and Zwiffle is my bitch!!! 

Zwiffle, you can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny. Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son. 

cheers ricky.

actually i just remembered i did some maps for doom2... that must be going back a ways!

i've long forgotten how to use worldcraft, lol. haven't touched it since the end of 2003, 4.5 years ago! the only thing that sparked my interest was the possible involvement in mindcrime's big project after nehahra. i guess that will never see the light of day though :o 

We didnt even have editors, we just wrote .map files with notepad! 

I remember playing 1 or 2 maps that were made with a text editor (some maps by DaBug I think), and I was really impressed. It must have taken a fair bit of brain power and dedication to produce a playable map of any sort, let alone a half-decent one, without a graphical editor. 

I remember that whole phase happening before real editors appeared. I took one look at that and said, "No thanks". :) 

I doubt they used a text editor to make the maps, although I guess it's possible....

I remember reading they used p300mhz machines with 64 mb of ram and thinking "oooh!" 

They used QuakeEd which is what QERadient was derived from. 

I remember having a like 50 meg harddrive, I had just finished a level (aerowalk) and was going to plug in my headset, suddenly there was a static sound *bzzzt* *silence* My harddrive had gone into brick mode :P

Lost everything and had to redo the map from scratch. It improved greatly the second time around though :)

Lesson learned, always do a quick draft first of any dm level to get the basic layout and flow mapped out, throw it away and do it right :) 

http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html
They surely had no 300MHz machines for Quake. Rather something from the 75-133MHz range. 

Lesson learned, always do a quick draft first of any dm level to get the basic layout and flow mapped out, throw it away and do it right :)

Wisdom.

Plus, if you know you're going to throw it out and redo it right, you can just map in a box and not care about overlap and gaps and all variety of technical ugliness and you can crank out multiple layouts, versions, and changes in a matter of minutes.

It deactivates your inner technician and frees up the artist to throw pigment at the wall as desired...

Also, I'm with Willem--no text editing for me. I wanted to make maps, but was/am way too lazy for that kind of tediousity. :) 

Do you know, I never believed anybody actually composed whole maps using text editors. Editors were available from the start so I cannot understand anyone doing it willingly, Utter massok... mascichi... massuc... nutters! 

Yeah, the 'ol map-in-a-box is a really good technique.

I would add though that it might be a good idea to do a room or two (perhaps separately ) early on to flesh out the style of the map both texture wise and architectually since it can inspire stuff in the general layout (even though you're not filling out all the details in the beginning)

Stuff like trim's doorways, general theme etc 

argue that the theme makes you think in certain directions, thus making your layout a tiny bit worse than if you would be free to think in all directions ;-)

It helps a lot with detailing later though :( 

Editors were available from the start

Not from what I can remember or maybe I'm wrong. I know that id released the tools after a few weeks and then people starting releasing editors some time after that but it wasn't from the start at all. id's editor only ran on NextStep at the time (written in Objective-C) so it certainly wasn't a simple matter of recompiling it on Windows.

argue that the theme makes you think in certain directions, thus making your layout a tiny bit worse than if you would be free to think in all directions ;-)

It helps a lot with detailing later though :(
I like this discussion. :) I think you're right. Theme can be somewhat limiting but I'm a sucker for graphics. I can't really work on a level unless I know what it's going to look like. I need to lay down at least a medium level of detail so I can envision what's going on and see how it fits together.

I'm learning to do the rough shelling stuff first as a result of how we work on Gears of War, but it's harder in Quake for me since the simple shell is generally the final architecture as well. :) 

i dunno, is there such a thing as layout in abstraction? In general having a theme like "city like level" "mountain-level", "underwater base" etc will need to be tightly integrated with the layout and architecture and isnt something you simply "paint" on in the end

Another thing I can recommend btw, is mapping out a couple of "trick" areas separately. In general layout should be done as whole but these areas tend to give a level it's character so they're worth getting right first and then connecting them with the rest of the layout 

That's true but I think the point is that once you have a basic understanding of how wide your hallways are, how large your door frames are, etc. you shouldn't get hung up on visuals and just lay out areas quickly so you can iterate the gameplay with minimal hassles. 

...is close enough to the start for me.

But there's an ineresting point, which was the first freely available Quake editor? The first BspEditor that I have is dated 12/96 (v0.67)and that was not the first editor I had been playing with. I remember Thred, Stone, QuArK, The Forge (09/96).

Who can place the earliest i.e. closest to the June 96 release of Quake? Shambler, you must have been a spotty oik around that time, you must know. 

A few weeks is forever when you're a Doom level designer wanting to make Quake maps. Believe me, every day was torture. 

Spotty oik, haha. I was relatively late to Quake itself, 1997-98. 

a theme like "city like level" "mountain-level", "underwater base" etc will need to be tightly integrated with the layout

in dm you simply can't apply such a strong theme to good success, unless the gameplay is made to play great in the kind of architecture the theme implies anyways.

I wasted years trying to detail my maps within such a nice theme always getting stuck at one point or the other ;-) 

preacher_ where is waterwalk? :) 

Sorry, but that shows what effect you have had on the community - it's like you've been here forever :-) 

>preacher_ where is waterwalk? :)

the layout sucked, unfortunately, and had to be scrapped 

Man, I remember reviewing Aerowalk for MPQ back in the day. Great memories!