Shadow Politics was a good ride, so I'm definitely looking forward to both the new Thief and Quake projects. 

skacky: Nice to see you here at func, hope you enjoy the stay, a different crowd to mapcore, much more game play focused..

It is hard to go wrong with the Kell texture set (beautiful artwork) but the greatest strength is also its greatest weakness, books books and more books! The spiral bookcases always look amazing (screenshot 4) and towering bookcases in some of the screenshots look epic.

I like screenshot 2 best because it has nice variety of floor heights and it feels like the fight with the ogre/fiend could be interesting. I like the additions of the flesh and mouth in the last screenshot and it is certainly a better direction than every wall being books.

The lighting seems to lack any kind of hotness and is either very dark near the sky (screenshot 5) or the central areas (screenshot 3) have a high ambient light making the center of the room look flat. 

http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/sp/its3.jpg
(large image 1.86Mb)

doodling on my start map, any feedback on lighting? things you don't like? nitpicks? all are welcome ... 

The lighting looks like a big improvement - much more sourced, gloomy, etc. The ceilings, especially in the last shot, look good. Style looks like a very tight expansion on classic Quake theme with no distance at all between concept, textures and architecture. My only request is for there to be one outdoor area in that theme, even if it's a secret area or only at the end. 

Not sure I am sold on those which house that fiend. Prefer the thinner bars found in honey etc perhaps. I think other than that my thoughts are identical to those offered by tronyn. 

I rescind my former statement about the fiend cage thing. 

looks sexy as fuck, sock. i don't mind the thick bars. 

That looks awesome! I like the Fiend cage and I don't mind the thick bars as well. The architecture looks mighty complicated, especially in the first and third pictures.

About the Knave texture set, I agree bookcases are its greatest strength and weakness, and I got a bit overzealous with them at times since I tend to dislike 64*64 tiling textures. :P
I'm trying to break that, though.

As for the lighting it's still very basic for the moment, I haven't used a single light spot for the moment and man do I love these. I'm trying to pinpoint the style as much as I can before working on the lighting properly. I'm also using a 35 minlight but I'm thinking of lowering it to, say, 20 or 18 to have deeper shadows.

Thanks for your feedback everyone! 

Sock: those black triangles can be a real pain in the ass. Sometimes they go away as the map grows. Other times you have to use a sledgehammer: force QBSP to split the face differently. Try if making the conflicting brush not intersect with the adjacent geometry works. If not, you need to ,anually split the face/brush in half (but not in the same way as QBSP does - check with r_showtris) and use a slightly different texture offset or scale (something invisible to the eye, like 1.0001). This often seems to fix it. 

That's space beneath the elevator. 

this tends to be my approach to mapping. doesn't bode well for prolificity 

I'm also using a 35 minlight but I'm thinking of lowering it to, say, 20 or 18 to have deeper shadows.

If at all possible, try not to use minlight at all or use local minlight if you must have it in some areas. :) 

I just finished playing through Fear Perseus Mandate... some great gameplay but the amount of horrible flat ambient light is shocking. Really is something to avoid :E 

I wrote a review for that a long time ago. Sure, the maps were lacking in flair but I enjoyed it more than the the first EP.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/fear-perseus-mandate/reviews/reviewerId,39185/ 

It's cool to hear people like Perseus Mandate, I did a couple of levels for it. FEAR is such a great toolbox for making compelling gunfights.

So much of the art in that game was designer art which is why it looks less than stellar compared to other games from that era.

Your review is really accurate erc :) 

You should be proud of working on it :) Superior to it's parent game in gameplay and pacing which is the key thing. I wanted Fear's combat cranked up and I got it :D

Also the much lower number of horror sequences + the extra length of those that were there meant they worked well as changes of pace and atmosphere, rather than whiplashing you better the two styles like the original does. 

*between 

I've added this little area this afternoon. It's actually the starting area. My map has more than 7,500 brushes no I may need to scrap some ideas and carry them other to another level. I haven't even made the silver and gold key areas yet.

I've also changed my image hoster since imgur blurs my pictures for no reason and they look like ass.

http://uppix.net/1/e/2/6162d433fd88317f079225969d3a0.jpg
http://uppix.net/c/6/6/f56a4e56184b90d4d838889a3af4b.jpg 

brushes aren't really a measure of how close to the limits you are. check out the stuff that qbsp outputs right after compiling (or use bspinfo on a finished .bsp file).

18087 planes 361740
65325 vertexes 783900
29085 nodes 698040
1743 texinfo 69720
56641 faces 1132820
58573 clipnodes 468584
15487 leafs 433636
64691 marksurfaces 129382
236371 surfedges 945484
127066 edges 508264
447 models 28608
96 textures 2493028
lightdata 1639628
visdata 863654
entdata 193675

vertices, clipnodes, faces and marksurfaces are usually the ones to max out first, but sometimes nodes can too. it depends on how you map.

in most (all?) modern engines like fitzquake, the limit for vertices, clipnodes, faces and marksurfaces is 65536.
limit for nodes is 32768.

these limits are actually a limitation of the .bsp format. to go beyond them, you'd need to use bsp2 format, but only the rmq engine can read those atm. (maybe directq as well?) 

limit for nodes is actually: nodes + leafs together must be less than 65536. (in some/most high limits engines) 

Thanks for the info guys. I'm used to Source and its brush limits so I've been quite careful with the complexity of my brushwork since the level is quite big and has a lot of detail.

It compiles well for the moment and I've only reached the node limit because of a leak, so I guess I'm good for the moment as long as I don't make it twice as big. 

sealing the leak will usually net you a lot more room to expand a map because the compiler can remove all the extra faces outside of the map which lowers all the counts (verts, nodes, etc...) quite a bit.

also, hl2 has an explicit limit on the number of brushes?? 

Yeah there's a certain threshold with HL2 you absolutely cannot go past, otherwise you'll get the awesome MAX_MAP_BRUSHES error in your compile window. The limit is something like 8,192 as far as I remember. This happened to me a couple of times, and there's also the t-junction limit that's pretty annoying when your map is full of func_detail.

As far as I remember displacement surfaces are counted as brushes with HL2 but I might be wrong on that one, I haven't used those in a long time. 

I always wondered why hl2 maps tended to be so small, I just figured it was to speed up loading time. I wonder why valve put in an artificial brush limit like that. Did the old id tools have a brush limit?

As far as I know, modern qbsp will accept any number of brushes, it will only halt when you go over a bsp format limit which would not be able to be loaded into an engine anyway. 

I don't know about the old id tools, but I do know that GoldSrc's tools had a similar limit, but 90% of the time you reached the MAX_MAP_CLIPNODES thing before hitting the brush limit anyway, if it wasn't the dreaded Allocblock:full madness that made me ragequit GoldSrc level design at that time.

It's great to hear modern Qbsp can handle a lot of brushes.