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. 

Congrats gb, you made a room that looks like any other Doom3/Quake4 related room. 

How dare you not make the most original architecture ever in a game engine you're working with for the first time??? 

Luke(gb) you have the force, you are just in the wrong path 

It looks like Doom 3? Good, that was kinda my goal :-P 

It looks like a combination of tools is the way to go with Doom 3, ie. build the basic geometry and place the basic lights and entities in GTKRadiant or DarkRadiant, and use D3edit (under wine, if necessary) and Blender etc. as needed and to fine tune stuff like spotlights, and GUIs etc., although like Quake, Doom's .map format is plain text and you should be able to use a text editor to create anything that's still missing. Learning how things like GUIs and movers work is the biggest hurdle, but there is a lot of info out there (doom3world.org, katsbits) and once you have grokked it you should be able to write the stuff you need.

I hope. :-E

Resources:

About lighting:

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/idtech/dynamic-lighting-principles.php

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/idtech/dynamic-outdoor-lighting-techniques.php

Clean Materials pack:

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6025

(if the links are dead, I have it and can upload it)

Common prefabs (although you can probably rip stuff out of the original maps and use that as a starting point, as with handrails, consoles, movers and guis):

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14677

Hi-res replacement textures project (insane):

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=23332

This last one is a reason to largely use the original textures, since your maps will then profit from replacement textures as time goes on.

Lots of the links at doom3world.org are dead, though. 

http://doom3-hr.com/Main_Eng.html

Hi-res texturing project site. 

You guys are going to make me re-install Doom 3, aren't you? :) 

on prefab rails:

doom3 is remarkably weird when it comes to prefabs. some areas have full mapobject (prefab) railing, some areas have railing completely made out of patches (more common) and some are a mix and match.

i would find it more easy to make railing in 3ds max (you can just use the spline tool and don't need to fiddle with ugly patches). thankfully, doomedit has a feature to export brushwork as an obj so you just need to import the the obj brushwork into your 3d editor, make your railing and export. 

Good tip necros. The prefabs are largely a bit questionable anyway, since you can make a lot of things yourself in a matter of minutes... I guess prefabs can be useful for things like shelves, ladder/handrail combinations, typical lifts, and maybe certain GUIs. The computer/console arrangements are probably also handy to have a prefab for, and just modify that, since they look a little time consuming to get exactly right. A lot of common things already come as entities, I saw.

People have been saying that you can also start making terrain out of patches, then export that and tweak / reduce polycount in a modelling suite, then re-import as a mapobject.