I decided to go back active in mapping for Quake. Yesterday started a new small
map, which probably will be a bit nonlinear on the walkthrough.

Th map will be for AD mod.

http://i.imgur.com/7hoFPqW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/oTxNk1z.jpg 

Awesome to see new AD mappers! 

The Windows behind the archways are a nice touch. 

If he is the DOOMer I think he is, then a phrase "everything new is well forgotten old" couldn't be truer. 

absolutely annoying asshole, then yeah, he is. 

 

@Bloughsburgh
Thank you :) And your map too inspired me to make something not under vanilla
Quake or Quoth2, but under AD.mod.

@mankrip
Yes :) But the arches in my opinion look quite just, perhaps they lack the
borders of another material.

@DeeDoubleU
I don't know about what you think DOOMer, in the Q-community were many. I have
no big releases for the first Quake. I have previously participated in several
speedmapping events and made a map for the Jam 1. 

Looks pretty oldschool. 

Yeah, that's why I recognized your nickname. Saw it while going through top rated maps at quaddicted and at quakegate. 

You're not ready for what's in store for you. Many months and money have been poured into this project, codenamed X-tra HOT that will leave even the most skilled of Quakers on their knees pleading for mercy. What is it you ask? Take a look.

Right off the bat, we're talking next generation level design here.
qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af1.jpg

Each map a true work of art, designed by only the most professional of crafters.
qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af2.jpg

Hundreds of traps and dangers just waiting for you to be victim to.
qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af3.jpg

Bizarre worlds and enemies with state of the art gameplay that will leave you on the edge of your seat!
qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af4.jpg

Mini-games like golf to take the pressure off from getting whooped by your adversaries, because everyone needs a little relaxation.
qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/af5.jpg

This is no doubt the ultimate in Quake experience, re-defined for next level gaming! Coming soon to ColecoVision, Emerson Arcadia, and the Casio PV-1000! 

I used to use the nickname "Fragger" before realizing how common it was. 

How many weapons will it have? 

Make sure you get some red armor if you sink hole 18! 

Go Map ! 

 

Lit liquids, before and now. 

 

The 10 fps screenshot was taken in my Celeron laptop with Windows Vista, which is the one I use for coding. And there's been some optimizations since then.

But yeah, I'm aiming this renderer at high-end CPUs (for full HD, a Core i5 should be the minimum recommended). 

Here's the skybox l_swampn from Arcane Dimensions: before and now. These shots are from one of the lower corners of the skybox, and skyboxes in Retroquad are (still) rendered without any lighting of fog, just the raw preprocessed textures.

Now all six sides of the skybox are preprocessed as a single image, to smooth out the edges, and I've noticed that this helped to improve the image quality as a whole, getting rid of image artifacts like the pattern on the lower side of this skybox, therefore improving the overall color fidelity.

Right now, skyboxes are the only thing using this image format, but I'm going to port this image preprocessing algorithm into a texture compiler tool, to allow the engine to use 24-bit textures everywhere with fast load times. I'm really curious to see how the combination of this texture color quality with the 4-step dithered lighting will look.

All this has near zero impact on performance, by the way. I'm getting around 60 fps when rendering nothing but the skybox at full HD in my Core i5 laptop. Regular BSP geometry is slower to render due to lighting and their 3D mesh complexity. 

I was going to post this in the LowRez Jam thread since someone had brought up making pre-rendered sprites and I thought my tests could be helpful. But, it looks like the project may have found a pixel artist, which is awesome. For those of you who also like pixel art, this thread over at polycount has some awesome stuff.

Since I don't have the time, money or talent to create an entire bestiary of beautiful pixel art monsters I opted to do pre-rendered sprites instead, here are some shots from the first test I did some time ago:

pre-model doodles
initial sculpt
pre-retopo rig test
rendering setup
eight angle render
in-game test

This was made in blender. This is my first model and, of course, pre-rendered sprite. Making the actual model took a couple days, but most of that time was spent going through tuts from CG Cookie. I was pretty burned out after making the model and just did a rushed paint job because I really wanted to figure out the rendering bit and see how it would look in game. Needless to say, a better paint job would have gone a long way, but this is sufficient for this test. Also, I intend to use GLSL shaders to emulate software rendering of the game, so that will further alter the look of the sprites (and world).

I prefer the look of hand-drawn sprites over pre-rendered sprites, but the flexibility of going pre-rendered just can't be beat. Also, this project has a lot of characters and lots-o-frames for each one. So really, pre-rendered is the only feasible way to go about it, I think.

One thing I *hate* about some pre-rendered sprites is hard lighting and shadows, which give it a plastic, fake look and totally gives away the fact that they are pre-renderd. I did a series of tests and it turns out that flat, uniform lighting looks best (IMO). Maybe incorporate something like SpriteLamp could yield some badass results.

Here are some picture dumps of the sprite making process from Blood, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom that I found helpful and interesting.

I've also done some viewmodel tests with physical models made from toy gun parts, duct tape and paint. It was a fun experiment but I have since moved to 3D models for that too. Maybe I'll post some pics from that test sometime as well.

I know this is kind of a niche thing but I hope someone may have found it useful or interesting, I did! 

O_O 

I find this very interesting, I've also seen the graphics for the level before, at least the bricks and the ivy hanging down from the arch, cause you have posted this at Q3W before right?

I love these old low polygon games, I have such an itch creating a game like this haha. 

Yeah, this is some of the earliest test art, so you may have seen it before. I go to q3w when I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around shaders. The arch is a decal with which I was having issues, that's probably what you saw.

I'm trying not have so much of a death grip on what I reveal or not, plus this is only old, pre-alpha test art, so not that big of a deal.

There certainly is something charming about low tech games... 

Do you use the Q3 engine for this, or what do you mean? Just the bsp with it's shaders?

I think you can get a long way with pre-rendered frames, like you do. We talked about this at the office today, if you do ONLY that and not mix it in with regular pixel art, then you will have a consistent and clean overall art style. 

Yes, consistency is definitely best. I use hand drawn sprites for pre-model visualization just so I can get things looking right before committing to a model.