every item in every map should be that way? :)

The variety would be healthy. There are plenty of items already in big open spaces elsewhere. MH encounters would promise to be different, and the hole-above-an-item is it's own kind of standoffish classic. If anything, having an item in a big empty room is a partial design failure, because the design doesn't contribute much to potential encounters other than by getting out of the way. 

i can't really think of an item that isn't placed that way in any q3 duel map.

it's either

1) in the middle of something (dm6 mh, ztn yas)
2) somewhere on a pretty important path (dm6 ra, dm6 ya, ztn ya)
3) in some important room on a ledge(ztn ra, pt4 rail ya, pt4 mh)

t2 rl shards are the only items that are kinda tucked out of the way, and maybe aerowalk ra. The latter is probably the closest match to stormtrigger mh placement.

my view on duel maps is pretty narrow though: dm6, ztn, pt4, t2, aero

dm13 has lots of out of the way stuff, but that map doesn't really count as a good duel map to me.

Any other examples i forgot?

not saying those are the only good ways, just analysing the problem. 

I polished the area "a bit". Still need to look into fx editor.

http://www.methodonline.com/temp/meth_test10a.jpg
http://www.methodonline.com/temp/meth_test10b.jpg
http://www.methodonline.com/temp/meth_test10c.jpg

Feedback is welcome.

-Method 

http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/8396/zizz4xb6.jpg

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/1155/rec2ov2.jpg 

Look cool, but dark (Have I said that ??)... Hell is Hell after all ;D 

http://grayheaven.net/starling0001.jpg

So. Any ideas why the light fixture doesn't get lit properly? 

the glowing fingernails, it looks like you haven't got any env_cubemaps in the level. I don't know if that would effect the lighting of props, but it's worth looking in to. 

If the material is reflective, that might be it, yeah. I'll try it. Thanks. 

Text_Fish is right. Any time you see props that look lit incorrectly like that, you either don't have env_cubemaps or you haven't done a "buildcubemaps" for the level yet. 

Dunno if you did (doesn't look it), but you ought to use a light_spot and env_lightglow for best effects. 

http://kaz.quakedev.com/junk/sample3.jpg 

looks nicely dystopian, although the shadow/lighting of that white light above the stairs doesnt seem realistic 

odd-looking temple map

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=8596&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=80

browse through all the pages 

those screens look interesting and strange. weird colored world inside of doom3 universe. 

nice to see people breaking out of the official style for a game that has such a strong style to begin with. Maybe we won't see a return of "quake 2 syndrome." 

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2004580002-2005100513,00.html 

 

this week, while bored and stuck in a hotel room I dug up an old model and worked it over in Blender. Nevermind the fucked dorsal connectors and any other obvious problems (for now :)), check out that ass!

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/playerd.jpg

Hours and hours of labor went into getting them to Latin streetwalking gigilo perfection. 

Love the goatee. Now export it for quake!
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/~ajd70/mdlexport.py 

Dead link => 404 not found :P 

http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/ajd70/mdl_export.py 

Unfortunately, I suck at animation, it is something I have to bite the bullet and learn to love. I'll likely start out with animating low level non humanoid monsters and weapon frames and work my way up to animating this guy.

At his high polies, I doubt if he is practical
for anything other than Dark Places and AquiRe's engines though. BTW, He still looks decent without the smoothing groups. I just use straight box modeling extension and subdivision and I don't mess with autosmoothing or sculpting because the underlying design can get really distorted with those tools.

Does your script also implant the UVmap in the model when it is converted to MDL? If so, you have saved me many, many hours of app wrangling :) 

Yeah, it preserves UV maps correctly when it exports, which is the main reason you'd want to use it over, say, working with QMe to start making the mdl file. QMe is still very hand for tweaking the model afterwards though. One small warning that should come with the script is that the first frame of the model should have all separate segments of the model occupying distinct locations in space. Vertices that occupy the same point in both the uv map and first frame get merged, so with weird models you might end up with stuff joined where you don't want it. It's also the first exporter I know of that observes the smoothing groups you apply and exports them to the mdl. Of course, the vertex normals are compressed in quake, so it's not very noticeable, but it's there.

On the down side, animation exporting may be broken, I'm gonna check it out and try to post a fix once I work out what's going on... 

It's also the first exporter I know of that observes the smoothing groups you apply and exports them to the mdl.

I can't wait to get a chance to experiment with it. If you'd like a fresh model to play around with feel free to do what you you want with this one (consider it under zlib, GPL's much more permissive sister),

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/wasp21.zip

It has 41 animations, and replaces the drone you can find on gamers.org with just a few tweaks (looks better shooting a nail than a laser), and a new skin. I originaly used three metal sheet designs for the wings, body and gun but scrapped it for being too so so looking. 

Now, I haven't mapped worth shit since I left Starbreeze, which was ages ago. But we've had people over every other month or so since last summer, to play some CS and CTF. So last time I decided I was going to build a map for us to play on. And so I did. Or, rather, it's in some kind of beta phase. It was horribly unbalanced towards the terror team until the CT's remembered to buy smoke grenades and then it swung a bit until the T's started retreating under fire and it's a long story... Nevermind.

If I learned anything during the development it's this. Making maps on your own sucks. I don't know how many of you team up and make them in pairs or something, but flying solo just drains your soul. It's all well and good to have your friend check it out, but he's a programmer and can't map his way out of a paper bag.

Anyway, here's some shots shot while shooting; http://grayheaven.net/starling/