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Looks as if the Squad Gloom doesn't like messin with rar.
Try again: http://members.home.nl/gimli/bonus.bsp Thought you would like to play the level.
But knowing Necros as a good beta-tester (mirrorman), I'll explain. I have only 4Mb Internetspace in my possession. Winzip is a good archiver, but zipping a BSP of 1.4Mb will lead to a BSP.zip file of 1.4Mb Winrar makes it to a BSP.rar of 582byte. That is the difference. But sure. Winrar is a commercial zipping program, and Winzip is free. I found the corrupted file. I have replaced it for a good one. So the ones above are gone. http://members.home.nl/gimli/Beta.rar Alright, once and for all.
http://members.home.nl/gimli/bonus.bsp are you sure your actually compressing the file in the zip archive instead of just storing it? because winzip has different levels of compression where one level doesn't actually compress anything at all, just is used for storing lots of files in one big one.
because i zip all my maps, and i've never seen a 1 : 1 zip ratio. All I can say is if you use WinRar or WinAce you are most likely going to lose some people playing/showing interest in your map.
That being said, I can understand your concern about space and bandwidth but,in my experience, a 1 to 1 ratio only happens with images . (nothing to compress as it were) but a bsp is mostly "text" (for a lack of a better way of putting it). I just looked at gmsp3 and it is 5,616,200 unzipped and 2,316,496 when zipped (59% compression). I also un zipped it and re-zipped it just to see what Glassman did and he did it at maximum compression (slowest). It took me about 5 seconds to re-compress btw so slow is relative. if you want my honest to god expert advice-no mallice intended-0% sarcasm: do not release this map.
i'm dead serious here. you've got to work on the brushwork a lot. quake is not cramped mazelike passages with 0 attention to detail. play through the quake episodes again and some of the custom maps released to get a feel for it. 12:19 0/0 77/129 (which begs the question, where the fuck are the rest of the monsters? mind you, there were quite a few fish.) As I mentioned in post #102, this map was the first one I made. I had no pretention with it.
If you say I should not release it, then you can forget the whole convertion. It was my own idea to let it be this way, because it was just the way it proceeded. Alright. I could make some changes, but I showed it here, because I thought I could get some good advice. That doesn't mean I won't hear of any critism, but then again, where is your command on the "MirrorMan" map I send you? Sure I believe there's a lot of work to be done, but I have not seen anyone trying to make an episode of 24. And I get quiet amazed of all that straight-to-the-top levelling I see nowadays. But that are all stand-alone's. Never gave me the continuous flow Quake1 offered me.(And will not be seen again, even not for the fool I am.) After all...I do it just for Fun! But thanks for the command, and I do mean that! All Necros was saying is that it's not up to the current (2003) standards. Now while I have not seen the level yet, I'm willing to bet that it most likely is up to 1997 (or so) standards. That's probably when a lot of these guy's started mapping themselves.
And Necros, lighten up, if your "first" beta got hammered by someone who was "experienced" after you had put a lot of work into it, wouldn't you be a bit testy? How about putting in some constructive critisism(sp). Point out to him WHY the brushwork needs some work not just to look at what somebody else did. There's a lot to look at in any level. Some done right and some done wrong (including the original Quake levels I might add). And before you start to flame, I've played around with WC 1.6 quite a bit, I never released anything because I don't feel the need to subject myself to the attitude you expressed above. If you could e-mail me the item in question (in a non-rar form) I would be happy to look at it and give you constructive critisism.
tedsam1963 (at) Yahoo (dot) com Thanks Quaketree.
I knew there would be an argue on the point of imperfect mapping. But that was just my point of state. The diary of a mapper. The whole convertion is almost done, so you can bite yourself on that kind of queer-talk. But I can use some hard critism, after constructing so long. Two know more than one. I can only say I had a lot of Fun with it. I had to thank Armino Rigo instead for his free editor. Ever bought a commercial editor "Thread"? That costs money! And my maps are freeware. Thanked be the good folks at Quake for such a good game! Post #114 delivers an unzipped BSP, so you're welcome. And Necros, lighten up, if your "first" beta got hammered by someone who was "experienced" after you had put a lot of work into it, wouldn't you be a bit testy?
How about putting in some constructive critisism(sp). Point out to him WHY the brushwork needs some work not just to look at what somebody else did. There's a lot to look at in any level. Some done right and some done wrong (including the original Quake levels I might add). QuakeTree, shut up. he wanted my honest opinion, so i gave it to him. i really don't think the map should be released. there are so many things wrong with it, that i don't even think underworldfan (in his infinite generosity ;)) would be able to justify reviewing it with a decent mark. and I did give constructive criticism. you've got to work on the brushwork a lot. quake is not cramped mazelike passages with 0 attention to detail. play through the quake episodes again and some of the custom maps released to get a feel for it. i told him that he needs more detail and to look at how the original quake mappers did it. MadFox, if you want me to elaborate: brushwork: do not make a map purely out of boxes, stretched boxes and other similar primitives. Use the grid Don't make protruding small brushes which impede progress Don't make areas which require trick jumping to get to unless they are secrets. the map should have a general flow, not just blindly stumbling through different areas wondering what to do next. Details! there are no details whatsoever! trying varying textures in long corridors more. try adding some curves, or something. try adding trim to where floor textures change DO NOT have the waterlevel of a water brush equal to a solid brush. it looks really stupid in game. Do not make door which open into a solid brush on the same plane. what results in bad z-fighting (where two polygons compete for the same space), aka flickering walls lighting: unsourced lighting sucks. by unsourced, i mean light which seems to emenate from thin air. it's bland, and leads there were a few instances of shadows which was nice. don't make everything so bright. darker areas (obviously, not pitch black) are a welcome change. the quake symbol shadow was neat. gameplay: Jesus christ! playing the whole map with only the shotgun is retarded! with 77+ monsters, i got really pissed off killing vores with a god damn shotgun! (at least there was plenty of ammo, i never ran out). i never even used the gold key, i think. somehow i beat the map without it. i had no idea where i was supposed to go. the majority of my time was spent wondering around backtracking trying to figure out where to go next. at least there were no spawns at least there were no shamblers (with only the shotgun, that would have been ridiculous) don't put fiends in small enclosed spaces. it completly negates their jumping attacks and makes them stupidly slow and easy to kill. don't put vores where they can't get easy los on the player. again, it negates their longrange tracking attack making them useless. FISH GET BORING TO FIGHT AFTER THE 20th ONE! misc/textures The new door texture, besides being a tech one (which was just a recoloring of the normal base door) sticks out like a sore thumb in the medieval theme. besides the fact that the texture just plain sucks and doesn't fit with quake's palette at all. trim would really help as well. maybe that information will be useful to you, maybe not. maybe you'll just hate me and never talk to me again and never play my maps/say my maps suck from now on. maybe you'll go into self imposed exile. and maybe, you'll take what i said at face value, screw up your ego and go map. What editor do you use? Does it have grid snap?
#1 most important thing in this case would be to use it, and do all the bulk of your main architecture with the grid set to 32 units. Most of your corridors should be at least 128 units wide/tall (4x32). Think of the player movement. Then start gradually taking into account what necros said. You're wasting any talent you might have by overlooking simple things like this. well, lets put it the other way
The goal of game level designer is to create an interesting map. And that requires both - the playabilty and the looks. Your map absolutely fails in the second department. It could not keep me interested for more than couple of minutes (thus I cant say much about the gameplay) and I dont see anyone willing to play the entire episode of such nubish dull maps. Please dont go defensive here. You have to understand that if you want people to play and enjoy your maps, you need to make them visually appealing and interesting (even badly made but imaginative and original map can be interesting). You have to learn. If it's any consolation, everybody's first map sucks. I've never seen necros' first map, but dollars to donuts it sucked. Same goes for xen, Speedy and myself.
"QuakeTree, shut up."
Well I was expecting that but it DID get you to be more specific rather than the generalized: "you've got to work on the brushwork a lot. quake is not cramped mazelike passages with 0 attention to detail. play through the quake episodes again and some of the custom maps released to get a feel for it." Comment. Don't forget that at the time I wrote the post I stated that I "Had Not" seen the level as I was under the impression that it was in a And mega kudo's to you for explaining the problems you had with the level, in detail. I've noticed a distinct lack of easily locatable information in general Quake editing information on the internet of late. (Yes I know that there are many such sites for other games that cover much of what you described above. But for someone who is new to it, they probably don't realize how much of it "can" pertain to Quake (Brushwork, Texturing, Details ect...). If you want to help fix this shortcoming, I have an idea, start collecting various information from whats left on the internet (and what you know) and compile it into a package that is easy to use off-line. If you want to colaborate with me on this I would be more than happy to do so. Then you (and evreyone else) can point to a file and say RTFM. And MadFox, After looking though the this might be somewhat interesting for the noob mapper/madfox:
http://xen.quakepit.com/tut1.htm Well, that really did make me feel good.
More like a child, who's is asked to get out of the way with his scooter-pet after he has passed for his drivers-license. You have a point Necros, and I won't feel angry with you, but this dude is still waiting to hear from you about the level "MirrorMan" he sended you. Now I got the feeling you pinpoint all your argues on a map that was made in the times there were no editors. I wonder how many of you ever have bought one. And if you have ever worked with an editor like Thread, which easilly puts two brushes on eachother, maybe you would talk otherwise. Have you ever transposed 600x6 brushnames to make them fit in Qmap? Ever worked with the first version of Qmap or BSP256? But that is no excuse. We were talking about the 2003 standards of Quake1 gaming, so what the hell? Allright, you didn't meet the Shambler, you played only Normal skill. The count of monsters was wrong? Can't help it, the console told me so, blame the quake engine, not me. That you only had one shotgun is because you are in the first level. It seemed to me people are so fixated in construckting one level, they almost forget, the game was a sequel of maps! Sorry, but let us qualify a minute of ten Quake, and start reconciling, Indeed Jesus! Not so long ago I read a revieuw of someone, who was complaining he had to fight with the axe, because there was not enough ammu. So he though the level was bad. Make sense, why did they put the axe in it afterall? Right for the statement of texturing, but I get the feeling you don't like the orb, because it has not cut its nails in a decent way. But if you levellords mutual are so devided, than I guess I still can learn something. You are certainly right Speedy. This map is not perfect, in fact it is quiet a creep. But why hasn't there been anyone who said anything about "GraveyTrail"? I get the feeling that when UndergroundFan had not released it, it still had been unknown. The only thing I hear is that people cannot wait for ten minutes to download it. Than it certainly won't be worth the joy of five minutes playing! Than the good request for mapping. In the time the site of Qmap still excisted, there was some kind of simmilar opinion. Don't put too many monsters in your level, other people must be glad to play it, not get wrenched up in a masacre. But this site does not excist anymore. Same for the people who try to make a sequel, and if they were still there, they suddenly have to satisfy the standars of nowadays mapping. It makes me a little concearned. I guess you never have waited 48 houres to collect your failures and start again. Still I am gratefull for your attention and answers, I will rejudge my statement of making a sequel, or get lost in the standards of profesional mapping of the Quake Team and the ancient times of the stomping grounds. i'm posting the feedback to this map here because i've emailed you about it but obviously, you didn't get the mail.
download this file: http://www.planetquake.com/necros/temp/ne_kwarq05_demos.dz i enjoyed this map. it's better pretty much all around. better lighting (sourced now, with good contrast in places). better gameplay (clearer route, although still got confused a couple of times). more consistent texturing. better brushwork. still is a boxy looking map though... the fancy bar work does do a bit to alleviate this, but some of the areas (the underground area comes to mind) are very boxy... little more than a six sided room --which is bad. thanks for the weapons this time! it was really nice to be able to use different guns. -- even though bonus.bsp is supposed to be the first map, it's no excuse for putting vores in there with only the shotgun (and a shambler, apparently). either remove the vores, or put in more weapons because not everybody plays with god mode on. -- there were some strange artifacts... you mentioned you used quark? make sure you are using one of the txqbsp tools, because it is the only one which supports floating point coordinates. quark uses floating point, so if you don't use txqbsp, you'll get seems and cracks after compiling (there were quite a few instances of this in mirrorman. i tried to point them out while playing) also so strange texturing choices... in general, don't have light textures tile... it just looks wierd. also, align the textures! ----- on the ax: while forcing the player to use the ax can be an effective gimick, it will only last for so long. using the ax is a tiring and monotonous ordeal. in general, try to stay away from the ax as much as possible. on weapons: all maps should provide the player with AT LEAST one other weapon to use. this is not because the map is too hard to beat without this weapon, but because the player will soon tire of using the same weapon to kill a large amount of monsters. example: in bonus, i was able to complete the level without dying with only the shotgun, however i was bored unto hell of it. example2: observe e1m1. although it's a very small level with only two dozen or so monsters, there are two weapons (not including the ones you start with): the doublebarrel shotgun and the nailgun. Keep in mind, the supershotgun is a secret and the nailgun is out of the way. however, they add variety to the killing. on map length: in general, level length (ie: how long you take to complete a given map) should be directly related to how much variation there is in the gameplay. Bring yourself back to e1m1. since there is so little variation (ie: few different monster types, few different weapons) the map is short. now think of nesp09 (i'll take an example from one of my own maps this time. ;)) the map is long because there is much variation. also keep in mind that the map would not have been good were it not for the extra monsters. it would have been too long. the added leniancy granted by the addition of the custom monsters let me prolong the map more than what would have made sense. (ie: as opposed to mowing down 20 shamblers, you mow down 8 shambler, 4 fireshamblers, 6 weak shamblers and a smattering of chthons). so perhaps, bonus.bsp should not be as long. if it were shorter, it would be possible to preserve the current weapon set up. it would, however, still be necessary to remove the higher powered monsters unless there were special circumstances which were in favour of the player (quad damages, pents, RA) i'm sure some of what i said is arguable, but this is what i've come to think after 6 years of playing quake. Just to clarify, MadFox seems to be using an older QuArK version (4.07 I think) that generates float maps but he still claims to be using the old qbsp256 which absolutely does not support float values in map files.
With this tool combination, he can map off-grid and then the compiler will do the "grid-snapping" due to the accuracy loss. This will actually produce pretty solid maps (without too much clipping errors) but with big visual brush alignment problems. All non-axial planes will "snap" to the nearest integer adjusted position with interesting results The bad thing is that since the maps apparently are made off-grid, it doesn't help to upgrade to compilers that can read float maps. It actually makes things worse by accurately trying to fit together brushes with tiny gaps or overlaps. This will cause major clipping errors and leaks. A difficult situation indeed you made a little while back? it was more or less succesful in converting map which were made in quark407 to a map editable in other software.
i only needed to fix a few dozen brushes (as opposed to hundreds or thousands). would help much in this case, since it really tries to preserve the individual face direction and position when converting from float to integer coordinates in the map file.
Since the brushes/faces are off-grid the only thing that can help is actually what MadFox is already doing; snap to grid either in the compiler (by using an integer-only compiler) or in pre-compiler stage (e.g. using my ConvMap to convert map file to integer format by cutting off the fractional part). There's nothing that I know that can automagically repair the brushes to whatever MadFox wanted them to look like. Except of course an extensive manual brush-aligning editor session
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