the best Quake have for me is the speed!!! only find that in Painkiller... but PK is to fucking linear :\ and Quake is pure fun! 

"Then Fuck Off"

Agreed.

I can't understand why someone who feels that the FPS genre is tired and dated, and the community creating maps for one of it's oldest games is tapped out creatively, would bother to stick stick around. Why not move on?

I grow weary of game design intellectuals who bemoan the state of the FPS genre and linear maps and whatever else they choose to waffle on about yet, of course, don't do anything about it. Just whine. Because that's productive.

If you don't like something - stop doing it. There are lots of other games to play. Leave us, the apparently unenlightened, to enjoy ourselves down here in the mud.

Sorry, just one of my sore spots. 

metlslime: excellent post! very much agreed on all points

spirit: nice idea, i'd thought of doing something like that before but never really had the time to investigate all engines that were out there. one point i'd like to raise is regarding skyboxes & fog - i think it should be specified whether worldspawn values are supported or not. or maybe have a seperate table for worldspawn values.. i'd consider them the most important additions since they reflect the mapper's intentions 

My website, Signs Of Koth, has moved from leveldesign to quaddicted.

The new address is:

http://kell.quaddicted.com

I'd like to point out that I've been pondering this move for ages, and Spirit set it up a few days ago. It is not an impetuous decision.

kthx 

The two games I return to frequently are Quake and Deus Ex, and these games satiate entirely different needs when I'm playing or creating content for them.

Argument for the necessity of innovation or else 'video games are dead' is as silly as saying pop up books are better than flat page print ones because the former break the 2D plane.

Poker and Hearts players never have to hear these arguments or hear complaints about their inabilaty to change. 

I was realy surprised by the use of coloured lights. Untill someone told me they were too harsh and the textures wouldn't compare with it. Then I understood to use it spareley.

I believe in the use of classic Quake, without any improvements, as it is the most pure way it is intended.

Of course I like Fitzquake and the gl- engines.
But it changes the way of mapping.

The abandon mod I can play in classic quake, although the second version, made with aguires new compilers show heaps. Fitzquake doesn't mind and expands almost the biggest levels, but it has changed my way of mapping. 

nice, now the URL on your profile is twice as out-of-date! 

fixed 

As it is, the Quake mapping community is still creating the same old maps, the same old gameplay, and attempting to dress it up with nicer visuals. Orges will always be above the player to lob grenades, you'll always need to get the gold key to get through a locked door, etc etc etc. At this point, you may as well use a more recent game that looks nicer since you really aren't pushing forward the gameplay standards. And if mappers aren't making all that much better stuff, why bother?

Songwriters are still using the same old verse chorus verse scheme. There will always be a middle eight, the second and fourth lines will always rhyme, and artists are always catering to the audience's expectation. They have to. It's what works. It's what sells records. It's what people love to hear.

They are singing the same old songs. It's always the same old major and minor scales, the same old beats. It's much like painting by numbers.

Technically.

Still, you can have ten mappers reinterpret e1m1 and I guarantee you they will all be different.

yup. 

Fribbles: Neglecting the texture mismatch issue, which is fundimentally an easily avoided level design bug by this point, I feel those issues aren't seriously detracting, especially since to my eyes, after years of playing GLQuake, that's how it looks.

you can't seriously be arguing that there hasn't been anything original.

what has been? You're always a Quake Marine, fighting hordes of evil, and getting to the goal. The 'storyline' of your experiance throughout any Quake level has always been the same, even if the written prologue is changed. Level Design is fundimentally about creating a new experience for the player, yet Quake design has been limited to 'kill monsters, leave'.

the overall quake mapping scene has run out of any creative relevance, and we are basically making new maps with tired old gameplay. And, if we really want to do something innovative in either the graphics, or gameplay departments, or both, we should be using a more recent game as a platform for that.

I have a habit of overstatement, but basically, yes. I relieze most guys mapping here are just hobbyists, but is taking the time to learn new tech really that difficult? My opinion is that the process of learning new ways to apply the skills of level design is very rewarding and as fun an endevour as creating levels.

I agree with the love of Quake being the enjoyment of it's pure mechanics and simple nostalgia. In fact, I believe our opinions are much aligned, despite our difference in tone. I think more could be done to make better levels beyond simply making prettier things.

Argument for the necessity of innovation or else 'video games are dead' is as silly as saying pop up books are better than flat page print ones because the former break the 2D plane.

So you don't think it's worthwhile to pursue and champion new ideas? If flat paper print only ever had stories starring a single hero, doing the same adventure, would you still read? The medium isn't the issue here, my boredom of FPS games only steams from their singular experiance they've ever offered me.

Still, you can have ten mappers reinterpret e1m1 and I guarantee you they will all be different.

10 different filesizes and enviromental looks, and the exact same gameplay. 

I'm spending my time working on the actual craft and not working on learning new tools, tech, or gameplay.

I'd like to say, I'm not hoping to put down anyone's enjoyment of their craft and hobby. I'm just saying I want more.


Also, pop-up books are way better regular books. 

Bitching on a Quake forum to Quake fans who are making Quake levels with Quake gameplay, is a bit like going out to an Italian restaurant and getting pissy because they're not doing your favourite Thai peanut curry with coconut rice. 

People at my office take the piss, saying I can see a whole new brown spectrum that's invisible to none Quakers.

Also, QuakeC is the mutt's nuts. 

I see a new brown spectrum every Sunday morning.

*rumble* 

Bitching on a Quake forum to Quake fans who are making Quake levels with Quake gameplay, is a bit like going out to an Italian restaurant and getting pissy because they're not doing your favourite Thai peanut curry with coconut rice.

It's more like going to an Italian Resturant and all there is is Spegetti, knowing there's more to Italian than that. 

 

But then again Quake mapping doesn't really allow for that much variation in gameplay (without QC). There are only few things one can do to break up the core formula of the game - killing monsters, reaching the exit. Quake wasn't made for more. People still play and map for it because of this simplicity (though I agree it does get boring after a while), so suggesting to switch to other games seems odd in this respect. 

There is more potential for variety than some people might think. It just needs people to explore it. 

I find it more depressing when I see "quake maps" in modern games.

Of course I'd like to see more creative stuff being done, it seems like there are still traces left in people from the formulaic years where many important lessons where learned but most of the wild creativity from the ancient times was lost. 

I'm aware that you can go nuts with QC and turn Quake into Mary Poppins' Magical Barnyard Funtime if you wanted. I suspect that the majority of people who are into Quake, and are still actively making content for it twelve(?) years down the line, are more often than not doing it out of a love of the original style and simplicity of the game (and the many custom levels that followed in this vein), and want to continue in that style.

Notice how in the early days, we saw a lot of crazy stuff and TCs - Quess, Quake Rally, wierd experimental levels etc. etc. Now I know you're not talking about doing full on TCs, but my point is that whilst Quake maps have got bigger, and pushed more and more the technical limits of what you can run in the engine, the gameplay in many ways has remained "conservative", more so than the experimental days of yore. I think this has less to do with a lack of imagination and inability to create new game concepts, and more to do with the deliberate decision to celebrate Quake for what it is primarily in terms of tone and simplicity of gameplay. 

People arrive in the game by first playing maps, then they play mods - Zerstorer, OUM, Nehahra, SOE.

Some of my best Quake moments were things that broke from the formulae through using QuakeC, I was always just too lazy to learn and therefore attempt to emulate those greats.

But if everybody wants to keep doing the same old shit then why is Quoth so popular?

Nobody wants to make the same crap, a little bit better. Might sound odd since I'm working on a remake of ep3, but there you go.

How many puzzle levels, trap levels, horde levels have we seen?

Maybe that's another case of a million shades of brown. 

in the early days Quake was the only medium for a huge variety of people to do A-Z. Now the games industry allows basically any weird quirk to be its own game. As a consequence people who are working with Quake now generally just want to do Quake.

"Kill monster, leave"
I've played some great new FPS games (Far Cry, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic). Explain how these are different.

I like to think that maps where you see the whole layout (like Scragbait's Estate, Masque, and Marcher) provide the player with an aesthetic pleasure of completion that is significantly different from fighting monsters room after disconnected room.

I actually agree with plenty of your criticisms, but you have to accept Q1SP for what it is, which is an incredibly limited medium. Games in general are also incredibly limited. Books, for example, are a lot less limited. 

was only about the actual level design part and not about anything .qc or whatever. 

I mean with Quake monsters, Quake weapons (not Quake engine limits though).

There is a lot of potential if people will explore it. Think what ijed did with Warpspasm, ignore the Quoth monsters for a mo and think about the size, the scale, the sheer relentlessness of it all. That was a new direction. There may be many more. Even some relatively normal maps show interesting ideas - look at Headthump's Zer map at the end - fighting monsters in lava with the clock ticking against you. That could be explored further... 

what gameplay modifications do other fps games have? They basically just offer different enemy/map/weapon models.

even something like descent doesn't really exapnd on the doom gameplay much - it just has two more DOF.

And if you're hinting at 'do stuff there, fix this, get me person x here'-missions: those are all mostly trigger based ideas (that could - from a gameplay pov - easily be done in quake, too); also, they aren't really core game mechanics to me.

the stealth games might count as 'expand gameplay', but again, this is not MUCH more than clever triggers + compiler