The word/role level design is used differently at different companies. Often these days it's split into different parts so that building the level and doing the scripting is different jobs. And the building part will look very different too, a lot of the pretty geometry may be done by an "environment artist" and not the "level designer".

So you don't really have to learn lua or some other form of scripting unless that's the part of levels you want to work with. 

Yeah my passion is very much about building the level, scripting and gameplay. Art is a necessary evil to make it presentable :p 

Hey, I've just got that crazy idea about remaking original quake maps (few maps, episode, all episodes?) with alternative paths :). Quake community did a lot of weird things in last 15 years, why not make a campaign, or whatever you call it with old single player maps reworked, so the are not linear, or at least you can finish a level by more then one way. It could be cool, as it doesn't require as much work as making new sp maps, and it still could be really cool, with new places, new paths, secrets and stuff. I would like to see every map to be possible to finish in at least 3 different ways, so you can play and experience sinle maps few times, and it would be different all the time :). Probably just crazy idea, but you never know... 

 

i had a similar idea to remake episode 1 with the exact reverse player progression: every exit becomes a start, and the start points become exits, and you work your way from e1m7 back down to e1m1 ... maybe even repurpose start.bsp as a boss arena. 

That would be ... how would that work? 

We once had a speedmap pack where we reversed maps. Or remixed them, can't remember. I made one start on its end but only implemented a small part of the rest. I loved that idea and it very interesting. 

well, it would definitely require some creative adaptation, like moving keys around, adding buttons or triggers, etc. 

here's a map you can try out: http://necros.quaddicted.com/downloads/ne_qep1_ext.zip

it has the same basic structure as that ne_qep1 map i made a year or so ago. it is e1m1->e1m7 glued together into one giant map, except this version has a huge outdoor area built around the original maps to connect them together and the path to the end is different.

there's no source map in there, though... this map's source was lost last year when my hdd died so it will never be finished (there were a bunch of areas that are unfinished) but it's playable to the end, at least. 

please note, the above map may not have enough ammo to complete...

it was originally going to be for that melee mod i've been trying to make. in the old version of the melee mod, it played a lot more like an rpg game... sort of like a 3d 1st person diablo, really. you had to level up by killing monsters or getting secrets, so most of the monsters were placed without any thought for ammo since the player was using mana that recharged and a melee weapon. 

one last thing: the map is only fast vised.
since the map source was gone, i couldn't generate a new .prt file for a new vis session.

bsp2prt just plain crashed (i guess the map is too big?) and the quakeforge bsp, while successful as creating a prt, the prt was not compatible with aguirre's vis and the quakeforge vis crashed trying to vis with the prt file. so yeah, epic failure. :) 

bjp's bspinfo -prt 

well, i'll upload a full vis when it finishes. :P

thanks random nameless person. 

99% of crashed hdd's can be recovered necros, if it's got stuff u really wanted on it. 

bloody hell that is fantastic!

dz: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/ne_qep1_ext-Feb-09-2011-224403-SpiritQuaddict.dz

ugly sunlight in the outside parts though. 

i've been thinking of doing another one like that for ep3 or 4. it's really a lot of fun to do, if anyone else is interested in trying. just grab the id map sources (romero's link is dead?) and start copy/pasting away. ^_^ 

here's the map again: http://necros.quaddicted.com/downloads/ne_qep1_ext.zip

same link as before, but i replaced the file.

vis, level4 + light, extra4
runs a lot better.

btw, thanks for the demo, spirit. that was fun but fiends ate you! :D 

..is there some sort of new levels ?
or is only a collage of pre-existent parts?

can you explain better the "alternate paths" ?

these type of works are not my cup of
tea(reminds me of a mod called "E5") ..anyway I'll take a look 

map is utterly awesome up to the end of gloom keep, but e1m6 is almost completely unplayable as it appears to have been rotated 90 degrees without most of the door & teleport destination angles being adjusted accordingly. it's first noticeable at the silver key door and every door after it does the same :(

gold key bridge didn't work either and the hallway crusher was ~128 units out. and i couldn't work out how to exit after killing chthon? the usual teleporter leads back to grisly grotto (where the ziggurat vertigo entrance normally is)

such a shame as i was loving it up until then.. great fun to explore and quite a headfuck in places seeing all those familiar places from different perspectives. would have loved to see the big outdoor areas more polished though (the rock surfaces in particular) as well as the new link-up areas

the thing putting me off from trying it is how much tweaking to the architecture i'd want to do and i'd be too tempted to redesign whole rooms a la rmq :) 

sorry about that. :( like i said, it's unfinished. after you reach e1m6, it's pretty much exactly the same, except it was rotated and none of the doors were realigned.

as an aside, i looked over the e2, e3 and e4 maps and i didn't get the urge to combine them... i think it's because i am exponentially more familiar with e1. you gotta know the maps almost by heart if you're going to integrate them together. :S 

I had some fun playing your map. There wasn't much problem with ammo but I have used all possible secrets. I forgot to record a demo. Killed 309 monsters on hard skill. 

one time I thought I would combine all the non-base e2 maps (or even all of them period) into "the TOWER of black magic," literally stack them all up and remake them all in one map in modern style. but I'm not thinking that now. 

yeah, i would strongly suggest against that. mainly because bringing the id maps up to modern standards, no, up to 'clean brushwork' standards alone, is a monumental task.

e1 seemed the cleanest built of the 4 episodes. take a peek at e2m2 or e3m1... they are brutal and getting them to work with modern styles would basically mean rebuilding almost everything.

i suppose, if, after you had everything set up properly, you went from start to finish, room by room, rebuilding and then deleting the old version, it might be possible, but very very slow work, i suspect.
if you like building details, you might enjoy it, otherwise it'll likely get boring.

also, something of note is that, on average, the ep2,3 and 4 maps seem larger than e1 maps so a full combination may not be possible... i recall qep1 was pretty up there in vertices and clipnodes.
otoh, if you clean up the brushwork, you can probably reduce clipnodes and vertices by at least 30% and that is a pessimistic estimate. 

I've got e3m2 and e3m3 rebuilt and connected, e3m7 is connected and partially rebuilt, with backwards access to e3m3 via a remake of a section of e3m6. I just need to find a suitable end arena...Penile Devastation perhaps? Anyhoo, much larger than this and limits start to become a problem. If I can get it all glued together Necros, how do you feel about dropping in the gameplay? 

that sounds impressive. :)

sure, yeah, if you get the brushwork together, i think i could put some monsters in.