plus, 8192x8192x8192 is only in relation to (0 0 0) - if you make a 6000x6000x6000 map (which technically fits inside the vanilla Quake boundaries) it can still break if it's not centered at (0 0 0). 

Well, the map is over entity limits so requires Fitz or Darkplaces, but I'll just keep within the geometry boundaries for simplicities sake then.

A question on difficulty settings by the way, what's the general feeling on power ups? At the moment the monster count is pretty much halved for easy, and the monsters that remain are weaker, but I'm afraid it might be a bit boring. Any feelings on keeping a fight similar in monster count but chucking in a quad + mega for easy? 

Removing enemies is ok, but more resources is better I find. Obviously, need to balance the two, but the second one tends to get ignored.

And killy stuff like quads are always fun. 

maps with Quad + SSG or SNG = lots of fun 

Do both. Halve the monster count *and* give extra stuff on easy. Then on Hard, remove some health and ammo and add some monsters. 

Don't be afraid that the map will be boring on easy, after all that's why it's easy - it might be boring for a skilled Quake player, but it won't be boring for a less skilled Quake player.

I always hate hard games, I played Quake since 96 and I used to be very good in 98-99 (playing pro in clans).

But even I do find sometimes that a lot of maps are actually hard even on easy ! Mappers needs to understand that they have 4 levels of difficulty.

You have nightmare - make this almost impossible to finish, so that only a very good player is able to finish it, throw there a lot of monsters, no health, etc. Make the player fight shambler with the axe, whatever it take.

Then you have hard - make this hard, but not impossible, people shouldn't run out of ammo and you shound't find yourself in a tiny run without covers fighting with vores.

Then it's normal - this should be challening, but not frustrating, it should be much easier than hard. Players should have good weapons, a decent suplly of ammo and enough health to not get into fight with low health.

And finally, you have easy. EASY - the name says it all - even a schoolgirl should be able to finish the level on easy, this is something that almost all mappers and game developers tend to forget - easy if for newbies, for people that don't even know the controls too well - you should have plenty of health there, powerfull ammo, powerups, red armor, everything.

Don't worry, you cannot make easy too easy. 

I'd say I'm a hardcore player, and I usually find most quake maps too easy, so I built the map designing fights with skill 2 in mind. I'm going back through it to fix each area up as you chaps suggest. By the sounds of it normal will actually be the difficulty to argue about...

Should have something for testing tomorrow anyhow :) 

It requires Quoth, and a limit removing engine (I've been using Fitzquake whilst making it).

It's mostly a bare shell, but I have at least thrown some lights in and used different textures so you can tell whats a floor or a wall :) Not interested in visual feedback right now, I want to nail the gameplay before I look into that.

It's a very linear, combat focused map, but I have attempted to vary the pacing and forms of combat throughout.

I've also attempted to support difficulty modes, but I'm not sure how well so please tell me what you think. Easy gets a lot of extra armour, megas, some powerups and extra geometry for some little jumping sections. Monster count: skill 0: 137, skill 1: 184, skill 2: 245

I'm hoping to make it the start of a series, which is why it's long but you don't get that much weaponry yet.

Sorry enough gabbling...


http://www.filefront.com/17282658/zqftest03s.bsp/ 

You should aways play your own maps on hard, then scale back to make normal and easy. It's a rule of thumb, pretty generic, but it seems to work.

id1 has many failings, but I said I wouldn't talk about the other project.

Zealous - is this a release? I can't play for a few hours yet (fuck you Hypnos).

If it then make it a news post. If not, then good on you for wanting feedback. 

 

I'm looking to finalise the gameplay before trying to make it pretty and release it.

I should have just posted it up in the Screenshots/betas thread :E 

true... I think on hard the first four rooms are nightmare!!! 

I think Normal and easy do need more toning down. The lightning trap area is the same on hard as normal which is pretty evil of me :E

Also causes trouble in the room with the two little computers because if you destroy them before killing the monsters you're kind of boned... so redesigning a bit. 

ZealousQuakeFan try it on Hard and map is a nightmare and boring... monsters coming everywhere... need a lot of monsters remove when you have a better version and if you want me to beta test just shoot... gameplay is my speciality ;) brushwork I suck but gameplay is my best! 

Can I set Doom 3 lights to "projected" or "parallel" somehow in GTKRadiant 1.5?

Is there a method to set the light center point by dragging somehow, instead of having to enter the coordinates manually? Shows up as a green dot in my radiant, but apparently can't be dragged.

I discovered that the light volume can be drag-resized, which is cool.

Also, scaling all textures by 0.5 seems to be necessary to get the right size in relation to the player, why is that, and is it the normal way to do it?

I have to use Radiant, since the Linux version doesn't have the built-in editor. Yay. I can compile etc. though without problems and also have all the materials working.

It seems to be problematic to switch Radiant from one game to another on the fly. :-/

Anyone here have some Doom 3 mapping experience? I started messing around with it a couple months ago, and decided to get deeper into it now. 

And this is probably a stupid question, but why use caulk on surfaces that aren't drawn anyway? 

I find Gtkradiant 1.5 to be much more convenient for the actual construction, mainly because of its camera controls and window management which are superior to D3edit and Q4edit in my view. Particularly the lack of a cascade feature makes the in-built editors extremely awkward to use on smaller sceens. However, ultimately it seems there's no way around them, as Gtkradiant doesn't display all resources, has no model/gui/etc viewer and seems to lack a few other vital features as well. 

So far it seems the actual brushwork isn't a problem, lighting is the thing that I'm having to relearn, although it's not really that different either. I was surprised it has no surface lights / flags. But OK, every light is a volume now. All right, grokked that. Would be nice if I was able to do spotlights though.

And gosh, do the testmaps look good ingame. The engine and the default materials are incredible.

I got a clean materials pakfile from the net, but it stopped working after I unpacked all of my pk4s - I had to do that because RoE wasn't loading some files for lowercase reasons (linux).

I should probably get one of those prefab collections as well. 

0.5 is the default tex size. all the textures were made double sized, like q3 before it.

as for caulk, the most straightforward uses of caulk are for brushwork behind patches (like curving walls and such) because patches don't seal the world and also to create box rooms which you can place a mapobject room inside.
most of the base maps in d3 have examples of the first reason (patches) and the hell maps are almost entirely made out of mapobjects. 

Ah, OK. That makes sense.

Apparently DarkRadiant has the light editing functions added and also runs under Linux. I might have to try that.

I never made a Q3 map, I don't even own it. :-E 

This looks very good. Cheers for mentioning it!
Will try if it can be set up for Q4, too. 

Looks a good bit o' neat it does. Now I REALLY want to solve my Doom 3 problems so I can start mappins for it. 

Too bad DR doesn't support Quake :-/

The clean materials pack is very useful, it removes all the broken materials / repairs them to a large degree. Pretty much mandatory. Doesn't work with RoE though.

Now to find out how to set up one of those sentry bots... and spawn some imps. >:-)

Doom3 speedmapping?

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/unidentified.jpg

Tossing around with something Enpro-like. So much easier to make pipes in Doom3 than in Quake. 

if you're looking for textures, lunaran made a great set called strombine (that works in d3 once you swap the material commands to d3 equivalents): http://www.lunaran.com/page.php?id=8

has some nice concretes and metals. 

Thanks for the link. It looks like there's some good stuff there. I'm just familiarizing myself with the stock textures atm - there's quite a lot of them.