Quake r4wks. 

That's a cool little article. Pretty accurate and rather kind to the little Quake community. Makes us sound like quite measured reasonable people. Which we are not. Sloppy journaliism, I say! ;) 

Far from being sloppy, I thought it was the most electrifying and important piece of journalism since the Pentagon Papers. 

the bit about some kind of fued between coders and mappers brought a tear to my eye (no, it didn't, but it touched me (and not in a molestation kind of way)). 

http://www.blizzard.com/inblizz/contests/artcontest2006/
We will be looking for 3D work and we love to see low-poly 3D too! 2D rocks and can be faster to make, but don�t forget about all of the prizes that you can win for your 3D environments and characters, AND in all 3 of our universes � Diablo, StarCraft, and Warcraft!

Nice prizes... And you can also choose the cash. I am sure there is something mean the copyright (like you transfer it to Blizzard by submitting or something) but I think some of you might have the power to compete in this contest. /me looks envious at Bal ;) 

Being a big blizzard fanboy, I will definatly try and find the time to make something.
And yeah those prizes rock. =) 

Of the rules, isn't that fun, cool otherwise though.

Sponsor Use of Entries. You hereby agree that in consideration of your being allowed the chance to enter the Contest, you hereby grant Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide license and right to utilize the entry materials that you submit to Sponsor in connection with the Contest (collectively, "Entry Materials"). The Entry Materials will not be returned to any entrant. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, you acknowledge that Sponsor shall have the right to use, modify, reproduce, publish, perform, display, distribute, make derivative works of and otherwise commercially and noncommercially exploit the Entry Materials in perpetuity and throughout the universe, in any manner or medium now existing or hereafter developed, without separate compensation to you or any other person or entity and you waive all moral rights in such work. You agree to take, at Sponsor's expense, any further action (including, without limitation, execution of affidavits and other documents) reasonably requested by Sponsor to effect, perfect or confirm Sponsor's rights as set forth above in this paragraph 7. 

You have that in most big contests really... =\
Most of all it gives them the right to actually use and display the image entries, with eventual resizing, cropping and whatever else they want to do.

I like the "throughout the universe" bit, talk about thinking ahead. =) 

! 

no mappage ? 

Hopefully everyone's waiting for the expo... although to be honest I think most people here have been busy watching anime and masturbating. Yeah, at the same time. 

lol i�m finishing my crapy map pack :p no time to masturbation 

no time to masturbation

Well, I am managing to get the odd one in here and there. So perhaps you need try speed wanking. 

cool, I've been iching to play some quake. 

So all you mappers out there: some people have complained that czg's curve tutorial is too hard to follow, doesn't have enough steps, or otherwise doesn't make sense. I'm thinking about writing a new one, and/or expanding on it. So what do you want to see improved/expanded?

Link (currently not found):
http://czg.leveldesign.org/curv_tut/curv_tut.htm 

is much trickier than the brush work. Some tips on doing that would perk my interest. 

czgs tut is only good for WC, but not radiant (its 404 now btw)

I did one for radiant/bsp (should work in WC too)

http://speedy.planetquake.gamespy.com/tut_pipe.
htm


HeadThump 27 and 63 (or 26 and 64, its not integer anyway ) for the 'classic' uhm .. 'curves' 

http://speedy.planetquake.gamespy.com/tut_pipe.htm 

Does anyone here use dreamhost's affiliate program? I'm gonna register hosting there and would like to share the 97$ (OMG!) reward :D 

czg's tutorial was just fine, I could follow it but I use WC. 

RPG, I would appreciate a more in-depth curve tutorial for certain. With better screenshots and maybe some blurbs about variations (spheres, domes, etc). And like was previously mentioned, texturing help too. 

That has always puzzled me is at what ratio do you fit in the brushes if the curve has more partitions than just the mirrored 2:1 -> 1:2 curves? For those you fit them in at 4:1 & 1:4 on the 90 degree brushes and 1:1 (45 deg.) where they meet.

So is there like a formula where you can figure out how to evenly divide a curved area with say 16 partitions? Or does it come out to some fucked up slope that wouldn't stick on a grid? Is there an approximation? 

If you look at this

http://blitz.circa1984.com/curves.gif

I'm pretty sure this is a way to add more partitions and still keep the correct amount of total area. It looks weird in D3 because D3 sucks at handling copied->rotated brushes, but I did the exact same ratio & number of partitions in a Quake 1 version in GTKRadiant and it came out better looking. I'll have to dig up the Quake version later when I get home because I can't remember from this screenshot at what ratio all the brushes fit together O_o 

don't you do that just by halving the grid and recursively applying the czg arch method so the 12-sided cylinder becomes a 24-sided one... 

All of these curves are approximations really, assuming that the original goal was a circle. Even in the simple 8 sided case you run into problems in length. If the perpendicular sides were 4 units long, I think most people would do the 45 degree sides as being 4 up and 4 along. Applying pythagoras' theorem to this you'll find that the angled sides are root two times longer than the non 45 degree sides.

A closer approximation would be to go 3 up and 3 along, as this would give these sides length (root 18), as opposed to the other sides with length (root 16). The problem with this is it's not good for tiling textures.

When you move up to larger numbers things get more complicated. The general way to work out a circle of 4n subdivisions would be to fine 90/n, and then find tan 90/n, tan 180/n and so on. Then you find ratios of lengths that approximate each of these. As it happens, tan 45 = 1, so you can do that exactly. Tan 30 is 1/(root 3), which we approximate to 1/2, then use the 2:1 ratio. This is a pretty good approximation, which is why the 8 and 12 subidivision are so popular. You'll probably notice though that if you are aligning textures to the side, rotating 30 degrees will probably look wrong. arctan is the inverse of tan, and arctan 0.5 = 26.56, so 27 degrees will look better.

So how would we move up to 16, well, we need tan 15, tan 30 and tan 45, the rest are done by symmetry. Tan 15 is 0.268 to 3 dp, which isn't far off 1/4, so the ratio 1:4 is a good one(which I've just seen in the picture you posted...).

So, that's the ratio for the side on the inside/outside of the curve, how do we get the angles of the sides between the brushes? Well, it's a bit harder. The nicest appearance comes from taking the average of the angles of each pair of brushes and finding tan of that. So if the sides were 30 and 60, you'd do an angle of 45 between them, which is exactly what you do in the 12 sided case. Quite a bit harder to do this on the 16 case. tan 7.5 = 0.132, which is probably best to approximate with 1/8. tan 22.5 = 0.414, so 2/5? 1/2? Neither seem that appealing, the former is a wierd ratio, the latter will look quite distorted.

For those interested in maths, there's a rather neat way to get the best "simpler" fraction from a more complicated one, by using continued fractions. You can read how to calculate continued fractions at the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction
For any given fraction, if you take the continued fraction form, knock off the fraction at the very "bottom" of the representation, then recalculate what you get, you'll get a simpler fraction that's a good approximation to the last one.

As an example
0.414 = 414/1000
= 1 / (2 + 172 / 414)
= 1 / (2 + 1 / (2 + 70/172))
= 1 / (2 + 1 / (2 + 1/ (2 + 32/70)))
= 1 / (2 + 1 / (2 + 1/ (2 + 1 / (2 + 3/16)))
=1/(2+1/(2+1/(2+1/(2+1/(5+1/3))))
So the best approximations are in order:
17/41
5/12
3/7
2/5
1/2
Not bad guesses then : - ).

Ok, facinating maths tangents aside, the last problem is how to do the ratios of different sides relative to each other, which comes back to the problem at the start with pythagoras. Basicallly just chosing a base size like 64 and always making the longer of the two sides this length is probably the easiest way, and has the benefit of being easy to texture. To be fair, the 45 degree example is a bit unfair, as it's the angle most prone to this problem, for all other sides the difference will be of a factor between 1 and root 2.