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/ 

er i didnt know people played cs:s... the shots look nice tho'! 

You're obviously pretty detached from the gaming world if you're surprised people play CS inertia.

Looks nice anyways wrath, kinda feels like there are lots of wall posters/tags/etc though. 

But the outdoor area feels a little cramped, maybe with more work on the skybox and non explorable areas around the outside can fix that and open it up a bit.

Agree with Bal about that decals too, maybe a few too many in areas. 

I was talking about CS:S vs CS1.6. 

Does seem that the decals on the exterior (the crane one and other) look to large, as well. But yeah, I played CS:S briefly, once -- and decided HL2DM is much more fun ;D 

http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/4684/quake01ja4.jpg
http://img61.imageshack.us/img61/7434/quake02ib8.jpg
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/9025/quake03sm1.jpg
http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/9791/quake04ml2.jpg
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/2756/quake05mh6.jpg
http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/3050/quake06wd4.jpg
http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/4737/quake07za2.jpg
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/372/quake08by0.jpg
http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/6760/quake09uj6.jpg

Map: e1_1m1 - Slipgate Complex 1.1
Quoth: No
Secrets: 9
Kills: 69

Faithful, conservative update of the classic
Less annoying and properly aligned textures (yay!)
More and upgraded monsters from pak1.pak
More secrets, items rebalanced
Cool new ways to get killed
Hopefully new ways to speedrun

To be continued :-D 

I fired up the Gimp about an hour ago: I felt like doing something evillairish, so I started with a dark grey that becomes the default highlight when I burn in some darker tones:

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/wallevil1.jpg

I notice I screwed up the alignment, leaving about half as much as I needed to work on the right hand side of the pic so I worked on a fix for it and added detail:

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/wallevil2.jpg

after getting what I considered satisfactory results, I worked on making it tileable, and then transfered it to Wally for some Quake brown love shellacking

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/evilwall6_1.jpg

It could use some directional lighting (only after I bake a normal map from it though) and more contrast if used for anything more than a diffuse texture. Other than that I'm happy with it. 

hm
I don't see the difference. There was a remake from vondur and czg. It was awesome. But here I don't see any changes in desing. Also there was Speedy who povided a different gameplay. But do you provide here?


btw i'm drunk, don't make take my opinino serious 

I do.

The main changes are gameplay related which screenies are a decidedly bad way to demonstrate. However the retexturing alone makes a noticeable difference when you're actually inside the map. Providing you have time to look at the walls because the monster count and difficulty was upped.

It is _not_ a remake, rather an update. It's meant to retain the oldschool feel because I'm an avid lover of the Id maps. I have no intention of doing an ambitious reinterpretation like Vondur/Czg did (although I dig the map.)

I should have just posted a download link instead. That would answer most questions I guess.

I believe that most people will like it when it's ready, and when they compare this and e1m1rmx (and e1m1) side by side, they'll hopefully understand what I'm going for.

Right now it's perhaps 80% done. You want to take a look, I'll gladly email it. 

you change any brushwork? 

Yes, but mostly under the hood. Off the top of my head:

- the changes required for retexturing (major part)
- supports/beams/etc get trimmed (see screenie 1)
- sticky-outy bits (lamps etc) get recessed into walls or erased
- ceiling details/lamps/light fixtures redone/added
- secret areas changed/added
- spawner rooms (a reason for going quoth)
- changed lots of small stuff, f.ex. bridge geometry, NG lift was made level with floor, some steps etc. changed to properly align floor textures, dropped some crates to put snipers on them / use them for secrets etc.

Not sure about the first slime pit yet, perhaps I'll make it bunnyable... I'll also probably make steps, rails etc. look nicer, they're pretty thick...

Mostly stuff underneath textures, a bit of obvious klunkiness and small-scale stuff. Otherwise monsters, items and lighting. There will be additions (moving/rotating) related to traps (and bobs!), but those aren't done yet (just roughly placed the traps.) Perhaps one whole area will only be guarded by such automatic security stuff.

Originally I wanted to not change any brushwork, but that turned out to be unrealistic. There's lots of work in there, but mostly it's not visually interesting. Gameplay wise, on skill 2, the map is *much* more busy than e1m1rmx/quoth. It just doesn't compare. It's more like TPOF.

I expect to do less retexturing in e1m2/3/4 but they will require a lot of effort to properly align all textures (the wall textures will be kept.) The fun will be introducing hell knights, adding monsters in general and expanding secrets there, plus more gloomy lighting. I have a few good ideas.

I expect not much retexturing/realigning to be done in e1m5/6/7/8 because their textures are more forgiving.

I might add a handful of quoth monsters (really not too many) and using the spawner functions from that will save lots of work.

State of the project is e1m1 80%, e1m2 is leak-fixed, made compilable and started to add monsters, e1m3/4 are next on the list. As I said the major part of the work is in those first 4 maps. I have a good idea of how to proceed and where the problems are. (.plan)

I'm pretty much doing this for myself, that's why I didn't start some kind of team. I also saw that others wanted to do more of a true remake, like e1m1rmx and that's not what I intend to do. I just want to clean stuff up visually and bring the gameplay up to spec. E1M1 has like 20 grunts and some dogs on hard (!) and that's really a bit like a sightseeing tour for 65-year-olds, except the texturing sucks...

...so... 

I've started another remake of ep3, much like tpof, which actually was changed quite a bit - completely new geometry, although the small original size allowed me to get it thrown together fairly quickly.

Though I reckon (and I'm not alone) that it suffered for that.

I'll be going through the whole of ep3 map by map, rebuilding everything and adding Quoth monsters as well as changing stuff a bit. Eg; I just realised a made a big mistake in warp, recommending the Nehahra engine and not using its transprency features. Bah.

Anyhow, this is the sort of thing that would be gauranteed to fail as a group project since its more for fun, though still fairly involved.

golden_boy, I'm changing stuff quite a bit in some cases, so it's probably not what you're aiming for. I'll also be stop-starting on this, so who knows how long it'll take.

Just letting you know. 

That sounds cool.

Perhaps once both projects are finished (loooong time) we could make a new start map to link them together. I'd be up for that. Others could do ep. 2 and 4.

Another idea I had recently is to take the normal start map, and add additional hidden slipgates.

You say rebuilding everything, so I understand you don't use the GPL source? Or are you deleting parts of the original brushwork and substituting your own instead?

You're right on everything else.

-> good luck 

I use the source as a reference then delete it; I tend to work on a 32 or larger grid for walls so the id sources become obsolete quickly. Wc's 'save visible objects only' is useful there.

I've started to put together a version of e3m1, it'll take a week to finish it since the blocking out is around 75% done.

Its pretty fun to do, even though I've had to disasemble a section of interlocking corridors a few times. Also have alot of corrupt brushes for some reason.

Anyhow, luck with ep1. 

one trick i've used when making conversions of maps where only the layout will be the same is to copy only the floor brushes to a new map. It helps keep things clean so you don't have a lot of messy brushwork to eventually delete. 

have you thought about checking out the SDA archived speedruns and taking out some of the more glaringly easy run tricks. Not to discourage speedrunning,
but to fix those maps that are just two
GL jumps away from entrance to exit. 

But I'm just turning the whole original map into its own visgroup, then extracting chunks of it to another to build the map inside.

Floors doesn't always help; e3m1 is a bit of a mess in terms of stacked corridors meeting at various junctures. 

Good idea. I've watched the easy and nightmare runs of ep. 1 and those are the obvious shortcuts:

e1m3 - slope grenade jump from gold key to door. Solution: make the platform's slopes steep enough.

e1m4 - slope GJ directly to the exit. Solution: reshape the slopes there.

e1m5 1) - GJ to the teleporter/gold key

I'm willing to allow this because they still have to pass the shambler etc. and it's a cool route.

e1m5 2) - Bypass silver key and just GJ/RJ to the exit.

This is where the problem lies; they should have to get BOTH keys before they can leave. I intend to fill that level to the brim with hell knights, so I want to see some bloodbath.

Solution: The button behind the SK door is needed to deactivate a very, very deadly trap.

e1m5 3) - simply GJ/RJ through hole up to the SK

Simple, just put some bars to block it from below.

I think that would provide an interesting route, getting the keys in reverse order.

e1m6 - jump to the GK, not activating the bridge.

It's nice that the GK sits in plain sight there, so I wouldn't want to change that. You could have the exit door need another button, namely the one that also activates the bridge, so if someone jumped to the key and pressed the button behind the GK door, it would just say "1 more..." and while jumping to the key, it would say "You'll regret that, smartass." 

And perhaps I could just exchange the keys in e1m5, because that would make more sense. Everyone has been going for the GK first since ... how long? 

Everyone has been going for the GK first since ... how long?

Many of those changes would not only make speedrunning more interesting but bring some new life into regular game play as well. 

Early on I already added an additional "loop" to e1m1 because otherwise nobody ever would take the water passage/lift. It's still optional to do that, but when you do you get a message saying "Good soldier", a nice end battle and all kills.

:-) 

http://img466.imageshack.us/my.php?image=joequake006yu9.jpg 

Looks nice ! and what are these textures ? 

A very strange combination I know
It is also in the map for the competition