That would be way to obvious xD
Then rather some Boom Eternal cutscene.
But i'm not so keen on learning how to steal at all, i just don't want to come up with
some linear hallway-room-hallway-room kinda thing.
You get the idea. 

Forget your intention of completing a finished map. Just imagine you are in a corner of a room. Start sculpting a corner without the intention to finish something off. Make a small ledge on the floor. Try to compare on the moment what your intuition is telling you.

I am working on three maps now, and stop immediately when I feel I want to finish them. That's why I am no speed mapper. It can take years and I don't care. 

But it hasnt yielded any release in years.
The last one was a WoP map in 2015.
Most of the time i experiment around with brushwork, but that doesnt help in upping my skills to create a map interesting to play. 

Make your method more structured.

When you just do random stuff finishing can get near to impossible. You don't know when to stop or where it's going so it just becomes an unending slog.

When you set yourself limitations and challenges, it becomes more satisfying to complete and you have to be creative to make something interesting.

Blockout
Build the entire layout in simple form, without detail or gameplay. The layout itself is up to you - I like to make things loop as much as possible and expand any dead ends into self-contained segments with unique challenges - button hunts, locked in a room with a shambler, whatever. Loops mean the player enters the same area from different directions along the critical path; try and avoid forcing backtracking unless you're going to change the structure of the level on the return or drastically change the gameplay (repopulate). You should be thinking analytically and planning what you want to do with these areas later on. If a particular area gets visited a lot, be sure to make it bigger.

Detail
Make yourself a handful of object to decorate the level with. Ideally these should be from an external bsp to let you make big changes with minimum effort further down the line. Does take a bit more work at the start, but it's worth it. Sprinkle the deco all over the place. Areas that deserve something special, make it. This is the more artistic part, so you'll be making your ugly blockout nice looking, modifying or expanding it where needs be.

Gameplay
Fill it with monsters. You should have planned ambushes and set ups in your head already during the blockout and deco phases - now you get to fill in the blanks. you should be playtesting constantly, on hard skill (nobody is better at your map than you). You shouldn't have to make any structural changes to the level now, but if you do or you have a cool idea, go for it.

Playtesting
Get a few people together and test it - demos are ideal. This is where the assumptions you've made on how the level with function with a rel player are tested. Listen to each complaint and understand what it's about.

Release
Wait for a month or so without working on it. Then replay the level and make any changes that you deem necessary. Once those are done and playtested, upload the zip.

Postpatch
There's probably some bugs. Be prepared to patch the release after it's done. This should be limited to fixes only, no new stuff. 

I understand your intention, but from where the urge to deliver an outstanding map?
My last map is from 2014 and was one of my hardest cases. It can bring you on the edge of tranquility, as the map starts leaking or lightning gets abused.

From the moment I stopped wanting to make something good I made all these small maps with no pretention that fitted in together.

Looking at I'd maps it comes to me that they are not that hard to make. The challenge is to give it something unexpecTed. A moebius ring or a part with moving walls that gives several options for leadways.

If I'm on the point to produce something wild I just start playing AD. 

My driver is the sooner I finish one project, the sooner I can start another.

Each project has new and interesting stuff to learn.

But, to each their own. 

one easy idea is to start by building a "hub room" which has multiple entrances and exits, so the player has a familiar space they return to multiple times.

The hub room could contain locked doors (so you have to go find a key and come back) or multiple elevations (so the second time you visit, you are on a higher level you couldn't get to before.)

Some good examples of hub rooms are: the central room in e1m5, the starting room in e1m6, the room with 3 wind tunnels in e3m5.

Once you have a hub room, then you are mainly just building out the looping paths that branch off from it and loop back into it from a different angle. 

 

 

Already making progress.
The explanation of loops, how to deal with dead and ends and the explanation of the hub room helped a lot!

@madfox: It doesn't necessarily need to be outstanding map, but at least it should be worth beeing played.
I think i should at least try to make the best out of it, nobody wants his time wasted by a boring map.
Had my fair share of ugly releases already, like that messed up monstrosity Chili Quake XXL.
Gosh, i have to do a remake of that, to save at least some of my dignity xD

@metlslime: yeah, e1m5 and e1m6 are very good examples for learning purposes.
They use both a hub room and loops, but are not overly complicated or long.
So for examining and studying them both are ideal.
Cool about e1m6 is that the goldkey is visible from the beginning.
On the other hand it's one of those maps you can cheat through by just grenadejumping there.

@ijed: Thank you for your very detailed post!
Lot's of useful information in there.
Never thought about letting a map rest a month or so before the final releas, but it seems very wise.
You might start to see stuff that you overlooked while still working on it. 

On the other hand it's one of those maps you can cheat through by just grenadejumping there.

These things used to bother me too, but with the DM4 jam I decided to just embrace the potential for breaking progression. It made for a much better map in the end. 

I'm trying to make some new sprites, but Fimg saved my results without alpha's. So I used *.tif files. Same result.

Is there another prog to obtain sprites? 

Worked fine for me - I just had to copy the dirty pink colour Quake uses for .spr transparency. 

Without that colour it seems to leave the alphas out. Now I've got ome bit it's still invincible as I used no fullbright's. 

Sprites ignore light, they're never black or invisible. 

I tried to make a sprite look like an ink cloud,
but the disadvantage is they fade too fast.

Anyway, this one I don't see appear in game.
It will be my lack of coding. 

Make sense now, somehow 

I set up Trenchbroom on a new laptop. When I open it up I get this in the console:

"Could not load palette file 'gfx\palette.lmp': File not found: 'gfx\palette.lmp'"

When I add a WAD file all textures appear black.
This is the entire console log when I start Trenchbroom:

"Creating new document
Loaded entity definition file Quake.fgd
Loading palette file gfx\palette.lmp
Could not load palette file 'gfx\palette.lmp': File not found: 'gfx\palette.lmp'
Renderer info: GeForce RTX 2070 with Max-Q Design/PCIe/SSE2 version 4.6.0 NVIDIA 445.75 from NVIDIA Corporation
Depth buffer bits: 24
Multisampling enabled "

Does anyone know what is happening?
Thanks! 

It can't find the id1 .pak files. Either copy those over or reconfigure your paths in TB. 

Thank you! I deleted my .pak files and copied them in again. It all works now. 

Hello, I've been playing around with Worldcraft/JACK for a while now and I'd like make a small map pack for Hexen II, but I'd like to have an opening cutscene to setup the story and world. However, I can't figure it out.

So does anyone know of a tutorial which shows how to setup a cutscene in Quake 1 or Hexen II?

Any help would be appreciated, thank you. 

There is a small map "visions of hatred" of Reign MacNeil, that has a "Capture Camera Kit".
It works a bit slow but it has a tut that will make you cutscenes. 

This is just what I was looking for! Now I just have to get this to work in Hexen II... hmmm, well, time to carpe those diems! :D 

The same question came up a month ago in coding help.
There are some more answers and possibilties there.
hexen2 #2768 

So i am currently working on a map with lots of skylight, and i get this ugly bright splotches, due to bounce most propably:

https://imgur.com/a/MRQtG9c

I am using ericw-tools v0.18.1, phong, -bounce, a sunlight + sun2 for direct & indirect lighting.
My guess is this occures because the light stage stage creates pointlights for the bounce, is that about right?

How are you guys working around this?