I don't see why you couldn't make rocks in Doom 3 the same way you do in Quake.

When you're finished, turn the entire terrain into a func_static and turn the simple room around it into caulk.

For parts that the player can't interact with, there is some key that lets you make the func_static nonsolid which supposedly saves RAM because no clipmodel is needed (I think).

You can then export the stuff (obj) and tweak it in Blender all you want, but for rough terrain, just to get the rough outline and scale, I don't see why you wouldn't want to use triangles or patches. Just to approximate it in the editor and get a feel for it.

You asked me to share my expert doom 3 mapping knowledge (lol) so here is other random stuff I found out while mapping:

- Shaderparm7 is used to set green/red lights on the door frame models. 0 is red, 1 is green.

- I ripped the frame and door models from id maps and tweaked them to my needs. All the doors are models as far as I can see, so are the matching frames, all nicely on the grid and on the Z point. The glass inside some func_doors is a func_static hooked up to the func_door with the "bind" key, like "bind" "door1". This makes the glass follow the door's movement in a master/slave way.

- Like Necros said, two ways to make consoles. a) models (in the mapmodels/com folder I think, look at the communications map - com1 or similar); b) brushes for the straight parts, patches for curves, small brushes for the guis.

- GUIs: For the model consoles, keys gui1, gui2 and so forth point to the gui files... for handmade guis, simple patch mesh turned into a func_static with common/entitygui texture and placed roughly 1 unit in front of the physical screen, can target stuff it should activate and "gui" points to the gui file like guis/comm1/sentrybot.gui is the panel that says "Activate sentry", for example. There are a lot of those.

- Mapmodels can have different skins; for example, skmachines/skcube.lwo can have "skin" set to skins/skcubedirtred to create the red version of that thing.

- Sounds are placed in maps using the speaker entity.

- Glass is simply a material.

- Two ways to make sky: a) like in Quake, slap one of the sky textures on brushes and b) portal sky, still looking into this last one.

- Lights; brightness results from the size of the light volume, as well as the color, where white is full brightness. You can assign textures to a light source, such as "texture" "lights/xray02".

- Entities under "movable" are physics objects, these drop to floor automatically. So do monsters, but not weapons for example. You need to place the weapons and ammo in the position you want them to appear.

- Decals are put on simple patch meshes of the desired size and shape and placed roughly 1 unit above the surface.

- Textures can be resized pretty freely without looking bad, so you don't have to build gui screens or decals at a certain size. Rather click "fit" in the surface inspector.

- The scale of everything is comparable to Quake, so is step height etc.

- You can load different mapmodels by creating a func_static and choosing models/mapobjects/whatever.lwo (Radiant will pop up a file browser).

I'd be interested to exchange testmaps and knowledge, hit me up on irc maybe.

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/sotox2.jpg

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/sotox3.jpg 

My knowledge of Quake C is zero and I'm still learning the ropes entities wise, but for the kind of stuff I'm thinking of doing a func_train_model kind of entity would be great :E

For stuff like making it rotate or whatever though I'd wouldn't know what to suggest, I don't know what the technical limitations and such are really. 

A map can have a script assigned whose main() function is executed at level load. Scripts can directly address func_movers for example by their name. Some GUIs (shutters gui for example) can execute functions from the script when clicked (called via shaderparmX, usually documented in the GUI script itself).

It's a lot like QuakeC. Tutorial worth reading:

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3144 

Guys, quick question:

In Q3 I saw .md3 player models in maps as statues. I've tried to put a knight.mdl in a Q1 map but it doesn't appear because I basicly put in a monster_knight with the editor and then replaced that with knight.mdl in notepad. But (ofcourse) that doesn't work. So how do I tell the engine to just put in the .mdl file?

Also: what if I create a custom .mdl and want that to appear in a map? Ofcourse I'd need a similar line of code (whatever it is) and aside from that, would it then be enough to tell players to put the .mdl in id1/progs folder? 

i forget how that works but you could find it in the teaching old progs new tricks thread.
you can use this for models that are already used in the game.
afaik, it is impossible to use custom models unless you REPLACE a stock model with a custom one. at that point, you should make your own mod because it is unrealistic to ask a player to overwrite a stock model with a custom one and then delete when they're done playing your map. 

Thanks. That reminds of wanting to create non-solid snow. Isn't the Func_illusionary used to make a brush non-solid? I suppose that would do the snow trick.

And ofcourse, I'd never ask anyone to overwrite anything. Ideally, you could just put the new.mdl into a pak file or in id1/progs and the engine would just always check that progs folder if the map file dictates it. But I guess it's too easy to think that way :) In Q3, you can just add all your stuff into a pak file, whether it's models, textures, sounds, or whatever. 

The difficulty is not so much that quake doesn't offer pak files and things to prevent you overwriting somebody else's models. The standard quake progs doesn't offer any way to specify a model to precache from the bsp file. So the only conceivable way of loading a custom model is by using one of the existing filenames, which would of course overwrite something.

The suggestion is not meant to be a serious on(I think), so you need a modified progs.dat in order to load ANY custom model sensibly. By that point you need your own mod directory and there is no danger of overwriting other's files. Unless you decide to use somebody else's mod which supports custom models, in which case conflicts may need to be considered. 

Thanks for the answer. The problem is that I want to make a deathmatch level that people can download automatically from the FFA server. So a mod is out of the question. I guess that's not possible then... 

A thought I had after replying there...

Problem: Map releases that take advantage of a mapping-centric mod like remakequake or quoth may have other custom resources outside of the traditional bsp files, for example custom sounds, models and skyboxes. The pak file sounds like a great way to distribute all of these things without risk of dozens of file conflicts. However, the system of loading consecutive pakN.pak files means that users have to jump through renaming hoops to pop the new map at the top of the list and risk clobbering a custom map when a patch for the base mod comes around.

Proposal: add a "-pak name" switch to engines. This would place the named pak file at the top of the search path for any files, allowing overriding of all models as well as supplying the location of new files.

Players using an engine with this feature would be able to leave maps distributed as pak files with an identifiable name in the directory, and load straight from them as they wished. Older engines would not be left out, although they would have to rename the pak they wanted to use to pakN.pak.

It might sound like this adds bloat to a command line that already needs -game and +map specifiers. Correctly designed mods could eliminate this though, by ensuring that quake.rc calls autorun.cfg, a config file with a dummy implimentation in the mod's pak files. Loaded pak files could then override this with their own autorun.cfg - containing a command to load the (first) map in the pak.

(Custom map paks overriding quake.rc directly should be avoided, since that file may be updated by future patches to the mod. Supplying the autorun.cfg is basically saying "this one is ours, and that one is yours".)

Extension: The command line could accept "manifest" text files listing a collection of paks rather than a single pak. However, this might be overkill, and it certainly should be in addition to rather than instead of the single pak loading system. 

for quoth at least, fitzquake and aguirre's engines have a -quoth switch that works the same as -hipnotic and -rogue, so you can effectively load your own mod on top of quoth.

Darkplaces does even better and has the ability to specify multiple gamedirs, so mods can mod mods ad infinitum. 

I'm working on a map that will use only the original Quake textures. I want to apply a texture to a cylinder (actually it's an hexagonal prism) that will make the cylinder look like a screw. Something like in this image : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Screw_bolt.png

Any ideas what texture I might use ? (cropped, rotated, etc) - just to get that effect. 

any texture with ribs -- then just rotate each face the same amount and slide them around until they line up. You might have to adjust rotation to get them to line up all the way around. 

Wow, that was fast :)

Thanks metlslime.

Yes, that's what I was thinking about, I need something like this : http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1111/1069643021_01b41ff384_o.jpg

But how to get it from standard Quake textures ?
I searched the metal textures, I didn't see anything suitables, everything is too flat or with "bubbles" 

Yeah, metlslime, I had them in mind before I posted. I was trying to come up with something inbetween the effective but hardcoded -quoth switch and the overly elaborate darkplaces stuff. 

http://necros.quaddicted.com/temp/worm.jpg

:D 

necros, that's an impressive piece of work. But I cannot do my "screws" from polys for 2 reasons :
-the screw is quite small, it's smaller than a shotgun bullet
-I have a lot of screws and I'm very near to 32k marksurfaces limit (I went beyond this limit, but I deleted some rooms and now I'm back to about 30k)

Anyway, that screenshot looks awesome, does it move ? Any chance to see the full map ? :) 

now make a worm that's missing chunks from the threads, and wheels that are missing teeth to go with it! 

ah ok. i only posted that because i originally tried to make the worm gear out of textures too. but i swapped to a model because the spur gears looked funny meshing with a texture.

you could make a screw model though, that was just 6 sided (plus top and bottom, so ~20 tris?). it would make texturing the thread easier on a model skin maybe?

anyway, yeah, that worm gear is part of a new map/mod i'm working on. it's taking forever though, so no promises on release dates.

also, can i lobby for more lightmaps in quakespasm? maybe around 512 lightmaps or 1024? :D i built this whole terrain mountain as a sort of 'brush skybox' but had to remove it because i ran out of lightmaps, lol.

i think fitzquake's (and by extension, it's variants) current bumped limits could use some normalization.
for example, static entities has been increased, but ambient sounds has not, so you can add more torches than ambient sound slots which effectively acts as an artificial static entity limit.
or in this map i mentioned, it's possible to be under the faces/marksurface/vertex/clipnode limit, but run out of lightmaps.

now make a worm that's missing chunks from the threads, and wheels that are missing teeth to go with it!

maybe cause it's a lazy sunday afternooon, but i don't get it. what's good about gears with missing teeth? wouldn't they just stop working when they get to the broken part?
unless you mean like some sort of puzzle? 

subject: overlapping brushes

I know you shouldn't have those, but what about water? If I want to flood a building with water, it looks bad when I cut the water around pillars etc, cause you'll see those cuts in the moving water texture...

And architecture partly covered in snow? What is the best approach when you want one brush (snow or water) to partly cover up other brushes? 

What's wrong with overlapping brushes? 

I know you shouldn't have those

Wrong. 

water will be cut pretty badly no matter what method you use, so i tend to just cover up areas with a single water brush.

if you are using fitzquake, make sure you use r_oldwater 0. this makes the engine use a much better looking water. 

I thought you increase the chance of having Z-fighting (flickering) if one brush is contained in another brush (overlap).

Another reason I've read about is longer rendering times when you overlap brushes...

On top of this, I've seen multiple good mappers stressing NEVER to overlap brushes, including Pingu who stated in an interview to work neatly and that there's not a single overlapping brush in A2: Return To Atlantis.

I'm not pretending to know anything, but I do know what I've read. Kind of strange how people here say it's not bad to overlap brushes... Now I'm confused.

And Necros: thanks for the tip. Although that doesn't help people who play my map and use another engine ofcourse :)

BTW: are detail brushes used in Q1 (vs structural)? I'm using BSP Quake Editor right now, and there is an option to 'add detail' or 'remove detail' but after I selected and added the detail, it's not reported in the 'map info' (detail brushes: 0). I'll check in another editor as well.

I've read that if you got a lot of stuff in a room (like a bunch of candleholders, charis, tombstones, etc), it's best to turn those into detail brushes and let the main brushes that are suppoed to block Line Of Sight be structural... 

i don't know why, but overlapping brushes will cause zfighting in newer engines like q3 and d3. in quake, qbsp will manage to remove overlapping WORLD brushes without any issues. (overlapping func_ or other visible bmodels WILL cause zfighting with other bmodels or the world).
afaik, it doesn't cause any problems once the bsp is in the engine.

i'm not sure where we are atm concerning the compiling aspect of overlapping brushes. i don't overlap because i like to work clean, but it's just personal preference. 

OK thanks necros. You have an alarm going off when there's a new post? You seem to be on top of things :)

Is there anyone who can comment on the Detail/Structural question pls?