also, mapping for pk looks to be very difficult, considering the whole game was designed in maya... :(

That'd be fine, if they released the tools that they used or whatever you need to get a file from maya into their own formats etc. It is my understanding that they haven't done that and won't be doing so, correct me if I'm wrong. 

to be precise, they haven't done that, and won't be doing so for a little while.

i've heard the PCF guys saying that 'later' they will release some SDK stuff. The map editor plugin things should come before that though. I don't have any specific dates though. 

this thread is interesting

i for one would love some of the old quake mapppers to make some 2k4 maps, the really "hardcore" mappers in ut that make duel/dm maps have zero clue whatsoever.. there are no maps along the lines of anything on prominence (just an example, i was browsing that particular site reminissing a few days ago).. unreal maps blow as far as gameplay is concerned, and user maps blow harder as a general rule. of course the games are completly different so youd expect a fair few differences, but come on.. some nice atrium maps wouldnt go astray, the majority seem to be locked into 2 floors only, and teleporters are a nono (apparently cliffyb said they were bad for flow once, so noone uses them)

blah

thanks for letting me bitch :) 

"I don't have any specific dates though."

Never believe what A.Ch. says =) 

"thats the problem with many games - restrictive gameplay. Add restrictive style and you got it - game with not much freedom for creative maps"

Bullshit. There is no restrictive style. You can make anything you want with the bits there. Games are not restrictive. People are restrictive. Consider RtCW, I don't know the maps, but I don't remember Raiders of the Lost Ark seeming like a typical WW2 movie and that had Nazis in it. I can see it a concievable fantasy to have Nazis on spaceships. Put them in a Coagula map if you can make it fun, if I even had the game I'd be as likely to play that as anything else... add a few raves for the map (yeah right) and I might even go get the game. And if you don't want Nazis, it's still got to be a better starting point for SP than Q3A (or Q2??? ;) ).

Similarly, so called quality standards are a weird thing with respect to Quake, it's not that hard to use a newer engine to make something that looks as good as Quake. But even if you can make a more fun map than any so far for the game you're mapping for, people would be far more likely to play a Quake level unless you pander to the wishes of the masses.

There's tons of mapping for newer games, but none of this is single player. I and others have gone through the weaknesses of the games that remain.

As to Unreal editors, I haven't used others, but UED seems like an elegant if twitchy interface, and it is prone to building errors in complex maps. UED2 comes more highly recommended (for UT, UTSP). Lots of experimentation needed to make things work due to documentation, but I'm sure that's true somewhat elsewhere too. I think there's a lot to improve on in Unreal because originally it had to be crippled to run on the PCs of the time, not that anyone else agrees with me on what those things are... 

necros: the stuff they're releasing later allows mod creation, and people to change the entities within preexisting levels, but not create new maps. 

but there has been some mention from the devs that they are thinking of releasing plugins to export maya format as map files, then to use their editor to add items and monsters.
it was really just idle talk, but that was a month or so ago. i don't know what their stance on the issue is right now. 

But spentron, if you made a spaceship map for RtCW, nobody would play it. You would get laughed out of the community.

You can't throw in all sorts of crazy verticals either. No efficient means of travelling other than running and jumping limits what you can do with the map. In RtCW, you can't really do much with the Z-axis as far as gameplay is concerned.

Another problem is making sure all classes and etc functions. If you want the classes to all work, you have to provide space and the capability for them all. For example, a spaceship map would not have any way for a mortar cannon to work, and would probably eliminate snipers and machineguns too, due to the confined spaces. The map would lose appeal pretty quickly.

Of course, I could be entirely wrong. But with a WWII theme, almost all maps are constrained to a WWII, or a believable setting. With Quake, we've seen it all so many times that there's no 'preset' that a quake maps fall into. There are plenty of dark military bases, void maps, outdoors romps, abandoned factories, WWII, WWI, modern-day settings. There's complete fantasy. It's all much more wide open, and because the monsters are so very generic you can use them in almost any map. If you are doing a medieval theme, fiends and ogres don't stick out very much, as well as knights and hellknights and scrags. Even Mr. Whitey works. Take it to space, and again the fiends, ogres, enforcers, hellknights, and shambly all seem right at home. WWII setting? Just use massed amounts of grunts for some mindless killing, and ogres and dogs with the rare fiend thrown in. It's all pretty flexible.

If you want to have a reasonable experience with, say, RtCW, you can't do that. You can't build a spaceship and slap Nazis in it without feeling somewhat corny about it.

And I still stick to my reason for not using UED: It's a dumb editor to learn, the instructions blow for absolute beginners. It looks pretty w3wt for experienced mappers, but getting the experience has been a very frustrating event thus far. 

i had once toyed with the idea of editing all the nazi skins and simply removing any nazi emblems. would have made them much more generic soldiers, of course, there was still the sounds...

i think it would be kind of cool to do like some hellish theme and throw in those wierd mutant monsters and the zombie monsters. that would look kind of cool. you'd need a bit of tech in there to make the electricity mutant monster fit in, but it could work... 

Did they ever release the rtcw sp gamecode? If they had it would have been a usefull platform for interesting sp but I don't think remember them doing so. 

Von Braun and stylize the ships and the like along Nazi engineering aesthetics, you could do it without fetching the story too far given there is nothing 'realistic' about Third Reich Necromatic experimentations. It is just a matter of applying a disciplined frame work around your speculative fictions.

As far as Z limitations. That sounds weird. I haven't played or mapped for ROTW but why would there be restrictions in the z-axis whereas they don't exist in other Quake Arena engine based games, and it would be odd to cripple the functionality without any compreable advantage. 

But spentron, if you made a spaceship map for RtCW, nobody would play it. You would get laughed out of the community.

Yes you would, but the joke would be on who? The problem is these communities define themselves as much as what they are not as by what they are. For example the people into pure action went to Quake, so all those into environment gravitated to Unreal, yes the two games started out different but the difference deepened... when techically and game-element wise they are no more different than a Mac and a PC.

Z-axis limitations, are you saying there's no elevators (or jumppads ;) )? Some of the greatest Z-axis action in Quake maps are pure idbase with only base enemy and elevators aren't needed for upward-overlapping layouts to be an SP staple either. Big dark evil factories with lots of walkways and other verts would fit RtCW. I didn't know about the cannons but docking bays are big in SF.

Actually I got into Unreal editing because it was so *easy* to get started but then I decided it was a good thing. I chronicled some of the things I found out but saw nowhere else at the bottom of http://www.intergate.com/~spentron/unreal/ 

Actually I think it can be resonable to make nazis on spaceship, i.e. Some nazi scientists/armies were able to escape the down of 3rd Empire in 1945 and ran into some secret military installation to do some research...OK, after 10/20/30 years they built a space ship and you were sent to...blahblahblah

UED may seem strange to radiant/wc users, but I think you can get customed after building some levels. 

The boss monster could be an Artifical Intelligence that arose from the Enigma Project -- 

Bullshit. There is no restrictive style. You can make anything you want with the bits there. Games are not restrictive. People are restrictive.

AMEN to that! That should be put beneath the func_qmap logo as a reminderary motto for all to see.

Wildsnake, he was talking about an SP map not DM so all your z-axis stuff is off target. 

Having a little discussion with a friend, and showing him my WIP add-on, and then showing him Kinn's Marcher Fortress...

J'tal: you offer the addon free right?
i'm just wondering how big ist he q1 fan base? huge? because this is pretty amazing for quake one you know? if you can find a good engine group that augmented the quake 1 engine you can score big
Phait: i can't charge for the addon that's not legal.. it's not a standalone game,e ven if it was i'd have to license the q1 engine i believe
Phait: and yeah theres plenty people interested.. been a strong community for years here with better work than i do - http://www.celephais.net/board/
J'tal: q1 is open source now, but yeah i guess under something you can't charge.. celephais...hmm
Phait: func_msgboard , previously qmap
Phait: kinn's http://kinn.spawnpoint.org/maps/marcher01.jpg
Phait: everyone loved
Phait: actually inspired me to do this
J'tal: thats obviously photo editted or haxed
J'tal: with ease
J'tal: it can'tbe q1
Phait: it is not
Phait: i've played it
J'tal: HAXXXXXX I SAID
Phait: just use an engine that supports skybox
Phait: thats about it
Phait: quake is more capable than people give credit for
Phait: w/ the power of the past few years you can build things bigger and more detailed
J'tal: yeah i've seen people AUGMENT the engine in amazing ways, but not map for it in such ways
Phait: well there isn't much diff from plain quake in that map, just skybox and maybe a few object limits bumped up -- still
Phait: what i'm doing is just architecture, not environmental or landmark stuff
Phait: heh people.. man.. pretentious people
J'tal: i'm still boggled...they should move to like farcry, doom3...you know...they can be fucking gods
Phait: they don't want to be gods - people work with Q1 because there is no other game like it. it even has thematic variety - at least as much variety you can get in so many hues of brown..
Phait: people work with it Q1 because it's a classic, or because the concept and gameplay are relatively simple to work with - or because it's simple, funner
Phait: the guys there work with other more recent games too.. but the quake series seems to have the most loyal following
...
J'tal: amen dman...games need to go back to games and not work
...
Phait: (quote: "It really comes down to the editor and the engine. Quake is simple. The tools are all straight foward, and the engine is simple. You have entities, textures, and brushes. That is all you really have to worry about in Quake. In the newer games you have the technology to restless with.")
J'tal:
its true...damn....man maybe thats why people take quake 1 source and modify

Bleh! 

had an extension to evolutionary biology. Seems can't find him in wikipedia. 

That conversation seems familiar, I have had it a few times with a friend who is always trying to rescue me from Quake mapping by telling me that I could make the stuff so much more realistic if I used a newer game.

I have tried explaining that it is the simplicity and limitations of the Quake engine that make it so versatile and enjoyable to work with, but he just doesn't seem to understand.

So normally I just pull out something like DarkPlaces for him to play various maps of mine in, the coloured lighting seems to make him happy. ;) 

I really miss in quake isn't coloured lighting, it's curved surfaces. And a higher texture resolution. So two things.

Which maybe there are newfangled engines that can do. 

DarkPlaces supports the Q3 bsp format, so yes, curved surfaces and purdy textures are available if you're into DP. 

thanks for the heads up.

although this is another thing that plays against quake1. a plethora of engines. some support this, some support that. end user qa is hell. unless you just go "this map is for fitzquake, this is for dp, and fuck you very much if you don't like it." but that makes the whole affair feel all fiddle faddle foo.

alas, such is progress. 

If you can package the engine and required files etc. into the map download, then I can't see how people can complain too much (some always will though). 

www.unrealsp.org

Another group of people stick to old school style...though I guess most people here heard about this site. 

longtimenosee 

It's my first year in Canada so I don't much leisure time :D

Really nice to see you guys again :P