well put pjw.

on a flip side... i am thinking about trying to make a quake1 sp level... not an episode as that would require a lot of work... so, how complex can the brush work be in quake? can i just go nuts or will the engine just conk out and break? (vanilla quake)
thats something i've been impressed with in the idtech3 stuff... i seem to be able to just keep on going and going.. as long as i keep an eye on caulking and detail brushes it just does not break. (much) 

you will definitely hit some limits if you go hog-wild. There are two types of limits:

1. soft limits: high complexity can trigger bugs in the compilers and/or extend vis times exponentially. Aguirre's tools have fixed a lot of the bugs, but the exponential vis times are inherent in the way quake vis is calculated.

2. hard limits: there are various numeric limits (number of leafs, nodes, faces, etc.) which can prevent the map from loading in a stock engine. However, many of these limits have been lifted by some of the popular engines, which means there is a viable audience for limits-breaking maps. (but it's still a smaller audience than if you were compatible with all quake engines)

Engines that support high limits (As far as I know):
Fitzquake - http://celephais.net/fitzquake/
AguirRe's engines - http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/
Darkplaces - http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/
DirectQ - http://mhquake.blogspot.com/

Check out some popular recent SP maps to see what is possible, that might help guide your expectations since you are used to Quake 3 mapping. APSP2, Marcher Fortress, Day of the Lords, ne_tower, A Roman Wilderness of Pain, etc. (check the news archive on this site for map releases) 

I'd bet it be a tech level :) 

lol indeed. ha, will have to call on my old doom mapping styles.. tricks and traps yo :D 

http://www.quaddicted.com/feature/tronyn/driant6.jpg
http://www.lunaran.com/images/maps/lunsp1_1.jpg
http://www.lunaran.com/images/maps/lunsp1_2.jpg
http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/screenshots/gmsp3.jpg
http://quakeone.com/~images/news/livingend.jpg

Map download directory @ Quaddicted:

http://www.quaddicted.com/spmaps.html

Convert Quake 3 to Quake with the click of a button:

http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1975

Although there are a lot of engines that might get used for single player, FitzQuake 0.85 is by far the dominant one. 

People treating each other like people on the internet.

Good luck on the level - just throw it together and it'll be fun.

The wierd thing about Quake1 is the more you try, the less happens. You end up stuck on piddling details... but that's me. 

Well I really touched the limits of the standard Quake engine with my last large SP map starkmon. If you want to see what is possible without breaking any limits then take a look! :)

There are some really massive maps out there which break many limits too, and they did get a lot of play. I always thought it would be cool to just make an absolutely huge map, like a whole episode in one map, with several different areas and levels, using as much of the useable space as possible. Coloured lighting would be out though because if the Tyrlite tool not supporting more than roughly 2000 entities to be in a map. And I dont mean just light entities. But AguirRes light tool would allow more entities than that, so it could be done. 

Ricky, did you have over 2000 lights in the map, or just 2000 entities in total? You could probably get around the Tyrlight restriction in the former case by removing any non-light entities from the map with an entity ripper, then restoring them after the light pass was complete. I suppose you would want to be able to do it from a batch file, to allow for incremental builds, but that should be possible too... 

Well it was entities. I think theres a hard 2048 entity limit in Tyrlite.

Removing all of the other entities for the sake of doing a light pass sounds like an arduous task, but did not try that, and I can see how it might work. I guess.

Somebody really clever could re-work the tool maybe ;) 

Well it was entities. I think theres a hard 2048 entity limit in Tyrlite.

Unless there is something else preventing that, the tool's limit doesn't matter that much because the tool is Open Source.

1. You download Tyrann's source:

http://www.disenchant.net/files/utils/tyrutils-0.4.tar.gz

2. Open bspfile.h and find this

#define MAX_MAP_ENTITIES 2048

3. Change the number

4. Open free Visual Studio C++ Express Edition ...

http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/

and recompile Tyrlite ;) 

That sounds doable :) 

by mh? 

the one that colorizes your lighting? I don't think that uses light entities at all... 

Here is Tyrlite recompiled with 8192 as the max entities. Let me know if it works, it's entirely untested.

http://www.quake-1.com/files/developer/tyrlite_8192_baker.zip

(I noticed it wouldn't compile in Visual Studio, I ended up getting "Cyggy" with it. No you don't want to know ...) 

Now all I need is a map with >2048 entities and coloured lights in it to compile ;)

No, seriously though, I will be keeping a copy of this tool very well backed up and stored on my HDD for when need it :)

I could run some sort of test map too though I guess....