a smooth surface for bunny hopping...

FFS.

More like "a smooth surface to hop around like a lunatic making and thrusting your cock down the opponent's throat because they can never keep a bead on you because you're bouncing off all the god damn walls in 5 nanoseconds".

Yes I'm still DM bitter. 

I can tell ;)

"Enraged" is being designed with seasoned QW team deathmatch players in mind. Essentially this means that I am trying to design the map in such a way that it has trickjumping potential, the player can move around at high speed and balancing items to ensure interesting team deathmatch gameplay.

Quite obviously this also means that when playing on this map, a seasoned player would have a huge advantage over a casual player, which isn't any different from any other good map really. A casual player attempting to win an Aerowalk match against Reppie or Insane or a DM2 match against Locktar or Goljat needs his sanity checked. 

jump pads or lifts 

This is a 3rd public beta of the Q1DM map I am working on: http://www.saunalahti.fi/dnaumov/enrapb03.zip The map is built for 4on4 TDM, 2on2 TDM and FFA gameplay. Report any and all problems you possibly encounter with the map, no matter how minor. I want to have this build throughly tested. 

Is a trick in a trick-custom-built map still a trick? 

One thinks it might be lacking in weapons, ammo, and health for FFA? 

Good to notice Jago and Shamb, but actually I think, not many people play ffa. Some occasionally when bored or to warm up. One can't compromise a 4on4 map for that.

And only dm2 of the 4on4 maps can be used nicely for 2on2.

I think there are two ffa servers in Europe, one runs random episode maps (xs4all) and the other just death32c (id dm maps connected together with a little extra architechture).


And to Snaga: maps can be trick-friendly or they can be non-trick-friendly. Often friendly if there are some open spaces to gather speed and some ramps. People will invent something. You can make boxroom with stairs between every room and be sure that there aren't many tricks possible.

And the last word on tricks, there actually are special "freestyle" maps for freestyle tricks where you can show off your movement skills. (these are different than trick maps where you perform one very specific trick after another like jump on some plats over void to reach the next trick). Of course many mappers here don't know how make something so purely for qw movement, and they actually are made primarily by non-mapping-guru players and are thus ugly. 

Sorry if I stept on that toe of yours, I was only philosophizing.

But thanks for the info. : maps can be trick-friendly or non-trick friendly, I'll keep that in mind ;) 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/joequake.jpg
trick-friendly. 

I've had a couple of good days of mapping over the holiday break, and I think this is pretty solid at this point. This is the second (and probably the last) beta.

Obligatory pics:

http://www.planetquake.com/pjw/screenshots/pjw4dm1a.jpg

http://www.planetquake.com/pjw/screenshots/pjw4dm1b.jpg

http://www.planetquake.com/pjw/screenshots/pjw4dm1c.jpg

Any feedback is welcome.
Download: http://www.fileplanet.com/dl.aspx?/planetquake/pjw/mapstorage/pjw4dm1.zip 

that looks very plain in the pics, almost q1 plain. 

Kind of agree with nitin, looks a little plain in the shots. Don't have Q4 yet, so I can't check it out properly.

I do like the tower structures in the first shot, but imho the lighting really spoils it. Is it intended for serious competition? Is that why you have gone for such a simple look?

The pipe walkways are a neat idea but I think they could use bulking up with more smaller pipes to give it a more solid and navigable look - perhaps even put grilles over the top to make a proper walkway. The point about the lighting still stands in this shot too - it's too bright and plain.

The other shot could use some more angles on the main platform edges, and I think some of the walls in the background could be made to slope in or out slightly - assuming that wouldn't destroy the gameplay. Again, the lighting is very bright and it doesn't look like a next gen game at all.

Is it not possible to light it so it looks nice and then configure settings in Q4 to improve visibility for serious DM?

Anyway, sorry to be so blunt about the visuals. I'm sure it has a good layout and plays well, but I think that making it look good should be the next thing you should do. I suppose it depends what you want from the map really.

Cool that you are mapping in your spare time whilst having a full-time games job. I almost stopped completely I was so burnt out and fed up after work :( S'ok now though :) 

Is it not possible to light it so it looks nice and then configure settings in Q4 to improve visibility for serious DM?

I asked myself the same question when wandering around the Q4 MP levels. They're all washed out compared to the SP levels Than.

pjw I'll eventually post some full (and mostly positive) comments re: Q4SP in the Q4 thread. I just need to finish my second (and much slower run) through this awesome game. However, the stock MP levels look... err... crap :( , and I think the reason is the lighting. Suddenly what looks three dimensional under the SP lighting looks two dimensional. What has depth suddenly looks flat. What is interesting suddenly becomes boring. I can understand that Raven probably wanted to pre-empt the sorts of light levels that hard core DM players were going to use anyway, from the start... if this is the case I think it was a mistake. 

I can't actually see any evidence of lighting in those shots, so I assumed that lighting had yet to be done/compiled? 

hey, it must be PRO map - minimum lights, not much geomety 

Yeah, the main reason for the relative plainness (esp. with lighting), is performance. The layout of the level is quite open, and in fact (even with this level of plainness) I had to close up a few entrances/exits and jam a big wall down the middle of one area to get performance at a decent level for MP (which is pretty conservative at this point).

Tris have less impact than lighting, so I'll see if I can throw some more detailing into a few of the plainer areas for the final.

(Oh, and Text_Fish--if there wasn't any lighting, there wouldn't be shadows and light and stuff. It would be dark.) 

One thing I might do for the final is to tone down the ambient a bit--that should help with some of the flatness, since ambient tends to kill the normals. 

Yes, I see some of the shadows upon closer inspection. I was thrown by the lack of any shadow cast by those big pipes. 

so the doom3 engine cant even render that sort of openness ? 

Of course it can...depending on how the map is designed.

It was misleading for me to talk about the openness of the level, since that's not really the issue, and I should have chosen my words a bit more carefully. "Interconnectivity" or "complexity" might have been better words to use, but still not quite right. I'll see if I can explain and be more precise this time. :)

The problem is one of [b]denseness[/b] of maps. There's also an important difference between MP and SP maps...

This particular map is an MP map, and in an MP map it's a bad idea to have any pitch black shadow areas (at least for an MP game of this kind).

This necessitates me finding a magic balance between:

(a) having normal lights sufficient in quantity/placement to light every small dark nook and cranny, which would result in crappy performance on this particular map since lights don't really illuminate to the bounds of their actual volume (more or less depends on the shader used), and would thus overlap quite a bit, and each overlap adds to a performance hit. Or

(b) using a single large ambient light volume (which has a special shader that lights all surfaces within that volume evenly with non-directional light). The problem with this is simply that it *is* non-directional light and thus tends to flatten stuff out and kill your normals and make stuff look like ass.

This particular map is denser than many other maps, with various layers both horizontally and vertically, which means the overlapping of light volumes is harder to avoid.

You could make a gigantic open space map with only a few huge lights and it would run quite well and also look quite good (because you could avoid ambient altogether in a map like that and not have to worry about light density).

You could also make a gigantic map comprised of both indoor and outdoor areas all connected together in a soup of complexity...as long as all the areas were spread out a bit and not smooshed into each other like sardines.

And SP is easier; it doesn't matter if you have dark corners.

Is that helpful at all? 

that explains it reasonably well.

But I dont like the sound of it :)

That sounds as much of a step backwards (engine wise) as it is forwards (most the d3 engine features do look nice). 

...now I understand. Thanks pjw! 

I just noticed that at least half the bajillion lights in this map don't have an assigned shader, and the default is really quite dark. I'm guessing that I saved over the wrong version at some point a few months ago, didn't notice, and haven't bothered checking since.

After I throw myself down a flight of stairs, and weep for a while like a little girl, I'll spend a few dozen hours fixing/adjusting/repositioning/deleting lights and the map should be better lit and run faster to boot. 

eting, that is. Fuck.