I made this map with the intention to give it coloured lights. Distrance and The Silent had it betatested and gave me some good advice of texture alignments, but they found I had made the colors somehow severe.

Then I became tired of the thing and layed it aside, the setup was alright but I couldn't compare the military base setting with the medieval castle. They didn't really fit.

Also the gameflow became somewhat back and forward. But after some time I still liked the play, although the coloured lights still are puzzling me. I was looking for a neon beam effect but couldn't find the basics for them.

great you enjoyed the map!
I will continue working on it. 

For a neon beam effect, make a texture from one of the 32 fullbright textures, then make a small room away from your map. Put the brush you want the neon light to be on inside the room, turn it into a func_train.

Light the hell out of the room, about 6 500 plus light values that hit each side of the brush object should work. Go to the spot you want the brush to appear, put an info_null there and set it to wait -1, target self, targetname self, connect the func_train to the
null and compile.

If everything goes right, you'll have a groovy looking neon thingy in your map that is self lit. 

not info_null -- and of course, those fullbright's are self lit textures in software Quake, but this trick will give them a hazy glow appearance, like a mug of Absinthe. 

and first my object was hidden in the skytext.
when I added a trigger_once to the func_train
it appeared inbox and it became a intens
object, but not the neon effect I expected.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/neon.jpg

I used 4 lights of 6000, but the texture of the object is already fullbright.

I was thinking of a mod I once saw that showed neon bars as trashold for doors. But it has gone so far in my collection I can't find it.

But thanks for your hint! 

I thought one of Matt Sefton's maps, and possibly Beyond Belief, had some laser-barred doorways. Truth? Fiction? Figment of my imagination that will be come real as soon as enough people believe it and someone loads the maps to find out, but remains myth until then? 

They were simply sections of corridor with shooters that just fired a shit-ton of lasers.If you went into them, you were pretty much guaranteed to die. In the speed run of beyond belief, the runners armour up and just run through the barriers though. 

It's easy enough to make a laser barrier with a func=illusionary (maybe you need to use func=wall if you want it to be killable) and a trigger_hurt. 

in czg05 (never finished), there were forcefields with thin brushes with water textures stretched by a large amount, making them looking like flickering/fading bars. 

I'm pretty sure it was in one of Matt Sefton's maps, then. Perhaps Jawbreaker or something. 

I have been working on a Symbiote map tonight; it's bedtime. Here is a shot.

http://img110.imageshack.us/my.php?image=symbiote4qg.jpg 

...I like a mapper who gets dark and light working for them. Nice! 

. 

I wanted to get the lighting tweaked carefully before I textured it properly. I chose a white texture (church1 from Armagon) so the weaker brush work would stand out and I would have an idea what needs to be worked on, and man, in my exterior work not shown here, they stand out

Thanks distrans, I'm glad you like it. The resident master guru of lighting and compile matters sent me a suggested light setting for the map, and it just floored me how much an improvement it is over my original. 

my original, as shown above. 

scroll down page to lordsquart's map :

http://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=51&start=1435&sid=6f5983a4a7a3f15edf615bab636847f0


1st pic looks funky.

Fjogg's map also looks good but this one caught my eye. 

it looks really impressive, indeed! i wonder how playable it'll be, though (r_speeds and all). 

Sorry I haven't been able to update today, my hotmail account has been iffy today. Anyway, I have been working on the skin to the Necro-Mech warship, boss monster. Here is the basic proto-type.

http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/7439/beastly71iw.jpg

If you like it, I'll go with this and
rebuild the model to accomadate the leaner design
in this shin. 

Well, I got talking in IRC yesterday about Doom3 and I remembered I had a bunch of shots from a single-player project I haven't touched in over a year.

http://kinn.leveldesign.org/doom3/shot00010.jpg
http://kinn.leveldesign.org/doom3/shot00023.jpg
http://kinn.leveldesign.org/doom3/shot00026.jpg
http://kinn.leveldesign.org/doom3/shot00027.jpg
http://kinn.leveldesign.org/doom3/shot00028.jpg
http://kinn.leveldesign.org/doom3/shot00029.jpg

There's a lot more interesting/larger areas than in those shots, but nothing at screenshot-standard yet. Good thing is, since I last shelved this project, I've developed l33t Max skills at my company, so I should be able to tart it up a lot with outdoor rocky stuff and gibbley hell groves >:}, not to mention machinery gubbins that I wouldn't wish upon anyone to be forced to make with patches...(id's designers are a bunch of masochists I swear)

Well, stranger things have happened than me deciding to dust down the old scrozzler and finish it off, so it may yet see the light of day :} 

I especially love the first three shots.

Still don't have doom 3 (played it at work ages ago though) but this might convince me to pick up a cheap copy if it turns out to be as cool as your Quake output. 

What's the thing with lighting? 

What's the thing with lighting?

I'm not sure I understand. Which bit do you mean? 

very even? Is it only a draft? 

guy is surprised to see d3 map that doesnt have pitchblack areas right next to bright lights.

could add more contrast anyway 

Bear in mind I altered the brightness of the screenshots for clarity, which I'm sure makes it look a bit more washed out than in the game.

As a personal preferance, I don't really enjoy Doom3's default style of fighting monsters in the pitch dark, so one of the goals was to make most places lit. But yeah, tweaking lighting will be something I do in the finishing stages :) 

(...with a praxinoscope, I should add).

^_~