screenshots look promising, man.
Second screenshot looks better, even if it is simpler and with a more common Quake base architecture. But the small bars on the back look completely dark even though the surrounding aren't. In the first one it seems like there is too many different styles in brushwork and the coloured lighting doesn't look too well. Purple texture pack would be a very good addition. Check the latest news threads - both the new versions of Tyrutils and rebb's mod of the BJP tools now support detail brushes. This should help a lot in your map, making it less of a vis monster.
Is that the the same map you posted the demo for awhile back? I liked it. The TyrUtils would help out with vis times. The map I played had a lot of opportunity to use func_detail.
More midnight mapping
rick, It looks odd with that many tech style lights on the bridge. It feels like it should be flame mounted lights if you are going for the grey brick in the background. ZQF, the coloured lighting in the first shot is too strong and the second shot looks cool but feels like there is too much copy and paste going on. Although, like in mstalk, a low light in front of the key textures would make them look less 'emaciated'.
ZQF - looks good, complex architecture and quite spectacular. I agree with the other people that the textures and lighting are not as good as the designs and need some refinement.
Sock - looks nice, I like the style, lighting, and subtle fog. really like the lighting, looks very natural, like there's some radiosity bounces going on. Is it just minlight and good light values though?
Like shambler said, good subtle fog too. As usual the texture alignment and brushwork is spot on. I like how you usually go more towards aesthetically pleasing and neat before you go big and flashy - it calms the stormy ocean of my pixel-nudging OCD brain, so thanks for that. @negke, yeah I have fixed that in my latest version. I do like that the texture glows, it feels very magical to me.
@Shambler, thanks :) @starbuck, lots of low fill lights, I don't use map minlight because I want black in some spaces. The architecture is very much scaled back in complexity, I want something that is solid and monolithic. On my sp version of the deck map... so I'm sure I'm almost complete except for a bit of clean-up work.
Lots of new areas etc. Anyone willing to play through it and give me lots of feedback, just click my name and then email me so I can forward it to you. (will be sent after I finish work tomorrow) Rick... I see tech, medieval castle and metal all in one screenshot, but not really mixed together at all - more like a scraps map.
I'd try to blend those opposing texture themes better or use some different textures. Put some tech and metal pillars against those big flat brick walls. There is some mixing of metal and medieval and there are some of those slotted style lights and a lot of light3_8 and variations thereof, but I'm not sure why this is bad.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/wish97vs13.jpg I can make some more screenshots of interior areas if you guys would like to get a better idea of the overall look. I'm about 80% done with the texture replacements and marksurfaces is staying around 32000 so far. Looks cool!
My ignorable suggestions; - Recolor the round, red window to match the blue of the other windows, unless you've got a reason for it to stand out. - Make the back walls of the arches (and perhaps other, free-standing patches of wall) a slightly differently tinted brick. Just so it ain't all gray. I like the castle vibe with the split level, it feels cool. A couple of visual/gameplay suggestions:
Reference Image * The height difference between both images (A and B) looks very different, how does that affect gameplay? Can the Hell Knight attack easily from above? Can the player attack back? Player/Enemy angle looks very steep * The front section should pop out further so you break the horizontal line of the upper ledge. You want both upper and lower to feel they are connected and part of the same building. Personally I would pull the small towers outwards, put an arch behind the towers to connect the upper section left and right and bring the back middle tower forward to over hang the front gate. * The lower arches need to either go back further into the wall so you get a nice dark shadow or use a different material. Then the edge of the arch will pop out and feel more impressive. Ok guys, not a single person emailed me regarding the beta. I'll give it a couple of days but if no-one emails me then I'm pretty much going to tweak it a small amount and then release.
I haven't done any skill adjustment or anything, it's my first proper SP map so I could do with a little input. Ok guys, not a single person emailed me regarding the beta.
You could be more proactive!?! Email people from this board, most users have email addresses setup. Some people will respond, some won't but at least you will find out. Also you need to think about what sort of feedback you want? and what changes are you willing to make? I now have a couple of beta testers... As for feedback I'm open to *all* feedback, for example I went and changed almost all the trims (and trim alignment), about 30-40 errant brushes, almost all the terrain, and a bunch of other stuff based entirely on negke's extensive feedback alone.
Since this is my first SP map (I have only made MP maps up until now), I suspect I have a bit more work cut out for me this time around. A lot of the time I'm looking for a kick up the backside. Yes, my map is a re-make of "Well of Wishes", but the "Well" is gone now - not that it served any purpose in the first place :)
I do appreciate all the comments and suggestions. @czg You're right, I hadn't really noticed but the red window does look out of place. I've aready made a blue one to match the other windows up there. @sock The hellknight has a monster jump so he can get down, but he can attack okay from up there. The player will have other things to contend with also. I agree that making the two small towers and the red window thingy protrude more to unify the upper and lower sections is a good idea, I think I actually had it that way at one point. The map is pretty big and I'm up against the marksurfaces limit, but I'll see what might be possible. There may not be enough room anyway, since there is this other big chunk of architecture at the other end of the bridge. http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/wish13bridge.jpg About those arches in the wall. I only put those there to break up the huge expanse of featureless wall after I enlarged this area. I really don't have any room to make them deeper, I was hoping the small stones texture vs the large stones texture would be enough differentiation. I suppose I could add another (darker) texture. I think I may need to re-color the stone textures anyway to make them less gray and more brown in order to fit in better with the brick texture. It's very hard to make any major structural changes at this point because the map is like a giant 3D jigsaw puzzle. Also, I made a promise to myself when I started this remake back in 2007 that it would not exceed any of the normal engine limits and I'm very close right now on both models and marksurfaces. This map has become more of a hobby than a project but I'd really like to actually finish it in 2013. is one of my favourite old-school releases! One of the very first custom maps I ever played for quake, and one that I actually come back to fairly frequently. Really looking forward to this labour of love, in whatever form it ends up taking, so thanks in advance Rick, and good luck with the final push!
I really like this first effort of yours !
that gate creates a sense of suspence and fright! my comment was for a screenshot way up above Rick's WellOfWishes
I played around with changing the window towers this morning. I'm not sure I like the new ones. I think they stick out too much and I don't really like the passageway through them.
Screens: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/Wish13_t2.jpg Luckily marksurfaces only went up by about 150. I may move the HK path to one of the sides and lose the middle section of the center walkway. That way I could push the front of the towers back 64 units. That would kind of mess up one of the larger battles in the map though, so I might just go back to the way it was after all. The transition from the octagonal lower parts to the rectangular upper parts is kind of awkward, not sure I like that either. I'm still working on recoloring the textures. The yellow lights on the bridge really stand out though, doesn't look quite right. Unless there is a gameplay reason for them to be different colours?
Nice stuff. The sticking out windows / buttresses + passage through look ok in the shots to me.
The blue/black theme is nice. Be sure to add lights of wind ambient sounds :) That looks damn fine. I'm not sold on the yellow lights under the bridge either, but the rest is awesome.
Those yellow lights under the bridge were just an experiment. I'm still trying different things as far as style goes. I think the orange lit windows in the big tower on the left need to go also.
The new stone textures have a bit more brown and less green and blue than the ones in those screens. They match the brick series a little better. The brick is what's on the wall behind the two middle tower things, just above the walkway. You can tell that it's more brown. May have to take some brown out of the brick as well. Making textures for Quake is a bit of a pain because of the limited color palette. Could you send me those blue window textures perchance? My next map is a completely blue map and I only have a couple of finishing touches to my current map (it WILL be released this weekend!)...
those shots are art, don't agree with the others here bothering bout yellow lighting.
blue n yellow always is a good match, as they are opposing on the colorcircle. human eyes dig that. Okay, I really didn't like the window towers in the last version. They just seemed too heavy and massive and tended to overwhelm the surrounding architecture.
I've come up with this new approach. To me, this is a lot better. Note that I only changed the left side, the right side is the original. http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/Wish13_t3.jpg I really like the way this looks. The new brushwork is more lightweight but still pulls the upper and lower parts together very well. Unfortunately, marksurfaces went up quite a lot (32,354) . While it's not perfect, I think the final version is somewhere in this screenshot, I just need to tweak things a bit. Ideally the upper window thing would align with the lower buttress, but there's not enough room for that. I'm thinking that the whole central area needs to be widened by about 128 units, but the surrounding parts of the map are so close that it would require a massive amount of work, so that's probably not going to happen. At this point, I think I need to go back and fix any problems with actual gameplay instead of fiddling with brushes, then take a shot at at reducing marksurfaces (which are actually the most illogical of all the original Engine limitations) and finally, tweak the detailing. There's also a lot of texture work to be done. I have really appreciated all the comments, please don't stop. looks very cool. i'd suggest building some little bits of structure up in the sky area to hint at more of the world than what is playable, but it seems you're at the limit?
isn't the new fitzquake (and all variants) limit 65k for marksurfaces? I really like that sort of asymmetrical-gothic look, and I wouldn't worry about a lack of alignment. This looks more interesting. I also like the colour scheme, though more variety in the brick texture (different sizes of bricks/stones or maybe trim) might add to the aesthetic appeal.
Also here's a couple shots of my own though they don't really show much of anything: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/bw1.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/bw2.jpg no I just wanted to not show much by making it grayscale and having a vignette effect. Though Black and White Quake could definitely be interesting (and Willem's Q1SP, White Room, totally kicked ass with that idea).
was original as a college work.
Had some cool render options like blue pencil drawing effect. They show more than enough. :)
It looks very detailed and with good proportions, it doesn't seem Quake. This kind of map seems to be from Hexen 2. First shot looks nearly perfect. Only thing that doesnt look as good are the torches, i dont know why, and maybe lowering a bit the platforms with the trees. I made a sepia palette for quake once, lemme see if I can dig it out...
Yeah, here we go: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/single_player/mods/noir.zip As distrans mentioned, it is a tiny mod - under 17k unpacked. It's going for a filmy look so it's quite sepia tinted, rather than a pure photographic black and white. It is interesting how designers have architectural themes they love to fall back on, I think Tronyn loves claws! I personally prefer screenshot 2 because the claw silhouettes are visually striking, the first screenshot feels like a scene from Heretic, not really Quake.
I tried the Noir MOD and it is still affected by coloured lighting which can produce some interesting results. For Noir to truly be right you need to design in black and white (including the lighting/fog). I think it could be interesting to experiment with coloured lighting and see if it is possible to produce chilling and sickly scenes. noir from Preach...that's the one. Interesting observation Sock, might be enough to get me back into pushing brushes. Cheers...
The coloured lighting you've got going on there is nice and complementary. Other things that can ruin the effect include full colour textures, which obviously don't bother with the palette files. So be careful with those skyboxes. On the other hand, you could even go far as restoring the red tones in the palette if you wanted to remake Schindler's List...
Continuing the proud tradition of Preach Double-Posts, I thought I'd mention two things about "wasted" pixels in the quake palette - a topic that came up just three, four days ago. So I've got some explanations for how you might get two identical palette entries, notice, but not care. The easy one to explain is the red duplicated entry. It isn't really wasted, because one of them is fullbright and one isn't!
But wait, even the other "wasted" pixel isn't really wasted. True, both entries are the same shade of brown and neither are fullbright, but there is an important use for each of them. Remember that the "runs" of 16 colours are used for the changing colours on the player skins. So it was necessary to have the same dark brown in two places on the palette to let the palette shifting work. You could argue that they didn't need to be exactly the same colour, but either they are similar enough to make no real difference, or they're so different that one of the runs would look odd. I'm not sure, the colormap still has to work from the palette and would have slightly less banding if the duplicates were put to good use.
In my post on this earlier I said there was 5% wasted colors, but I don't know where that percent sign came from. I meant to just say 5. That doesn't count the red since, as mentioned, one of them is in the fullbrights.
Yeah, I probably should have said you could get some value from tweaking them. It's just that they're all in the "dark brown" range of the palette, and quake already has that pretty well covered, so the benefit is marginal. It's not like you can use them to add a proper saturated green range, or purple fullbrights or something.
The way that quake has multiple matching ranges of dark browns bites back if you try and create exciting palettes. I was messing about last night, trying to create a set of lively, bright colours to ruin the quake atmosphere with. Although the colours were tropical and lovely, they clashed in a bad way. On lots of the previously brown textures, adjacent pixels coming from different palette rows had changed in tone and value a lot. This resulted in lots of very noisy textures which looked ugly. I recently tried doing a more colorful palette, more vibrant and brighter ranges. Problem is for a lot of stuff textures use multiple ramps so it's slightly messed up in places, and the skintones don't look that hot.
http://www.spiney.me/files/etc/palette.lmp But you really need to design your textures to your palette for it to work well, not the other way around... What would be really usefull is some tool that could take a 16*16 bitmap and turn it into a palette file. Would be less of a pain in the ass than having to use QME. Yeah, I've successfully saved a 16x16 RGB image to RAW format using GIMP and it works just right.
Drive-by tip...
palette.lmp = Photoshop Careful with indexed images in Photoshop though, I recall some versions reversing the palette order on some types. The "Load/" part? The part where it reshuffles all the colors? The part where it's not actually raw rgb data?
Heh, I was trying to say PS's
The other was just a warning about a weird problem I encountered years ago when doing Quake & Quake2 texture work in PS. /me goes back to lurking... But on shot 2, you could swap the floor textures to make the sunken tiles red. That would look a little bit better.
it looks ok.
It's kind of flat looking floor plan, I like a map with some sweet Z-Axis. It looks like you're very early in the development stages but some nice details in shots 1 and 2, shot 3 looks much earlier and unfinished. I liked your other base map so I am looking forward to this. Yeah its kind of early in development, flatness of floors...
Z axis action is already there, have no ss by now. Ricky, knew you like it! Heavily inspired by Stark Monstrosity, i can tell. is one of my all time favourite maps that I play very often.
If this is your inspiration then I am truly excited! only thing I can say is maybe work on the rocks a bit more, at the moment they do look like flat walls with rock textures. Apart from that, it looks really good.
its the concrete texture causing your eyes
to see flat surfaces. I can assure you, no flat brushes in those shots, except the floor... rocks gonna rock. Does that mean you're planning to change the rock texture up? Cuz I was thinking that particular texture looks a bit 'flat' and was gonna suggest trying a couple others out.
Boy i sure like these two screenshots, every detail seems to be in its place, and altogether they create nice sense of environment.
Knave map, started messing around with it tonight -
http://oi41.tinypic.com/2z5kw92.jpg Blue map, not much further developed from last time - http://oi42.tinypic.com/16itgrc.jpg Map started in Worldcraft and abandoned when TB was released, may revisit/redo - http://oi43.tinypic.com/dc7794.jpg Ok, why did I bother showing? Cause I'm going on holiday for 2 weeks and I thought I'd leave you all a little present on what I'm working on. I'm a bit annoyed with myself that I used up the name fesp1 as I might turn these maps into a full episode. Thoughts? Which would you prefer to see first? Looking good for early shots. I enjoyed FESP1, especially the excellent design / build quality, and look forward to any new maps from you. Just do whatever is easiest / most inspiring and I'm sure it will be good :)
Question To Kinn
#9472 posted by spy [37.150.51.110] on 2013/06/06 17:42:13 hows it going? Any progress to your maps? 'Sup. Ummm, well my situation of the last year or so hasn't changed in that I haven't found any time to do anything outside of my "work" work. I don't have an ETA on anything right now. There is however an outside possibility I might just use the level geometry I've built so far as a base for some of the content in my current (commercial) project. I see,
it's sad, id like to get your Q stuff as soon as possible. as you're most inspiring mapper ever GL to your commercial project Hey guys,
The basics of my deathmatch map are done. I need to do a lot to the textures, cladding, fixing stairs etc, but I want to get your opinions on the "feel" of the map from a players perspective. Does the selection of weapons and powerups work?, do you feel like there is sufficient ammo? do you think I've got the teleporters going to appropriate places? etc. FYI the pentagram is only for show, I was bored. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/108695968/hellvert.zip Thanks in advance, Ben it's only meant for 3 to 5 dm players. I included a lot of dm spawn points because I wanted them a bit randomized. I could always cull them down.
I'm worried that if I include the pentagram then the balance of the map will be thrown out. If you don't think that this will be a problem then I can change this. Eventually I wanted to use the demonic textures so that the pentagram would tie in nicely with the theme. There is still a lot of work to do with the hallways, ceilings, textures etc. Thanks for the feedback :) I thought adding "goodies" to a level just encouraged the attraction.
Pentgram is a heartbreaker, and sureley it unevens the balance of a level, but then again if you make account of the func_lift only opening after 3 min the challence of the level gets stronger. Same goes for another cache with a QuadDamage. Strikes out the amount of players when there are so many spawns. Decent foundation but could stand some reworking before being made pretty.
Thoughts and musings in more detail in demo format: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/uwx2gsuo5w5dfd9/hellvert_lurk1.zip Briefly: 1. Hallway lengths and general walking about rhythm are OK, but pent area is far too cramped and most hallways could benefit from a slight widening. 2. Pent should be removed. if I see an item in a DM map, I expect it to be obtainable somehow. This one shouldn't be obtainable (too unbalancing in a small map), so it should go. Also, it confuses bots. 3. I don't like the teleport destinations (into doorways of the hub room!?). One-way teleports to alcoves would be an improvement, but 2-way teleports (teleporters linking to each other) would be ideal. 4. Yellow armor should be downgraded to green and moved elsewhere. 5. Red armor should be moved further down its tunnel or moved to a risky 2nd floor jump in the central area. 6. More ammo would be nice. I played a 4p match where single shotgun was almost the only weapon getting any use. 7. More could be done to allow players to read each others' intentions and cut them off. Right now the focus seems merely on responding to immediate threats and a more cerebral duel play doesn't seem particularly possible. But on the other hand, the map is cramped and in general too closed off (essentially only a single floor to the central atrium) to allow manic free for all. was done right in Terracity. It's a good gameplay device when placed properly, it will break any standard gameplay map though.
thanks lurker for the in depth demo / commentary
I've re-designed a bit of the map and will look at re-designing the teleporters and widening hallways where I can. I'm still not sold on the two way teleporters, but I will fiddle with the teleporter destinations to make them better. It might be a bit tricky to keep the circularity and move the destinations... I'll see what I can do... Visibility is a thing I should be able to improve, but having it balanced is going to be tricky. Again, thanks for all the commentary, (I'll also fix the powerups) Thanks again, Ben Invulnerability sort of defeats the purpose of a shooter.
Dunno, if it's temporal it gives incentive to cull as much baddies as possible for it's duration. Also can get you through a hairy situation when low on ammo etc. And sometimes being superman and having pent+quad+sng just mowing down some hordes for the heck of it feels kinda nice. A fun exercise could be to spawn in a room without any ammo and having to use the pent + inter ranks agression to kill some key monsters (which opens a door to a ammo stack, etc). Ahoy, I did a bit of tweaking and redesigning. I feel like I addressed a lot of the things that lurker mentioned in the demo. I feel like I have lost a little bit of the flow in the map, I may be able to recover that with further tweaking.
Anyways, If you guys could share your thoughts on the gameplay again that would be terrific. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/108695968/hellvert_rev2.zip -Ben I'm only a DMSP2 player and this level is very unfriendly for that mode of play, but then one would expect a decent 1 on 1 level to be exactly that. The number of spawn points means that the same type of enemy spawns at the samw spot in DMSP2 and that's not ideal. Nonetheless, I could see this becoming a popular duel map. One suggestion is to not to forget to put a bloodsoaked texture at the bottom of the spike pit :) If you could orchestrate some spatter on the walls that'd be good too. Big up!
V.2 comments in demo:
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/wbnjb6zbrx2j95q/hellvertv2_lurk.zip Briefly: 1. I've enjoyed my duels on this one. Thanks for the changes! 2. There is a leak above the lightning gun. 3. Bars at green armor area need a clip brush. 4. Nailgun ammo is a little tight in 3P. 5. MH alcove probably needs a back, as the MH is too close to the RA right now. Keep it up! looks great.
The wind tunnels are made of bricks? It works. Like the subtle custom textures, the simple quasi-metal/industrial grillwork. Is that a fog laden abyss below the wind tunnels? Really nothing to criticize, for me, except that the bottom area, if it is a pit, is very flat, if that makes sense. Like some kind of downwards protruding structures there would make it look better, imo. yeah the wind tunnels are made of bricks which is stupid, but I wanted to stick to the brick theme and not get back into metal. This is a screenshot of the skill selection area, the abyss below is deep, but the fog does not work well at distance fading to black. I like the idea of stuff protruding below.
it looks pretty good with bricks. At first I wasn't sure. Might be divisive, but it doesn't seem *wrong*.
in the first wind tunnel, have some bricks broken off the tunnel visually... and then as the player takes it, have some bricks fly by his vision inside the tunnel
But I think it's something to do with the way Quake skews the textures on angled surfaces that makes it feel odd.
The vertical parts with the brick don't look too bad. Do you horizontal scale to compensate for stretching? It's hard to tell in the screenshot.
Where the top part angles out is a Quake texture alignment nightmare, I don't think there's any way to make that look right. I see nothing wrong with bricks for a "wind tunnel"
Quake has the same thing. @scampie, that is the sort of stuff you should put into a speed map! :)
@ijed, I love it, a brick to the face of an ogre! for some reason I googling brick to the face and got some funny images! :P @Rick, this is me being lazy, I have fixed the texture stretching on the pipe 45 angles. I did not do a final texture pass. The screenshot is one big climbing frame, just stuff for the player to explore while deciding which skill to pick. When you have surfaces at 45 degree angles on every axis texture alignment hopeless.
I've been doing a sort of Doom style texture wrapping where it makes a difference, but in many cases it's not much improvement. I Wasn't Being Critical
I took no offense by your comments, I have a very thick skin with regards to internet feedback. I always prefer people to be critical of my work because 'no comment' is not much use to me. That's some intense detail you have there MadFox with the tiny little arch shapes under the trim! Maybe even a little *too much* detail!
I'd love to see where you go with this though :) The pix of the side of the castle in the inspiration thread is tremendous.
The front from the sea makes it an irratic sculpture, though. Maybe to much detail, but that towers are hard to compare with hust jubes. Always surprised when an impression sets me up mapping. Well, in case anyone was interested in knowing if Cryostasis (6/10) or Star Wars The Force Unleashed (7.5/10) are any good, I reviewed them...
http://www.etherealhell.com/etherealhell/index.php They were alright. @Madfox, is that castle front gate from a photo reference? I like the style but the small towers feel too small for the overall structure.
I like the look of it. I really like the muted palette choices, it's very familiar while still seeming also different. Can't wait to play it!
The third screen of backsteingotik is my favorite!
The sight attracks to explore the scene in a recitent way. Fine way of tuning the light. The photoreference is in the inspiration thread #2026. Towers are small indeed. @deqer, I use a special light compiler. Parameters - light2.exe -gate 1.0 -soft -softdist 8 -extra4 %1. I always use coloured lighting and try to create as much contrast as possible. I also make sure the main path through an area has the strongest lighting levels.
@onetruepurple, I asked necros/negke to help with testing, don't need anymore at the moment. Screenshot 3 is my favourite for game play reasons, there are lots of choices and different ledges to jump around. Thanks.
By special compiler, I'm guessing it's your own custom-source/compiled Light.exe. I noticed that bjp's Light.exe has those parameters you used. It's version is 1.43. I will try them. Colored lighting is good, indeed. People would be surprised just how much an off-white (light yellow) light will do, to a map; as opposed to a plain white light. I'm still going vanilla approach, so, colored lighting (in my map) might be the last thing I do; if I even do it at all; because I'm making strictly vanilla/1990s-like map. Looks ace, I love how your attention to detail and quality allows for having all that fancy trim and brickwork looking good.
And angled shapes look better than the horizontal ones to me.
Do players bounce off those nets of webbing? Random BS idea - particles drifing in the wind? 5th: it's Q3 :)
Ijed: agreed, there's a bunch of stuff I'dd reconsider If I were to start over. Base geometry was very boxy, still is kinda. I just started with 3 or so textures and inferred everything from that. I'll try to see if I can push the verticalism some more. Players don't bounce off the nets but they do avoid getting falling damage. They're more for getting down than up. The pipe structures act like wind tunnels. I've set them up with negative gravity which isn't a 'hard' trigger like a jump pad. You go stand below them and once you jump up you accelerate upwards. You can also drop in from a height and slow down before hitting the floor or going back up. Downside is that only works for vertical axis movement, would be nice to be able to do it in any arbitrary direction. Feels more physically correct (less gamey) than using trigger_push. I'm going to add some particles inward and outward to indicate air flow. There's more pipe structures throughout the map. Prolly add some vents, propellers and stuff along with sound to make it come alive. Reinforcing the theme that the pipes are driven by some kind of pressure cooker in the bowels of the map.
Very nice Spiney. Mirror's Edge vibe.
More spec! :-^ Q3 maps can indeed look a bit like Source. I assume you bumped the overall gamma setting in the light compiler? @gb, @spiney, If you are after large (1024+) industrial textures (concrete an metal) I released a pack of them last year. I even released the PS source if you want to make your own versions.
sock: yeah was thinking of your pack earlier today. Might use it in a future map, I want to explore the brutalist aesthetic some more.
gb: gamma is default, thought about it but haven't tried it out. Think raising it might flatten out the lighting Just using bright textures and 1.2 gamma in these shots. Some good stuff there. Love the church and the vore platform jutting out. Would prefer a different rock texture tho.
shot 1 looks great, i would prefer a different rock tex too, as shamblr said..
is that a button by the vore? Looks huge(too huge). but hey.. keep it on. re rocks - ogro is a pretty inconsistent set, I think, and rocks are a definite weakpoint. Spiky anus looks good but too uniformly lit perhaps? Button size seems fine to me... Though you might want to have some structure coming from beneath, giving the platform and the big button a bit more 'plausibility'... if that makes sense.
ogro is really one of the hardest texture sets, incomplete, unforgiving , hard to mix with other texture sets, but still can look very good imho.
The terrain texture is actually not a terrain texture but rather the castle is built on a floating pile of bones, I like that idea somehow ^^ Did anyone download the dopefish model by Madfox? The link provided by Madfox is broken and I would like to use model in my level!
The readme says I can distribute this with credit so here is a model by madfox:
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/models/dopefish.zip That is exactly what I was after, thank you :) I just need to create a dopefish skin and it should be sorted! :D
I've been putting the dopefish texture in my maps for ages.
And I see that it's got a full set of animations. Secret Boss maybe? I added a lot of models to quaketastic, but unfortenately in the wrong thread. It seems they're gone but I can upload them again.
In addition to the dopefish, while I was making it I came comparing that real pirhiana's eyes are more to the front then the quake model Using the pix as skinfile show the eyes just above the jaws. So I could change the eye part more in front and a bit smaller. here's the pithania skin for dopefish07.mdl hehe you could make a fishing minigame near waterlevels of a certain depth ala wow or torchlight...
they're funny but not game related.
It would end up in a barberque and Ogres turning rotten fish on spades and getting drunk. screenshot Some awesome detailing! Hard to tell from the shots but it looks like a very high minlight value, considering dropping that! Looks a bit washed out imo.
Been playing with fog values and minlight settings a bit.
Question to anyone who reads this: Which shot looks most sexy to you? Been thinking about totally adding no fog, as some have mourned since mfxsp6. is sexiest, I guess. Or 1. Very classy looking base style! Some minor rock texture misallignment in one of the shots there (3) which is great otherwise. Might also want to consider a different rock texture, if you aren't dead set on the current choice. Or at least increasing the scale of the texture. IMO!
Anyways, looks beautiful - test the fuck out of it and it'll be an instant classic! @mfx, I thought you would get tired of tech by now, but it seems you have been drawn to the dark side! :P
Shot 1, has nice clean lines but needs some tech detail (like tech09_3, tech09_4) and the tiny square lights on the large panels looks odd. Pull them out of the brushwork or use a large light texture (tele_top is often a favourite of techo fans) Shot 2, is my favourite, I love the fog, the place feels industrial! Shot 3, looks messy and incomplete Shot 4,5 seem to be corridors? I would recommend you add objects (pickups, monsters) to give people looking at your screenshots a reference for size, also try to use less light textures. Think about where you want shadows and try to alternate light fixtures around a room to create contrast. Looks very tight in style - everything aligning up with the textures. When this isn't followed though it looks a bit odd. Like in shot3 where you've got the ceiling light panel bending even though the texture doesn't.
Yeah the rocks look bad. Go for something that is smaller and more tiled so it doesn't fight with the angles of the brushwork so much. A decent grass / natural floor texture following the same idea would work well. I'm trying to track down some black stone textures offset with green moss that might work, will post again if I find them. No luck. I think the set was originally made for Q2 and consists of around 3-4 textures, which were unnamed - 'tex40-3' or something like that.
Got bored searching so just dumped a load of rock into a wadfile: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6z0nibg718wikv8/rocktex.wad Maybe something in there will help. you seem to be making terrain in the way I have tried for a number of maps, honestly I created so many leaks and errors by doing it the way you have done it that it's not worth the amount of time you will spend fixing them.
I hear tri-soup is the best way to do it for creating less errors, and TB is probably the best editor to do it in. As for the shots, I like the first shot the most, though I agree with sock in regards to the odd light textures. The rock texture would be better if it had a little more light contrast in it and a lot less dark contrast. got a bit of a ShadoW vibe going on will all those textures. Will be interesting to see what comes out of this!
Though I'd definitely change some of the texture choices. Shot 2 I'd take out the tech lights and the metal textures. Probably would replace the big white brick textures and wood textures with something else too.
First hot should have more lights: there are too much shadow areas IMHO.
Second shot is really amazing: the work onto arches is really great. Apart from that I concur with FifthElephant's comment on shot 2 about light texture selection: should be more medieval oriented. Keep it up !! for sure.
Also, I assume shot1 is a spectator shot (ie from noclipping, not something the player would see)? Gamma was adjusted for the shots.
http://www.mediafire.com/view/dspkgpempzis1lp/titanmap2.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/5i16kf4bl8pd5lj/titanmap22.jpg my kinda map. rock walls could use a little pizzaz, but there is a great Dark Souls vibe going on here!
onetruepurple: shot 2 looks cool, but I also think that it needs other textures for lights, maybe even torches.
mechtech: the shots are awesome, seems like a very nice map, can't wait to play :) OTP's shots... first is a bit dark. Second shot is great, I love the lighting, and the contrast. Not so wrapped in the textures though.
I still don't understand why soooo many mappers just stick with the same old id textures that have been used 1000 times before, while there's so much underused custom stuff out there, that's better than id's textures. The underground void idea was from TLOR Balrog sequence. Towers of stone in an immense cavern. The progression of the map, starts in a stone cave, as the player ascends I add more Castle/stone type stuff. The end will be the player reaching daylight in a Quake medieval setting using the Quoth Death Brigade enemies.
Screen shot 1 is admittedly boring. Needs some texture variance. I hope to have my maps out before the end of 2014. At the rate I'm going working 70 hour weeks... we'll see I'll get a beta release going soon. Shot 1looks like a bloody basement, nice coloured lighting in there..
Shot 2 has some texture problems, they just dont blend. Quake has a very limited palette, mind you... Nice curves you have there, but in shot 1 i dont like the skull texture in the left
on the nockles map. i'm all for mixing up textures/themes, providing it's kept consistent across the map
Thanks everyone who has given me feedback so far, I really appreciate it, and the feedback has absolutely helped me make more progress quicker, and making this map has been an absolute blast. I hope to have the level finished on Saturday. That could slip. But it would be brilliant if everything went smooth and it was simply finished on time! :)
Here's a newer shot taken from that location, the geometry is still fairly similar, but the texturing and lighting is new. It's still absolutely work in progress, but I think it shows the kind of direction I'm going in now: http://i.imgur.com/o7uZIHY.jpg I think letting it own the medieval theme is a great idea, as was removing the tech lights. I was absolutely trying to juggle too many themes at once, visually, it was a mess, and was not doing the map any favours! I have decided to have a go at sticking with the cream/brown brick contrast because I think it helps make the outline of the geometry pop, but most of the metal/blue textures that were being used are being replaced with Quake medieval. I've cut the old lighting and I've replaced it with torches, and used small dimmer unsourced lights to simulate light bounce and get rid of really dark patches. I like all of the changes, except I liked the light coming from under the stairs in the original shots - you could probably keep that, the medieval maps in e4 do that if I recall correctly.
Firstly don't worry about an imminent release. Take your time and work on polishing it up - gameplay and design.
Secondly, under the arches with the new pale blocks - make sure it looks like the arches are made out of the blocks, continue the joins between the blocks underneath. At the moment it looks like the smoother texture underneath is just painted on. A common mistake but one that is well worth avoiding. Other than that, looking cool, keep it going. Cool. The torches looks even better than I expected, congrats on the changes, everything looks much better now, it's "natural".
Spirit was right to be fair. I am absolutely refinding my feet with Quake SP level building, and happily making tons of mistakes along the way. Genuinely plenty! :)
I suppose I am really rushing to get this one out. Afterwards I'll take what I've learned while making this map, go it a bit slower and make the next one a bit more focused. ...but i preferred the original look. it wasn't perfect but it felt different; the new version is fine but just seems a bit.. generic i guess?
to be fair i'm working on a traditionally textured episode at the moment so i'm not against that kind of thing; i just liked the experimentation in the first version, and if anything would have probably lost the medieval elements in favour of a metal/tech/green brick combo. something for a future release maybe? :) I think you find yourself entirely alone.
But maybe experimenting with different texture combinations is a good idea, though you need a consistent theme for it to work. People employing unusual texture combinations should be encouraged, not told to reproduce the same old themes we've been seeing all along. There's still a lot of potential in the stock sets with a little shuffling - Doom mappers have been doing it for ages, with success. In Quake, the only maps coming to mind that really show some imagination with settings and themes in recent years are Tronyn's.
In Luke's new screenshot the contrast is better, but the old shot (the one that's not pitch black) looks more interesting themewise. I'm not saying that people shouldn't experiment, but I don't think the textures went well together at all. Though he has gone with different texture choices than I had imagined.
In terms of themes I haven't seen, I made a metal test map with lots of wood and runic lights with purple and yellow lighting that went together immensely well. I'm shocked no-one thought of putting those together, although it's admittedly a more "UT" feel than Quake. city5_2 + twall1_2.
wbrick1_5 + Ogro floors. Knave + Zer. Rubicon 2 + Jackboot, like sm161_distrans. Metal + the green ropey set from kdmh. People should be using Kell's deathmatch sets more, anyway. I have a couple lame-ass maps lying around that I'd like some aesthetic advice on. I don't want to post shots since they mostly look like shit, but if you are interested in walking around some empty, ugly-ass architecture, let me know and I should have something in the next few weeks, etc (djg164@mail.usask.ca). Especially lighting advice since I suck at that horribly.
As I hoped my comments indicated before, I also really liked the wonkier version of Luke's map. I think that it captures a certain strand or element of old school custom mapping which gets diminished with improving "taste" and certain communally accepted standards re texture combos. Again, that was one thing I liked about ShadoW's maps - in a way it *is* noobish or whatever, but that is part of the appeal.
Onetruepurple, i liked the previous shot better (the second one) for its spotlights and because it has more character, the newer one is better for the more coherent theme, but loses its special touch and i don't find the lighting with enough contrast.
I do think as others pointed that ou should put again the light below the stairs, it adds a point that calls for the people to look, making them thinking if it hides something or not, eyecandy or item. Mechtech, that looks gorgeous, the second shot made me remember of the underground part of Alone in the Dark 1, but as you have pointed, both look a bit simple, not only for the textures, maybe it needs another type of detail, from lighting or from detail in brushwork. About the textures, i prefer to make experiments, as much as possible, there is always new possibilities to find, even with iD textures. For example, I am currently using some medieval/wizard textures in a base map, mainly for details. I have a Q1 map that needs some input on the item placement etc.
http://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/greybox_rmqe.jpg It is literally a greybox. Files: https://anonfiles.com/file/a4da656b2eef6bf697011eba0a753b4e Includes Frikbot waypoints. No problem Cocerello.
Part of the reason I decided to go more traditional medieval was that I think that it's important with this level to work within pretty tight creative restrictions. So creating a new visual look is way out of scope. For this same reason I've decided to go with stock quake progs, no quoth monsters for instance. Similarly, what I could have done is taken the textures I was using and colorize them in photoshop to work together, but that'd take more time. It's a good idea for another level design. Restrictions are good. Restrictions mean that the toybox I'm learning is smaller, more managable. It also means that working to a tight self-imposed schedule is doable. Restrictions get stuff finished. That said, I was going to release last Saturday, but decided to delay while the forums was down until this coming Saturday so I can release it here. A restriction that I wanted to work to but failed, was to stick with original Quake map limits. This hasn't happened, the map is too big. Only just though. Next level, sure I'll go way more adventurous. Kinn's curves for photoshop: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61424391/Temp/photoshop%20curves/photoshop%20curves.rar
Saturday arrived, and I wasn't yet happy with the quality of the level, so I'm just going to let it cook naturally, and release it when it's finished for real.
Here's a screenshot of an outside part. It's a bit close to the start of the level. http://i.imgur.com/MMEeJOT.jpg looking forward to it!
PS - please get testers if you're becoming a deadline breaker! I'd offer but super busy lately. yay, medieval!
have you thought about using a skybox? Duske at https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/kell.quaddicted.com/skyboxes.html is a bit overused, but I think it might look good with your map. Damn that looks good. Something about it looks clean and modern, even if the textures are dirty medieval. The brushwork is also elegant and effective, looking swell!
A couple things:
- maybe make the wooden roofs darker and the windows yellow? - the grass would look more organic and less Minecrafty if you rotated the texture a bit, like 30 or 45 degrees. - might be a good idea to use a seamless texture on top of the white trims. OTP I'm not trying to argue for the new for its own sake. Indeed, if you know my maps, I've lazily done next to nothing to accommodate new tech, except as it allows for bigger scale.
I think that the outdoors-inclined mapper, can have rocks in the background (see Beyond Belief 2008) or a skybox. BBelief2008 could have led the player to higher levels - as could have Termination Mental - if they built more rocks to surround the level. Anyway, I like levels to give the illusion of being part of a larger area, and while I totally fucked that over specifically and deliberately with Masque, I think a skybox is better than a normal sky for a map with a visible horizon. Hey, thanks for all the feedback everyone.
Onetruepurple, great points, I'm going to action each of them. I won't use a skybox in this map because I don't want to use anything that takes away from the feel of original Quake. The skyboxes that have been linked to are absolutely fantastic, and would really help create the feeling of the level existing as a part of something much larger around it, but it's not period accurate. The overarching theme of this level is that when you play it, it should feel like it could have just come from some BBS in 1996. With slightly higher r_speeds. I also really think that the way the sky material flows and warps in quake is absolutely lovely, it's an effect that hasn't quite been done before or since. they tried to recreate the Q1-style scrolling sky in Q3, but it was never the same. I really like the idea of making a Quake map with the idea of making a 1996 map, rather than making a Quake map of 2013.
Still though, my ideal Quake map has always been The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which never gave you a look at the Quake sky's scroll-point, despite how ridiculously panoramic it was. What I'm trying to say is, build more rocks around the outside, like hipnotic did back in the day, god bless. Here is a prototype of my remake of DM-Stalwart from UT99. No screenshot or video, because it's not really tuned for looks yet. Source so far is included.
http://db.tt/UpUx2JIL It plays pretty well, but hasn't been detailed yet. The boxes you see littered about are mostly just placeholders until I think of a theme to build some widgets around. Same for the textures, just wanted to see how big/small the rooms felt without the greybox. I altered the proportions of some places (the halls mostly) to make more room. Movement in Quake is faster than UT99, so the thinner halls from the source material felt too cramped and bouncy. I also altered the weapon placement for the same reason, with how fast Quake players can move it was too easy to camp all of the weapons. I left myself plenty of room to do detailing and and lighting. The ceilings are all going to have channels/grooves for lighting like the original. I just threw some torches around in this version, so lighting is temporary as well. Still deciding on a theme for the map, so I'm not sure if the lighting will be industrial, or moody, or torch/fire based or what. The original would suggest metal, but I think it might be fun to do something different. Keeping in mind this is a boxy beta I plan to make less boxy when I detail and shape the rooms more, please be brutally honest and correct me if you see any bad habits developing, or if I'm doing something outright stupid I'm not aware of. Source was included for this reason.
I can take it! I'm trying to keep in mind advice I've heard from various places. The most helpful of which so far has been from Daz during one of his videos on Custom Gamer, where he says it's best to put detail in places the player can't get to, such as ceilings, or high on walls. I certainly have a lot of space like that to work with, so I started brainstorming.
If I stay with the metal theme, I think it'd be easiest to preserve the feeling of Stalwart with a cargo, storage vibe. I have lots of areas I could add bays, racks, and shelves for flavor and fun yet functional lighting. I figured I'd start with the ceiling. http://db.tt/x49W5N9n Then I thought it'd be cool to have in-wall bays, something to make them feel less flat. http://db.tt/8WgAOIJ9 Probably not best to have it right under the rack. I think I'll make it run the length of the wall. There's a clipping brush to stop players running up into it, but I don't like using those. I think it's better to build a way to keep players out, or do something else to communicate that the area is for decoration, which feeds back into the advice of keeping detail out of arms reach. I may make the in-wall bay double-decker, move it out from under the ceiling mounted one, and put items in it that were previously on the floor. Maybe an alcove. Still thinking and experimenting. I'm also considering a medieval theme. I usually use torches or fireballs for temp lighting because it's easier to visualize once you get in game where shadows are coming and going from when you can see all light points. The fire is kind of growing on me, and I have some ideas to make sure of the awesome stained glass textures wake has. Like I said still thinking. Make sure to check out Kell's Knave texture wad. It blends between rusted metal and medieval quite nicely (a bit q3ish in that regard)
I had forgotten how boring the layout of Stalwart is.
I think Knave is a bit of an overused texture set at the minute (even I have a knave map on the go). But it is probably much better to have that than the current set, I probably would have gone with a base theme. You know what would rock? If someone made DM-Peak. it's best to put detail in places the player can't get to, such as ceilings, or high on walls
Does he give a reason for that? What video did he say it in? He was talking about a map he was making that he gave up on, called "Factory".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7FZAuWfNNg At about 11:45. If you want to have fun with geometry, put it up high or otherwise where the player can't get to it. The gameplay area should be functional and apparent, and having superfluous geometry/excess props and fixtures where the player has to navigate, or consider navigating, makes the area less immediately understandable. Of course if your goal is to make it less understandable or to make the path not obvious, then it doesn't apply, but if you're just trying to add detail it's probably best/good to do it in a way it can't impede/confuse/mislead the player in any way. It sounds reasonable, and I mostly agree for abstract games such as Quake. But if you look at the world around you, detail is usually all round you.
It's not realistic, but it makes a lot of sense for gameplay. Realism alone is not a desirable quality. The most important thing you should consider is for your games to 'read' right. Players and monsters should be easy to discern from the background. So when you put in the eyecandy you add it in places where it adds to the visuals without interfering in the gameplay oriented visuals.
Detail is a misnomer by the way, it really should be 'contrast' or big changes in luminosity. You can do a lot of geometric detail, if the lightness stays within acceptable range it should look fine. For instance, a black and white checkerboard texture on the floor will start competing for attention with other scene elements. You want to focus player attention to where it matters. In a Quake DM map, players can reach pretty much every spot as soon as they have explosives.
So ceiling detail isn't out of the way in a Quake map. And if you clip it off, players are gonna ask why they can't get to that nice camping spot. This is probably why the original maps are relatively bare, as are most Q3 maps. You give them a grenade launcher, and they can get everywhere. Hence I usually try to make detail useful for gameplay at the same time. Not sure I agree. I think Romero just had a fetish for ceiling detail. It's also a logical spot for complex beams, lighting, etc, and, if you build so much detail that the player COULD go there, why not just make it a secret (ala near the end of e1m2)?
This is all assuming it's indoors. Wall detail is good but requires a lot more clipping so as not to interfere with gameplay. Floor detail - who's done it? Not that I've put a lot of thought into this. My approach has just been to entertain the player visually by having large/outdoor areas visible, rather than detailed indoor areas. But I enjoy good outdoor detail more than indoor. Especially in a game like Quake where anything goes. You can design whatever kind of weird, off the wall structure you want, and it'll fit right in. Cathedrals with cool spires/roofs, castles with crumbled walls and bulwarks/battlements, military bases, prisons, depots, it's all fair game and the player will eat it up. I know I do.
I especially love maps that appear to be a place in a larger environment, like with surrounding cliffs or with vistas that give you glimpses of areas off in the distance. I'm always torn with that... so you start making some area that is just for decoration, to make the map look like more than it is. then you realize it's cool, so you make the player able to reach that area. now you need to make another place outside of the map to make it look bigger than it is.... rinse and repeat. :(
"an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed." - Tolkien
The idea of a map taking place in a larger environment is so appealing, but it takes so much effort to build it, and I have exactly the problem Necros just mentioned / I am unfortunately lazy. The main point I was trying to make when talking there was that it can be very frustrating to navigate around a cluttered area with lots of stuff needlessly getting in your way. Even more so when you are in a combat scenario and you are getting stuck on little details sticking out of walls etc.
The space should be functional for its purpose. There are times when this can be a good thing, for example if there is no combat and you want to make the player feel like they are exploring somewhere new where no one has been before, then placing things in the players way can help with that. If the player has a clear route through an environment then it can sometimes feel sterile. This mostly stems from the fact of playing so many source engine custom maps where OH LOOK, A ROOM FILLED WITH BOXES IN MY WAY AND ENEMIES which gets annoying very fast ;) another purpose for clutter can be to slow down the pace of the gameplay (obviously in non-combat areas). you may want to stick a pile of crap in the player's way after a big fight to kind of calm them down.
That reminds me of Black Mesa where I would constantly get stuck on props lying on the floor. I had to crouch jump over everything with the abysmal jump height (eventually figured out it could be tweaked and all was well).
They also put knobless doors everywhere. I knew I couldn't open them, but for some reason I always tried on the odd chance I might hit some secret room. This is a Quake 3 map using Starbuck his Base set remakes. Lighting isn't final.
http://imgur.com/LjiqZWM http://imgur.com/aerhkpY http://imgur.com/3FlbRvg http://imgur.com/Vjq1w6P I like it but as I said there, if you are going for q1 look, I think lighting should be more monochromatic. If you dont mind the q2 comparisons, its fine as is.
Looking good. The Quake vibe is within grasp for sure. Since the textures are so nice and the geometry is on point, I'd say that making sure the lighting comes out with just the right amount of harshness will decide if it feels like Quake1 or not. The lighting needs to be good, but just crude enough it retains the lo-fi oppressive feeling.
I love it. I like the yellow/beige base textures in combination with yellow lighting, I've seen mappers get scoffed at for doing that in Q1 (pffft, colored lighting...) but I think it looks great myself. Are you using patches in that last shot? The column seems in need of some smoothing. I think it would look better if you double the lighting resolution. Q1 has low res lightmaps but no AA unlike Q3. Also Q3M2 can do lightstyles, could be cool to have.
Thank you all. Here's some more. Lighting is experimental and thus temporary. I have your feedback in mind.
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/VsyYRfpl.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/jIk6iY4l.jpg[/IMG] Paste error:
http://i.imgur.com/VsyYRfpl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/jIk6iY4l.jpg How do I edit my original post? I love those shots. I'm kind of gutted that this isn't going to be for Quake 1.
Thing is that a lot of mappers are coming along and making base maps, I bet a bunch of the guys here are wishing for other themes :P Looks really nice. The lighting is actually very good in those shots. I look forward to playing this.
Not only base maps, but base maps with the same id textures. Seems to be common these days which is weird. I never much liked the idbase maps to begin with.
Why doesn't someone at least use the mkoxide modified quake2 textures that I used in Guncotton? http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/mylevels/guncotton/index.php They were great. Or do a mix of some different sets, rubicon, ikbase, evils' sets, some of lunaran's packs, look at his q4power that's fkn awesome! http://www.lunaran.com/page.php?id=8 I'd definitely use that if I was starting a new map, you could mix that and rorshach's hh3 clockwork: http://scmapdb.com/wad:hh3-clockwork That would be completely unique in Quake, all industrial/dystopian/steampunk. Actually the last map I started before I retired was going to be really alien, lots of curviness, a bit like an Unreal level, using these: http://scmapdb.com/wad:dethtex-spacemadness 12 years later and no ones used them yet :( It's great to see so much activity here. Not just because it's positive, but seeing a community so alive. Awesome!
Anyway, let me go a bit off topic. I was thinking about doing a original Quake map for a while. Probably SP. Something very dark and gothic. But if there is demand for a specific theme I'm more than willing to give it a go (after I finish this of course). I'd like to see another base map using the Q2 Oblivion textures, or a temple map using a combination of IKWhite and Heretic2's Palace set. Neither of those is dark and gothic though. For dark and gothic, how about a map like Daz' Arabian Nights, except using the Day of the Lords/Living End textures, those textures are really gothic and grimy.
to get MFX to test his map thoroughly with testers who thoroughly test maps (MFX, please test a lot, as it will lead to your releasing something truly fucking awesome and polished)!
I'll take another look at that thing soon! In two weeks, for three weeks, so will try and leave at least something worthy of looking at for then.
love those wild corkscrews! ^_^
I'm glad the terrain is working for you now, that's a very cool outdoor shot. be careful with all those details though, gonna make your vis times skyrocket. :( neg!ke here is your juggle-vormit.
jugler vormit @necros- ramps are a bit overdone. Terrain is harder though, as I keep losing the grid reloading in GTRadiant1.5. @ijed- Radiant has a standard way of filling in the _sunlight and _sun_mangle. @spy- I know. disneyquake. Nice. Though it looks more like seniors sport than artistic juggling. Still, this would probably make an excellent jester for your Byzantine palace!
@Madfox, I like the scope of what you are building but the scale of the windows are wrong. Try using wizwin1_8+window1_2 to create long thin windows or download my latest map and take the window texture from there, they can be setup to be any vertical size.
I think most of the external trim detail on the outside of the building can easily be converted to nice angled textures and will still give the same impression as all that brushwork. The lighting is so bright you cannot pick out the brushwork detail and it could be converted to textures with painted shadows without any lose of detail. Your spiral columns need to be more solid and look like columns that could support a ceiling. The spiral design is suppose to be decoration around a solid piece of stone. @neg!ke - I think you missed the timing from the gif/model.
In game it takes 1.5 sec. What do you want to see changed? Is the teleport.mdl Vormit's ball? @5ThElephant - let's reference more insparation! @sock - I couldn't find that colomns, thanx for the example. The things I made are more drills, especially when they turn. First I wanted to use solid brushes for the rocks. Then I made triangle ground that I lifted over more then 256. Bad thing is that it's hard when I reload the map in GtkRadiant1.5 I get a scrambled rock. Reminds me a little bit of DM-Peak from UT. One of the things that got me about DM-Peak was that it looked awesome but because you're actually on the peak you don't get to see it in all its glory.
Using sock's texture to create the arches rather than using BSP would actually make it much more realistic. Also if you tone down the face count on the rock it would probably compile better. Sadly if you take both of these pieces of advice it would mean remaking a large chunk of the map. reminds me of that map from Deus Vult 2... Eagle's Nest, I think it's called?
That dude pulled that theme off perfectly. it would be cool if the spiked ball was spun on the vore's finger like a basketball
juggling vormit
I reproduced the original poses of the vormit (as criple I am) with three voreballs in it. By adding the jugling frames it can be switched with the original one. Only the qc must be attached for the new pose. download @enliten - I could do that if neg!ke doesn't kick me out of the retired team. The short answer is no.
The long answer is that I have a bunch of different box test maps with different themes and with each I ran into a bit of a creative cul-de-sac. Plus I have a job now and I've not really assigned much free time for mapping. No doubt I will get the itch again. An open vote between four options:
A) Chaingunner (easy) B) Cowardly bomb planter (hard) C) Both (hard) D) Neither, stop wasting time on features and go map You may possibly mean jungling Vormit?
Many nights I have spent on extrapolating this devious contraption Is Quaketastic still working for uploading new files?
(Login isn't working) I really like the mines setting. Heretic 2 had a good Mines texture set that may be worth looking into. I want to see some Shambler juggling one or two ogre(zombie, or Vore) heads. Could be great !
I made an update to the link. Maybe I had to change to the models & request thread.
juglin vormit I changed the shal_stand into the jugling one. Other poses are also there so it fits easy in game. Now he's jugling behind my death trap. Are there any request a shallrath could use for extra pose? @mechtech - I signed up to that link, but I can't view the jpg. @barnak - Do you not understand this will collide to a great panic of bouncing boxes? A is one of Madfox creatures 'Mr Big' who I've begun to implement as a shambler class base enemy.
B I think would be cool. I was reading the 3d cafe bot tutorials and had an idea for an otherwise weaponless enemy that would try and get close to you to plant a bomb, then run away. Once the bomb exploded, if you were still alive, it'd return to plant another. I wanted to use it when revisiting areas so that its bomb wouldn't depopulate new places. Could also be used in labyrinths designed especially for it. So yeah, going with A for now. Big bullet sponge ogre hybrid with a chaingun. I'm on holiday in a few days anyway, so it's just fun to make a simple enemy before I go. but also B, after reading this initial description. Sounds more unique, but more risky, and perhaps less Quakey?
So yeah, I think you should go with A based on what I've seen. Good luck on the pre-holiday push! I've been a good boy and listened to your feedback. Here's a test shot. Colored lights in a Quake themed map, oh my.....
http://imgur.com/HLSaF7Q Colored lights can work well in Quake if they are very subtle. Check out sock's maps for examples.
I did coloured lights in a bunch of maps - less is more :)
Although that does look rather fetch :D But I think that the yellow light up high is just a tad too yellow. The lower lights look good though. As mentioned earlier, less is more when it comes to colored lights in Quake. It's not a disco and it's not a shopping district so colors just look out of place if they're garish but if done right they can add to the look of a level.
but are you mixing jf1 and jf2 textures? I'd recommend replacing all jf1 textures with equivalent ones from jf2, which are less sloppy overall. (e.g. the rivets are tighter looking, bevels are harder, flat metal has more of a texture to it instead of just ripply colors.)
Yeah I'm mixing the two, though I've been thinking of replacing the jf1 textures since I started using jf2 a bit later.
texture quibble aside, i like the moodiness of it, the lighting and texture use. The green fog seems to work also. The triangle shaped structures are cool.
I like it too. Very moody. Has a bit of a Doom vibe don't you think? The green waste levels.
Not sure about the sky though. Darker green would look better. This is too light imo. The sky has this color because of the fog. It's a greyish sky normally, though I could probably darken the fog somehow.
Looks great - reminds me of a map by RPG (wasn't it?)....
On my screen it actually looks a little dark rather than bright.... I'm on holiday in a few days anyway, so it's just fun to make a simple enemy before I go.
So I decided to give him the ability to throw dogs at the player as well. Works like a charm and makes me chuckle since I imagine him carrying something like this: http://i.imgur.com/CW5y1.jpg I don't even have drug abuse as an excuse for inventing this nonsense. @Skacky, nice combat space, for some reason it reminds me of a Q3 arena. It feels very wide open, like it needs some more cover in the middle. What does it look like with a monster for scale?
@ijed, sounds awesome, a puppygun, I want to play! I hope the gun makes a woof sound when a dog is thrown across the room! :P A spare offcut that has been festering on my HD. This is actually the start map of an episode I'm making, so you won't be fighting anything inside it.
Your screenshot looks intriguing. :p @Skacky, If there is no combat in that area then fill the center with something cool looking. Try creating a mini upside telecoms towers in the center pointing downwards into the void/fog instead of generic pipes. Google image search "telecoms tower" to see what I mean.
in the map I gave to Vigil for his rubicon2 chainmap that will never be finished!
Are for Nintendo 64 games. Go download Project 64 2.1 and some ROMs if that's what you are looking for. :P
@necro, there is no minecart ride, it is just an offcut of brushes.
@scampie, what is stopping you from completing the map section yourself? maybe start a minecart speedmap theme? :) https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Quake/mr_big/bigshot1.png?w=AACimJWL9SJZBGcCp08m5lPSCyYjCnmOkAVgNx7YsB9Htg
https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Quake/mr_big/bigshot2.png?w=AABYMHPzJz8V2L4cqt8uDlTk62cbWIL_fIuPlZt031Qpnw https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Quake/mr_big/bigshot3.png?w=AAAdZN_VaiyY-KaUbqpKvewpjxbWx5TnXVBpXrRanRu8Fw https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Quake/mr_big/bigshot4.png?w=AADcbJiD6Fx-esXYk70xP-ovQAy1wYO_afg_7sp9gBo8JA @ijed, I cannot view your screenshot links :(
@mfx, you need some light contrast, what is happening with the rocks? Another offcut i know, rocks undergoing some heavy rework..
dont mind.. been playing around with different compilers.. blah blah... you got some time? beez
@mfx - just found the screenshot on quaketastic. Feel sorry for the guy. @sock- piece of the art. that is one impressive screenshot sock!! I love the way the top of the structure is.
Please tell me that is a map that will be released? @Madfox, the wings are moving too slow, it feels like a bird but with the body of a bee! You should make the wings really large and create a huge mutant bird/bee creature that vomits exploding dead bird projectiles at the player!
@OTP, I thought the name was catchy! @nitin, it is just a brushwork offcut, it is infact a giant door to nowhere! But probably been built up too much now :)
Sock: Just stick one of your 'test' maps behind the door - you've already admitted to have a massive library of scraps that put most normal levels to shame. Skacky: the spotlight cones look a bit artificial. A trick that I stole from Gb is to place a second light, close to the source but with its spotlight cone pointing upwards, which gives you a bit of glow of the ceiling around the light fixture as well. Together a better map with socks scraps than most mappers could make if they tried
Maximum framerate for models is 0.1 so with 3 frames for the wings it's the fastest movement. If I use two there's no movement but tremble.
I know this looks like flapping birdwings, but as the creatures are so small, the animation of their movement makes it harder to perceive that slowness. Now they're not swarming yet. I knows it is a bit tricking, but I see no way to excellerate more speed in their wings. Framegrouping won't help. you can force faster framerate by putting self.nextthink = time + 0.05 in each of the frames. 0.05 gives 20 frames per second.
I suppose you ment something like:
void() swrm_stand1 =[ 0, swrm_stand2 ] {self.nextthink = time + 0.05;}; I'm such a dude concerning qc. Twenty seven bees, that need 1188 verts and 1998 tris. yes, that's exactly it. :)
you can use smaller numbers to get even higher framerate if you need it. @spiney - I tried that, but then the wings seem to blend into the same position.
@necros - Yes, that's what I was looking for. That's gonna be scribbling adding ai_functions also. gif is a bit sloppy, in game it's twice as fast. Now adding regular poses. Like hanging round a torch. Dammit sock you're not becoming a scrap mapper now are you? I want to see EVERYTHING you ever create released. That screenshot above looks awesome, love the random upper structure.
I agree with Kona. We should beg Sock to release his scraps. We could also try to bribe him. It's funny really. Everything I've ever done in Q3 mapping was trying to emulate Sock (and failing ofcourse).
@Kona, I like to think of them as brushwork experiments, playing with shape and form and not have to worry about gameplay.
Rock Knight Sword Some variants of the green cop texture that would improve the interior of the arch where it looks a bit stretched.
I don't have them to hand just now but can probably find a way to get them to you - easiest is if anyone with schism access want to pull the rot.wad from /textures? I should really make some of those wads public. The idea for each was to focus on a single underused or inflexible texture and expand it into a set. By the way - if it wasn't for all that extra arch detail everywhere I wouldn't even have mentioned it.
Some mappers here would give their left nut for the permission of turning those scraps into a full map.
@ijed, yeah the texture is really only designed for vertical surfaces. I should create a proper texture for the whole edge surface. BTW this is awesome feedback, I am always interested in stuff like this.
@spiney, nah it took ages to create that cave and detail it. I especially like the quad gothic window arrangement, much better that the previous version. @OTP, my medieval offcuts are not really compatible with tech/idbase stuff. I might see if I can mash together some of my better stuff and see what it is like. Please, some more pics of whatever you have! I've saved them all hard drive and I can never have enough Sock stuff.
@SpronyvonJohnson, I knew a journalist (long time ago) who printed out screenshots of my levels and would hang them on the wall in his office. I always spend a long time trying to get the right angle, lighting and scale in screenshots.
@RickyT23, I prefer working with quads they are much easier than tri-souping. Really quick to edge push quads around in GTK. @nitin, thanks. :) That's funny, because I have a 'Sock' folder on my computer for inspiration and wallpapers.
Not to creep you out, just a fan :) thanks man,
what I'm finding amazing about your mapping is that you're using the q3 engine and making these maps that looks like they're out of any engine from the last 3 years. -Ben from a gravity conductor
I made this model after watching a SF movie.
Some story of a big machine, where judy foster sits in a metal sphere falling in the center of the thing. I was fascinated by it and decided to make a static entity of it. I uploaded it to /quaketastic/models/gyzmo01.zip so you can see it move in quake. Quiet spectaculair, but hard to penetrate when used as an entity. I wondered about the strange habbit of Quark using models. Everytime when I make a model, let's say this gyzmo.mdl which size is 525kb changes after im/exporting in Quark to 125kb. What is changed to the model? This was also the inspiration for other mappers, for example there is a "black hole generator" in one of the quake 2 id maps, and also something similar in mexx10 (maybe hidden in a secret area). I was going to make something like that too but then i saw quake2 and mexx10 and i'm like, "okay, there's enough of these in the world."
Oh yeah, and Dead Space 2 had something similar in one of its puzzle rooms. Had a similar thing as well, but much more ominous - the overdone set design there was still pretty cool.
It also had a retarded script and piss poor direction, so probably best to stick with Contact :) I wondered about the strange habbit of Quark using models. Everytime when I make a model, let's say this gyzmo.mdl which size is 525kb changes after im/exporting in Quark to 125kb.
What is changed to the model? I'd like to find out (my suspicion is that it's collapsing some of the vertices together), but I don't know if I can reproduce it from your description. Can you upload a zip with a model before and after you use QuArK? If I load both of them into qmdl it should be easy to spot the difference. Event Horizon was pretty good, though everything else by that director has been an embarassment afaik. Good cast (Fishburne + Neill), and it was the closest thing to Doom in scifi movies for a while (hell). Contact was like a hippie 2001, where the ultimate revelations about the universe and intelligence have a peaceful, enlightening message. Event Horizon is a good pseudo-Lovecraftian correction to that.
Good theme but a completely disjointed story which resorts to dues ex machina to explain all the loose threads - "because hell!"
well, Sam Neill is pretty good at "because hell!" (In the Mouth of Madness, Jurassic Park, etc), and come to think of it so is Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix, Apocalypse Now). Proper prophets of "you're more fucked than you can know!"
But yeah it doesn't really have a story. But it's still a better Doom: The Movie than the actual Doom: The Movie so many years later. I didn't think hell was supposed to make sense. I guess in a sense knowing you deserve it could make you suffer more, but a total lack of understanding, there's real material for hell. Everytime when I make a model, let's say this gyzmo.mdl which size is 525kb changes after im/exporting in Quark to 125kb.
What is changed to the model? Interesting, Sock and I encountered some similar things while working on the new ogre model. Somehow it would ballon up to 3mb and when I would resave it it would go back down to 700~kb. http://www.snarkpit.net/index.php?s=downloads&game=15&cat=1
http://snarkpit.net/index.php?s=downloads&game=23&cat=1 http://quark.sourceforge.net/userprefabs.php http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/qpp/prefabs.htm https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/prefab.planetquake.gamespy.com/quake2/q2doors.shtml Everytime when I make a model, let's say this gyzmo.mdl which size is 525kb changes after im/exporting in Quark to 125kb.
What is changed to the model? I was getting this problem with Qme, I updated an ogre model several times (properties/skins) and the file size grew to 1.3Mb! No idea why but it was strange. tough call.
Great shots. I'm very excited about the possibility of playing through that setting, and I'm very glad you're embracing a somewhat chunkier, more I'm not sure I'm completely sold on the rock/ground textures, as the level of detail feels somewhat incommensurate with that of the stock textures. But other than that its a god damn cream dream, which looks like it will appeal to all my specific quake fetishes. This is probably the most exciting Sock release yet, something with mine-carts even!
To me, outdoor shots are always the most exciting, but that aside the last shot with the mine cart seems especially epic. Looking forward to playing this. I am also going to hold an investment banker at gunpoint and force him to hire you (at a rate of your choosing since money is just an imaginary number to such people), to create a "Quake as Romero Might Have Intended, If He Was As Badass As Sock." Then after all the right documents are signed, I'm going to shoot him in the sack because he's an investment banker. The larger model contains all the extra information that QME uses to track objects and more accurate vertices. This information isn't used by Quake, but helps to preserve the model's quality when it's repeatedly edited. You can spot the difference by opening both models in QME. Notice how the first one has 29 objects, and the second only has 1. QME 3.1 does away with this and has it's own model format called "mdo" for storing the models in high quality.
QuArK doesn't read this data, and wouldn't know what to do with it if it did. So when it saves the model again it gets stripped out. I wondered where all the data was gone.
Not that it is that important to me, but it's a rather big chunk for a model to loose 2Mb weight for the same 500kb. Qml30 shows all objects, even the small one. For now I reached my beta state for Bender. I like to add the runattack pose, as the laughing act when the player dies. Wow, I produced three models last week! must start mapping again to add them. I can see beyond the lack of lighting and the basic textures.
It looks big and doom-ish. I cannot wait to play it, I always look forward to your maps! if you'll need for betatester at any stage, i'd like to betataste it.
It is always nice to see something nonbased for you I prefer 1 over 2.
3 feels too close by. I love 4. Gives a good view of the different tiers. I don't like 5. In order: 1,2,4,3,5 looks epic. I'm imagining that some skylight, fog and a suitable skybox would give the outdoor area a great sense of scale, distance and atmosphere.
Since you apparently haven't done much texturing yet, what if it was all snowy? Experimental Pixels
Love the floor in the middle being sunken down with the pillars and walls looming above. Feel very oppressive.
I like the wooden steps leading into the lowered floor, that looks really nice. I really like your use of wood textures in this scene.
I'm not so sure about how the wooden support beams inside the door arches just end in the wall without any kind of fixture. I would add a vertical support beam on the wall that would carry the beams within the arch. @Drew, what is terrible, can you be more specific? Lighting, brushwork, screenshot angle etc
@OTP, yeah the name is a bit cheesy but the map does feature a lot of mirrored architecture. The original name was "The Horde of Zendar". @SleepwalkR, yeah the strong brick edge does bother me too, especially with all the nice marble door/window edges in the background. @Shambler, the next maps does have non linear routes but it is more compartmentalized to reduce the lost factor. And +1 for Zendar.
Also I agree about the comparison to E4M6. I'd love to see an elder style texture mishmash with Sock's level of detail and polish! come on.
I think that the shot looks super nice. In fact, and perhaps unfortunately, I have nothing to criticize. I also vote for Horde of Zendar. So good. Soaring architecture is always one of my favorite settings. That mountain church in Nehara was probably one of my favorite user made levels in any game out there that I've played, visually speaking of course.
The one that Elek made? Wonder what he's up to these days, kind of disappeared and at one time he'd released more levels than anyone. Poor bugger must have grown up, unlike the rest of us haha.
he does vfx at epic. http://derelict-compendium.blogspot.com
Hey sock. I don't like that skull texture, i think when you repeat a texture like that the skulls lose their creepiness but don't add anything else. The sense of scale is great, it alone made me want to play this map. The use of wooden beams together with stone like that reminds me the Gothic series, looks good.
>http://derelict-compendium.blogspot.com/
Damn that Quake article gave me the feels and something to think about. It's been far too long since I posted an update so here are two WIP shots of the final area. I haven't done anything regarding the lighting yet. I did however implement a lot of suggestions. More computers, pipes, rocks, more open, etc.
http://i.imgur.com/RHvqCoQ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/L6mmd8J.jpg It's been far too long since I posted an update so here are two WIP shots of the final area. I haven't done anything regarding the lighting yet. I did however implement a lot of suggestions. More computers, pipes, rocks, more open, etc.
http://i.imgur.com/RHvqCoQ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/L6mmd8J.jpg The pipes are awesome! The lights are a nice shade of yellow, but I would de-saturate the colour a bit, more towards being white - you want to keep it really subtle with the coloured lighting IMO. Except red - red should be red.
what RickyT23 said about the colored lights: definitely too much, need to be smoothed...
The pipes... How the Hell have you been able to texture them this way ? What's the trick ? Please en-light us ! Looks pretty neat, but not quite as detailed as your previous shots.
I'd be tempted to put a subtle shader on the textures to make them seem a bit more metallic. :) perhaps it'll be of some use for one of the current rubicon mappers...
and while we're talking rubicon, http://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/mein_teil_1.jpg http://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/mein_teil_2.jpg http://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/mein_teil_3.jpg http://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/mein_teil_4.jpg http://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/mein_teil_5.jpg A chainmap between me and Lardarse/Pineapple. A lot of it doesn't really look good in screenshots, which is why it isn't pictured. There's a silver key door and a bottomless lift shaft, and the rest is silence. I remember pineapple built a very cool 24-sided spiral out of brushes for this. he's been half-assed working on a Rubicon chainmap as well which I sent him a couple half-assed rooms for
It's rubicon fever!?
I've got a bsp2 map + mod that's maybe a month from completion. A handful of new monsters and a few new features like Pineapple's entity randomiser. I even considered trying to form a cabal at one point to make a rubicon map pack but didn't think anyone would want in. Mfx / Gb / Pineapple / Vigil - what do you say? Once more unto the breach? Or a bonus map, or whatever you want :)
http://s.twistynoodle.com/img/r/nail/lets-build/lets-build_worksheet_png_468x609_q85.jpg?ctok=20100427065200 Rubicon map pack; count me in. I need someone to collab with on this map though, more specifically a person that roughly blocks out the rest of the map, taking a few ideas into account. I'll take it from there then.
This map probably also needs BSP2, so I suggest we pick an engine that can do it (both variants, since I'm gonna use the 2PSB toolchain) and ship the pack with that. FTE / Darkplaces?
I'm using two engines, Spike's modified Quakespasm and one made by Tyrann. I can send those out Monday.
You'll be happy to know I'm working in Trenchbroom as well, so no problems with map formats. I guess negke is now in charge of the level bits that vigil and I worked on (he was given them today on irc at the least)
I'm not going to do anything more myself, sorry, got other projects I want to work on I might be able to contribute a gussied up version of one or two of my JF2 themed speedmaps... Maybe if I merged them all together... When would you guys actually get around to doing this?
Thanks for the feedback guys. It wasn't received to well so I'm going to rework this.
JPL: In GTKRadiant it's jsut a matter of clicking shift + S and selecting natural. It's Quake 3 btw. I love those Rubicon shots guys. Very inspirational. My one needs about a month more - we can make a cutoff point around whatever people's projects are.
I'm AFK until Monday, once I'm back I'll send out the Dropbox link with the modded content to the interested parties. Negke, you in? Some shots from a map I are working on for 1 month or two.
Don't know if I want to change all the entities, thats a lot of work. I'm using Quoth atm. Anyway I think this will be a BSP2 map as well. But good luck with your projects! Go to: http://hrimfaxi.dk/rub/rub.html I think mine could be finished in a few weeks, but may I humbly suggest a deadline of "when it's done"? If one or two maps take longer to finish, then the rest of the gang could just chip in and help those. Like, actual collaboration.
We shouldn't grieve over missed deadlines the way Base Pack did... I'm coming down the home stretch for this semester so mid Dec would be much better for me...
AND HOLY SHIT! Hrim, that looks fucking awesome. That looks great. You're also using one of the generator models I've got :)
I'm easy on deadlines. And whoever finishes first can help the others - there's always more that can be polished and improved. Yeah! That model are from Malice (I think).
I'm using it as an replacement model for the flak Ogre. I think it looks more like a base monster than the Ogre does. It may change under the rest of the process though! for my upcoming single player map that's going to be released, eventually. A note to everyone that this future map(s) will be of the bsp2 format, so the RMQ engine or any engine that fully supports bsp2 is going to be a requirement.
If you are interested in doing some beta testing, let me know :) Then I don't want to hear any complaints when the map is released about not being playtested enough, since no one wants to volunteer ;)
on my surface.
I don't like missing out on maps, even this I will miss on release which is a bummer. The FMV version that Spike hacked bsp2 support into is here: http://triptohell.info/moodles/junk/markv_bsp2.zip
Haven't tried it myself yet though. For actually beta-testing a map, I expect you'd want players to use the engine that it will actually be played in on release, but RMQ is a bit of a tough sell for the general Quaking public... ANYway, I can give it a try this weekend in whatever engine you want. If there's some particular build of RMQ that is necessary please be specific about which one and where to get it. Is release a trimmed down version of the map alongside the RMQ version of it, since RMQ doesn't seem to be a very popular choice here. It would have the exact layout and gameplay, but the many details would be either simplified, or removed completely to accommodate Quake's BSP limit.
It may result it the map looking somewhat plain and dull, but it would at least be playable in any Quake engine. I actually used RMQ as a main engine until I upgraded and now it wont work.
what I would suggest is that be specific about which build of RMQ you tested it with and recommend.
Tronyn's map worked fine once you played it with the proper RMQ build but there was a lot of trial and error until people found the right version of RMQ to play it with. ps : I dont think you should do a stripped down version. The Quakespasm hack that Spike made and was posted above by Johnny Law...
http://triptohell.info/moodles/junk/markv_bsp2.zip RMQ was just a forked version of fitz. It had some some to handle lights and rendering better... plus some effects that everyone whinged about before turning off. Also support BSP2 / 2PSB.
Not sure if these are considered faithful enough though. The resistance to the BSP2 format seems to be 'I don't like big maps'. Which I don't understand - it seems a shame since what many mappers want to do is push the boundries. One way of doing this is to extend the 1996 limitations - which has been sneaking into custom content for years anyway. Remember when skyboxes were introduced? The content of a map (good or bad) != map format. But I can understand why people exceed the normal limits at times.
I can't offer to do a thorough beta test because I have a map of my own that I'm desperately trying to finish this year and I just don't think I have time. I could give it a play through and offer any comments though. plus some effects that everyone whinged about before turning off.
I still can't turn off interpolation. The RMQ engine that I have been using for testing is version 0.85.3, dated December 28th 2011. The latest build of RMQ presents unusual problems such as grenades falling through solid floors and monsters getting stuck in places they shouldn't. I may just include 0.85.3 of RMQ with the map release, so there's no confusion of what RMQ engine to use.
I tested the map with Darkplaces, and it runs fine but there are certain essentials items that disappear from the map, as well as alpha textures not being supported. FTE will load the map, but about 30 seconds in will crash, I'm not certain why. @mfx The map is actually already split in two, that's how large it is :) Fitzquake_mark_v_bsp2 unfortunately doesn't load the map at all, it returns with an error of mod_loadleafs 34703 exceeds limit of 32767. I'm assuming that this could be an easy fix. To those concerned about the map being too big, I can say right now its not THAT big, maybe only 20 minutes for the first part of the map. It's size is massive, but the actual play area isn't too big, to the point where I'm certain you won't be able to get lost. And I won't make a stripped down version of the map ;) I had an idea, but when I went to build it things didn't work the way I thought they would.
The idea was to spawn a bunch of monsters, in a stack, inside a tall skinny box. I put a teleport brush in the bottom of the box. The teleport is triggered once every 4 seconds by a string of relays. I expected the stack of monsters to fall every time the bottom monster was ported out, but no. In addition, not all the monsters would drop on top of the one below it when initially spawned. Some would just hang in mid air, at their original spawn point (I had them spaced with 128 units apart vertically). I haven't bothered to test this one, but it might just work...
Try adding a trigger_monsterjump with speed 1 and angle pointing down to cover all four monsters. Also place them closer together so it doesn't matter if they don't drop to the floor initially. I'm using Fitzquake 0.85, it's all I ever use.
A trigger_monsterjump will probably work, but I was trying to minimize the number of models required. I was able to get the monsters to fall correctly by activating them with another relay. Once they start moving they fall as they should. Pre-activating them this way is less than desirable though. The way I had this working before, all the monsters spawned on a long, sideways moving door. There were small walls between them to keep them separated and to keep them from moving with the door. As the door slowly slid out from under them, they would fall into the teleport. This worked, but the timing was hard to get right due to the different sizes of the monster bounding boxes, and I was trying to get rid of the door to free up another model. I have gone back to using a door to move the monsters. This time the door consists of 4 brushes sized 64x64x8 (one brush per monster 8 units below each) moving downwards. The monsters correctly fall onto their section of door when spawned. Once activated, the door lowers them into the teleport brush. The timing is more deterministic this way, so even though I haven't freed up any models, that is an improvement anyway. I still don't understand why the monsters don't want to fall correctly. In order to stay on topic, here is a screenshot: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/Wish13_0007.jpg trigger a teleporter. If you give it a targetname it won't do anything until called.
Would mean making a single teleport per monster though, so not particularly helpful for reducing entity count. That map looks badass. from dat shot perspective the map itself looks a bit dull , in kind of texture set
that rune texture(red-ish) added here and there would do the job Advice:
Trim-trimmings-trim Trim-trimmings-trim Trim-trim-trimmoo, I've got an important message for you... If you don't break up the textures on the wall more, it might slightly suck, David Cameron's a whore. But seriously though, it looks really cool, love the tone. How in the world do you guys see anything in that screen shot? From that distance and with all that fog I think you can assume that whatever detail there is can't be seen.
It is a little on the monochrome side - that's intentional. There was more color six months ago but people said it didn't fit in or something. Whatever it looks like now is how it stays. I have no desire to make those kind of changes. Yesterday I wasted hours trying to figure out why monsters didn't fall when spawned. Today I added the new teleporter system (that I finally got working right). To do that I had to change one room from short and wide to tall and skinny, deleted 12 unnecessary spacer brushes and I replaced a door that was using about 50 tris with one that used only 24 and when I compiled the map the marksurfaces count went from 32029 to over 32800. So I've spent the last couple of hours fixing that. Does anybody know if there's a way to keep Netradiant from renaming all the target/targetnames when you copy and paste? we get the GIST of it Rick - gothic cathedral-like outdoor architecture, indoor Runic areas lit with oldschool spotlights, and lava! How could we not think that's sweet?
As for the technical side I'm pretty useless (other than bothering people who know what they're doing), but I'm sure someone useful will come along soon. I remember the moaning about the yellow lights,
and now people want it back. I like the look now, monochrome or not. People are strange. As for the NetRadiant issue, i have no clue... I had added this room about a year ago. It's a pretty important room, but I was never really happy with how it looked. This is an old screenshot from before I did the re-texturing.
Old Room I worked on it a lot last week end and I think it's looking better. Probably still needs some lighting tweaks. New room Different view is phenomenal!
And yes new room looks better but lighting could be less flat. new room looks MUCH better with the texturing. those windows and bricks are great. the outdoor spires are fantastic. just be careful not to make it TOO dark.
damn sorry Drew seems like I over-interpreted things again, as I always do.
New version of the room is a lot better, everything seems way more considered and detailed, including lighting and texturing. /Eschews gothic label I think the bricks look kind of small in relation to the huge scale of the room. I'd prefer if at least some parts of them could be bigger for a more 32ish style similar to the previous metal4_4 style.
Which is good. The new one looks better because the textures break up the flat areas of the previous one better.
Is there an altar in the middle? Looks very interesting indeed.. neo-gothik / medieval maps are always cool :)
Go finish this ! Looks pretty good.
I think I prefer maps with a higher contrast of light/dark lighting. Also I thing I would personally avoid large flat walls and break them up with detailing with protrusions or texture changes. large flat walls
Honestly, what do you mean? There are not any of what I would consider large flat walls in any of those last few screen shots. There are some that are pretty tall though. I wonder if it's something about the angle the screen shot was taken at? Here's an overhead view with an exaggerated fov. I didn't change brightness or contrast from the original, just converted it to jpg so I may look a little dark. http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/Wish13_d.jpg If the walls aren't the same thickness at every height. You can make these transitiones in two ways - with a 'step', i.e. the wall suddenly gets X units thicker, with a perpendicular step, or with a slope. This is true of much architecture because the foundations need to be strong enough to support all of the weight above it.
Either way, it's a nice way of adding a whole other dimension to your architecture. You could add some damage detail to the architecture too, maybe a few cracked tiles, , bricks out of place or missing etc. Overall I think the shots look pretty awesome, just thinking of elements that you could take more advantage of. It doesn't require gussying up. It has a nice stark balance and subtle detailing. In the shots I've seen, I'd consider that aspect of the map 'done'.
What you've got is good. Finish it as you see fit.
Float walls refers to not using geometry (brushes) to make the light map do the work of making a space interesting. But with all the work you've put into the light it's not a mistake you've made. Don't go into pre-release worry. We've only seen screenshots! .
dont let them distract you! Not much chance of that. The reason is because I intend to stay within the normal Quake Engine map limits. onetruepurple is correct, the map is bursting at the seams with marksurfaces What this means is that the geometry of the map is pretty much finished, with no chance at all of any The map is currently bouncing around 32000 marksurfaces, which is what causes me the most problems. Most of the time at this point, just adding a brush or two will cause QBSP to go insane and the marksurfaces will jump by hundreds and go over the limit. I've found ways of getting around that, but sooner or later I know I'll hit a wall. I basically have to fight tooth and nail just to make small changes to the brushwork and not go over 32767 marksurfaces. There is also a 256 model limit. I have 255 at the moment. If I add just one more Fitzquake gives me a mean old message that 256 models exceeds the 256 model limit. It doesn't actually, but I will keep it at 255. As of yesterday, I still have six "place holder" func_walls in the map left to play with. I'm still kind of struggling to understand the various comments referring to flat lighting, large flat walls, small brick textures, and so on. It's pretty hard to move along any wall, anywhere in the map for more than 128 units without something changing. I really appreciate these comments. I think about what you guys have said along these lines quite a bit and give these comments much consideration, but when I play the map I just don't see it. Somehow, I think the screen shots are failing me. And if you really think this map has a problem with large, featureless walls, covered by a small brick texture with flat lighting, I have three words for you: "Honey by CZG". Yes, I am just teasing you there. Yesterday, I worked mostly on the lighting in this room. It's a fairly important area that the player will pass through more than once. What do you think? http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/Wish13_e.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/Wish13_f.jpg Remember: qbsp splits large surfaces every 224 units anyway. This can be used to your advantage.
Brush models and marksurfaces: This may or may not be helpful in your situation or the context of the map, but you can 'clone' existing brush models and turn them into functional entities (provided they are on the same rotation and light level as the originals). If there are identical bmodels used on several occasions, you can make one actual brush-based template and use it elsewhere as point entities. The screenshots are cool. Though I think I would consider using some vertical trim with seams on the sides inside the window frames.
I like the screenshots a lot! Being overly anal about details that no player really notices can make a map worse.
Your windows on those 2 screenshots could have a stronger light emitting from them, leaving a pattern (just a cone) on the bridge. I think it looks completely fine as it is though. I can see a lot of work has gone into the trims and such already, I think maybe it's the contrast between the trims and the main texture that isn't different enough.
Let's be honest, the map still looks very nice and this is purely a stylistic suggestion on my part. There's nothing wrong with saying "this is my map and I want it to look like this". I was just elaborating on what could be meant by 'breaking up large walls'. The map does look really nice! I love those arches, and the mood of the lighting, in the shots.
Negke is right about the marksurfaces thing, but I know what it's like to be surfing the limits, and you get the map to compile nicely, why fuck with it at that point, when it's already looking really nice. TBH it looks pretty decent to me man, go with your heart :) Well they are quite flat walls. But lots of popular mappers like czg have quite plain walls. I always try to pack as much detail into walls as possible, but then I could never make any of my levels very big. That's the trade-off of putting in lots of detail. Players prefer bigger levels over lots of fine detail.
you can make one actual brush-based template and use it elsewhere as point entities
Negke, can you (or anybody) explain how exactly to do this? It's something I could possibly use in a couple of places. There were some brushes that absolutely had to be changed and when I fixed them it blew the marksurfaces over the limit again. You can first try this: open the map file in a text editor and move all recently-added brushes (the ones after which the limit was exceeded) higher up, preferably to where the older brushes in the particular area are. This can arbitrarily lower the marksurfaces again.
The template trick is essentially a modelindex hack. You can look it up in mce.map (available on my site), it's used for the light sources and ammo pickups. The original ("template") entity is a brush-based info_notnull located at 0 0 0. While this location isn't absolutely necessary, I wouldn't put it elsewhere because then it'd make placing the clones a pain in the ass. It's also lit there. I strongly recommend moving it up in the Then you can put point info_notnulls where you want the clones to appear and give them the corresponding values of the template, e.g. "model" "*1" "modelindex" "2" This will create nonsolid copies of the original brush model which do not add to the model limit but take up an edict slot. They can be rotated, too. It's possible to further modify their 'state', so to speak. For example, you can make them solid or turn them into static entities (=no edict) by adding "think" "func_wall" or "func_illusionary" and "nextthink" "0.1". However, this will override any custom rotation! I tried to do a similar thing with func_doors through qc. It even worked as well, after Preach explained some of the nuances of collision generation.
Nobody cared though. I may have to give that a try. It's a bit more complex than I thought it would be, but it could prove to be useful. Thanks for the explanation.
As far as moving brushes in the I only do this when BSP goes crazy and ups the marksurfaces by a huge amount when some insignificant change was made. I don't worry about it when the change in marksurfaces seems reasonably proportionate the whatever change I've made in the map. That was cool. It's also the kind of thing "external model" support in Quoth is meant to help with. Currently having an actual external file is a bit cumbersome to install (and to delete when the map is finished though), so it's a bit of a hard sell to get working.
One potential solution could be to create an "internaliser" tool, which would operate on your base bsp file. It would look for all your entities which reference an external bsp file, load that external file, and bake them into the bsp as an internal model. In effect, it's formalising negke's entity hack above, but in a way that doesn't require fiddling with brush order to get it working. Plus because you created the external model independently, you've got the freedom to light it without the rest of the map interfering, and easily set the rotation centre. There is a second solution to the loose file difficulty, but I'm afraid I'm not yet at liberty to say...Or I'd just really like to see the internaliser become reality so I've got to sell it to someone with the bsp know-how. Was just idle experimentation really. Whilst I tip my hat to those who struggle to colour within the lines of bsp1 limits, I decided not to bother with it.
The internalizer you mention in fact sounds something like the skip utility, which moved brush face around so they wouldn't be visible. <@Bal> http://www.born-robotic.net/content/maps/balostepisode.zip
<@sock> someone should re-work them into maps with vanilla gameplay Too bad there aren't much monsters to fight, in these giant maps.
I guess I'll have to play them with the DMSP mod. Oh lord these maps look great. I can't believe these are sitting around unfinished. None of my scrap levels are anywhere near this kind of quality or completion (I usually rough out a couple of rooms, you seem to make entire maps!)
Those superb maps doesn't do anything with the DMSP mod. WTF !?
Why, O why Lord !? The b1blue, b1office and b1rocks are so cool, why not finish'em ?? There are no deathmatch starts in those maps, which is why they won't work with dmsp. The map files are there though, so I guess it'd be fairly quick to throw some in and -onlyents compile.
Extending Daikatana mainmenu graphics for widescreen support. Fun!
http://spiney.me/files/etc/back0.png I like it, very quaint. Almost thief-like in some respects.
Not everything has to be some outrageous structure. I'm kind of surprised since I usually love the yellow windows, but I agree with mfx. They don't look bad but maybe a more toned down intensity or different colour would be better? Might be worth tinkering with.
Such a minor thing, but of course it's hard to find serious flaws with your shots. I don't think the windows are too yellow, I think they are lit too brightly.
I can see a shadow on the ground, which gives me a light source, and the walls around the windows are lit but it cannot be coming from that same light source. So if it were me, but it's not, I would either reduce the Light or move the light closer to the window so there is less 'overspill'. Other than that, very pretty. I like it Sock, very fresh! Which is hard enough to do in Quake. As been said, the yellow windows steal a bit too much attention, although I like their contribution to the color palette. Maybe having some yellow oil lamps on the walls could be an interesting idea to have in certain areas, to get some variation from the usual torches.
Also, the stone wall above the stucco (?) housing seems like to heavy a structure to be on top of those. I'm kind of hoping this'll start a trend for some Tuscan/Venetian village like maps :P Looks fine to me, although that kind of bleeding makes me think it'd be better in a twilight / early evening setting.
A darker sky and some very mild dark blue fog... Random idea, and we all love spouting those off. Village maps are great. A quiet stroll in the light of the moon.
beautiful shot
the blue sky with yellow windows contrast works well, the first shot seems too overpoweringly yellow with both windows and sky Trouser activity is measured in either front or back occurence and evaluated by the implications each side brings with it in context. Spatial orientation is largely irrelevant in this respect.
Doesn't this equally depend on locality and the coordinate system used? e.g. Your orientation might no be straight from 2 colluding sets of post-2-lates.
I like your stuff, sock, but I really wish you'd change your lighting style when it comes to those yellow inset windows. The light would in no way be able to hit the walls like that and it just looks
This probably wouldn't work, but could an info_notnull with effects 8 produce a fake volumetric glow for the window effect?
Hm. Even if not, might be useful for marking buttons or other stuff, will have to give it a try. but I think they would be better if they were a bit more orangy like the one on the left? opinions opinions...
Looks very nice. I also have to agree with a couple of comments.
I think the upper square window has too much of a greenish tint, more to the orange side would look better I think. And the way the light from it illuminates the surrounding wall is a little unnatural looking. That light would have to be reflected back onto the wall and there is nothing there to do the reflecting. What I had in mind...
click About the lights being unnatural, I think the windows would stick out much more without them. It's okay to sacrifice realism for improved local contrast, imo. Plus you need some kind of light source for lighting those parts anyway. Doesn't bother me much. That literally looks like this http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/diablo-fan-06.jpg
is that a remake of e2m1? (I got that impression, or at least an e2-ish impression, from the moat/drawbridge type setup).
Looks amazing. Extremely atmospheric. ps, I always light windows like that. if it's inside the light must be coming from outside, if it's outside the light must be coming from inside, heh. I guess what hits me wrong there is not necessarily that it's physically inaccurate but more that it makes it plainly obvious that there's a spherical light source sitting in front of the window. I dunno
I agree with willem, FWIW
The current technique would probably be fine if the light was more subtle. Currently it's bright enough that it has my brain looking for a source. Dimmer and I might accept it as general ambient lighting bounced from somwhere else. I think it's the fact that the sky is the only thing in the scene with that color. When compositing a scene you need to repeat the main hues in several locations in a scene or it might look off. Ditto for the windows actually. It doesn't need to be as bright or saturated either, just repeating a certain set of hues already helps a lot. I tried to tone it down to bring it more in line with the rest of the scene, but ideally there should be other things in the set that share the color palette.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h13yssu9o5hq6wb/telefragged_001.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l2h6b9okm8zq8d8/telefragged_002.png Yeah, dropbox. Sorry I'm in a hurry. But it's kind of flat, and in more way than one. The lighting could be a bit more dramatic, surely, and perhaps sink the middle of the floor, a bit?
I have been wondering how much detail you can pack in to a map before things start to break. I got to this point when I started seeing wandering vertices and degradation.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/5the1m1.jpg How about a spotlight above the pentagram so it casts it's shadow on the floor?
5th, nice stuff, but it's a bit bright - some shadows would help. And trenchbroom needs a lighting preview!
Also, I'll post some proper shots of mine (with proper links as well) soon. I feel like the gate and teleporter are too small for the scale of that room. Perhaps just making the gate larger would do it.
Otherwise, yeah it's cheesy, but such is Quake amirite Yeah, the lighting in that room needs work, that's why I'm looking at it. The floor could be less flat also, don't know if my marksurfaces can handle that though.
How about a spotlight above the pentagram</> There already is one, but it's turned off in that shot. the gate and teleporter are too small I'm pretty sure it just looks that way because of the angle you are seeing it at and partly because I kicked the fov up to 100 just for that shot. The actual distance between the gate and the teleporter is over 800 units. Both the gate and the teleporter are pretty large, 192x192 I think. I decided to register since i'm becoming interested with this community. also, screenies:
http://i.imgur.com/aZWtINM.jpg http://i.imgur.com/N9CJjl4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xpt88vy.jpg "How about a spotlight above the pentagram so it casts it's shadow on the floor?"
That pentagram is way too high to get a crisp looking shadow out of it. I've found that if you use a func_detail brush (so no vis or r_vis hit) along with a skip texture (so the player never sees it) and then place it where the player can't get to it (and that there's never going to be an enemy above the player) that you can make some very detailed shadows in tall spaces like that That'll allow for a crisp shadow, but another way might be to have the pentagram purposely distorted; going up the walls and so on. Although I suspect that wouldn't work in that particular room.
I'm thinking of that one room in id1 where for no reason there's a Q shadow on the floor. And of an unreleased custom map that did some similar shadow painting tricks. It's kind of hard to see what's in the shots. Screenshots from the game are always dark, usually they need brightening in Photoshop or whatever to leave the contents more visible.
New quoth map in the works? Is it single player? looks moody, but the walls need more detailing or breaking up.
Btw, I could see the shots fine, not too dark at my end. "I'm thinking of that one room in id1 where for no reason there's a Q shadow on the floor."
Actually that shadow is the clue for a secret on the back side of the teleporter that it's in front of that leads to the roof, a quad damage and a fiend. (E1M4 I think, maybe E1M5). That one was done using a func_illusionary )or maybe a func_wall) disguised as a sky texture and a solid "Q" shape with a normal texture on it above that (inside a box made up of a sky texture). That was about 2 player heights or so over the floor What I was describing was for very tall spaces like the one in the screenshot where there is no way to do that and still have a crisp shadow. I messed around with this room for a couple of hours today. Never really got it looking much better but did manage to increase the marksurfaces by over 600, so I just gave up for now. I did find out that I can't really change the floor much because there's stuff under it that would be too much trouble to modify.
Here's a shot with the pentagram light "on". Screenshot http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/editor1.jpg
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/editor2.jpg Who made those and why did they never post them here?! Awesome!
Gonna have to rip off the idea now. But that involves me making a nine point symbol because of... never mind. Quaketree; yeah I remember. The red castle level with the various types of trap in it. And that's one of my favourite secrets as well. Really sets the tone for good secret hunting "something's not right here..." But it's not just a wonky texture or something. yeah those are my shots, I did post them somewhere in this thread... that map is still coming but alas progress is slow.
Working on a new thing, calling it "Quake As Id Did"... yep, I stole the idea. So it's QUAID for short. Not sure if I will keep the name tbh. This is about 30% on the first map. The idea is to make something simple, fun and faithful to the original game style.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/quaid1.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/quaid2.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/quaid3.jpg I could make something more detailed and crazy but I am working a lot and don't have the energy to pour in detail like I did with Deck. This is like a de-stress project. Mapping therapy. I think this would make a good community project but it's just me on it right now :) Those look fantastic! Make me really really excited.
(Please add at least some misaligned or badly cut off textures, if only to annoy negke!) I honestly thought to myself "you know, if this is going to be exactly like id did then maybe I should screw up the alignment".
I can't bring myself to do it. I have OCD. The base maps have terrible alignment issues, the other maps are nowhere near as bad. No idea why that is.
It must be that Romero was going to go back and put in secret doors for every misaligned texture, but he ran out of time. Yup.
Also... QUAAAAAAID: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ESYPfqNZfpo/UCppEbTJQfI/AAAAAAAAiZE/beUp2hkMWwc/s640/TOTAL-RECALL-KUATO.jpg in DTWID was that in general the weapons, items, secrets and enemy types and counts were pretty much the same in the relative sense of the original id maps that they are supposed to replace. Done entirely differently of course but there were a lot of similar ideas used in different ways. The same goes for D2TWID. I got the feeling that they were going for the same basic game balance but with entirely different layouts.
Just something to keep in mind as you progress. Good luck. There will be a progressional feel through maps in the same way here. Most SP maps now are singular experiences with every enemy and weapon appearing. Mine will try and retain that classic feel.
Minor nitpick regarding the title, rather than calling it "Quake As Id Did", might be neat to be consistent with the Doom releases and call it "Quake The Way Id Did". Makes these projects feel more like a set with a common goal then.
Nice start so far though, have any plans to tackle other themes? This are WIP shots, most of the areas will change, there's no coloured light, skybox, fog or fullbrights. For now at least.
http://i.imgur.com/kEFouQy.png http://i.imgur.com/wGayfxq.png http://i.imgur.com/N1fELgJ.png http://i.imgur.com/qNXiS8N.png http://i.imgur.com/cLdZdyk.png http://i.imgur.com/MfndbOj.png http://i.imgur.com/tX6r5nH.png http://i.imgur.com/GsaFkNO.png Rick's Pentagram is kicking ass. Especially the shadow on the floor. Nice touch.
Tronyn, those editor shots look sweet! Verily! I'm making them chronologically though. This is essentially map 1. I have a few experiments with other themes but my most complete maps so far have been base maps, I need to break the cycle!
hmmm, i must admit, i'm not a huge fan of rubicon textures. I think it's the lack of colour contrast (everything is that same colour) and those giant blurry bolts around everything like xmas decoration. so it is good to see some other textures mixed in.
ijed your screenies remind me of zerstorer. Looks like the Rubicon Empire is trying to take over the quake universe.
Also, are those barrel textures in screenshot 3 from half life 2? Most of my family are, but not me. Even my sister is, which is rare.
I like rubicon because of its contrast - the red and green. Which are classically the easiest colours to confuse when colour blind. Rivets like Christmas lights. Argh. Ok, need to include more red bits and less rivets. I kind of agree that the staple textures of the set are all kind of green/rusty/reddish without a huge amount of contrast. (though the red and green do complement each other so be sure to use both.) I think the way to make the set look best is to use enough of the accent colors like the beige concretes and rock walls, the hot red/blue/white light fixtures, blue computer screens, and the liquids/skies. You also need to use enough architectural details, and varied lighting and shadows, to keep things interesting.
Always found Rubicon textures to be very noisy in terms of detail/luminance. Most of the Id base textures are very flat and simple in comparison (incidentally emphasize lighting more). I think toning down the contrast on the single textures but increasing the color contrast over the range of the entire set would make the scenes appear more appealing. So, reduce variance in micro and increase in macro...
On the other hand it does have it's charm. I like the clunkyness and rawness of it, which is somehow unique to Quake. Also, maybe there should be a steam-age Rubicon set to use with the non-base monsters? Could be a fun design challenge.
Shots look great... but I think you might want to try some alternatives for the brown brick walls. They seem to give everything a busy look and steal attention from the other geometry.
I've just started adding a bit more variance in the texture set so now is a good time to add distinct areas, ones that don't rely on the bricks as much.
The map needs this; it makes my previous levels look small in comparison. #10055 posted by ijed
Hard to tell but looks pretty cool from shots. Maybe a bit boxy in places. Sizeable already which is great. #10057 posted by mfx Looks cool, I like the grey tower textures and vertical scale in shot 2. Shot 1 the hazard tex on the grill doesn't look good! #10062 posted by Rick Style is very nice as are walls, room a bit empty. Pent is okay but not that interesting. #10064 posted by FifthElephant Like it, this is the sort of stuff I do appreciated wandering around a map. I might not notice it when I first go into an area but all that sort of detailing helps. #10071 posted by RingofQuaddamage Can't see much but like the swampy atmosphere and torch lighting. Keep it going. #10088 posted by FifthElephant Looks very Id and decently done. I would prefer beefing out of designs (doesn't have to be too much) and gameplay compared to Id maps tho. #10097 posted by ijed That looks cool, although image quality / pixellation is horrible. Nice variety and designs and nice details. #10100 posted by Hrimfaxi Looks good, great detailing in that, especially last shot. Lots of maps in the works, great stuff, keep it going guys. Have still been loving all the Q1 SP recently. I decided to make a new starting point of my map because I felt that I kinda screwed up or ran out of ideas on the last one. I also experimented with sunlight and sunlight color on this one. Anyways, SCREENIES COMETH!
http://i.imgur.com/oSv39zs.jpg http://i.imgur.com/tM2ffhD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/1wXBsUb.jpg Interestingly, the actual RGB value for the center of the ubiquitous light3_8 texture is 219 195 187, which is a fairly pinkish color.
When I first started putting colored light in Quake maps I tried using that value as the color for light entities associated with that texture, but I decided it was just a little too much color. I now use 255 240 240 for that texture. Colored lighting is a tricky thing to get looking right in Quake. digs
Read the main topic. Need a place to host your screenshots? Upload them here: http://shub-hub.quaddicted.com (password is ilovetheshubhub) or here: http://www.quaketastic.com/ (same password) http://shub-hub.quaddicted.com/ not available.
http://www.quaketastic.com/ now have new design and require login and password. If the quaketastic login hasn't changed recently, it's
Username: quaketastic Password: ZigguratVertigoBlewTronynsSocksOff The password was changed when the site switched owners. Seems arbitrary and counterproductive, a way to make it even more exclusive. In my view, it would be fine if the login information was stored in an on-site faq or readme.txt in the root folder along with the general rules - so there's only one hurdle involved which is finding the site in the first place. I doubt people would spam it with junk or warez, and if so, action against it could be taken then.
* is shub hub down permanently?
* is the quaketastic password going to stay the way it is? (post #10128)? If so I can edit the thread topic to be more accurate. Yeah, password is going to stay like this.
shub-hub.com is actually up and running, but I haven't installed a script (yet). If there's demand, I will, although I don't really know why we would need to places to store files. I improved my speedmap a tad (changed how the last arena is accessed, mainly) and added some eye candy/changed some monsters here and there so they are more efficient. Anyone wanna test it to see if everything works fine before I release it? It's short.
Pictures for the people who didn't play it: http://i.imgur.com/H3rsuMT.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zPPUSPq.jpg I sometimes think to myself how i don't like the metal theme, but then i look at shots like this and change my mind :D
@skacky Looks very nice! what engine are you using in the screenshots?
@sock Beautiful! can't wait to play it tomorrow! This is map 1 of my quake like id did theme. Demos and feedback is what I am looking for. Just email me, in my profile, for the file.
http://i.imgur.com/6zOPaEx.jpg http://i.imgur.com/hNi29qi.jpg I have a little advice, some of your lights in your map look a little dull. Sometimes it's a good idea to put a small but very bright light near the actual source... It looks a lot better.
Too busy at the moment.
But on the subject of lighting, just as an experiment try putting a ball of lights floating in the middle of the room (no source) with key values light 10 wait 0.25 delay 2 This style of fill lighting should make those flat shapes and sharp edges look a lot more interesting. You'll probably need to experiment quite a bit though, those values are just off the top of my head. that reminds me of part of e1m2Quoth by Kell (comes with Quoth IIRC). Sweet stuff :)
http://i.imgur.com/SFlcuhY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/FTlbqBc.jpg http://i.imgur.com/uojjpoE.jpg Not too sure when this will be released as there is still a lot of work to be done, but there's progress. Some of you might remember this map, I posted some pictures here over a year ago or something. Long story short: I axed a large part of the map and remade a lot of stuff from the ground up, and it's a lot better now. I'm going to release my extended speedmap probably next week btw. These ones remind me of "Breakfast at Twilight" in the best way.
So, another angle of map 1...
http://i.imgur.com/voIx1op.jpg And I have started work on map 2... http://i.imgur.com/lFR0b4t.jpg Really going for an episode 1 vibe, I know it looks little "copyright infringement" right now but that's kind of the whole idea, only with better alignment ;) @skacky, I love the verticality you have in those shots, I hope you have some monsters patrolling, it will add to the overall ambiance.
@Fifth: Loving the second shot a lot, the lighting is moody and I'm definitely getting E1M2 vibes from it.
@Skaky: Tons of height variation, scenery shapes and ceiling details is really putting that texture set to good use. Also noticing some similarities in your mapping style from Thief here, which is not a bad thing at all. Considering how tall the map seems, it mostly reminds me of "Between These Dark Walls", is there going to be a lot of climbing involved here? I'm very impressed with them. You got the theme right too.
The second one looks very good. But i do think that it has more of a vibe of DoE, even though the episode 1 vibe is strong on it. By the way, those lights have delay 3, don't they?, or is there a light with delay 4 or 5? I thought you were going for full Quake the way Id did. Nice looking screen shots FE.
I would guess delay 2 or 5 on the lighting with maybe some _sunlight? Delay 3 is no attenuation. Delay 4 is "local minlight" and I've never really figured out what that does. I never used any delay in the past, but I've been doing a lot of re-lighting lately and I'm kinda liking delay 5, as long as the wait is cranked high enough. Delay 1 with low light values can make good fill light as long as there is only one or two in an area. quakis, thanks, it's not that difficult for quake to feel moody due to the textures, ease of adding a brush under a flame and the sounds attached to texture volumes (like sky and water). It's fairly quick to get going.
coce, I have used various wait keys on the lights. Not played with delay values actually. I am trying to stay faithful to the feel of the original game but I wouldn't expect it to be exactly the same. Can't say I played a whole lot of the expansions for quake, played them maybe once and though they're good I never returned to them. Rick, thanks. like I said, just using wait, nothing with delay. Glad peeps like the shots, I have done a lot to that area now. It's tempting to overdo it but that would stop it being "like id did". Very nice. Love the vertical look of it and the attention to detail in the "trim" around the doors, things like that make a level "Pop" and have a sense of being. My only (albeit minor) input would be that the wall lighting sconces could be a bit less of a "Block holding a torch" and maybe a bit more detailed.
I like the E1M1 shot. The varying roofline gives it a feeling of depth without looking like it went too far off of the feel of the original level. Keep up the good work.
@ skacky - looking great, and having see the speedmap, I definitely trust you on consistency and build quality.
@ Fifth - still good but pretty simple, I do like the pure Id theme, although any twists with your own design would be great. @Tronyn: Breakfast is one of my main source of inspiration, especially the amazing outdoor areas.
@quakis: there is some climbing involved but nothing too crazy in terms of sheer height. There is one secret, however, that overlooks a whole area and that is very high up. The verticality is mostly used by monsters such as ogres and death guards to bombard the player from ledges above. Hard/Nightmare is a challenge thanks to them. @quaketree: these are still work in progress, I'm not really satisfied with the way they look yet. I'm thinking of redoing a lot of what I have done. Here's the screenshots... it feels a bit massive when you're in the map, it's a nice scale but it feels a lot less "id" than map 1. What do you reckon?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4xniigg0ax40yi7/Quake0006.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/awpwfs4jjtl7jdx/Quake0005.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/57revjzi1f0cq09/Quake0007.jpg Kinda like that, but it's loosely based off of the secret area from e1m2quoth, which was included in the pak files.
Heres my binds for screenshots, you can copy it into your config.
bind "o" "r_drawviewmodel 1;sizedown;sizedown;crosshair 2;echo Screenshot mode off" bind "p" "r_drawviewmodel 0;sizeup;sizeup;crosshair 0;echo Screenshot mode on" Quoth base enemies in medieval world? No. Unless it's a transition start like E1M2.
Looks good otherwise. yesh the big white fluffy monster is right, no base. use tronyns little arrow shooting dudes if you want grunts, they're effectively replacements for the grunt/enforcer.
actually e1m2quoth had a mix of base and medieval monsters, so I will have to play around with monster types until you guys like it.
Looking really nice, nice terrain sculpting. Which editor are you using?
Like in e1m2, a few base details (crates and a slipgate) will make the base monsters look at home. Trenchbroom.
http://kristianduske.com/trenchbroom/ Bothers me that the waterfall is continually filling the small pool without it overflowing.
Besides that, looks really cool! Please keep the base enemies in the medieval setting. It's freaking quake, things don't have to make sense. I don't understand the aversion to mixing themes in a game that's such a thematic mess anyway (and all the better for it!).
And yeah... put a hole in the pool :) But the teleporter textured brush looks a bit weird.
Like the rest of it though, seems a bit cramped maybe? I think that mixing thems in the same map is a good thing, in Quake. Here are my thoughts on this :
Quake is about parallel worlds turned mad (doomed dimensions), in an infinite Multiverse. So why not a kind of interference between them ? A dimension that turned so mad, that several other dimensions are "overlapping". So imagine a map in which you have a main theme, and where elements of other themes are appearing here and there at start, then turned to be fulling mixed at the end of the map. All along its path into the map, the player would say "WTF !?", "What the Hell happened here ?", "The Universe itself is doomed !"... This would be like a kind of "dimensional nightmare". Not sure about it yet, might try scaling it.
Ideally it should deform and distort while maintaining the classic starfield tex. Will have to see what I can do. Cramped? Yeah, unfortunately it seems thats my new style. Repeating some of that red color inside the teleporter around the scene might give it a nice overall color palette. Just a thought.
You can minimize the distortion cause by the warping if you float the teleport textured brush behind the teleporter frame. Make it a rectangle just smaller than the teleporter frame and very thin. If the player can get back to the rear of the teleporter it won't look so good though.
Yeah, I might make it blue instead to match the other colours.
Lighting and palette is pretty random at the moment. Nice detailing.
As for mixing themes, it is possible but it must have some sort of internal logic and harmony to it, Quake might be an abstract and fantastical game but that doesn't mean it should be mis-matched bullshit. I see no need for abuse of themes. I'm sure there are plenty of variations on a theme not yet realised that would look nice (I made an experiment with wood and metal with yellow and purple lights that looked quite cool) but it needs to make some kind of sense. The grunts in e1m2 were there because it was a transition of themes.
Remember the tech enemies from Operation Urth Magik? Or the ogre, carrying his chainsaw and grenade launcher, but dressed in a medieval one-si. Even the player is futuristic, but still hacking through all these medieval, elder and metal settings.
As long as you've got a well realized theme and you stick to it then you're good. You're missing out on a lot of gameplay possibilities by sticking to a single theme.
As for visuals the lo-fi and 8bit palette nature of the game ties together everything, the existing themes are pretty 'abusive' internally anyway. No need to go Madfox to make a point... I posted this on my tumblr, it's a doom map with a mash of almost all the quake textures in a single level (base, metal, wizard, they're all there) and also a bunch of doom textures too. It doesn't look too bad actually but it's still seems a bit funky to me -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NISa53WBq3c I think doom does well with quakes brown loveliness.... It doesnt work as well the other way round though, Doom textures are a bit too colourful for quake IMO.
That actually looks pretty nice imo.
Didn't Nehahra use Doom textures in certain parts? Worked okay for the most part iirc. But prolly need to brownify them a bit I guess. What's the resolution difference? I think Quake textures are twice the res? Id always upped the texture resolution really gradually. It probably stayed around Q3 level for the past 10 years tho :P Doom and Quake were both basically done with 64x64 textures. Doom textures were often made from "patches" which were pieced together to form the final texture.
Quake 2 had a lot of 64x64, but was mostly 128x128. With Quake 3 Arena they changed to larger textures (most were 256x256) that were down-sampled in the game to half the original size. do you still have the src files of the Rapture pak?
As you remember one map has been split into two parts it's time to join the map for its original state pretty please I don't have the sources for anything before Masque. What's even more annoying is that years ago, like before Masque, I started a joined Rain Palisade version (I assume you mean that map), with a much bigger initial outdoor area and another vertical level.
I was hoping you'd provide an update of this: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/quakenight.jpg
Was there anyone who seriously disliked this map?
https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/qx11_z1.html It was awesome in exactly the way Barnak described. @Tronyn, it was ok, it was cool when the base part moved to medieval but its not the best example of theme mashups.
The turtle map by Zwiffle is the ultimate example of how a mashup map should be done, amazing stuff! :) That's really sad now, mr.T
yeah, i was referring to a Rainpal level https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/ne_lend_doom.html
The Elderworld Waystation looked pretty neat mix of base in a strange environment, though it's been a long while since my last playthrough. Maybe some zerstorer trees could make the horizon lines more interesting, against the bright skybox.
Looks good, but could be a bit more vertical. Try sloping down the grates downward, for a start?
http://qrf.servequake.com/~orl/oms3ss3.jpg
http://qrf.servequake.com/~orl/oms3ss4.jpg http://qrf.servequake.com/~orl/oms3ss5.jpg Three not so revealing screenshots of my upcoming map, or rather maps, as it has gotten so big it had to be split into two. Are you suggesting that I use a certain engine of the Fitz variety, instead of the one that I have loved and grown accustomed to? :)
and expand on it... Also, align the textures under the curved ledge bit! Otherwise people will lose their mind!
someone please do it and also mention that the maximum filesize is currently 128mb, and if someone needs to upload more, contact me
but OH MY GOD YES I WAS JUST THINKING ABOUT HOW SOMEONE NEEDED TO DO THIS!
Shesp1 is one of my favs. We can always use more IKWhite! Also, love the coloured lighting. The thing I love about white/light grey texture sets is that they are sort of a blank slate for your lighting. shadows are immediately apparent and become part of the texture, and even the faintest of colours can change the mood entirely.
My discomfort may be misleading. Coloured lighting could be used so well if used tastefully and with restraint
That yellow light stands out like a sore thumb. Even if it was a "shoot me" secret, I'd recommend changing it.
the yellow light is good, i think it would be to drag without it, but there needs to be more than just 1. don't make everything yellow lights, there needs to be a mix, done in a way it would make sense to make you have certain tall lights that are yellw and the rest are white. or maybe the yellow lighting comes from the sunlight, which means change the sky. that way that top dome can have a ray of yellow lighting. it would mean most areas of the level where need some sort of peek into the outside so the sunlight can get in.
I'm still experimenting with lighting, since IKWhite is a very singular theme. I figured having a few warm lights would be a good idea, but I'd like to keep the thing mostly light cold blue (the only white light is the one from the sky so far). I'd like to keep the night sky.
The yellow light might be too strong though. I'd agree with taking the yellow light down a touch - when it's surrounded by all that blue you'd probably even get away with not colouring it and it would look warm. Also, if you want a copy of http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/dome/ that's been palette-swapped from ikblue to ikwhite, just drop me an e-mail and I'll hook you up!
Sure, I'll send you a mail pretty soon. Domes are welcome since I already have quite a lot of brushes in the level. :p
I changed the yellow light for a very cold orange and I think it looks better. It's less piss and more subtle. but practically where is the water coming from? The top part should be set further down so it doesnt look as flat as it does at the moment.
Then again it probably will depend on player's perspective when he looks up, ie will the player be as high as where the shot's taken from? The player won't be that high up singe the waterfall is flowing down the slope. and also, do you want me to change the alpha scale or remove it?
The boxes shown at the bottom of that fall have some weird proportions. Doesn't feel right.
agree re transparency.
Completely disagree re looking top part being too high, re boxes being bad proportions. Left one is 64x64 but only 32 high. Middle is 32x64 and 32 high. Neither of those are a "standard" size. Right one is 64x64x64. The weird shape looks like is because of an abnormally high fov setting.
Make whatever looks good to you. You don't see non-cube crates often in Quake but that doesn't make them wrong. I was just saying that the distortion was probably just a display artifact. It does look a little more skewed than I'm used to, what engine is that?
looks like my map isn't working very well, I'm getting strange vis errors. you think I should start over?
---- WVis 2.31 ( XT build 1.01 ) ----
Modified by Bengt Jardrup Multithreading enabled by Willem Further mods by Tuna, rebb Detail code by Alexander Malmberg <alexander@malmberg.org> File: Bre01.bsp LoadPortals: couldn't read Bre01.prt No vising performed. Found out what was happening, but there's a bug when near the waterfall, I get this odd HOM bug. how do I fix it?
You could always post some screenshots of the area and maybe a wireframe view of the area?
I'm thinking about restarting my map. sorry for disappointing you guys. :(
http://i.imgur.com/6DhWfpp.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xlNQjBP.jpg http://i.imgur.com/1JZbjsd.jpg http://i.imgur.com/dInzwny.jpg http://i.imgur.com/OYdaLCb.jpg You should make the map file available to one of the more experienced mappers here. I'm sure someone can tell you how to fix these problems. Maybe ask negke or necros, they are good at diagnosing technical problems.
May I suggest to change the waterfall to something more in line with the red sky ? Bloodfall, or lavafall, with a river of hot blood/lava around the crates...
Would feel more "out of this world" ! Best thing to do is check to make sure vertices in the affected area are grid snapped. Make sure there are no mixed faces. Also is the map sealed off from the void? Sometimes a map which is unsealed has weird vising issues, plus be careful with brush entities as vising can sometimes occlude them in areas you definitely don't want them to be occluded from.
SW has a nice idea too, one of more experienced mappers may be able to diagnose the problem. It make be a simple case of rebuilding a few brushes in the area also. If anyone wants it, grab it here:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/6adm32byjk3a1sl/bre01_old.zip I'll have a look too, maybe its a problem with the tools. I would also recommend compiling the map with TyrUtils and see if the problem persists.
What texture were wads used? Some of thos I can't find. If you make the "bad" bsp available they can be extracted.
One thing I noticed that seems a little weird is that, in the rock areas around the waterfall, you have "tri-souped" using brushes with non triangular tops. Looking down from the top I would split these into two triangular brushes. No matter what happens, keep going. Nobody expects miracles in your first map and neither should you - this is your first test bed for ideas.
No matter what happens, keep going. Nobody expects miracles in your first map and neither should you - this is your first test bed for ideas.
plugging bsp holes and bug fixing takes a while. I had problems where entire areas would scrunch into a mess with weird shapes.
I ended up redoing whole areas and brushes. Also I found that when you have too many overlapping brushes it tends to cause serious problems. offcut.wad by sock (found in ivory tower pak)
Quake101.wad kdmtex.wad found here:https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/kell.quaddicted.com/ idbase_ultimate.wad It keeps on error20.
E ven a big box around it keeps args on the non-convex face. I can't compile it. I'm afraid there are too many shape-brushes that are used as hull-brushes. Then there's always a leak-error. >>> Parts of the map are outside the 4096 limit.
txqbsp_xt generated 33 warnings, mostly point-off-plane but some r_cutnodeportals also There are two convex shapes on 3288 -1276 608 and 896 -1572 128.
If I delete these brushes, (after surounding a box round the map) my compiler errors on leak. I see you use convex brushes for the outer site of the map. (empty void) Not sure if that's a good idea, as the outsite brush becomes one of the three hulls. I have no good experience with convex brushes in the outsite of a map. Even if they're well ligned, I alway seal them off with a cover brush. This only my personal opinion but I don't think anyone should use skip or detail brushes on their first map. This map is small and it's mostly one big open area, I see no need for either at this point anyway.
BTW, the part of the map that's outside the 4096 limit is the side with the waterfall. I subbed some textures and ran it with no vis in fitzquake. Looks fine, I'll see if it will vis next. wvis.exe wouldn't vis the map with an error "LoadPortals: Not a portal file". I figured it was because of the detail brushes, so I downloaded the latest Tyrutils.
Well, the vis in that set of tools wouldn't vis it either "LoadPortals: unknown header: PRT1-AM". Why? I thought txqbsp_xt should work with it, it does detail brushes. Oh well, I went back and BSPed it again with the qbsp in tyrutils. That one only generated 4 warnings, one about no deathmatch starts (!) and three of "WARNING 12: new portal was clipped away in CutNodePortals_r". It's been vising for over 30 minutes and "Calculating Full Vis" is up to I have an email (obviously Gmail) but I don't show it here because I'm afraid that I could get hacked or have my personal information posted somewhere on the internet.
Seems to be a problem with the Jury-Rigged Tools.
I've isolated the water-area and the vis glitch only occurs when a detail-brush is intersecting the water surface - in this case the crate. TyrUtils does not show this glitch ( because Tyrann actually knows what he's doing ;) ), so i'd say use it instead. You'll probably have to make some fixes to other parts of the map first for it to compile in TyrUtils though, i got quite a few leak errors in it and only the isolated water-area compiled on first try. I'll investigate the problem tomorrow and hopefully come up with a fix. The detail-brush implementations of TyrUtils and the Jury-Rigged BJP tools are not the same and write different portal-file formats when detail-brushes are used.
and no leaks with the Tyrutils qbsp. I wonder if this is because the map was modified then saved in Netradiant? All I did was change textures though, none of the brushes were touched.
Wow, that thing took almost 2 hours to vis.
I looked carefully but I didn't see any terrible problems except - everything below any water surface is gone. Once you drop below the water surface it comes back. From inside the water looking back up everything is fine. It's very easy to see if wateralpha is set to something low like 0.01 I've isolated the water-area and the vis glitch only occurs when a detail-brush is intersecting the water surface - in this case the crate. I compiled the entire map, the disappearing geometry problem also occurs at the first small waterfall and small pool of water. There are no intersecting detail brushes there. It definitely appears to be a vis issue because with r_novis 1, the problem goes away. I'd like to remove the detail brushes and see what happens. I can't do that until tomorrow because it would probably take 8 hours to vis on my work/dev/internet computer and I can't tie up the living room computer for another 2 hours on Sunday night because that's the home entertainment machine. Once you drop below the water surface it comes back. From inside the water looking back up everything is fine.
I have to take the above statement back. Apparently I just wasn't deep enough in the water. When you're barely below the surface, it's okay, but go just a little deeper and everything above the water disappears also. I don't think you can get deep enough in the first small pool of water to see this. Also, for the record, I used tyrutils version 0.14 for this (well, except for Light). I just plugged the different exe and map names into the same batch file I've been using for years.
Seriously, that's not the default? With txqbsp and txqbsp_xt the switch is -nowatervis to disable transparent water, with qbsp it's -transwater to enable it.
I probably should have read the docs, but I've been using txqbsp since 2007 and it never occurred to me that any newer version of qbsp would not have transparent water on by default. Here are three screenshots. In your original five I actually wasn't sure where the problem was in a couple of them, but I could see the problem in the two shots taken from in the water near the crate. The last of your screenshots illustrates what the player sees when they cross one of the 4096 unit map boundaries.
In the water near the crate: http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/bre01shot1.jpg http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/bre01shot2.jpg As you can see there are no problems. Crossing the 4096 unit limit (this is normal): http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/bre01shot4.jpg I have no idea if saving the map in Netradiant magically fixed something, but I was too lazy to download the texture wads you used, so I had to load the map in Netradiant so I could change them to regular Quake textures. I used the Tyrutils v.014 qbsp and vis to compile the map. I don't see any reason to give up on the map at this point. You do need to move the map away from the 4096 boundary. The map is basically one large open area, I doubt you're getting much benefit from detail brushes, but from what I see they're not the cause of any problems either. why would people here not help you? Even the jerks around here are addicted enough to quake to help anyone as long as they get their quake fix ;)
Seriously though peeps are cool around here and will help mappers out, even going to lengths like editing the map files for you and bug fixing :) This should now be fixed in the Jury-Rigged BJP Tools as well.
Test-Build ( will likely become main package soon ) Detail-Brushes should help even in open maps, as their portals will not complicate the vis calculations. This should now be fixed in the Jury-Rigged BJP Tools as well.
I just tried this and there was no change to the marksurfaces count. When I tested the Tyrutils v.14 version last night, I got almost a 5% increase in marksurfaces. are you guys going to give me my map file that you changed around? or should I continue on the one I currently have?
Just substituted a bunch of textures, saved it in Netradiant, and compiled with Tyrutils v.14
Yes, you need to center the map. Right now it's mostly in the bottom right quadrant and actually extends past the 4096 limit along the right side. Select the entire map and, looking down on it from above, move everything about 1024 units toward the upper left. Not real sure how Trenchbroom views work, as an angle, move everything in the 135 degree direction. I just had to get rid of the leaks in my map and compile it. AND EVERYTHING IS WORKING! There's still tiny bugs I can fix but I can't thank you guys enough for helping me fix my first map! I'm starting to love this community! :)
When I try to play a map I'm working on I get the following error from fitz and quakespasm:
Compile Error: FGD - doesn't need to be merged, but doesn't seem to have everything included? Mod_LoadBrushModel: maps/smqx11_drew_rumble.bsp has wrong version number (1112756274 should be 29) Looking good, But I think it would be better replacing the textures on the rocks to make it look natural. Just my opinion on that.
Same sort of comment; I'd go with a stone blocks type of texture for the castle walls, and something more like rock and less like sand for the island it's on. That said, looks very impressive with all the little details, the Arabian-style arch on the bridge is interesting too.
Texture of the rocks looks a bit flat indeed.
I'm more concerned about the broad space, as it is only a small part of what happens inside. Strange the alignment crashes while changing the map from Radiant1.5 to Quark6.4. I had to start again several times because all rockshapes were scrambled. but I have done a bit of work today...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/999bms3rd67bo07/map2.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/2fyhqwu2e0ky089/map2-1.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/udu13dx47hg9yi4/map2-2.jpg Had to rework areas a few times, creating map 1 of the episode was easier but that's probably because I now have more experience with making something good with the base texture set. Something weird going on with textures in shot 2 though?
Anyways, looking forward to this! That's quite skinny when compared to this sugar pumpkin
Maybe I'd feel differently seeing it in game, but I think the chainsaw's base is too wide. It comes off as a 'fat sword' rather than a chainsaw.
Mappers tend to stick perpendicular to the grid on the x/y axis. It's easy... Quake textures tend to be nice and modular when working like that (also, faster vis). Base maps tend to use more angles usually, for some reason. Would be cool to see more maps where the rooms aren't boxes though, helps make things seem otherworldly, since boxes are like the constant in architecture.
Also, rotating entire rooms or buildings so the horizon is titled, can give player a feeling of disorientation/unbalances. Takes bit more work in bsp engine since need to keep things on grid. Just a basic assumption that isn't questioned often enough I think. Doom does it more, because it's more 2D and have less options for variation besides just making the sectors irregular shaped. I rotated a tower around the z axis and it took most of a day to get it looking right and aligned to the grid. You can kind of see it, lower center, in this screen shot.
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/wish13_a.jpg Pain in the ass it was, especially the arched doorway you can't see :) But at least you can align textures fairly well. The problem with going too far off straight vertical is that the texture alignment gets pretty ugly looking and not really fixable as a surface approaches 45 degrees tilt off vertical and is angled in the xy plane at the same time. A lot of the textures are just cut and paste, highly modified versions of the standard id textures.
The stone textures are modified versions of the zstn3 set (I think) from Kell's Apocrypha wad. The brick textures are based on a couple of full color jpgs from a site called Spiral Graphics. I had to modify them a lot to work in Quake, and I created nearly two dozen unique variations just for this map. (Just in case, BTW), I wasn't disagreeing with you or anything, as a matter of fact I pretty much agree 100%, I was just trying to point out that Quake is pretty unfriendly with regard to texture alignment when it comes to oddball brush orientation.
I actually went to a lot of trouble rotating that tower and even though the effect is subtle, I like it a lot. You need to use an editor with proper texture locking. Build it on axis and then rotate it later. Should save you a lot of pain...
The problem with funky rotations was older compilers which lacked support for floating point rotation of textures, or not being consistent with editors when to switch between projection planes when dealing with 45 degree surfaces.
Quake itself has no issues as long as the information in the while, some/many of the old compilers would flip rotations or planes or both, that's not exactly what I see.
As far as I can tell, it (Quake) always seems to project directly on axis (90 degree angles), never at 45 degree angles or anything else for that matter. When a surface is exactly vertical, simple scaling will usually fix any horizontal texture distortion, but once the surface is tilted 45 degrees away from vertical it becomes hopeless. The texture projection is entirely up to the compiler. If you feed a standard map file to a modern compiler, it will however use the paraxial texture projection which you are seeing.
If you want more control over texture projection, you will need to use an editor that writes and supports Valve's 220 map file format, which basically allows you to set up the texture projection in whichever way you like. TB doesn't support this yet, but it's planned for TB 2.0 (I think you are using TB?). OTOH, there are many examples of Quake maps with paraxial texture projection which have proper texture alignment on rotated objects, but it's tricky. Hi all, I realize this is mostly me just ranting, but could you please be more clear when you decide to discuss non-standard Quake stuff. I'm really tired of these cases where someone says "Oh, yeah, you can do that", then, after wasting much time, I find out that, well no, you have to use this, or do that, or something else, and no it's not really possible in standard Quake, or it pretty much won't work in regular old Quake.
It's not that I don't find the information useful, but at the moment, I'm not interested in mapping for any other game besides Quake. I probably wouldn't be here if I was. This site is pretty much the last Bastion of old school Quake mapping info. I sure hope it sticks around. OTOH, there are many examples of Quake maps with paraxial texture projection which have proper texture alignment on rotated objects, but it's tricky.
This is not entirely true though because when a face is off-axis on more than 1 axis, then the texture projection creates a skewed texture which is impossible to align no matter what is done. I'm really tired of these cases where someone says "Oh, yeah, you can do that", then, after wasting much time, I find out that, well no, you have to use this, or do that, or something else, and no it's not really possible in standard Quake, or it pretty much won't work in regular old Quake.
As a frequent advocate for the benefits of backwards compatibililty, I can assure you that you can create maps that take advantage of these new features that still run in the original winquake engine. You need a new compiler, that's all. The texture alignment problems are not a compiler issue. This is the way Quake normally works.
Necros has very clearly (thank you) re-stated the issue in post #103374 when a face is off-axis on more than 1 axis, then the texture projection creates a skewed texture which is impossible to align no matter what is done. Again, if anyone has a fix for this in vanilla Quake, please share. However, I'm pretty sure it's not possible. For the record, I'm not about to incorporate some weird Valve texture alignments in a Quake map or be forced to recommend a "not really Quake" engine to play one I make. That's just the way it is. Also please note, I was not complaining about this or asking for a fix. I was simply responding to a prior post in order to point out the difficulties and problems faced when surfaces are significantly off-axis in Quake. BTW, I use txqbsp_xt. I think it's a whole year old. The only newer one I'm aware of is in tyrutils v.14 and that one has marksurfaces issues. The editor I use is Netradiant, the only one I know of newer is Trenchbroom. From what I see, these newer compilers and editors are still experimental and buggy. Surely that's not recommended? Also, I still stand by what I said in my previous post. Please be clear if something you recommend either will not work in, or has not been tested in, vanilla Quake. It may save others from wasting time. This is not an engine problem. The engine doesn't care how textures are projected - the appropriate information is generated by the compiler. You can "fix" the problems by switching to an editor that fully supports Valve's 220 map format, which was invented to solve exactly this problem. Most recent compilers will understand the 220 map format and generate proper texture coordinates for your map file.
The problem is that you need to find an editor that supports this map format. I don't know if Netradiant does. All this will work great in vanilla Quake - it's all about the tool chain in this case. necros' post only pertains to the paraxial texture projection which is used for standard Quake map files. It has nothing to do with vanilla Quake. It's just that the standard
There are no simple workarounds; it's needs a lot of experimentation and manual fiddling. I found that sometimes it's beneficial to change the shape of the brush/face ever so slightly in order to make the texture fit better, rather than trying to fix it by means of aligning. It usually won't be visible if it's just one or two units. Though often textures on multi-axis faces (at least those with only one spacial definition, e.g. horizontal seams) can be aligned neatly even without floating point offsets by changing the scale on the particular axis in very small increments. An example for this would be the trim inside the window frames on the roofcony in mce.bsp. But it's a pain in the ass, indeed. allow better texture alignment, Rick.
I don't use worldcraft because Trenchbroom is fun to use, though aligning textures is more problematic. Despite its excentric appearance it has the potential to get things done. But you really got to know how to handle it, otherwise it'll refuse to cooperate and the whole thing will end in frustration.
Can't really think of anything apart from the floating point issues that quark does not do better than other editors...
Also, Radiant is not much better. I mean - multiple rows of toolbar buttons with random icons? Seriously, whenever I use Quark to check something out that doesn't work properly in TB I'm at a loss. I don't even know where to begin just to select a face and see its properties, for example.
I'd guess that the Jackhammer editor supports the 220 format, from the way they describe their texture features. Haven't tried it myself though.
It happens every time someone brings up QuArK. Spirit's trolling attempts prove sucessful once again.
i am honestly not trolling.
I had to read tutorials before I could even place one brush in a radiant. Faces in quark are selected by clicking the icon at a face (squares) or by clicking on the in the 3D view. Then I don't remember much but the properties are shown somewhere in the left panel. Radiant is driven mostly by keyboard shortcuts, those icons are apparently made by people who felt they were necessary for some reason.
Netradiant has a Help menu that lists the keyboard shortcuts. I was being unclear - that "multiple rows" remark was directed at Quark again. Radiant's UI is a bit better IMO, but also suffers from a lot of issues. But back when I was still mapping, I found Radiant to be much quicker, as in, I generally was able to map faster with Radiant than with WC or Quark.
I stand corrected. I looked at the crater map provided by Preach and the 220 texture thing does indeed work in plain old Quake. Unfortunately it looks like Netradiant doesn't support it.
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ericw_wip.jpg
This is done in QuArK, but I've got to switch away from it - it's so slow. AFAIK the vertical shearing I'm using on the sides of the staircase needs something other than vanilla quake http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ericw_wip_trenchbroom.jpg Any suggestions? learn radiant for now? Or maybe the tilted wood panels look OK and I should stick to vanilla I noticed Tyrann's compile tools can read the Quake 2 makes me think that TB really needs a texture skewing tool. Rotating to fit seems like a weird solution to that problem.
TB doesn't support Valve's 220 map format (yet). TB2 will support it properly, but it's still a couple of months off.
Does this mean that the 220
Is better in many respects but the most important one is probably texturing and how it deals with floating points.
WC3.3 gets flack because of few few things that I can think of off hand: HLWAD format required which makes for extra work converting wads using TexMex. The mandatory install location is hard coded into it which is not always desirable. It doesn't always play well with 3rd party compiling tools as far as adding -flags without using a separate tool to use them (Necros's compiling tool usually) which means another layer of extra work Difficult to set up for Quake without the QuakeSpasm (I think, maybe QuakeAddicted) setup tool. I think that the above things have a lot to do with the fact that it's first and foremost a Half-Life 2 editor (source engine which is a derivative of the Quake 2 engine which is a derivative of the Quake engine) and not a Quake editor. There's 3 layers of engines and their extra features to muck through to get to editing a Quake map. It's pretty easy. I agree with some of the things you said, but really, it's a doddle to get it set up and get it to compile even huge maps for Quake 1.
The setup tool to which you were referring is called Quake Adapter (http://quakeone.com/qadapter/). The thing that doesn't work too well is loading the The only other real issue (and one you didn't mention) is that sometimes people will experience a bug where the cursor gets locked in the wrong mode in the 3D view, and you have to save with Ctrl+S, and shut it down, re-load and everything is fine. But sometimes to problem persists. The bug doesn't corrupt the map, it just prevents one from being able to edit it until the editor stops bugging out. I haven't seen the bug for years, but it used to happen to me once in a blue moon. Others have experienced it. My beef with Worldcraft was that it obstructs the workflow in a team setting because maps produced by it can't easily be loaded into other editors. Plus people usually don't care to convert their maps every time they check them into the SVN (if they do at all).
Since most remaining Quake mappers work alone, don't intensely cooperate on the same maps, or actually use WC themselves, that isn't a problem of course. My other beef with it was that it's closed source and unmaintained, thus new features that might require changes to the source (such as Q2/Q3 support) cannot be added, at all. A third beef to me is the 4 pane layout; I'm used to working in 2 panes, a 3D viewport where I do most of the work and a switchable 2D viewport that I sometimes use to quickly create new brushes by dragging with the mouse. To my knowledge, Radiant is the only editor that supports this workflow. Trenchbroom seems to solve some of those problems. If Trenchbroom one day gets Q3 support, it would be worth long and hard looks from anyone who makes maps for Nexuiz, Xonotic, Warsow, SJ, Alien Arena, and any Darkplaces- or Quake3- related game. There's a new level editor in the works called Sledge, still in alpha stage and currently only supporting Goldsource and eventually Source, but the developer has said he isn't opposed to adding support for other games/engines if there's demand for it. Seeing as it's in development and only in alpha stage, anyone can make suggestions, and it's even open source: http://twhl.info/forums.php?thread=18410&page=1
I take it many people here are happy with Trenchbroom, but for people like me, who can't live without 2D views, I think this could fill the void nicely if Quake support was to be added. So let your voices be heard if you agree! Getting a huge Doom vibe as well from ericw's pictures. Also, I've been using Worldcraft for very long (more than 8 years) and switcihing to TB was very easy. I miss valve 220 sometimes, though.
Reading the editor chat I still get bumped in houres mapping spirit by this bug that keeps holding on.
Mapping with Radiant is really sharp in cutting edges and staying on grid. But what to do if a map like this the other day opens like that? I tried to understand what happened to the wedges, but I didn't change them. In Radiant1.05 the map looks great, in Quark6.4 imported it's junk. Those shots are indeed impressive... very nice foggy/grey style.. looks to be an architecture masterpiece :)
Keep it up ! How does Quake Fans feel about Chasm the Rift? I remember the weapons and models were great.
.. staled mappers... (like me)... almost but never stopped, in lack of time/inspiration/etc..
Is it considered as slow, or simply out of the "context".. if in the context, we are many to pretend being the slowest :) for mfx or anyone else using rubicon2 entities:
On light_fixture1, set these keys: "angle" "315" "mangle" "0 -90 0" This will give a shadow on the wall directly above the fixture. Set _softangle to 20, to make it look neat.
Thanks metlslime, i already have the mangle wall-torch thing on the fixture, but a slightly smaller angle. Looks good anyhow. oh no, he borrowed from sock's modern approach to an e1m2 look. what a fucking scandal
always copy from those who came before you. just make sure you add your own personal touchs with making maps like Socks. He is a great mapper and copying is part of learning, plus if people think your maps look like his then you're making a good map!
If Sock has a patent on wbrick1_5 with some white thrown in and a bunch of wood, then e1m2rq must be the biggest heist in history.
cough. even though I think the responses RoQ got were a bit asshole-ish, they did bring up a pretty interesting topic, style.
It's something I've been considering, like if I map in the future, I'd like to work in a totally different style. But style is interesting, I recall the term "negkeish" being used on here, lol, with all its (accurate) implications of impeccably detailed brushwork and mind games meant to torment us into rage quitting. Have some actual feedback:
The floor is a bit flat, and from this angle the room looks like it is essentially a rectangle. Does this lead anywhere? The stone-skull-slab to the left looks a bit odd being perfectly flush to the wall, perhaps pull it out slightly? Is there a reason the stained glass is there, and not centered in the wall? Does it serve a purpose? Without any more context, I can't really say where you should go with the room. But do keep it up, I don't think you are "copying sock". I think like anyone you've seen some good work and it has got your mind going on a similar thread. I'm happy to see content that is so Quake oriented in its themes. so not that exciting, but still not nothing:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/far1.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/far2.jpg My advice was serious.
Sink the floor. Put a water brush there. Put zombies on the wall. This is irritating. That looks wicked! At first I though the crane and some of the lights were base/industrial details, but looking closer I guess it's a pure medieval crane. Looks great in any case.
one thing - the light grey crane/buildings against the skybox looks kind of color inverted. maybe try lowering the rgb values of the fog just enough to get the crane silhouette the be darker than the skybox? I don't know whether it is made voluntarily but: those black and white shots are really amazing... or is it the fog that generates this visual effect ?
Second shot upper structure is really puzzling me: wtf is this ? Can't wait playing this map ! obvious WIP
http://i.imgur.com/Y5mPFL5.jpg hmmm no ones done a b&w map have they? could be really cool to see one, it'll give more focus to the lighting which needs to be fantastic.
looking really good tronyn! and that's it, I think...
PS - just wandered through the Bal scraps... so nice! Hope someone with the adequate skill set does something with those! Pretty crazy to think he whipped those up back in 05. Tronyn you map like a god, but i whould love to see a map from you less epic... a smaller map :)
Your maps have always huge sizes, but guess is your signature :p I messed with it years ago. I converted most of the original game content into black and white by texture and skin swapping but I hit a wall with engine based explosions and stuff like trails being in color which just didn't look quite right so I dumped it.
Aside from that it definitely added a different feel to the game as a whole. Too bad the feel was broken by the stuff that I couldn't change myself. Ever since SM110/108 I've been fantasizing about making an abstract, possibly Alice-like map combining the B&W and Zer flesh themes. Maybe some day...
after the Drake merger, if I make anything further, it'll definitely be on a smaller scale!
negke: what a great idea! sounds cool. If anyone should make a b&w map it's Tyrann, since his lighting has always struck me as the most impressive. awesome tronyn I love your maps ;)
smaller maps might gives us more maps :) wish I had the time and your skills! couldn't you just create a greyscale palette.lmp and be done with it?
I did that...(almost a decade ago now I look) http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=4&start=4968&end=4992 Of course, my hosting died since then - I can reupload it if there's demand. A properly done b&w map has to be built to be b&w, because much more emphasis has to be put into the textures and lighting for proper contrasts. not just slap an engine mod on it and expect it to look good.
where are these bal map scraps? I want a looksy-poo. you mean Dry Sorrow, yeah that was an old DM map converted for SP, and it's definitely the smallest map I released since like... I dunno it's even smaller than A Desert Dusk
I have completed the first 2 maps in my quake-like-id-did episode. Just need a bit of feedback. My email addy is in my user profile.
A properly done b&w map has to be built to be b&w, because much more emphasis has to be put into the textures and lighting for proper contrasts. not just slap an engine mod on it and expect it to look good.
Exactly. I tried using the Preach method first (messing with the palette) but it just wasn't working out the way I wanted it to. So I converted everything individually in pak0 over to B&W. Textures, skins and sprites. Because I did it texture by texture it looked a lot better because I could do some tweaking to individual textures to clear up some errors made in the conversion from color to B&W (but it still had some issues where the engine added color to a few things) but unfortunately I couldn't really do anything with it for fear of violating id copyrights so I chalked it up to learning something new and chucked it. In retrospect I probably should have at least saved the wad, sprites and skins somewhere. You have to keep in mind that the engines back then were less than fully documented so figuring out how to make some thing look fully monochrome wasn't something easy to just look up online. I think TomazQuake (which had just come out when I was messing around with it) came the closest to looking closest to "Right". IIRC I used Pak Explorer, AdQuedit, QME 3.0 (the free version) TexMex, MS Paint and Paintshop Pro 5. Here : http://www.born-robotic.net/content/maps/balostepisode.zip
Wait no that was for Kona not quaketree! wow those are awesome. i especially like that it's all custom textures, I think more people need to use custom textures rather than id's stuff all the time.
and as much as I'm well over base maps, that smaller one you've got there looks great with those textures. you could even merge start, vil, tower and rocks all into one huge bsp2 map, they're kind of similar styles. for a chunky, unvised map that won't be out for a couple months (I want to start vising it soonish though). So you would need a powerful computer. Email dustin dot geeraert at umanitoba dot ca.
http://i.imgur.com/1Xx46PC.jpg
Hopefully I won't screw this up. Bind "snap vertices" to the space bar and make sure you give it a tap every time you're faffing around with the vertex tool! (or the clipping tool!)
Seriously. Plus you eventually get a feel for what kind of geometry is possible and what's going to give you nightmares down the line. So I spent a lot of today just getting the start area sorted for my quake like id did pack... It intentionally very much like the original game, but I am going to make it a bit more unique once you go to the episode choice area (not actually made that yet)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mye0mljt0ix935r/ss1.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/nt3mv1lb9xa1unz/ss2.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/n7jjhyi3swc2v1t/ss3.jpg Not Quake the way id did... perhaps Quake the way Raven (or Romero) would have done?
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/qtwrd.jpg I have played Tronyn's start area thing. It's epic on a scale you wouldn't believe (really, it's fecking huge). :P
I think after all these years, acknowledging the highly unrealistic nature of Quake levels in a meta- fashion, is fine. Arguably, stuff like Kell's e1m2 with its floating pieces of rock going into the skybox, similarly admits this.
I think it would be cool if it were in Latin, and said initium
nowhere yet, it'll be released with the final version of DRAKE (my goal is by spring day 1).
but, the tech people, whom I massively admire, have made things easier, so I'm hoping to release the whole thing within like 2 months. nice to see you still around Shambler, approximately 15 years after you refused to review my first map.
@Fifth, I know you are going for the whole ID vibe in your maps but it feels too similar to the original. I know you have done subtle changes, like extra floor detail but I was expected more differences.
@Tronyn, wow nice large epic start entrance, it feels very greek style to me, maybe have the start text in a greek style font and try 'begin' or 'enter' instead of start? I would prefer to see the screenshot in colour. This is the only room which will be so close to the original game. Once you get to the episode selection the differences will be much more apparent. There are some very small homages but it is all brand new stuff, promise!
haha tronyn, 15 years since shambler refused to review my first episode as well! he was offended I even thought he'd consider putting it on his site.
re start map, fifth that just looks like id's start map. what's the difference? if you're going to do big changes to the other maps, why not the start map as well? it could have a lot more detail added. You'd be surprised at how different they actually are side-by-side. Mine is meatier with more detail and more defined lighting.
I might do a second pass on it once it's finished to make it feel a bit more unique anyway. I don't want to overdo the detail though as id maps were simplistic (and my intent is to actually release more maps per year). Did some more work on the dam interior.
http://i.imgur.com/9dUwQhP.jpg http://i.imgur.com/efaZ1RH.jpg http://i.imgur.com/c5Nn3TT.jpg WTF was he playing at??
On the plus side there does seem to be a correlation between having early maps rejected and then becoming a prolific and consistently good mapper :P well also Shambler, as you pointed out, at some point the general quality of maps became so good that even someone's first map was worth reviewing
Nice architecture and texturing, but the lighting looks flat - maybe take some cues from sock's maps to improve it?
I replayed the Alkado Crisis just before this "issue" raised its head and... not that it stopped me from being in awe back in the day :)
@Mechtech: wow.... really nice and awesome arch texturing... hats-off..
haha distans I didn't even know that episode was still online anywhere, I thought I'd eradicated it from all existence!
we all start out somewhere making crap before we get decent. i guess to get pretty good it could take a good 50-100 hours, depending on the individual and how patient they are to improve. i wonder what some of the early id levels were like, because I bet there was some early stuff in the learning phase that didn't make the cut. what did they do in the first 100 hours of level development... Some the the textures are from The Florentine Library by Sock. Still doing broad strokes. I want to get to the end, whatever that's going to be and fill in the monsters, lighting and skill specific stuff. I also want to find a good subtle fog setting. Any suggestions? using Fitz
The models are nice, but they do look a bit flimsy when compared to the big rustic architecture of Quake. Got to thicken up the details a bit to prevent it from looking 'unnaturally realistic'. I think you could do some interesting things with the ceilings not typically seen in Q1
Gotta agree with the comments about thin details looking wrong in quake.
Quake's combination of low-res textures and lightmaps, and lack of smooth light shading across polygon facets, all combine to make fiddly details look weird and wrong imo. Quake is best when painted in broad brushstrokes I reckon, although strangely the super-thin fence/bar stuff in czg's honey worked really well, so add the usual arse-talking disclaimer to my generalisation there. but it does happen.
Usually these are minor details anyway. thinness can look good in quake.
In that screenshot, i'm not sure i can pinpoint the problem. One issue is probably that the thin bits aren't anchored to the rest of the scene in any way. Are they touching the floor? The pillars? I can't tell. Adding a thicker vertical post at each end of the fence and having that touch the ground in a believable way might help. Or adding some sort of metal bracket where they touch the pillar could work too. One thing that helps make things look solid in quake is shadows, and when objects get small enough, they don't cast shadows anymore. This makes it harder for them to be believably in the scene. That's why a wider or thicker brush where the thin bit meets the wall or floor can help. http://celephais.net/levels/rubicon2/images/rubicon2_02.jpg
These aren't as thin as your brushes, but the principle is the same. I added a chunkier bracket thing where the thin poles meet the wall. The bracket is fat enough to cast a shadow. Adjusted some light compile settings
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/titan2s2.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/titan2s3.jpg I'll give quaketastic a break
http://www.mediafire.com/view/028wke2ooorn7ay/titan1s4.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/iefc127htz5j57j/titan1s6.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/z5bzvv11fg7ljma/titan1s5.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/0knsi0aa3dsdabd/titan1s1.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/5zdi9f0u6wfdgyq/titan1s9.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/27r6fy8cwl7c62r/titan1s3.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/dr0i48rcnubq85b/titan1s7.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/kjumljsb59lkikh/titan1s2.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/mm1ktk30fshrjel/titan1s10.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/8yn6b8nspmghlqr/titan1s8.jpg mechtech: looks interesting but i'd relax the colours a bit, just make everything closer to white while keeping a little bit of the colour.
A (hopefully final) beta of Titan1.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/2vdtbb0ci47af46/titanbeta7.7z Requires Quoth, recommend Fitz. Skill levels easy=more Quake hard=more Quoth Try easy first, hard is hard. Please email with anything. Email in profile I always saw it as not so much him being a prissy bitch liking one mapper over another rather than harboring bandwidth in general back when that actually cost a bit of money. I downloaded a lot of maps from his site (on dial up over 8 real world hours away) and I honestly have nothing but appreciation for him doing that on his own dime. If you wanted to see every 3rd rate map out there back in the day then that's what fileplanet was there for.
That being said fuck you Shambler for never even looking at my first offering. It made me stop mapping and start looking at maps too critically... (actually none of that is true and it's just the pain meds saying that. I've never really put anything out there and I'm my own worse critic that even that priss Shambler couldn't put to shame.) But I do like knowing how the game works which is what ultimately keeps bringing me back here reading what you insane fuckers have to say... So there is that I guess... Fuck me my back hurts. Feet shouldn't be numb unless there's snow involved. I wondered why I never saw the weather lightning in Quake. So I took a pix into fimg and ended up here.
As a static model keeps on going I stated the last frame on self.nextthink = time + 10.0 which is a blanc frame so it isn't vissible. So now I have a weather lightning within 10 sec. breaking my head how to add sound and light simultaneously. File is on quaketastic/models/bliksem.zip The great thing about it is that, just like in the real world, the light and the thunder do not ever have to match up and in fact should rarely ever match up (honestly, if they ever do IRL you are probably fucked). That means that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the sound lagging by up to 10-15 seconds from the modeled bolts and light flashing. It would be harder to attenuate the sound depending on the time between flash and rumble if you randomized the (x)(distance) factor.
Didn't one of the expansions have an ambient thunder thing going on anyway? Not too hard to do really if you think about it. One more pass in Light with a _sunlight of 500 or whatever for one or two frames and a rand_sun(x) worldspawn tag. As long as you don't get over 4 dynamic lights (so 3 plus the lightning) even Vanilla Quake should be able to handle that. I must agree I totally believe what you say.
My qc attention is less than thunderstood. When I made my static entity I knew there couldn't be sounds or light attached to it. Already glad a sprite appeared, now I'm trunked again wanting to add sounds and lights. The lightstreaks could be animated better. Ambience thunder relays me a sv_startsound not looped. I'm not trying to discourage you. I'm just giving you some input. Thunder would be, in my opinion, a great addition. I'm just looking at the technical difficulties and nothing more. Preach is probably the one to talk to on this. If anyone can hack that into it it's him.
I'm a bit of a dummy so how would that get plugged into a level? If it's a quake.C thing that's fine but I like to make no assumptions on what someone can or cannot do that aren't using very standard editing setups.
Have you ever thought of writing a new progs.dat with the Those were intended to be modifications to the code that MadFox supplied with the model, they would make sense to nobody if you weren't looking at the QC file supplied. The step-by-step would actually be something like
* Get the qc file from MadFox's download * Add it to a clean quake source file * (Make the changes I suggested) * Add skylight.QC to the list of files in progs.src * Compile the mod Not too bad, but you do have to get all the qc compiling stuff to do it. I don't know how much you'd gain from rewriting the progs from scratch; you'd make a bunch of unintentional changes that would annoy people, and probably not get enough benefit in return. My plan is to keep posting things up on the blog to share any good stuff I come up with (and as a teaser I do have a fun bit of code in the works right now!) @quaketree - ever since I played the addon pack I had the feeling:
great, thunder but where are the skyflashes. Now my knowledge lays closer to qc I can make that happen. Great you give some feedback how to make that happen. I'm just more dummy to understand how it works if I don't have the strings excact where they belong. @Preach - Yes, that was the thing I'm looking for. Maybe had to ask it in the modelling post, but now I can tinker on with the code. The lights were a mystery to me, but that's a neat fix. I loaded the sound management from necros to see how to add sound, but my compiler failed. Well, let's see how to make this lightning pak. You don't need necros' sound management in this case - that's for sounds that loop continuously without a pause (but that you can stop and start at will). The sound from the thunder can just be played each time the bolt strikes - the crucial difference is that it's ok for the sound to finish and go silent between lightning strikes. So you can just use the single line of code above...
Right, the sound is great now, just lowered the looptime to 15 sec before it gets annoying.
I see the lightstrike is rather pale, and affects the light by dimming it. Maybe I shouldn't worry too much about inside light, as long there are windows. I suppose the light can't be brought back to not-lightned for an instance? here is the file so far. though I think it would have been cool to have the lighting done as the lightning model used in the LG gun... Definitely a cool start though. Couple this with some rain fx (I'm sure there was a mod for that) and you could make a really creepy haunted castle/mansion map
The line:
lightstyle(0,"z"); is what's leaving the lights on. The letter in the "quotes" is saying how strong the light effect should be. Some examples: "a" is pitch black "e" is quite dark "m" is normal lighting level "s" is brighter than average "z" is as bright as you can go. So in order for the lightning to not be permanent, you need always end on a lightstyle(0,"m"); not "z" like the current code does. @fithelfant - making the tesslacoil I used a bold beam to reach the player. Not so easy to make it a split beam. There is a beamcode in the chtong map, but it excludes doors.
@Preach -I see, great to see those parms, shouldn't know where to look. Good to make it go from dimm to bright. Still it feels a little bleached. I dug into the SOA code, it uses a lightning code that can make it fullclear for a moment. "TheCrypt" has an example, where I expected such eyecandy. Timing will be a cripple problem with a static entity. Updated the the weatherflash with blitz.zip on Quaketastic with sound and scattered light.
Although the framecycle for the sprite is 15, in game it appears 17-32-47. So there's a delay of 2 sec. Trying to use progsref for adding a flash fails going out of pattern. I think it's because the static entity is apart of the game engine. Thanks for support, Preach! Mechtech - Titan1 looks great, nice strong designs and funky details. I agree the frilly stuff is a bit frilly, I also think some textures could be toned down, but keep this one going for sure.
Titan2 is not my style, it looks like HL1 in the Quake engine. I can see some designs and ideas are cool but I think the style needs to be made more harmonious with Quake and it's monsters. RingOfQD. Nicely detailed but please just go ahead and make a map!! ...and this is what i have so far
http://i.imgur.com/5ceLd8F.png Those that have downloaded the test map. Let me know if it works. If anything is broken, if it crashes. The textures, lighting and layout are done. I am interested in game play breaking bugs. If it's done I'll finish the second map and be DONE.
The whole thing started with this level from Duke3d. http://www.mediafire.com/view/hc4g06mwcm165ep/e2m1_01_small.jpg That was amazing back in the 1996 beta map http://www.mediafire.com/download/2vdtbb0ci47af46/titanbeta7.7z Greetings,
This will be my first public release, titled DARK CITY. It is intended to be a non-linear survival horror experience. http://i.imgur.com/rx6SeRf.png http://i.imgur.com/BWKdEQZ.png Beta to follow in coming weeks, time permitted. Screenshots you take in game will always look stupidly darker when viewed later. Increasing the contrast and brigthness by about 15-20 tends to fix that.
I should take both possibilities, that the map is too dark and that the screenshots are a misrepresentation, into consideration.
However, I might explain further that part of the non-linearity of the map stems partially from the need for players to activate electrical generators that turn on lights to reveal new areas. So in many cases I have to make sure that the light is dark enough that the player will not see or be able to access those areas until the have toggle the appropriate lighting. Perhaps this makes screenshots a bad way to go, lol. For brightness, just make a histogram of the screenshots, better than eyeballing it.
Though it will always be ridiculously dark, cause it's Quake. I'll try that. I also started using fade multipliers. Here I've tried extended the geometry and added ambient light:
http://i.imgur.com/raIyx4O.jpg nitin
They do? How is that possible? https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/Untitled-1%20%40%20100%25%20%28Layer%201%2C%20RGB8%29%20_2014-02-16_07-20-27.jpg Metal map plox? https://www.quaddicted.com/_media/pipeline/blackrock1.jpg
I still have it at about 70% done. Unfortunately, I had it tested and it needs a lot more work to smooth out gameplay and it hasn't been detailed at all.
yeah on my monitor settings they look fine. It's calibrated but I assume most people's are and so it just comes down to different displays doing things differently.
look too dark on my monitor. and of course my monitor is correct and all of ya'lls monitors are wrong.
Willem is on the money. If 99% of internet images look spot on brightness wise (to everyone) and 1% doesn't....guess which ones are wrong??
Quick Willem, post something retarded about modern gaming so I can start disagreeing with you again :P http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gamma_calibration.php gamma was dropped by
....relatively bland wall detailing / textures, those get a thumbs up from me. I like the classic styles with a few tastier details.
First thing I can criticize in each shot, just with a glance, trying not to look too closely.
Shot1; Maybe give the steps a different vertical texture? Shot2; small intense lights on the red runes could work, bright red with wait 4. Shot3; are there lava balls jumping under the stairs? Shot4; ambient_drip Shot5; maybe pull and push some of the big green bricks in the main walls to break them up a bit. It's looking very promising! # makes no sense to change the tex as these are brick tile things
# no coloured lighting in this as the original game had none (next stand-alone map I think I may do something like Stark Monstrosity with coloured lights and stuff) # no, but thats a good idea # already got my ambient drip there # The detail in there is already much higher than the original game, I am almost tempted to *remove* some detail!! distrans, Kinn kind of got why I changed the texture, a couple of my maps have the brown texture go grimier and greener the more you go down and get to watery bits. It still feels very id-like and quakey while bringing some freshness to the texture use. Overall I'm actually looking forward to making some Sandy Petersen style maps most, they were weak on detail but had some toughness which I tend to prefer in maps. On criticism and feedback: http://blog.42floors.com/thirty-percent-feedback/
I'm playing with Quakespasm. Sock, will your little warrior thingy be playable on it too ? Hmm ? Don't drop QS !
@Barnak, In The Shadows will still work fine with any Fitz type engine (Fitz, MarkV, QS) and now it fully supports DP features as well. Obviously Fitz engines don't have much eye candy but the core gameplay/assets are still present.
@mfx, it will be coming out soonTM ! :) Anyone mind testing out my doom map?
Just add me on steam and i'll PM you the link. http://steamcommunity.com/id/Breezeep/ I made this nice room but decided that it was too similar in theme to the previous map textures so I gave it a lick of paint.
Before - https://31.media.tumblr.com/168de3a9c815249384548af7c8503429/tumblr_n1t5wa8GIQ1s95hkno1_1280.jpg After - https://31.media.tumblr.com/268c2fd8568b48bf10e793b23434450f/tumblr_n1t5wa8GIQ1s95hkno2_1280.jpg The walls are much better in the first one. In the second one the repeated green vegetation pattern becomes very obvious
It needs less chunky and more detail, its the year 2014! :P
On a serious note, the lighting looks very flat and even across the room. Try to break the symmetrical torch arrangement by the doorway under the stairs. The banding of the textures looks too neat and tidy for the vertical space, the upper dirty bricks should extend downwards more and be uneven in vertical size. Feedback is feedback, 5th can easily just ignore what I suggested if he wants. I think it is better to comment than saying nothing.
Id's original level design already exists, there is nothing wrong with adding your own flavour to things, otherwise its just a perfect copy. The idea is "like id did", but I think there are areas which are similar enough to the game that I may get a bit of negative feedback about (and already).
I've tried to make the lighting as varied as possible to mask the large flat walls. But it probably needs a few more tweaks. Why not have the swamp bricks just along the waterline, like they've been affected by the water but the ones further up are dry. Could put some decals on the plainer parts of the wall too. Or even cage the torches off to create some cool lighting effects. The roof could have some lighting effects as well.
Got back to extending the Daikatana menu...
http://i2.minus.com/irXk0cibBM5HB.png Greebles, too much! I need some brand new spanking skyboxes for my ITS mod and I downloaded the latest Terragen. Compared to the previous version I used years ago it sure has a lot of new menus and buttons to play with!
First try at a Terragen 3 Skybox, Moonlight Crater Don't like the new GUI... really confusing to me, reminds me of the new Kismet system for Unreal.
You have a thin stripe of brown bricks on the floor (second shot). Something tells me it wasn't intentional.
but other than that, looks great. maybe some chandeliers or rafters to break up the uniformity of the central vault?
Pillars in the middle could go a long way too. Anything to create a little bit of parallax goes a long way.
The shadows cast by the wall torches. It's almost like some sort of fake AO effect.
I wonder if an AO technique could actually enhance the base quake aesthetic. All the big bulky architecture could possibly make it look really nice. It looks fantastic in Minecraft (I think they use some sort of fake AO effect there) and really makes the blocks pop. I've never seen a Quake engine with AO and I can't force it on in any of the nvidia drivers for Quake engines. Eh a bit of a tangent :) Nice shot anyway, agree with others re: door. It should be brighter. I think some ceiling detail is needed as well. Perhaps some supports coming down from the ceiling into the room. If you map using Radiant you could do a test with Q3bsp + Q3MAP2 inside FTE or DP, which has the 'floodlight' and 'dirty' compiler switches. Essentially a form of AO. It can also do bounced lighting. Otherwise just spamming a ton of large radius low intensity lights in a 3D grid kind of works, though it won't give you the high res crispy-outlines kind of AO.
I just remembered Slapmap's awesome lighting technique.
http://slapmap.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/outdoor-lighting-and-fake-g-i-in-quake-with-examples/ yeah that is bloody good, as as the chap says himself, it's fairly easy to spam a load of lights around like that.
That said, AO done in light.exe would be nice That looks great, and is basically what I was rambling about :)
Something like that works great outdoors, I wonder how it could be used for indoor stuff as well. Perhaps creating an array of minlights around prominent indoor light sources as well? I would have to test it but it could work. The shadows cast by the wall torches. It's almost like some sort of fake AO effect.
I wonder if an AO technique could actually enhance the base quake aesthetic. All the big bulky architecture could possibly make it look really nice. It looks fantastic in Minecraft (I think they use some sort of fake AO effect there) and really makes the blocks pop. Unreal (1) had a nice effect that I always liked as it made things seem really solid - I think it just darkens the seams where polys meet in a concave way. Also, q3map2 has the -dark switch, which "Enables darkening of lightmaps at brush/lightmap seams. Sort of like a half-assed occlusion pass, ends up looking a bit Unreal 1-ish. Very subtle." I'll add it to my tyrlight wishlist... It did make it virtually impossible to do rounded concave corners that didn't look like ass though.
I always assumed Unreal didn't pad edge pixels in the light maps, causing interpolation to leak in the black margins around the edges. I'm not sure if that's what was happening or it had something to do with the light attenuation formula. if it always darkened edges the same amount it wouldn't be good, but if it took into account the angle between the faces and interpolated between vertices, it'd probably be pretty awesome.
if it always darkened edges the same amount it wouldn't be good, but if it took into account the angle between the faces and interpolated between vertices, it'd probably be pretty awesome.
Yeah i assume it's shaded based on angle The chandelier implies it's a housing environment, now it looks like it's asking for some more decorative elements... tables and book cases near the walls maybe? Floor rugs? Perhaps experiment with the lighting, making the chandelier the primary source? Maybe some wooden bars across the ceiling holding a secret? Just keep doing your thing, sir!
I wonder if an AO technique could actually enhance the base quake aesthetic.
Lun3DM5 has zero pointlights and 100-something sunlights. I really wish q3map2 supported Quake1 :( I think I might rely too much on "realistic" light sources (torches and lamps). Do you use fill lights often? If so, what kind of attenuation? I usually add a zero-fall or inverse light with low value to create AO effects like that.
A few years ago I modded aguirre's light.exe to support AO without hand-placing hundreds of lights. The thing is that the "sunlight 2" feature already auto-generates hundreds of lights, but the code clamps the result so that everything looks flat. If you take out the clamping and reduce the intensity of each of those lights, you actually get something that looks like AO. However you need to improve the distribution of those lights to get equal light from all directions of the sky -- the default distribution doesn't spread the lights out uniformly since it doesn't matter when you clamp the results.. Problem: hundreds of really dim lights run into precision problems, so you'd need to do some changes to the intermediate math so you don't lose a lot of precision. But it does look good. I should probably clean up and release that code.
yeah, i'd be interested in that too. i hacked in AO/GI with sunlights but I didn't change the light level data type so you'd just get integer junk which looked ok, but didn't give much control.
I would love to have a play with that light util if you get some time to release it metl!
I think the transition from wall to ceiling is a bit abrupt, maybe another layer of trim would do the trick. Especially with the protruding wall columns. Maybe lower the brightness of the wall torches a bit and push it some more on the chandelier? The torch lighting trick linked earlier might also help sell the lighting more.
This was more evident in the old shot before you put a chandelier in front of it:
The curved ceiling in the first area extends all the way down the hall, but you cap it off with just a 45 degree slope. If you used the same barrel turned sideways & intersecting, the regular square ceiling tile texture would bridge across the seam with perfect alignment. That's exactly what I ended up doing, Luaran. I decided to move on from that ceiling at that time because I have a tendency for myopia.
I have a mapping question posted in the help forum as well. Thanks This is the very first section of my map where I believe I'm ready to get advice on the difficulty and monster placement, etc. It is very short scene, but I tried to design it so that the player has a choice in how the approach the battle:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/wjznnigdhkn9shi/dom.bsp I don't really use coloured lighting in Quake, for some reason it never seemed to work as well as in other games I've mapped for, but how does this look?:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/colorhall.jpg I also just suck at lighting in general, which is why I usually make outdoor maps (heh, lighting Arcanum was such a pain in the ass). IMO lighting is the easiest part of mapping. Less is more is my motto, use less lights but use them effectively. Cast big shadows, make the light at the source nice and bright for contrast and don't over saturate the lighting to make things washed out.
not feeling it Tronyn. Have to agree it is pretty OTT. minimalism isn't really your thing though...
Or an N64 game...
Red should be bright red but any other colours should be closer to white, I use paint's colour picker to set values that play nice with quake's palette. In the shot you've got a lot going on too close - you're going from red to blue and where they mix you get a muddy purple / pink that isn't doing the brushwork any favors. Try an only ents where the blue is 192 192 255 and the red ones have a wait of 1.5 or 2. Those are just hunches, I'm not great at lighting either. No doubt some of the masters here can give better advice. Oh, and avoid using delay unless you want it for a specific special effect - it's like hotsauce, useful on the right meal, but you can't drink it on its own. And if you like your hot sauce, you'll know there's a right time for the green or red, the matured, the smoked, the pastes and the smoked. Those being parralells for delay 1-5... Yeah, I'm eating while typing this. Woah there!
There's just too many colours. I would remove all the different colours being emitted by the various stain glass windows. Change all the blue ceiling / floor lights back to white and just keep the orange candle light and uncommon red wall lamps. Or even better, remove most of the candles and use normal light, and have the candles+orange light be a nice contrast. You could use the candles to draw the players' eyes to things. I'm gonna dissent a bit from what to change, although I agree with the general feeling it might be too much. I'd say lose the bright red light in the back, it's too distracting and has unfortunate 90's coloured light overdose connotations.
I'd also replace the dim blue spotlights. I can see where you're going with blue tones in the shadows and warm tones in the brighter light, but it's easier to do that with a slight blue tint to unsourced light and warm colours in the spotlights. Blue sourced light seems a bit odd. Keep the orange candles, everyone seems to like them. I also like the blended colour effect coming from the downwards vertical spotlights, so keep that up. I guess there's something with stained glass going on from the right, but it's hard to judge if that's working from the angle of this shot. fuck that, make them more saturated!
and make the flash too!! on a serious note, i find it doesn't matter what colour you pick as long as there's sort of one main colour of a room. then you can use a colour wheel to pick the second colour if you really have a hard time with just eyeballing it. http://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.htm
Also, only make them flash if you can do it in time to the masic and maybe use some rotatings with alpha to make strobe laser effects. + white fog. Maybe you could stick to exactly two colors that could be mediated by white lights. Representations of dusk usually combine a light blue and tan, for example.
Valve used to have a great article about use of color in Nova Prospekt. Can't find it now. There is this:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Color_Theory_in_Level_Design I think that IF (and it's a kinda big if) you are going for a more surrealistic look then it has possibilities.
If you're going for realism then just no. That lighting is totally wrong. Think American McGee's Alice with odd floating bits for no reason other than to have them be odd floating bits (which may or may not be important to getting through the level). Have some fun with it and get a bit outside of the box with what you do. Be creative and people will respect you for that. That being said... Colored lights are very tricky, less is more in almost every case and if you do use it it has to be consistent across the entire level/episode (unless you use it to indicate a secret or some other important element). Look around the real world and there are very few instances where the lighting isn't white or close to it. Colored lights are used to attract attention but not for task lights or for everyday living (unless you live everyday in a LSD induced fog). I like it! See some comments inside the demos. https://www.quaddicted.com/files/temp/dom-beta-spirit.7z
Scale of the table felt off, that room needs detail too. Skill level seemed high normal or hard. Maybe have one knight patrol the big room? I never realised how different things looked on different monitors.
On my normal screen it looks pretty bad because the colours come out saturated and therefore very artificial. However, when I looked at on another monitor with both contrast and brightness set high (and I mean way over the top) I thought it looked great because there were no saturated colours but the colour was still visible. (do I remember someone releasing a discoQuake map where Ogres were dancing? I'm sure some collaboration would result in something er... different) thanks guys
it was definitely very Quake2 (I had the blue lights from Warehouse in mind). I'll post a subtler/modified version later. I quite like the way some of the lights mix into different hues, it just clashes with the Quake aesthetic (it does look very 1997, haha).
I think you should keep experimenting a bit more, never know what you might come up with. The Terminator 2 movie evoked the colors of a California (polluted) sunset by using blue and orange color gels:
http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/09_moviesequelsbetterthantheoriginals.jpg?w=480&h=320&crop=1 Also, if you wanna switch it up you can use warm ambient and cold direct light. Mappers rarely take that approach.
my favourite thing which is also really easy to do is to set sunlight/minlight colours.
Bright yellow sunlight + low (10-30) dark blue minlight can bring almost any outdoor scene to life. Another interesting combo is sikly yellow sunlight + vibrant green (but 10-30 intensity) minlight. well no, i do mean normal minlight. but 10-30 is very dark anyway. just enough to give the blue colour and it's dark enough that you can still get nice shadows.
it's only when your global minlight starts going over 50 or something that it starts looking bad because it's just too bright and all your shadows disappear. with MH's version based on Aguire's you can. Maybe tyrlite too?
sunlight: _sunlight_color sunlight2: _sunlight_color2 minlight: _color and actually... now i come to think of it, it's not the minlight you would add color too, it's sunlight2 because you only want the colored shadows outdoors which is what sunlight2 is for.
sorry about the earlier post! forget the shit i wrote, obviously i am getting it wrong:)
My anti-knowledge is self-embarrassing as fuck.. Necros is right, thanks for explaining, now my map needs some retouch i think.. I abuse global minlight. My lighting abilities are abysmal so I use lots of monsters to cover that up. With your help I will light my next level properly.
In solidarity, and with Jesus' love. often means you have to make the lighting unrealistic or impractical for it to look nice. I will often obscure lights in a stupid way to cast shadows, in a real-world situation you'd be a maniac to do this but for a game it creates interesting shapes and can often disguise more simplistic geometry (id often did this for this very purpose).
Lighting large areas means putting a wide-area light (or multiple) inside the skybox, this is almost the same as having minlight as you get large coverage but you also get the advantage of dark shadows for contrast. I find lighting the easiest part of mapping, the hard part for me is making interesting combat situations (especially when it comes to end of map combat as a big finale) and run around it with "r_lightmap 1"
It might be that we're used to Quake having all white light, it might be that the palette doesn't work with a broad range of strong tints, or some of both, but there are really almost no cases in Quake that I can think of where even remotely saturated colored light (more than 10-20%) actually looks good. Maybe lava. However, as with any lighting, subtle colors well-chosen can look terrific. This is true in any game, but especially Quake. i've been having good luck with infinite lights: the shadow cast by the beam in the first shot, and the starlight in the second shot is from one point light on each side of the skybox (it's currently a map inside of a giant cube of sky..)
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ericw_station_1.jpg http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ericw_station_2.jpg The red light from the slipgate in the first shot is probably oversaturated. For the second shot, I need to do something with that wide swath of flooring, for both gameplay and visuals. The brushwork and lighting is good, good work!, but
And are you using blue fog? it goes well with the brushes at the bottom, but doesn't look so well for the sky. Maybe it is that i never got the fog right in Quake 1 - First shot looks very promising.l Maybe some detail in the wall around the door, make one of the panels go 8 units out of it. Where is the transparency? I can't find it, RoQ. I got interested. - About Tronyn colorful screenshot, i agree with Quaketree there, could look good on an otherwordly theme or for a for the fun map. But above everythihg, keep trying, maybe you'll get something unexpectedly good. I miss the experimental maps that we saw a lot back in the 90's, even those that looked terrible visually. Now the trend is professional looking maps. Not that it is bad, but more variety would be good. thanks for the feedback. The textures in the second shot do clash, it's sort of two bases in one map (an idbase-textured base, and a rusty ogro and speedbase textured base). I'll try to do something to fix the part on the right where the rusty wall panels are touching the idbase chunk.
There is a faint blue fog, yeah. "0.015 0.01 0.02 0.04" maybe it's too blue? The bars of the ogre cage are a doom sprite displayed with a (quoth) mapobject_custom. I love sprites! Only problem is they render as fullbright, so you have to have a bright light on them to hide the fact. you can see the grill sprites by the slipgate in the first shot stick out because the brushwork isn't lit enough. ijed, yeah a crate maze could be good, I'll try it out. I miss the experimental maps that we saw a lot back in the 90's, even those that looked terrible visually. Now the trend is professional looking maps. Not that it is bad, but more variety would be good.
Thank god we still have Madfox 8-) ... isn't experimental, his layout is. His brushwork, more than classic, should be classsified as idish in style.
Recent examples of experimental maps, i would say, Nyarlahotep, ITS, Ascending as descending, sm170, sm172, etc. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/q70v05b.jpg
I haven't goten any good lighting into these after hours of tries. I want it so the monsters are lighted when they go near the torches but are mostly in the dark the rest of the time, but i don't want to lower the torches even more. I suppose the answer is doubling the number of lights, but http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/q73v03_400_3.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/qep73v03c_400_2.1.jpg Any ideas for this ceiling? Nothing i tried convinced me. The lighting will change in the future. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/qep73b03.jpg if you can't figure out what to put on a ceiling, just cloak it in darkness! :D
for the first shot, there isn't much you can do to make better lighting there because the brushwork doesn't really allow for anything. if you had rougher stones and things jutting out that could cast shadows, that would certainly help. for the second and third shots, try putting the light down by the base of the pillars instead of high up and put them in the little corner where there's the inset arch so it casts shadows. looks like it's coming along quite well. one thing i really like about doom mapping is just how fast moving the whole process is.
just be careful with doing the lighting effects because if you need to change the area later, it can be really annoying having to deal with all those sectors. it's fun and easy to get into!
doom builder: http://www.doombuilder.com/ slade (in beta): http://slade.mancubus.net/ Seriously though that's a potentially interesting bit of topology for moving/fighting around, and I've always liked the mossy-block Quake texture set as being one of the "most Quake-ish". Keep fiddling with the lighting.
The full version of that texture set has a lot more textures, but for some reason I don't have it in a cloud service anywhere.
I'll check on my local drives tonight for it. * Brown96, that looks good. Work on the lighting and, that angled brush at the left, looks unscaled to me, but maybe it is the perspective. That many health packs make me think that it is for a big fight, so i got wondering which kind of fight culd be pulled there.
* Faethon, Mechtech, i have some demos for you. When i get some time i'll send you them with some comments with. the healthpacks are modified with QuakeC. with another spawnflag, they give only 2 hp. there is a total of 48 hp and 100 armor to be had in this room, and you will encounter a total of 2 wizards, a hellknight, and 4 knights. given that the nailgun is found in this room with 75 nails, it feels "about right" for my skill level.
http://i.imgur.com/1SMAxNL.jpg i still haven't messed with the lighting in the previous area yet. i intend to do so over the course of the next day or so. thanks for the feedback. Found the textures. I'll prepare a neatened up pack.
They were painted for RMQ and feature modified / expanded sets of the id1 textures for the most part. Should I email them to you as well Spirit? reminds me of the Bad Dark Cistern a bit, or Round the U-Bend (hey negke and than, how about more Dm-for-SP remakes, such as dm2?).
Texture sets armed up and sent to spirit, you can also get them here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6uahnrw014qztfg/rmq_textures.zip The wads contain work by myself, Gb, OTP and probably some others. The textures are based off the id1 textures and designed to fill out the gaps in the sets. Often there's a cool texture in id1 but you want to expand it into a style a bit more, which is what happened here. The rotmet set is the one mentioned above, and is an entire texture set based on a single texture from id1; met14. https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_blumet.wad.jpg
https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_brownmet.wad.jpg https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_city.wad.jpg https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_darkmet.wad.jpg https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_graves.wad.jpg https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_redtech.wad.jpg https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_rotmet.wad.jpg https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_techsludge.wad.jpg https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_torturecorpse.wad.jpg https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/rmq_trans.wad.jpg I'm on the fence on these textures, some of them are just extended versions of the originals (ie, someone has just copy and pasted the tiles to make them bigger versions of the exact same texture). Some are just badly sprayed on...
It's not all bad, but it's more bad than good. Some of the darkmet textures have way too pronounced shadows and highlights. Not to offend anyone, but they look amateur. "Bevel and Emboss"?
The techsludge wad is also questionable. Some of the redtech stuff looks really cool, a nice compliment to a regular idbase map at worst. Especially those hybrid red-trim-on-idbase ones at the start of the set...
Except the second one.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/canon_coce.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/canon2_coce.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/Flipad_coce.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/Temple_coce.jpg Currently modifying the second to go more to the grid (it is a miracle it doesn't complain about the first, as there is almost nothing on the grid) and change lighting and balancing. Probably, I will use it later for some single player map. * About the textures, fist of all thanks to Ijed for uploading them. Second, i do think they are a nice addiction to id textures maps, there is one third that are questionable or just cheap as some of you already pointed out, but the rest can add a good variation to id textured maps. The redtech one is going to be on one of my maps for sure. It is a pity that i don't like runic theme, as there is some textures for details quite usable. bluemet has some utility, even if they are simply tiled version of the original.
darkmet has the best additions. Salvage the best of those two and release a single wad. redtek is just awful. Horseshit brown is just about the last color I look for in a sci-fi atmosphere. So, mrs Vore, what colour do you want to paint the dungeon?
Dogshit brown? Cowpat brown? Mouldy brown? Horseshit brown? Manky Brown? Smoky Ochre with hints of brown? Stale Coffee Brown? Third eye brown? Crate brown? http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag01.png
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag02.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag03.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag04.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag05.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag06.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag07.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag08.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag09.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag10.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag11.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag12.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag13.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag14.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag15.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag16.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci01.jpg
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci02.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci03.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci04.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci05.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci06.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci07.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci08.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci09.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci10.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci11.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci12.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/ceci13.jpg Ijed, that way i don't have to record a demo. Less work for me. :D
Those shots look very nice. Awesome stuff indeed, even thought i still don't like the brown brick texture, but now it looks better than in your previous shots. * Ceci02: that fog looks good. How you did the distorted effect on the teleporter? Looks eerie. * Ceci03: mixing a construction with a natural environment is something i always liked, and in this one looks nice, it shows, but there is room for imagination on what's farther up. * Cecia08: that looks amazing, it makes me remember of some UT maps or of the most interior room in the alien caves in Forbidden Planet (the first one, of course). * Ceci09: that provides a nice contrast with the rest of the map, with those white bricks. *Tfrag01: that water texture that end in an unexpected place? * Tfrag05: in the vicinities of the central pilar it looks impressive, as if there were something incubating in there, but when the rest of the brushes are pitch black, the lava looks like if there were some bug in there. Maybe with some brightness 30-40 delay 1 lights * Tfrag11: i love this, i love the fluids tank. * Tfrag14: after so many good looking small places, this ample place adds a good variety and it feels like a breather. The effect on the slipgate are thin layers of multiple func_illusionaries, with decreasing alpha values. Starting at 0.5, to 0.1 i think.
Not recommended, as this is purely a visual effect, and eats too many efrags. tfrag1 - waterfall
tfrag5 - Yeah that area is an unfinished secret, based off the altar secret in The Nameless City. tfrag11 - It has some functionality not apparent in the shot, you might have to play after all! tfrag14 - I avoided showing the other outdoor areas since I'm still tweaking them heavily for visuals. that response was off the hook - thanks guys!
These shots are exciting. Rubicon 2 was awesome, and it had that "partial conversion / mission pack / slightly new version of Quake" feel, so I'm really looking forward to going back to that world. If you guys are all using the Rubicon2 mod, you should just link your maps together into a giant "Rubicon 2 - 2" episode and release it during QEXPO. Or maybe you are already doing this and it's a conspiracy. I am now going to stop making annoying suggestions and go map. I will post some shots in the near future. ...after Hrim's second shot I just stopped. I'll be upgrading my system to guarantee playing this lot. Rubicon2 and variants forever!!!
jf2, Kingpin, Doom 2, cr8, and Jackboot. I try to learn from the best texture mixers (aka distrans).
You can grab it here: http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=45640
Pretty good map. IMO I think it suffers a little from not enough ammo near the beginning and also it's quite tough, I never realised that the Revenants rockets tracked the player until I played this map.
I got some recommendations from the guys over at the ZDoom fourms and I fixed some misaligned textures and an area were the player can jump onto the crates and over the fence to get the blue key. I've uploaded V2 of the map btw.
RoQ: Overall a nice little map for a first release. Demo recorded with ZDoom 2.7.1 - not sure if it works across quickloads, though.
Q1SP screenshots: Cool. Got a bit of time off at the moment to map. So map I have done...
http://31.media.tumblr.com/07f7aed7df3d7df279673c3c5013c1dc/tumblr_n43994mLmg1s95hkno1_1280.jpg http://37.media.tumblr.com/e5621833177bfaa1003db76f20dce773/tumblr_n43994mLmg1s95hkno2_1280.jpg If you don't finish that beast of a level I will cut you.
So many screenshots :O Looking good! In this case I'd agree that a bit more alignment might be good, and wouldn't distract from the ID1 stylization going on. Agree with mfx too about that particular wood seeming somewhat out of place in shot 2.
1st shot atmosphere is rad, can't wait to play it! The map has a lot of wood trims so that's unlikely to change much. Alignment is something I usually stick on top of as the map progresses, though I will be looking to get the next couple of maps tested before I do a second pass. The second pass usually involves refining everything and adding a few extra secrets (so the people who tested have a little extra something once it's released).
Rubicon shots look very cool, i'm excited to see this megapack when it's released.
P.S. regarding <a href="http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/tfrag05.png ">this screenshot</a>, you should give r_oldwater 0 a try :) probably a mistake.
My philosophy when working on fitzquake was that it was a drop-in replacement for glquake -- lots of people using broken glquake, so let's give them an engine that is better, but has the same defaults for cvars and stuff so their hand-crafted configs still work. Another example is gl_flashblend, which still defaults to 1 in fitzquake. Notably, both of these cvars default to the higher performance setting rather than the higher quality setting. This is due to targeting the same hardware specs as glquake, which at the time was reasonable. But this is a new generation of players at this point, and most people get recommended fitzquake who just installed quake from steam or are coming from a different custom engine. And they have much better computers. So I really should change all the cvars to give the best looking experience. I should really finish that secret. All the testers are disappointed when they find it, and oh back at least once, thinking I can't possibly have left something unfinished...
Oldwater? Ok. Don't remember what that does... I miss r_lavaalpha, r_slimealpha, r_telealpha. everyone who uses fitzquake or quakespasm should turn r_oldwater off (set it to 0). it makes the water texture warp completely smoothing (like it did in software quake).
nothing much here (hopefully some actual screenshots in the next few weeks, as I am finally about to have some spare time), but anyway:
q2warehouse-ish coloured lighting shot previously posted: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/oldcolour.jpg version with no coloured lighting: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/nocolour.jpg The more I think about it, the more the second one looks more "Quake." Btw it is a bitch to light those white textures especially in a level with no global minlight. I was going for foreboding: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/bw3.jpg and a random editor shot of more fleshy life forms interfering with things: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/noob%20saibot.jpg The more I think about it, the more the second one looks less "Regurgitated disco horror."
Definitely better. Of course wihtout colour is more Quakey, we are more accostumed to that in Quake. Provide both versions, if someone doesn't want the colour, he has it easy just by removing the
In the coloured version i like the violet coloured glass at the left. I think that more subtle colour in the rest of the lights is better for Quakey feeling. Non-coloured shot feels a bit dull, maybe it is just a feeling i have after seeing the coloured version, maybe it is because it is mostly black and white textures, maybe it needs stronger contrast in shadows or some spot that calls you to look at. The third shot is perfect. don't change it. It feels like a shot from a recent high-technology graphics game. Fourth is good too, maybe the texture used in the inner part of the window at the right RingofQuaddamage, i can't give you a decent opinion as the last time i played Doom was 20 years ago, but those look good, maybe less of that brown texture. quake doesn't have to be black&grey only. i like colored lights, just make them less intensive. only mild color tint here and there would be enough.
even to us colourblind, the coloured version is a rainbow overload. no colours pls.
bw3 is a work of art though! I still claim that a two-color light scheme could be used to great effect. Too bad I don't have any engines with colored light to work with.
Look to James Cameron's lighting techniques and try it again. Not a big fan of "smooth" lighting in Doom. Most of the time it doesn't look nearly as natural as lightmaps, but it eats a lot of sectors.
Just a personal thing, of course. I am using community chest 44 textures (by various people) deconstructed textures and a sky from Vrack 3.
It's simply because if you don't play a game, you're not familiar with the nuances of its custom content. Someone not playing Quake would feel the same way. Which is not to say that of the vast amount of custom levels there aren't indeed many generic parts that look alike.
Yeah well, Doom doesn't work like Quake at all in that regard. You can do nifty architectural stuff in Doom but nothing too complex.
Have you tried out some of the newer Doom engines? I personally like Risen3D and some of the maps made for it, especially the Egyptian themed one. If I were the type to give ratings I'd easily give it a 9 out of 10 (nothing ever gets a 10 in my book because there's no such thing as absolutely perfect).
I recently tried some stuff for Risen3D. Felt like going back in time to the mid-00s, when it was all about making Doom look "modern" without much consideration for exploring its strongest points. The models are straight from that era, very little has changed.
Although it's probably wrong to judge by one level that I didn't even finish. 10 doesn't have to mean perfect. It can mean, "Has my highest recommendation". Making 10 mean perfect means your scale is from 1-9. With 9 being perfect. And down the spiral we go!!!
"10 doesn't have to mean perfect. It can mean, "Has my highest recommendation". Making 10 mean perfect means your scale is from 1-9. With 9 being perfect. And down the spiral we go!!!"
I blame my navy days for that. Nobody got a straight 4.0 evaluation from me, including myself (yeah, I had to evaluate myself which was kind of pointless really). Nothing is ever perfect and I'm always distrustful of any score that says something is perfect. If you can't find at least one fault with something, no matter how small it may be, then you weren't really looking at it. I'd have to say that there are very few things that get that level of scrutiny and attention to detail. Generally speaking the worst enemy of good enough is trying to be the best, that usually means that nothing is ever finished because you're too busy polishing the cannonball to actually get it loaded and doing its job. So yes, I suppose my scale is actually 0-9 out of 10 (which is still a scale of 10 if you think about it). I used to really prefer the rating system of 1-5 in the old CVG mags.
1. Poor 2. Average 3. Good 4. Very Good 5. Excellent With this rating alone it would still make you want to read the article because it still feels less scientific than percentages or marks out of 10. Plus CVG used to have a call out box with a second opinion on the game. I really miss that mag, it was the greatest. If a game feels like it should somehow be worse than 1/5 they used to put little turd symbols all over the place. Now THAT is what Func_Msgboard needs. Every post that I have ever made needs that as an icon. Instead I'll use a crate, which is a sort of turd-ish thing seeing as it just sits there, takes up space, and is not something that people want to see.
I have a problem... my "quake like id did" is become a little bit more detailed than I intended... Oh well.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4b412mxcf71j37j/map4.jpg It's looking pretty sweet regardless.
Do you have any particular "rules" that you're trying to operate by, or are you more or less going by feel? (I remember that the DTWID guys really went hog-wild trying to figure out concrete aspects of the specific design styles of various Doom map authors.) I am making this entirely on my own and I don't really want to spend any time going through the minutiae of each mappers style. Generally speaking most of the maps in Quake could have been made by any of the other maps, *except* Sandy who had an almost doom-like style to his maps. I'm not even sure if I will end up finishing much beyond the first episode.
That also brings me to something else, should I release each episode as I complete it? I like the clean look of it... like if Id had spent the time making sure everything lined up neatly.
Its more detailed and clean than previous maps, maybe even to nice, compared to the others. Not that they aren't pretty in their own way, but this is different, obviously, and might stand out as such. The nice details within the map might slightly undermine the aesthetic of the pack overall... Then again, as a personal project, whatever. I'd also be worried that the project could get extended/distended if you start feeling the need to do that consistently throughout, if I were you.
I'd say that considering the relatively quick pace at which you made the previous maps, it would be a better pay-off to release episode-by-episode, or, if you can make yourself wait that long, until the whole project is 'finished' - whether that's a 'megawad', or 2 episodes, or whatever. That being said, one or two maps released early could, depending on your work/motivation style, give you the impetus to keep going at a fairly quick pace... who, other than myself, after a long day at work, and hoping to be constructive but worrying he is just rambling, writes like that? It is, I feel fairly safe generalizing on this point, a super fucking annoying way to write.
All too recognizable, I start rambling trying to articulate trains of thought. Rereading afterwards makes me realize I could condense stuff into a third. I even piss myself off reading some of my crap. Lol.
I decided to create a tutorial video, this is a test. I would love some honest feedback on it, I want to create a series of vids which allow someone with zero level design experience to easily learn how to map in a short space of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BisleGBgQ4w Do an intro. Something that lasts 10 seconds and has a logo with a cool name.
Script it; you tend to repeat words a bit. Even if you throw the script out you'll be more fluid and comfortable because you have practiced. Divide it into sections; Tools Compiling Editor Setup Engine Brushwork Lighting Entities etc. At the start of each of these would be a good place to show your cool logo again as a type of intermission. This will help users pause, come back to it, try things out etc. and keep their mental place in the video. Don't start with the func page - this should be something towards the end 'you can get help here'. Show a map in the background near the start before you get into the detail, like 'You're going to be able to build this by the time we finish'. Finally, finish with a preview of what the next video will contain. Maybe even break it up into lots of shorter videos covering the various topics above. This would allow viewers to jump back and forth and get to the video that explains the problem they're having. First of all, thanks for supporting TB, and a tutorial video is certainly quite welcome.
That said, I agree with everything ijed said. The video needs more structure and a script. I think if you plan ahead a bit more, you can make a much better video. Also, I noticed that you don't use orbit at all (Alt + RMB drag on an object). I think you it would do your editing speed wonders if you try and use orbiting more. I myself never look around without orbiting anymore - it's just so much more useful than strafe + look. I actually created a bunch of tutorial vids with a friend about a year ago and they were much better than this. He helped me do all the structuring and scripting (he makes films), but he's also very slow at making stuff and terribly unreliable at releasing things. I'm basically throwing myself into the fire by trying to make videos (I spent 3 hours trying to figure out why I was getting lots of noise and feedback on my mic).
The reason I posted my test video here was to get feedback on what I need to work on. I wanted to make the first video a very quick "set up and make your first map", I find if you get very quick results and feedback from learning something new then you'll want to stick at it. If you have to watch several hour long tutorials without getting any kind of results or gratification then the time invested will feel wasted for the pupil. Getting that first hurdle overcome will mean I can spend more time helping people refine their ability with TB. As for using orbit, I generally forget about it most of the time. I find the tool very situational due to the nature of mapping for quake. If it was solid space mapping that back culled the outside faces then it would probably feel far more valuable to me. I'd much rather have a forward/backward movement that I can make as fast or as slow as I wanted (and smooth rather than the incremental feel that it has now) and a smoother strafe. http://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/pixel4.jpg
Did a test for someone about making a pixel art FPS. Map format : FBSP (512x512 lightmaps, dirtmapping) Texture format: 32x32 TGA file, RGB (but indexed to quake palette along the way), using an image by Moondrunk Torch from SJ. :-s Sorry, I was too lazy to make huge square particles, but it's quite possible. Engine: FTE (SJ) M.C.Escher style is great! how do you navigate in there? Are you rotating the whole thing in game?
Or..? Just curious there's probably no real good way to navigate that in the fashion you would like to. I could imagine a set up using portals in unreal but it would have been tricky to do.
yes, Madfox gets even crazier!
Will your trademark animated machines be included? I have yet to see any game pull off an escher-esque environment (ie people shooting at you from different alignments) - I think Prey was probably the closest. -@mfx :
I saw the quake level of the villa of Escher and became so pleased that I wanted to try the other. Print through the animation master, I found a project of Buce Vo, which had a 3D version of it. Although it looked complicated, I made a model of Pepacura, and I was a little obvious. After I came out a couple of times drunk out of GtkRadiant I began to shift sections. Turning parts can work, but it pointing my eyes to my nose. -@5thfant : It looks a bit, but sometimes it is difficult to. Using wrong buttons if the screen is vertical, putting a ladder against the ceiling. @-Tronyn : Good idea, from now I'm thinking in func_trains that go my misfits way. Why not make it a giant harmonica that jugs from top to button like a LunaParc? That pulled off the "escher-esque environment" pretty well.
Or is this single player only related? I tried my hand at textures a few nights ago:
http://killpixel.com/textest.jpg From a picture of a rusty baking pan, I cut out horizontal bars and applied bevel/emboss to each one. The cool part is you just use the eraser to make the worn/distressed bits and the bevel/emboss as automatically applied. Slap on some grime and blend as you wish, shrink, sharpen, adjust hue/saturation and brightness contrast, index to quake palette and BAM, speedy textures. This set took about 1.5 hours total. Now that I know how to make textures I'm going to experiment with less generic designs. Beautiful! You might want to team up with http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5442 , which looks super promising.
Standart Photoshop effects such as Bevel and Emboss are cool for some quick results. Although it's quite important to not rely on them too much. Sometimes they can be a bit too obvious.
Ah, Inside3d. I noticed it's quite hard to get there. After around 2 months of waiting I finally gave up hope that my account will be activated in the current decade. @Spirit, thanks!
@JPL, for the amount of time, thought and effort that went into them I think they turned out pretty good. @dwere, agreed. However, using any effect or method injudiciously will look amateur. If this was anything more than "learn how to make textures" I would have fixed the glare atop the "1138" sign to dim as it moved away from the light source, among other things. I also understand these textures are about the easiest to make: Simple, geometric shapes with a noisy surface in shades of brown... kinda hard to mess that up. dwere, I fixed the rendering glitch for your model: http://sourceforge.net/p/quakespasm/patches/19/
I'd like to ask on inside3d if the change I made is reasonable, I basically just randomly removed a 0.5 offset from gl_mesh.c, and the results looked good :-) KillPixel: nice start on the texture set. Interesting.
They probably added this offset for a reason. But no matter what the problem was, their solution seems rather hacky. Thanks for bringing attention to this oddity. my guess is 0.5 puts a vertex on the center of a pixel, rather then the vertex being on the corner of 4 pixels. I can't say why it's there unless it was to emulate winquake, and obviously you're saying it doesn't.
Bear in mind you're gonna make some people unhappy by changing that 0.5 pixel offset - for example sock took advantage of it on some of his models to create "half-width" highlights on a skin at double the resolution the skin size normally allows details. The Quoth
If you say it's closer to winquake then that might justify it, but just be warned that the GL rules might have become the defacto standard in the mean time...even the software renderer in QME uses the centre point. Yeah, I guess glquake's behaviour for the texture alignment is probably more of a de-facto standard than winquake's at this point
This "different standarts" situation is rather sad. It pretty much eliminates the idea of pixel-perfect detailing. Even if you align everything for one engine, it will look like ass on another.
This "different standarts" situation is rather sad
I feel like I just had a discussion with someone about this. also: yay sock if every GL-based engine uses the 0.5 offset, and QME (the only native authoring tool for quake models?) uses the same offset, then it seems like this is probably worth keeping.
Probably if you want to "fix" this you should have a cvar that can restore the behavior of all other GL engines, since a lot of content has been made now with qME and tested in a GL engine. In fact what content HASN'T been made with qME? Yeah, glquake and winquake are just incompatible in this small way. I'd give the tiebreaking point to glquake, only because winquake alias rendering has a bunch of artifacts when it renders far away models and large polygons - the distortion is very high. It's harder to make the case for an exact standard based on an inexact renderer - even though it has seniority.
Disclaimer: I may be biased, on account of having carefully accounted for the glquake behaviour on several models and tools, not knowing that winquake behaved differently. ps: Loving those force-field walkways sock! fuck, you're just so good at this!
Also Lunaran, what ever happened to the grimy medieval map you posted shots of years ago? Sock, you've made look that even more fucked up and cool than what Neggers does with space maps. Sweet.
yay socks back and has been mapping all this time!
never been a fan of floaty space maps, but it looks sweet. fog is very atmospheric. has the most notes of any map I have posted on my quakeguy blog and I only posted it a couple hours ago (35 notes so far)
Also Lunaran, what ever happened to the grimy medieval map you posted shots of years ago?
it turned into five of them, with new monsters. dear god somebody help me that's the problem I find, it's more fun to build stuff and then expand it than it is to finish it
still I'm definitely looking forward to it Especially those 60+ likes I got on tumblr when I posted the image ;)
http://quakeguy.tumblr.com/post/85936164682/didnt-sock-say-he-was-retiring-from-quake-maps 60 likes? Pff, I got 130!!!!!!1123 https://www.facebook.com/8723859970/photos/a.10150277895379971.1073741827.8723859970/10150371386514971/?type=1
Still looking for ACTIVE volunteers to join the page, I lack talent at recruiting people who like to post stuff... Join now to gain a lot of internet power and fame. Wait... posting on func_msgboard is the secret Captcha for activating an inside3d.com account? That's even more selective than NeoGAF! :-)
I am at a dilemma, I started work on making the secret map for the first episode of "quake like id did" and it was going to be a low grav map. In-fact I was going to probably do 2 or 3 low grav maps in total, but I have learned that on standard quake it has to be named e1m8.
Here's the dilemma choice - 1. Have no low grav maps. 2. Name the map e1m8 and have just one low grav map. 3. Have multiple low grav maps and use quoth. I don't want to do #1 really. If I do #2 it means we get just the 1 low grav map like in vanilla quake. If I do option #3 then I could have a normal mode, a hard mode and a quoth mode (aka "quoth like id did"). I don't know how much of a pain in the butt it would be to balance for a vanilla mode and a quoth mode though. Any thoughts? #2 sounds good to me! But it's not like I'd lead a pitchfork-mob to your castle if you do something else.
http://mobile.sheridanc.on.ca/~jonescor/temp/progs.dat
add 'gravity' to worldspawn for custom gravity setting. which reminds of this mod that fixes every single aspect of quake....
http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60978 Option #2 is closest to the map pack title of "Quake like ID did it" IMO. I thought that the original concept was just to jazz up, expand and otherwise tweak the original levels as if ID had all of the time in the world to make them instead of being under a deadline to get it out the door.
Now that may mean that they might have added more secret levels with low gravity (I would think that that little extra bit of fun would have been something that they would have made the player have to work for before they could play it no matter what) but as it stands there is only e1m8 hard coded into the original engine which to me says that the "The way ID did it" part of the title means that that was a conscious decision, after all once the engine allowed for low gravity it would have been just as easy to make it a worldspawn entry. There is a simple workaround, if you are willing to make each episode it's own standalone mod in its own folder you can have four secret maps named e1m8 with low gravity without changing anything in the engine or progs.dat. It's not like anything carries over other than the episode gates anyway (the sigils too) but that's just to activate the episode gates and allow entry to the final boss battle with Shub and there is a simple workaround for that too by simply making it tie into the final exit in episode 4. The main downside to this is that it forces the player to take each episode in order instead of allowing for them to pick and choose (and the Nightmare skill teleporter might have to be moved). Just my 2 cents... A quick scan of the progs.dat that necros posted looks like all that changed was that all of the "Official" map names (e1m1 through e4m8, all of the DM maps 1-6, Start and End maps) now allow for gravity to be set. I also didn't see what I saw in the joke progs where all enemies were turned into spawns. Adding a custom progs.dat is not an issue and to be quite honest you would have to do that anyway because if ID had unlimited time to roll out Quake they would have caught the fish kill count bug and fixed it anyway so no harm, no foul.
I don't know what that prog fixes. I have no coding skills so unless someone donates a fixed one then it will just be the low grav...
The idea isn't to spruce up all the id maps but to make an alternate universe quake. I kind of regret calling it that since it definitely feels much more detailed. I don't even think it will run on the original engine.
If you don't mind asking, why not? Unless you're breaking the original engines limits that is. If so I get it and I completely approve (not that my opinion matters a bit of course).
One of the things that I forgot to mention in my previous post was that I almost positive that your project would break the limits set by the hardware of 1995, and why not? That was one of the issues that ID was facing and why there was a much more blocky layout. I think that any Quake level should still have that blocky feeling (at least in the background) because that's part of what classically defines it (and the original models wouldn't look right if that blockiness wasn't there anyway) but with todays tools, engines and hardware there's no reason to not get a bit more detailed or add more surfaces to draw at once even when you know for a fact that it's going to break the original limits I was under the impression that you were going to basically keep the general tone of each level, add some new areas to explore, move some secrets and maybe add new ones but in the end keep enough of the original levels general idea to make it recognizable as such while switching up the gameplay to make it fresh again (that's what the similarly named Doom mod did so that's what I assumed here). Was I wrong in that impression or have you changed your vision as to what you want the end product to look like? I'm not trying to sound whiny here (especially when the whole thing is going to be free anyway so there is no reason for anyone to complain) but there is only what I've read here written by you to go on and the screenshots are few and far between. With all due respect and not meant as discouragement but QTWID not running in the original engines would be a major disappointment.
I wanted to address this separately because I wanted to make some very specific points on it.
Alternate universes in fiction (and lets face it, Quake is set in a fictional world) have things that are the same yet different (sometimes very different, but still recognizable). For example, even though they share a lot of similarities in settings in a general sense, Star Trek is not set in the alternate universe of Star Wars. They are two very different universes. I hate to sound like a Trekkie but if you look at how they did it the bones (not the doctor) were the same. The ships were similar in layout and overall feel, the enemies were similar (although they may be the opposite where who was once an enemy were now your friends and vice versa) and so on. In other words you knew what was going on was in an alternate universe, there were enough similarities to know in a general sense where you were but you may have to do things differently to complete your goals. As a simple thought example, in the original Start.bsp the easy and hard level teleporters might be swapped in an alternate universe where reading was from Right to Left. In that universe it would make perfect sense and not cause anyone to bat an eye but would certainly draw comments in the original Quake universe. I'm not saying that a simple transposition is the answer but that the basic idea's could be the same while still being very different in implementation. In another example e1m2 has a lot of things going on as far as choices for the player to get around. In an alternate universe some of the original ways to do things would have to be kept while others wouldn't be there but replaced by something different. Secrets, weapons and ammo may or may not be in the same places but the same amount and types would be there, that sort of thing. Continuity is the keyword here. The player has to be able to say to themselves "Hey I've been here before but it's different now". Let the levels that you are re-imagining keep the bones of the originals. Then you are doing a "Quake as ID did it" because those bones are what helped to make Quake in the first place. Otherwise you are just doing another original mod or map pack and that may or may not stand out above the others. Gimmicky gravity might not be the way to go unless you do some careful thought on it first. Again, just my two cents and that's not worth a whole lot these days. I respectfully disagree Shambler.
There are at least a few (free I might add) engines out there that are at least as good as the software 1.0.8 and GLQuake ones that do allow you to break the limits. Unless you want to play on a x386 with 8mb of ram and maybe, if you are lucky, a 260mb hard drive there is no reason for not being able to break the limits, not anymore. If FifthElephant wants to keep it inside the original limits I have no problem with that (what I said was pure conjecture, but I did expand upon it) but it might limit what he has said in the past about what he wanted to do (he was after all recently considering switching over to Quoth which is so far outside of the limits that it's not even close to being original Quake, so consider that). But ultimately it's his project and it's his call. I'll respect his decision either way and let the work stand for itself in the end. If it's no longer what the name implies, better call it something else. People take issue with those things.
IMHO do what you think is best. Whether or not that conforms to some nostalgic pre-existing name based bias is another question.
look at the original qsrc world.qc
================= void() worldspawn = { lastspawn = world; InitBodyQue (); // custom map attributes if ((self.model == "maps/e1m8.bsp")|| (self.model == "maps/insertyourmapnamehere.bsp")) cvar_set ("sv_gravity", "100"); else cvar_set ("sv_gravity", "800"); ============ that should do the trick something like that I agree 100%. But it's a take off of "Doom the way ID did it". And that is not something that would ever run on the classic Doom engine. It exceeds the Doom limits in almost all respects and requires engines that exceed those limits, which is why I said that I expected that this would exceed the Quake limits.
Did I say "Exceed" enough? That is kind of the point of these types of things. Quake made as if almost no limits were there to keep the original level designers constrained to very limited The concept was never to run inside the limits of the original Quake engine (and apologies to FifthElephant if I ever misrepresent this, that's all on me) but to take the original levels and tweak, twist, modify or otherwise change them to be the same, yet different. All while not worrying about original limits. He's (apologies to FifthElephant if you are a she but he works better in text) is trying to re-image the original Quake levels in some other way. From past comments made by him I was just trying to remind him and the readers of this thread of what he said his idea was months ago. Mission creep sucks and all I wanted to do was to nudge him away from it. The sentence is "Quake The Way Id Did It" not "Quake The Way Id Might Have Done It If This And That".
Doom The Way id Did doesn't exceed any vanilla limits. It was designed to be as close to the stock levels as possible.
Doom The Way ID Did does run on the classic engine. The whole point of the project, and similarly FE's Quake The Way ID Did, was to make (new) levels that look and play like they could have been part of the original games, as if made by ID themselves. It does NOT mean touching up on the stock maps or making overly detailed maps that break vanilla engine limits.
I'm also of the opinion that the QTWID levels should run in vanilla engines, otherwise it would defy the goals or the idea of the project. How can they exceed the limits anyway - one should think that smaller, less detailed maps wouldn't even come close to having any of such issues. If they do, there's clearly something wrong with the design. At the end of the day, it's FE's decision how to proceed. However, I would be very disappointed if it turned afterwards that tweaking the levels for vanilla limits was possible after all. This is a lot of text.
I will probably be disappointing many people with this project. The first couple levels will very likely run on the original engine but the last two maps I made I went a bit mad with the details. The maps are supposed to be like an extension to the game not a revisit of the originals. I think if I went back and took out all the details just to make it run in the original exe people would be mad. I might just give it a name like the expansion packs and let it be its own thing. People will still see the inspiration from the original game I am a mere lurker, but I think a proper QTWID should be a community project where detailed id style analyses are used to vet and refine maps, just like DTWID. Studying the DTWID site and Doomworld discussion threads would be a good first step. And of course all maps should be vanilla-compatible. Anything else does not follow the TWID ethos and should really use another name, IMO. I very much hope someday a proper QTWID is done, and it would be unfortunate if the name was already taken by a set of maps that follow a significantly different design philosophy.
using winquake and all the maps except map 3 run fine.
The only problem is map 3 took me quite a long time to make and is fairly elaborate. I dont think I could go back and rework the entire map. I think I would have to redo a lot of it from scratch. Honestly it may be unsuitable for redoing as it's just too detailed and too much of the map is visible from any one point. As for making QTWID a community project? I did make an attempt to do this and the guys here ended up doing a speed map session that ended up only 1 map really feeling like it was made by id. Which limits does the third map exceed specifically and by how much?
Community projects don't work here anymore, unfortunatly. There's simply too little of an active mapping community left. The geometry is disappearing, probably too much shit visible on screen. So you can see into the void in a number of areas.
This is the only map which has this problem. I'm probably going to have a look at making some cuts to get it to run in vanilla. Oh. I thought you were talking about the hard limits that crash old engines. Technically, according to the rules disappearing stuff or grey flashes shouldn't occur in TWID maps, indeed, mut this is not that much of a critical problem in comparison. It can be alleviated by adjusting maxsurfs and maxedges in software engines. Of course, if you could optimize the areas a little more, it would go a long way. Still, no end-of-the-world problem as it sounded at first.
Aren't there already tonnes of maps that are qtwid (ps shouldn't it be qtwidi, what happened to the 'it'?), just play anything from 96/97/98 and they're all within original limits and mostly id textures.
What exactly is Quake the way Id did it anyway... small, blocky, underdetailed levels? Is that really what people want to play now? I'm all for creating some levels inspired by the style and design that id did, but "extremely under-detailed" shouldn't be a prerequisite. You can make an id themed map with detail. I wouldn't worry about a custom progs and it not running on the original engine. Is there anyone at all that would actually attempt to run this in the original engine at 640x480? I'd still be playing it in dp. in standard quake. Probably still needs a tiny bit of tweaking but it's pretty much resolved. (Just chopped down on detail a bit)
The detail I have reduced isn't going to be missed, the map has still retained the same feeling. I think once I am done with this pak I will make a much more detail intensive map like I did with q-deck. This should restore balance to the universe. According to the DTWID site:
"The idea behind this project was to imagine that the original Doom had more maps before the release, but they were lost. The mappers tried to simulate the work of John Romero, Sandy Petersen, Tom Hall and achieve that authentic id-feeling in their maps." Achieving that id feel entailed analyzing Romero, Petersen, and Hall's individual mapping styles/habits and refining submissions based on community feedback to better emulate those styles. You can see how the project developed and find some great design analysis in this gargantuan thread: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/52046-dtwid-public-beta-5-released/ if the name causes so much offence (spiney was rigth re RMQ reference) call it soemthing else and still do what you think is right fifth.
Community projects don't work here anymore, unfortunately. There's simply too little of an active mapping community left.
Sadly this is the state of quake mapping nowadays, but there are a few people still around. It really depends if the project is going to be organized properly and actually finished! if the name causes so much offence I get the impression people are concerned because the project name means something special to them and feel it is not going in a similar direction to the previous doom project. After reading the first couple of pages of the Doom project it seems the doom community spent a lot of time analyzing and trying to understand the original authors building styles and design ideas. I assume this is what Fifth has been doing, but his design process has not been visible to the community, hence the comments. Here is an awesome quote from the Doom thread that could easily apply to Quake mapping: You do know that the main reason the stock episodes looked the way they looked is because: 1. id had to make suire the levels could run on a common computer from the early 90s. 2. Romero was a better level designer than Petersen. I would say that to create a level that mimics Romero you would have to throw away all bells-and-whistles off today and follow the rules Romero made for himself: * always changing floor height when I wanted to change floor textures * using special border textures between different wall segments and doorways * being strict about texture alignment * conscious use of contrast everywhere in a level between light and dark areas, cramped and open areas * making sure that if a player could see outside that they should be able to somehow get there * being strict about designing several secret areas on every level * making my levels flow so the player will revisit areas several times so they will better understand the 3D space of the level * creating easily recognizable landmarks in several places for easier navigation There shouldn't be this much of a debate. It's not like Fifth is planning on reinventing the wheel with a tiny mod, he's just trying to redo e1m8's key feature. Blame Romero for being a lazy dicklord who could've easily made gravity a worldspawn key/value instead of doing a shitty hack.
The goal is to make maps that emulate id's, who cares if it's /id1/ or not. Is it 'more' like id did it if he has to use an entity hack and break save game compatiblity? id would never have shipped a map like that. They would do it right in code. Besides, done in it's own Blame Romero for being a lazy dicklord who could've easily made gravity a worldspawn key/value instead of doing a shitty hack.
Actually it was American who's been responsible for the main QC coding Just wondering why the id had never fix all of the qc bugs although some people may be getting a bit butthurt (and not really, even) *I* certainly can't condemn anyone for that even if they do and actually this is a good design-based discussion. I just hope 5E doesn't take any of it for discouraging since it's great to see episodes still coming out these days, episodes are easily among the most exciting releases. The idea of an e1m8-inspired map obviously knocks my socks off as well (it's true though, e1m8 is arguably cooler than e3m5, yet it hasn't got tributes).
I just hope 5E doesn't take any of it for discouraging since it's great to see episodes still coming out these days
People are just expressing opinions, ultimately its Fifth's project and he can do whatever he wants. Its certainly not much fun to hear lots of people moaning about your project idea, but there are plenty of people who will love it regardless of what direction it is going in. Stop it
The reason FE is being publically criticized and subsequently shunned is not because of the mod, but the fact that at least one of the maps exceeds old Quake's visibility limits (*).
Thus the blame isn't on American McGee for employing hacky code, but SleepwalkR for releasing an editor that encourages detailing! Hold on, there was shunning? Did I miss the shunning? Aw man. It's been a long time since I could get a good shun on.
Maybe I should just released it without telling anyone that it didn't work on standard quake to see if anyone noticed... ;)
You could take the offending maps out of the pak and release them separately.
Or leave it all as is and call it something slightly different. id tribute pack, or, something. Or: just do whatever you want! it's other people who are apparently having the heart attacks. I am looking forward to your release more than the next sock! But the QTWID label might invoke different expectations than what you made. Either live with some bullying from pseudonymous internet twats or name it QTWITIMHDID.
will have to put up with for the community based new UT development.
I probably shouldn't have brought it up...
Fifth, I think that I made it clear that you can, and I encourage you, to make it the way that you want it to be. There can always be a QTWIDI-2 or whatever. My comments were purely based upon what I recalled about what you said that you intended to do way back when you first mentioned it several months ago (December-ish I think). Whatever you release I will play through and based upon QDeck I think that it will probably be pretty good. I personally would stay away from Quoth though. That kind of goes outside of the whole "The way ID did it" part. If you do go with Quoth I would suggest changing the name. Is what it will turn out like. When they realise they actually do know how to make UT better than all the gibbering internet fucktards do (as proved by the previous 4 incarnations of the game).
Is what it will turn out like. When they realise they actually do know how to make UT better than all the gibbering internet fucktards do (as proved by the previous 4 incarnations of the game).
Pretty much? I had thought this was true from the outset and that this was mainly a way for epic to generate buzz. designing a game by committee is a disaster waiting to happen as everyone tries to pull in different directions and I have to assume they are aware of this. Can you make the antennas pointy and much taller, and stick impaled guys on them because that's what I do in every map I make...
Uh, I mean, good work, keep going :) Shame sock didn't put a clothline with a dirty sock as a credit easter egg in Zendar like I suggested. Perhaps this map is another opportunity.
"Pretty much? I had thought this was true from the outset and that this was mainly a way for epic to generate buzz. designing a game by committee is a disaster waiting to happen as everyone tries to pull in different directions and I have to assume they are aware of this."
Obviously every community suggestion won't be taken at face value and blindly to the game. There's a difference between developing a game "for the community" and "with the community". The latter, which is what we're doing, comes with implied curation and filtering and iteration. is the worst idea. However!
I think a lot of people feel very passionate about their games and what makes a good one (I got a lot of feedback, I will take it). I think a lot of people really understand what made UT great in the first place. Things that I hated about the newer UT games were the bland colours and the stupid American Footballer style proportions on *everything*. People who will actually make some UE4 prototypes, instead of simply spamming the forums with walls of text, will be listened to by Epic first and foremost. I wonder if that was an intentional way on Epic's end of encouraging people to subscribe.
This topic is about screenshots. C'mon guys and worms, show us more pictures of Quake maps in the works. I want an erection !
Yes, prototypes are the way to go if you really want to make an impression. Words are great, but if I can fire up your blueprint sample and PLAY what you're talking about
"Or lots of interns." As a first pass filter, maybe. Ultimately, it will have to be looked at by someone at Epic - likely me - before it goes into the game for reals. AAA games are already designed by committee, may as well have the gamers on that committee too. Even if all their suggestions are fucking stupid, they are likely to lead to better gameplay than what your art lead is suggesting.
The point was to prove that a 90s style look is possible with FBSP, q3map2 and FTE, using non-paletted (ie RGB) TGA textures.
The idea was to demonstrate that technology is not per se a hindrance in achieving that look. Or marketing, production, creative dictator(s), other designers, parent company wanting to 'help' and of course, the client.
bloated, distributed teams are becoming a thing of the past. The industry has changed so that more agile and focused teams are more effective. Hopefully this will mean the end or at least attenuation of committee design. Still a long way to go though. My title is games designer, which really means facilitator. Random brain rambles, but I wonder how many of those stories of "the publisher ruined our game!" are actually true.
I know it happens sometimes but I think at least some of those must have been smoke screens. Sometimes a game is just shitty. :) Not trying to excuse the oinkers I've worked on.
Biggest culprit for a bad game is a bad team and/or teamwork. This can be caused by morale though, and there's nothing for lowering morale like a command from on high that's counterproductive and must be done anyway. "there's nothing for lowering morale like a command from on high that's counterproductive and must be done anyway."
Sooner or later, no matter what field you're in, you realize that The Wire describes your workplace. From my experience, it was a little of column A and a little of column B. A mixture of directionless idiot leads, with a Publisher (who happens to own the studio) who just wants to flip Call of Duty shaped hotcakes off the griddle. So you go from atmospheric horror/puzzle game with time travel mechanics, to mediocre and forgettable shooter with time travel story.
What game are you talking about scampie? Singularity had time travel...
A lot of games suck because there's a mass of dumb cunt gamers though don't know what good games are. The younger console market who just want to do STUPID FUCKING MINDLESS SHIT like minigames and running over pedestrians and collecting pointless crap like new outfits for your character. I've been playing far too many of these open world sandbox games lately that seem to be more about just fucking around doing random shit with your mates over while eating pizza, instead a really amazing gaming experience. Unfortunately, that seems to be what brings the money. Dead Rising 2 is the current one I'm playing through and I'll take any COD game over DR2. @nitin, yeah this weekend hopefully.
@necros, yes this is my skybox. I bought the latest version of Terragen and have been testing out some ideas, this is one of them. @ijed, the architecture is a cross between runic and base. The towers of runes are suppose to be topped with metal antenna poles. No spikes or bodies for this map. @negke, never been a fan of easter eggs in my own maps, just simple secrets is enough. @rest_of_the_idiots, seriously start another thread "UT dribble" or talk in general. This thread is suppose to be screenshots and feedback. >:( I have nothing but respect for the team that came after and actually finished it.
But I can only relate my time during that story... and it was not a very happy time. Change them for Sentinels?
Those are a bit more runic than tech and don't have the dodge behaviour. Man up, you pussies. Bobs are much less annoying than any other Quoth enemy.
Sentinels are most likely too slow/poorly visible for that environment. Bob is rad for its retro look (rivaled only by Floyd from Rubicon 2) and death sequence (I dunno, I just like it).
Really interesting read. I enjoyed the little I played, but the the shoddy DRM (game freezes when not connected internet) broke it for me :(
Steam is DRM enough, I wish publishers would stop bogging down their products with this crap. Cliche up, negke, you macho nob.
Actually, sentinel's slowness would work well in the void I think, it could add some vibe to it, especially if they have patrol routes. I should have faith in sock, I doubt even Quoth can ruin his reliably fine gameplay balance.
Man up, you pussies.
The new enemies are belligerently unfun. Each one feels like Doom3's "bludgeon the player and call it a challenge" design philosophy brought to Quake. I could tolerate this at first for the sake of playing cool maps from the community, but it became a dealbreaker when some in the community made clear their attitude that it was my fault. Quoth can apparently only be appreciated by people better than me, because I'm a pussy. I won't even read the news post for a new map farther than the word Quoth anymore, regardless of who made it or how cool it looks, because I already know everything I need to. For sock, I'd make an exception. Good thing Quoth implements impulse 205! Doom3 was challenging? That's news to me.
This is how Doom3 "bludgeoned" the player: "Ok now, we're gonna spawn not one, not two, but THREE enemies in your general vicinity. Be ready, we're giving you all the ques that this is going to happen... hey, here it comes, get ready. It's coming. Aim your weapon, use your WASD keys. Here it comes. We're gonna spawn them one at a time, just in case you get flustered, ok? Get ready. Actually. Nevermind, here's a scary sound and a medpack." NIGHTMARE mode was such a missed opportunity in that game. They had the chance to offer a challenging difficulty setting, instead it's just veteran with decreasing health :| There are two sides to the issue, in my view. I agree the gameplay in many Quoth maps can easily become annoying, but is it because the enemies are designed in a bad way or because the authors use them in a bad way?
Probably a bit of both: It seems to me they were intentionally designed to be more difficult in order to provide a high-tier supplement to the stock enemies much like the occasional fiend and shambler in a base or medieval map. However, authors often use them as replacements for regular enemies which results in a much harder overall experience rather than situational difficulty spikes. So perhaps a misunderstanding on both parts. Designers wanted high-tier supplements while mappers expected normal-type additions for extended variety. Add to that a possible veteran player mindset on both sides and the result is frustrating gameplay. I don't mean to bash people for not liking the new enemies, prefering less taxing combat, simply being not as hardcore players as others. Shambler being the exception of course! :) However, in the case of Bob, I don't understand the hate it often gets. It's not unbalanced in terms of health and damage like several other Quoth monster; the only thing that sets it apart from the regular enemies, in a positive way IMO, is its unique attack behavior which I don't consider difficult to read and master at all, there's no randomness or unfair behavior. I had no idea people disliked Quoth's gameplay until, I think it was with ARWOP, someone said that Drake was just like Quoth - I thought that was a good thing but apparently not!
Personally I think Quoth is great, but apparently I've underestimated the traditionalism here, even though I didn't even use a skybox until 2008. Anyway it's nice to see forum activity and Sock screenshots. discussion goes where ever discussion currently is. over the long run, the thread will go back to it's original purpose.
I think relentless is a fair assessment of some of the Quoth monsters. On investigation, I found that sometimes they were literally more relentless than stock monsters in nightmare. When the patch notes for 2.2 say that the "contrast" between nightmare and other skills has been increased, translateed that says the worst offenders have had such behaviour shoved into nightmare where it belongs, and more resemble Quake creatures in skills 0-2.
I get the flak Quoth receives despite my personal love for the additions on offer, but I've always felt bob criticism was weird -especially after he got retooled. his pattern is very easy to master, I think.
I think that sometimes designers will design a monster that's numerically in line with Quake monsters, but put one in a test box with a pillar in the middle, easily kill it without being hurt, and think "oh, I need to make that way harder." Thing is, every existing Quake monster fails that test too. You can even (laboriously, with practice) solo a Shambler with the axe just by doing the "shambler dance." The danger of a Quake monster doesn't come from its abilities, it comes from how those abilities overlap with other monsters, with surrounding architecture, with where the player's attention is focused, and with how his movement is constrained.
Meanwhile, the whole Quoth menagerie has homing shots and perfect leading shots and hitscan attacks with no anticipation frames and every new dude is like his own miniboss. this is supposed to be the screenshots thread You're right! http://lunaran.com/pics/lunsp2/lunsp2_0019.jpg to people complaining about actual discussion taking place on this forum for a change: Calm down.
I really liked Singularity, it's an underrated game. I didn't realise it had such a scrappy development. Ironically I think it's a better game than Wolverine Origins in pretty much every single area.
Funny that it had such big issues running in ps3/xbox - the levels are all pretty small and linear for 2010. I know there's Hellraid, but I always hoped Raven would be able to return to their roots. I guess I hoped for the same thing with Human Head. Hell even with id, since they've done nothing in 10 years that reminds me of their old stuff. I especially suck at letting things go, but from Heretic 1/2 to Call of Duty franchise work just depresses me. We all know the masser the market, the dumber, but I'm sure all of us have seen the same commercial influence corrupt things - the parallels with music aren't too hard to see.
Fuck yes. Love the moldy mildew monolith deal you're showcasing there. I'd say I can't wait to play it, but I guess the last couple years prove otherwise. That shot has me more excited than Sock's though, which is saying something!
reminds me of the atmosphere from another game, cant quite remember what though! But love it.
i love the massive height of that hall. something that might be a cool theme would be a map where every room and hallway must been taller than it is wide except where absolutely necessary.
For the common sense - see, you ARE capable of it.
But, it's not just about the difficulty or the imbalance, it's about the annoyance - Bobs are one of the easier Quoth enemies, but fighting them is annoying due to their size, dodge mechanics, and distracting attack. For one of the maps, I've set the goal that the player starts near the very top of the valid grid, and the exit must be near the very bottom. All (or nearly all) the 768^2 maps had the player start at the bottom and ascend, which is a very natural progression to the point of being the default. I wanted to see what the hurdles were in designing a map where the player is always descending, deeper and deeper, without just stacking locked chambers.
http://lunaran.com/pics/lunsp2/m2editor_side.png Discouraging shortcuts is tricky in a game without falling damage, as is creating combat scenarios where monsters below you are still threatening. When I build it out for real it'll be fun to transition the visuals to an extreme degree as you descend, so it feels like you're disappearing into the bowels of the earth. yes, i've tried going from top to bottom as well and those problems are why i never followed through with a complete map.
finding ways to stop the player just jumping down without flat out putting walls everywhere is a huge challenge. I am curious to see you complete this map just so I can see what you end up using. :) an unreleased version with bugfixes someone here sent me. it was either necros or negke. anyone know where sikkpin's gone?
I like QE3 because it still scrapes a folder full of *.qc files for /*QUAKED*/ comments, so I can document entities as I create/change them in the code, and not have to faff around with maintaining a separate file. Also because it's basically Radiant. :) necros, having lots of death pits helps. I made a chart of the maximum distance a player can leap horizontally given 'x' height difference, so I can make areas visible down below the player that are just far enough away that a flying leap still sends him into the void. you can also use a ceiling a bit wider than the floor, so if you try to drop down you'll slide straight down the side of the ceiling brush and past the ledge. it's still possible sometimes to nail a gentle keyhole trajectory between the two if you do that, but it's hard enough that it probably falls under "speedrun tricks" which is okay. I like QE3 because it still scrapes a folder full of *.qc files for /*QUAKED*/ comments, so I can document entities as I create/change them in the code, and not have to faff around with maintaining a separate file. Also because it's basically Radiant. :)
i now feel like a complete buffoon. i had no idea it could do that and would always copy/paste the comment block into a separate file. god damnit that is a massive time saver. how do you set it up to do that? set your base path to your mode folder? f5 to edit project, and change "Entity File(s)" to "c:/games/quake/sickmod/src/*.qc" or whatever.
seems like id used @Lunaran, lovely mouldy look, I thought you had finished that map? Is that green or black fog at the top? Are you reworking the textures?
More Metal Pixel Pimpage - Runic Prison Are those from the wad I uploaded a while back?
Metal is great. You are obligated to keep it clean and 'bland' for want of a better word... Gah this is a fun hobby. one thing that would be nice for metal would be an ikbase style set with some angled textures for a bit more variety.
Are those from the wad I uploaded a while back?
No, I started with two large rune sheets from my favourite metal map by Kell. I then extended the rune shapes into larger panels and created a collection of colour/style matching metal trims and door structures that also work well with the id runic set. I even created runic light fixtures with horz/vert versions for correct rivet shadows. The final set has enough panels and trims to create enough variety for edges and large set piece objects and not feel out of place next to id runic pieces. The wad and source map will be included in the metmon pak file if anyone wants to play with them in their own projects. sock, I've already had to rethink a bunch of visuals in the first couple maps because you one-upped me so much last year, please don't make me have to rethink the metal map too :(
...Which is an upcoming jokewad for ZDOOM.
Really love shot one.
RoQ, not bad... make your screenshots smaller though jeez! ;) oddly, shot 1 was started and completed in an afternoon. I wish all areas went by so effortlessly :(
all shots are very WIP, btw. Is pretty sweet also.
In the second shot the stripes of light are coming from the left? (outside of the shot) The third one also has an interesting indirectly lit look. In the second shot, the stripes of light are coming from the top.
When I first started this map I knew nothing, not even that light had properties that could be manipulated (falloff, angle, etc) so I thought of this little gimmick to kinda get light the way I wanted it. In shot two, you see a little bit of a white light texture in at the top, it's illusionary. Behind it is a shaft with a bright light at the end. This allows you to focus bright light into any shape you want, in this case, a rectangle. By moving the light closer or father away you can change the sharpness of the projected light. It's a cool effect. You can have very controlled bright light in otherwise dark areas. The contrast becomes even cooler when enemies move between the shafts of styled light. Now that I know how to change light parameters It's not my go-to way of lighting, however, I still use it for it unique effect in certain areas. Here are some very early shots, the top right was the first use of the shaft light method. http://www.killpixel.com/kpcn/KPCN_old.jpg The Rune of Black Magic is whispering dark secrets into my brain, Scoob!
http://secretfunspot.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/50-scooby-doo-background-paintings.html?m=1 love those scooby-doo backgrounds.
I love how they light the nighttime scenes with shades of blue. I wonder if this was an influence on lucasarts adventures (esp. monkey island) which has a similar style A few days ago Lunaran posted a pic of a really nice looking Quake4 map. Upon looking through the rest of the screenshots, this caught my eye.
It was sexy and I knew I'd seen it before, like here in Doom3 or here in Quake2. These areas use tall, pillar type brushes that look structural. In between them you can place walls, eye candy, or whatever. It makes mapping flexible and it looks cool. Ordinary walls now have a bit of interest and the utilitarian look if the beams/pillars adds believability. So, since I'm over a decade behind on mapping theory, I gave this idea a shot. This also gave me an excuse to give making textures a second try. BAM. It's generic as hell, but still cool. This is part of the big map I'm working on. The new textures will seem jarring, as there aren't any others elsewhere, but, meh. Download the map and take a look for yourself, or Download the textures if you'd like to use 'em. are those your textures?
If so, some advice: 1. edges of features should line up with pixel boundaries in a consistent way. For example, your floor texture has 4-pixel wide openings, but the space between openings seems to be 4.25 pixels, so the third slot is obviously The wall vent in the top right screen shot, far right edge is an example of repeated features completely not lining up with the grid, so they are all blurry and weird looking 2. repeated patterns like vents and ribs also should be powers of 2 in size. This way even when mipmapped down they retain their crisp readability. Your floor vents are good because they are 4 pixels wide with 4 pixel gaps (once you fix that gap width) so even on the third mipmap they will be crisp. So try to make things 1px, 2px, or 4px in size, and gaps between features should be 1,2, or 4px wide. 3. All of the textures in your screenshot have almost the same color across the entire texture. It's a very flat, brown look. Adding some sort of contrasting material color can really help make your textures pop. It doesn't have to literally be a "Color", it can be more brown but of a different value (for example you have one panel that is slightly darker brown, try making it even darker so it stands out against the lighter brown you are using everywhere else. It can also be the same color but a different saturation, for example taking that brown and fading it almost to a dirty grey color. And of course you can add more of a real color too. The red pipes in some quake2 maps is a good example of color that pops well. 4. finally, a good way to maintain color harmony with different textures -- once you have more than one color :) -- is to make sure that in any given texture, some pixels share the primary color of other textures. The quake palette helps with this of course. if you look at the quake metal textures, the grey textures have blue pixels and the blue textures have grey pixels, so the eye sees those repeated colors and it pulls the whole scene together better. Textures that don't look good together often have no common colored pixels. @necros - Thanks!
@FifthElephant - IF you do, you might wanna download my first attempt at textures and mix them in for some much needed contrast. @metlslime - Thanks for good advice. I fixed a few other textures that suffered from the misalignment issues you mentioned, but then just got lazy... I should fix these. What they would look liked mipped never even crossed my mind, nice pointer. And yes, they're all exactly the same color. I should do something about that. hehe... looks like Alien3. And your final point is very nice, I'll put all your advice to use my next texture making go around (third times the charm, hopefully). Tell me what you think of this idea, and if it's not a very good one on a technical level: I planned on greyboxing an entire map, focusing purely on gameplay. Then making a single, giant texture for each wall, all uniquely drawn. It's basically like megatexturing quake style. I think this could yield some really cool results, however, my technical ignorance causes me to wonder how bsp/engines would deal with that. Just imagine: a map without any tiling textures, just a big, uniquely drawn canvas full of detail... It's worth trying but you should do an early stress test to see if it's even viable -- there are a number of steps in the texture loading pipeline that probably never had to handle 100s of megs of texture data. You'll probably need a giant -heapsize, for example.
Also, map load times will go up linearly with the amount of texture data to load. I like how quake takes 2-3 seconds to load a map. Changing that to 30-60 seconds doesn't sound like fun to me as a player. "Tiling textures are really just a crappy form of compression." -John Carmack
"No, they're a great form of compression." -Lunaran Carmack 1, Lunaran 0.
yes killpixel studying the level details of lunaran and others like him that are good at architecture is the best way to improve your mapping skills. Speedmapping could be a great idea with this set :) Totally Doom-base style (which I love).
<3 Carmack will decide on a viewpoint that he finds "pure" and then use that as the justification for a huge amount of decisions that must be correct because they're derived from a pure assumption.
We all heard the story he kept trotting out about "being able to see what brick will pop out of the wall" in a cartoon because the brick is cel shaded and the wall is a painted background and that's why lighting should all be unified and real-time. Great, sounds terrific. Lighting wasn't unified up to that point, of course, because it allowed you to make pretty deep case-specific optimizations that made your game actually run fast, a lot faster than Doom3, but now you've talked yourself out of that completely for pat-yourself-on-the-back points. Anyone else would be called naive. Tiling textures are, from a certain very grognardy point of view, a form of compression. Sure. And if your goal is to perfectly simulate the real world, yes I guess it's not 100% accurate. In the context of the reality of having to make a video game, however, it's really pretty damn good. 1) Very simple to implement. Already supported by 100% of hardware! 2) Artists intrinsically understand it and can work with it easily. 3) Players barely notice, and environment artists barely notice once they've started playing and stopped looking. I no longer take the view that the goal of a video game is to perfectly simulate a real world, because doing so just so you can fill it with absurd gunfights and guys who wear tires for hats is dumb. Building a game with nothing but unique surfaces and textures that the player will then drive past at 40 mph in a dune buggy is dumb. I planned on greyboxing an entire map, focusing purely on gameplay. Then making a single, giant texture for each wall, all uniquely drawn. It's basically like megatexturing quake style. I think this could yield some really cool results, however, my technical ignorance causes me to wonder how bsp/engines would deal with that.
Its a trap! Unfortunately the only person who is really going to notice all this detail is you because you created it. Most players will notice the first room, but after that it, it will just become a blur of detail overload. I never really understood the fascination with the metal Doom3 texture set, its mostly fixed sized panels painted over generic corridors. I really preferred the wide atrium, outside areas and underground temples to the constant alpha/beta/gamma lab corridors sections. Taken in context, extolling the virtues of megatexture, his comment makes perfect sense.
But, sure, if you want to talk realities of shipping games you certainly wouldn't want to listen to John Carmack. What's he ever done? ;) Let's also bitch about how Quake maps are slower/harder to build/longer to compile than Doom maps because of all the bullshit innovations.
I see your point, and you may be right.
However, I quite liked the (macro) detail and uniqueness of RAGE. It didn't feel like detail overload and the environment always had my attention... of course, that could be because the game had absolutely nothing else to offer. The idea of greyboxing is to give the level designer total freedom in terms of gameplay. Later, the artist can "make it work", making giant, area specific textures which gives the artist flexibility needed to do that. So far, my little test is coming out much better than I expected. The mapping is easier, the texturing is easy and it's looking really cool. I'll post my results in a week or so. Number of games (non-id & excluding expansion packs) shipped on Quake3 engine licenses, according to Wikipedia: 15
Doom3 engine: 6 Rage engine: 2 Do the Unreal or Crytek engines only support one lighting path? They must, if it's such a brilliant streamline. How about fully virtualized textures and geometry? Well, you know, billions of voxels are really just a poor form of compression. What we need are actual digital atoms.
Seems like a pretty shitty form of compression, although then again we seem to be getting some hints that it's more efficient than we think
To the best of my knowledge he's never made a level. Carmack is an engine guy. That's not a bad thing or a pejorative statement but as I see it it's not in his toolset to be creative outside of programming. I liken him to the guy who lays rebar, makes forms and pours concrete into them. He makes the foundations that great buildings stand upon, but I wouldn't call him an architect even though the architecture wouldn't stand without him making the foundations that they sit upon.
This line of thought brings to mind some other people. For example Henry Ford made a blanket decision that all of his cars would be painted black. It was a wise decision in that it streamlined the production process but soon enough people were paying extra money to get their cars painted in colors other than black. Ford made the cars but others added color. As I see it Carmack is the Henry Ford of the gaming world. Without a doubt. But I will say that the mapper has to learn the limitations made by the engine so they tend to understand what they can or cannot do. The guy who makes the foundation doesn't always know what will be built upon it so it has to be both robust and flexible. Carmack did that well and I have a lot of respect for what he did. But, his vision was in programming the engine and what it could do, not the levels themselves.
Doom and Quake were both built upon Carmack's engines. What came out of it wasn't Carmacks doing any more than any work of art was made by the people manufacturing the paint, stretching the canvas or quarrying the stone. I think at some point he made some deliberate decisions relating to what sort of game he wanted to see, including its environments; he seems to have dealt with mappers' requests with impatience. I think he did have a vision of the games and that the limitations of his programming reflected that. The artists worked within his context and that context was certainly not mostly unconscious.
I understand the analogy somewhat, but I think that creating an innovative engine is a bit different from manufacturing some generic tools for artists. You can't do the former without a slightest idea of what you want to see in a finished product. That's the problem with Carmack's latest efforts - they're too focused on certain goals, and therefore are less flexible.
Holy hell
I don't know why the argument that Carmack never made a level raised it's head here, but it was never argued that he HAD so we can leave that one outside for now. Technologically speaking, the quote is correct. Ask any artist (at least the ones I know) if they'd prefer tiling textures or unique textures and they will almost always choose unique. Tiling textures, however, are more realistic for shipping games but I think that's more of a workflow/storage issue than a visual or aesthetics one. So if uniquely texturing worlds ever becomes as easy, workflow wise, as applying tiling textures you can bet money that it will become the standard. Also, unique textures =/= realism.
To me, megatexturing just makes the art (realistic, surreal, cartoony, whatever) more rich and interesting. So good. I remember these... Are they lost forever, or are you advertising that you have the source?
please tell me you will be finishing those, neg!!! i loved them back when he started them and they are still amazing.
I don't have the source. Just stumbled upon the screenshot while searching for a particular video for mocking sock and thought I'd share them for inspiration.
not the sources, no. these were maps Kell made during Quoth dev that he had originally intended to make into an episode. Unfortunately, what you see is most of what there is.
that looks super cool!
If only the egyptian enemies from rogue weren't so shit they'd fit in so well there. Agree! Maybe the altered ones from Drake? Certainly a few centroids would fit the setting!
By the way, holy hit You map fast! I really have to get trenchbroom working. Also shame about the kell source. Great inspiration for a new subtheme though http://scampie.net/wp/?p=102
http://scampie.net/etc/mapshots/junk/ Some good, some bad... most will never be finished, some my get reworked someday. Who knows! It is really weird to me that someone took the Wasted set I uprezzed and repainted for Quake3, based on the Quake2 set, and downrezzed them for a Quake1 wad.
also, dunwich is too cute not to finish. maps with little houses and graves are neat. put the castle in that nero shot at the end of it. And i was thinking that no one mapped for DoE because it is a mythos and in reality it doesn't exist
why do you have so much great-looking unfinished stuff? Lemuria has a really unique look to it and I would love to see a full level in that style. I guess it's probably because (like me) it's more fun building stuff than finishing it.
Shame about the Kell sources, I never forgot about that "netherworld palace" idea he seemed to have going on. How about a speedmapping theme where each mapper takes one of those kell shots (or one of glassman's old shots) and uses whatever it depicts as a centerpiece for a level. really gutted about bal's unfinished maps. I dunno how anyone can throw that much work at a bunch of maps and then not finish them. Seems weird to me.
I have no idea why there hasnt been a lot done with this set. It's quite nice (except the lack of a door texture, had to kind of fudge one together).
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7swzkbah0qdetpy/doomoxy.jpg That set was made for a Quake3 level that didn't have any doors in it.
Quake's at the same texture res as Doom, just use the door from Doom :) same here fifth, i think they look great. so much better than plain old idbase. I did a couple levels with them, dm levels for q3 and q2 and really liked using them. don't know why q1 users don't branch out a bit more in texture use. maybe it's too much effort to find different wads. but there's a lot of good tech style textures that could be mixed to fantastic results.
There is some textures that don't look as good when sawn in the Editor than in a map, but i think that the main reason is that people prefer bad already known textures that take the risk. Thats probably the reason too because some people don't like custom mods.
My reason is that i prefer to know how to use Quake's well before moving to the rest. The same as when i use mainly vanilla Quake instead of mods to map. The only thing that goes out of that rule is Quoth entities that give the mapper the opportunity to do some interesting things and others that would need elaborate setups without Quoth. Fifth, those textures choices look good. Keep on it. About WIPs, i would be happy the rest of the year if some of this got released. Just by releasing an unfinished one would be enough. https://www.quaddicted.com/pipeline both are deserving of release based on shots alone, particularly the former - such a great look!
Lun's suggestion to put the necro castle at the end of Dunwich seems possibly fitting if the progression from the church is downwards, beneath the floorboards and into the earth; it would look great situated in a dark cavern rather than a dusky pink sky First up, I was inspired by Sock's monstrosity to make a shitty Coagula map, though it is really much more indebted to (and aiming for the quality level/ scope of) ELEK's Coagula 2. Black fog in lieu of lighting, because who has the time, am I right ladies? No monsters either, nor any real idea of how gameplay will go. I'd say this is like 30-50% done.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4x65z65l6vfbxc5/coagish1.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/7yk9qauwqg4efwc/coagish2.jpg A slimy speedmap that I started for Quoth that seems worthy of expanding a bit, even though the gameplay overly difficult in that classic Quoth-implemented-badly way discussed elsewhere. Silver lining: no Bobs! Probably like 60-80% done, depending whether aforementioned expansion actually happens. Also some fucked up parts I have been avoiding dealing with that will take a minute to fix. https://www.dropbox.com/s/sohag3stimetbae/slimespeed1.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/gt08w6a2kujiliv/slimespeed2.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8nh9jzfvm4qx39/slimespeed3.jpg What's the issue with Dropbox? It works for me. At least I don't have to enable a bunch of useless JavaScript to see the pictures, unlike most of the other image hosting sites.
Blocks public access after a number of views, doesn't allow to open the image separately, is blocked in some work places, etc.
There's no reason to use it over imgur. Seemed like a nice way to skip the hassle of uploading to quaketastic. So yes I'm a lazy shit. (go map).
If it's in your public folder, just right click it in Windows Explorer and choose "Public Link". Paste that link anywhere you want to show it
Well I don't have any problems viewing anybody's screenshots from Dropbox. There is a Dropbox background where it whines about requiring JavaScript, but I could always just right click and select "view image" if I really didn't want to see that. Doesn't actually bother me though.
Blockage in the workplace is another story. If that's the case for you, then you probably have the same issue with lots of other sites besides dropbox. For some reason, many employers don't like to pay people for surfing the internet. For some reason, many employers don't like to pay people for surfing the internet.
Especially fun when clients send you blocked URLs! Dropbox also implies "this file will be deleted whenever I feel like it" while Quaketastic is meant for longtime accessibility.
Rick - Sure, but for any white collar, creative type job the internet is pretty important for a whole array of reasons. Blocking it in the hopes of raising productivity likely does the opposite.
Spirit - Fair point! simply because it's the fastest and easiest way to host files. I always click the link I share to make sure they work (they always do for me on my home pc).
I dont know why it wont work for you. It's unlikely that files on my drop box will be deleted soon after I upload them, I am just not that organised. Also I think it would be unfair for me to throw WIP shots on quaketastic, seems like a waste of bandwidth. Also I think it would be unfair for me to throw WIP shots on quaketastic, seems like a waste of bandwidth.
Absolutely not! Tumblr links are very volatile from what I know. Imgur likes to recompress pictures and deletes them after a while http://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/201476457-How-long-do-you-keep-the-images- I just organised the archival of 140,000 mp3s off a dying website, I care about longevity. Some Map waffle and reflection on making things in a hurry.
(Features screenshots too!) Longecity is one thing, authorship rights is another. Some people like to keep control over their images, the freedom to delete them whenever they please.
then posting on a public (as can be) board might not be what they want but rather something more private with a restricted audience?
It's what it's there for. Don't worry about bandwidth, it's practically unlimited.
@nitin, I want to do more to the map and release it another time. The article is just me making notes and thinking about what went right with the map session.
I made the brushes in trenchbroom and then used quark to add the lights and other entities.
It's not an ideal way to do things but until Sleeps adds full support for other engines this'll have to do... http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/Htic2-01.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/Htic2-02.jpg The first lighting pass looked pretty good, but with subsequent rebuilds I've noticed the lighting get a bit weird. I'll so play a Heretic 2 map. I loved Heretic 2 and mapping for it. The texture sets weren't as flexible or durable as Quake's, but it did have a distinct art style with some really great environments (the sky cities, mountain temples, etc). Tons of cool map objects too. Quake2 engine + fantasy style produced some interesting creativity.
Shame I never got to finish the big Doom map I had started a couple of years ago. Only did the lower part, a dark blood sewer/dungeon - there was supposed to be an upper floor as well, some sort of butchery factory with monsters working on large meat grinders with conveyor belts and all. Unfortunately, at some point I accidentally overwrote or deleted what little I had and then lost interest for the time being.
1 2 3 that really IS too bad!
Love the outdoor area, reminds me of Necros' doom-style Quake map. What about that villagey Quake map you posted shots of a while ago? If you're not making anything especially for the Honey map jam (I'm not, I'd love to take part but I'm not, as any mapping I do at this point must be dedicated to finishing old stuff, not starting new stuff), then you should just box that up, fill it with zombies and rottweilers, and submit that (after all Honey did start with a village). now I'm going to go map. He was a great man...
@RingofQuaddamage - Looking good! The second image of your last post is sweet. I'm a sucker for blue floors and tan walls with a bit of tech. @negke - Well, you've made good progress, you should just hold out and do a megawad :P With maps that big it would be, what, 64ish hours of playtime? I'm ready. I always liked mapping for Doom. I had a couple of maps that I was going to release once, but I ended up contributing them to a total conversion/megawad project.
I had to make a lot of changes so that they would fit in with the megawad thing, but I've always wanted to take the time to rework them back to how they were originally and release them as stand alone maps. did you ever make any progress with that map i sent you? if not, i was thinking i should just release it as is.
I'm afraid I didn't make much progress. I suppose it could be released in its current form and would be accepted by the Doom community - there many newly released maps that are more plain. However, I'd like to give it another shot - just a few touch-ups in some of the bigger rooms might do wonders. It's not like we're pressed for a release date.
not so much a collab, and more a 'i gave up and negke was pissed because he playtested so much' :P :P
you can play MAYHEM 2048. I made a map for the wad and you can find it on the list of maps in the op. http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/68303-mayhem2048-it-is-ready-idgames-pending/
Grab RC4 of Mayhem 2048: http://www.speedyshare.com/aYEEb/MAYhem2048.wad
my map (emerald gardens) is map 14. Map 01 is about done!
http://i.imgur.com/JboYARn.jpg Here is what Quake looks like megatextured. It's uniquely textured (well, 95%) but it's not one physical texture, rather, nineteen of them (not including the door texture and accompanying shader). Shader? Oh yeah, this isn't BSP29 either, it's FBSP (q3map2/qfusion). "Megatexturing" for vanilla quake is pretty laborious, which caused me to abandon my first megatexturing project. However, I did get some useful graybox textures out of the deal.
The most notable benefits of switching map formats are: 1. No palette! 2. No WAD repacking and map recompile to update them in-game. 3. Textures must only be divisible by 2 rather than 16. The room took me about three solid evenings to make, quite a bit of that time was spent fiddling around and getting the hang of things. One who is experienced could do a better job in less time. I say this because it pertains to my initial question: is megatexturing Quake, or a derivative, viable? Based upon my findings, my answer is ABSOLUTLEY. Of course, certain variables alter it's 'viability'. For instance, opting for textures with a greater pixel density than Quake will result in much more texture data. My test, KP14, has exactly 3mb of textures. If I were to make a map 100x larger and megatexture it, it would only use approximately 300mb in textures, which is nothing. This is the workflow and benefits of texturing this way that I imagine: Concept art is the anchor, the unifying element that both the level designer and level artist will use. This is key. The level designer lays out a map focusing almost exclusively on gameplay, the level designer does not texture the map, he only grayboxes it. The map is continually refined until it plays great, I mean beautifully, as this is the designers main focus. Now that we have a great playing map, the artist goes in and draws all over it, focusing only on making it look great. The end result is a map that looks AND plays great. I feel that by narrowing the focus on these two elements, the end result is of much higher quality. Both the level designer and artist have a much higher level of freedom than they would if using traditional texture sets. There are other details, but this is the gist. It sounds good on paper, at least. Anyway, here are some pics of KP14 being assembled. bam and boom That is a shitload of commendable effort! I like the direction you went, it reminds me of both Rage and Warsow at once, somehow.
To be honest, though... I think I'm siding with sock and Lunaran on the matter, in that while the difference between regular textures and unique textures is obvious on paper, the average player won't really notice it in game. And especially not in the heat of Quake combat. No palette! But you can already have that with normal BSP and external textures. Is that you seem to give everything a fairly thick outline. Which is okay on its own but you'll notice Quake hardly ever does that.
Place a couple Enforcers and ammo crates inside that corridor and they will stick out considerably (and not in a good way). @onetruepurple
Sadly, I went down the wrong road in the art direction (I was going by the seat of my pants anyway), as this effect could be pretty easily achieved with tiling textures. When I say "Megatexturing Quake" I really mean megatexturing a game that is a Quake derivative. In other words, a unique IP built on the tech. Agree, if you're looking to simply map for Quake, this method is overkill and the result is very un-Quake. However, it's doable if that tickles your fancy. "the average player won't really notice it in game. And especially not in the heat of Quake combat" The reason many games suck today is because the are made for the average player. They're not my target :) O_o
Are you sure that is Doom? Maybe i played a different game. Too awesome to be true. If you don't release that we will loath you forever. try this link: http://www.speedyshare.com/aYEEb/MAYhem2048.wad
and click on the underlined message that says mayhem2048.wad. it will download the wad file. drag and drop the "the average player won't really notice it in game. And especially not in the heat of Quake combat"
The reason many games suck today is because the are made for the average player. They're not my target :) my head hurts Mine too.
otp is right, this is overkill for Quake. I wasn't responding to the statement itself, rather, the underlying philosophy (however, in the context of Quake mapping, is appropriate). If you only do things the average player will notice or appreciate your games will be just that: average. That's all I'm saying. @RickyT23, Spiney, nitin & mfx
Hopefully this is just the first baby step of something awesome. time will teeeeelllllllll..... Also, as someone with a background in music and audio production, my answer to your question is this:
The artistic merits of the music are not lessened. However, the overall impact of the expression could be compromised because of the technical limitations of the medium. To put my point in question into simpler terms: Developers who make games as shitty as their target demographic allows will end up with shitty games. The "average player", in terms of the largest generators of income for the devs, set the bar pretty low. Going above and beyond that bar, even though it doesn't positively impact your bottom line, is not a bad thing. Been Playing this game called
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem:_Avenging_Angel It's like a cross between Quake II and Undying and it's pretty good. It's on Isozone, and it runs on Win 7 using wndmode. http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Requiem:_Avenging_Angel hiring masses of artists to uniquely texture your entire game world isn't "going above and beyond the bar" for just the discerning environment art geeks in your audience, it's a captain-goes-down-with-the-ship style decision made purely on the principle that unique is automatically better, and that tiling a texture is "shitty" and only worthy of these fabled unwashed masses who are ruining everything with their F2Ps and their QTEs.
and you've spent how much time on just that one room? honestly assess just how much value is added by slightly different faded paint, slightly different scratches on the corners, and having a different big number on each wall, and tell me you're excited about the possibilities that it opens for doing a whole map that way. You made several points, I'll address them one by one:
I must have been unclear in my wording. I'm not saying games with tiling textures are shitty, nor am I saying that games with unique textures are superior. My previous points aren't about a specific practice (in this case, texturing), rather, the idea that doing enough to get by, or generate profit, is sufficient. Also, my conclusion that uniquely texturing a game on this level of tech, at this pixel density is a viable route is not based on the "principle that unique is automatically better", as you assert. In my eyes, unique textures makes it possible to create very rich environmental art, that is, if the devs have the capacity wherewithal to do so. To quote you: "honestly assess just how much value is added by slightly different faded paint, slightly different scratches on the corners, and having a different big number on each wall, and tell me you're excited about the possibilities that it opens for doing a whole map that way." To quote what I said to otp a few posts up: "Sadly, I went down the wrong road in the art direction (I was going by the seat of my pants anyway), as this effect could be pretty easily achieved with tiling textures. " Clearly, I understand I didn't have the wherewithal to utilize the freedom of unique textures. And of course, not being a moron, I have "honestly assessed" the logistics of doing things this way. That was the whole point of doing this in the first place ;) This room took me a solid 10 hours to texture over the course of three evenings. That is a long time. To quote my initial post: "One who is experienced could do a better job in less time" Some dirty math: Say I want a level 30x times that size, that's roughly 300 hours of work. At a 40 hour work week, one artist could finish it in 2 months. for ONE artist, working full time, they could theoretically pump out 6 levels a year. Say you want a 16 level game done in 1.5 years. A team of three artists would be sufficient. That's basically 2 levels per 6 six months for each artist. I'm talking artists, there would be a separate team of level designers. To me, this isn't "hiring masses of artists". If uniquely texturing games wasn't viable studios wouldn't be doing it. Bleh, maybe I'm nieve (I'm sure I am), on the flip side, maybe you're jaded. These are just my findings and my opinions, if you disagree with them I understand. I should be more clear when simultaneously discussing separate issue that have both stemmed from one subject... You assume work is linear, and vastly underestimate, which is the downfall of many a project manager.
"30x times that size" is not going to be a whole level, it's going to be 30 more empty hallways each with their own slightly different textures. Your basic sci-fi hallways are the easy part of making a map. Make it 300x more, and you have a slightly more reasonable estimate... but it will likely be even more than that as complexity of the level grows. Aww man, you got my hopes up that Spike actually implemented it in FTE somehow. Calling lots of standard textures megatexture is like promising the greatest boobs ever and then they turn out to be fake. :(
Wouldn't texturing like this be very wasteful on memory? You still seem very limited to the faces so the look is not very unique. It looks very similar to recent Q3/QL. I was expecting some really wild texturing not "standard tileness". For random decals as detail you could just use decals. "You assume work is linear, and vastly underestimate, which is the downfall of many a project manager. "
Very much so, yes. Assuming a linear level of productivity over the life of a project is just not realistic. People will get bored, tired, distracted, etc. You won't have consistent levels of output. And even then, doing an entire game with levels don't like this would require an astounding level of discipline where levels won't be changing once they are textured. That has NEVER happened on any project I've ever been a part of. That's why things like decals are preferable to painting in splatters and such that cross multiple walls. The walls can change, the decal can move, etc. It's flexible and inherently far more productive than repainting the decal every time you decide that a pillar should be 16 units further to the left. Having said that, I understand that actual megatexture games don't have all those limitations
Doing this for Quake with existing level design tools feels very limiting. I went to bed last night with the essence of Lunrans comments fresh in my mind. I realize that my time/work assessment is about the most optimistic it can be while still remaining quasi-realistic. I choked down a few bits of harsh reality, some of which has been posted mentioned by Scampie and Willem.
Work is not linear. Nor can I expect anyone to BLEED this project until it's done. Just because I could abandon life for a year and a half to live at a computer desk doesn't mean I could expect that of anyone else. My outlook is often optimistic, it hasn't failed me yet, in terms of personal projects and work. But I understand going by a plan that is very much "best case scenario" is unwise. After taking a more cynical, or realistic, look I would say using standard, but diverse tiling texture for a majority of the map with key areas uniquely textured is a goal that would require little bloodshed to achieve. As for now, I'm going to have to let this topic rest. I have more stuff to work on. However, I'll continue to weigh all points raised here. For a hobbyist project, I think you can do whatever you want. Who cares? It's your time, spend it as you see fit. :) I was speaking from a professional perspective.
I think uniquely texturing areas is an awesome idea but the key is to make it worthwhile. Not just, as Lunaran pointed out, a unique number on the walls or custom scratches. But really stretch it It looks good, but the architectural style of 'future base' is designed to be built from prefab panels and girders, the generalised look of which doesn't lend itself so well to megatexture.
Take what you've got and stretch it as Willem says - explore the benefits of megatexture within the Quake setting. I dunno. How about turning the centre of the base into a gigantic crater? Or twisting parts of it into organic shapes that have been warped by demonic / slipgate energies. Anyway, keep going - its great to see stuff like this. I'm a pretty lazy mapper, although I do try to incorporate the feedback I get... but yeah, whenever I cut corners I used to think "well, it *is* free" but these days I kind of have to in order to get it released at all.
I loved how maps in the Myth series of games were basically megatextured whereas other RTS games at the time were using tiled images (and were mostly just 2d as well). But for FPS, even for Rage, I don't think unique textures everywhere is an efficient use of artists' time. My $0.002. I mean I saw the Rage editor videos - these guys were painting onto a 3D world map, just as you would paint onto a 2D canvas in Photoshop. It gives the ability to use decals for example, but without unnecessary layers underneath [at some point in the rendering pipeline], and then do little touch-ups here and there.
I like the fact that you can use tiling textures and then touch parts up to make each part seem more unique. Imagine if SleepwalkR put this ability into Trenchbroom! Imagine an editor that would allow you to pixel-paint onto any surface, and then created the necessary Good idea, huh, huh? I bet there's some ready-to-use code out there that would save the effort of creating a painting app from scratch, it could be hacked into it. Then doing what Killpixel has done wouldn't be as time-consuming... I really geeked out over Myth maps... the placement of goals and terrain features, the available unit selections, how that all worked together. Some of those big texture maps were cool and iconic; I even used them as desktop images for a while. But they were also the barrier that told me if I wanted to make my own Myth maps I could either become a texture artist or fuck right off. So that was a bummer. :-)
One could import a map into blender. Also, Photoshop CS6 has a greatly improved 3D editor. I'm not sure how well it would handle a map, or even sections, though.
The most time consuming part of the method I used was grabbing the dimensions of each surface. Doing that for an entire map could take a week or more. But once the dimensions are grabbed, a basic, flat texture is made and placed into the map. After that, it's only a matter of drawing on them. This pic shows some of the basic textures placed onto the map before they were drawn on. Obviously, if one were to do a whole map (or more) in this way, the artist would have asset libraries to pull from. It's not like every surface would be hand drawn from scratch. This kinda makes me think of the game Riven. Although pre-rendered, the world was uniquely textured. If they had used tiling textures, the impact of the environments would be diminished, imo. When your game's just a prerendered slideshow the whole debate kind of goes out the window because there's a bunch of other tricks that come into play instead - noise based textures, editing and compositing in post, etc. Whole new renderer, whole new point of view.
For a hobbyist project, I think you can do whatever you want. Who cares? It's your time, spend it as you see fit. Willem reminds me, I should point out that I never meant to tell you you can't do this. It'd be pretty hypocritical of me considering I released a tool-assisted q3 map with fully unique geometry. :P I've just never had any real faith in megatexture as something that adds appeal for anyone other than the people who actually art the environments. I know, I've got the exact same internal artist voice that's always saying "more, more, better" but I know that voice is greedy and utterly unbounded by practicality. You seemed to be on the same koolaid pretty hard, so I couldn't help but pound the keys. Sorry about that. Embedding textures in the ugh, now I want to go add compiler-level procedural rock textures and grass blends that just bake huge unique textures into the bsp :| Rage did have some of the most beautiful outdoor environments I've ever seen in a video game.
lol, me too.
Once upon a time I had an idea for a long, story-based "episode" that would take place in several different games, including Myth and Rune. Then I realized that yeah, efficiency is a concern. When your game's just a prerendered slideshow the whole debate kind of goes out the window because there's a bunch of other tricks that come into play instead - noise based textures, editing and compositing in post, etc. Whole new renderer, whole new point of view.
I didn't mean as an example of practicality or viability. Simply, that unique textures offer a look that tiled textures could not. For a hobbyist project, I think you can do whatever you want. Who cares? It's your time, spend it as you see fit. Heh, a no point did I ever feel I was told I "can't" do this. I don't think anyone here would dictate to anyone else what they can or can't do. Should, well, that's another story... *cue Never Ending Story music* For contextual purposes, this would be more than a hobbyist project. A potentially commercial effort with a small team of 4-8 people or so. Otherwise, the question is simply "should I spend my personal time doing this", which is something one could answer themselves. You seemed to be on the same koolaid pretty hard, so I couldn't help but pound the keys. Sorry about that. It's no problem. Hearing other perspectives was the reason for posting. I already knew what I was in for. Like ijed said, a prefabbed repeaty space hall is the worst place to show this off. Agreed, I mentioned this as well. I'll get a better idea of the logistics of it all as the project evolves. It's still in it's infant stages and at a time when possibilities are on the table and examined 'tis all. And you got an answer:
discussion goes where ever discussion currently is. over the long run, the thread will go back to it's original purpose. If you're not interested in intelligent discussion regarding game design, then, well, I have bad news for you. actually most of this HAS been directly related to the (numerous, cool, interesting) shots that KP posted.
I'm afraid that there aren't enough people mapping right now for a new 15-20 posts in a thread to be all screenshots (err wait... actually that's over in the Honey map jam thread!). looks great, a few suggestions:
-marble tile floor texture looks out of place, I'd suggest something more like city4_1. -I'd use a darker, solid rock texture (actually city4_1 might work) with less obvious lines, for the lining of the arch. -See how it looks with a low minlight (30?) and fog; this might solve the issue of black surfaces next to lit ones. -make it so rotfish jump out of the water (heh). what's going on at the base of the waterfall? is that an mdl?
also, on a scale of "yes" to "absolutely" how much is this your reference image for the first shot? http://th05.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/f/2013/082/1/4/a_narrow_and_desolate_ravine_by_crs1009-d5yy6s4.jpg Tronyn- brushtex is a bit out of order, as it was more a case of will-it work or collaps.
As it works I was planning to use the rock5_2 tex for the cliff. The light errors were due to the light1.24 of BJ. @mfx- thanks for the tutorial, almost gave it up after finding Tyrlight. @Lunaran- whole waterfall is an mdl, at the base is what my poor imagination could think of turbulence. On the scale to "maybe" and "sure" I must relay to the inspiration and reference thread like four elephants asking: someone should make this fifth. Cliff Demons" wait, shouldn't that go in the Mapping Inspiration thread?
jokes... actually it's really cool to see what images mappers used for inspiration... perhaps the basis of a future article at Quaddicted. Yeah, that looks cool, MadFox. Although aligning all those textures will be a bitch. Great inspiration images, too.
On a somewhat related note, I imagine a Tronyn version of that Ukrainian castle would be like this. (Hint!) aka, with way less detail & is very angular, & I should stop pretending there's terrain around it, since any such attempts suck anyway? if so, totally fair!
sh(ee)it with how slow I am my levels should have more detail... so I'll just call it "oldschool/doom style" heh. actually it's really cool to see what images mappers used for inspiration
I used that IMAGE for inspiration for the bridge at the front of Zendar. It is not perfectly the same but it has the same vibe. Here - check section - "What HTML markup is allowed in my posts?"
Lunarana: you've been able to do that since the site was launched... even on Qmap you could do that. Possibly even on Qboard.
actually i think i added the anchor tag support after launch... originally you could only put raw URLs and it would auto-convert to links
moon runs purple
The last screenshot shows the strange behaviour of using another skybox. It looks as if the green has becomes silver. I'm searching for a good fog setting. If I use 0.02 I get a fine effect indoors, but outside my skybox gets hazy. So I make my skybox harder in contrast but even setting fog to 0.01 or 0.005 it seems to keep its thickness in outside area's. The results of the distance wil be due to it. r_skyfog command will set the fog level applied to the sky only.
You can't set it in the map file though. Either enter it manually or put it in a quake.rc file in a game folder. I don't know if engines other than fitzquake can do this. I added it to worldspawn and it works fine.
I'm just obvious about seeing no change in 0.01 and 0.005 I think the scale ends at 2 dec. My memory is clearly better than I remembered.
It had fairly Quake type ceilings as well http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/3970147660/ I think most of the Gaumonts were kind of art deco. searching the right light.
@mfx -I took your advice the light tut. The whole canyon is lit with a few lights.
@5th - Won't blame you, more the fact that I haven't seen chance to participate in the mapping jam. @Lun - I went back to zero light and there are only three lights with a 30 wait 0.4. It seems large spaces take ohther light advantages than small rooms. A few screenshots (from a map which I may or may not ever finish) illustrating the evils of 16 unit high steps.
Ruined Architectural Scale And just for good measure... Step fronts are not for detail That is an outstanding looking map alright.
For all the meticulous texture work, though, I'm not sure about the tiled texture on the curved stairs. Could you add a couple of that red_dish runic textures
just drop em here and there , right now that looks very monochrome It's from the Z-Kart community project.
The 16 unit steps comment is just a bit of a joke referencing a post in the Map Jam 2 thread, as is "step fronts are not for detail".
...I'm not sure about the tiled texture on the curved stairs. The brown part on the top surface? Not real sure about that myself, but haven't come up with anything better so far. Could you add a couple of that red_dish runic textures just drop em here and there , right now that looks very monochrome Yes, the map is mostly grayish brick and stone with wood and rusty metal here and there, and slightly tech looking light fixtures. That's pretty much the way I want it. I had a big red window at one point and some yellow lights under a bridge, but several people said that looked out of place. I guess you actually mean the little squares with the runic symbols like you see on exit teleporters? IMO. Also stairs look fine, if not mind glowingly gorgeous. What's holding you back now? Still struggling with limits?
"step fronts are not for detail"
I meant 8 unit steps. "I can't fit any detail in there!" "So don't!" I know, I was just making a bit of a joke.
The 16 unit steps are obviously staying. I might change the name of the map to "Ruined Architectural Scale" though. Has a nice ring to it, eh? Anyway, here's one more picture. I figure if I just actually work on the thing I could finish it pretty soon. It's really just minor nit-picky things that need doing now, it's playable as is. Wanted: Sexy vampire chick to perch on ledge Someone really should make a new id megawad with all the stock and all the new id1 variants made by sock, than etc
I know, I was just making a bit of a joke.
Your behaviour is not a joke, this is you being an online bully because you feel my comments are a reflection on your own work. As I have stated this is my views and work ethics and it does not mean you have to be a jerk about it. Getting everyone to agree to your view point by showing screenshots of a map you have been pushing brushes around on for a year with no before or after comparison of steps heights does not prove your point, it just makes you look petty and vindictive. now as someone who has an unfortunate tendency to be petty and vindictive, but who also uses 16 unit stairs...
I find the 'discussion' on step/stair size quite interesting as I couldn't remember what I used to do.
So I just reinstalled BSP, loaded an old map and had a look. Wow! I can see I was firmly on the side of sitting-on-the-fence (or perhaps that should be handrail) For narrow staircases I mostly used 16 unit step size. For wider staircases e.g. the stairs up to the Imp's Castle in FMB-BDG2, I often used a 16 unit rise with an 8 unit step at the front, giving a sloping tread. I do remember that I tried to introduce a degree of asymmetry into my maps, so maybe that also had something to do with it. (that's if anyone gives a toss) Rick did kind of go apeshit in response to socks comments which, while ovely prescriptive, were certainly not aimed at him.
I get that step do look a bit bulky at 16 units but it shouldn't be something to start a flame war over.
That us 16 unit purists start a new messageboard which more adequately reflects our values.
for the next mapjam or speedmap.
All the brushes should have at least one dimension (heigth, width, depth) of 16 units. sixteen unit stairs with textured fronts that subtly convey the feel of 8 unit stairs without the extra polys/work to build them.
Anyone with me? No..? :( Ramp loses the detail of the player view shifting up each step... guess you could hack in a camera animation that fakes stepping.
On that note, I actually noticed while testing my Jam2 map that Quake does a funky thing where it shifts your camera up/down a staircase when you are on them if you are in a default view (don't mouselook at all). I hadn't realized it did that but that seems really smart when you consider that most players were expected to play Quake with keyboard only. Then just make a box room, and apply the shader...
I often would put clip brushes over 16 unit stairs to turn them into ramps so as to stop the bobbin'. They still looked like stairs but the player would glide up them.
We did that all through Unreal Tournament as well
Quake also has ramp jumps, which shouldn't happen on stairs.
I think the small bit of camera bob, done with some smoothness so it's not too obscene, helps with immersion. People are used to stairs in real life, and stepping up a step is accompanied by your head being lifted up at that moment as well, not a smooth gradient upwards that a character's bounding box would do as it slides up a ramp. if this view-tilting is not smooth enough, it's obscene? strong word choice I would have gone with "annoying."
Standing still happens in Quake. Fighting often happens on or around stairs, and since they physically behave differently players will expect their movement to be one thing or another, cued by the geometry that they see. Sometimes the best safe place to peg an ogre or taunt a fiend might be standing on some stairs, and sliding out of position in that case when you don't expect to would be annoying.
Also, everyone avoids ever jumping around on stairs because stepfinding doesn't happen while you aren't FL_ONGROUND so stairs become momentum-killing walls, so ramp-clipped stairs is a confusing signal that way, too. easy solution: actual ramps! Quake3 had nicely fixed camera movement and physics going both up and down stairs (so you don't run off the top of the top stair and go DOOF DOOF DOOF all the way down), but messing with Quake player physics in although now that I've said that the engine guys who read this forum will see it and by the weekend we'll have three new network protocols and "sv_useoldstairphysics 0"
... We would be completely bored.
Make some. For example, you can do something for the jam2. In the 48 hours that remain till the deadline, you can finish something as big as the shortest ones in jam1. Here's something I'm working on. in editor because I'm new to this and have yet to compile a map/didn't research how yet!!!
http://i.imgur.com/7DgjCqy.png http://i.imgur.com/3dz61m2.png http://i.imgur.com/YmDaDx7.png also texturing comes later! I hope you fill in the details with your brain so it's not so ugly. Have you mapped before? That looks pretty decent!
I suggest learning how to compile sooner rather than later, just in case you have some gotchas. It can be easy to make bad brushes or something that the compiler won't like, and it's nice to know that as you build! Here's where I link my getting started mapping tutorial and point you at 'Tools of the Trade' and 'Time to Compile' sections! I played a lot in Hammer before, and DromED (which was a failure), and dark radiant but never released anything. I've finished a number of maps that were mostly quick throw-togethers.
http://i.imgur.com/dYGKPU2.jpg http://i.imgur.com/9FXDhni.jpg http://i.imgur.com/drFbf7E.jpg http://i.imgur.com/CUkwRJA.jpg This is some of my older stuff I made in Hammer, never really had much of a game play plan for it, but it was intended to be ported to the dark mod. I like to think I'm very good at storytelling, and think of a lot of ways to tell stories through level design and lots of creepy stories to tell. That's what I'm doing with my map up there, but I'd never sacrifice game play for story...I want to be great at both. I'll have to look at that later on, and thanks for the advice! I'm trying to go on the general rule if it doesn't crash trenchbroom it won't make a compiler kill itself. I should know it, I still have a Thief map in the backburner that's on hold due to stupid compilation errors. NewDark made things easier but the interface is still a pain and the compilers are dogshit.
Your stuff looks pretty cool map, keep it up! Nice shots, reblinds! This one is particularly intriguing. I'm ready to play when it's done.
Make some. I am :) Just not screenshot material yet. I posted a couple dozen shots these last 30 days. I wanna see what other people are doing! by "this one" i meant http://i.imgur.com/3dz61m2.png
Man you guys are really supportive. I should have posted years ago when Quake mapping interested me. My main inspirations are Thief and Quake. I just hope I can make an effective non-linear level where the secrets are more focused on alternate routes and giving the player combat advantages through that. That's one of my goals. I'm gonna have quite a bit of reading to do, but thank you for everything, this is all really exciting for me! I'll try to get back to you guys with some more finished content later on.
Continuing on the supportive note, you should check out sock's maps, esp. zendar. It's a prime example of exactly what you're trying to do. He also wrote a along article on his web where he explains many of his choices.
Reminds me a little of Ribbiks' releases, "Swim with the Whales" and "Stardate 20X6" in terms of its one-colour contrast theme. Could turn into something interesting if the idea is approached well, but that all depends on which direction you're planning to take this map toward.
In fact, a hexagonal themed texture set could help compliment the visuals, i.e. perhaps some dark, neutral coloured hex-floor tiles to dial down on using solid black.
Aard's 10 sector map was made of randomly generated hexagon sectors: http://strlen.com/maps/doom/
The map I'm making is inspired by Ribbiks's entry for Doomworld Mega Project 2013
Not sure if irony, but
was looking on phone before.
On laptop, those look really nice - very solid theme going on, it looks like. If you don't want to finish, you should seriously consider posting the scraps! That's cool. One of the rare shots that makes a Doom level look like an actual place rather than an abstraction.
I was making this map for a while a long time ago (textures are mix of speedbase, quake2 and some other wads), then moved to another city without pc, then finished arcanum map, then was busy with real life, then found these screenshots in my id1 folder in 2014. I lost the idea of it. Tho need to check if the map file is somethere at my current pc.
A rare day with no work and university work I can procrastinate has led to me opening up an editor for the first time in a decent while.
http://www.mapsbytron.com/images/random-temp-stuff/lobby.jpg Obviously incomplete, just working out a style. I like it, the ceilings with the inset bits are cool, but the overall shape of that area is quite square. I think it would benefit from either changing the floor height in some parts just up and down a bit or making that left wall bow outwards a bit and to get some angles in there.
Nice vegetation models, btw, are they yours? the overall shape of that area is quite square.
doom3's rectilinear light volumes perversely encourage you, for performance reasons, to build areas of the same shape. that's about as good as rooms in doom3 get! Yeah... I dabbled in D3 for a bit and really disliked that about the lighting. :(
Still, I doubt many people would have trouble running a map with 3 or even 4+ lights on the majority of the surfaces if they are small like the above screenshot these days. This is just really a little passageway between areas, if it gets expanded out more then there will be more interesting shapes for sure.
Vegetation models are downloaded from some stock models site, can't remember the name right now. I've been playing with different material techniques to try and get some plants in Doom 3 that don't look like total arse. Having nice assets to start off with certainly helps. With regards to light counts, Doom 3 is ten years old. I just operate under the mindset that so long as it runs on my five year old machine I don't care about things like light counts. I just operate under the mindset that so long as it runs on my five year old machine I don't care about things like light counts.
I think that's a safe assumption to make. I'd like to see some doom3 maps that are in the same vein as modern q1sp where you just make whatever as long as it runs good on a modern machine. I'd been paying so much attention to getting some nice faked bounce lighting going on that I completely forgot to check what any entities looked like in the area. Stuck an imp in and it was half in darkness with ugly solid black shadow that didn't fit in at all with the lighting of the area. Pulled out a couple of the lights and replaced them with a larger one which doesn't look as good but at least things fit into the environment better.
I should have remembered to check that earlier, been caught out by it in the past. That's what I get for not doing any serious mapping for a few years. Fucking unified lighting. >.> So not much progress to show, apart from that I've just been experimenting with various lighting tricks like god rays, thanks to help from Zombie. http://www.mapsbytron.com/images/random-temp-stuff/lobby2.jpg http://www.mapsbytron.com/images/random-temp-stuff/lobby3.jpg isn't there a way to use shaders to apply lighting only to some shaders and not others? you could make a new shader for the monsters and have lights that only work on them and not the world. lots of extra work though. :(
Was discussing that idea with Zombie earlier tonight, it's a crazy amount of work though since the tools aren't set up to do it easily.
is really painful sometimes. tho it's very powerful, it's hard to make everything look good
If you have the time, painting special light shaders can help a lot.
If you are making world geometry in a 3d editing suite, there's the option of baking on lightmaps as well. But yeah, it's mainly inflexible unless you are willing to dump tons of time into it. However, these days I think you could get away with making oversized light volumes with the exponential light shader and lighting areas like you would a quake map... I painted unique volumetric lightmaps for a silly Quake4 map. Results weren't bad, but it took a while and meant even less flexibility.
Raven added a little fudged normal map contribution to the ambient light shader in Quake4 (Doom3's was just flat diffuse) because we just had to use it so damn much. Every multiplayer map except DM11 had one big ambient light covering the entire thing, because otherwise nobody could fucking see the other players. Replayed Strombine just yesterday checking out that lighting technique you used, I think I'm definitely going to be stealing that gui based interaction system you came up with for it.
I forgot I even did that. It's a GUI plane with nothing in it, right? So you get the interaction with nothing displaying? You should probably take it a step further and have some kind of glowing interaction hint display in worldspace, like the hand icon in RTCW.
It might not work in Doom3 though, I think D3's GUIs had to have an opaque background? If it doesn't you could fake it with doomscript. Doomscript was the only good part of that engine and it was great. also I think Tron, Tyrann, and Tronyn should merge into a superentity and do battle with DazDranz and negkcros. Doomscript was the only good part of that engine and it was great.
Hell yes. I loved that scripting engine. I'm all in favor of this super-entity idea, so long as I get to be one of the arms.
Been playing around with creating a custom ambient texture, Strombine style. Produces some nice effects around vegetation when a bit of colour is introduced for the filtered green light and I think it's definitely getting adopted as a standard technique by me. Can't really see it in effect in this shot, but I figured everyone can enjoy a fine wall of Imp ass. http://www.mapsbytron.com/images/random-temp-stuff/lobby5.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/q2map1.zip
No screens but it's a really, really, early look at what I've managed to do with TB2 so far. I have to say this is going to be an awesome time for Quake 2 players when TB2 is finally here. I had to edit the
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/q2-tb2-1.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/q2-tb2-2.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/q2-tb2-3.jpg The warm lighting fits with the textures, but the cooler lights don't as much, maybe you'll need to tone down the saturation on those ones, except on the third screenshot.
I'm just gonna sneak this in here before I go to bed...
http://quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=50439 overgrowth and bare fluorescents go well together. are these your textures? the ornate copper floor and ceiling are beautiful. also pipes and ventilation vanes!
probably the most visually boring is the mineshaft... This map is incredibly beautifull. I played it a bit on my Mac mini, and it's running very well. I'll try it with some bots tomorrow.
Really awesome work ! Thanks
Some are mine, some are just photosourced from cgtextures. But I produced them all into the level if that means anything. The actual ornate floor and ceiling are actually more or less like the source, but the pipes I've made myself, the small pipes are actually a really old texture. Feel free to use the textures, I'm gonna make a source release of this later on too, all max files, map file etc You can edit the surface and content flags in the face inspector by clicking on the
The map is ok, but (as others already said) has a very bad gameplay. I write this just after I played the map, I came here to see what others say, I thought maybe I'm stupid or something. I played on EASy skill, I repeat - EASY (skill 0), not even normal.
You say the map is unfair only on hard, sorry, but that's bullshit, pleas try to play your own map on EASY and see how easy it is. I ran out of ammo quite fast, playing with just the axe is not fun at all, especially when you are fighting death knights and fiends. Otherwise the map is ok, but please, please, next time try to test your own map, at least a quick run from start to end on normal or easy to see if it's "doable". Somebody please delete the previos post, it was meant for other thread, I can't edit it or delete it :(
All these old nannies are knitting and stretching their wool :
http://fsgregs.startlogic.com/Public_Files/Cham/Pictures/sissies.jpg we don't have a delete feature, and if it is flagged as spam your IP address gets blacklisted, which is not what you want, so i unflagged it.
Not really a screenshot, just some initial test bits for a quake texture pack I plan to make when I got a bit more time.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/quaketest.png If by PXart you mean pixelart, then yes, infact I am a professional game artist who is specialised on pixelart.
Me and my friend [url=http://store.steampowered.com/app/239070/]released a a pixel art game last autumn[/url], where I made almost all art, I've also considered making some q1 textures with the q1-palette.
I'm always looking for talent, do you have some home page or portfolio? You can go to http://ptoing.net which links to my slightly outdated art blog and pixeljoint gallery. That should give you an idea of my skillset. ATM I am mainly focusing on getting better at 3D in my freetime.
you made Hammerwatch?! I freaking love that game, me and my friend played the co-op for hours when it first came out!
Ptoing, your stuff reminds me of old school bitmap brothers - https://www.tumblr.com/search/bitmap+brothers I plan to. It will probably take a while because of work related stuff. Work first and all that. But I am pretty fast once I got going, and once I got some decent base textures for metal and rock and all that those kinda things should be fairly fast as well. But yeah, plan is to make a full set or sets. Base, Metal, Rock, Weird shit.
Yep, yep. Ptoing, your style reminds me a bit of heretic. I like the orange, not many textures like that.
Thanks. The colour I used is not indicative of the colours in the final textures, just one of the 16 colour ramps to get a good base. But I want to make textures with colour variants which are not that common in the original Quake set.
I still have to experiment and get a feel for the colours and which ones work well together. I always wanted to play Gods, and spent hours trying to guess how it would be in reality, based on some full color double DIN A-3 pages in a magazine, that had all the levels in the game on those pages, as a guide to complete it.
Xenon 2 is also a game i miss a lot. I always loved the feature about buying weapons, upgrades and bomb-like equipment, like the one where you get enough weapons to fill the bottom of the screen for a few seconds. Unfortunately, those are the only games i know done by them. Looking forward to you work, Ptoing. If you do it quickly enough, it could be the next map jam theme ;) Doubt it will be ready for the next map jam, but yeah, would be cool if it was used for a jam when it's done. Would love to see what you guys can do with it.
Oh hey ptoing, remember you from Apedogs and Unit16 when I used to lurk there a couple of years back. I have no doubts those textures are going to go out like hotcakes :]
Some more stuff. Maybe I should make an own thread for this? And yes, I plan on doing colour variants of probably most of the textures. Or at least for the ones where it makes sense.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/runicanimals.png the top row looks the best. like bronze or something... would be cool if there was some teal/green in there like the id *cop* textures.
Yeah, teal/green could be nice. So far I am very much still in an experimental phase, seeing which colours work together well. Top row looking best I would say is highly subjective, thought I quite like it myself.
I think that it will heavily depend on the surrounding textures used and as such I will have variants of almost all textures in my pack. a) because it's easy and b) mappers will have a lot more variety to choose from to give accents to their maps or use it for stuff like secrets, hints and the like. Oh btw, I have not tried this yet, but I take it max amount of animations for a texture is 10? +0 to +9? Are those too small? I would have expected twice the size (or maybe map editors always scale up textures?)
Those rune animal ones are 32x32, which is the size of the red rune textures in quake for example. I will probably make combinations of different ones as well, and have them as single ones too.
Most textures in Quake are 64x64 actually, I will probably go more towards 128x128 for walls since that will allow for more variation on bricks and such. And it's not too much more work. But yeah, I think I will make a new thread for this and post my updates there. Don't wanna clog up this thread. so if it it's WIP then it's the right place to post. It will be nice to see a new texture set... shame it's not purple (we're dying for a purple set here!)
Fifth: There will be purple variants. VARIANTS OF EVERYTHING! I reckon that I will have over 1000 textures when this is done. Because variants are quick. Like make a brick texture. Make a banged up variant, make an even more banged up variant. That is 3 textures.
And then 5 or 6 colour variants of each of those and potentially mixes where you combine 2 or 3 coloured bricks into one texture for more funky kinda layouts, which would already be 15-20 textures from one basic brick texture alone. And again, yes, purple will be available, I promise :) Just made a 128x128 brick texture and then made 9 really quick brightness variants. This is really easy to do and surface colour vs lighting in the level is something to take into account.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/brickgradient.png But I was wondering if this would be a bit overkill. Because once I do other colours (not every ramp is as stretchable as the browns) and stuff like mossy variants and so on it will quickly go to 100 variants for this single texture alone. This also makes me wonder how to best organise the wad file. It is probably best to break it up into several wads. Question is how exactly. Theme makes sense. Base, Metal, Medieval, Runic and so on. But the question is whether to break it up into colour sub wads or what. Suggestions are welcome. are you a god damn wizard. How did you make a 21 colour texture look 24 bit? Like seriously?
Also, careful with the last 2 lines of the quake palette, if you didn't already know the last 2 lines are reserved for full brights. (just checked and I'm sure you've avoided this problem anyway but still) As for texture organisation, just make sure you name the textures well. Like wall1, wall2, wall3, trim1, trim2, trim3, light1, light2, light3 etc etc. I think 8 different shades of the same texture is overkill. 3 is probably the sweet spot (bright, middling, dim) as level designers can then use the three shades to make cool shapes.
I would rather see variations of the texture with different trims, misc small details like blood, scorch marks, etc as then level designers can also incorporate those elements of the textures into the game play of the map. Textures do look great though! Hehe, Thanks. And yeah, I am aware of all the ins and outs of the Quake palette, colormap and so forth. I actually have 2 palettes I work with, one with and one without the fullbrights so that if I use dirty tools like blending and the like no fullbrights can creep in.
Yeah, it will probably end up being. brik##gr kinda format and use the #s for variant and shade and the gr for colour, so that would be green or something, will see. But so you are saying, basically yes, more variants are useful. I can see that, since you might wanna make a level that has an area of dark bricks without being actually that dark, or use lighter bricks in some not so well lit areas. I fear that this set will go into the 10s of thousands, haha, not even kidding. It could happen. Just a quick thing that popped into my head : Consider doing some extremely large versions of some of the "bread and butter" textures in your set. For example in czg's level "Honey" there is a 512x512 wall texture that is all simple brick but has loads of different grime, grit, dust and moldy bits on it. It really helps break up the repeating nature of the large surfaces in that map!
Ah, posted at the same time as DaZ was.
I will totally make variant stuff with less destruction, more destruction, blood, trims, what have you. And those will only become more once I amass a bigger texture library to combine from. But this variant thing for the shades is literally 5 seconds of work. But I also see where you are coming from with the 3 brightness versions. What probably is also something to take into account is mixed brightness/colour textures. Since doing that with brushes would be a bit tedious/overkill. Yeah, see what you are saying. I will have a look at the Honey textures.
This one being 128x128 is already bigger than most original Quake ones, where stuff like bricks usually was 64x64. I will have 64x64 ones in there, but I kinda doubt I will do that for bricks. Btw, what are the naming conventions for quake testures. Do the names have to be 8 symbols only or can they be longer?
are those palettized? if so, good job. if not, you should check to be sure it looks ok.
if you want to make huge amounts of variations, go for it, but please don't lump them all in one wad file. a mapper can easily load multiple wad files to get whatever textures they want, but it will just be a mess to sort through hundreds of textures in a single file. http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Textures
Nice work! Looking forward to seeing them on a map! Are you the same Ptoing from Pixelation forum by any chance? Yeah, they are palettised. I work in Cosmigo Promotion which is geared toward indexed work/pixelart and animation. So nothing here was painted at a higher bitdepth and quantised down, it is from scratch using the Quake palette.
And here is a little teaser for FifthElephant :) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/purplebrick.png About the organisation, yeah. I don't think I would have them all in one wad. It will for sure be wads sorted by theme, texture type so they can be easily found as well and you will have groups that make sense in editors like Trenchbroom. What would be good to know is if I can give the textures longer names than 8 symbols, and which symbols are allowed. I reckon alphanumeric only and _- or something? seeing as + and * are special. Any clearing up in this regard would be much appreciated. than: Yes I am. To my knowledge there is one other person that goes by the name of ptoing but our paths have not crossed so far.
metlslime: thanks a lot :) It says 15 characters in there. And I reckon 15 should be enough.
brick1_2purple is 14, so yeah. 15 should be plenty enough. But they're very big.
I think brick works well if it's small and dense. It's interesting that you have stuck to the same palette gradient in order to get more out of the texture colour range. It might need to be made grittier or dirtier in order to fit the quake aesthetic, using noise and colours from other sections of the palette. Here's a really simple room I just made - https://www.dropbox.com/s/rbuzgtoy873p2e4/ptotex.jpg Hm? Why scale it down, I am confused. The texture is 128x128, but has the same scale as all brick textures in quake, just less repeat. As in the bricks are the exact same size.
I think bricks work in all sizes and of course I will make smaller ones as well which probably can be 64x64 tiles, but I might as well make stuff 128x128 since it is not a lot more work if I got good base textures. Some variants with more colour shifts are a given, I have been looking at the Quake textures quite a lot to see what colour combos they used and such. How many variants of the texture have you actually used in that little room? Last one before bed.
Highly experimental this one, and also WIP. I quite like the colour combo in this one though. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/weirdrocktest.png Also, I appreciate people doing small tests to see how these look like in maps, but please do not use them for anything you release until the set is done. First quake since 16 years back
http://imgur.com/bnkNg4Z I'm only learning how to develop my textures into Q1 and also trying out both radiant and trench, I will probably build a little singleplayer level later on. I scaled down as I wasn't sure about how to use them. I won't release anything until i see the full set to be honest, if these initial textures are anything to go by this should be really nice.
Also I probably should have gone to bed rather than mess around with these. I will keep a close eye on this thread. * Ptoing:
- Purplebrick: looks good, with a strong personality. I'm also waiting to see a purple texture set, and if there is a orange and pink ones, even better. As Fifth said, i also see that they aren't very Quakeish. It's good because that gives us the option to make maps with a different feeling, but most mappers prefer to make Quakeish maps for Quake, so it can affect how many people will use them. Something that had bugged me is that in my eyes those are blocks, more than bricks, at least in size. Apart from the size, i can't tell for sure if that is stone or brick. In Quake, bricks are usually smaller (8-12 units high), like ID's city1_x and city 2_x textures. Check Quake e4m7 for reference. Don't misunderstand me. It is good to have bricks so big, but it is probably better if bricks so big aren't common in the texture set, except if that is one of the charms of the set, if it is like that, ignore what i said about their size and keep going like that. - Weirdrocktest: looks good as well, as a desert rock texture, but the tiling is a bit obvious: In a normal texture that wouldn't be much of an issue, but rock textures are often used outdoors, where most brushes are well and homogeneously lit, very big and you see them from afar, so the tiling is way more noticiable (in this case, the whitish zone in the upper-left corner). Try to make all rock textures at least 128x128 and make some 256x256 or maybe 512x512, and check that there is no point in them that stands out noticiably (in this case probably getting rid of the whitish zone is probably enough). Well, most of those tips are in Rorshach tutorials(at the bottom of the page), so it is probably better if you read them directly than me continuing to write. *Hipshot: looks decent for a first try. It would need something around the door, a frame, or better, some rockish detail. Glad you are coming back to the dark side of mapping ;) . Any requests? I remember when I posted my Quake 3 WIPS here that people said that certain themes were done to death. I can only promise to do my best but it would nice if it's a theme people would like to see.
I'm also open to continuing unfinished stuff that people don't care about anymore. Just hit me up! > I'm also open to continuing unfinished stuff that people don't care
> about anymore. Please, check this thread : http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61065&start=19 Two very nice maps almost finished, that were scraped ! :-( Rather you build with a theme you want to build with and that you have ideas for, regardless of what other people feel like seeing. Make us not tired of e3 metal!
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. Just keep in mind that all of this is super WIP.
The main difference from Quake stuff is that they do not have as much colour variance, though there will be versions of them which will have that. But probably clean colour ones too, like they are atm, can't hurt. As far as the size goes, there are plenty of textures in quake with stones/brick/whatever which have the same dimensions, just one a smaller 64x64 texture instead of 128x128. But yeah, there will be bricks/stoneslabs of many different sizes, don't worry about that. The weirdrocktest is just that a weird rock test, and I am well aware of all it's fault, I have been doing pixelart tiles for almost a decade professionally, so I know about hiding the grid and all that. Those tutorials you linked me to do not seem to be there, but I am sure I have read similar stuff before. And I could ask Kevin the next time he is in a hangout I frequent as well. Well, if you just want a theme that no one does. How it sounds a map for DoE expansion, in Alice textures, that relies heavily in rings of invisivility, and fully geared towards DMSP or COOP?
i think there's definitely room for some more strongly coloured sets. some great maps have been made with the terracotta textures recently... Terracity and Red Slammer come to mind. They have an almost stylized strong orange theme moreso than e1m5, for example.
For sure. I think the Quake palette can produce some pretty funky stuff, but there are not many textures in the default set which use the more "non-earthy" colours in a broader way. Those are mainly used to add accents to other colours. Such as the purple and cyany colour.
Ok, no problem. I'll be expecting your work eagerly. Keep it fun for you. But
Well, if it is easy as you say to make colour versions of existing textures, maybe i could try begin to learn at texturing by doing that. I always wanted, but never knew where to begin. For now i am getting info on the issue till i begin with that. I have been doing pixelart tiles for almost a decade professionally, so I know about hiding the grid and all that. I know that you have been working as a pixel artist, and checked the links you provided, but by basing myself on those i though you worked in videogames with art similar to Monkey Island, for example, which is a very different work to texturing, and because those tips, even if they sound basic, i have seen them not present in enough famous videogames to put that info there for just in case Those tutorials you linked me to do not seem to be there Rorsarch tutorials are there, but not the video ones, those are probably lost forever. I was telling you about some text based ''tutorials'' at the very bottom of the webpage, below of where it says: ''Various help pages'' and ''MAP TEXTURES''. I suppose you probably know what they tell, but even with that, check them if you are bored, they are short, but kind of the base of texturing in Quake's community. Thanks for the comments. I'm very impressed with the unfinished stuff by Bal. However, I wouldn't have expected otherwise from him. Having said that, it's way out of my league but I still feel I could at least mess around with it. Quake and SP level design is completely new to me so having such an amazing base to start from is pretty convenient.
In the read me he says that all the content is unreleased Nehara stuff. That's a mod I was unfamiliar with (relatively new here). Does this mean I can't use the textures he used? Does anybody know this? Yeah, I will make variants, I said that already :) Atm I am doing a less bread and butter texture because I was bored of making bricks, haha. Gonna post it later.
And yeah, editing textures is a good way to start I guess. I have done tilework for Wayforward, specifically on Aliens: Infestation for the DS, which was very limited in terms of colours and tile usage, good practise. And I have done other tile stuff before where you have to try and hide the grid. But I see where you are coming from. Ah, found the tutorial stuff. It's under help. Will have a look a bit later. Just read some of his texture stuff and I actually disagree with some of his do's and don'ts. Specifically saying to not work at scale. I think working at scale gives you more control at the pixel level, because if you scale down shit will go to mush.
Another thing is that he does not seem to like textures like the bricks I done based on scale, saying the bricks are too big. I would disagree there too, especially in a game like Quake where epic/monolithic architecture works really well. But yeah, the stuff where I agree I already knew. At full scale those texture do look pretty nice. In this picture it looks a bit like a cake but I reckon if you stick to the same colour range it will look good, just flat purple was really nice. (no this isn't a proper map, it's the shell map I made that ended up being my jam 2 map... I use it to test texture themes)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/suhl6p3t3zhkffn/ptotex2.jpg mfx: Noted :) I quite enjoy doing Gigerish stuff.
Fifth: It does look like cake, yummy layercake. SleepwalkR: Yeah, they are quite clean, as I said before, these are a base pass before mixing in other colours, doing "moss passes" and what have you. I think I will provide these clean variants in the pack as well though, because that can't hurt. Would be neat to have a map where stuctures get more and more decayed as you go along. And here is what I been working on today. Also still WIP. And NSFW. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/basrelief.png And there will be several broken versions, colour variants, splattered with blood (offerings to the goddess) and so on. And probably runes on her sides below the hands and besides the head. Variants are a lot of fun to make once you got a good base to work from. I think I will provide these clean variants in the pack as well though
PLease, please, do that, as long it isn't extra work for you. You can always put them in a different Those so pure textures look suitable to Alice and other videogames in very weird surrealistic worlds, by looking at that screenshot.
Problem with that kind of texture combinations it that they usually require to keep the number of shadows to a minimun or give the map a minlight of 50 or more, because dim lighting makes all colours more similar between them. The good part, or bad depending of how you look at it, is that that issue is more prominent with ID textures, due to their similarities as usually they share at least the third most used colour in each texture. In fact, I tried to do a colorful map in ID textures and ended like that, so had it switched to brown-green textures, as dim lit areas is part of the gameplay of the map. Looks good, I like the texture blend of the rock and grass... would look nice at the top too!
Yes it would, I'm just gonna figure out the best way of doing that on those angles, in this engine =)
Wow, that looks very nice. I know you've done amazing things for Quake 3 (and some other multiplayer games), but just out of curiosity, is this your first single player map?
Cool, keep at it! Are you the only person in the world making a Q2SP map, or is there an active community of Q2SP mappers?
There seems to be a somewhat active community at -
http://leray.proboards.com/ But the Q2 community is nowhere near as active as ours and I am struggling to get answers to my questions fast enough. I expect once TrenchBroom 2 is release we'll see a huge increase in the different maps for different games. it looks like q2 just with WS support and other things similar to what Fitzquake does.
Well, haven't done any mod SP since HL and Q1 really, so it's gonna be a really fun to return to it!
Assuming you did q3 maps hipshot?
This is quite nice http://lvlworld.com/media/id:2126/s:212612893015555064 I like the style, brick and sewery at the bottom, with mixes of wood and pipes and a more realistic setting with buildings. You should convert those textures to q1 and do a full q1sp out of it. The Kingpin set? There's another industrial one as well thats similar and I think Nehahra had a few in the same vein.
Can't see anything wrong with having more industrial textures. Although after staring at the Rubicon2 set for months I probably won't be doing industrial for a while! Yes and <a href="url">this one</a> I just released, same theme kinda, but "even more". But I feel the Q3 community is "dead", even the QL forums, there's like 2 new maps there.
And I have been wanting to do Q1SP for a long time now, so I figured why not now, those Jam2 levels are really great! the bricks can be jf2, the wood can be from a sock wad, and the metals could be cr8, ogro, or even some idbase/wizmet mix
. Has been underused. Here's a map by yours truly that uses Kingpin to good effect, if I may say so myself:
http://mpqarchive.pauked.com/index.php?view=viewcomments&review_link=17000 A made a func_door, out of two brushes. But it doesn't move. When I create a door with a single brush it moves, also, looking at E1M1, that door that consists of three brushes, seems to move, but I can't see that they do any different than what I do, seems to use the same spawnflags, just different shape and texturing.
I did search on google for a solution, but I'm having a hard time finding good Q1 mapping newb tutorials that describes the issue I have. @Hipshot: Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but there are at least two things you can try. You can look at some released map sources and see how exactly they have implemented the doors. The map jams come with sources for all the maps, so they would be a good place to start. You can also find the sources for the original iD maps that John Romero released many years ago. They are a bit old, though.
And the other thing is to copy your door into a minimal map that has only the features you need to play it and attempt to open the door. Then if there is a problem, post the map here and ask people to look at it and explain why the door doesn't work the way you expect it to. For example, make two boxy box rooms and put a door between them. It doesn't even have to be lit properly or look pretty. By two brushes I assume you mean two seperate piece that move in different directions?
If so, turn on the "Don't Link" spawnflag. Sorry, that I wasn't clear enough, but I looked at the E1M1 Source map and it was as simple as mine, that's what I thought was so strange.
For some reason, it didn't move, but when I created a new one today, it worked, they look exactly the same in the editor, strange. @ijed, it works w/o the don't link flag, it moves both brushes. And sorry about posting this in the wrong forum section. That's not it. If he's got two doors linked they'll just open at the same time. That's what linked doors do.
If a door made of any number of brushes isn't moving it's probably some small silly mistake. Doors in Q1 aren't much more complicated than doors in Quake3. If it has a targetname it won't spawn a touch volume, because it will assume it will be triggered by something else instead. Is the lip too big? If lip is the same number as the door's size in that direction it'll move (lip - size) = 0 units. So I was editing the Quake palette, specifically the last ramp before the fullbrights with the horrible saturated blues.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/quakepals.png What I did was just extrapolating the ramp back from the colours on the right side of the ramp. This is likely what this ramp looked like before someone decided that they needed the Dopefish secret. I am pondering using this for my textureset, though I wonder if I should make it mandatory or if I should make an extra wad with all the textures that make use of the new colours (probably not that many, seeing as the difference of this blue ramp to the other blue ramp is similar to the differences between the 2 purple ramps.) Yeah, I already stated that :P
It is very similar to the difference between the 2 purple ones, mainly saturation change. yes, you can modify the palette the engine uses. in fact, this was done for the YPOD doom mod so that the textures and art assets would look good.
the only thing to be wary of is to check that stock assets are not negatively impacted, but i'm sure ptoing will take care of that. I think the only textures where the sat blues are used are the dopefish stuff (who cares), one of the stained glass windows and the silver keycard texture. None of those should suffer (probably look better actually)
I will probably have to supply an adjusted colormap too, but that would not be a big deal. Don't make two identical blue rows just because there's precedent. The fact that there are two very similar purple rows is already stupid, especially when the complete list of purple things in Quake is three items.
Haha, yeah I know. But the resulting blues would be more useful than that fullsat blues (though I guess I could do something else with the saturated end).
I thought about it more, and I think the list of purple things in Quake actually is three items:
- Runes - The sky - Voreballs Am I missing anything? It's used in a few textures, but never as the actual colour of an object, just as an accent/blend colour. Underused for sure.
And yes, there's a version of an arch (or a window?) with purple, but it only appears in QTest.
Someone should make an otp.wad :P with purple variants of existing textures. Jam! here's some more work on the big stones tile and a tiled view.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/brickstile.png There are still areas which need some work, to hide the tiling a bit (mainly the area where there are 2 broken bits right next to each other, which creates a dark bit. Colour variations on this are also not final, just research, but it works pretty well I think. Buncha moldy cheese! Actually, with the colours that Quake has you could make some pretty good cheese textures.
Time for an editor shot:
http://s296.photobucket.com/user/voiceofthenephilim/media/ionsp01A_zpsec3da8fd.jpg.html?sort=3&o=0 You can pop the texture box and visgroup box underneath the Categories/Objects/Faces box, just drag and drop - then BOOM - you have more room ;)
MFX: Thanks
RickyT23: Startlingly obvious, but it never occurred to me once. It feels like my mapping window has doubled in size, which is hugely helpful. Thanks. MFX: Discovered it while browsing the <a href=http://www.noevdia.com/news.php>NED</a> website for new releases. The name stuck in my mind (didn't hurt the I liked the <a href=http://aluktodolo.bandcamp.com/album/finsternis>album</a> Fifth: Thanks Daz: There is no nicer screenshot. It's mostly wide-open areas that are only partially complete. This is one of the few places cohesive enough to represent the map in a positive light. skill 2 demos for gravelpit_1.3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/buhx9ux7w4vdaor/grav13_ericw.zip?dl=0
Looking good. The final arena still needs a bit more ammo, I think. There could be more monsters given the large spaces... Maybe spawn in reinforcements when you hack the computers? (totally cliched of course.) Don't know if this link will work but
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6cay6zUJZndTU15R2UzcWZuZEE/edit?usp=sharing Whoever said that is an asshole, Knave rules.
Is that a Knave and Zer combo? I always wanted to do just that. So I got my OBJ to MAP convertor thing running
We'll see. It still carries with it all the Quake weirdness with plane accuracy and stuff. It works OK with simple edge bevels but trying to do something even slightly complicated and the planes start sliding off just enough to get misaligned certs where shapes meet... /ramble Did you snap the geometry to grid after pasting it?
edit/actions/snap verticies It has crash problem in TB1 when snapping large amounts of geometry, like entire levels, but thats probably just a memory issue. Oh yeah, I can fix it by manually twiddling verts and such in Trenchbroom but I'd rather not. A clean paste is my goal. Heh...
TB parses the pasted brushes just like it would parse them from a map file. The grid has no effect on this. I suppose that either you are snapping your plane points to integer coordinates, or that the process by which you determine the plane points is not accurate, or, finally, you're seeing the inherent imprecision of the vertex generation algorithm that TB uses.
You and Sock and negke and CZG should conspire to build an espisode ;)
I don't like these whitish textures though Sauber :D Looking good. What I always wanted to try is make a textureset very specific to a level.
One of these days, once I got more time and am done with my other texture stuff I would totally be up to doing that with some people on here. As in you people map stuff, plop on placeholder grid textures and I check what the sizes need to be and make specific textures to fit what was made. /me shakes fist at time! By himself.
The shots look nice. The silver key cathedral in particular stands out, and looks finished. I wouldn't say that same-ness in looks is particularly prominent to me. Maybe the ceiling textures/ architexture could be broken up in shot 3... Make some gigantic floating asteroids between the structures that the player doesn't walk on as points of reference, but make all the actual buildings from the same repetitive style.
if you want to see a colaboration by all these matters.
Now that i mention that, wasn't spposed to be the third jam on september? *Mfx, that looks very good, and the textures look OK in both highly lit and in darker areas. Please make a map out of that, with more of the second screenshot, the other two, while having their own personality, are still probably too similar to Sock's map. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/KjNiThI.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/jTfgK2w.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/DFsl4BQ.jpg[/IMG] Obviously ripping off Mars City pretty hard, don't worry there are non-corridor areas in this map. Or just more variety overall?
Have the same issues, all looks alike.. could you try to use metal4_4(rotated) tex instead? just to see how it works and fits(or not) i'm not insisting to you switch the whitish immediately, just for variance the two-tone look is very quake3.
It seems very clean and pure. Not bad in and of itself, because not every quake map has to be a rusty gory mess, but with filthy blood-covered ogres and knights crawling all over it might seem a bit odd. That's a beautiful Quake place. It's nice to see textures with a light palette that still has the Quake-y grit/grain, and shows off chunky architecture.
I really like #2, it's the one shot of those 3 that evolves beyond "brushes" into "architecture." The shape of the door echoed by the shape of the large angled pillars on either side is really sweet, the overall profile of the floating island is cool, the chain and broken stairs are cool. The only bit that seems out of place is the arch; i don't think you need or want arches in this level. The wedge / triangle shape plus angled pillars and mitered ends seems to be the unifying motif, a curved shape like the arch works against that unity and looks out of place.
indeed. We should totally try that sometime when I got more time. I mean even just using the textureset I by then hopefully will have made and adding to it where some more specific textures would be needed. Like for platforms, lifts, arches, tech machinery and so on. Or even for chainlinks. making a texture that has built in edge wear at the appropriate places.
I thought I posted this
Sorry if this is a repeat. Anyway, I'm doing a project this month and hope to have something to show at the end of it. WIP test level: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/Update1.jpg And here's a utility I made to help out with converting OBJ files to Quake MAP files for pasting into Trenchbroom. YOu still have to work with convex shapes and such but it saves time in that TB really only supports cubes at the moment. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/Update2.jpg I'll post more info as the month moves along... Bonus shot - heads on pikes! Gibbable, of course: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/SpikeHeads.jpg @WarrenM: Will you be releases the OBJ converter thing? Also, am I correct in assuming that it also uses UV data to get texture scaling and rotation and such? Or did you do that in Trenchbroom after importing?
@FifthElephant: Looks like Modo to me. Thanks guys!
Yes, it's MODO. I lurve MODO. And I could release the OBJ convertor thing. It's not as awesome as you're imaging, believe me. :) All texture work is done in Trenchbroom. The OBJ->MAP thing is a simple polygons to planes thing. BUT it's useful for getting shapes that are hard to do in a traditional Quake editor. I'll definitely release it
Gives me impulses to to make the smoke.spr a broader range of five frames, and to decorate the sides of the corridor with an animating roll of trainview frames.
Great sreenshot. The side slide of a static ent can make smooth animations,
alhough they get queer in long termain. func_train i love train levels. the constant and fast movement gives a very action feel to a level and the sound contrast between indoor and outdoor portions works really well to set the tone for pacing.
The Q2 Lazarus pack called Citizen Abel?
Its a heavily scripted cyberpunk story style mod which has trains and car chases. And a fight against a helicopter. And a casino. It's great. played the first one... was really shit.
this is what you're talking about right: http://blendogames.com/older.htm (at the bottom) there is a train sequence but it's little more than running across the top of 6 cars while monsters spawn behind you. i was thinking more where you're fighting through the cars themselves with different types too (cargo ones, passenger ones, fancy passenger ones, etc...) where monsters can break in through windows or in the case of cargo containers, open those side doors or something. Experimenting with both a different visual style and also hammering out bugs in the OBJ->MAP convertor.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/Update3.jpg With each version, the 4th was great. I think that's the one with the Makron as a crime syndicate boss, and more involved train stuff.
Also I stole an idea from it 'telefragged' :) Minecraft has taught me that wooden floors and lava don't mix. What about flagstones?
I hope you've got some eerie sounds for that void as well :D Haha, never even thought of that
it was... ok.
also Quake2 engine has bizarre physics. Like the way you bounce all over angled floors or how you will slide down even modest slopes, not to mention to way you will step up on a ledge if you jump towards it. YES. That is all. The finely crafted... almost delicate brushwork looks fantastic. More please!
The obj->map converter works both ways and he's converting all Q1DM's into UT4 maps as we speak.
then Epic will finally manage to have a good deathmatch level in one of their games.
Hah! Truth be told, I'm off work this week so I'm hoping to get some real work done on this project. We're moving into our new condo today, so starting tomorrow morning I should have days of time spread out before me to work on stuff
The convertor is working well enough. It's very delicate however and I don't totally understand why. Probably my lack of programming skills. But it works well enough to get shapes converted and that's all I need for now. Now I just have to decide on a visual style and start putting some sort of playable map together that works well with my mod Trying to squeez an Ogre!
Hope he don't get bored. I realize this is a little OT for this forum so feel free to ignore me, but if any of you play any CS:GO I'd really appreciate your feedback on this map I've been working on!
looks nice, but I can see that the texture is really broken on the tower in shot #5.
Can't really comment on gameplay as I don't have the game. Oh yeah, thanks for the spot! That's where the tower turns from a brush in to a displacement with alpha blending, so I'll have to extend the displacement down to the bottom.
or hide it with rocks... btw, I really like how worn down the cement looks. Reminds me of some coastal fort I visited in Florida.
...Ogre == auger & "bored"
With wordplay like that Madfox I'm starting to think you control of the English language is far better than I thought :) Cross post from the news item:
I thought I would share some screenshots of the amazing stuff that these guys are developing: Russel "Castle" Maekim: http://i.imgur.com/7lSU73K.jpg http://i.imgur.com/EpWGwmT.jpg Chris "2d-Chris" Kay: http://i.imgur.com/zj2J78l.jpg http://i.imgur.com/uJNMtQt.jpg that map looks hella nice. I dont have the game installed but it looks good.
Sprony I like the second map the most. The first map feels very 2k3 or 2k4 UT and I wasnt a huge fan. If the skybox has only one sun/moon, the shadows are in the wrong place on the architecture.
ZBrush for basic shapes, ZRemesher to bring poly count down, optimize and chunk into convex shapes in MODO, OBJ->MAP, and into Quake
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/FaceMadness.jpg I'm sick, help me. Thanks to Preach and his awesome FBX->MDL Python skills this project has been extended as I now have the ability to do custom models...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/CustomBanners.jpg Thanks to Preach, I can now do custom models and skins. Let the fun begin!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/CustomBanners.jpg Dig the look of the map. There isn't enough contrast in the lighting imo, maybe its just too much minlight?
DaZ - Lighting is all temp, just letting myself see what's going on.
RoQ - Quakespasm with everything set to "old school" It's basically just setting the texture filtering to nearest, the particles to square and
Reminds me of some coastal fort I visited in Florida.
St. Augustine? I visited there in the early 70's as a kid. It was quite the trip. We went from Key West to Jacksonville and back (my grandparents lived in Plantation at the time). We hit Disney World less than a year after it opened so no Magic Mountain for me (this is my sad face). We honeymooned in Florida but we went for Expo instead. That and Sea World, some water park next to Sea World that I can't recall the name of (the Der Stukka slide I remember though, jammed my swimsuit so far up my ass I'm still picking out threads over 30 years later. The wife also remembers it because it turned her swimsuit into a thong long before that was fashionable)and Coco beach because she wanted to go to Ron Johns surf shop. nothing so fancy. there are a bunch of them that are nominally maintained yet still look pretty run down (eg: http://fortdesoto.com/ ).
I was thinking east coast and not Tampa. St. Augistine is the oldest fort in Florida so that's what I thought you were talking about. Fort Myers was going to be my second guess. Desoto was my third.
I'm not a big fan of the Gulf. It's too shallow. Deeper is better when you happen to be inside a submarine. The North Sea and Irish Sea was also a problem in that regard (600 feet isn't the best depth band). The White Sea and the Barents were all good though. Deep water is better, less chances of hitting the dirt that way. I think this mapping scene is only getting better with age!
I need to get my pc sorted out so I can join in again So in the latest Nvidia driver they have included something called "DSR" or "Down Sample Resolution" that lets you boost the native rendering resolution of any game by up to 4X and then resize the image to your monitor (basically giving you controllable super sampling in any game you like).
So here is The Marcher Fortress in 4K resolution http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/marcher4k.jpg Great for screenshots! :D nice screen. does nvidia dsr work with any dx version and opengl? i use gedosato sometimes - borderlands 2 in 4k downsampled to 1920*1200 looks amazing - but it works only with dx9.
What's the benefit to the gazillions of anti-aliasing options? Super sampling is from the 90s, right?
supersampling is extremely resource demanding and incompatible with some modern engines. post-procesing fake aa works always but the result is questionable at best. instead of sharpening the image it just blurs everything. the idea behind dsr is interesting. would be nice to have one standart for both amd and nvidia cards. i tested stalker: shadow of chernobyl in 4k donwsized to 1920*1200 and it it incomparable with those crappy fxaa or mlaa fake anitaliasing modes. proper supersampling doesnt work in stalker so downsampling is the only option. of course you need super fast gpu..
The driver release notes state that is should work with any game, opengl/dx. I believe you do need a (somewhat) recent nvidia gpu for it to actually work however, I have a 660 and it works for me.
As for performance, yes it is super resource demanding. Quake was just about holding 35-40fps @ 4K resolution but I also had 8X msaa anti aliasing enabled as well which much be a huge resource hog with so many pixels on the screen. Definitely recommending for screenshots only! i think it's a good way how to play older games that are not so hardware demanding. in many older games we can set 4k resolution and even standard gpu can handle it at playable fps.
Not sure where to put this so I'll post here.
Seeing the trend towards large BSP2 maps. I wanted to see how far I could go before something broke. I used Hammer 3.5 and the ID map source. I was able to add the first 14 Quake 1 maps to a single BSP2 file. I strung the maps together so you can play it. Somethings are broken due to redundant targetnames. http://www.mediafire.com/download/ipdets9uiogdq3y/stress.zip cool! i had tried to glue the other episodes into a single map and couldn't do it in bsp... maybe now that bsp2 is more widely supported, it might be time to revisit that project...
How easy would it be to convert the q2 maps to q1, maybe string several together using bsp2? replace the baddies with their q1 equivalent, maybe rework some of the textures. could be a cool remix project.
A glimpse at the original Id map sources shows they have targets and targetnames like this:
"targetname" "t143" "targetname" "t143" "targetname" "t141" "targetname" "t142" "target" "t53" "target" "t144" "targetname" "t144" It's no wonder they clash if you try to join the maps together. However, I think it would be easy to transform them by adding the map name as a prefix, so you'd end up with names like "e1m2t142" and e1m2t144" in map E1M2, which is where I got the above lines from. These names couldn't clash with those from any other map, because the other names would have different prefixes. This a simple text-processing task that any programmer can quickly script together. If there aren't any serious problems with the simple solution that I am missing (not knowing the map format inside and out), it looks it could make joining multiple maps together much easier. So, I guess I almost volunteered to write such a program with this post. Heh. Does anyone think a little helper program like this would be super useful to have? find ^(s+)?"(kill)?target(name)?"s+"(.+)"(s+)?$
replace \\1"\\2target\\3" "whatever_\\4" That covers targetname/target/killtarget, are there other places targetnames are referenced in the standard id progs? Your proposed solutions are not very practical for people who only use Windows without Unix-like extra packages like Cygwin. (Which is not what I do.)
I found only the three keys, killtarget, target and targetname with this: grep (BACKSLASH)"t[[:digit:]] *.MAP -h | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq Replace (BACKSLASH) with the actual backslash character, because the preview is apparently eating it. It printed this when run on the Id map sources: "killtarget" "target" "targetname" I think that a simple Python script would be more practical for Windows users. They'd only have to one fairly basic install to run the program, if they don't have Python already. People who want to do this, but don't have the programming experience, just ask someone. It really is as easy as czg made it look. Just, you know, better not ask Spirit, because he will judge you for not having sed on your computer :) (Actually, I will too.) No need to provide a tool, just do it once and release the result. The sources are gpl after all :)
I don't judge anyone, I just feel superior! czg's regexp looks much nicer but he probably has some seeds on his MacBook Air. Here is one final pic of my jam3 map : http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/jam3_daz_4k.jpg
I should be clear that this is something I finished, rather than started, for the jam. I wasn't even sure if the theme fit, but then again the theme is evil, and I find using the zer chaingun in this map very fun.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/jam3t1.jpg http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/jam3t2.jpg My god
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/MyGodItVISd.jpg VIS time is very fast (a few minutes). Getting it sealed was the problem. VIS was consistently convinced that it could walk straight through walls into the void. Aggravating.
My hope is that this bastard ships tonight
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/shot2.jpg I really like how you get terrain textures to blend. Great texture alignment work there, it really makes a difference to element the terrain bits to the next level.
Loved watching skacky on twitch last night
Hacking and noodling on the weekend...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/QuakeStuff3.jpg with many such islands in the sky would be great.
oh god... i was just happy with the one island, but that would truly be glorious to behold. Sadly I had to work today, so didn't get started until about 7 hours ago. Sleep time now, but I was able to throw down 1039 brushes. Maybe 40% done at this point. Don't know if I'll be able to finish, but I like what I have so far.
http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/mm196/voiceofthenephilim/rg2_ionousA_zpscf4e95dd.jpg Not fond of the colored lighting. It looks too dark and saturated, possibly wrong tone, for that skybox.
yeah looks great... just the sky is bit light in comparison to the buildings, it makes it harder for the eye to focus on the detail with the brightness behind it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3-R1SCIYAAdJXd.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3y2HLxIUAEkZnZ.jpg "Sky Eater" - great name cool screenshots. I tried many times to make a map that works with that sky and failed.
I always wanted rotating sky parameters like in Q2... That this will be my, and many others, favorite map from Sock, in terms of visuals alone.
I made a static entity of a flag and hope to get smarter to get the backside not transparant. I need one that is doubled sided textures but the parms for it are a little kinky.
just duplicate the polys to make the other side, and add edge polygons to connect the two. Quake doesn't have double-sided polygons.
I couldn't find the right program for it, then I used Q2mdl-v9.0
to copy the parts and save them as 3ds. Rather a long trace for 74 frames. I had how-now and now know-how it was an old problem. Uploaded to quaketastic as qflag.zip as here. For a neverhappened jam.. Now i dont know what to do with it. Hmm...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4aVM6TCEAI_Pio.jpg:large Nice :) Looks beautiful.
I'm also making a similar thing, but i map WAY slower than you, so give me a month or so :) If I was to make any comment about the screenshot you posted it would be 'try some different rock textures'. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1849053/Shambler_Wip.jpg
Currently working on his rig and animations. Already have him working in engine too but with temp poses. Once I have him working properly then I'll post more images. The skin / texture will take me the longest though. It must be epic.... hmm, if engines supported transparency on models, fur wouldn't be too bad. you could just make a few bits that hang off the model and the rest could just be painted on.
as it is, you might be better off just going with a white albino skin interpretation instead. I think it will be the fur that makes or breaks it. Shamblers have fur!
The head looks like it is not hunched forward as much as the original. Perhaps the muscles around the elbow are slightly too large? Now that I think about it, I think a lot of underlying muscle structure would be covered by the fur? It suddenly looks a bit weird! I don't know if you intended these shots to be a size reference also, but the new Shambler looks much bigger than the old one which will cause problems when in game. Great start. Love the teeth! hmm, if engines supported transparency on models, fur wouldn't be too bad. you could just make a few bits that hang off the model and the rest could just be painted on.
I tried this on the dancing shambler model http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/shambler-dance/ I added a tga skin with an alpha map so that the "furry" polygons could be shaped like tufts rather than triangles. The trouble is that you quickly end up with overlapping alpha-blended triangles, which start rendering in the wrong order causing visual artifacts. Doesn't mean there isn't a way to do it, but you may need to be careful. The screenshot is not a scale indication. It is also in a bind pose for those wondering why its not hunched over. The forearms and claws are bigger yes but its a style choice I am going with and it looks bloody evil in-game. Don't worry you shall see :)
As for Fur... I think I will be going more with monster distorted pale flesh and blood covered skin / exposed muscle instead. of fur. Maybe I will have some fur on the back and its nether regions though. Does Quakespasm or Fritzquake support alphakey on MDL models? 1bit alpha like they use on the sprite FX? That would avoid alpha sorting on models.
As soon as I read your post, I envisioned a version with Zendar textures, but also involving Heretic2 textures and Ik/palace-style textures as well as Heretic 2 statue models like the giant amphibian dude, a huge super-detailed palace/ancient village getting progressively slimier as the map descends towards the waterfront. Then I remembered, there's no time to map and even if there is I have other things I must finish. But damn that was a great idea anyway!
a huge super-detailed palace/ancient village getting progressively slimier as the map descends towards the waterfront.
Something like this? hehe, that was actually going to be a sort of weird arx fatalis styled map.
The idea was that the surface of the planet was constantly covered in acidic rain (the rain would have caused damage in the finished mod) and that the surface inhabitants had all moved underground, as in arx fatalis. the twist was that this somewhat medieval setting was basically a facade built overtop a high-tech facility, so stone and brick corridors have air returns where you can hear fans whirring, underground waterways lead to hydroelectric generators and eventually as you got deep enough, it was a full-on ikbase area ending in a quake rune-gate. it was kind of a reverse monster progression too, starting with demons and medieval guys and ending with tech guys. man, that video made me nostalgic... maybe THE ULTIMATE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH could be a gigantic turtle map.
Spires and palaces -> Skacky Moving parts and dungeon scenarios -> Necros and Madfox Design aesthetic and QA -> Sock A fucking cool Shambler model.
I'd vote against transparent fur, in games it just tends to look out of place. Polygons aren't suited to it IMO. http://www.compositeeffects.com/site_images/CU/HRM/image_107.jpg
Going more this type of stuff for his skin. Will be fun to pull off. I always read it as distorted flesh and gore hands and blood covered limbs / mouth after all. Never got the fur sensation. :P It just depends what folks read in those blurry pixels from the old model. Flesh or fur who the hell truly knows.
Random doodle... first time doing Q1 maps. Colored lights for the win?
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1849053/Quake_Mapping_01.jpg Colored lights for the win?
100% saturation red lights on dark green quake textures is just about the worst lighting combination possible, so I would say "win" is very subjective here. Look at sock's maps for a good case study in how very subtle coloured lighting in quake can work in the right places. I do like the feeling those red lights give off though in combination with the textures, reminds me of a mix between Sixth House caves and Daedric Shrine locations from Morrowind.
Using colored lights as main light sources isn't a good idea in most cases. In my view, you'll get better results by using regular lights for the overall lighting and colored lights only with a fairly small radius for a subtle tint around the light texture.
Agreed with negke there, the way the coloured lights have tinted the doorway in the close-up works really well, but the spotlights seem a bit intense.
We're quite averse to coloured lights on here, I think it's a reaction to Quake II.
I'm not so sure any more. A few years ago I would have agreed with you but looking back at the last year or two of releases, external assets in the form of replacement models and coloured lights have become the fairly normal, rather than some abhorrent beast. It's really interesting to see the shift over time. I remember when even the mention of using a coloured light in a level would have you running from the forums, wiping the flames from your body as you went. Opinions can swing and this is usually accompanied by a map release that pushed the envelope in some way. An author does something in a fantastic way that keeps the Quake aesthetic intact while making the level/game look better and the community accepts it. Most people hated coloured lights because the examples they have seen are horrid magenta / green / red combos in a medieval map or some such other idiocy but as soon as someone did it right it cottoned on. I think another side of it is that some people (I suppose I am included in this subset as well) have always seen these various graphical upgrades and additions as somehow taking away from Quake's old school identity and turning into some awful botox infused mess that has no idea how old it is :) I don't really view it that way any more, as authors have figured out for the most part how to incorporate new things such as coloured light, replacement models, increased map detail limits into the base Quake aesthetic and still keeping its essential Quakeness. So yey for that. This got long. Not picking on preach' post at all I just got inspired and nostalgic after reading his message :) Now go map you scums, don't you know there's a JAM on!? The question you have to ask yourself is:
do you wanna keep it oldskool with the 1996-era white lighting flava, or do you want to be a funky fresh nuskool 1997-era colour cat? Not to worry I wont do ugly colors. I guess the "got compile tools working" part should have been stressed a little more. As for the lighting I do plan on using it ALOT but in a tasteful fashion. This is just a test map for random butchery. How intense can lights go and what do all the 5 zillion light settings do in the end with these new compilers. So you all get to enjoy my Frankenstein creations for now till I figure out all the buttons. As for the white lighting of the original quake? I think its time for subtle warm and colder colors for those interior and outside areas.
I do like Quake 2 but indeed they went a bit Primary back in the day. Back then it WAS Colored lights for the WIN!?! Before that nobody had done it much before accept in the realms of prerendered CG. nobody thought about tasteful interior lighting. But we'll see if you guys like my eventual creations. Wandering from Unreal and Cryengine into the older tech is fun. I love a good Min Max challenge. Cheers! Doing a map in the style of the new Mapjam4. Doubt I will finish it in time though. But hey nice learning process at least for me.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1849053/Quake_Mapping_02.jpg Some early style experiments. I find red lighting difficult to get right.
It needs to be strong enough that it is clearly red and not pink, yet that is usually 'too strong' in that it just looks like batman forever. ... when well executed, it gives awesome rendering. Just try to make it smooth: no saturation, no strong colored lights, just smooth... and that will work fine...
For anyone looking to make a huge map that will fit within the standard
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/hugemap.zip I find red lighting difficult to get right.
It needs to be strong enough that it is clearly red and not pink, yet that is usually 'too strong' in that it just looks like batman forever. I always had the impression Quake engines do something strange to the blending of red lighting, sometimes it appears equally dark as it's surroundings while it should be brighter... or something. Cantputmahfingeronit. With multiplicative lighting (and also real world lighting), component red light is going to eliminate any blue and green luminance information, and likewise with any other combo, so colors and brightnesses can appear to change weirdly. Rune metal for example has a lot of blue and green in it, so hitting that with pure red just gives you a strange dark mess.
Justoffthetopofmaheadtho. You wouldn't ever use pure component green lighting, or blue, red technically shouldn't be an exception. Is it just because it's a DARK VIOLENT COLOR that it feels less inappropriate than super crystal green? need a high saturation or they're just pink, as Mentioned above. The reason they look dark in Quake is because lots of the textures are green.
Green + red = black. The map looks good, keep the lights. I skipped Lunaran's post :p
To elaborate a bit, there is also a clamping issue; colour components can only be so bright (ie 255) which often combines badly with the quake palette / textures. Specifically red as well, since it practically requires 255 0 0. Once you know this, you can use it for specific effects. The screenshot still looks good, but the proof is in the playing. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1849053/Quake_Mapping_03.jpg
Some more areas developing. The blood tunnels will get more open spaces soon... But I like the door style :) spikes! i feel like the middle screenshot has too many of the cross lights in one spot.
maybe if the bottom ones were the rectangle lights, or even better, if the lights that had two on the same pillar were merged into one long 192 unit tall light, it would make it look better. Dwere, Texture issue is with Trenchbroom bug currently... or my compiler need to check
Necros, Yea I need to consolidate some of them into the taller ones or change style indeed. I also want to make the area taller and a bit more spaced out since it goes past too quickly. The lower gravity requires that I make those upper platforms a little taller :P Still not bad for 2 hours of mad mapping at 2 in the morning for that entire space haha. I am enjoying this. A lot less work then UE4 :P Looki lookie, my new level. A shameless rip of Overwatch, still, someone needs to do the empire of the rising sun some justice in Q3.
Soes anyone have or know where one could download those old, original pre-shipping screenshots of Quake 1? Remember the ogre (not even the shipping model, I don't think) walking down the hallway, the shambler fighting in front of the slatted stair case
I've scoured the internet and they seem to have disappeared. I'd love to get a hold of those and check them out again An old ogre pic is included in this PDF.
http://www.quaddicted.com/files/misc/Tronyn-QuakeSlides.pdf Here are some other pics, including one with the dragon. http://www.gamers.org/games/quake/screens.html Dat 90s screenshot resolution. heh, I had a similar feeling about a Quake2 (pre?)release screenshot I remembered... A gladiator on a bridge over lava...
Tracked it down and ugh.... box room, saturated light, stretched textured on boxy character model. Spent some time on a new area that you'll find yourself in early in the map. Had some fun with terrain as well. Included a snapshot in-editor of that madness!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1849053/Quake_Mapping_04.jpg Then just some more small scale are details when you are not bouncing off the walls in low G. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1849053/Quake_Mapping_05.jpg Hope you like it! i really like that doorway design with the spikes. very distinctive and quite original as well. you should try to work that design into more of the map, make it something that appears in more than just doorways.
I can't remember the last time I saw a Runic map like that. It's almost like a resurrection of the Runic maps of 10 years ago, but with modern build quality, scale, lighting, etc. The blood bowls casting light are a cool touch.
Yep, this map is promising.
I think that Runic metal is the best "out of this world" style for Quake1. This actually.
http://i.imgur.com/vzsblxN.jpg
its a start. would love to get to the top of the buildings in a low gravity environment.
Now to think which kind of gameplay would fit that I'd be really interested in building something like that, actually.
Funny but I actually preferred this: https://i.imgur.com/IV2lL.jpg instead of the second link you posted. This is way more interesting to look at, what with both the circular design and the whole built-into-the-mountain thing. Using some of the external editors for minecraft to whip out amazing structures like this is probably fun, but I imagine as soon as I started I'd ask the question "why am I using this engine?"
one of us just wins the lottery, so that we can ALL have the "3 months" or whatever that it took that guy.
Loved the link btw. Sucks that as time goes by there's less time for mapping. At least for me. And others perhaps. Ahem. Necros. If one of us wins the lottery, we should all just make "What Quake was supposed to be" as a game. You travel to different realms, upgrade the hammer, it has RPG elements, etc. Lol. I would start up a game studio as one of my first things to do... and hire a bunch of people from func.
I'm through vising, there's no point.
Full:97.71 Elapsed 116h13m Left 17h13m Total 133h27m 87% happy newyear. Using all the tricks in the book I am sure too. I tried a lot of Sock's tricks from Zendar with Func_Detail and Skip Render brushes that would contain those elements. TON of work sheesh but does make it worth in the end.
Too late for wvis now, it was just a shot in the dark,
looking if my efforts would have faith, and have a test vis. I heared the stories of vis time for months, but I didn't see this one coming. I expected three days, my limith for vistime. If it's more my interest become mapping smarter. I had to take more care for the "sawn into leafs" warnings and block everything out in func_wall. Full:98.98% Elapsed:134h59m Left 10h36m Total: 145h35m 92% I don't know what sort of abuses you guys are throwing at VIS but damn
Seriously. func_detail everything that isn't the shell of the level, and I would guess your compile time will drop like a stone to <1 hour with tyrann's latest vis tool.
Of course, don't that as gospel, I haven't seen your level :) Seriously. func_detail everything that isn't the shell of the level
Out of interest, how many bmodels can you throw into your levels these days, what with increased limits and whatnot? Is the answer "all of them"? Also, I'm guessing Tyrann's new lighting wizardry makes bmodels visually seamless with world geo? #OutOfTheLoop bmodels actually draw quite slowly. I had an great idea of making a huge, unreachable terrain as an external bsp bmodel.
I got less than 15fps. although that should be fixed now in QS 0.90.0, large bmodels should render as fast as the world.
With tyrutils you can set "_shadow" "1" on a func_wall to make it cast shadows. for more info: http://disenchant.net/files/utils/docs-release/light.txt . haven't tried that feature myself though. although that should be fixed now in QS 0.90.0, large bmodels should render as fast as the world.
Sweet. What was the reason the rendering sucked before? I think it was just lack of batching OpenGL calls (not sorting the bmodel faces by texture), so for each face of the bmodel, there were a bunch of gl calls to set up the gl state (bind textures, etc.), then draw the single face, then reset the gl state. This is fine for ammo boxes, but as the bmodel gets complex, all of those state changes start to take most of the drawing time.
although that should be fixed now in QS 0.90.0, large bmodels should render as fast as the world.
Oh cool, I might try that again then! I was wondering about these... what is the process for making them that is different from normal mapping? I would love to do some custom pickups myself...
there is almost nothing different.
you put some brushes into a next, you load it in the same way you would any other model file and it display in the engine. if you make them solid, you can walk on them and collide with them just like any other. you *can* rotate them, but it is weird and there are some technical limitations on that. problems: dynamic lights will not work on them (except in some engines) if you rotate a solid bmodel, the collision is broken. also, you don't need to make ammo pickups bmodels. they could be normal models, like in sock's mod. Since those work in Vanilla quake those are BSP I thought. I did not spot MDL's I must be missing something...
While I'm not sure that sock exploits this, stock quake engines don't actually use the file extension to decide which file format to load. So you can take an
I think it was just lack of batching OpenGL calls (not sorting the bmodel faces by texture), so for each face of the bmodel, there were a bunch of gl calls to set up the gl state (bind textures, etc.), then draw the single face, then reset the gl state.
Ouch. It seems like the kind of thing that modern but cautious custom engines (like fitzquake derivatives) should display a "extension does not match model contents" warning, and exotic custom engines that support lots of other model formats may have broken support for inadvertently. Also, bear in mind if you replace a bsp with a mdl, the game will crash if that entity is given SOLID_BSP status - you need a genuine bsp for that to work.
Everytime I read this I'm stunned... that Darkplaces & co. are still seen as "exotic" in some corners of the Quake community. Lord Havoc is among the people who put the most time and energy into this community, into QC extensions and so forth. He basically wrote the book. Yet, no one uses his engine except for custom textures. It's really weird.
Back when Nehahra was made, engine extensions were apparently cool. Don't take this as a mortal insult, I'm just completely stunned by this. I'd think a mapping theme of "use at least 1 Darkplaces extension and Q3BSP" would be pretty interesting to see. But well, that's just me. Again, no flame. Just marvelling. I'll go back into hiding now. The trouble is, for me, I really don't like the DarkPlaces look. So if the default look turns people off (I can't be alone) then engine extensions are going to be of minimal value.
Added to the fact that you'll then be locked into DP for your map and I would be interested to hear why people don't like DP (ooh-err!) around here.
To be fair, last time I tried DP (oh behave), was a few years ago, but it felt sluggish compared to fitz, had loads of annoying eyecandy crap on by default and I couldn't be arsed to trawl through a ton of stuff on the internet to figure out how to make it look more like quake - and the physics felt just slightly different. I am aware that it has loads of awesome potential for modders and mappers (q3bsp spoooge)- but because no-one here plays in it, there isn't really an audience for DP-specific maps. Darkplaces is a good engine, too XD
The only thing I disliked about it was the mouse smoothing/acceleration or whatever it is. But I'm sure I can probably adjust it, if I only knew how.... Out of sheer curiosity and insanity, I just installed DP to check how close to Quake can I make it look.
Model interpolation is essentially required, since you can't turn off movement interpolation. Particles are shit and blurry even at the highest quality, and apparently there's no option to make them square. They don't behave correctly, either, because way too many of them spawn, and also smoke particles seem to fade to solid black before disappearing. This is very noticeable when using the GL. Underwater warp exists, but the actual water surface doesn't get warped. All it does is a Q3-like rotation. No way to disable colored dynamic light, by the looks of it. The game font is scaled at some weird size that makes it blurry with linear filtering and MSPaint-quality jaggy with nearest filtering. OK, but if someone is able to use QC extensions (or, hm, if someone is able to create game levels, even) I would expect them to be able to take DP's particlefont image and just paint themselves some nice new particles, even blocky ones if they want.
If too many particles spawn, well, the particles are customizable so someone could write a vanilla set with square blocks instead of dots. Waterwarp is gonna have to be a shader. You can probably do it with a Q3 shader, but I think MH wrote some pretty cool waterwarp GLSL some time back that could be ripped. Perhaps there's even a cvar for Quake-style waterwarp. I'm just saying these issues are not insurmountable for people who routinely create game content. IMHO getting to use the QC extensions is worth a little investment polishing the particles and whatnot. Just as an example, hipnotic and I believe Chapters (and who knows, maybe Quoth) uses copyentity implemented in QC. It's in hordespawn I believe. That is absolutely horrible for various reasons. DP has a nice simple builtin that does that. Same for many other things. It's just an improvement to have such things provided as engine builtins any way you look at it. I agree that it should have a "vanilla preset" like FTE does though. Regarding DP-only, well, a lot of maps are Fitz/QS-only in practice, which is the same thing. DP is easy to install and free. On the other hand, extensions could be added to Fitzquake etc, but that's gonna be significantly more work and you need engine coders to do it, whereas most of the other stuff can be done by content authors. Just my 2 cents. Cheers. One of the absolute most basic requirements of a custom quake engine should be that it's possible to make it look like vanilla Quake.
Otherwise, well there's your reason no-one uses it here I guess. Well it sounds plausible that a modder could jump through a ton of hoops and make DP look quakey enough to please most people for a specific mod, but I don't think that will help it be adopted much.
My reasoning is that I'm assuming most of us quakers really just want to have a single engine of choice for all our quaking needs - fitz, QS, whatever - it works for everything, or at least 90% of everything. If DP only looks acceptable on maps/mods designed specifically to work around all the silly eyecandy stuff, then I don't think that's a great solution. I love DP (darkplaces not double penatration) and wouldn't use anything else. Maybe it takes a bit of getting used to, but I go back to fitz and other engines are find them a bit vanilla. Also there's lots of maps that say "don't use DP due to bugs", but I still use it and never come across any of these so-called bugs.
I started trying to use DP to get some cool texture effects going, but the shader tech in DP has some pretty severe limitations and being spoiled by Doom3, I kind of grew frustrated with it.
And then there are some fundamental changes to how some things work in the engine that break some QC stuff that relies on the original behaviour and tracking down the console variables you need to set to revert back to the old behaviour is annoying. "I go back to fitz and other engines are find them a bit vanilla"
That's what the rest of us LIKE about those engines. :P DP is great. It's just that to me and the way I generally use Quake it feels too "awkward" to use compared to ports like Fitz/QS - too complex in its usage and features/settings, too slow in terms of loading times.
In a larger, more active community, I guess it would've been more established as a modding platform, similar to ZDoom, but Quake doesn't have that anymore. For the remaining people the costs of making something DP-only may not justify or outweigh the "costs" in most cases. So yea.. it keeps going. And I have a few other sections I still need to brush out! Madness. I am enjoying this mapping thing though.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1849053/Quake_Mapping_06.jpg old sky meh:
http://i.imgur.com/Aas7Mtn.jpg new skybox hotness: http://i.imgur.com/MSq6U56.jpg Note the nice new knight.mdl. Aww. I think the new sky/fog looks way better. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/QuakeAO.jpg
AO or not, this screenshot fucking owns. Looks really good MF. Definitely need to get some small radius lights near those light textures. Other than that though I'm liking what I see.
Looks really cool overall, Madfox! Agree w/ fifth on the light fixtures; it looks a bit weird to have a nice cone of light hitting the rocks, but the fixtures themselves are dark.
In those screenshots at least, the skybox brightness is also a bit overpowering, maybe they would fit in better if darkened a little in an image editor? @-5th All the info_light have an upper light, but that makes the entcount so hight.
I tend to a light0.3 with dist0.7 and range0.7 -light15 for a large area soft ligtning. @-uaddy Quake screens always are point of taste. Sometimes I can't see a thing. This case was I support them on my own site and they were low jpgs. I turned them into high, hope you see. @-ericw you're right about the skybox, but it's the fog0.02 that's causing it. I changed the boxtga but it won't work, only clearing out fog, but then they're so awfull cliffdemon it cries out colour. Or no fog and soften the original. For fitzquake family engines, you can set "r_skyfog 0.1" to reduce the fogging of the skybox (default is 0.5)
Make another light near the light texture itself with a small radius (like "wait 3" or something")... pretty much standard practice for the type of light you've made.
WARNING: 16,384px * 12,288px.
http://triptohell.info/moodles/junk/fte-megapixely.png hopefully your browser will cope... My browser coped fine.
My boredom threshold didn't. Most pointless screenshot ever, congrats. Spike: hah! Just what I needed to test my megapixel viewer :P
lotsa pixel Should work in every browser (do tell if you have issues) fyi 'my' megapixel viewer = https://openseadragon.github.io/
Feel free! It's on my shared hosting which I canceled half a year ago. Apparently they're too lazy to close it, should have done it earlier. lol.
http://i.imgur.com/EaTaJIh.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/poYy8tj.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oQWkLo1.jpg Took me a day to do all the gameplay blocking out first and the basic lighting. And then another day to do all the texture work and do the lighting proper. I think gameplay-wise it's one of the best DM maps I've done, it's like a cross between DM6, Q2DM8 and Deck-16. Contest hasn't really started yet but the map is mostly done, needs a couple of gameplay tweaks and a bit of bug-testing. I might run out if I hold down mouse1 all the time. DM is supposed to be about dealing with a fuck-ton of enemies and surviving against ridiculous odds, not ammo management.
Maybe make some of the inset pieces either orange or black, even though visuals are a secondary consideration for DM.
Here's a primary one though; the 16 unit slope next to the stairs might cause a problem for movement. I think colored lighting is overdone in a lot of quake 2 maps. The lip on the stairs is not a problem but the ladders in the map are a bit crap for some reason.
It's mostly done now and I could release in its current state and be happy but the contest doesn't start for a bit so I might polish ot up before then. I meant change the textures to those red/orange bulkheads - if memory serves they are the same versions of the ones you've used.
I always liked the powerstation black textures as well, but maybe that's just fond memories of that episode, probably the most enjoyable one in Q2 for me. If you're not interested in colored lights, I suggest stronger shadows where appropiate. Obviously visibility in DM is a concern, but nobody would mind if the ceilings faded to nearly complete darkness.
Maybe even hack AO into q2's light somehow? i remember trying to compile a map with q1rad a short while ago and it was still slow as hell.... i dunno, but fake radiosity seems like a better option even now.
Mostly just theme testing. Not properly nailed down the layout yet...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9Mi3aSIcAA_F5e.jpg:orig CZG : "There's supposed to be more of them, and they should have a proper finale, but dammit, I'm so sick and tired of these things. "
the transparent colour on the palette is index 255, the peachy coloured one. Also your texture name needs to start with a "{" character for it to be recognised as a masked texture. "{cobweb.pcx" for instance.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o8se6ino3z7fwfr/cweb.jpg?dl=0 If you use it then for non solid objects like cobwebs make the brush func_illusionary. And for solids make it a func_wall otherwise you may get hom errors etc
You are on a roll. I love the Q2 stuff. Looks very true to the original. Also, are those decals (spiderwebs) in Quake?
Nah, I messed about with ripping them from some Thief FM, converting it to the quake palette etc.
I just wish that quake engines supported having an alpha on a masked texture. But it's not to be :( I just wish that quake engines supported having an alpha on a masked texture. But it's not to be :(
Well, you can use a sprite, you just have to bake lighting into it... All (afaik) of the engines with { texture support can also take an 'alpha' key on the func_. Only problem is, if you go below about 0.7, QS/MarkV/DirectQ have a bug where the whole alpha-mask part will disappear. But at least you can make the cobwebs slightly transparent.
I hesitate to say this, but what about the monsters?
5th: Level Upped! Now bug Sock for the Spiders... @ijed I do not know yet for monsters. I hesitate to integrate is the vera thereafter.
Extra Screen WIP: Startmap http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/07/1423503957-spasm0002.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/07/1423503956-spasm0003.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/07/1423503952-spasm0001.jpg I think the startmap be over in 3 or 4 days. I rework the texture to remain in the quake universe. Thanks All 90 degree angles man.
Looks pretty evil, I like evil looking stuff. You could put a few lights in with "light" "100", "wait" "0.25", to light up the totally black areas subtley it's MineQuake. The only lights allowed are ones that simulate the lighting properties of MineCraft's various light-emitting objects.
but flat/plain 2d
is what i'm trying to say and dat pic looks like it could've been a level from d1-2 sorry, no offense here i'm retarded http://www.noelshack.com/2015-07-1423924190-spasm0008.png
http://www.noelshack.com/2015-07-1423924185-spasm0007.png http://www.noelshack.com/2015-07-1423924193-spasm0005.png http://www.noelshack.com/2015-07-1423924189-spasm0006.png I read your recommendation and try to do the best . Of course it is square , for this is the theme of minecraft > < . I work on the optimization of the room and light now. Thank you for your comment http://www.noelshack.com/2015-07-1423924190-spasm0008.png
http://www.noelshack.com/2015-07-1423924185-spasm0007.png http://www.noelshack.com/2015-07-1423924193-spasm0005.png http://www.noelshack.com/2015-07-1423924189-spasm0006.png I read your recommendation and try to do the best . Of course it is square , for this is the theme of minecraft > < . I work on the optimization of the room and light now. Thank you for your comment theres excerpt from frib's readme
I promise you that there are no crates, no 'jump pads', and nothing which could be accurately decsribed as a 'curve'. [b]Angular is beautiful too! [/b] bear in mind Angular is beautiful too! ... not sure angular is my of my taste... curves are greater... have you even seen a woman with cubic boobs ? That does not work... except in Mine-Quake ;)
Thanks all.
The rain effect is from Zerstorer with a model instead of a sprite. Really love the Terra series, haven't played it in years. Definitely influenced by czg's work. https://www.flickr.com/photos/129414687@N03/16342455767/ I just felt a great disturbance in the force
Looks good, seems like it might be even more atmospheric with fog and a skybox that has green mountains that would appear to merge with the map edges.
One day I will have time to map again... GB just posted a ton of shots on the Quakeone.com forums which makes me want to map even more... EricW's AO appeared at just the right time.
Been messing with lights, fog skybox and various options to get the nicest look, something I don't usually bother doing. Next up, foliage. gb asked about getting _sunlight2 in my modded tyrutils, and I made some progress on that this weekend with more code borrowed from q3map2:
https://runeofearthmagic.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/yoghurt-sunlight/ The second shot is my modified tyrutils using a 200-light dome, and unlike _sunlight2 in bjptools, they're regular additive lights instead of minlights, so you get some nice gradients in the shadowed areas. Also at the same time I added a penumbra feature that splits up the primary sunlight, giving it some nice soft shadows (neither screenshots is using -extra or -soft, light time for my code was around 20 seconds). Need to polish a few things, write docs, etc, but will have a beta up for this sometime soonish :) Now do it again with not-the-worst-possible settings in the first shot...
Not saying the new way is not great but that is not exactly a fair comparison, is it? I think the second one is too, actually. The softness is only the penumbra, if I understood ericw correctly.
The second one is what I'd expect the first one to look like with just the improved light dome effect.
Extra4 would just make the edges of the shadows smoother, and is the sort of thing it'd be hard to discern at that distance. What you've got in the second one (appears to be) more sunlights producing a more contrasted effect overall and the additional shadow casts, which are the much, much softer edges. I'm mouthing off because right now I'm trying to achieve the same thing by hand, and the effect is very similar... but nowhere near as nice. looks pretty nifty. I dunno if it looks better than slapmaps fake GI lighting.
https://slapmap.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/outdoor-lighting-and-fake-g-i-in-quake-with-examples/ Infact I know it doesn't. I think once you add all the fancy new features in then it'll look real nice. I'd love to play with this. I think with AO turned on it will look good. But probably not as good as fake GI. The thing with the fake GI is that it's less uniform, has brighter highlighted areas.
I think you'd have to spend a bit of time making it less uniform. It would be nice if there was a way to add a bit of a gradient (brighter at the top and slightly darker near the bottom). Still though, these extra features are always welcome. I assume someone will add radiosity at some point too ;) Spirit, neither one is using soft or extra4, it's just that the second one has lots of suns to give the soft edge on the purple light. I maybe should have left that feature for another comparison, but oh well.
Here's another test where the sunlight deviance angle was raised to 25 degrees: (cloudy day diffusing the light?) http://i.imgur.com/zJ3nqFt.jpg The main thing I wanted to show is the effect of using minlight for the light dome (first shot) - this is why the shadowed areas look flat - vs regular additive lights in the light dome (second shot). I think the light domes have a similar number of lights actually. Fifth, yeah, good point. Could just be a question of tuning the parameters, not sure. back in the elder days when i made maps, I remember various quake engines drew the skybox at different orientations, turning the highly sophisticated idea of sun direction matching the skybox artwork into a bit of a "why do I even bother" situation.
What I'm trying to say is - have the various engine peoples sorted that shizzle out yet? thanks! also I remember on your website, you were saying it would be nice if you could split up a light entity into a bunch of smaller lights in a ball- i've got that working as part of the same patch, it looks handy!
how are you doing the fake GI? When I did it, I just spawned a bunch of suns in a sphere and divided the light level by the # of suns. I had to convert all the light variables into floats though because each sun would have like 0.5 light intensity. :P
I also find it is *insanely* slow because each sun is now impacting onto the entire map. that's all I'm doing. It's a dome for _sunlight2, and for regular _sunlight I just jitter the angle a bit on each sun to get the penumbra effect.
It is slow, but none of those screenshots took more than about 20 seconds to light (and I'm on a laptop, though it's an i7 quad, so 8 hardware threads.) It'll be a lot worse for -extra4, but even if it's 4 or 5 minutes for the final light compile, that's not bad. "Elder days," I hope you come back one day.
With all this lighting discussion, I am hoping for some help from some of you with a question I have, "WHY SO UGLY!" I have a map whose architecture I think is reasonably okay, but it always looks like shit in-game, and I think the lighting must be part of it. I have looked at it enough to feel stupid even trying to figure it out. I hadn't even mapped this year until a week ago, and I may be living in a tent this summer while trying to finish my Phd (lol)... but nevertheless I am going to annoy some of you (and/or anyone who volunteers) with this question of WHY SO UGLY, posed in I assume you are accounting for how there will be more suns near the poles of the sphere? my problem was I forgot to do that, so there was a much larger percentage of sunlight coming from straight up and less from the sides.
Yeah so you need some texturing, good skybox, bit of fog maybe, looks like a neat village layout for Quakey exploration...
funny someone else is working on foliage at the same time, well here's my attempt at it:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/129414687@N03/16453403469/ I've tried that recently. And by foliage I mean shitty, drippy slime and dopey ass looking plants.
What game is that? Potions, zombies, trees, looks great.
REAlly liked the Quake shot as well; Cyclopean for sure. Loose stones are a nice touch. Foliage is the hot new stuff it seems.
The maligned and yet mighty { And just as EricW starts putting together lighting models that are especially suited to open terrain. crisp, crunchy, old school foliage, fits with the aesthetic whilst progressing it in a way that's perfectly cromulent to quake traditionalists imo.
also they don't take lighting.
rubicon2 originally had sprite-based metal grates, and i tried to make it work better by having the LD choose the lighting level (by setting the skin index) but it still didn't look right almost ever. .spr for anything environmenty always looks like pickled arse.
really wish autosprite2 was vp parallel upright :/
maybe there's an "autosprite3" on the horizon... on
That way you could make rags/spiderwebs that can move with the wind etc :) I'm looking at the same problem - I want thin fenced stuff with alpha that can blow in the wind and has lightmaps applied.
I can kludge it with some entities, but really a hierarchy (eg. bones) is needed for this type of stuff. #define MFH2_HOLEY (1u<<14)
set that bit in your or if its an iqm you can just provide your own shader while playing with the model's bones via csqc. lightmaps is less easy, although iqm does support vertex colours, while mdl would need to bake it into the texture itself. I guess this stuff needs some new light util tweaks. Pretty much starting over with that rainy level as the visuals keep evolving.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/129414687@N03/16585062198/ absolutely love it! Perfect texturing, and what looks like nice dirtmap lighting... and the transparent textures too! Great example of using new techniques but keeping an authentic quake feel.
love the sense of scale and atmosphere in that first shot.
second shot looks properly damp and dreary too. cubespew is spreading to the other quakes
but, yeah, what's going on on the floor in the first shot? it looks unless quake can do reflective water suddenly, then yeah it sure looks like a shoop.
Dude says it's a "concept" tho, so I guess it's a...concept. Yeah, it's partly shopped, don't want to throw away anymore brushwork so I'll be painting over primitives before building them. It's convenient to be able to make your own reference.
Not Quake, but whatever
MODO, Substance Painter and Unreal Engine 4. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2272200&postcount=8 Moving on Why not make one of those? little people maps have been a staple part of maps for a long time :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FRkAat9ROA Bedroom maps are a staple of every UT game. Many will be made, trust me. That's not a niche that needs filling.
Absolutely wonderful stuff! I love the details here, so authentic and personal. Love the Far Side calendar, and all the games and tapes. Zork! Bards Tale! Slayer mixtapes! Coffee rings on the dungeon map. Great attention to detail.
Also I guess all the fingerprints and griminess was substance painter? Looks like a sweet tool. Probably a bit too late for construction criticism, but if not, I thought the empty cans looked a bit sketchy, and I would've preferred the carpet if it was dirtyish and more of a subdued colour. Also where the hell are the cheeto crumbs? Overall though, amazing composition and really shows off your modelling / materials skills. Makes me want to get an oculus rift and just sit there. You should make the full house and set a whole game there. Thanks a lot!
Yeah, it was all done with Substance Painter, actually. It's all I want to use for texturing these days... Instead of a trailer, I'll offer you a trailer for a trailer!
Why not a screenshot for a screenshot? Awesome.
related to that, I've been playing with qbsp a bit and trying to get it to load Too bad Quake doesn't have a weapon clip etc, because I wouldn't mind having to make my own collision.
Guess you'd need to do something funky with skip textured func_walls to make the collision for a misc_model? ericw - That sounds more useful than what I'm doing. :P Honestly, I tried that at one point as well - inserting model triangles directly into the BSP but I didn't understand the code well enough to get any real headway on it.
That code is ericw - that sounds awesome - does lighting work with them? I can see that being a good way to get things like decent dead trees and whatnot
I tried an experiment like that a while back - I wrote a program that took a bunch of triangles and stuck an extra vert on the back, pulled out a little to create a tetrahedron, which I then wrote out as a brush in a
It worked very well, but I found that when used on a large-ish scale, e.g. to create big cave systems, all those funky planes would caused the bsp compiler to go bananas and generate microleaks. Made no real difference even if i made sure all tetradedron verts were snapped to grid. In these days of detail brushes however, it might not be so much of an issue... Yeah, that's the "spikey" option. It usually sucks but sometimes it works so
It worked very well, but I found that when used on a large-ish scale, e.g. to create big cave systems, all those funky planes would caused the bsp compiler to go bananas and generate microleaks.
I wonder if the next enhancement to the engine and tools should be increasing (or removing) the maximum number of unique planes. I wonder if the next enhancement to the engine and tools should be increasing (or removing) the maximum number of unique planes.
Don't know if this was an issue. I just think the compiler wasn't really designed to handle that sort of geo. When it tried to make a bsp tree from several hundred non-orthogonal triangular faces, everything ended up being sliced and diced with floating point inaccuracy stacking up until it eventually plopped a great big Welsh salad on the table. I haven't tried it though since detail brushes became available. It probably works a bit better now. Close
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/PreviewA_01.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/PreviewA_02_Standard.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/PreviewA_03_Extrusion.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/PreviewA_04_Spikes.jpg does the "standard" option simply take all the polygon planes in the obj model and define a brush with them? So that option would only work if the obj model is convex?
Right, it treats each mesh in the OBJ file as if it's a set of planes and converts it into Quake MAP format.
It doesn't do any kind of automatic decomposition. The meshes need to be convex already or you'll get weird results. I WANT to do some sort of automatic convex brush breakdown but maybe at that point it really is time to move on to bsp3. :S
I'd rather people bite the bullet and just embrace q3bsp, rather than add more cruft to the q1 bsp format. Right, it treats each mesh in the OBJ file as if it's a set of planes and converts it into Quake MAP format.
It doesn't do any kind of automatic decomposition. The meshes need to be convex already or you'll get weird results. I WANT to do some sort of automatic convex brush breakdown but Yeah, that would be the holy grail, but it's a massively tricky problem :/ I'd rather people embraced UE4, rather than add more cruft to Quake.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know what I'm waiting for as this seems to work, so
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/OBJ2MAP_PreviewA.zip I don't have any docs written yet but it's pretty straightforward. If you're using Trenchbroom, you can just paste the results directly into your map. If you're using Jackhammer, you'll need to load the resulting MAP file and copy/paste the brushes over. This is also a test to see if this needs anything other than the EXE to run Windows only, suckas! I'd rather people bite the bullet and just embrace q3bsp, rather than add more cruft to the q1 bsp format.
i meant q3bsp. :( is there any chance of seeing it implemented in quakespasm? ^_^; WarrenM, I couldn't get it to output a
3dsmax-2014 x64, exported OBJ using default options. Exported 3 OBJ's; a box, a pillar, a humanoid creature. None of them could be used to output a MAP. Any particular OBJ export options to use, or what am I am doing wrong/missing? Can you send me the OBJ files?
warren.marshall@epicgames.com ? I'll debug... The box will be enough if that causes the error. After messing with qbsp a bit I'm kind of fed up with my approach, I think Warren's tool is the right idea. My patch was fragile/ugly and could fail in strange ways (e.g., sometimes the models block gunshots and sometimes not, because of qbsp black magic :-/
For mesh decomposition: would this do the trick? https://code.google.com/p/v-hacd/ Tempted to play with that.. I wouldn't be totally opposed to supporting it in quakespasm, if there is a substantial q1 map release using it, not sure what the rest of the team would think.
To be honest though, I think it would be a lot of work for little benefit, given that we have bsp2 now, which has essentially no built-in limits. but what about the issue of unique planes? afaik, that is still a limitation of q1bsp regardless of bsp or bsp2.
I always figured that the only motivation to adopt q3bsp in other engines would be if there was a worthwhile amount of q3bsp Q1 mappage already existing (for use in DarkPlaces, or that one other engine that currently supports it, I guess).
Has anyone even made a q3bsp Quake 1 map? bsp2 should be fine with >64k unique planes.
From what I can see, the only reason vanilla q1bsp had a 64k plane limit is the planenum field of dface_t is 16-bit, but that's been increased to 32-bit in bsp2 Wow, 3DS Max spits out a special OBJ file format
So new version https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/OBJ2MAP_PreviewA.zip Much thanks to WizardExt for the OBJ file samples! v-hacd
I think that might work but it would have to have an option for exacting output because I don't think anyone will accept approximations. They'll want the exact mesh they modeled. But I'll look at it, it can't hurt! Oh, and if more people could give the OBJ2MAP thing a go, I'd appreciate it. I want to make it real release but I'm afraid that there's something I'm missing. And the immediate problems WizardExt ran into tell me I'm probably right...
tool sometimes outputs scientific notation for small numbers. just round to 0? anyway, TB can't parse that. :(
{ ( -63.6619 8 -2.5683 ) ( -63.6619 -8 2.5682 ) ( -63.6619 -8 -2.5683 ) EMPTY 0 0 0 1 1 ( -55.6619 0 -4.99999999998835E-05 ) ( -63.6619 8 -2.5683 ) ( -63.6619 -8 -2.5683 ) EMPTY 0 0 0 1 1 ( -55.6619 0 -4.99999999998835E-05 ) ( -63.6619 -8 -2.5683 ) ( -63.6619 -8 2.5682 ) EMPTY 0 0 0 1 1 ( -55.6619 0 -4.99999999998835E-05 ) ( -63.6619 -8 2.5682 ) ( -63.6619 8 2.5682 ) EMPTY 0 0 0 1 1 ( -55.6619 0 -4.99999999998835E-05 ) ( -63.6619 8 2.5682 ) ( -63.6619 8 -2.5683 ) EMPTY 0 0 0 1 1 } Odd, there's code in there to handle that
Can you send me the OBJ file that does that? warren.marshall@epicgames.com? Or just give me a download link or whatever? OBJ2MAP worked for me under Wine in Linux and successfully converted a small obj file containing a single octahedron. If there is a larger obj file you'd like me to run it on for more testing, gimme a copy and I'll give it a go.
The window layout is a bit wonky, but it's all right to use. http://i.imgur.com/jCrqM4J.png primal - Thanks for looking! Nice to know it runs under Wine. That layout is basically correct...
Fifth - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/OBJ2MAP_PreviewA.zip I have some test meshes from various people that are behaving stupidly. This is the joy of trying to release something publicly. :) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/OBJ2MAP_PreviewA.zip
+ added field to the UI so users can choose the decimal precision they want + added code to remove scientific notation in number results + added log file for debugging purposes (OBJ2MAP.log in the same folder as the EXE) This should handle your gear mesh without scientific notation in the map file now, necros. This also writes out a log file so if you get a problem going foward, please include that file with your bug report Using the "spikes" method with current fixes...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/Gear2.jpg if there was a special texture applied to the non-drawn planes of these mesh-brushes, that represented "this plane is not supposed to be part of the bsp", could a suitably modified bsp.exe use that info to discard these planes in way that simplifies the compilation process / makes it less error prone / makes these structures more robust and less likely to leak?
I could add a field for a user specified texture name to be applied to the extrusion and spike faces that get added pretty easily if that would be useful, sure...
i've had some scaling problems with that converter, objects scaled way too large.
Now its working, thanks warren! Go map! For anyone having issues with crashes when pressing the GO button to convert OBJ to MAP files make sure to run the program as an Administrator. :) It crashed for me at first but then I thought I would give it a go in admin mode. Worked perfectly then.
Am I the only one who has an admin account on their machine? :)
Out of curiosity, what crash are you getting? I could add a field for a user specified texture name to be applied to the extrusion and spike faces that get added pretty easily if that would be useful, sure...
Certainly a worthwhile feature. Could default it to "skip". What I meant was which 3d modelling software? No piracy ofcourse. :P
Is Gmax still a thing and does it export to obj? I have blender but it's a little bit obtuse (plus getting grid snap to work is impossibru) Found a thread were someone tried using v-hacd in a SketchUp -> Hammer workflow, and it sounds like it didn't work out because of the v-hacd results only being an approximation.
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=60709 I found another reference to this library, which seems to do exact decompositions, might be promising: http://doc.cgal.org/latest/Convex_decomposition_3/index.html re: texture coords, I did get conversion of UV's from Wow, really? Texture coord conversion
I'd say UV in 3d modelling would be only go so far because of the way textures tend to skew in the standard
Yeah, from what I could tell, the conversion is lossless for triangles with UV at each vertex, to the format
This was a Messy code is here: https://github.com/ericwa/tyrutils/blob/obj/qbsp/brush.c#L784 basically you just have to solve a "known 3-vec = (known 3x3 matrix) * (unknown 3-vecor)" equation. I could give it a shot if you don't mind sharing the source (either just privately or here?) Let me get the first real version out and then we'll talk. I'd LOVE to get some sort of convex decomp thing going along with texture coords
Warren, cool, sounds good!
Yeah, the spiders are in the BSP - each one's a func_illusionary, but instead of being made of brushes, qbsp is getting the faces directly from the I think going via I probably didn't do that right. I think the real way would be to convexorize the stuff myself and then rotatecopy it. That way I could use your default setting to generate several brushes instead of 1 brush per face.
auto convexorizoring would be awesome though, but likely really mathy and complex. Yeah, I had that thought while looking at the gear
But, the other methods will work now so it was worthwhile as a test case. I'm going to do a proper news item tonight or over the weekend but for now, I think we're at 1.0 and ready to release.
+ logging should be more reliable now + added more info to log + user can specify a texture name for visible and hidden faces https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/OBJ2MAP_Release.zip https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/OBJ2MAP/ReleaseShot.png Run it as administrator! Apparently that's necessary for some people. I just tested the latest version with Wine, and it worked fine. Since it's going to be a 1.0 release, I thought it was a good time to confirm this.
There are a couple of minor typographical errors in the log file. It says: "Copy To Clpboard : True" - should be Clipboard "Beginnning MAP construction" - should be Beginning Glad you shared the program with us all. is definitely the way to go: http://i60.tinypic.com/zm1c7p.jpg
I can't wait trying it out, but I'm stuck on the message:
it's not a valid win32 application. 'not a valid win32 application' is typically a dependancy issue. make sure you have
Yeah, should just be
Also, run it as an administrator. Don't know if that's relevant. i think the run as admin is only if you're writing to a folder that is normally protected, eg: program files, or documents?
and yeah, that is a shit error message for a missing dependency. :\ I'm using WinXp servicepack 3, but it's fresh installed.
Also I hate adding an administrator and password as I'm the only user, so I can't even reach that prick. I think it is the but in that case I'm not lucky because it won't fit WinXp. I'm an ancient fossil, I know. Why is that? I'm honestly curious because I'm hard pressed to think of anything I don't like about Windows 8.1
Broke a gazillion of awesome old games by ruining DirectDraw emulation.
I wouldn't even complain if compatibility mode worked, but it simply doesn't. So that was just my knee-jerk reaction from using it for ~1 day I'm afraid. First impressions were not good though, it seemed very naggy, it forced a restart without me being able to postpone. The mobile/desktop UI mashup was confusing at best, and enough's been said about the start menu.
I presume it gets better though use though? Or at least that the annoyances can be mostly tweaked away? I'm planning on building a windows gaming machine sometime soon, so I hope I can come to like the OS :) you can fix the DirectDraw problems in windows 8 but it involves changing registry settings. The problem is that it limits frame-rates in fullscreen mode but not windowed mode.
You can fix it by following steps on this guide - http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=99477#1202630 It's not a very well known guide at all and I spent a lot of time searching google for a fix. It's a good operating system. The fact that direct draw is broken is a huge problem for me since I play a lot of old school games. There are other problems I have had running games on win 8.1 (like hotline miami 1 being broke, amongst other titles, because game maker isn't built for win 8.1).
For anything other than gaming it's really great, but gaming on pc is going through a golden age right now and microsoft needs to step it up. but gaming on pc is going through a golden age right now and microsoft needs to step it up
what's fun is that it's not because of anything microsoft has done, but in spite of it. that's one of the strengths of the PC space, that even with msft's totally clumsy efforts with GFWL, constant driver fuckups, and their single-minded dedication to bringing every good gaming experience they can acquire exclusively to the xbox, it's still been entirely possible for other parties to do a total end run around the de facto owners of the platform. The advent of the internet allowed individuals to take the power of their own creativity and make stuff that the slow, short sighted and clumsy megacorp can't for various reasons.
I don't think its a golden age, because that implies that it will end. Instead things just get more and more possible as we improve our methods. I can now 3d print a working gun I want, all media (which the megcorps want to gate access to) is effectively free, governments and corporations are fighting a constant losing battle against the rest of humanity, and they're giving ground each time a new startup appears with a cool idea and just does it. The next step would be the dissolving of such cumbersome and wasteful institutions as we approach a type of creative singularity. Which will happen once the actual costs of production become low enough - which many smart people are currently working on. Yes I'm talking more about physical products, but we've already reached a point where this same community is producing free content of a much higher quality than many paid digital downloads. Someone is going to come up with a cool idea which frees this content creation from the licensor's. Hm. I should look into how much it actually costs to license Quake1 from id. So to wrap up my Throne Room posts from a little bit ago, the contest wrapped up and I managed to squeak into 10th place! Only the 9th loser, not bad!
But I got the prize I was shooting for so I'm happy! Now, back to Qonquer jamming http://www.polycount.com/2015/04/07/the-throne-room-10th-4th-place-winners/ cool warren. probably only 10th because, well, it wasn't really a throne (if that's what the contest required), but it still looked cool.
On noticing you're using Modo to UE4, what's your pipeline? I had some trouble exporting FBXes that UE4 would accept, and I'm just wondering if it might be that my Modo version is too old or if there is something special you have to do to make it work.
Kona - It's funny because a bunch of people messaged me saying how much they liked my scene and it should have ranked higher. I even had a few judges tell me I was in their top 3 - yet, 10th place. :)
I don't mind tho, as the prize for 4th-10th was exactly the same so other than ego there's no difference. Was a fun contest tho, and I had a blast making all those props... It helps in that now I know it's just supposed to work, and I don't have to do any conversion steps inbetween.
I'm still using Modo 501, so I guess my problem is it doesn't support the right format? Time to try to upgrade I suppose! I did get it to correctly import geometry, but the UVs were missing. It does output something that identifies itself as FBX 2010, but probably not the right FBX 2010.
Thanks for the info! If it helps, this is my FBX export settings in MODO
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/2015-04-08%2006_27_38-Preferences.jpg I think the candles in shot 2 should create a brighter hot spot around them, it seems very flat atm.
Shot 1 looks really cool. Again maybe a little dark though. Nice atmosphere however! I took out all the lights and replaced it with the new sunlight stuff and also added dirt mapping. I loved his map but the lighting seemed like fullbright. I also added WarrenM's skybox.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ueyhc3a7bn33efa/hypnos.png?dl=0 http://scampie.net/privfiles/QuickerQonquer.zip
Not a full release or anything, no bug fixes or anything... but if anyone wants to try this out, I've tweaked Qonquer a little to make the early rounds faster. There are more enemies at a time, a little less delay between spawns, and time between waves is shortened. The effects of difficulty are much more pronounced now too. I tried not to go too crazy so all the jam maps wouldn't become unbalanced (items still respawn at the same rate, so I can't make it too fast!), but I think this will help get to that later fun rounds faster So I'm not really going to release it without his permission. But it's more of a proof-of-concept. What I found interesting is I just wanted to add dirt mapping at first but I couldn't get it to work right without nuking all the lights in the map.
That works really well for me, makes the mod feel fun from the first wave and I ended up playing for quite a bit on each jam 5 map. I do feel my map is overly hard now but I think it's because I was evil with vores and shamblers.
Go for it and thanks for the re-light!
Didn't have time to explore the light past the initial ones I placed in the scene. Haven't even had the time to play the jam yet :( Cool, I will tweak it and release. I like the custom textures in the map btw, did you do them?
Sort of, blending mixes of stock textures and a few from knave. I'll expand it if I ever make a standard map with this theme (or someone else could do it..)
You don't even have to make a map (actually you do, I've decided new rules)... would love to see this theme explored more!
(playing your map to the assassins creed sea shanties is fun) Looks like I have no choice in the matter!
Still backlogged with taht rainy thing I started in December so I'll finish that first. Sorry fifth! No jam organizing, time is scarce. Enjoy my tweaked version folks.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/jam5_hypnos2.zip I added the source and a readme explaining what tweaks I have made and compiler settings etc. Just pop it into the Jam5 maps directory. looks excellent.
mfx, yes sir very interested although I find the skybox too contrasty to the textures personally. mfx: shots look promising, but:
try turning on trilinear filtering and crank up anisotropic as high as it will go. The see-through gratings will hopefully look better. the screenshots look amazing. I really like the Doom 3 shots, brushwork looks fantastic as ever. And Sock's mod looks really sweet too, the Furry Knight isn't very cute. Got some moves though. But the shots of the lava cave look really immersive :)
Another MFX map?? Ooooh could be tempting. Of course :P. Shots look great, well apart from Shot 3 but that will look fine in GL...
Kinn: It was the flounce of the decade, so, errr, yes?? It was the flounce of the decade, so, errr, yes??
As always there is mighty stirring of the drama teacup here! :) Arcane Dimensions is indeed a new MOD I am developing featuring tons of new content from many different people all nicely stitched together into one package. I only intent to post about it in one place and have no interest in chasing everyone (the 5 active quake people) around on 4 different quake sites! if anyone wants to post news items on other sites, by all means use the screenshots. As always feedback is most welcome and is really important to my creative process, so get involved and post comments over at the Moddb pages! Obviously once the mod is finish I will be back with a news items and download link! @nitin, @rickyt23, @distrans, @lunaran, thanks for the comment and feedback and yes lots of homage! Scanned a cardboard layout of a ship, and transformed them to textures.
Now I want to make a mod that scrambles the monsters into nonentity paper rags. Get on your fifth elephant!
Flying Dutchman Mine is almost, almost done but I'm too tired to continue today. I've also pushed the deadline to the 28th so Ionous and Back2CCCP can finish at their pace, so negke and OTP, go map!!
http://i.imgur.com/jl9iCsN.jpg http://i.imgur.com/amw4iAf.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xNXW9Ua.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AGdX6WY.jpg http://i.imgur.com/m4pv2WW.jpg Feeling like a poststamp.
After two days of texture tags the map starts cluthering in lower areas, while it didn't before. Added no brushes, just texturing. I must admit I'm over marksurfaces and entity limit, but while only texturing that can't count so much? you didn't had to do what you did
but you did and I thank you! first screenshot dates from 6-6-2013. I'm a snail what mapping concerns. SUPER early look-dev for a thing I want to do. I've never tried this approach : work on visual hooks in a test map before starting the gameplay layout.
Might save time, we'll see! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/PersonalMapJam/PMJ_A.jpg kinky dopefish
Map: My Home Alpha 1
Mod: Quake Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x7alibiwjm8wdg3/MyHomeAlpha.zip?dl=0 I have reproduced my house to integrate the quake atmosphere there . Currently there are 40 monsters, 3 secret. I finished a 6-minute rush by knowing the secrets course. It remains that the first part of the map so alpha . I'm still working on balancing the placement of weapons etc Thank you and good games. The rooms are all too small for proper Quake game play. The corridors are too narrow and the ceilings too low.
it may be "realistic" but it is not particularly fun for Quake game play. I didn't like all the teleporting enemies, even teleporting directly infront of you or even behind you depending on where you are standing. It gets better when you go outside because you now have space to move. You can get stuck in the cage that comes out the floor after picking up the SK. Need to add a button in the hole that will raise the cage again. Couldn't find SK door so I gave up :P The problem I wanted to keep the real proportion . but I agree that his remains narrow for the games. next time I would increase the proportion of out realistic and increase playability .
There is 1 boutton secret per floor. I intend to overtake me on the rest of the map expanding the corridors. Thank you for return I once made my house in UT, kept the same scale as my own house pretty much but sadly these games are designed with really fast player characters in mind and dont work from a gameplay POV. Larger spaces might work, like your town centre or something but these are usually very flat and wouldnt work for different reasons. Some games it may be cool, like Doom 2 or Duke 3D or even newer games like Left 4 Dead or Half-life 2 since those can have more real-world settings. But Quake is really abstract.
"The problem I wanted to keep the real proportion . "
Yeah, don't do that. :) Real world architecture might be a good learning platform to get used to Quake editing, but it doesn't make for good maps. Neat little map, I enjoyed running through it. From the description I knew what to expect in the gameplay department so I wasn't particularly disappointed by a lack thereof and don't hold that against it. Also, as much as I love Quake, I feel its gameplay is pretty flat and limited even in best case scenarios.
I made a Quake map once and tried to be somewhat "proportional". In my experience, that's impossible as Quake is fundamentally disproportionate: crazy move speed, insane jump height/distance, quakeguys eyes being in his chest, massive pickups, etc. Maybe you could find a happy medium by just keeping the map architecture proportionate to itself and double, or maybe even triple, the map size. Something along the lines of de_rats, just not as huge. This would more or less play to Quake's strengths (freedom of movement, more enemies in the combat space, etc.) and you could scratch that "proportion itch". Just my two cents, nifty project nonetheless. quadammage lift
Should be coming with the RetroJam3DLC pack soon-ish.
78 monsters on skill 2/3, 6 secrets. http://i.imgur.com/2V0A34a.jpg http://i.imgur.com/GosQpUV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/K584OaI.jpg http://i.imgur.com/qW7OVkG.jpg not sure if it's the map we deserve or the one we need right now, but looks awesome! looks like it combines some great elements from the ever-classic e1m8, as well as runic maps by kell and necros! can't wait!
I just spent several hours building some evil bloody flesh thing today but don't have anything worth giving images of yet. I decide that we take a vote:
Is negke a fuck? AYE X NAY I checked out MyHomeAlpha.zip and found it exceptionally well made for a "my home" map. Very creative, surprising and fun. Got stuck in the zombie cavern, is there a way out?
Of course I'm going to finish it - can't wait to see Daz get lost in search of the key doors!
http://i.imgur.com/zwuQv4j.jpg
Spike and I (mostly Spike) have been working on a It's looking promising: it'll be backwards compatible (light will generate regular lightmaps, I am imagining all the amazing lighting effects I can do with more detailed shadows. Been after something like this for years :D
so that's pretty damn amazing??! so you basically end up with a
i see you mentioned there will be a _lightmapscale setting for func_groups?
so you will be setting lightmap scale based on faces, however, would it not make more sense to set lightmap scale per light instead? i think 90% of lights would be fine with their old resolution, but for key lights (eg: those shining through cool transparent textures) a higher resolution would be desired. so could you not just output low res shadow onto a high res lightmap by default and then when a light specifies it, do the extra traces for the high res shadow? If you do it per light, what about cases where you want the sunlight casting strong shadows in just one particular area? You set your sun as a high res light and you end up having an enormously inflated lightmap size just for that one transparent chainlink fence texture casting shadows into the courtyard, whereas with per face you can just set the courtyard faces to be high res. As ericw said, the method he's proposing is basically the same as the Source engine, and per face works very well there in my experience.
The way it's currently set up in the light tool, that'd be a bit awkward because the tool needs to know each face's lightmap resolution before starting the light tracing. I think you would need whole lighting pass just to figure out what faces a "high res" light is hitting.
I have to ask
ericw is doing
I find it amusing that you can have real-time lighting and shadows etc in dark places (and I guess you could make some really nice maps using this) and yet it seems the community is still in love with baked lighting :P
would it not make more sense to set lightmap scale per light instead?
you're right, this would, in fact, not make more sense. you're picturing only the use case where you put a torch in a little lantern cage thing to throw those neat lines, and you'd rather just tag the light to upres every surface it touches. this sounds like a recipe for winding up with tons of faces with far higher resolution than they need. I'd be just as excited about selectively turning lightmap resolution DOWN, in areas where high ceilings are shrouded in darkness or on the backs of pillars or what have you where there isn't a lot of variation or contrast in the lighting that actually hits that face. I'm a pretty obsessive optimizer though. Having control only per brush and not per face is a bit of a shame, but I understand it's a "this sounds like a recipe for winding up with tons of faces with far higher resolution than they need. "
But again, who does this affect? What machine is having a problem loading Quake levels because of texture/lightmap memory? Turn that dial to 11, let's go! :) What machine is having a problem loading Quake levels because of texture/lightmap memory?
Lots of them were until the recent version of QS. There's a fallacy here that a 1996 engine can have no bottlenecks in the year 2015 - it absolutely can. I'm kinda with WarrenM here.
If the whole map runs fine with increased lightmap resolution, I think I'd just go with that, rather than spending a ton of time setting up funcs all over the place where detailed shadows appear. Brainfart really
let's say the compiler does a hi-res lighting pass. After this pass, could you then do something a bit clever like automatically detect surfaces that have uniform or near uniform lighting and automatically downscale the lightmap resolution there as appropriate? @WarrenM, if you compile a box room and whack the lightmap scaling to 0.0625 (1:1), then fire a rocket, your framerate WILL plummet (you can use rtlight-style lighting to avoid any slowdown, or just use gl-style flashblends instead, in any current engine including vanilla... assuming you were getting those slowdowns from crazy lightmap resolutions in vanilla anyway).
throw in a load of flickering lightstyles and your framerate will stutter 10 times a second (this can be worked around like rmqe already does, although this is not without its own cost). high lightmap resolutions are NOT without their cost, and using a scale lower than 0.25 (4 texels to each luxel) is probably going to be abusive unless constrained to specific surfaces. 0.25 should generally be okay though. For reference, 0.0625 gives 176mb for just vanilla start.bsp. There is no way around the load times, if nothing else. Using that resolution on every single surface a light might hit is just impractical, but you can get away with it if its just one or two surfaces. @necros, typically you want the lightmap resolution concentrated behind the fence texture (typically ground). spreading it around the entire light is going to be wasteful. see my remark about <0.25 being abusive. it would be nice to auto-detect the surfaces that got light applied to them through a fence texture, or areas with hash shadows, possibly by just calculating it at a high res and then reducing the resolution if it doesn't have many harsh boundaries on it, but this is likely to result in either every surface being high-res or significant glitches between highres and lowres surfaces. @ericw, presumably the "black" texture should have its lightmap scale set to a low resolution by default, as it shouldn't normally be significant anyway (really this should be surfaces that have all texels set to 0). Maybe it could use the standard res lightmaps for dynamic lighting effects
Kinn, I was thinking the same thing, automatically lowering the resolution when it won't be visible would be cool. Just need to try coding it.
there's gotta be a pretty standard image processing algorithm that finds the minimum resolution for an image that still preserves its significant details.
my original suggestion was with the implication that all lightmaps would be high res, and only indicated lights would cast high res traces (because it is the traces that will take the most time). For other lights, they would put their low res maps (upscaled to match) on the high res lightmap. (like simply increasing a bitmap's size by 2x, maybe use some filtering to smooth out the results)
I have had light take several hours when doing final passes with -extra4 and all that other stuff. increasing the number of traces to get high res light maps would increase that by order of magnitude, I would imagine... unfortunately I hadn't considered how dynamic lights would work what with having to update all those lightmaps. could there be 2 full lightmaps, one low res for dynamic and one completely static high res one and then just do some additive blending at run time? also, for setting lightmap res on faces, would that just be a huge pain? If i set 1 light to be high res vs setting all the walls, doors, plats, whatever else in the room to high res? the problem with per-surface lightmap res is how you get it from the editor to the qbsp. it would require a new
I doubt that it would be that hard for the qbsp though. You could do it with the standard
Might be a slight pain to work with, but if you're only going to utilize the highres lightmaps in key areas, it shouldn't be too bad to set up Nice, I really like the lava river
Hi, I was browsing this thread and came across a screenshot on some blog, I'm trying to find it again. It was of a fairly basic scene, with two views. One with void or dark area, the other with lava. I'm pretty sure it was from this thread, a few pages back. Anyone recall?
The scene is of a corridor with a gap in the floor, which has lava in the second view. I think it's a single image of composed of two shots.
In post #12241 there's a link to a map from jam5. It crashes my ezquake as it loads, did I install it wrong or is it for another client?
ezquake is a quakeworld client, it is not meant for singleplayer, it will make you play a different singleplayer, it will not support mods, you should use quakespasm, fitzquake or directq.
AAS, I can load the map with both of those set to 1 but crash on spawn. With ezquake.
But jam5_hypnos2 doesn't look like the early shots from posts 12087 and 12106 :) ezquake is a quakeworld client, it is not meant for singleplayer, it will make you play a different singleplayer, it will not support mods, you should use quakespasm, fitzquake or directq.
surface light . . .
http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60967&start=338 @WarrenM, @Shambler, thanks :)
@Nitin, 2-3 maps from me, no release date yet, still building stuff. The AD MOD project is also designed to be a resource kit for mappers to play with and luckily MFX is busy creating a new map for AD. http://i.imgur.com/UPkmIqc.jpg?1
From my first map. Sorry about the hud. Dig it and get out. Well, it looks better than my first map, which was a box covered in textures that came with the qED map editor, that said "qED" on them in big letters.
Pretty hard to see much in that screenshot, but the lighting from the sky looks good, could do with being lighter on the left side of the screen as I can't see anything. I think the engine/texture replacements are getting in the way of seeing whats going on. Looks like you're adding some nice detail to the computer section. Would recommend downloading an engine such as Fitzquake if you haven't already. http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60831&start=871 happy mapping! Rises over Foggy Bogbottom (more MFX goodness)
Still simple. Didn't want to leave that first one without an update :D
http://i.imgur.com/0tW0Dhm.jpg?1 Do people screenshot qw maps here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=entq9ZReftE&feature=youtu.be
Some really cool stuff especially later on, I do think some breakables need a higher HP though. Marvelous! :)
Also, not gonna lie, those candles on the floor as light sources made me tingly. So, so good. All of it. Great stuff... oh cool, i love that monsters can brake brushes on their own, especially that melee attacks can do it. awesome.
@shambler what is so genious about it? I mean, breakables already been made in hexen.
yeah, it looks cool and, as it was noted by necros, I like that monsters can destroy those specific brushes on their own. But I wouldn't call it genious anyhow. But I wouldn't call it genious anyhow.
Don't worry, you won't ever have to worry about anyone mistaking you for a genius. but how the video shows that feature has been implemented, both from an AI sense and a mapping sense!
My one complaint is that it sometimes lack a little clarity in the visual language -- i.e. these brown bricks are breakable, those ones aren't -- but I'm sure sock will sort that out before release.
Yeah, and the way the AI interacts with it is cool. Makes it feel like a native feature rather than an add-on. Them pathing to a boarded over window and busting through looks great!
Needs some slightly different shade of brown for the breakable rocks perhaps. Or make the cracks more evident.
I know I'll miss it otherwise :D can the breakables be made weapon specific... axe for wood, grenades and rockets for bricks, everything for glass?
if we're talking a modern game, it would have a giant arrow pointing at the breakable, then perhaps a qte such as spamming the space bar to break said breakable.
I'm just talking about clarity of design. If some brown bricks break and others don't, that's going to turn a cool feature into something annoying.
And I don't pretend that sock doesn't know this I need some feedback for the "final" version of my Quoth map before I can host it on Quaddicted.
It is a short map and was made so I can have more experience in Quake mapping and making maps that aren't recreations, which is why it's kind of blocky. screenshots: http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/25/1434630724-escape1.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/25/1434630726-escape2.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/25/1434630713-escape4.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/25/1434630765-escape8.png download link: http://www.mediafire.com/download/449awkn0ijiw8kx/escape.zip I enjoyed your map. I think it has a strong Doom feel, so you can say it's blocky by design. You're right, it's short, but it's consistent and looks good. I couldn't find any of the two secrets, but maybe it's just me.
I played it with the MarkV engine, without the Quoth mod. But don't realease it yet. It probably has leaks, because all exterior surfaces are visible. You didn't just put the whole level inside a box, did you? Two things about this room in escape8.png you posted:
1- The open corridor above this room leading to the end is a nice touch. This corridor should have rails instead of solid walls, so the player can see the room below. It shows off your design and add to the "accomplishment" sense: reminds you of a fight you already had. Wich leads me to... 2- The room seems too big for too few/weak enemies. You feel like "what was supposed to happen here?". This is a big room with a valuable item, the YA. The battle here should be memorable. Maybe a Fiend room, not Enforcers'. Or maybe the enforcers would be in a level above, surrounding the room, giving them advantage. P.S.: yes, I didn't play it with the Quoth mod, but hope these comments worth something. It's kinda strange to complain about the lack of opposition while playing without the mod the map was intended for.
I made the disclaimer. Didn't wan to play Quoth, but wanted to help anyway. The author can decide if it makes sense or not.
About (1): maybe it should be a corridor made of glass panels. It would show off the room below. https://www.mediafire.com/?449awkn0ijiw8kx
*Made some changes on the enemy placement *Secrets are a little bit more noticeable *Modified the bridge so you can look down on the computer area, even jump down here Issues I can't seem to fix is destroying the first computer brush, light and ambient sound at the start of the map when the player shoots the computer And yeah, it is a Quoth map so you kinda need it to get the full experience ;) it's a fun little map.
I'd make the nail gun a little more noticeable or prominent as I somehow managed to miss it. I still managed to complete 90% of the map with just the shotgun and SSG so maybe tone down the ammo a little? Also the room full of ogres, plasma dudes, flame guys etc is the best battle (although a bit hairy when you only have the ssg) I think this fight should be the last fight in the map? Anyway, nice little saturday morning distraction! Played with Quoth now. It makes it harder, indeed. I like the new nailgun position. Like that you made the secret door slide in, not out. I wouldn't change anything now, but that big room...
In nightmare mode, I just stayed at the top of the stairs, behind the glass, killing everything that tried to climb with the shotgun. Maybe some enemies would activate when you get in, other wave when you get the YA, and finally the worst wave when you get the silver key. Maybe that stair would be broken, so it's a one way only into the room and you have to cover beneath the computers, and not just climbing the stupid stairs again. I was actually waiting for it, but it didn't happen. I took a breath before getting the YA and another before getting the key, waiting for the worse... but nothing happened. Just my 2 hundred cents, though. The level is already a lot of fun the way it is! Nice work. Well it's up on moddb, 99% of what goes up on moddb is bound to be cancelled eventually. At least it didn't drag on for years like most of them.
Maybe he'll come back to it one day. *Fixed the readme file
*Fixed some geometry errors like clipping brushes *Added a new spice to the final fight *Fixed ogres appearing at the wrong skill https://www.mediafire.com/?449awkn0ijiw8kx I'd like to hear your thoughts about this 1v1 deathmatch level:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3Ww0W8WFfq7ejJqTFRONUNUUEE The textures are mine, except for the stock Quake teleport. The skybox is derived from a Q3A skybox I took from To make things easier, the zip contains the level, the Reaperbot and MarkV executable. Just run markv.bat on Windows and you're set. To add a bot and start the deathmatch, just press B. I recommend to add just one, it's a tiny level. I wasn't cheap on geometry. Think I pushed the limits a little. To do: music (it's being made by a friend). Just let me know your impressions. Super pretty! Reminds me of counterstrike
No idea about DM. Never ever put a id1/config.cfg in a download. >:D *facepalm*
Here is a better zip. Deleted the other one, so no one curses me. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3Ww0W8WFfq7Tk5KUVpIU0FnMDA Not bad. Seems to be improved a bit. When you said you added extra spice I'm not sure that's what I had in mind ;)
that is a very nice and striking visual you have in that map. Reminds me of some of the later UT99 community maps with the texture set.
In terms of gameplay I think you really need several ways up the tower. Someone with the RL could easily dominate the whole map at the top since it has just one entrance and you can pretty much rain down rockets at people below. Wee, thanks!
Yes, more than one way up (to every floor, by the way) is always a good thing. But the upper two floors only have the bigger weapons, 1 health and some ammo. Health and armor is at the lower two floors. Doesn't it give balance? I was thinking about a secret with a Quad at the first floor (or maybe underground), so you can get to the top with: yellow armor, mega health, super shotgun, super nailgun and quad, giving you leverage. What do you think? :D
Couldn't use all of them yet. There is a sidewalk, a brick road, grates and fences, arches, iron gates, plants, parquet... Level looks great, played a few rounds with bots.
Fifth already said it: a second choice of route up is needed. After that, make a singleplayer map. Yes, a single player would be nice. Gotta organize prefabs and wads out of this stuff.
What about these map jams? Is it a thing closed to friends, or anyone can join? Satan's scrotum those textures are NICE - best new ones I've seen in Quake for a while. Great use of fog and lighting too.
I'm not really sure about DM but it seemed like the map wouldn't be free-flowing enough, needed a bit more openness and route choices. Really? That's odd. You're the first to give this feedback. Maybe it's an engine issue and some cvar tweaking at the console would help.
That's exactly where the textures came from, how did you know?
And yes, I'm thinking about a second route now. Thanks! I think the map is a bit like Aerowalk, but it does need a couple of routes to the top, probably a 2 way teleporter also. Having the powerful weapons at the top needs to also come with some big risk or way of countering a height advantage.
I would have given more feedback earlier but I had a short break. I would add a second lift and maybe a couple of ramped or stair-way paths up. Looks good though, can't wait to see the rest of the texture set. Yes. But there should also be a Quad far away from the upper levels, so one could storm upon the rocket launcher with leverage.
please, try out this new version:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3Ww0W8WFfq7QmxENE1FYXBVY3M It's still WIP, just to test the gameplay. There are 2 elevators, one for each room in the 2nd floor; The nailgun room now takes you to the terrace; There is a quad damage still poorly placed. The goal here is to see how it breaks RL dominance. I shall try and satisfy your demands with a picture.
http://www.stjohninthewilderness.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/oms3_2_overhead.png It shows the majority, but not all of, the second part of my map oms3_2 in a birds eye view from the editor. The first part lasts about 20 minutes, and I anticipate the second part presented here lasting anywhere from 20-30 minutes. The construction is nearly complete, with only one big area left to create and apply details to. It will absolutely require Quakespasm and or RMQ since it not only breaks every standard Quake limit known to man, and probably some not even known, but it slightly extends beyond the +-4096 boundary. In other words, its huge. And you have the nerve to call my map pron? :)
...that looks as far from Periwinkle Paranoia as anyone could get. Looking forward to it Ionous.
Rock. End of story. I can see fuck all from those shots, but I just know they will be good :)
Awnnn I got a thank you in the credits! :D You're welcome! Glad to help. I'm stealing your readme template, though.
Your comments about gameplay were absolutely right. DM-Cepheus plays much more better now. Check it out:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3Ww0W8WFfq7eTdqM0hhOG1DSnM As far as I can tell, it's finished. What do you guys think? P.S.: Promise to build some single player next. awesome, i'd love to see a map that is composed of a dozen of those floating chunks, different sizes, where you have to travel from chunk to chunk. Mmaybe using wind-tunnel type launchers, or maybe by riding various moving platforms/ferries, or maybe the chunks move closer and farther based on the wind, like in bioshock infinite.
That is exactly the plan, some hanging wooden bridges, some stone arches, floaters in between, ladders, chains, and a new gadget to explore it all...
I always liked the concept of a treetop city, like what the ewoks had on endor, or "tree top town" stage of donkey kong country.
Having said that I don't think it would easily lend itself to a quake map, maybe deathmatch, but it's probably a bit tight for monster combat. Each year I think that people have done the cool stuff and explored all the cool styles in Quake and anything further will just be a improvements and rehashes (no bad thing).
And then MFX does something like that....okay so maybe it is the same old textures, maybe people have done enough floaters before (I did a massive one after wednesday's stir fry), but fuck me that just looks so good. in between the floating architecture, you should have a piece of a large tanker ship, and it should be connected to the other islands with big drooping chains that you run across.
To anyone interested, the final version of that level is:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/7dscbi1pvo730in/dm_cepheus_markv.zip Here is a video: https://youtu.be/UB8HxFaBXpI https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32711504/pulsar_runic1.jpg
Almost no lighting so far. I wanted to make a small map, but it turned out to be pretty large that looks awesome. I much prefer small maps with detail like that than huge maps with plainess everywhere.
Because I have pressing matters to attend to -
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/sensf1.png Note: Textures and lightning not yet done. Only checking basic layout / item placement for now.
After wanting to jump into level editing for years a friend recently asked me to make a 3v3 -> 5v5 TDM map for an event and this is roughly what I came up with. I just want to check feedback on anything that needs changing badly. Linky: http://www.mediafire.com/download/uvxnf915bd4svg7/spz1dm2ftk_test.zip i think its worth posting despite the gun.
http://i.imgur.com/re4mmwk.jpg Works pretty well for like 15 minutes of work. Leaves could be added with fences maybe. And different coloured version (more brown) would be very feasable for barrier structures.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/bambootest.png Fucking hell mfx that's some fine brushwork in this shot: http://i.imgur.com/fQ3VK3f.jpg
Looks like if Studio Ghibli did Quake Hi. First time user. I'd like some feedback on a level I'm currently working on. It's a remake of the first level of Monolith's original game, Blood. I've added a few if my own touches to the concept to make it look more like a modern work.
Please watch this YouTube video to see a complete run through of the map. http://youtu.be/wqaZqz-MM6g I'd love to hear any criticism and suggestions. Thanks! Ruin Very promising.
Outside bits look good. Rocks could do with some more rounding off. Inside bits boxy and a bit cramped. Textures are consistent but look a bit like arse. I'd say, keep the design and layout, upscale the inside rooms a bit, add some more interesting quake-like designs and details to them, and go for a more subtle texture set. This is just a quick test I made, which I think works pretty well.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/brickstile_test.png Basically it still is only 8 different blocks from the source 128x128, but they are distributed around the 512x512 so there is a less obvious tiling grid. Older for comparison: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/brickstile.png Also this version is already somewhat dirtied up with tints and the like, so ideally I would do the tiling pass on the cleaner version, and then dirty up from there, so the dirt is actually unique. I reckon for stuff like bricks and the like, things that tile across bigger areas, this is worth it, no? Do we even need small 128x128 versions? texture is very well done... though I think if you want the texture to be used alongside or fit in with the current set of textures then it needs colours from different parts of the palette. When you look at even some of the most simple textures in quake it's very rare they stick to the same colour row.
Atm this one uses colours from 4 rows I think, but they are all brownish, apart from the little grey bits I got in there. That kinda stuff will be what I will do later on when I got a really good base to work from and sorted out some other colour variants first. Little bits of green, blue, whatever works nicely.
Though I am not necessarily thinking about how these will work with the original textures, since I want to make a full set, trims, buttons and all of that. So mappers can just use my set if they want, but it should work OK with the original Quake stuff nonetheless. Also when it comes to all the wads that are floating around out there, from the Dooms, Heretics, Hexens, stuff like Kingpin and what have you. All of those are kinda different styles and people still mix them together (more or less successfully) So with that in mind I will just mainly focus on making a selfsustained set where people will not generally think "Oh, I need this one texture from the original Quake here." Though I am not necessarily thinking about how these will work with the original textures, since I want to make a full set, trims, buttons and all of that.
If that's the case just keep doing what you're doing. In comparison to Quakes textures though, Quakes are considerably more noisy and generally don't have as many colors per texture as yours do. Maybe play around with adding a bit of noise for some texture that will register close up in game (try 1% uniform monochromatic before indexing). If you do that, you many not want to dither at all during indexing, or at least very little, depends on the look you're going for. Are you using Photoshop? ...and then dirty up from there, so the dirt is actually unique. I reckon for stuff like bricks and the like, things that tile across bigger areas, this is worth it, no? Do we even need small 128x128 versions? Good. I opted to go for larger textures for textures that will often occupy large spaces. Go for unique as possible as much as you can in this case. Typically, I'll make the entire thing unique or make half the grid seams then copy-paste, flip and rotate bits and pieces till I fill up the whole texture. after that its just a mater of drawing in the bricks and tweaking. I cheat a lot, however, on basic pattern based textures. For instance, I made a brick seam template, which I can manipulate with masking layers and layer styles. This lays over the base 'brick' image. Then of course, detail passes, which take the most amount of time. Anyway, your texture looks very good. I posted my first textures here a little over a year ago and they looked like ass. Nice work! Some Quake textures are more noisy, some less. In general there will be a bit more colour variation in tiny amounts. As far as colours goes, this has 27. There are plenty in Quake which have way more.
I use Cosmigo Promotion, which is for indexed work. Like a more powerful version of DeluxePaint and the like. I do have Photoshop as well, but I probably wont be using it that much for these textures, apart from maybe some groundwork. I like to have 100% control as to which colours become which when I repalettise and I wanted to practise indexed texture work a bit more anyway, so this is a good excuse. Also I have been doing pixelart for over 10 years professionally now. So that helps with this kinda work as well :) Also I have been doing pixelart for over 10 years professionally now. So that helps with this kinda work as well :)
I bet, no wonder your textures look good. I look forward to seeing more! It will probably be a while until I have some more time for this stuff. Pretty busy with working on a game we just released a while ago on Steam early access, as well as a freelance gig I need to finish. If I had the time and money to just do this right now I would, but alas.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/246920/
If you like really chaotic multiplayer fun that is more aimed towards party than competition you will probably enjoy it. We also seriously need more players. Going a bit slow right now, though I am confident it will pick up over time and when it gets more exposure. Quake is a fast game, as Shambler says, what you've got there is a bit crampt for how quickly the player can get about, meaning that they're going to trip over the geometry quite a lot as it is now.
For the aesthetics, try and make the textures match the geometry they're placed on a bit more, that can help a lot to lead you to new ideas for the layout and deco itself. Also (and take this as you will) don't use Darkplaces. It might sound purist, but if you can't make it look good in Quakespasm no amount of real time shadows, bump maps or particle fx will save it. But yeah, it looks good - keep going and good luck! Not as much Quake related, but more something that bears similarity to Quake. The level is mostly done in Ogier, but TrenchBroom also came in handy for speeding up the process of creating cliffs and rock formations. For anyone curious, the game is Enclave.
http://www.ogier-editor.com/files_ogier/Forum_Northern_01full.jpg http://www.ogier-editor.com/files_ogier/Forum_Northern_02full.jpg http://www.ogier-editor.com/files_ogier/Forum_Northern_03full.jpg http://www.ogier-editor.com/files_ogier/Forum_Northern_04full.jpg looks very pretty/atmospheric, makes me want to get enclave, makes me fondly recall when I had time to play games, and also makes me want to play lots of coop rpg/action games / quake maps at christmas. win.
Great to see Enclave finally getting some mapping love. Looking great so far; rich design and tons of architecture! I've still got the editor all setup here, but nothing has come to mind yet. :(
Was good. CyBear of this very forum worked on it. Never worked out how to get combo moves working properly, but it hit the medieval 3PS melee vibe just right.
yeah i remember how varied and interesting the maps were too. all very different with a good solid theme in each.
ranged attacks were hard for me though... really difficult to aim the bows and xbows... Thank you for the kind words! I've always found that Enclave has some great level design, and it's made all the more interesting that it's a brush based engine similar to Quake. (The editor can even save levels in
If anyone's interested in Enclave (and with any luck editing for it as well), just shoot me an email as I have a few spare Steam copies. Gotta respect cool stuff made with Quake textures.
What about this orange container? Is it just a brush with a very good and hi-res texture scaled down? jf_obtex.wad is actually a palette conversion of the quake 2 textures I made for the "oblivion" mission pack
Here's a wip of the blood bathroom I'm redesigning. I'm creating my own
My goal is to make prefab's of all props. This is a demonstration of that. https://db.tt/CkP02bou this is really neat, you know there was a Blood TC project for Quake a while ago? They probably could have used your talent very much :)
Also for something like your maps I feel that Quake doesn't quite offer the right variety of enemies, if I was you I would check out either Drake or Quoth or perhaps even wait for Socks Arcane Dimensions mod as they will probably have the right kind of variety of enemies. this is really neat, you know there was a Blood TC project for Quake a while ago? They probably could have used your talent very much :)
Also for something like your maps I feel that Quake doesn't quite offer the right variety of enemies, if I was you I would check out either Drake or Quoth or perhaps even wait for Socks Arcane Dimensions mod as they will probably have the right kind of variety of enemies. this is really neat, you know there was a Blood TC project for Quake a while ago? They probably could have used your talent very much :)
Also for something like your maps I feel that Quake doesn't quite offer the right variety of enemies, if I was you I would check out either Drake or Quoth or perhaps even wait for Socks Arcane Dimensions mod as they will probably have the right kind of variety of enemies. Thanks for the constructive criticism, Fifth. I agree that Blood and Quake are a funky mesh. I decided I'm going to attempt to use Quoth , since they do have a lot more features and rotating brushes, which would be great for the doors in Blood.
Yes, I am aware of Transfusion/QBlood total conversions. I feel that what I'm going for at this time is more of a blood-inspired complete episode with subtle changes to the original Quake gameplay. I'd like to keep this mod simple and focus on level design above all else. If this project picks up momentum, I'd like yo get into my own custom enemies and weapons. For right now, as you've said, I feel Quoth offers a lot of elements that will fit in this project nicely. Here's a level designated to prefabs for upcoming levels I'll be working on. All textures were made by me, with resources pulled from cg textures, and the Getty's public domain website.
These are all map objects, created with Trenchbroom. Also used Wally and Gimp for the textures. https://db.tt/WzLz1Bw3 https://db.tt/As5oHXBU https://db.tt/qX9kCHUA Here's probably a better example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFzn1UuYi2s&feature=youtu.be Neat! Those look cool.
I'd love to see more Quake-y type prefabs like that. Medieval dungeon stuff I'm playing through Blood for the first time atm and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Can't wait to play this project, so far everything is impressive.
Really nice scene, I love this kind of setting. You mastered those curtains, the look so very real.
What are these textures' size? So, this is something I'm calling "Concreto": http://www.mediafire.com/view/rq6382z4ibfgc43/cct01.jpg Textures are derived from stores' catalogs and free stuff. I'm giving proper credit when I release. Along with cement and iron, I intend to make it fire and brimstone as well... Thanks, adib.
I'm keeping all the textures the standard quake resolution. I believe the curtains texture is 128x128. There's a lot of stuff I wanted done for my maps, but since I couldn't find proper textures to truly fit my theme, I started making my own with a lot of help from cg textures and other online resources. Here's a pic of what I was able to finish tonight. https://db.tt/tq71feoO Lovely!
I think you should risk more with texture size, make them at least 256x256 and scale them down on the surfaces, in Trenchbroom. That would give them a sharper look. The floor, for example, looks washed. Also, it looks like you're facing something Warren was talking about few weeks ago: Quake player is a speedy dwarf and it's very hard to make realistic sized stuff for him. To me, it looks like you're getting close, but this is something you can only tell while you play. You guys are using the worst image hosts imaginable (Photobucket, Tinypic, Mediafire, etc). Why not direct links to Quaketastic or Imgur?
was about to say the same. If you can't post a direct link to a jpg file, learn 2 internet plz.
Coo. I think the light coming from the white lights on the pillar falls off too fast, it looks very artificial. Maybe the skylight is a little too blue as well, but hard to say without seeing more of the level.
As for the shot, the white lights are a little weird as well in that they wouldn't be splashing up on the bottoms of the pillars like that. Your light entities are too far away from the light source...
Doesn't go directly to the image, so for many places is more than a nuisance than a help, for many reasons.
For other things, like for big files is good. It certainly does.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/RobotDesigner.jpg Does clicking that not just load a JPG for you? I see it like that.
All i have seen till now where like the one from Mediafire Adib linked to, and in worst cases, the page wouldn't even load, depending of the system the page used and hard/soft used to load it. Yeah, Dropbox usually puts a WOULD YOU LIKE TO SIGNUP popup above files hosted there. Super annoying.
imgur has the drawback that big files get re-encoded and dropped after a while. Just use Quaketastic! It might be because people don't know how to use DropBox
The way I do it, it's transparent. That the files are likely to disappear when people clean up their Dropbox though.
There you are:
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/cct02.jpg Someone please delete cct02.jpg from "files" directory? Don't know how to do it. I saw the "screen_shots" dir too late. DaZ and Warren Thanks for the comments. Warren is right about the splash. DaZ, I can try either a longer falloff or a weaker bright. That amount of brightness is falling too fast, indeed. But the blue comes from a night sky (yes, another nightie level). Makes more sense now? really neat, the concrete + metal + flesh theme is unique.
One idea, try making it so the lights below the concrete pillars don't light up the lower part of the pillars, since it looks like that should be in the light's shadow (or at least, receiving less light than the floor does). Also think the blue might still be a tad too saturated, I get a bit of a theatre/movie lighting feeling from it. There would be some light reflected off the floor that would illuminate sides of the columns. I would probably stack 2 lights per side, one near the floor and the other slightly higher and dimmer.
Thanks everyone.
About the pillars, I think Warren and Eric are saying the same thing. So I turned the big lamps func_wall and placed a point light entity inside each one, instead of using surface light. Lamp + pillar look better and the metal parts trace a soft shadow on the floor. So far, this room is all I got. I'll get back to your comments when it's time to tweak. I'm inspired by The Devil's Advocate and a 2009 movie called Walled In. Flames will look bad as mesh IMO...
Why not a particle effect instead? Otherwise, it's cool - I like flying melee enemies a lot :) Loved the Lost Soul. I think it's finished the way it is plus flame particles (agree with ijed).
Looks like a metal map using some base textures. Metal is my favorite Q1 theme. The level looks all atmospheric already, and it's looking great. Wanna play it.
I know that while you're posting you should be mapping, but I'd love to hear more about people's creation process. Looking awesome.
I made a crappy speedbase version of muh_bad a while ago, uploading in case it's useful: http://quaketastic.com/files/texture_wads/speedbzmuhbad.wad my creation process usually involves a huge amount of procrastination. The problem is that my PC is my primary form of entertainment so it's easy to get distracted away to youtube or steam.
One of the biggest things I find about mapping is that you need to actually lay brushes down in order for something to get made. Mapping in front of an audience, like on twitch, kind of forces you into a frame of mind of "well I need to be doing *something*" so you just throw brushes down in the hope that something decent will come of it. First thing I do is pick a theme and make some prefab areas, usually a test map, play with lighting a little bit and some specific shapes (long curved rooms, stair way ideas, door-ways and windows etc), think of it like creating a kind of "palette" in which you're going to paint your map. It also helps to keep the theme consistent. For the main map I usually start out by making some shapes on a 64x64 grid just to get the ball rolling. Even if it's just the main atrium or a couple of rooms. I then see about how traversing the environment might be fun, so I make some raised platforms and stuff and think about how the encounters might play out. When it comes to detailing I have made my test map with prefabs already, so I see how they fit into the gameplay area I have made, sometimes it involves shuffling things about and making areas bigger or smaller. The last part, but the most important, is to ensure you put at least 1 spawn in the map. Preferably in a small room that is hard to escape from if you find yourself in there. You mean a tarbaby? I thought you all hated this monster.
Anyway, I used to blockout the level completely and then start to make prefabs. For jam 6 that cost me about the time I took polishing the map after deadline. So, now I'm starting with an overall concept and making prefabs. I got stuck because I don't know where to go after that room I showed above. I decided to just think and prefab other spots to connect them later. But you're right: maybe I should prefab and map separately. Let's see how it goes. @mfx- model looks great, I like the way it has it roundings and carves it mouth. Maybe make it more vampire with hooked teeth.
I made one for the quake/doom mod Hangar, but mine is more smaller and I used a torch for flames. All kinds of new methods have been invented since I last played with qme (and did so amateurishly even then) but I'm wondering how easy it would be to convert models from other Quake-engine games (q2 engine, or even q3 engine), PURELY models for decorative items - no animations.
I find lack of decorative objects in Quake, very limiting. In Drake there's trees at least and the hexen 2 statue, so that helps. if you have a model that fits in qmle it is easy to export one frame out of it to a 3DS or DXF file.
Opening a new model from scratch and import the same frame back in Qmle you can save it as a mdl. From there it can be used as a static entity that can be used in game as eyecandy. As long the model excist on the extention 3ds or dxf and is under the 1000 verts / 2000 triangles it will do. Just give it a qc code like: $frame 0 void() squad_stand1 =[ 0, squad_stand2 ] {}; void() squad_stand2 =[ 1, squad_stand1 ] {}; void() model_squad = { precache_model ("progs/squad.mdl"); self.solid = SOLID_BBOX; self.movetype = MOVETYPE_NONE; setmodel (self, "progs/squad.mdl"); setsize (self, VEC_HULL2_MIN, VEC_HULL2_MAX); self.think = squad_stand1; self.nextthink = time + 0.1; }; Of course you need to compile it in a new progs. dat. preach has a md3 to mdl converter so depending on what you need, it could be trivial to convert them!
The model is done by Sock in the end. We just collect thoughts together...
(it is awesome to hear from Madfox and Necros! If I won the lottery I would pay you guys to make a giant rotating mechanical quake episode).
I will write you guys later this month. I will see if I can rouse PM from his slumber. Aren't 8chan users mostly pedos?
I'm just going from things I've read, I've never visited that place. the part about imgur being used in an XSS attack doesn't bother you? Don't you guys ever go to imgur?
This post has some details on what happened and some updates:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3lw2g6/imgur_is_being_used_to_create_a_botnet_and_ddos/cv9tzzm It was concerning that it was able happen of course... but Imgur has removed the images with the attack and fixed the exploit of how it got there in the first place. Still, it was shitheads targeting shitheads. You were only affected if you went to specific images that were uploaded with the exploit, and they were all posted to /r/4chan/ and /r/8chan of Reddit. Hard to muster any concern for them. but there is also a lot of interesting content too. Just stay away from the *troublesome* areas.
Ok, after obtaining a little more knowledge about Quake mapping (stackenblocken actually did help!) and using tronyn's lighting tools, I was able to come up with this so far:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/dp20150923220544-00.jpg Thanks, Ruin Cool overall design, will be interesting to see it fit into the Quake vibe and scale. Keep it going!
that looks super nice. It looks like you're spending a lot of your "budget" on those railings. If I was you I would try to use alpha or masked textures instead.
https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/blood_transparent.zip you will have to put a { as the first character in the texture name in order for the pink bit to be transparent. And transparency isn't supported in some engines like Dark Places, I hear you can write a shader but I have no clue how that works. You could also make things like cobwebs to get a creepy mansion vibe going on. It's fine to build small details like that in brushes in my opinion, but it would be better to use them for detailing in areas where you actually would like to have the player looking.
Along the edges like that it will just be a part of the backdrop and "disappear" even though it's right there. I wasn't even aware that there was a way to do transparent textures in the Quake engine without an external file with an alpha channel.
I wanted to avoid transparencies because of this weird bug I've been having in Darkplaces, where any object behind a transparent brush becomes invisible, showing the void behind it (refer to my first map for an example of this). I know a lot of people have been telling me not to use DP, but I love the features and overall feel of that engine. Perhaps I can create both a shader file, and use the pink transparent color for support on other engines. Also, meant to say "Tyrann" not "Tronyn"...sorry Tyrann :( The _dirt feature is amazing. I hope I don't get carried away with it... Yes, I'm pretty sure you need a TGA file with alpha channel, but it works.
About this "bug" you're reporting: BSP compilation deletes faces covered by brushes. Compiler is not aware that you're using a transparent texture on that brush, so if you see through it and there's nothing else behind, you'll see HOM. Make the transparent brush a func_wall and test it again. Quakespasm and Fitz Mark V have this "{" transparent feature. In your Cradle level, darkplaces shows the same shadow artifacts on the ground that made me give up on this engine. QS, MarkV, EzQuake, none of them show these dark spots. You can see them around the graves in the beginning of your level, for example.
oGkspAz, I've bumped around in your map briefly online, and I think you could add some geometry to block up some of your atriums slightly. I know you had 5v5 in mind, but my impression was that the rooms are too open, and the connecting corridors are really claustrophobic. Sorry if this comes too late :p
To everyone else, does anyone discuss or play quakeworld here? :) a hallway and a room for arcane dimensions
http://scampie.net/etc/wip/thing1.jpg http://scampie.net/etc/wip/thing2.jpg http://scampie.net/etc/wip/thing3.jpg http://scampie.net/etc/wip/thing4.jpg I love this kind of design, you can't go wrong with it. Looking forward to play.
On a side note, I'm still amazed by how people here love texture mode GL_NEAREST_??, the "pixelized crap", like someone named it. You are conservative folks. I think I was the one that said "pixelized crap".
The way I see it, Quake was a pioneering game in the world of hardware accelerated 3D graphics with texture filtering. Why use that capability to emulate the appearance of archaic software rendering? I know a lot of people disagree, and that's fine. It's a personal choice, kind of like whether you want to run Windows 10 and be spied on by Microsoft or not. pixelized crap
they are pixel art textures. They are designed to look like that and they look like runny poo when you use blurry filtering. "The way I see it, Quake was a pioneering game in the world of hardware accelerated 3D graphics with texture filtering. Why use that capability to emulate the appearance of archaic software rendering? "
Because that's what the art was authored for. Blurring it removes the charm and character from the textures. When I played Quake I played it software mode. I played the game with a 3dfx card but even when I had one I still preferred the blocky textures. Also GL mode had rubbish lighting because it lacked overbright.
"The way I see it, Quake was a pioneering game in the world of hardware accelerated 3D graphics
Actually, GLQuake was rife with all sorts of graphical glitches and compromises that made the game look a bit rubbish compared to the original software version. Please don't point to GLQuake when making an example of what Quake was designed to look like :) Why use that capability to emulate the appearance of archaic software rendering?
People is answering: "because it's archaic art". What surprises me is that more people would be largely using Q3 textures to map for QS or MarkV, but most of you rather stick to traditionals. People is answering: "because it's archaic art". What surprises me is that more people would be largely using Q3 textures to map for QS or MarkV, but most of you rather stick to traditionals.
This is not really any different to the "more polys = betterer" "argument". Open up any Sock map. Note how awesome the texturing is, and how the low-fi textures compliment the low-fi architecture and the low-fi monsters. Once you start randomly adding hi-res to certain aspects of the game and not others, the cohesion just breaks down. Yeah, I mean obviously you can set up Quake to look however you want, but just in service of explaining why I myself like to disable texture filtering I'd say the same things as Warren/Kinn. The game's visuals were designed a certain way, and while that doesn't mean it's immune to improvement, it does mean that changing certain things may "break" its look by making it less harmonious.
On a similar note that's why some things about the look of Unreal/UT rubbed me the wrong way. I like those games _a lot_ and am only teasing if/when I get involved in the "Quake vs. Unreal" wars, but I always thought they tried to do too much with texture detail for the level of geometry detail that they had available. It's probably at least partially just because I imprinted on Quake first, but I always thought it had a very nice match between its chunky geometry and pixelly/impressionistic textures. Unrelated P.S.: negke is playing some cool Than maps right now on twitch.tv/negke Just for the record, I've seen amazing things people here do using 1996 textures. Scampie just posted some.
more resolution is not more freedom.
I have fun making content for this game rather than doom3 or unreal4 because I can spend as long on an entire quake level as one model in those engines. Sock's mod has a nice alias prebinded: 'pixels'. It lets you switch between crisp textures or blurred textures simply without having to remember the obscure GL_WHATEVER_MODE_SETTING command, so you can all set it to whichever you prefer.
alias filter1 "echo Point Sampling -OFF-; bf; gl_texturemode 6; r_particles 1; bind F1 filter2"
alias filter2 "echo Point Sampling -ON-; bf; gl_texturemode 3; r_particles 2; bind F1 filter1" bind "F1" "filter1" let's make it a powerup you pick up in game. 30 seconds of pixel-vision, and you can jump twice as high.
http://imgur.com/a/qoq41
not a whole lot to look at without textures / detailing. just working on the layout. might inspire someone with the basic architecture though http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/5thadbase1.jpg
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/5thadbase2.jpg Just thought I would leave these here. This and #12560 are the same? It's evolving really nice. These screenshots are beautiful. Again, you guys squeeze sweet juice from these textures. Kudos.
Yes, it's from the same map. The second shot isn't really lit. But I enjoyed the silhouette so much that I thought I would share. In-game it's a bit too dark.
forgot to add im doing some level design streaming tonight. just working on that dm map cleaning up the brushwork and changing a few things before texturing / lighting / detailing.
http://twitch.tv/foogs_ Sweet broken floor. I could see the layout when you noclipped. It will be a fast 1v1 arena, right? Those are my favorite.
After considering a lot of the constructive criticism and suggestions from Quaddicted and here, I've made some changes to the original idea for my map. This is a complete overhaul. Please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks! P.S. for some reason the video is super bright, but I recorded it without it looking like this, so I don't know wtf. I have bad luck with technology, I guess... https://youtu.be/x3G7NDBwQpE Watching you run through the map last night makes me think this will be an excellent map to play on. I'm not sure about your texture choice, also it looks like your texture res is lower than it should be? Even quakes textures aren't normally that low resolution, you should always take your preview screenshots at the best quality you can.
I'm not 100% sure on the theme, I dunno if the texture you have on the walls is doing it justice since it's more of a floor or ceiling texture. I kind of expected something like the DaPak or ZTN style aesthetic. The scale looks really great now! I'm glad you took on-board the advice given.
The outdoor area feels really huge. I would get some people to playtest the map a few times and get them to record some demos for you with annotations to help you fine-tune the level. But it looks great. I still think the monster variety in standard quake isn't doing the level justice and I would recommend using Quoth, Drake or waiting on Sock's mod to gain access to a larger bestiary. 2nd shot needs some pipes!
1st shot looks super fucking sweet. I'd personally add some trim or something along the window there though. Really digging the slime. looking good man!!
Interesting texture set, I haven't seen that one before. I'd probably have the floor texture as something that is a different colour to the walls for contrast. Also if you're using coloured lighting then I find picking 2 colours works well... Make them quite subtle so it adds tone but doesn't make the map look like crayola. https://www.dropbox.com/s/0tb6qoepfyno6e6/lightingexample.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/qy4rektk41ddgma/qon1.jpg Having 2 tones adds a lot to a scene what's up with the water? Looks like the faces got split somehow; check that the textures have the same alignment and offset as that will prevent the faces looking like one smooth bit of water.
Yeah looking a lot better with the contrast... dunno if I would have chosen magnolia for the floor but it's your map!
Necros is correct on the water, make sure the water texture is aligned otherwise the faces will split and it will look weird in the engine. (I usually select all water brushes and reset their alignment and it will fix this for you) Yeah, I call that a "GL seam". Any time there is the slightest difference between the textures, you get one. Rotation, pixel color, offset, etc., any difference at all. In this case, I'd guess the scaling is different.
Scampie map - awesome, keep it going.
Fifth map - awesome, keep it going. Zwiffle map - awesome, keep it going. Pixels - pure shite but who gives a fuck at least we can easily make the game look good and proper with the usual GL renderers. Pixels - pure shite but who gives a fuck at least we can easily make the game look good and proper with the usual GL renderers.
nice opinion u got there m8 Where everyone plays favorites and everyone is in bed with everyone else whilst comparing who has the biggest and thickest map to use to violate everyone else.
Mentioned in #12510 and some following messages, Enclave is on Steam sale until the 5th. Amran posted some screens of his custom map for it, if you don't remember.
The game is also being given away for free (in the form of a Steam key) with every new account on DLH.net! I released a version of the map a while ago, and also the source for it if anyone is interested in a closer look. I'd be excited to work on more content for the game, and a collaboration with others would be interesting to do as well. The link to the map is below (and the source files can be found under the 'downloads' section). Northern Watch (on ModDB) More information on the map and a progression video are included under this topic (Ogier-Editor). http://imgur.com/Nl2ZTCk ive looked at all sky textures and changing them to moving every brush to a different location to moving lights. Why is this little bug happening? Bengt Jardrup light tools. Thanks for the help. Sorry Shambler for something k?
http://imgur.com/Nl2ZTCk ive looked at all sky textures and changing them to moving every brush to a different location to moving lights. Why is this little bug happening? Bengt Jardrup light tools. Thanks for the help. Sorry Shambler for something k?
not sure.. I would see if my light tool makes any difference: http://ericwa.github.io/tyrutils-ericw/
Also, what engine is that? There is a bug that 64-bit engine builds can have that looks like that. Check in quakespasm? Right - technically my first almost finished map (started on spz1dm2ftk after this)
Somewhat inspired by cpm3 and Aerowalk-ish. Feedback welcome. Screenies: http://quaketastic.com/files/spz1dm1_1.jpg http://quaketastic.com/files/spz1dm1_2.jpg http://quaketastic.com/files/spz1dm1_3.jpg http://quaketastic.com/files/spz1dm1_4.jpg Known issue: Textures on 2 spots not lining up after compiling yet it's correct in TB. http://www.mediafire.com/download/0aczfxuv8cnfcvl/spz1dm1.rar http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/5thdm1a.jpg
Basically an expanded DM1 style map, heavy influences in places and straight up rip off in others. Looking good so far.
I think on the walkway on screen 2 you should stick some trims on there. Screen 3 there should be a little extra detail, lots of flat space that could do with filling. All in all though this is a really lovely looking effort for a first map, you should be proud. Looks very classic id. nice
one day I wanted to combine all e2 maps (except the base, though even that could be used as a "gateway point" across a bridge or something) into one giant megamap. Riffing on the original content is always interesting. Your shot looks suitably eldritch! I made you a demo with all my thoughts on your map... I'm hoping it's constructive. I think your map has loads of potential.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/5thspzdm1.zip Thanks dude. I like the idea of the having a mega-map made from an episode. Though I would probably choose E4 because I'm a sadist.
Actually there's quite a few places in my map where I took inspiration from Episode 4. For example I didn't use the 64x64 sized buttons, I made Sandy style thin buttons (the tall brick style with the sword?). I also threw a bunch of spawns in there too, very under-used enemy that doesn't feel unfair if you stick em in the right place. Thanks for the feedback. I'm visiting family but will check out the demo when I get home this evening. I've been trying to think of ways to fill out the SNG / RL room and even the platform it's on now was only added before upload.
Fixed the stairs near GL, wasn't really very fond of that setup myself. Trimmed the lava walkway. I was only aware of the grenades that get stuck on down angles and not the look down thing so will see what I can do there, Contemplating a room through that wall and maybe shifting SSG + GA there. The 1 unit lip on the trims came from q3dm6 but I was very much in two minds about it, flattened it again.
The weird angle near the bottom RL is also intentional as the stairs are clipped off to allow for angle jumps. You can jump from the bottom stairs onto the platform with the TB (and if timed correctly up to the YA from the pillars angle too). I figured lighting is going to be an issue for me. Still looking for decent lighting guides. Things that say "If you're having this issue try this" etc instead of the current "this command does this" versions out there. Having big problems lighting spz1dm2 due to this. Might have to move some weapons around and maybe even drop TB entirely. I stayed away from powerups due to wanting more of a 1v1 map but have contemplated a TDM version featuring an extra room or so with at least a Quad. Thanks for the lots of z-axis comment. Was definitely a theme I was trying to go for. For lighting it might be worth checking out this guide, it's a little out-dated -
https://shoresofnis.wordpress.com/guides/lighting-basics/ This has some stuff you might be interested in - http://ericwa.github.io/tyrutils-ericw/ and this isn't for quake but you may find the general advice to be sound - http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/wold-members-tutorials/magnar_jenssen/functional-lighting-magnar-jenssen.php My own advice when lighting is concerned - If you have a light (like a spotlight) then put a bright light near the source, like something that is light 300-400, but make the "wait" key 3 or 4. Then use a fill light. That is a light that is lower brightness, like 100-200, then use "wait" of a sub-decimal. Maybe 0.7 perhaps. Doing the above gives you a nice bright light source but fills the room with a nice level of ambient light. You could even double up on the spotlight effect by having a bright light near the ground where it would hit. You could try messing with the "delay" key, mappers like Sock tend to create fill lighting with a delay of 5, a wait of 2 and a light of 1000. This will ensure the light will fill an area nicely but wont look super bright due to the way delay works. Another thing with lighting is shadows. Having the interplay of light and shadow is always good. Think about how you can obstruct a light in interesting ways to cast shadows with interesting shapes. It's not practical in a realism sense but Quake is a very abstract world. Lighting takes practice, and I would say copying is the best way to achieve your goals. Try and emulate nice lighting scenes, look at other maps that have good lighting and emulate it. The key to making maps and getting good at it is making test maps. I guarantee that every mapper here has 5 times as many test maps than the amount they release. That's lighting. When balancing weapons and powerups I find you need to ensure that a player has to work hard to dominate. So make weapons spread out as much as possible. Some weapons you will need multiples of, like the super shotty and nail gun. This enables new spawn players to be able to arm up against players with the rocket launcher or lightning gun. Put powerful items in more dangerous places, this gives you a risk/reward scenario where taking risks net you a reward. Like putting a Quad in a tricky jump over lava, or a rocket launcher at the bottom of a central atrium (moving into an open area makes you a sitting duck but if you get the gun then you'll be powerful). Put powerups in secret out-of-the-way areas. I used to love making DM maps, getting the gameplay balance right takes a lot of thought. A nice little way of adding extra depth to your lighting is by adding -dirt to your light.exe command. It will add fake ambient occlusion and make corner areas darker. You may want to bump up the brightness a little to accommodate for this but you will find that scenes "pop out" a bit more and add extra depth.
oh man I would love to see someone try to fit E4 into a mega-map, but I have no idea how anyone could go about it. My plan was to just stack the e2 maps and/or use them as different sides of the same giant structure in a swamp, calling it "The Tower of Black Magic." I'd love to win the lottery and dedicate 6 months or a year to that. But if you were picking E4, it's hard to say what the meta-environment would be; certainly not a swamp. Much of E4 is indoor without even a sense of any outdoors existing, which is part of why it's so strange. Maybe the meta-environment could be piles of dark stones, ancient ruins, or just void? What's "outside" The Tower of Despair?
your tools are fucking amazing. texture alignment actually matches what is in radiant. surface lighting is going to make lighting maps so easy. thanks man.
I would suggest Quaketastic:
http://www.quaketastic.com/ i had started on something like that but at the time bsp2 wasn't common and it was well over standard extended limits... now though....
my plan had been to use the nameless city map as a hub and then glue the major parts of each map around it. the nameless city would become a more outdoor area and you'd eventually be able to explore hills and such around between all the other maps. i never really got far with e4 (little more than taking the sky brushes off of it) but i do have an e2 which has a decent start but I got sidetracked with trying to do some weird base monster vs demons war thing which ended up being dumb :P Make a 6 megamap remake of id1. One of the levels becoming the hub / filler for all the others is cool as well. I wonder if it could be done removing all the end/start level teleports and using some sort of extended key system.
The RMQ map scraps have could be useful... just sayin. the big problem which made me stop completely on the e2 remix was there's not enough room in +/- 4096.
the way I wanted the e2 one was to have all the maps connected by terrain as if they were on giant world. you could explore each map separately in whatever order, but there were not gates that would stop you from finishing any one map without visiting at least another. but yeah, you'd need at least +/- 8192 to really get it done nicely. The RMQ scraps wouldn't be much use considering the size restriction. Each individual map used most of the 4096 footprint.
no, that was unrelated :)
i had planned to continue working on that goofy rpg mod i started, so i needed a huge map where you could spend time leveling up and such, have more difficult areas you might go back and visit later, that sort of thing. now i hadn't considered converting some maps into dungeons... that's an interesting idea, but i still prefer the idea of a big sprawling map with canyons and rivers connecting everything together. If you could fit in all of E2M2-7 in with some trickery like ijed said, but there was no room left for the lost E2M6 entrance.
http://imgur.com/a/nEUE4 <-- 4 shots
got to play with ericw's tools. only have 1 light entity now. pretty awesome makes changes so much faster. feels a little overbright but pretty happy with how it turned out. foogs, kinn is right. If you're using ericw's fork of the compiling tools you can add -dirt to the command line. Or add it to the worldspawn. Either way it will add some extra depth to your scene by faking ambient occlusion.
Yeah and you'll want to goon around with the various dirt settings. Here's a handy visual guide!
http://ericwa.github.io/tyrutils-ericw/ Moved a few items around and added an extra room after getting rid of the big ramp.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/94w8mbq7alssjy6/spz1dm1_14Oct15.rar After this I vote I'll need some help lighting spz1dm2 I like the addition of coloured lighting, looks nice. Map looks a lot better now. Still a few things I would clean up, some of the trims near the lava need to go all the way to the end of the platform edge for example.
But my quibbles would be minor at this point. i just realized i was doing lighting with gamma 0.5. no wonder why everything is so bright :(, But it's what I play with though :( So I guess I should do lighting with default gamma in quake?
disagree, gamma should be used to make the stock ID levels look correct on your monitor, then you should make your levels similar to the brightness of the stock ID levels.
The last time I asked for help with Screenies I was told to put it in the screenshot thread instead of Mapping Problems so here goes:
I have two different compilers on the PC: Txqbsp and Tyr_qbsp(renamed so that I could differentiate). Both of them are giving me texture alignment issues (IE they don't match what I see in TB) With Txqbsp this happens: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/spz1dm1_txqbsp.jpg and with Tyr_qbsp this happens: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/spz1dm1_tyr_qbsp1.jpg and generates 5 warnings: "*** WARNING 12: New portal was clipped away in CutNodePortals_r *** WARNING 12: New portal was clipped away in CutNodePortals_r *** WARNING 10: Reached occupant at (-720 -688 294), no filling performed. Leak file written to spz1dm1.pts *** WARNING 22: Healing degenerate edge (0.000000) at (208.000 -1264.000 512.000 *** WARNING 22: Healing degenerate edge (0.000000) at (224.000 -1248.000 480.000" leak being here (my teleport entity might be extending outside map, I'll check) http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/spz1dm1_tyr_qbsp2.jpg 1) Why? and... 2) What do? You can likely fix the second one by passing in "-oldaxis" or whatever the flag for that compiler is. It flips the 45 degree determination logic...
check the coords given, there is a hole in your map.
You can put the i read only the half of it.
Note that liquid brushes (*prefix) dont seal your map, so it looks like that teleporting brush could be the cause of the leak. The strange thing is with txqbsp the leak doesn't happen. There's a solid wall behind that teleporter brush. I just checked the entity after my post earlier and that's also not outside the map. Possibly due to the supposed leak it does not vis with tyr_qbsp either.
-oldaxis worked by the way thanks. You can also load the pointfile in TrenchBroom if it's in the same directory as your map file.
It's under the File menu. After that, you can ride on the point file trace, look in the View > Camera menu to find the shortcut keys to advance / retreat the camera.
After various cases of "Is it this one? Delete, recompile, No!" etc I just deleted the whole lot and started again.
Good news: No leaks Bad news: wtf... http://www.quaketastic.com/files/spz1dm1_wtf.jpg (could have sworn i was in the screenshots directory, oops...) Yep, thats a missing face, check for floating point inaccuracies.
Or even duplicate brushes at that spot. Or or or. Try to keep the brushes on grid and their texture alignments too. Snap the verticies of all nearby brushes. I think it's under edit? Or Tools maybe.
Okay, figured something out. No matter what the brush looks like, as soon as I add it inside this area, that wall to the in the WTF screenshot gets the missing face. Even these 2 pillars I have in now cause the same issue.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/spz1dm1_TB.jpg Just ran a test. Compiling the exact same
In my experience those sort of differences between tyrutils and txqbsp are usually due to the different default epsilon values the compilers have.
For research purposes: try passing the flag "-epsilon 0.0001" to txqbsp, it should bring back the flickering face. The next version of my tyrutils-ericw will support that "-epsilon" flag so you can tweak it. However, as ijed says there are probably some off-grid brushes / small misalignments that are the root cause. Just gave it a go but no flickering faces that I can find anywhere. Tried snapping vertices too (Ctrl+A and the ctrl removing all the entities. Ouch)
Thanks all though. Giving up for today. I'll make do with the misaligned trim for now. I don't really wanna do any wall detailing. but here's some screenshots before the final release:
http://imgur.com/a/GNRJv -extra4 -dirt -dirtgain 0.5 -dirtmode 1 -light 50 http://www.mediafire.com/download/5qio1p35pvaqe90/shifter_b10.bsp thanks for the advice on the lighting tools and everyone elses input. looks good. I can see some vertex snapping issues in that screenshot on the right hand side. This type of architecture can be difficult to get on grid for sure.
It's actually on grid in editor but it turns out that way after qbsp. Don't know how to deal with it.
pulsar: which editor and compiler are you using? make sure you turn off integer planes in TB, this has always been the source of problems for me.
tho I've got an idea of how to fix this. Though every vertex of these brushes is on grid I have a problem with the shape due to the difference between rear face that can't be seen and face that is actually visible. If I cut of the rear part of each brush , I may solve this problem.
http://clip.corp.mail.ru/clip/m0/1445188735-clip-112kb-b5AsCfnN6ugp.jpg for something like this it may be better to use pyramid/wedge shaped brushes instead of cuboids.
vertex being on grid has nothing to do with it.
the plane described by those vertices cannot be represented by an integer, this is the source of the problem. try using other shapes like fifth is suggesting, also try splitting that square shape into 2 tri faces. (eg: turn 1 brush into 2 brushes each representing half the face). necros: I use jackhammer and updated version of aguire's txqbsp.
fifth: Yep, that was the idea I got. I'll try it when I get home. It's funny that such ideas come not when you're making the actual part, but when you share it. Making curvy corridors are always difficult. I tried once but gave up after some time, so well: you made it right, keep it up !
Worldcraft/Hammer for some reason lets you use vertex editing to create bullshit impossible brushes that you only notice when your bsp is full of cracks. Primary reason I stopped using Hammer tbh.
To make curvy things in Quake, it's best to stick with triangles (triangular pyramids in this case).
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/jam66601.jpg I would just expand the brushes, Pulsar, to close that gap. I wouldnt care too much about intersecting stuff, the compiler works it out in the end.
Unless, of course you want a dibblydeedobbledoo super clean map file, but basically you search for integer solutions for diophantic equations with those curves being snapped to grid. Ermm yeah, this wont work(as far as my tiny knowledge of this topic is correct..) Thats what i wanted to say in the first place!
Quad Post! My steps actually curve, the tops are not flat (the corners are not co-planar). Every face on the steps is a separate brush face, not created by BSP chopping up rectangles.
It compiles error and warning free. Also, it was a real pain in the ass to construct. I left it in my Jam 6 map if anybody wants to look, but I didn't use it because it has serious clipping issues. cause he's one of those fel-wizard mappers who uses unholy incantations to appease the BSP eldritch-gods.
You have no idea how many babies he's consumed just to get his foul maps to compile. I think it is a great map piece!
After all the wrenchtalk I even haven't the nerve to enter it. Heep! There's a geek on my wall cheek, I wish I didn't seek the freak when I was the innocent mapper on cripple creek!. like in #12738 and #12739 and on ericw's light tools page?
Also gaaah, need to get back to mapping. Stupid life, always getting in the way. splited those brushes in 2 triagle shaped.
how it looks from previous screenshot spot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32711504/mark_v_0016.png it seems like those gaps are gone. what it actually looks like: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32711504/mark_v_0017.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32711504/mark_v_0018.png also it produces tons of spam in compile log :/ Snapping vertices to integers will not fix it. You need to ensure that the planes line up. The vertices depend on the planes and not vice versa.
That's great! Gapless surfaces are one of my recent topics of interest, due to their influence on features like Phong shading.
This whole recent "I love Quake even though it's shit ugly and unplayable, thank god you guys can polish this old turd!" meme has gone past getting on my nerves and now it's just plain fucking annoying.
http://i.imgur.com/ZS8lJ47.png
You should see how funny not rotating bboxes from monsters react to round brushwork. And this is why improvements should be optional. It's good to keep a foot on the ground and not forget what the game's design is really like. Otherwise, it may lose its personality.
one last thing you can try is to stretch the brush out so that the faces overlap. this will let qbsp knit things together without gaps. it won't be pretty in the editor, but it should be fine in game.
Released final version of that map I was working on. Thanks again for the help. I'm always lurking here if I have anything helpful to add to anyone I'll try to post more often.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/bdoqbovbl28849i/shifter.zip http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/topic/6700 Had fun playing against a Reaperbot in Fitzquake Mark V and Quakespasm.
In Fitzquake Mark V I get stuck at that upper ledge when teleported from LG + YA + RL site. That doesn't happen in Quakespasm. Probably not in EzQuake, or it would be fixed already. It's a beautiful level. Really good textures, nice lighting, good navigation. The old Reaperbot mastered the level, easily going everywhere. Great job, man. but that's just nitpicking I guess?
looks cool, particularly since it looks like there is a dense knot of hyperdetailed corridors within that structure. Not Quake but what-ev
It's almost done. Just gotta grind through a bunch of tech details and such This is standard game dev stuff. Lots of little pieces bashed together to create an environment. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/WarrenMarshallBiz/CrumblingRuins/WIP/CR_K.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/WarrenMarshallBiz/CrumblingRuins/WIP/CR_L.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/WarrenMarshallBiz/CrumblingRuins/WIP/CR_M.png Some earlier shots so you can see where it's come from:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/WarrenMarshallBiz/CrumblingRuins/WIP/CR_E.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/WarrenMarshallBiz/CrumblingRuins/WIP/CR_B.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/WarrenMarshallBiz/CrumblingRuins/WIP/CR_G.png I think I'm right in believing that this kind of soft-edged, "cartoony" design has been closer to your forte than the usual realistic gloom? :)
has that been a success for you so far? I could imagine buying assets for an indie project could run expensive unless you have some self control...
I've only been doing it a few months
Last WIP update. I now begin the actual WORK part of the process of creating collision, tuning lightmaps, etc.
Kill me. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/WarrenMarshallBiz/CrumblingRuins/WIP/CR_N.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/WarrenMarshallBiz/CrumblingRuins/WIP/CR_O.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/WarrenMarshallBiz/CrumblingRuins/WIP/CR_P.png I have a handful of scrap maps sitting around on my hard drive - a couple of which are almost id1 quality/length, hovering at 50-70% done.
I will probably post here in the next little while, since real life doesn't seem like it will be mapping friendly for the next decade or so. yup. my thunderbold!!!
I was thinking just the other day of how to fake a working conveyor belt in Quake, and other than a convoluted func_trains system I'm not sure if it can be done. Looks good madfox :)
@-Tronyn: You haven't seen the dopefish yet.
@-Zwiffle: I think it is as hard as the escalator in Quake. @-mettfuchs: gut zu wissen, dass ich ein Begleiter zusammen habe. @-5thphant: this fucking demo took as much time as the construkting of it. What I learned is that all engines have another way of exposing. I am still missing some frames though. Result of Boredom
I still would prefer Jackhammer, since Radiant seems to be more complex and challenging to master. it's funny you say that as, coming from a radiant background, i find hammer editors very difficult.
It reminded me of this infinite scroller experiment I've made over two years ago:
https://youtu.be/-qvli2BFIGk I think computers were made out of vacuum tubes back then, so give him some slack.
:D I love this place.
Anyway, the variable framerate of the Quake engine (in that case, FTEQW) made the loop get out of sync, so the floor repositioning is noticeably abrupt, and the mountains behind the trees aren't spaced correctly. This is why one of my goals is to implement scrolling textures. It will be a much better, cleaner, easier, more flexible and more accurate approach. wouldn't mind scrolling textures for waterfalls, actually.
but then no one will use it until other engines have it too. :( most likely
https://twitter.com/SimsOCallaghan scrolls maybe?
To use something that turns your grammar from context free to context sensitive. That would give me another chance to get told to fix my parser when I complain about it.
I *REALLY* hope editors have started properly using quotes when saving
it'd be really nice to NOT use yet more name prefixes as they tend to fight each other. Maybe we should start hiding our extra surface attributes inside // comments for backwards compatibility! :P if we rely on comments then we have to add support to all the map editors, and the map compilers also need to add support and it won't be in comments since there aren't any in a bsp file. If we use prefixes then the only the engines need to add support for the feature.
What so you mean by using quotes properly? Texture names are not enclosed in quotes, at least according to the unofficial map specs:
http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/spec/quake-spec34/qkspec_2.htm#CMFMF I'm certainly going to use surface flags. Q1BSP doesn't support these, but scrolling textures would appear broken in vanilla engines anyway.
Surface flags will also allow for physics scrolling (so conveyor belts will really work), and for entity interaction (bind it to an entity field, so the entity can toggle the scrolling on/off and change direction and speed at will). And the "{" for alphamasked textures is dumb. I already have plans for a new map format. Things will eventually happen, and I'm going to do it carefully. Editor support will also be considered. the unofficial map specs are just that - unofficial.
I'm far too lazy to actually test it, but as far as I'm aware the following is a valid-but-sadistic "{" // } classname worldspawn sounds 2 "{""(""what" the hell ")"( 1 shoddy parser ) ( hello "2, or 'to' if you'd prefer" you ")" "tex with space"naught//(shift_s) slash(shift_t) there(rotate) 1t(scale_s) 2oo(scale_t) //and a real comment. <OTHER PLANES> "}" "wad" "c:\this\is\borked\" "message" "and somehow\nthat was a newline, at least for the engine" "}""{" classname info_player_start } thank god nothing actually uses all those quirks... at least not all at the same time... the various bits of punctuation (especially noteworthy with the ( and ) brackets) MUST be their own token, which is why they normally have extra spaces. the format is simple and stupid. a token is just a token, once parsed it is irrelevant whether it originally had quotes. A token is either quoted, or its all chars until the next whitespace where 'whitespace' is any char above 32. Because this check is agained signed chars, any utf-8 chars or non-ascii ansi chars will be considered whitespace but can be quoted to pass them through unmodified. If a token did have quotes, then whitespace is not needed after the token to determine the end, as this is inferred from the fact that the quotation ended. Additionally, there is no special handling for punctuation (like any kind of brackets). New lines are disallowed in certain places, but entirely optional otherwise (with the obvious exception at the end of a // comment). Double-slash/single-line/c++ comments are only recognised as comments when they are at the start of a token. If they directly follow an unquoted token without whitespace beforehand then the token will contain the slashes rather than the parser seeing the comment. Because they are terminated by a newline, they cannot be used anywhere that a newline cannot appear. *SOME* editors write quotes around texture names (I'm fairly sure I've seen this happen). These editors do not have problems with spaces in texture names, and also avoid the {foo issue when importing in certain other editors (although nothing can be done about those other editors saving and then failing to re-load the file they just wrote themselves, other than fixing the editor). QuakeEd uses the exact same helper functions as QBSP. It doesn't write quotes itself (and thus will bug out if the file is re-saved thanks to the spaces in the texture name), but it should parse it all just fine (I don't have a machine with actual NEXTSTEP on it). If you're worried about compatibility with other unofficial tools then just write the quotes only when it has chars that are not azAZ09_*+ If an editor sees "{foo" as literally containing the quotes then at least it'll save it out correctly too, even if it cannot display the texture properly in the editor. But whatever you do, don't write out a file that the same bit of software cannot then re-load! So yeah, that's what I mean by 'using quotes properly' - using them in order to stop your importer+qbsp from reading the file wrongly. "*SOME* editors write quotes around texture names (I'm fairly sure I've seen this happen)."
I'd like to see an example of that. I've never come across that in all my years of Quake tinkering. how does one make a new map format, with everything that modern mappers want without losing the q1 feel?
If we're going to lose the feel of the q1 experience, then why not just use an engine that supports and migrate our mapping HL(2) / D3 / Q4 formats? It is clear that you've put a lot of thought into this. I hope you can get it through to completion.
On a side note, why re-write an engine rather than contributing to an existing engine? Your comment seems like you'll be doing it for philosophical rather than practical reasons. It sort of seems like you'll be re-inventing the wheel if that is the case. Unless you want a bare-bones engine. In which case, yeah, go nuts. Because I'm really not sure whether other editors can read them back in properly. One option would be to have TB write with quotes if the input map file had them in the first place, and have some option to turn this behavior on and off.
Demonstrating how bad the QBSP parser is doesn't really prove anything other than "QBSP doesn't conform to the agreed upon standard". And from what I have seen so far, the unofficial Quake specs appear to describe the least common denominator that all tools that I have seen so far understand. I do agree though that having texture names in quotes would be the best option. I just fear for compatibility, and it's quite important as a lot of people seem to use more than one level editing tool. The 'agreed upon standard' also doesn't include floating point coords, nor Hammer's texture planes stuff.
Writing out By all means only use quotes when they're actually needed (yay for smaller file sizes), but do make sure they're used when they ARE needed, because writing out a file that can only be read by your own program is muuuuch better than writing out a file that can be read by nothing. The times when you NEED quotes are: empty texture string. texture name contains spaces / other whitespace. texture name contains chars that an unofficial parser may consider to be punctuation. texture name contains non-ascii chars Also, I wouldn't call QBSP's parser bad, I'd much rather call it simple. And by simple, I mean that its tokenizer is consistent and predictable. That said, showing exactly what weirdness you can throw at it is fun, as well as a possible way to hide other optional extensions (without needing the qbsp to write out multiple copies of the same texture). Carmack is kind of an exceptional individual, but more power to you. Doing it yourself is very rewarding.
If Carmack created it all almost alone, then it's humanly possible.
Way to go assuming Carmack is human. For a hobby project. Doesn't mean you can't get a job that pays the bills though.
Writing a game engine from scratch - nothing stops you from trying to get it greenlit.
that's awesome.
Do us a favor, if you make a new map format, document and comment the hell out of your code so that others can implement it in their own engine too :) SleepwalkR: I do have a full time job. The payment is low, but it's almost stress-free and gives me free time to study.
ijed: There are some plans for a commercial release using it. Shamblernaut: Sure! Lunaran: Yes, and I've already beaten some of his contributions. My particle drawing code is faster than his x86 ASM code, and my Z-buffer drawing code in C is as fast as his x86 ASM code. I like the challenge of optimizing the software renderer. There's a lot more to a game engine than the renderer. Don't pat yourself on the back too hard JUST yet. :)
Great stuff! I'd recommend posting over at the vogons, there are some super smart and retro affine people there.
keep a hold on me!
That thing looks great.
Also, somebody should tell the second Orbb that his RL is backwards. I know, have another look, I changed the pic.
It was quiet a lot of work to get the both parts together, when I saw too late how the launcher is placed. Open for command, please hit me, before these beastards do! how the ogre holds a nail gun, yet shoots grenades.
I once modded them to shoot nails. Ruined the ogre experience. Always felt like he should have had a sack of grenades that he reached into to throw. Mini shub was born while I played OneDarkNight and the Old One wouldn't let me win that tiny orbit.
So I painted my eyes and received a blind spot from the rocket of this creep. Bender is there to steal fried schrimps of Scampy and he sure jumps the gun with his shiny ass! Much fun to meet a monster that doesn't do what you expect. I'll never cured from chaotic after QuakeTest'96. what I ment with a blind spot.
Recently a really cool skybox generator was released... but it took me fucking forever to figure out the right orientation. So here's a cheatsheet and a link to the tool to help you get started -
https://twitter.com/GavinEdgington/status/670624431459442688 It should be easy to figure out, make sure you save as a That's very cool!
What do rt, bk, ft etc. even mean, though? I've never seen an explanation anywhere. Basically you need to name the file ending with those things. DW is right, it stands for right back front etc.
fifth, the _ isn't necessary, or you're going to have to specify your 'skybox' in worldspawn with an underscore at the end of the name.
also, front/back means x+/x-, left/right means y+/y-, and up/down is z+/z-. (or more likely some daft never-tested rearrangement of same.) yeah I was so excited that I had figured it out that I insta-posted my findings... There are definitely problems. However, it's probably the most helpful thing I've done in a while :P
Even Valve struggles to get their own skyboxes correct. If you turn the graphics down to minimum in L4D2 then the skyboxes disappear because of missing texture errors...
Hm... I saw how they did their path finding solution. They're incredibly good at some things and have massive knowledge gaps in others.
I think I own most of their games though, so just ignore me. That church/abbey looking structure in the back is sort of what I see in my head when I think about what I want a Quake level to look like so
It's indeed an awesome monster. The
yo; badass :o
except some tris are inverted in the anyway, yeah, someone do something with that. it's awesome! or your own creation sock?
Either way, I am ready yes :) It's by Speedy: https://slapmap.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/plasmagun-model-and-dl/
And knowing how much Q2 and Q3 content those used, I'm gonna say... probably yes?
@OTP, @negke, the source for the mod will be released, you are welcome to add any extra monsters yourself. I have already added 23 new monsters, I think that is plenty enough from me.
@nitin, The white skinned monster is called a Minotaur in the mod, Here is a video showing in action. The monster is from the Marcher mod, similar code but it has some new tricks. The model is originally from Hexen2, like most of the new monsters I have put into the mod. The plasma gun model is from slapmap/speedy, very cool model, it is my own QC setup. I do have extra documentation on all the new weapons and how they work, it will be part of the release. the tri's are flipped, yes, but for some weird thing that happened during my export process - when animating it's fine... apart from the wrists breaking a bit :L
It was supposed to be the boss of episode 2. I have to agree. This one's a bit more "high-fantasy" than "eldritch terror", in my books. Probably because of the bright red cloak. Maybe a swampy green one would like better. And a big toothy grin.
I think the worst bit is the high contrast black and yellow trim all over the cloak. The red would probably work, but maybe the red needs to go a little darker and the yellow/black trim replaced with a different trim design that's a bit murkier, and less contrastey?
Maybe the cloak also needs to look a bit ripped and dirty. but really it just looks a lil too clean, both in terms of the primary color contrast and like it's physically not grimy enough.
I obviously think the Skull Wizard is epic and am really looking forward to that map/mod.
Most Hexen II monsters have been ported to Quake somewhere by now; are there any yet remaining that haven't? Ps post screenshots people! I will when I get enough time to make something worth taking a screenshot of lol. Please port any and all remaining Hexen II content!
(no Raven/Heretic logo on func_ unfortunately) yeah, keep ripping stuff from other games and mission packs. if you're gonna get a C&D then you might as well do it in style.
that was meant to be sarcasm, just in case people didn't realise. mods get much harder to endorse when the user has to buy and manually merge content from 20 different games just to avoid copyright minefields. Someone Has To Say It
But why on earth say it now? Sock's about to give us all the best Christmas present ever and you think it's time to drag this old thing up? Take all the big quake releases from the last fifteen years - it's probably hard to find one that doesn't in some way use assets from other idTech games of the 90s - be they textures, sounds, or in some cases models. I'm not saying it's all perfectly above board and legit, but if anyone gave a shit, surely they would have given a shit. And considering the amount of repurposed content in both Bastion and Marcher he's kind of a celebrity authority on January he matter.
inb4 the "stealing is creative bankruptcy" argument. because that's when my birthday is, yo.
repurposed content in both Bastion and Marcher To be fair, back when I released that pair of otters into the river - just over a decade ago - I was young, dumb and full of "don't tell me what to do, mum", HOWEVER... I think the horse has bolted, the ship has sailed, etc. etc., let's just shut the hell up and enjoy the tasty Christmas pie sock is cooking up for us. You chose not to include the q2 weapons out of legal reasons.
Actually the q2 weapon support in my mod back then was something I did for my own personal gits and shiggles - I never had any real intention of supporting them in the publicly released map(s). You know, it's weird
Those are things I've long missed in Quake. Those little candle piles and such on staircases really turn my crank. Of exciting stuff to play with and I'm sure we'll see some great new maps for this mod in the coming years
maybe next january, depending if I can score a few months of unemployment between now and then. All these bastards keep giving me work though...
love the fish, love the castle, love the balloon tree next to the castle, love the lolshots of the weird remake of that one part of ETC for HL
#12949
i'm looking forward to admiring sockarchitecture! #12952 yes, I'm sick of bastards wanting me to do work. leave me alone I just want to video game. <Shambler> <onetruepurple> http://scampie.net/etc/wip/necrokeep_tease.png damn
<Shambler> dat vibe <Shambler> sick <czg> looks like a scampie map AKA shit <Shambler> love the little details <Shambler> hush zweiburp AD_DM5 - The Mire (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uumlXx5AWEc)
https://mobile.twitter.com/VoiceOvNephilim/status/678131310464860160/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/VoiceOvNephilim/status/673284151861121024/photo/1 tell me the AD release date to make me finish my extended retrojam4 map faster, cuz nobody will notice my release if it takes place shorty after AD =)
let this be my last screenshot then.
https://twitter.com/MaikFranzXaver/status/678277515916496898 Check your tree this year, there may be some Arcane Dimensions lurking under it, lit by glowing candles... That looks great
I've long wanted to make that type of map. "Intermission / Kleins Bottle" was great too. @PuLSaR, the mod is under the Xmas tree, you better hurry! We are planning a release some time before Xmas Day!
@nitin, 10 proper maps and 14 secondary test/start/end maps My trip down memory lane Working on my first SP level for Quake.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23701801/spasm0000.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23701801/spasm0002.jpg Love the style. The blood water works really well with the green bricks and lighting.
2nd shot looks very cramped in the vertical space. Suggest lifting the ceiling somewhat and raising all the structures up to support it. Getting a very "classic id" feel from it, nice! Thanks for the comments.
@Daz the cramped vertical height in this area is actually inspired by a real life location in Florence (the museum at the Medici Chapel see link.) We just took an awesome family vacation to Rome, Florence and Venice. Not sure if I'll change in this little area it but def understand it's limited for combat. @NarNar. That was one of those "I'm out of ideas for the night, let me try this." Glad you like it. :) Less than 50% completed on the overall design. But lots of vacation time to keep at it!! @daz here's the link I referred to above.
https://d1ce0xx3pfclcz.cloudfront.net/slir/w800-h600/repository/ft/8/3/831334565365.jpg I actually like the idea of having low arches to duck under during a firefight in a more open area, the way mice have the safety of their lil hole in the wall.
Hi-res kernel-dithered texture filtering, with 3-step hi-res kernel-dithered lightmap filtering.
[url]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXByDhLWwAE9MK2.png:orig[/url] [url]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXByEVaWMAAwpQc.png:orig[/url] [url]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXByEgmWAAAqNwe.png:orig[/url] I just don't understand why people want to mess up all that gorgeous pixel art. :-/
But it looks like a good algorithm, yeah I just don't understand why people want to mess up all that gorgeous pixel art. :-/
This. It's like taking Quake's monster models and running a meshsmooth on them. I can see it being interesting from a coding point of view. But...the art, man :/ The general public doesn't care about pixel art, and I need not to take pride on such technical limitations. Such advancements are optional, of course.
Also, I'm aiming for specific technical challenges, and for a specific visual style to use in games made with Retroquad. "The general public doesn't care about pixel art, and I need not to take pride on such technical limitations."
I guess that explains the complete lack of interest in retro gaming. Didn't realise it was software rendering there. Very cool you got modern he filtering look with software, although as others have said, I prefer the pixel look because it's clean and sharp.
It's not a lack of interest, it's about giving people options.
And retro doesn't mean pixelated. By your standards the SNES isn't a retro console, because it uses true translucency instead of a pixel grid like Genesis games does. Also, the Nintendo 64 is a retro console, and Quake 64 is a retro game. But whatever, have your opinion. It's just a personal preference thing. I prefer the pixel graphics in Quake and I generally dislike anything that messes with it. Smearing, blurring, high-res texture packs, fancy shader effects, etc.
One thing I agree is that the filtered look isn't perfect for Quake, because Quake's assets were not created with filtering in mind.
However, Mario 64 would look like ass without filtering, because its assets were created with filtering in mind. Both are different retro artistic styles, made for different retro technologies. My style will mix some different retro approaches into its own thing, with new assets made specifically for it, offering a different vision about retro gaming. And, well, if this is giving people some food for thought, that means I'm in the right way. Some disagreement is normal. Retroquad will remain compatible with Quake, although my main focus now is on developing this engine towards creating a commercial indie game.
Quake-specific improvements aren't a priority now, but I'll also work on them from time to time. I generally dislike (...) high-res texture packs
I'm surprised, because you seemed to like those I made for Cepheus. The world being made up of lots of little visible squares isn't fucking realistic either you shitcunts.
As long as the option to switch pixellation off is there, who cares tho?? I don't understand the fascination with writing software renderers with "modern" features. I mean, this has been done in the Unreal 1 and Unreal 2 engine, and also done in that old Pixomatic thing from RAD Game Tools:
http://www.radgametools.com/pixo/PixoWithUnreal2004.txt Unless, of course, you like heroic coding: http://blog.codinghorror.com/i-happen-to-like-heroic-coding/ But it's not innovation in any way. Not everything is done to innovate or profit. Sometimes it's just for pure enjoyment. Folks 'round here call it a 'hobby'.
Now I'm doing some detailing here and there with my map on the more finished areas I decided to experiment with phong shading again -
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/5thphongrocks.png I don't understand the fascination with writing hardware renderers with "oldschool" features. I mean, this has been done in other engines.
Unless, of course, you like lazy coding. But it's not innovation in any way. Sorry for the trolling, but it's impossible to demotivate me. I just don't care about such arguments. I'm used to them.
I see what you did there. I used to use anti-aliasing in my quake all the time but it does tend to look smudged when I posed a JPEG online so I decided against it to get a little sharpness in my images.
Hey Fifth what compilers are you using for this stuff? Am I also seeing see through glass with shadows being cast on them for the building on the left or am I crazy?
you are indeed seeing glass with shadows cast on them. My method is using a texture with lots of gradient detail but only in one direction (to simulate those "lines" you see on glass), but setting a very low alpha amount. I believe the texture is a metallic one.
As for the compiler I'm using the test build that Ericw posted in the tyrutils thread. It has smooth lighting support. Doing the start map now
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/01/1452201677-screen1.png Living the dream boyyyyz Technically a simple 8-maps long singleplayer campaign. It adds 3 weapons (Infantry Gun, a basic machinegun ; Gatling Gun ; BFG) and some more monsters, both custom and some added from Scourge of Armagon. I'm also planning on adding a Berserk Powerup where the general rate of fire is increased by 3.
The basic premise is that some strange ruins have been discovered on a northern island, so a colony is made there. 3 years later all hell breaks loose and you're sent to "investigate". While I'm at it, here's more screenshots: http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/01/1452276770-screen3.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/01/1452276781-screen4.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/01/1452276772-screen5.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/01/1452276777-screen6.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/01/1452276775-screen7.png But please, no sooner than early-to-mid February. Right now I am completely and utterly swamped (like treading in waist high shit) with volunteer work and I only fet enough spare time to annoy skacky on Steam.
Currently the ratio of jams to finished otp maps is 10:0 and I am quite eager to fix that, especially with AD. But I would very much like a breather from everything else first :( http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452553250-razenkrauft20160111235709-00.jpg
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452553252-razenkrauft20160111235714-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452553251-razenkrauft20160111235725-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452553250-razenkrauft20160111235746-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452553252-razenkrauft20160111235756-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452553260-razenkrauft20160111235809-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452553258-razenkrauft20160111235817-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452553261-razenkrauft20160111235823-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452553260-razenkrauft20160111235832-00.jpg red lighting is a bit over the top, I would dial it back a bit!
Glad you worked out the fence texture stuff! Also not too keen on the rock texture used but that is personal preference I suppose. I think something with less green in it might work better? Hard to say. Add a white light to the front of the teleporters so the skill text is more readable. Also Red glasses are softer and the portals now emit a slow pusling light
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452556275-razenkrauft20160112004857-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452556278-razenkrauft20160112004902-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452556280-razenkrauft20160112004914-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452556281-razenkrauft20160112004930-00.jpg that looks good. Be careful with saturating lights like this, especially when those lights share the same room.
I know we all have different taste in what it "should" look like, but on the other hand most here would agree on "what it shouldn't look like". Right? ...and from the archives....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KK7qwyi9mY that was my testmap for the stupid coffins no one saw in necrokeep... originally the monsters spawned below the ground and rode them up, but they broke in the real map so they just spawn above ground but since no one even sees the coffins explode out of the ground it doesn't matter! ...more from the archives...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmsfYn1jF_I when the nailgun used to be in the center of necrokeep, and did the e3m2 thing... couldn't ever get it looking right and I ended up moving the NG anyway so it wasn't easily missed. http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452591659-razenkrauft20160112103624-00.jpg
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452591659-razenkrauft20160112103630-00.jpg Though I gotta ask, what's the ambient entity for that "bzzzz" sound effect used for emulating electric lamps? ambient_light_buzz doesn't produce a single sound. Also, I looked at the original start sourcemap to see how to go to the next line for a message, I tried /n as shown but this doesn't work. What gives? ...there's ambient_flouro_buzz and ambient_light_buzz as the total entirety of ambient sounds with the word 'buzz' in them... I let you go ahead and experiment and discover which one is the buzz you want.
(also, ambient_light_buzz DOES work, it's just a low constant hummmm of a light, hard to notice if you have music on) letting mappers build their own rubble props for breakables is such a great feature. You could go really nuts with it and unique breakable rubble for everything :o
Lol read my mind was about to post much the same thing. external bsp model breakage is one of those "holy shit that's awesome how did no-one think of that before" things :)
Anything that references a progs and also ref a bsp - we had this back in the day as well. Only real problem is setting the size of the pieces. You can either leave them as points or try and guess.
You could go really nuts with it and unique breakable rubble for everything
The end result would certainly be cool but I'd rather take a nap in the garage with the car running Even if you automated it by writing the generation of breakable bsp models right into the compiler, so that each piece can take roughly the average lighting of the area where it will be used, it would simply make the way they spin in that wacky not-quite-physics way all the more glaring instead.
I'm very okay with tossing a big handful of small, generic I kind of assumed the furthest anyone would want to go with it would be reusable gibs that match the texture of the object (which is what AD did anyway) not unique gibs for every single object.
#13078
that centerprint in your last screenshot seems redundant since from the screenie it appears obvious that you're supposed to use the door with the massive red lights on top. As there's a teleporter just behind that brings him back to the skill room
I'm not sure if that's an failed attempt at making an opengl sierpinski triangle, or sadism.bsp with a corrupt graphics card
Here is a little video showing the Shambler with all new mesh and animations! Still working on the texture so not done yet but sooooonnn....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OemMkCeTB6Y http://scampie.net/etc/mapshots/ad_e1m1_1.jpg
http://scampie.net/etc/mapshots/ad_e1m1_2.jpg http://scampie.net/etc/mapshots/ad_e1m1_3.jpg http://scampie.net/etc/mapshots/ad_e1m1_4.jpg short little bonus map. it'll be out in the patch later this week. I actually did not make it so the jaw can open. Did not feel right for the remake for some reason.
It's just e1m1... I had considered putting some other stuff in there, but I decided against it, felt it wouldn't be right. It's ultimately a pretty short and sweet map, 5 mins if you spent time finding the secrets. Which you might want to do if you want to survive hard...
And yes, I managed to make a base map without any crates... unless you count the explosive boxes. Unless those 20 minutes me of me waffling around in MAP30 with cheats counts.
I know people who haven't played doom... haven't watched star wars or indiana jones...
It's a dangerous world out there full of scary people. I did watch Indiana Jones. Public opinion dictates that I should have hated 4, though, which I didn't.
I have played Dyna Blaster a lot. I could play Wolf 3d at school but it was not approved at home. There was no chance for Doom either, so I continued with DB.
Then, on a summer holiday I got introduced to Quake. It was the full step from full 2d to full 3d. More than a decade later I said 'let's shoot some'. I remembered Quake however I never got past e1m4 before: the drop down to the gold key in e1m3 with the zombies and the ogre guarding the silver key in e1m4 were enough to make me start playing Quake in 2010. I started with Doom 2. I had played the shareware Doom, but you couldn't buy the full game in stores, only mail order. Doom 2 had just come out, so that's where I started mapping. I remember clearly my first one room map, four walls, a double barrel shotgun and an imp. The ceiling was apparently the same height as the floor, so I could'nt move to pick up the gun and the imp killed me. I was hooked.
Was shown Doom and Quake at the exact same time. '96 or '97 (just before Quake 2)
Saw Doom, thought "cool". Saw Quake, thought "HOLY FUCKING SHIT BALLS". Immediately forgot about Doom and never played it myself until about 2000 or so. I often feel slightly alien in my exposure to games, especially on pc... I actually don't remember a time were videogames weren't part of my existence. I've played everything that id software made as it came out and each successive id game blew me out of the water.
doom was my favourite over quake until like 98 or early 99... quake was awesome, but it felt slower than doom. plus hordes.
I played Ultimate Doom a ton and Heretic as well, even started crappily mapping for Doom, then Quake came out. The open levels that Doom and Heretic had were something that I missed in Quake and Hexen II.
The open levels that Doom and Heretic had were something that I missed in Quake and Hexen II.
Yes! This is why I didn't really switch over right away! The first videogame I ever played wasn't even electronic. It was an arcade machine in 1975, a periscope where you try to torpedo the passing boats. The periscope had lens, but the boats were little cardboard shapes, the sea was a series of parallel lanes, the torpedo was a red led crossing the lanes, the sinking effect was a red lightning on the horizon.
I loved that machine. I was too little, my father had to lift me to play. Sorry for the digression, but the arcade is still there:
https://www.google.com.br/maps/@-22.2807731,-42.5318872,3a,75y,59.68h,97.65t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sV6n7--SXhNVoC89pfqg7Tg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1 Well it's a screenshot, isn't it? Here you go! Still need to fix the hands but he can open and close his mouth now. It was requested and I got it working after the fact. Worth the effort I think.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1849053/Shambler_Mouth_Texture_Update.jpg Anyone know all the movement speeds to the shambler? I know he moves 8 units per frame in his walk.. but not sure for the others. Is there a snippit of code where I can see all the info? :)
Working as fast as time allows me. I do hope I can get it done before the patch. But we'll see. I am polishing walks and runs still for foot sliding and there is some seams left to fix... plus his forarms and hands need some love still.
Sooooon..... Skiff, Sock is a good person to ask about all that... And also a good person to ask about including the shambler in AD with some extra goodies ;)
that is some badass shit! i love it!
here's the amount of movement per frame: http://pastebin.com/xFm144ig I was quite apprehensive about a new Shambler model when you first started talking about it but this stuff is beyond brilliant.
Seriously, nice job on this! Someone else said the same above but I LOVE that you updated it and still kept everything about it that makes it what it is. Beautiful work.
Congrats for revamping an iconic monster that makes it still look like an iconic monster. You can be trusted with Quake :D
Well, if they're all redone in AD and nobody noticed... that's kind of the same as them not being there. :P
There's a new Hell Knight and Ogre model, but they are not straight replacements, they have different animation lengths.
You can't drop them in like Lunaran's Knight. has improvements, like extra details for death knights and ogres (extra spikes and armour details). Some extra varients like the zombie knight. If you didn't notice the upgrades you must have your eyes closed ;)
The enemies that have seen visual upgrades are the grunt, dog, knight, player model. Now we have an improved shambler. And don't forget the monster footsteps in AD. The shambler stomping around...hoo! Who knew you could make a shambler even scarier!
In SMC (by Seven - QuakeOne), the Shambler seems really heavy. This feeling is the result of the shaking earth when he walks runs and falls dead. I personally love this effect. Would it be possible to implement it in AD??
yeah looks awesome. Can you give him real teeth, rather than painted on teeth? That's the only bit that I reckon looks like it should be 3d.
Things like spikes, and I suspect teeth, are susceptible to vertex wandering with animation. It would probably be fine if it wasn't for quakes 8 bit models.
i would agree with kona except for fifthElement's reminder that it will turn into trash with the low-precision coordinates.
Teeth maybe if I get MD3 support... otherwise the dang things jitter and wobble like crazy. The default MDL format just cant handle tiny details. That is why I stuck to using a texture instead.
than the quake remodelling project
and for that matter the retexturing project they both felt really plastic with the implementations at the time... too much bump mapping, overkill on coloured lights. see: http://qrp.quakeone.com/screenshots/ That looks like ass.
Skwiffy's shambler does NOT look like ass. People need to learn from this shit. The arm and leg is mirrored but I hide it with a unique middle torso. It could be 512 x 512 too I believe but right now the shambler has a 1 to 1 pixel ratio with the level geometry. Kinda nice ha.
I am sure the tech on Darkplaces can make some sweet visuals but you need artists that have an eye for proper color and details. Those screenshots are very primary in their understanding of design aesthetics.
I personally prefer all hand painted textures plus default Quake1 geo is just not detailed enough to hold up with super high resolution textures. The stuff being done in AD on a BSP level could work with double rez textures I think. One of the few things I would love to add in all the quake engines is better water. Water with shadows and reflection and proper murky depths. I'll be sticking around for the foreseeable future so expect a few more remakes of classic monsters. PLUS colabs with other members to expand on the remade monsters abilities and behaviors. Extraordinary, I would say. It's amazing that you painted so much detail into 256x256.
About water, I would love to see UT-like water surface. http://scampie.net/etc/mapshots/ad_e1m1_win1.jpg
http://scampie.net/etc/mapshots/ad_e1m1_win2.jpg http://scampie.net/etc/mapshots/ad_e1m1_win3.jpg http://scampie.net/etc/mapshots/ad_e1m1_win4.jpg MarkV WinQuake shots... map still looks cool :D In fact, without the colored lighting and fog to distract, all the lightstyle animations look much cleaner. it's a 64x64, but the texture is scaled up on the liquid brush, there's a func_illusionary below it as well with the same slime texture rotated and at normal scale. It looks pretty goopy and thick that way I think... Looks better in normal MarkV than in WinQuake MarkV though.
I'm not 100% sure on the missing tooth... maybe it's because I'm used to the texture having such lovely teeth?
I like that a lot. Now we just need some reflection and make it standard for all engines going forward? :)
Skiffy: Water reflection isn't in my plans, I don't see any gameplay reason for it and it's not needed for artistic consistency.
SleepwalkR: I don't have a Mac. =P Beginnings of the first map, a Port Town:
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/05/1454452471-shlsr1screen1.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/05/1454452490-shlsr1screen2.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/05/1454452480-shlsr1screen3.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/05/1454452486-shlsr1screen4.png And seeing how much trouble I'm getting with coding properly the BFG, I'm thinking more of doing something similar to the Shotcycler. It would be easier to code (though I won't add in shotcycler jump for obvious reasons) and its design would be on the same tier as my Gatling Gun: great damage output, but eats lots of ammo and has a wind down time coupled with an arbitrary fire. I saved it as a quake wad, I was surprized quakespasm and so forth got no texture errors, but there's still bullbright pixels there and there.
Using a rotating static entity as a skybox.
cool, needs to have a radius of like 4000 though.
And try rotating it in quakec instead of animating it, to eliminate swimming vertexes. Or, try making it rotate with the model flags, like weapons do. And needs a higher-res skin :) I would love this functionality with the skyboxes we have now since there's a nice range of cosmos skies available.
It would also be neat if we could control the speed and other settings too. :) Wasn't there a quake client that has Unreal-style skyboxes (the one that could have multiple layers of textures)?
I used a resolution of 320 x 1324.
The bad ods are the texture skin takes boths sides for resolution. It is layout as a flat layer but comes up in qmle as two sides. So only the half is used. A static entity can only use 256 frames so I'm bound to the fast turning, or change it into a player, who has more frame content to include. My qc know-how is too poor to change it into a qc file. I thought the weapon turn flag goes rather fast and is there a way to change it? For now it is 1404 units and that is more than qmle can catch, as it appears as a white dot. If there was no skin correktion in fitzquake to 320 height it wouldn't come on screen. @-fifth: well, I would like some support on this subject. I'll send you the file, see your email. try using the rotate flag AND animating the rotation in the opposite direction. the combination of rotations might give you a slower cumulative rotation...
maybe. or. . I was thinking of animating it only for a half cycle and use the skinfile doubled in length. In this way the speed slows down.
Necros, how do I add a rotation flag? I made a static entity before, used the texture name to upgrade it to 512 and placed it in the high resolution teture file. In game it came up right, so now I wonder how I can place this sky skinfile upgraded in this texture file. I did but for some reason the texture won't come up in game, maybe because it isn't square. Fifth.., you're email adress is lame! why not have a false skybox using the rotate stuff in the "teaching old progs.dat new tricks" thread?
@-fifth: it may not be your email, but I tried to send an email and keep
"Can not send the message because one of the recipients was etc." A turning skybox would leak the file? I just did, downloaded the rothack_example and changed the fans into a skybox.
I made it turn slow '0-3-0' and as long there's no sky gfx/env set the box turns, although not smooth, more like a clock abcis. When I use the gfx/env option of a skybox the box keeps turning, but the front side left right stay frozen. Does anyone have a good looping ambient sound of wind, particularly as in winter wind in the mountains?
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/frost.png that looks disturbingly like hexen2's mission pack... you might want to make sure the textures are legally usable.
also it definitely needs some sort of trim, the boundaries between snow and sudden cliff face has a very low poly budget to it (both next to walls and drops). maybe I should ask Romero if he wants to make a guest map for this episode - lol maybe I even will too...
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/05/1454808553-shlsr1screen5.png
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/05/1454808561-shlsr1screen6.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/05/1454808564-shlsr1screen7.png http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/05/1454808566-shlsr1screen8.png I have the general layout of the level in my head, as well as a couple secrets. I really don't think anyone will spend big bucks to take you to court for using the textures from a 20 year old game in a free non-commercial map for Quake that. Nobody cared when we used to do it with latest releases in the late 90's, early 2000s.
alice, quake 2 and it's various mission packs, quake 3, dkt, heretic 2, hexen2, kingpin, rune, fakk2, undying, wolf, sof, doom 3. None of them cared then did they? So they're even less likely to care now. Hell, if I was mapping I'd be ripping the Doom 4 textures and other modern games :D If you hit SHIFT+Z you can make the active view fill the editor window. You hit SHIFT+Z again to unfill it. Great for taking pictures in the Worldcraft/Hammer/Jackhammer editor.
You can have some of my wind if you want?? Might not fit the map though, maybe better with fire and brimstone theme??
BTW, the top of that rock texture could do with some editing so it's not as an abrupt transition to the snow above, otherwise, cool stuff. Go map for HL2. Seriously. You've obviously got good ideas and passion for it, but I think you're going to struggle to fit those into the Quake engine / style...
I prefer Quake's gameplay a lot more than HL2 (or any other FPSes I've played, even Doom. The only one that comes close is Unreal but it's stiffer). And the only struggle I have right now is for natural brushes like cliffes and mountains, but I can learn.
It all comes down to using the grid system properly anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9buU-_Vbqeo
Sure it's Daikatana but considering it's the only game that comes close to replicating Q1's movement I think it's worth mentionning. it's a very early shot, I just wanted to post something to show that I'm not dead and along with the question re: the wind sound. This is the first chance I've had to map in months.
haha Shambler. "Are editor screenshots the new thing?
Sucks to see no lights. And clip brushes?!? Come on. " Yeah, I agree. That shit's fugly. :) dmc.wad still has some fullbright pixels, making stuff ugly, so I have to rework them. It's tedious but doable.
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925486-schlossherr20160208104955-00.jpg
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925493-schlossherr20160208105025-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925491-schlossherr20160208105039-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925501-schlossherr20160208105053-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925496-schlossherr20160208105107-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925490-schlossherr20160208105118-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925496-schlossherr20160208105126-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925499-schlossherr20160208105136-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925500-schlossherr20160208105249-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/06/1454925501-schlossherr20160208105302-00.jpg And yeah I'll put in a proper skybox in the meantime This is how vanilla Quake renders dwmtf.bsp:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s2_correctionOff_ditheredlightOff.png And now this is how Retroquad renders it: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s2_correctionOn_ditheredlightOn.png There's no colored lighting and no texture filtering on this screenshot. So yea... I could not resist starting on this one just as I finished up the Shambler. Might as well keep the momentum going right?
Vore Wip Screenshot! This is the final mesh and unwrap with a temp rebake of the old texture with some quick cleanups that included fragments of the face from the GIB head texture. Same workflow that I employed on the Shambler. So get the shape done first and then work ontop of original texture as a starting point though ultimately that gets replaced almost entirely. So like before I will most likely setup my animation rig with proper animations before working on the final texture. I'll keep you all posted! It looks like a great model but (I probably won't be the first to say this) - the addition of ladybumps and a slim waist may not be to everyone's taste :}
In the case of the vore... It really was so badly constructed with zero lack of any sort of anatomy. We'll see how it looks like with a more final texture. For the torso I will be going for a more gaunt emaciated ribcage / waist.
Ha it wont be sexy when done I hope. That or folks are in to some freaky stuff on this forum.... Whew, the vore getting a Skiffy job? Fantastic.
I remember first hearing the idle sounds of the vore and it chilled me to the bone. That's great Skiffy!
I always thought the Vore was female anyway. Looks great so far, can't wait to see how this progresses!! The only significant performance hit comes from the dithering, mostly because the lightmap uses a separated surface cache now, which is combined with the texture in realtime.
The color & brightness correction has near zero impact on performance. Resist the urge to add human tits to a weird interdimensional monster just because it's female. The lovecraftian horror that comes from unknown things from beyond our world is reduced when they have relatable human features.
CZG told me that you need to add a vagina... which, I assume, is where vorelings come from?
Also make a birthing animation. Screw all these guys not wanting a female vore ;) can you make the vore really twitchy? like really fast acceleration of movements.
might make her seem more arachnid-like I think it could make a subtle suggestion of female anatomy, yes. If people notice, it adds an even more twisted look. So far is looking great.
I saw Fifth's shambler video. Its movements are so well done, so smooth, it's impossible not to wait for all other monsters' revamp. Man, this is some wicked render! Retroquad (I still love "Retrowheel", but anyway) is gonna be outstanding.
it's very clear now that you're not reinventing the wheel: this and other screenshots show what you're trying to achieve and it looks very unique.
I always got a feminine vibe from the vore monster.
I think subtle suggestions would enhance the model but nothing further than that in my opinion. Hands up for skiffy!
Awesome vore! Tho I'm also not a big fan of humanisation of creatures from another realm. It should be more unhuman that human.
Madfox: this is so great! You made my day! The fiend has boobs too... boobs on everything! hooray!
Seriously though, the fiend has eyes, the shambler has fur and the vore is a girl... just the facts people. If vore has 3 legs it may have 3 boobs. Fiends may have boobs on the back (with eyes).
I hope Skiffy takes the negativity with a pinch of salt. Because this forum has some of the worst trolls, even worse than youtube.
To be honest I kinda want Skiffy to give it a couple of big pendulous dairy cannons now just to mess with us.
in your juggling vormit.
I'm just going to finish the skin and animations and then see if you guys are still on the fence hehe.
Here's a more complete set of comparisons.
All these images are 8-bit color data rendered via software in a 8-bit color mode using the vanilla Quake palette. Without colored lighting, and without texture filtering. Lightmaps are rendered using a separate surface cache, which is combined with the texture in realtime. The lighting has four steps of dithering applied to it now. Each dithering step is done on a different step of the rendering, so they're actually multiple different approaches to fix different aspects of the vanilla software renderer's limitations. These comparisons are extreme cases, which are quite common for completely custom textures in maps designed without the original software renderer in mind. The better the texture & palette combination is, the smoother the resulting image will be, with the color differences being more subtle. I already have a method for generating an optimal palette from 24-bit images, so a game made from the ground up for this engine should look significantly smoother than this. I've still got to propagate these color corrected lighting modifications to the rest of the renderer (water, skies, and sprites first; MDL model rendering needs a complete update). Afterwards, I'll start preparing some completely custom content for a demo. No correction, no dithering. Exactly the same as vanilla Quake: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s0_correctionOff_ditheredlightOff.png No correction, but with 3-step lighting dithering: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s0_correctionOff_ditheredlightOn.png Color & brightness correction enabled, but dithering disabled: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s0_correctionOn_ditheredlightOff.png Both correction & dithering enabled: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s0_correctionOn_ditheredlightOn.png Other comparisons: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s1_correctionOff_ditheredlightOff.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s1_correctionOn_ditheredlightOff.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s1_correctionOn_ditheredlightOn.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s2_correctionOff_ditheredlightOff.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s2_correctionOff_ditheredlightOn.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s2_correctionOn_ditheredlightOff.png http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s2_correctionOn_ditheredlightOn.png I prefer this one....
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/retroquad_dwmtf_s0_correctionOff_ditheredlightOn.png the other corrected version looks less vibrant This dithering gives a sexy retro feel. It's kinda scary retro, actually. You can render unsettling horror scenes this way.
The corrected version looks less vibrant because that's how that texture is. See the hardware-accelerated screenshot from Quaddicted:
https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/screenshots/dwmtf.jpg But I agree that there are cases in which color correction isn't desirable. retrojam4dlc_dw.bsp comes to mind, it looks better without it. And vanilla Quake in general feels a bit different to me with color-corrected lighting, so I'll make it optional. #13277: That's a good description. I'm definitely a colour correction OFF fella - with it on, it sort of has that sterile GL washed-out look.
Dithered light is kinda nice If you swapped the dithering algorithm slightly every frame, you'd like get a film grain effect for almost nothing. :P
Kinn: I've also noticed that.
JneeraZ: :P It's already very grainy when in movement. Not so much in maps with textures that matches the colormap better, of course. Fun fact: The more fidelity the drawing algorithm gets, the harder it is for the PNG compression to save space. The screenshot filesizes got progressively bigger. Yea I plan to do just that. And then it might be a while before I do another one. Because I have some serious anatomy course studies coming up in April which will consume my soul for a few months. So this and maybe another critter if I can then it will be quiet for a long time at least with new model updates.
Well, it happens. But let me thank you for having done a fantastic job on the shambler, which was sorely needed. Quake as a whole looks a lot better thanks to that.
I suppose your pending anatomy studies are the reason why you're focusing on non-humanoid characters at the moment. In that case, the fiend would be the logical next step, I guess. :) But anyway, thanks for what you have already done. http://www.scott-eaton.com/anatomy-for-artists-online-course
this one for anyone interesting in upping their game as an artist. :) Oh and here is my thread on polycount... I randomly post stuff there now and then. http://polycount.com/discussion/119346/skiffys-wip-thread-old-and-new-projects Surely you got some fine art in there, skiffy!
Some of the monsters do me think of characters from drwho, or that fish like archville dolphin. That anatomy site even spontaneous set me on drawing again. Nope I did not... its still being worked on though as I learn from you guys and the level work from Arcane Dimension. It will be a level for that mod now for sure.
it is being rather actively worked on.
it'll come with an all-new hand-painted texture set and hopefully some interesting foliage models and maybe a new monster or two. which is exactly why I don't post screenshots anymore
I have that screenshot in my Quake inspiration folder, looks so good, the height variety, the architectural shapes, the church in the background and the zombie crucified at the top!?! I don't suppose I can help test this map? I promise to find bugs!?! :) looks so good
Thanks :) The map has since turned into a ridiculous vis-mulching monstrosity, and sometimes I do worry that I've lost the simple elegance of that initial area I screenshotted years ago :/ I don't suppose I can help test this map? You'll be the first I contact once I have something playable :} My uncle always said the vores were his sister, that's why the shriek so loud.
Kinn, use detail brushes!
The longest compile phase should now always be light. Yes there are complaints that my maps don't run on everyone's computer. But mine cost 200 quid and runs them all at 30+ Kinn, use detail brushes!
Word up, yeah I use detail. It'll be fine, I just called it a vis-mulcher to imply that its layout is somewhat...not very retro. Got my inspiration from looking at references from command and conquer. I intend on a couple more prefab vehicles to round out the base... The level is fairly complete in terms of geometry tbh.
http://imgur.com/a/ijNgv
http://www.moddb.com/games/killing-floor-2/addons/kf-sweetdreams#downloadsform Not really a 'beta' I guess since I'm done with it barring game-breaking bugs that need fixing, but otherwise yeah I'm pooped on it. :( I found a texture flat of a vehicle from C&C, basically put it into Quake... Will probably need to modify the texture if I am to use it.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/5thvehicle1.jpg I just need to remove the GDI markings and put my own stamp on it. Probably will use the quake skull markings or whatever is normally used in the base maps. I have Speedy's signature all over my map. I know it's his texture set but it's kind of immersion breaking... obviously he'll get readme credits and stuff.
It's a shame I'm not a better texture artist, I would love a range of vehicle prefabs that can be added to base maps.
Texture definition test. 512*512 @ 0.25 scale:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/scr_0728.png Still using the Quake palette. absolutely love that, great job! What C&C game is that? So you took the texture and made the model yourself?
starbuck... I just googled "c&c vehicles" and someone had the flat texture map, so I converted it to the quake palette (actually zero hassle, most of the colour was retained), and built the thing with brushes.
I haven't made anything proper in a model program since I was in college, I need to learn how to do that stuff at some point. ah cool, not a stressful process then! Definitely enjoy the result though. Wonder if there's more stuff from that universe that'd fit in quake, quite a nice look that I we don't normally see :)
C&C has the right amount of gritty chunky design that can be converted to quake. The tank I made was based on the GDI Predator tank from Generals, although I didn't have any textures to work with on that. It's all brushwork and whatever stock textures that fit.
There's some definite vehicles I want to see. I would love a big blimp, a submarine and some kind of futuristic chinook or jet. I have some ideas in my head for those. I think it would be nice to utilise AD's extra functions, like a futuristic plane could hover like a harrier jet (this could be done with func_bob quite nice I think). And it would be cool to use them in some kind of set piece, maybe have the tank be used as an objective where you blow a hole in a wall to progress? There's still a lot of work to do, so I can't predict it yet.
I want it to be actually usable, not just a gimmicky engine. And I'm also simultaneously developing a whole game on top of it. There is a solid goal, but the path to it will be a mess.
I have zero experience with developing a whole game (Fightoon doesn't count, it's unfinished) plus zero experience with the commercial side of things, so there will surely be a lot of unpredictable mistakes on the way. Anyway, at least I won't make the same mistakes as before. It's time for new mistakes. Life is fun! No news here, but these CleanCut comparison shots are a good example of an extreme case for color correction on translucency.
First, a 24-bit color mockup. I've done this by getting a screenshot taken with r_wateralpha 1, and applying it with 60% opacity over another screenshot taken with r_wateralpha 0. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/correction_2_mockup.png Now, an actual ingame color-corrected screenshot taken with r_wateralpha 0.6. It's not as smooth as Floyd-Steinberg dithering, but it's very close to ordered dithering, surpassing it in some other cases. http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/correction_3_translucent_on.png And this is how the translucency was without color correction: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/correction_4_translucent_off.png The Quake palette is quite poor for translucency, because the game wasn't designed for it. But an interesting side effect of using such a limited palette is that it makes easier to measure the effectiveness of such graphical improvements. With a palette developed with alpha blending in mind, the results will be significantly better. Danget gives engine already! This supports colored lights? Be curious to see some shots from the E1M1 Doom remake with this engine.
Static entity as frame for the alpha glass.
model
It reminds me of the examples of the coloured tifany shadows from darkpaces. I guess it's not possible to simulate coloured glass. here and explain me how to obtain coloured glass!
a palette developed with alpha blending in mind
Do you plan to develop a palette? This is something I'd like to see. Skiffy: No colored lights yet. I've got a plan for that but the engine needs some structural changes.
And the engine isn't robust enough, there's a lot of cleanup and bugfixes to do. Adib: I already have the method to generate an optimal palette, but it needs all textures to be created first. Are the window bars double sided? Or do you need two models, one for each side?
Colored glass = solid color testure named with * at the beginning. Its water. *waterglass1 *waterglassred *waterglassgreen etc etc The model has a broader width so it will fit in a glass brush of 4 units.
example I wonder if I can break the alpha 1 to obtain more colours. I have used the simple glass.bmp with alpha 1.
right link I just noted your doom-e1m1 level there, it's funny, cause I saw someone remake e1m1 in UE4 a couple days ago, and it looks so so bad:
http://www.pcgamer.com/the-first-doom-level-has-been-recreated-in-unreal-engine-4/ I told my friend that I can make that shit in Q1 and have it look 10 times better and now I see you did just that =) The only reason why I shun that remake so much is because it has gotten so much attention around the net and it just strengthens my belief that gen-pop don't understand quality, especially in older games, using old tech. These Unreal-remakes get's way to much attention, it's not like that Kakariko village level looked any good either, but this guys seems to think so: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SOsQ3288SzI/maxresdefault.jpg Sorry, 0750-hours, before heading to work in a cold Stockholm, rant =D 100% Correct. That UE4 level looks utterly fucking awful in the shots and would still look utterly fucking awful if it had been done in UE1 18 years ago.
And yeah Scampie's pisses all over that not least because Scampie understands high map quality. FFS. Are people really that struck over bloom lightning and cheesy shaders? There is a time and place for UE4 but not for something like this. I am fortunate that a community exists that has similar views! :)
[[[CAN WE PLEASE HAVE A NEW PASSWORD FOR THIS AS THIS ONE IS UTTERLY FUCKING ANNOYING]]]
WHO DID THIS 😂😂 I wasn't satisfied with the Floyd-Steinberg dithering that I had implemented in the TGA loader ages ago. Floyd-Steinberg dithering only works per-texel, which means that its color correction doesn't interpolate at the subtexel level used by the 3D rasterizer and the level of detail gets quite poor when the image is projected in 3D space:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/scr_0735_fs.png So, I've ditched it and came up with a 2-step per-texel & per-pixel approach. There's a huge amount of preprocessing involved in this method, so I'm gonna have to make the engine store the compiled data in the disk to make loading times tolerable: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/scr_0735_mankrip.png And here's how it looks with a high-res skybox from Arcane Dimensions: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/scr_0755.png No. It's about improving color definition, not texture resolution.
Detail textures adds more detail than originally existed, while per-pixel dithering prevents average color loss. Sometimes I may get a little odd with nomenclature because I'm inventing these features from scratch and I'm not a native English speaker. Texuring is hard, even if I scramble my skybox.
#13361: I'm guessing that was meant for Specialbomb, but as someone who's still trying to learn the finer nuances of Quake lighting I find that really helpful.
By the way, what (in relatively lay terms) is the difference between wait and delay? I'm sure they're completely different and this is probably a silly question, but I've read necros's guide (before and again now), but I still don't quite grasp the difference between the two. what (in relatively lay terms) is the difference between wait and delay?
delay is just an integer id to denote what attenuation formula the light uses - read the light tool readme to see which number means what. wait is a float scale factor that stretches or shrinks the attenuation. wait < 1 stretches it (light goes further), wait > 1 shrinks it. If you use ericw's version of the light tool, the readme will tell you everything you need to know about using lights. That sort of makes sense now (I mean it's well explained on your part; it just needs to sink in on my end). It'll hopefully become clearer with time and experience, but now I don't feel quite so lost.
And thanks for the tip about ericw's readme. It really is very extensive, but your explanation helps me understand the readme a bit better too. Sorry for the thread-inappropriate discussion. with light, the fastest way to become completely 100% clear on everything is simply to make a test map, and just tinker with each light setting one by one, referring to ericw's readme, until everything makes sense.
Qmaster: The working name is Retroquad, but it should be changed upon release.
Rick: Cool guide, we need more stuff like this. Need testers for my new map
screens: http://digspt.ru/quake/digs08_02_tmp.jpg http://digspt.ru/quake/digs08_01_tmp.jpg map (without VIS and with draft light) http://digspt.ru/quake/digs08_test.zip I love this map., Great geometry. I like this style in Quake.
I didn't had time to make it all, but here are my crittics on a few things (so you could make it better) : 1. Not enough monsters (I tried it in nightmare mode). I felt lonely in most places. 2. Not enough atmospheric sounds (winds, water, etc). The map is too silent. 3. The trees are as ugly as my butt (too crude, the trees, not my butt !). Make them without leafs, or replace them by strange rocks formations, or some kind of out-of-this-world sculptures. Trees in quake really suck. 4. Some corridors are a bit old-school (very square), and could have more "out-of-this-world" details. Thank you!
1. I may increase the number of monsters. 2. No sound, because they do not complete the assembly map. When the full - they appear 3. Trees 4. I tried to make more parts, but probably will not change my architecture. Thank you! I've got a lot of feedback. By the weekend I will try to resolve any issues and make another version for testing
Map Screenshot Album: http://imgur.com/a/NIFEx
Downloads! First two maps beta here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1f2cv6odho8i58b/QusPack1.zip?raw=1 Installation instructions: -Extract to your Quake folder :) Running Instructions> -Run "Start QusPack 1.cmd", input your Quake executable name and voila! Started QusPack with majesty! Please note it's not the preferred way if you want to change difficulty. You should instead start Quake, start the console, type the difficulty level you want (0 for Easy, up to 3 for Nightmare!) and then do "map guse1m1". Enjoy! I'll later add a difficulty level selector for a future GUSINTRO map. Open for criticism! Thanks :) your texture quality is lower than it needs to be, have you set picmip to a different amount?
Map 1:
-Item fell out of world, check bounding boxes. -ambient_thunder does not work in vanilla quake, just remove it from the map. -Quite a small map with only 4 monsters and 3 rooms. It is more of a test map and that's fine but there is really no "level" here. Map 2: -Turn around from the start and you'll see a visual error referred to as the Hall of Mirrors (HoM). Check that location in the editor and see if there is even a brush blocking this wall. -Two monsters stuck in wall -Nice use of the monster jump! I told you that was a fun way to go about things. It worked perfectly for your trap. - The lighting was a bit dark, consider adding more especially at the underwater section. Summary: It is clear that these are test maps and it is great to get feedback on them...the only issue is that there is so little here to give feedback. I would expand the first map by at least 4 more rooms and add some more gameplay in general. The second map holds its own but it's still very tiny with just 8 monsters on skill 2. Keep mapping! :) FifthElephant,
wtf is that? I just used the textures that I had to use in TrenchBroom: loaded QUAKE101.WAD and MEDIEVAL.WAD from Mike's website. Blougsprug, I can't see any HoM from Darkplaces, I guess I'll have to use Fitzquake for this one. And I can't see stuck monsters in Map 2. I will also increase both maps :) They are small because they were done for people learning to play (in special MAP01, and MAP02's first Shambler fight has that penta so nobody cares with the shambler in special. :P ) In overall thanks for feedback! :) Darkplaces is typically not the best to test maps on that you plan on releasing. I would use Fitzquake, MarkV, or Quakespasm instead.
I started testing my very first maps with Epsilon...good lord was that a terrible idea. Hello,
I figured if I don't upload a map now I may never. There will always be something to improve but I'd like to have at least one release under my belt. I started mapping for Quake starting in December and learned a lot through this board. I would appreciate if I could have some testers play through my map. Look for texture problems, broken entities, and gameplay balancing. All difficulties accounted. **Requires Arcane Dimensions** A Horse Named Quake: Screenshots: http://imgur.com/1I66T0H http://imgur.com/2gOVeJP http://imgur.com/ate92Mb Map: https://copy.com/v4rqzblLUyi6YwtU Please do not download the map if you do not intend on providing in-depth feedback. Wait for the official release! Thank you! Blough,
Map looks nice, even more impressive if this is your first? Gustavo, Try entering "gl_picmip 0" and then restarting the map and see if the textures look clearer. Screenies look great! You started mapping in December and have already managed to produce something like this? I'm deeply jealous!
(Haven't played the beta as I don't have a working Quake setup at the moment; just going by the screenshots.) Well total_newbie, I started mapping a week ago.
Revision 1 of GUSE1M2 is avaiable here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wfj440tkrnq2bn4/guse1m2.zip?raw=1 Won't release the source Now with more rooms, more monsters, and a deadly final trap! Play at your own discretion! ;) Well that's a good sign about the screenshots.
I would like to say the map is very small, I decided to focus on fine-tuning versus size to get something out with some form of Description:
A 1v1 deathmatch map. Problems with it: Needs to be bigger. Some items don't spawn. I'm tired. Sorry if I'm not being to informative. The map: http://www.mediafire.com/download/cx9oz664ly42j6i/bridgetst.bsp Bloughsborough, nice map!
Btw, I still didn't find a reason for that HOM. I tried shrinking the brush a bit, but it's visible face has about 3 tris! (tested in Darkplaces with r_showtris 1) Still didn't test if the HOM still shows in Fitzquake after shrinking the brush. I ask this here because this is where I was warned about the HON. That map looks sweet! The lighting looks amazing! I'm going to download it and try it out!
Another thing to check is if that wall is close to the standard map boundary limits (4096 each way)
In your are in TrenchBroom, just click on that wall and look to see if any of the coordinates are over or very close to -4096/4096. And thanks! :) I can't really play the map. Anybody have a link to the mod?
Anyone who does have Quake1, and doesn't have Arcane Dimensions, should be impaled and crucified, pure and simple. Texan style !
Keep in mind that I'm new to the scene, and I have no idea what's required and what's not. Someone should make a Quake essentials guide if it's that serious.
http://www.mediafire.com/view/ip6u7h9o2qiq66e/bridge1.jpg
http://www.mediafire.com/view/kflhrgyp14nd4yn/bridge2.jpg http://www.mediafire.com/view/qzhhzx89z1tb8qc/bridge3.jpg There are a lot of nooks and crannies, and I couldn't get all of them without taking 10 pics, but whatever. AD is quite new. It's not required for mapping so much as required for playing.
The levels are monstrously long and challenging, it is really the antithesis of what some of the guys here have been working on the last few years. For your own mapping, they have HEAPS of good ideas to *cough* borrow and set a pretty good example of map design. Recently a map called Zendar was modified for AD as well, while I haven't played the AD version, I can certainly recommend the original. Sounds hard. I personally have never beat Quake, because for me, it's really damn hard.
Also, I don't really want to focus on singleplayer mapping, so if I do make a SP map, it probably won't use any mods. Please please use imgur.com guys.
I'm not going to whitelist all that crappy other stuff no more, just to look at screenshots i don't like:) +1 for necros doing it for me.. +2 for texan style! Those screenshots are unlit/basically untextured, it's hard to even make out the map shape enough to give feedback.
The scale looks off/cramped to me. e.g. stairsteps should be wider than they are tall. Avoid having the ceiling all the the same height. I suggest using a strong texture set, this will help get the scale/shapes right. I'll work on it, jeeze. I made it last night. I'm not publishing it yet, which is why I posted it in betas.
screenshots and beta's is certainly for unfinished work... usually we're used to seeing something that's a little more finished than your screenshots though ;)
I'll add textures to it later, I got school stuff to do. I would have given it a bit more detail if I had time.
do you school-work first, it's more important anyway! :P
If you want to show off work as early as this it might be an idea to do a stream, people love seeing this stuff made from scratch. SpecialBomb - I don't know what feedback you are expecting from those images, and getting all defensive when someone gives you valid feedback is not going to end well here.
I dunno why I even put the screenshots there in the first place. I just thought it would be a good idea, but I obviously didn't base it off of anything. I won't put any more screenshots until it looks acceptable.
(Note to self: Don't piss off kinn, he is made of pure salt) Fullbright screenshots (or anywhere really) are always a bit of a ghastly sight because everything is 255 in brightness. Even with the very similar brown textures you used, having lighting would have increased the visual flair of the screens by a considerable margin.
As far as texturing goes, don't worry right now about getting things perfectly aligned or what goes best with what. Instead, search in the texture browser for "floor" and apply that to your floor faces. Do the same with "wall" for wall spaces. You can just slap the floor texture onto the ceiling for now. For lighting, if you really don't want to mess with specifics just do this: Add a light into the map and add a key called "delay" with a value of 5. Give the "light" key a value of 450 (or higher...play around with it!) and then just copy+paste them around the map. You'll notice a large increase of visual fidelity doing this. Then, as a test post another screenshot of your level with texturing and lighting and see the difference! Good luck So, link to map is broken...here is the updated file. Would like some testers!
https://copy.com/7uLLFsTBpsB0K8RS Lol, I couldn't agree more.
I sometimes get annoyed by the fact that some people on here champ at me even though I'm putting in a lot of work for free because I love mapping, as if they think I'm a robot and they're the user, and they should just be able to control my creativity - and force me to hold back releases until those releases live up to the particular standards of how they voluntarily decide to spend their free time. Still, I recognize that with a very tiny amount of exceptions, this is mostly meant as constructive criticism, and that's how it is best viewed. Kinn, by the way, is "made of" pure win. Making a remix of my favorite Q1 map E1M3 - The Necropolis, I'm a few days in at this point. It is not a brick by brick copy but instead a re-imagining. Keeping some key components like the "ring of shadows" secret, traps and overall layout of the original. Going for a "medium-sized" map, not much bigger than the original, and certainly not legendary scale like the amazing AD maps :)
Some things I'm not sure about, like shifting from the brown/white castle theme into the swampy/brick theme as you move down/away from the start area. Maybe stick with with the broken/swampy theme, feels more like the original? Also, another consideration is to either stick with classic Quake or incorporate AD entities, there are especially some useful ranged monsters like crossbow men etc. Some screens for reference: Start Area [img]http://i.imgur.com/wkq8dZS.jpg[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/RWAVC5o.jpg[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/ql7FJBP.jpg[/img] Gold Key Area [img]http://i.imgur.com/diwP3op.jpg[/img] [img]http://i.imgur.com/1jwxN5M.jpg[/img] It is early but if you have considerations and feedback I would appreciate it. That was stated on the original post but I guess I should entered that information again!
Great idea, E1M3 is a classy and iconic map (maybe due to it being an early aspiration of Quake speedrunning, as well as the great variety), and has a lot of potential for enhancement whilst retaining the classic layout and atmosphere.
It looks good so far BUT needs some more texture variety, especially in the 1st start shot and 2nd GK area shot. Feel free to go heavy on the detailing too as long as it's consistent :) P.S. I kinda like the shifting thing at the start, adds a bit of flavour. Yeah, you can't expect people not to be lazy.
Here is a demo https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58150516/q1/mjb.7z there is a few notes in it. Thought I was stuck at the top level but noticed the key right after saying that. Ran out of ammo couple of times. Forcefield ambushes trap you in an area that feels a bit small, not much space to maneuver. Overall, plays well imho. DeeDoubleU,
First of all, thank you for testing the level. I really appreciate it! I'll just list things in bullet form: -I wanted the NM skill search to be assigned to the player so they start looking around the skill selection room. It is atypical to be sure. - The Mega Health clip through the crate thing in the stable is a glitch I was made aware of yesterday when friends tested the level. I tested the level +500 times and that one eluded me haha. -You say: "Oh come on" during a yellow window shot...is that because of the lack of direction they give? The yellow windows are tied to a super secret but maybe providing the *"More to go"* message is the better way to go. -The bobbing crate is not a favorite among testers haha...I will have to rework that section a bit. -Stable key sort of blends in but I am not sure how to draw attention there. -Force field fight is not implemented the best but I didn't want the player to be able to freely leave at the same time. I might add an extra respawn of items in there. -As for ammo, a lot of items were sitting atop breakable planks throughout the level. I think I need to add a visual connection to show the player that you can do this. -You and the rest of the testers only found the one secret (armor in the window) so I wonder if I should make them a bit more obvious hmm. -I may add the entrance to the stable to break open so the "Horse" can chase the player further and not get stuck in the stable. -You escaped so fast at the end that you left the "surprise" encounter in the dust! Very interesting (and nerve-wracking!) to watch someone that isn't me play through wow...so much insight about how players interact with the world you designed. This will be of tremendous help and again thank you! Couple of the questions on the technical side:
Lighting okay? Overall presentation not from a gameplay perspective...atmosphere...stuff like that? Thank you for the feedback shambler, regarding detailing, I'm new to Quake 1 mapping and the extended engines (I use quakespasm) but just how nuts can you go with details in one area without causing problems? :P
PS: Sorry for broken links, wasn't sure how to put them here. Looking good! I like the additional vertical layer at the start section and that things are a bit more open in general. I would say go all out re-imagining with AD!
Looking forward to more :) I played Horse Named Quake last night. Not a bad level at all, with quite a lot packed in to what is basically one big room. Played on normal.
Found 6 of 9 secrets but I only completed the yellow windows because of no clipping. Discovered a window that wanted a "widowmaker" and had no idea what that meant. Saw the red armor, couldn't get to it. The little ramps to get up to the higher area (after climbing the ladder) are too awkward. I could climb the rope but couldn't figure out how to get off. Doors in the start area just sink through the ground in a way which which looks weird. Wood textures everywhere need to be aligned better. The grain should appear to run in the same direction on all sides. I saw what looked like a red key in the start area but couldn't get to it. I also saw what looked like a shoot button, but wasn't shootable and didn't see any obvious way to get up there to push it. Didn't have any problems with the amount of ammo or health. Monster placement was okay, but it seemed like one of the little spider things was stuck under a ramp. Lighting was a little bland and maybe a bit bright, but way better than none at all, and really good lighting can be very time consuming get right. Overall a pretty good map. Even though I'd never played an AD map before, it wasn't hard to figure things out, so you did well in that respect also. - I meant "oh, c'mon, how is this not a secret/button?"
Disregard that. I guess I was too far away for me to see that particles were "bloody". I don't think you need "More to go" message, would make it too obvious. Have no idea how to activate top-most trigger, tried to shoot while jumping but always hit the wall. - I don't think it is the crate itself, but the context - most of the time when I tried to climb it, there was few enemies around. That made me panic and miss those jumps more than I should. - stable key some particles maybe? Torch above entrance to courtyard drew my attention immediately. - Ah, breakables. I'm not used to AD and keep forgetting about it. Noclipped to check other stuff and I think secrets are fair. It's up to you of course. - "surprise" encounter Whoops. I honestly thought that is all there is. I think it is cool that different people will have different experience. - lighting is just fine. Only weak point I see on the visual part is view from ground looking up. Ceiling areas(there spider is hanging from for example) looks empty. Imho few supports, wooden beams that kind of stuff is needed there. As for the atmosphere... stables without a single manure pile?! I don't buy it. =P To be honest, I was too overwhelmed with action most of the time and could only enjoy the aesthetics while flying around. Rick, thanks for testing the map!
Refreshing to see you found more secrets...it would appear that Hard skill makes players focus more on surviving rather than taking time to explore the site. -I guess if you haven't played the AD mod, that some terms are confusing. In any case, if the secret is solved you are rewarded with the Widowmaker which would hopefully make the player go "Ooh!". That was the plan anyway ;) -Now that is interesting! You found 6 secrets but couldn't get to the one that everyone else could only find. Just really curious stuff! -Always felt off about the small wooden ramps upwards. Going to implement stairs so ramp running is not required. -I added some lip to the start stable doors so they don't just vanish...good eye. -Yep, red key is the puzzle to reach nightmare. I tried to keep the convention of red = shoot and anything else means to push. A well timed slope jump may be able to reach that button. ;) -I know what spider you are referring to and I pushed him out a little more. -Any pointers on the lighting? I did focus a good amount of time on lights. Tune down the sunlight/2 perhaps? Should I remove some ambient delay 5 lights I placed around...? - Whoa, wood grain alignment...not something I was thinking about! That is a nice bit of feedback. You say everywhere but I look at major wood textures (Like ceilings of the vertical sections) and it looks like they are all going the same direction. Any specific glaringly obvious examples? -Cool to know I conveyed AD even with the absence of AD knowledge! Excellent feedback and this helps a ton...thank you again! DeeDoubleU: Ah, great to hear about your noclipping analysis! Adding wood beams or detail to the ceiling sections is a great idea...going to definitely do that. Ah, now I need to create a poop model to really enGROSS the player...haah! Thanks for the follow up! Try to imagine how the grain would be oriented if you actually built in real life using something like 2x4 or 4x4 planks.
http://quaketastic.com/files/GoodandBadGrain.jpg I think I understand now, it is more so the planks of wood and places where you can see all sides of a wood brush, thank you.
Any advice for the lighting aspect...to make it less bland? I tried having intense light at the windows and source of flames. :) It's possible my TV is just set too bright, but everything looks fine to me. I switched to Nvidia controls instead of Windows and turned the gamma down a bit. Seems better. Maybe it's that moon up in the sky that makes me think it should be darker. I also noticed the gamma in Quakespasm was set one notch higher than in Fitzquake and I've been testing my map in Fitzquake only for the last few weeks.
And yeah, about the wood. When wood is turned into lumber and used to build stuff the grain will almost always follow the longest dimension. That's the way it has the most strength. Okay well if you are saying it looks fine then I am pretty satisfied with that. I have seen your WIP shots of your wish level and that lighting is gorgeous so I feel safe haha.
Looks like that damn bobbing crate is the source of many tester's woes. It appears that sometimes it will bob lower than it should and prevent the player from reaching the higher ledge! Going to need to implement an alternative route up, can't risk that happening on official release! The TV computer's Windows install has some issue with adjusting display settings. They will adjust but then it complains about "path not found" when it tries to save them, and resets them back to default (which is actually way too bright).
The thing is, Fitzquake's brightness (gamma) setting seems unaffected by the Windows desktop gamma, but in Quakespasm it is. In Quakespasm, the Windows desktop gamma being too high also causes the in game brightness to be too high. I think that's what was making your map look too bright. I wouldn't worry about it too much, though I think the sky light could be lowered a bit without hurting anything. I wonder where other people set the gamma in Quake? I play in Fitzquake with brightness at two notches from the minimum. Judging by looking at the status bar in youtube videos, I think a lot of people play with it set too bright. Beta2:
http://digspt.ru/quake/digs08_beta2.zip 1. Fixed an issue with the two hell knight 2. Increase the number of monsters. 3. Added a few secrets. A few old secrets are made more notable 4. The three buttons in the blue region. I made them more notable and increased security. Now the fun 5. Some weapons moved. Now it is easier to see 6. Added a few pointers that reduce the probability of getting lost. 7. Added ammo, medicine chests, armors 8. portal that opens golden key now double (not one with double side) 9. The trees were old. I do not know how to make good trees 10. Fixed a lot of small problems Map named "The Isolation". Barriers that appear not to provide an opportunity to get out. They are needed to tease freedom. And yes, I'm not going to reduce the number of teleports, as planned from the outset that there will be many. Especially since the branch on the map is not so much, in fact. Already much better.
Please, don't forget to change the sucking trees ! Use some weird out-of-this-world alien-like Giger-erotic sculptures. Is it possible to add "infinite" number of monsters in nightmare mode ? Kill'em-all-more-are-spwaning-on-their-way-back-to-kick-your-chick-butt ! Texan-style ! Hello again, thanks to DeeDoubleU and Rick and a few friends for testing my potential first release. I fixed some things, upped the visuals a tad and (hopefully) aligned wood grain ;).
I still would like some testers to make sure nothing is outstanding but if I receive no hits for about...oh a week I will release the map! Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/XkmbF ***Arcane Dimensions with Patch 2 Required!*** http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61270&start=662 A Horse Named Quake Beta 1.1: https://copy.com/Ddsy3FydWR9J7VFI Thank you and looking forward to joining the long list of map creators! and (hopefully) aligned wood grain ;).
I'm sure I have updated version since there is particles around stable key. Maybe not the latest one though? Parts with wood grain still misaligned is shot in the demo. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58150516/q1/wood.7z Unrelated question - why I can't pickup items while notarget is on? Drew,
Thank you! DeeDoubleU, Well bleh, at least some of it must be fixed. I admit it is a bit challenging for me since I made many things wood. Great that you found them though so I can see for myself! I do understand what the alignment requires...just probably missed some. You have the latest version if there is a lift by the bobbing crate and a shortcut to the 3rd level. Any other outstanding issues? Are improvements apparent? I made some large and some small ones. I will check the demo when I get home...thanks for taking some time to look for me! :) I already thought it was good last time. Only pointing out those wood textures because I got an impression you are on a hunt to cath'em all 8)
Lift next to crate helps with jumps. On the other hand its area is even smaller, felt even more like sitting duck while riding it. Did so because I wasn't satisfied with the first one.
Just wanted a quick test to see if the overall geometry was good enough, and see if _sunlight2 is what I am looking for for overall outdoor lighting. I'm glad it is. Some areas need to have their lights reworked, and some textures still have fullbright pixels left(wierdly enough, the big rock texture from the first ep of Daikatana have fullbright pixels leftovers). Still, I have hope. http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458752404-schlossherr20160323172542-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458752406-schlossherr20160323172742-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458752406-schlossherr20160323173018-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458752407-schlossherr20160323173042-00.jpg That has to be the greatest demo I have ever seen. You were like a wood god seeking out his disloyal subjects. I am glad I did understand the alignment and most of the offense is in the stable.
Thanks for presenting it in such a way that both made me help optimize the map and also chuckle. And, none of the random planks are meant to shape any form of lettering but I like that it looks like NiN! http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458843148-schlossherr20160324134452-00.jpg
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458843142-schlossherr20160324134638-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458843148-schlossherr20160324140810-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458843146-schlossherr20160324185240-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458843147-schlossherr20160324185320-00.jpg http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/12/1458843149-schlossherr20160324185534-00.jpg Doing those tests make me more comfortable on the level. Sealing it was a pain because I wanted some quick tests, but ever since I did that, testing the map is as easy as booting up Quake, even if the compiling process takes a bit of time. Once I'm done with lighting, I will start to put monsters and items. looks sweet, can't wait to play it. I wanted to make e1m3 remix by myseft for a long time (since mid 00s), but never made it.
Though some more texture variety and trims would be nice. I've dusted off the deathmatch map I was working on and need some advice.
The map is pretty functional as is in terms of gameplay, I am just prettying it up, placing some visual cues so that it's easier to learn teleporter locations. I have some platforms that hang over a pit of spikes that players need to jump over in order to traverse the level. The platforms look silly sans support, so I fabricated up some chains to hold them in place. Visually it looks excellent. As a player would you rather these chains: a) slightly obstruct player jumping, increasing the risk of death? or b) be func_illusionary removing some "reality" but less chance of death? Maybe they can be supported from below or from the sides, with thin brushes?
I'm a little dubious about the idea of falling-into-certain-death in a multiplayer map though. If the platforms are quite big, so that essentially you're making a "space map" (hipdm1, q3dm17), then that's fine... but since you're worried about players blundering into edge supports then I'm guessing the platforms are small. There are maps like q3dm6 and Furious Heights that do have spots where players need to bounce across some player-scale platforms, but the penalty for falling is just tactical (and maybe a small bit of falling damage). If those maps had death-pits underneath then I don't think people would enjoy them as much. They reside in the middle of an open area that is meant to have risks to traverse. Both in dangers from other players and the "oops I fucked up this simple jump" factor. The platforms are quite large.
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/hellvertica.tga The chains don't look right to me just disappearing into the floor like that.
They could use some kind of fixture to represent an attachment point, and probably would look better attached to the side of the platform. Personally, I'd just add supports or something underneath. I was going to add a fixture to the top, but now that you mention it, the side will probably work just as well if not better.
I was testing some stuff out, when I loaded E1M1 in both QuakeSpasm and Retroquad and got shocked. For a moment I almost thought I hadn't alt-tabbed properly.
See the comparison: QuakeSpasm & Retroquad This also shows how faithful to the software renderer QuakeSpasm is. Good work. i've been meaning to ask... what is with that weird fuzzy look in your engine? reminds me of software unreal.
It's the series of dithering filters I'm developing. It's actually superior to the filter in UT99 (though not to the filter in UT2K4, which uses a 16-bit bilinear algorithm instead of dithering).
Here's a view of a single pattern generated by Retroquad's 3-step dithered lighting: screenshot.
Rendering in Retroquad generates multiple patterns like this, non-overlapped. And as can be seen, the resulting pixel patterns in Retroquad are more dynamic and complex than the ones in Unreal. I decided to go back active in mapping for Quake. Yesterday started a new small
map, which probably will be a bit nonlinear on the walkthrough. Th map will be for AD mod. http://i.imgur.com/7hoFPqW.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oTxNk1z.jpg If he is the DOOMer I think he is, then a phrase "everything new is well forgotten old" couldn't be truer.
@Bloughsburgh
Thank you :) And your map too inspired me to make something not under vanilla Quake or Quoth2, but under AD.mod. @mankrip Yes :) But the arches in my opinion look quite just, perhaps they lack the borders of another material. @DeeDoubleU I don't know about what you think DOOMer, in the Q-community were many. I have no big releases for the first Quake. I have previously participated in several speedmapping events and made a map for the Jam 1. Yeah, that's why I recognized your nickname. Saw it while going through top rated maps at quaddicted and at quakegate.
You're not ready for what's in store for you. Many months and money have been poured into this project, codenamed X-tra HOT that will leave even the most skilled of Quakers on their knees pleading for mercy. What is it you ask? Take a look.
Right off the bat, we're talking next generation level design here. qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af1.jpg Each map a true work of art, designed by only the most professional of crafters. qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af2.jpg Hundreds of traps and dangers just waiting for you to be victim to. qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af3.jpg Bizarre worlds and enemies with state of the art gameplay that will leave you on the edge of your seat! qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af4.jpg Mini-games like golf to take the pressure off from getting whooped by your adversaries, because everyone needs a little relaxation. qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af5.jpg This is no doubt the ultimate in Quake experience, re-defined for next level gaming! Coming soon to ColecoVision, Emerson Arcadia, and the Casio PV-1000! The 10 fps screenshot was taken in my Celeron laptop with Windows Vista, which is the one I use for coding. And there's been some optimizations since then.
But yeah, I'm aiming this renderer at high-end CPUs (for full HD, a Core i5 should be the minimum recommended). Here's the skybox l_swampn from Arcane Dimensions: before and now. These shots are from one of the lower corners of the skybox, and skyboxes in Retroquad are (still) rendered without any lighting of fog, just the raw preprocessed textures.
Now all six sides of the skybox are preprocessed as a single image, to smooth out the edges, and I've noticed that this helped to improve the image quality as a whole, getting rid of image artifacts like the pattern on the lower side of this skybox, therefore improving the overall color fidelity. Right now, skyboxes are the only thing using this image format, but I'm going to port this image preprocessing algorithm into a texture compiler tool, to allow the engine to use 24-bit textures everywhere with fast load times. I'm really curious to see how the combination of this texture color quality with the 4-step dithered lighting will look. All this has near zero impact on performance, by the way. I'm getting around 60 fps when rendering nothing but the skybox at full HD in my Core i5 laptop. Regular BSP geometry is slower to render due to lighting and their 3D mesh complexity. I was going to post this in the LowRez Jam thread since someone had brought up making pre-rendered sprites and I thought my tests could be helpful. But, it looks like the project may have found a pixel artist, which is awesome. For those of you who also like pixel art, this thread over at polycount has some awesome stuff.
Since I don't have the time, money or talent to create an entire bestiary of beautiful pixel art monsters I opted to do pre-rendered sprites instead, here are some shots from the first test I did some time ago: pre-model doodles initial sculpt pre-retopo rig test rendering setup eight angle render in-game test This was made in blender. This is my first model and, of course, pre-rendered sprite. Making the actual model took a couple days, but most of that time was spent going through tuts from CG Cookie. I was pretty burned out after making the model and just did a rushed paint job because I really wanted to figure out the rendering bit and see how it would look in game. Needless to say, a better paint job would have gone a long way, but this is sufficient for this test. Also, I intend to use GLSL shaders to emulate software rendering of the game, so that will further alter the look of the sprites (and world). I prefer the look of hand-drawn sprites over pre-rendered sprites, but the flexibility of going pre-rendered just can't be beat. Also, this project has a lot of characters and lots-o-frames for each one. So really, pre-rendered is the only feasible way to go about it, I think. One thing I *hate* about some pre-rendered sprites is hard lighting and shadows, which give it a plastic, fake look and totally gives away the fact that they are pre-renderd. I did a series of tests and it turns out that flat, uniform lighting looks best (IMO). Maybe incorporate something like SpriteLamp could yield some badass results. Here are some picture dumps of the sprite making process from Blood, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom that I found helpful and interesting. I've also done some viewmodel tests with physical models made from toy gun parts, duct tape and paint. It was a fun experiment but I have since moved to 3D models for that too. Maybe I'll post some pics from that test sometime as well. I know this is kind of a niche thing but I hope someone may have found it useful or interesting, I did! I find this very interesting, I've also seen the graphics for the level before, at least the bricks and the ivy hanging down from the arch, cause you have posted this at Q3W before right?
I love these old low polygon games, I have such an itch creating a game like this haha. Yeah, this is some of the earliest test art, so you may have seen it before. I go to q3w when I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around shaders. The arch is a decal with which I was having issues, that's probably what you saw.
I'm trying not have so much of a death grip on what I reveal or not, plus this is only old, pre-alpha test art, so not that big of a deal. There certainly is something charming about low tech games... Do you use the Q3 engine for this, or what do you mean? Just the bsp with it's shaders?
I think you can get a long way with pre-rendered frames, like you do. We talked about this at the office today, if you do ONLY that and not mix it in with regular pixel art, then you will have a consistent and clean overall art style. Yes, consistency is definitely best. I use hand drawn sprites for pre-model visualization just so I can get things looking right before committing to a model.
Yeah, I'm familiar. I was rooting for them when they launched their kickstarter. Sadly they did't get very far. IMO, it's sorely lacking in the gameplay department, which the primary focus of my current project.
AFAIK, steelstorm is the only commercial game using darkplaces. This art of yours is freaking great.
I don't think you need to mimic software rendering. At 64*64, you're going to need all the detail you can get, specially on distant objects, so I'd recommend regular 32-bit rendering with anisotropic filtering and trilinear mipmap filtering. Since the resolution is so small, you can also use 8-bit alpha channels on the sprites and enable FSAA to smooth out all edges. And for sharp pixelated texturing on close-ups, you can use this large texture magnification for pixelated games without aliasing between texels shader. By combining all these approaches you should get a visual style with sharp texturing and smooth geometry. Also, pre-render a shadow directly from above the models, to give a better sense of them touching the ground. You can even use an 8-bit alpha channel to make them really smooth. The fact that the prerendered models aren't lit directly from above isn't a problem. Artistic freedom can be more charming than realism in such cases. no chance of making that a 3d model then? you could make a low poly mesh and render the high poly texture onto a low poly UV...
either way, that thing looks awesome. really well done. :) Oh crap, I thought Killpixel was Khreathor. My reply was for the low res jam game.
https://33.media.tumblr.com/c3139b5d84e53da909f8b7083b022f23/tumblr_nsb0doVQEo1s2yegdo1_500.gif Oh crap, I thought Killpixel was Khreathor. My reply was for the low res jam game.
Nope, not Khreathor. Glad you liked the art though! Interesting write-up you linked as well. @necros - Thanks :) But no, game-ready models are not on the agenda. The irony of creating high poly models just to turn them into low res sprites has not escaped me, however. Beautiful work, hell of a first model! With Blender you can render out a world space or tangent space normal map. SpriteLamp tends to have a pillow shaded look it to.
Did the password change? I tried the ZigguratVertigoBlewTronynsSocksOff and it doesn't seem to be working
@joshua - thanks! I'll look into normal maps, still feeling my way through blender (and 3d modeling, for that matter).
Delver was one of the games I used as reference when exploring the pixel art style. I still pop in once in a while just to so soak in the art, go figure! The password still works for me.
One problem I've had before is when using copy & paste to enter the password. Sometimes I would get an extra space at the end. I can vieuw quaktastic, but every link further bounces back to the waybackmachine.
I tied all, delete cookies, cleaned up webbrowser. There's just some kind of hacker in between. 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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