The idea was born among the q3 mappers and carried over it q1. The speedmapping was a real event - people gathered online and started mapping at the same time. Making DM maps. The time was limited to 60 (later 100 minutes) maybe with some extra 20 minutes for fixing. Then all the maps got collected, packed, put up on a server and played.
The maps had to be made from scratch and the use of prefabs was seen as cheating.
Later on it switched to sp maps and more time was allowed (as sp maps are harder to make)
And even if some people couldnt get online to map at the same time and the pack was collected in few days, the 'offline' mappers honorably kept the rules making their maps from scratch and in the limited ammount of time.

Some years later it degraded into something you cant call 'speedmapping', more like 'turtle mapping' (which also comes from q3 scene - where people were making full maps in 1 week time) 

OK, well, I took a look at SM141 and I think I'd be up for something like that. Simple, blocky-ish maps with some quick kill gameplay.

I'm in for the next one! 

Although, realistically, it needs to happen within the next 2 weeks or I'm only going to have limited time to work on it. The rest of the summer is "ship Gears2" time. 

wink-wink 

Yes, I'm working on that as well. A speed map is, from what I can gather, a 8-10 hour commitment. 

speedmaps were made in one hour.

Then it was increased to 100mins and then there were turtlemaps and speedchainmaps etc.

Of course, speedmaps are still made fairly quickly, but I think the problem was participation in the weekly events was slowing down as people weren't often able to get into IRC and map at the right time.

Maybe we should have a proper oldskool speedmapping event where we do actually log onto IRC sometime and do it like we used to.

Then again, I'm in a crap timezone for speedmapping now :/ 

Willem: cool!

I'd also like a one week timeframe. I think I can finish in under 10 hours now, too, the last one really took longer than I expected but I didn't want to release a map with half the monsters missing, because that would suck, and what good would it be?

Brushwork indeed only took 5 hours. I underestimated the time needed for monster placement etc., simple. And then I decided to do it right instead of rush it.

When you look at today's normal maps, 12 hours for a speedmap really still is quick. Very quick. 

Maybe we should have a proper oldskool speedmapping event where we do actually log onto IRC sometime and do it like we used to.
Yes, please. It's called speedmapping for a reason.

12 hours is not speedmapping...
How can it be a speedmap when it takes more than a day?! 

I have some little ideas I'd like to try out and small speed maps would be a great place to express them. I'll need more than an hour, however. 

well, it is speedmapping when you compare it to 7 months or whatever real maps take today. This isn't "the old days." This is the post-warpspasm era.

I'd also rather play a fun map than a demonstration of how fast you can knock something together just to prove it. I want to have fun playing it, too. Knocking up "something" in 60 minutes is an academic exercise, not more. It should be fun to play. I admit it doesn't take 111 monsters to have fun, but cut me some slack plz Spirit, it was my first damn released map (hey, welcome, newbie! Thanks!) and my first speedmap. Next time I'll hire a Japanese with a stopwatch.

that's my pov. I think 8-10 hours are reasonable. I wouldn't want to play something with a spikeshooter and 10 dogs.

Ricky, we need to train much harder and drink much less absinthe. We're damn slackers. Besides, Willem will be watching this time. ;-)

How about "Slackers" as a theme? Or "grunge". 

My "first released map" was a speedmap too (sm111). And it was crap. And damn fun to create in ~90 minutes. I learned a lot from that one.

To me speedmapping is about enjoying oneself. I always considered speedmapping as a nice opportunity to explore new things, experiment, create wild maps. I don't see any motivation to spend too much time on a speedmap as a) speedmaps aren't exactly real releases, b) speedmaps aren't exactly supposed to be balanced or great and c) if I want to spent so much time on mapping then I'll do a proper map instead.

Post-warpspasm? What exactly did/does Warpspasm change? The public interest in it has been underwhelming from what I know.

Not the old days? What old days? I can't see any important new trends that make all maps better? And NO, making a map huge and empty and use min/sky lighting is not good. Did you look at the stuff in early speedmapping packs? There are some incredibly nice things in there. 

I like 'grunge'. Let's do that. 

 

Like, can a speed map be a tasty 5 minute exercise in gameplay or are there expectations these days? SM141 was, to me, longer than I was expecting. A lot of simple rooms with tons of monsters. Is that what is expected or is it acceptable to knock up a small number of rooms that have some sort of a hook to them? 

Fucking bunch of snobby wankers. 

As you like it! I still gaze in amazement at sm48_daz and sm48_xen which had no gameplay whatsoever. 

Hah! OK, good news then. I'll knock something out when I get a few ideas together. 

yup. that's it.

/shakes head

that's it all right. 

you are right about the bunch of snobby wankers.
But that should be no reason to not make speedmaps anymore. 

I wasn't knocking current speedmaps at all. I was just saying that doing a one off old skool speedmapping session where everyone actually gets into irc for 1-2 hours and makes their maps at the same time would be fun.

It's a great idea to extend the speedmaps and allow people a bit more freedom to chose when to make and how long for, I just remembered that I had a great time doing it in irc and thought it would be cool if there was another event like the old ones.

Maybe there will be during QExpo. 

i completely missed the part where speedmaps went from 2-3 hours to 8-10. I remember noticing that people stopped doing them together at the same time on IRC, and started doing them "sometime during the week" -- but i assumed they were still only devoting the allowed 2-3 hours.

So is 8-10 hours spread over a week the standard practice now or just a one-time thing for the most recent speedmap session?

One of the purposes of the short time span of ~2 hours was more people would be willing to participate if the commitment was that small.

It sounds like you guys should be calling these Turtlemaps and embracing the 1-week timelimit if that suits your mapping desires more, so that real speedmaps can still happen once in a while without people's expectations being that they have to devote a week to it. 

2-5 hours is more like it for when I used to speedmap, and I guess now that I'm free on weekends I should participate. I'll try if there's actually a meeting in #speedmap or whatever anymore. 

This clearly takes practice. I spent a few hours last night on an idea that i had- just rough sketching the level. No monsters or lights or entities beyond a player start ... and it's nowhere near done. Not sure how you get anything useful done in 2-3 hours but maybe I'm just not focused enough. No, in fact, I'm sure that I'm not. Heh. 

I found the drag copy function in Worldcraft (hold shift and drag a brush to copy it to wherever the mouse pointer is moved to) immensely helpful when speedmapping. Dunno if you already have a feature like that in toetag, but if not, you should consider it. Seriously great.

Actually, Max has a similar shift drag operation that duplicates polys and extrudes edges, so if you use that at work you will know how helpful it can be.