Given the aesthetic quality of the rest of the map, that brick / diagonal cutoff as the floor wraps around the octagonal hole bugs me a lot. 

there is trim there. Maybe it should be raised up to imply the diagonal-cut stones are covered by a strip of wood.

On the other hand, go map! 

That sort of minor misalignment used to bug me too, then I looked at laid stone in the real world and realized that it almost never matches up perfectly like a power of 2 sized texture... It's not that hard to cut stone to fit. 

Any better?
http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/maps_q3/moteof1bw6l_1024.jpg 

Just make sure to clip it :D 

it's amazing how little things like that end up looking awesome. :) 

i wish that would be converted to q1sp 

http://necros.quaddicted.com/temp/cath4_1.jpg

clockwork droid textures are fun. :) 

:) 

But you've done them justice with some very clean angular curvy brushwork. I can visualize how it all fits together and it is a thing of beauty. The grating in the middle is a nice touch, even if its color does clash a little with the muted speedbz trim around it. I would love to see another sublevel below where the floor of cabling is now, just to really drive home the feeling of vertigo, but perhaps that would be pushing the portal count a bit. ;) The only thing I don't understand is the square rods seemingly coming off the ceiling; maybe they make more sense from a different angle, I just can't see what they are doing.

Altogether, it looks sexy and I want to play it. You are a mapping machine, necros, and I'm glad someone is still holding the torch for q1sp in 2009.

Also, it's my new desktop background. 

Nice shots ! The architecture is cool ! Go map and release it ;) 

I find them a bit....a bit blatant? Like they're trying to be too industrial...

How is this map breaking Quake then necros? Or is it the same one? 

my major complaint about clockwork droid is that they're a little limited. it's either trim or squares. no rectangles or triangles. i really love the ikbase set for that.
as a result, i've mixed in metl's obtex and speedbaze. the borders between external tgas @ 2x res and normal 1x res palettized textures is sometimes a little obvious, but i can live with it because i find the oblivion textures too blue and the speedbaze textures too dark and brown on their own.

in anycase, this map was originally going to be the second map of the three i was planning to do.
i'm working on this while i perform some vis tests on the other one. 

beautiful textures but I have to say that most maps that I have seen with them tend to look the same. That might be because of what necros says above but it does seem like they were textures created for a particular map already built. 

necros, what is the idea behind the map? is the structure part of something? 

it's a giant machine. the area in the screenshot is the very top (or back) of the machine and it's purpose it to drill into the ground.
after the drilling has been done, and the machine moves downwards, workers at the top would then build a smaller metal passage way anchored to the sides of the shaft that was dug. (you can see the rebar of the unfinished metal tube that grahf was asking about)
it was built in a hurry by mercenaries hence the exposed machinery and wiring. 

Necros, OMG that is awesome :D I was half expecting the usual 'oh its just a series of platforms with a hole in the middle' but you actually have a reason for it all, total respect :D I love the history to it as well. 

yeah, i normally don't really do that, but i was reading WoT when i started, and i felt it could be interesting to come up with a history and a series of events before the player even gets there. 

Try and come up with something to stop myself losing interest - just laying brushes. 

makes the environments feel so much more believable. 

The trouble with back story is how to tell the player about it. Players don't read text files and they don't like text on the screen so you pretty much have to tell it visually these days. Give them information via environmental clues and let them fill it in, IMO. 

I'm not sure I approve of pandering to idiocy and an inability to process non-spoonfed concepts... 

I think we're off track. What I'm saying is that people like to process things visually. Show me blood splattered on the walls, some dead bodies, a shattered computer monitor and a word scrawled in blood - I'll figure out what happened. I don't want to read a text file explaining what happened in that room, necessarily.

How is that pandering to idiocy? 

What I had for warp up and bundled it anyway. The kind of elaborate set pieces you describe were missing though. I'd see that as more Doom3 territory - drag marks and so on.

Having said that I'm experimenting with some npc ideas, and map objects are always useful. 

Large screenshots so you can have a good look.
http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/maps_q3/moteof1ca1l_1024.jpg
http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/maps_q3/moteof1ca2l_1024.jpg
(take off the _1024 for smaller)

What do you think the central object is?

I ask this question because the object does have a function as part of a puzzle but I have been trying for several days to make it graphically recognizable to its purpose. (This is version 3 btw)

So what is it? What do you think it does?