There's the classic id texture of machinery that tended to be nearby any button operated door. Replacing it with some rotatings / chains / pistons embedded in the walls and floor.

Good idea. 

even keys are better than buttons that just go "phhhht".

For example in e1m2 there are 3 doors (4 if you count the exit, 5 if you count the fiend cell.)

One is a key door. Another two open magically. The exit opens magically (why is there even a door there...) and the fiend cell, which is not a player-route related door, does have a button which activates some floating blocks. At least. That's a bit thin, but it's enough. OK, it also moves the bars but they're right next to it.

The only other button extends the bridge, which is something I'm willing to assume a button could do. Especially since it's around the corner. A shootable trigger reveals the YA, which is rubbish but acceptable on the basis of being a game. (Human) Armor on some pedestal in the Quake world isn't very likely either.

Some secret doors (really moving walls) open by being shot (could be a breakable) and by approaching/magic. This is pretty much acceptable on the same basis as the YA thing: game gimmick.

Buttons that operate lifts are acceptable based on immediately interacting with something next to it, that obviously uses compressed air or whatever (sound.) The medieval lifts at least have the chain (?) sound, as do some doors. The press-style buttons don't fit them too well, levers would be better. So in this case, the lift _is_ the machinery and that's OK then. Buttons right next to their related door are rubbish on the other hand, at least in medieval maps, because they can open magically.

What I find hard to accept is that two buttons on opposite ends of the map just go "phhhht" and say "1 more to go..." and then some important door opens. This is a case where I'd personally like to see the thing that connects it all.

It works better in base maps, since we can assume there is electricity at work. But that's not so satisfying.

If you go "magic", you shouldn't use too many buttons at all IMO.

e1m3 has 3 doors that I can think of, 1 is a key door and 2 open magically. So that's in line with the "magic does it" approach. The button that opens the zombie closets below is a small miracle, though. Opening 4 doors would require quite some levers etc, and it being controlled from such a tiny button, with nothing else visible, is too much for me personally to believe.

well. I just find lonely buttons that do something on the other side of the room/map a bit hard to swallow. Except in base maps, where it's the more buttons, the merrier. 

And I like the buttons idea. It could be scary if you think about some machine, just standing there for 50 or 100 years, and it _just_ works when you start it. Like one said that there's a knight, standing behind a door. He's not from our world, he stands there for thousand years, covered with the dust, not even blinked once through all this time. But when you open this door, he's immediately ready to kill you.

I think this paragraph for me sums up Quake very well! Well done to the original author! 

id just removed the use button from quake to make it faster and more arcadey compared to doom (and wolfenstein) - it was pretty redundant anyway. :) 

That static discharge from the air to the ground
was not caused by the Gods being angry at you. 

Wii remote mod. With the axe.

I know people have been modding/hacking to get wii remotes to work on a pc.... ?

I mean the potential is endless!!
I recon a lot of people wlll have access to a wii remote too :) 

zomg, waayyy too hard. died twice before quitting, both before the five minute mark.
doesn't really feel like it's nonlinear because it's basically a one atrium map (as far as i got) and the options aren't really made obvious. the feeling was more.. well, i look around this corner, and there's some ogres, and then i'm practically forced to pursue that path because ammo is so sparse. no real choice at all :(

it also has fucked up d3 style teleporting monster right behind / in front of you places, and invisible teleporting places, and 'better don't fall into the lava while you balance over that beam while being followed by a death knight, and you only have 20 life left', oh, and don't forget the 'this jump looks like it's possible, but you won't make it, and there's slime below it in the dark and there will spawn several wizards while you frantically try to get out of that slime'. 

A lot of the bizarre nail traps the author claims were to alter bot navigation and keep them from always jumping into the slime, which I agree is rather dumb, and there are some cheap ambushes. What I like about it is the fact that, yes, it is a one atrium map, with a warren of unique side passages and spaces above you that you're continually unlocking and discovering ways into.

It's a concept I find myself wanting to explore - take what I thought was good about it and polish it, remove the gunk. What I'd aim for would be ways for the player to feel more and more sure of his navigation, having unlocked enough passages to essentially turn the map into a deathmatch level, except in a way that he still feels he needs to be ever on his guard. New caches of monster population can be left in unpredictable and not necessarily 'sensible' places, so that the player can't count on the assumption that an area is empty once it's empty, or on the equally predictable fill-the-last-room-once-the-player-has-found-they-key backtrack repopulation. 

Forgot to mention, he made it as a deathmatch map, hence the bot thing. I think as single player it actually works pretty well, and the deathmatch basis lends it a very unique sensibility a truly linear-minded single player mapper would never have discovered. 

that IS interesting.

The major issues that pop into my head are indeed:

1) choices need to be obvious (and deadends need to be kinda obvious, too e.g. his ssg deadend i didn't walk into at first because i decided to take another path, so i ended up not having the ssg the first try). This probably means emphasizing the doors to the alternatives with architecture and lighting, and it could in turn lead to interesting 'secret' paths that aren't emphasized, but not hidden in any other way.

2) the quake ammunition problem: in a lot of maps i find myself having just enough ammo + a dozen shots or so to finish all the enemies up to the next ammo pack (or i'm just using sg too much). This decourages peeking into alternative paths.

3) The gameplay/monster encounters should be 'predictable' from at least one corner ahead or so, so you can go back if you don't like the particular situation. If you had alternative routes in a d3 level, it wouldn't give you any advantage - you can't know what enemies will tele in before they're.. well, teleing in. E.g. in descent, there's often situations where you take a peek into a largish room, and find yourself up against a particularly tough robot (frmo that position!), so you look at the automap, see that the room's probably accessible from the other side and decide to go that way. Maybe it's just that: the fighting space needs to be predictable 

Nice idea with the Wii remote. There are some open projects to use the remote on standard PC. Like this one: http://wiiuse.net/ (and many more I think ;)

Also, there's a _nice_ idea by Johnny Chung Lee - "Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote" - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/People/johnny/projects/wii/ 

a friend who tried the headtracking; he was 'very underwhelmed'. it looks perfect in the video because the camera is tracked perfectly and it's just a 2d image, but your eyes would need two seperate images. 

Did raptor have anything more than just a raptor against humans?

Why not make some other suitable dinosaurs, possibly Strog-style / Edie style dinosaurs with cool weapons attatched...

Er, I've never made an mdl in my life, or any other kind of model using a wireframe, let alone gone through the painfull process of cell-by-cell anuimation, but I could try.

I.D.E.A. 

now this idea wont leave me
What about an open-world with some semi-random events combined with quake combat gameplay? Huge world to explore, very replayable, with NPCs and emergent gameplay.
I`v been thinking along the lines of 'stalker quake'. I even built a sort of a 'technology prototype'.

Bur Im pretty scared of the ammount of work it would take to make, and the tech difficulties I will run into. And Im not a coder at all... 

Ill map for a project like that!
Put me to work
AguirRe quake sounds like a perfect platform for such a project!
I wouldnt want to trade off too much detail for scale - I imagine small winding valleys and gulleys, a bit like the first level of SOE, or even the start of Carved in Flesh, only on a bigger scale?

Ooh! 

it uses q3 tech and nothing is defined 

....for president! 

You could extend that on a somewhat smaller scale by adding randomness to the regular game. Add a lot more traps and monster closets and such to your level but have them trigger randomly. That way the player would never quite know what to expect when playing through. 

Simply adding random events to a system won't lead to any meaningful emergent behaviour. For things to get interesting, you need to get your system into a state that is on the edge between order and chaos. There already are games that feature emergent behaviour. Sim City is an example.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence 

Oh sure, I wasn't saying that was a replacement for emergent behavior. Just that it was an interesting idea. 

that this concept is only valid if you can guarantee that the level is interesting enough that your audience is going to want to play it more than once. 

The imagination boggles! 

Im not going for any complex systems, 'living world' and 'fuzzy logic' - its just random numbers. ie the ogres wont simulate social life, hunt and wage a war on enforsers at the mood swings of their leader`s AI - there is just a probability of them wondering around and getting angry at anything in sight

but so far Im just dicking around with modelled terrain, hopefully getting it look as bad as rtcw/cod 

You guys are not so bad but I have read through many forum sites where everyone who post write in such a way that it would be safe to assume Daniel Dennett taught them all to roll over and play fetch. 

it will probably be very hard to make the behaviour not either

-totally random
-converge to certain places or set behaviours

but it could be cool to prototype it. It's probably very sensitive to tuning, and you'd have to be able to simulate with the game code separately.

Does q3 support heightmaps? And if you put fog can you load additional areas during runtime so huge maps are possible?