I've replayed my speedmaps recently. Some are better than I thought, and most are much worse. Pretty much all of them are ridiclously hard - 60 monsters in such small maps, what was I thinking). And the humor in some of them is beyond lame, yeah.

The most obvious thing going on when playing one's old maps is realizing their shortcomings, like Trinca said, and how one would build it differently. 

I also think that the fact that you guys play others games help a lot in inspiration!

In my case i dont play others games because of my very limited time :\ i wish i had more time to play others games and map more :\

But in the other hand i�m very glad of my life, i love my kids and my wife ;)

I will keep mapping for Quake but this year and next will be hard for me to release anything, only speedmaps... full map i dont have the time and the will. 

joyfully playing my own map again then seeing it quoted by someone who HAS to do the job. 

Has anyone gotten Wordcraft/Hammer to run well on Linux? 

Getting it to run on windows - no joke.

It's got a very nice interface but if you're looking for editors I'd suggest going for another one, maybe QuArK. Which is multiplatform AFAIK. 

It is not and it is an editor that makes it too easy to screw up (and likes to do that by itself just to annoy you). 

I've had no problems with it on windows. I know Radiant works on Linux but I've been using WC for years and it's what I'm comfortable with.

I have Quark but it runs slower than WC. I'm just wondering as I'm looking to switch to linux. 

I'm still looking for a solution to the 'no 3d selection' issue - There are dll's that can be used but they screw up the texture rendering. 

Radiant and Quest run natively under Linux.

Several others run under wine (pretty well actually), if that floats your boat.

I'll learn Radiant soon anyway. 

I fucking love replaying 90% of my old speed maps. I never get tired of them, and I don't look at them critically (probably because I haven't improved much, if at all). 

Full: 75.01%, Elapsed:307h 39m, Left:482h 54m, Total:790h 33m, 38% 

Is it really worth the full vis? After all the map is very open. 

It'll still have an extremly high polycount, but even if the fullvis can only lower it slightly, it'll be worth it. 2000 is better than 4000. 

your computer will burn :|

make a backup of everything NOWWWWWW 

I wonder what the magic breaking point is for VIS. My latest map has gotten larger and is still VIS'ing in under 5 minutes. It has one huge room in it with lots of detail but even that doesn't seem to daunt VIS... 

It scales up exponentially. A single room (how huge is huge in Quake terms) might work, but if most or all geometry is inside a single volume like in a space map, it creates a multitude of portals. There's one for every little edge and slope and all they also affect each other.

http://negke.quaddicted.com/images/coag_prt1.jpg
http://negke.quaddicted.com/images/coag_prt2.jpg

Note the portal jungle in the upper half. 

CDA seems near the magic breaking point, if anything.

That suggests if your map is one large sandbox with all structures open to it, and some triangle mesh etc perhaps, you might have good chances. 

wow, just saw those numbers. You love pain, right. 

get the urge to leave... 

Multithreaded VIS on 8-core Nehalems will make this problem pretty much go away. Remember, id had to use the most badass Alpha hardware available in '96 to compile their Quake maps.

or you know, detail brushes. 

or use Doom 3, no more vis. 

yeah, whatever you say about the lighting, the visibility system in doom3 is badass. 

What system resources uses Vis anyway ?
Does it help to have lots of memory and a good processor or could you just as well run it on a Pentium 1 from the old Quake days ? 

VIS process needs memory and a fast processor to limit its runtime.
It is based onto a recursive algorithm (a kind of "turtle" algorithm)... the faster the CPU will be, the less consuming the VIS runtime will be.. Having GBs of RAM will not help, as I don't think the process needs it... though...
But in anyway, VIS process is the evil one in the Quake map building flow :( 

Also, VIS benefits greatly from multithreading since each leaf can be processed independently of each other (which is how id ran theirs on their Alpha machines). I've enabled this in my Mac version of the tool but I don't think any Windows versions exist like that.