There's Tronyn Reviews @ quaddicted.com at the moment, for Quake 1, though he doesn't review every single map AFAIK (most though). But since Underworld Fan gave up the job about 5 years ago, there hasn't been a dedicated review site, only the reviews on Quaddicted (long live Spirit, Tronyn etc and thank goodness they were there the last five years) dot com.

So a new Quake review site isn't such a bad thing. I mean I take it that this site has sprung up amidst all of the buzz around Trenchbroom, but I hope it's not just for Trenchbroom maps.

There are a lot of mappers still mapping for Quake (the flow of Quake 1 maps never stopped completely, though it did slow some), and with BSP2 now accessible there is scope for some of the biggest and baddest maps to date. I personally think that Quake has yet to peak. There's something inherantly attractive about one person being able to develop a whole map or episode for a true 3D game like Quake. Because Quake is fairly low res and simple, and doesn't require a degree in Lua to 'script' for, not to mention the voice actors and modellers etc etc, and because the ceiling for large maps has just been raised to four times the height it was before I really think that the best has still to come....

But no - two quastions:

1 - Is the site exclusive to Trenchbroom Maps
because the majority of Quake mappers have yet to adopt it (not saying they wont, but it's abig transition))(I'm guessing not)

2 - Who will review the maps?
Will there be a community scoring system?
Will there be one person who reviews the maps (this has positives and negatives - positives being that 1 persons POV is a solid thing (i.e. the Tronyn benchmark - "I usually like the same maps he likes, so this one must be good"), negatives being an individuals bias potential)

3 - I like Deqer now, Deqer sorry for swearing at you and being a bit mean, I felt bad once I read your subsequent messages and realised you were sincere in your messages and your enthusiasm for Quake/dev. 

It will actually be cool if hakkarin reviews new maps without knowing about an authors previous maps.

Like a lot of us will know that some mappers work is going to always be awesome, and expect nothing less, but someone who hasn't played all of them and doesn't know all of the various mappers and their work will have no preconceptions based upon the name. That would be cool.

This should probably get moved to another thread.

hakkarin - please create a news post in the News section, it will go out over RSS for starters, and it will stop us from having the rest of this discussion on the Trenchbroom thread :) I feel it could be a lengthy one. 

I am personally not a fan of scoring at all. I prefer in-depth textual reviews such as the ones on TeamShambler or The Ramshackle. I realize those sites had ratings, but personally I don't think it's necessary.

The problem with ratings is that they don't serve much of a purpose (unless you're running Quaddicted and want to be able to sort the maps by them) and they instantly spark debate. I would much rather read a detailed analysis for certain aspects of a map (item placement, architecture and so on) than get a short description of the map and rating.

Ricky, a community scoring system makes sense on Quaddicted, but not so much on a review site IMHO.

That said, I say let hakkarin figure it out by himself. He hasn't written a single review yet and we're already meddling with it ;-) 

The thing with long and wordy reviews is that in my opinion they only really entertain the writer and the map author. I play a map or I don't. Reading a long review does not affect me in that decision.

Great to see a new face/nick, welcome hakkarin! 

I did as you guys suggested and posted about the new site in the news, though the post hasn't be approved yet. And no, there is no rule that demands that maps must be made with TrenchBroom in order to be reviewed. And yes I will have scores on the site because who doesn't love em? There will still actual written reviews as well though, because having only numbers as scores would be very boring :) 

Oh and if I could turn back time, Quaddicted would use a much reduced scale for ratings, 1 to 3 as in "no", "try", "play it". 

Personally I am more interested in in-depth analysis of someone with a deep understanding of level design / game flow / etc. than I am in reading a short review. I don't need scores to tell me to play or not to play a map - come on, it's not like we get bombarded with new maps and have to choose, right? 

The trouble that I've seen with wordy review sites is that they tend to start treading the same ground and start using the same phrases over and over. Which is understandable given the subject matter but it is witheringly difficult to give a fresh and in-depth critique to each and every map. Maybe if there was a team of writers or something who could switch off map reviews... 

I always enjoy reading well-written reviews, having another person deconstruct your work is always a great way to learn and improve. I don't mind rating systems as long as it's a good representation of the opinion of the reviewer and not some pseudo-scientific calculation (1-5 star reviews are good, like the old CVG reviews) 

 

And what Palette?

Finding it difficult to assign different ones to the various groupings. 

Not sure what exactly you're asking, but maybe these links will help:
Quake palette: http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/wad_conv/palette.html

The color codes for Quake palette: http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/wad_conv/quakepal.txt 

Got it.

Fgd uses rgb 0-255 while Def uses 0-1.

So all the worldcraft values are invalid - any number at all clamps to 100%.

Fixing. 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dqnm02pth5313sd/Quake.fgd

This uses the 0-1 colour scale.

However, in order to read future fgd's out of the box, without having to convert by hand, you might want to consider reading their native 0-255 rgb format.

In regard to how I grouped things, I tried to make it forwards compatible with any new entities a modder might require:

Logic - white
Dangerous Stuff - Orange
Atmosphere, lighting - Yellow
Misc - Turquoise
Pathing - Purple
Collectables - Blue
Ammo - Dark Purple
Players / Camera - Green

The sub groupings of stuff have slight variations within those broad colours.

I'll do the Quoth one if you decide to keep the 0-1 colour format, along with some cleanup to make them easier to read. 

Thanks, I've been looking for a colour key for ages since a link I had to an image was lost when a site closed.

That .txt colour readout is going to be very useful. 

I would actually prefer the. In the native values. I can fix that very quickly. 

I thought so. It took me longer to figure out why it was displaying weirdly, and even then not long either so no problem. 

The website is now more or less ready and I included a link on it to TrenchBroom's own homepage. 

ok, so last night I changed a value in LinuxCapabilities to force 24bit z-buffer on my laptop and the z-buffer started to work normally.

I was knackered from a long cycle trip, so that's all I did, but next time I get a chance, I'll have a better look at that file and see if I can figure out if I can fix it so that it works without forced value setting. If not, at least I have a build that I can probably use now :) 

Yup, that's what I suspected. Thanks! 

- Fixed a crash when undoing edge and face move operations.
- Improved map loading speed.
- Improved accuracy of vertex computation.
- Added antialiasing for grid lines (rebb).
- Thin out grid lines after a certain distance (rebb).
- Draw thinner grid lines for small grid sizes.
- Added face shading depending on view direction (rebb).
- Fixed a performance problem when editing face attributes.
- Place initial brush in new maps and make the camera look at it.
- Position pasted objects so that they line up with objects under the mouse cursor.
- Added option to use Alt+MMB to move the camera forward and backward.
- Fixed parsing of color values in FGD files.
- Improved Quake.fgd and Quoth2.fgd.
- Updated and fixed some errors in the documentation. 

Cool, you updated your website too with the latest version. You compiled the binaries for me! Yay! 

on my machine. I have microsoft sidewinder mouse.

Also was there something wrong with the brush creation / vertex manip on version 1 that the editor now picks up a couple of brushes in my map and deletes them because they're invalid?

Vertex manip seems better, like the shading, no longer have the map loading speed problems I had before, better grid etc.

It's definitely all-round better. 

You must activate Alt+MMB drag in the preferences. It is mainly targeted at Wacom Tablet users though.

Regarding the brushes, send me the map file please so that I can test it. The whole vertices vs. face planes issue is still not quite resolved in TrenchBroom, but I'm working towards it so that these things can happen. That said, maybe I fucked something up, so make sure to open a bug and paste the file there. 

even though I checked the box in preferences, I even updated my mouse drivers.

I'll send you a private link to the map file, it's not quite finished yet (still a ways to go!).