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 

I've just posted a short rant/article on why I am mapping for Quake (instead of mapping for newer games) as an entry to my blog: http://dnaumov.blogspot.com/2005/08/why-i-make-quake-maps.html 

Er..
and most maps were in the 150-200 polygon/scene range. Today you can play it at 1600x1200, in full OpenGL glory with custom map projects pushing 1500 polygons/scene

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, your numbers are way low. When brushes are split (into polys, right?) in the original id maps - they were over 1,000 - that's 1996. Today people are pushing over 2500 - 5000.

Or if I'm entirely wrong, let me know. 

I was talking r_speeds. 

I didn't see r_speeds anywhere in the article ;) 

That's the most elucidating thing I've ever seen you write. While posting it to the regulars here may be preaching to the converted, it's a good summation. n1

Oh and, two of your paragraph tags seem to be missing ( Easy to get into and Cult following ) 

This rant was not aimed at the experienced mapper demographic, but that non-mapping people with some understanding of games and mappers for newer engines. Anyways, what are r_speeds if not the world geometry polygon count drawn by the engine? 

Working on a map alone: one of the problems with newer games (think Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and the like) is that in order to make a decent custom map, the designer has to be a level designer, texture artist, modeller, programmer jack-of-all-trades. Basically, unless you are multi-talented you are going to need lots of help from other people. With Quake you can make great stuff with just the level designer skillset (although programming experience could come handy if you are working on a project of big scale) and focus on the gameplay.

I've been thinking about this lately. Are there any q1 map collectives out there still? Working on a pack using a professional approach to it would be a good primer for aspiring amateurs, and great fun to boot. It's a very useful experience, working several mappers on the same map, trading tasks, playing to the strengths of the members, and whatnot.

(AFAIK, dapak was every man for himself, as it were.)