Indeed. He only mentions tiny tris, backfacing and frustum culling, but it looks like they're demonstrating occluded geometry culling here? Either way, it was only a wistful joke to soothe my pain... speaking of, I should get back to trying to optimally vis my non-room-corridor-room-corridor map... 

It's still coming :) I haven't been mapping lately, but on the other hand the recent func_detail fixes I made to qbsp were probably necessary to finish this map anyway. 

I'm getting closer to starting up video tutorials for TB2. I wanted to ask some of the newer mappers who use TB2 what topics would be helpful to cover. Maybe not something that you need to know now, but something you wished would have been in a tutorial before you started mapping.

Please everyone weigh in.

For the more experienced mappers what mapping questions do you find yourself answering often? 

That's great ds to make tutorials. Your voice would be easy to listen to and understand.

I can share that when I was new to mapping I wanted to know how to make cylinders, arches, and other curve shapes.

Another simple thing was how to make pools of water and generally openings and corridors from other brushes. When you never used a map editor before, even those things seemed confusing! That was TB1 though.

I see a fair bit of compiling questions as well. 

I remember a while ago I made an image set describing how to use the different clip modes and 3-point clipping. Having something that explained the clip tool in video form seems like it would be useful.

Also can second Bloughsburgh's suggestion around curves, that'd be a good gateway into teaching how CSG works in TB2/in general.

I'd also definitely suggest covering some basic topics. Things like how to make doors move up/down, and how to use things like triggers, counters etc. Things that are relevant to any mapping tool but will probably be new to people who are using TB to try quake mapping for the first time. 

you definitely have the voice for it. I tried to do one a while back but the biggest complaint/feedback I got was to do with the structure. I thought I had covered everything but maybe not.
You can see the video here for reference - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BisleGBgQ4w

I was going to do a series but never got around to making it. It's actually pretty self contained and would get most people on the mapping ladder. Maybe you could learn from any mistakes I have made. 

Fun drinking game :-

Drink a shot every-time I say "what you need to do".

You'll have alcohol poisoning in no time. 

@bloughs great I will put much of that on my to-cover. I think with these suggestions I am going to come up with a map that has a lot of these features built in and cover them all step by step.

@pritchard I need to "rehearse" your method I am horrible at this but yes thank you I will use and link to your tutorial when I get to that one for sure.

@fifth

I skipped around it. Yes I will review the whole video for sure. I dread the setup aspect - that alone takes so long I know people really want to jump in and map so I am going to try and keep things moving along quickly with the least amount of me rambling on (which I can do very easily)

I also am a pro editor so I can speed up my voice - make all kinds of seamless edits etc.

Alos planning on keeping each video very short and having a playlist of a lot of short topics so if people know how to set up a compiler they can skip ahead.

Would love to hear other ideas. 

Yeah I would be interested to see a professional spin on something like quake mapping. You tend to get a lot of very amateur videos like mine for this type of community content.
It's kind of funny watching back the video, I got a number of things right but I should have scripted the tutorial first.

Can't wait to see what you come up with. 

Definitely let me know each time a new tutorial is done so that I can tweet about it / link it from the manual and shit.

Also if you script the tutorial beforehand, we can go over the script to see if there are things you might not know about etc. 

I'm doing the video tuts actually.

That would be great tho and I will absolutely run them by you before recording them. Right now I am planing on three Youtube playlists. 1. Overall Concepts (map files, compiling, entities etc) 2nd a TB2 specific walkthru of making a simple but "full" featured SP map with triggers and such. 3rd playlist would be Advanced stuff: ericw's _phong and _dirtmap lighting, hint, skip. 3 point clipping. Map hacks, mods.

TBH I still have a lot to learn myself but I am getting there. I didn't even know you could flip/mirror selections a few months ago! There are always holes in someone's knowledge base I guess.

I was planning on lifting parts of the script directly from your manual and from "The Unofficial Quake Level Design Handbook" as it has a great overview of all the basic concepts.

So yes let's collaborate on the Tb2 sections at the very least. I do track the github each week to see what's up. 

I watched your entire tutorial. It was good! I agree the main takeaway is to script it. I recorded my first test last night and I had to edit so many "ummms" and stutters and sentence fragments that "winging it" is not the way to go. So I will def be scripting. And breaking up concepts into playlists is going to help as long as people can find the starting point. That's one drawback to playlisted YT vids. Sometimes it's tough to find "Chapter 1" (well on mobile it is).

What I have planned for the first overview set are these chapters:

Quick overview of what this set covers
.map file
Compiling tools overview
light and .lit (show a lightmap)
Leaks (concept only)
Game engines
Entities (point, brush etc)
Brushes
Wads / Texture concepts

These will all be targeted at under 2 minutes apiece. Then on to the TB2 specific tuts. 

Unfortunately I don't have the chops for editing videos properly, I'd just have to get the "take" correct with little-to-no mistakes.

I created the video in the way I had was to give the viewer the shortest possible time to get from nothing to something.

Then the further videos would have been much more in depth for each subject matter (manipulating brush vertices, clipping tools, lighting techniques).

When I learn a new map/dev tool I always think "how quick can I be running around this world". 

So I figured out a mediocre solution to my organization problem. Haven't tackled my mods/maps situation yet, but I have created an "engines" folder in the Quake directory to house my engine files. Initially I tried creating shortcuts to the respective engine exe's using the -basedir parameter, but SQLauncher wouldn't see it because shortcuts aren't technically exe's themselves. So I used symbolic links instead. This preserves the exe extension so SQLauncher will see it.

So now I simply have 3 symbolic links in my root directory for quakespasm, quakespasm_ad, and quakespasm_spike, with their files tucked away in an engine container folder. Adding more engines will be simple, tidy, and they should all cooperate with SQLauncher. 

Let's get you one of these for your Quake directory!

Seriously though, good job on figuring this out. I may do the same. 

Now for the mods. 

Are there cvars for brightness and contrast? For some reason, launching mods with different engines resets my settings for brightness, contrast, and resolution. Just want to have the cvars to drop in my autoexec. 

cvarlist in console? 

The brightness cvar is "gamma" and the contrast cvar is "contrast" 

...and found this old article.

So cool to see an article written by someone John Carmack really admired touting the young upstart's work.

Quake’s approach, which I'll call surface-based lighting, preprocesses differently, and adds an extra rendering step. During off-line preprocessing, a grid, called a light map, is calculated for each polygon in the world, with a lighting value every 16 texels horizontally and vertically. This lighting is done by casting light from all the nearby lights in the world to each of the grid points on the polygon, and summing the results for each grid point.  

Was really neat! I rejoice in seeing content from the old websights I used to visit. Of them only Gamasutra is left. 

 

dumptruck_ds

for the tutorial, i think it's a good idea to do many examples of using the clip tool, vertex tool, brush tool and duplication when you are building a map, and how you should try different ways until you find what's your prefered way. 

Is there a trick to getting quake to appear fullscreen on a secondary monitor? When I go fullscreen it always moves back to the primary, even if the window was on the second monitor. Running Windows 7 if it matters. Does using a particular engine help? 

Thanks - I will include those ideas for sure. TB especially has a a lot of methods to accomplish the same task.