"I find that odd, since your favorite part of mapping is detailing and you just got through with (or were very close to finishing) the layout portion and were about to get started with detailing."

It's a little odd, yes. I dunno, I guess maybe I hurried the layout and wasn't really happy with it and don't want to rework it? Beats me, at any rate ... bored. 

You still have that larger map in the works, don't you? 

sweet bro, is it gonna be single player d3?

yeah, it'll be a minimod that uses my tweaked gameplay stuff. it plays a lot like quake atm esp with movement speed boosted up and max 5 damage from falling.

the ai stuff in d3 is pretty awesome. aas pathing owns. 

"You still have that larger map in the works, don't you?"

It's there. Lurking. 

what kind of food does it like? maybe we can coax it out of hiding. ^_^ 

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/rickyt23_wip.png 

Looks cool :) 

The only one I've made this year except coag3, you know which one it is! 

Don't forget the code requests ;) 

Looks good, can't wait to play it Ricky.
I hope its brutal as usual! 

So if you wanna play it then we'd better finish the pack! 

I thought so.
And yeah, you totally should. 

I uploaded 73 minutes mapping. It's unfortunately rather big 669.2 MB

http://www.mydrive.ch/
user: joee@banan
banana

I'm also very interested in the workflow of other mappers. 

Reminded me I found these on worldofleveldesign.com - several videos for L4D2 workflow - scroll down and you'll see "L4D Environment Workflow"

http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/cat_left4dead_mapping.php

Fascinating to watch and some generally useful information. Videos are sped up to 2x and about 6-10 minutes in length each. 

I didn't watch the whole thing, I mainly jumped around a bit and then sped up the last 5-10 minutes to 2x, but it looks like you spent 70 minutes making acouple of rooms. Cool rooms, admittedly, but still all that time for 2-3 rooms, when you could have tried blazing through half the layout in that time (assuming single player.)

I'm interested in knowing if this is a single player map or a death match map. I'd like to see the next vid focus on laying out the path the player will take over making some cool arches and cliffsides. 

What are those textures the guy is using in the videos posted by Zwiffle? It looks very interesting. 

The orange/grey textures are the development placeholder textures. If that's what you're referring to. Find them by searching for 'dev' in Hammer texture application. 

I've been reading this stuff I got from the worldofleveldesign.com site all about time management and how to just get shit done. I can't really go into it because by doing so I would be against the copyright laws (yeah, I paid to read someone's opinions on level design.) So I'm gonna try this out and see if I can get something done. 

Go map.

(That'll be $30 please) 

If you had read what I read, you'd know that's the exact WRONG thing to do. 

it's not a copyright violation to paraphrase, sumarrize, or otherwise convey the essence of a copyrighted work in your own words. 

Th site a while back and found it too abstract and theoretical. Maybe I'm biased by what I've been hearing recently, but 'go map' does fucking work.

I'm tired of theory. I did that years ago, for years. 'Go Map - For Fun'

Intellectualisation is a retreat for not getting stuff done.

Or so I find. Another theory might be... 

Hearing the Quark digger mentioned in the mapping help thread reminded me of the hollow maker. It's an even more "extreme" version of the digger: it provides the outer bounding box brushes implicitly (and only digs against them, so you can put other brushes in the room with no problems). Basically you can map with one brush per room, and intersecting brushes in the hollow maker automatically become corridors.

I know this sounds like a recipe for disaster, but I was thinking that this could be an awesome tool for building a throwaway map prototype. It could at least improve your "sketching" speed, and get a map to a point where you can work on gameplay really quickly.

I haven't really tried doing a map this way.. so maybe it encourages box map design, but I'm planning to try it out on my next map.

http://quark.sourceforge.net/infobase/maped.tutorial.advanced.html#wallhollowmaker 

well, that's basically unreal mapping right there. :P

i guess if each of these hollow makers are only carving from themselves and not against other brushes, it'd be fine, but i dunno, it'd probably still be pretty messy. also, if it's auto combining other hollow brushes, if the joints aren't square, it could cause carving problems. no way to be sure unless you try i guess. :S 

For a wheel type design - basically a big cube and a single complicated carving element. I built the single element then subtracted it from the big cube.

The cube ended up with the correct geometry and hacked to pieces, but I never edited the cube, just deleted it and edited the negative to make changes.

It seemed to work ok, but it was a small DM map.