Im up for a knave jam.

Arcane Dimensions or at the very least, Quoth, please. 

If it's going to be a celebration of the Contract Revoked themes then Quoth is the only option. 

who else could trigger you so bad, heh? 

Now if Unity can make brush-based mapping (I remember a prototyping tool that seemed to have grid-based brushes)

If you are set on using Unity you'll be far better off doing it properly and learning actual mesh-based modelling, rather than using some "brush" tool someone wrote for Unity that will just be generating highly unoptimised meshes anyway. 

Lost Chapters source code | Lost Chapters Source Release Post

Lost Chapters being the sequel to Contract Revoked.

Completely possible to do a faithful to the original Contract Revoked theme map, since Lost Chapters was open sourced. 

I thought that was lost forever when the 2005 expo went down!

Thanks Baker. 

But then how is the Dusk guy doing it?

I'd like to emphasize this for DP, can the HUD be entirely customizable? Last time I looked at a DP-based game the layout was the exact same as Quake, making me fear the HUD being hardcoded carries over DP. 

here are some games using DP:

SteelStorm

Blood Omnicide

Xonotic

Warsow

there are more out there including a bunch of smaller projects. 

Do the Warsow developers know they are using DarkPlaces?

That would be an interesting conversation. 

here:

http://www.moddb.com/engines/darkplaces-engine/games 

My mistake, it's qfusion. I could've sworn they were using DP at one point. 

Warsow used qfusion. 

Referring back a few posts...

If you really want to do brush-based mapping (or at least layouts) for a modern engine, http://hammuer.nte.be/ lets you import .vmf or .map files into the Unreal editor. 

Is my DarkPlaces favorite project:

http://www.moddb.com/games/retroblazer/images/screenshot1#imagebox 

Ohhh... I didn't knew it's on Darkplaces!
Sadly development died... 

and func is the only website that loads up because it's the most optimised and the connection is too shit to load anything else. 

Try loading the entire General Abuse thread 

 

after seeing those examples. I might use it afterall.

But one last thing just to be sure: is Quakespasm's way of filtering texture an usual one? Can it be replicated by DP? Can tyrustil's (and others) compilers be used for a commercial game? 

in theory yes.

in practice, I'd use unity. 

then I'd settle with DP.
But then I've seen that TB2 can export map files into wavefront 3d models, meaning they can be used by Unity as a single model, meaning using Unity *and* TB2 is possible.
The downside I see with this is the back and forth with converting files and testing maps. If the map I test in Unity is wrong in the original map files, I have to edit in TB2 and then convert it.

Is brush-based maps in Unity that buggy? Because I'm wondering how the guys behind Dusk are doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqUiJpITMS0

Another thing I'm wondering about TB2: since my game won't have a palette limit, can TB2 use .wad files (or texture pack files rather) that doesn't hold a palette limit? 

Try http://sabrecsg.com/ for brush building in Unity 

With a dumb conversion of .map to mesh, You'll have all sorts of lovely problems like sparklies everywhere because .map brushes -> mesh is just t-junction city.

Also, unless you caulk and automatically remove all the unseen brush faces in a conversion step, you'll be drawing all that too - which might not be a problem because it will be so low poly (I assume?)

If you want to go down the .map -> Unity route, I strongly suggest creating it as a Quake 3 .map, and then using q3map2 to process your brushwork into clean .ase meshes

You'll need to look into how you do collision. Are you going to just duplicate the visual mesh and use that as a collision mesh? Could be pretty unoptimal unless you are going for 1996 levels of geometric detail in the visual map. Manually creating optimal collision meshes will eat up a ton of your time.

You'll need to think about culling too - Unity has an occlusion culling system but you'll have to have a long hard look at that to see how it works so you know how to organise your map meshes - it's no good having the map as a single mesh, it has to be split into lots of seperate meshes so they can be culled independantly of each other. 

IMO, the iteration time between changing something in a .map, and then going through all the different steps to see those changes in your Unity game, will be such an insanely convoluted waste of time that you will have an incredible new appreciation for how easy and quick quake-engine mapping is.

Unity plugins like that one mukor linked might be worth looking at before you discard the Unity idea though. 

What are the benefits of brush-based mapping compared to mesh anyway?

I'm asking because at some point in the future I'll have to decide what to start with, and right now my experience = 2.5D mapping + a little bit of low-poly 3D model creation in Blender.