sorry, did not mean to come off as being mad etc... but ok, i'll give it a shot...

"Quake 3 has far better mapping tools than the game is actually fun to play."

subjective, i and and lot of others strongly disagree about the gameplay, but the tools for idtech3 which have had lots of development through great peeps like yadar etc are amazing, i agree with you there.

"My point is that talent does exist to be used and to create and the outlet of sterile Q3 DM maps is a waste of that talent, generally."

thats just offensive... or am i reading that wrong?

"If Quake 3 had single player, some of you could make some terrific single player episodes that people would really enjoy playing."

with quake live and the old school community still going strong i dont understand this statement. quake 3 is a multiplayer game... thats the point of it. i find heaps of maps fun to play, both with bots, but especially with humans. i would hope ppl get some kind of enjoyment from playing my maps as well..

not liking the fact its not singleplayer again is just your preference... why even comment on a game you clearly just plain dont like?

or something... 

My point is that talent does exist to be used and to create and the outlet of sterile Q3 DM maps is a waste of that talent, generally.

Some people (metl, fKd) have already touched on this, but there are two apparently obvious things that you seem to be missing.

1) There are a lot of people who enjoy MP in general. There are also some people who enjoy playing MP with bots. Those people are getting enjoyment from these maps, and the authors are happy to be feeding that enjoyment. Hardly a "waste".

2) I look upon map design as an art form (among other things), and I would be equally irritated if you were to comment on, say, a Rembrandt with "what a waste; that talent and time could have been used to create something that people could interact with--where's the utility?!"

Nothing says that you have to like these creations, but to dismiss them as wasted effort via an offhand comment about "maps that aren't actually going to be played by anyone" is really ignorant. 

L4D2 came out three of us in the office played Q3 every day, was always nice to run around inside good maps for visual or gameplay merits.

They didn't buy L4D, so play chess now instead. 

It's just my opinion. Feel free to disagree. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong.

I have my own guiding principles and who knows maybe I shouldn't have posted my opinion. Sometimes I click submit when I shouldn't; sometimes I don't click submit when I should.

And life goes on ...

@metlslime

I'm just saying that Q3 has a massive number of beautiful DM maps that adding some pebbles to the heap in general seems unnecessary.

I was struck lately by loading up the Simpson's Q3 map and thinking how much work it was to make, how beautiful it was and how really the only thing I did with it was walk around it a few minutes out of curiosity and then exit. 

I wasn't looking to offend the author's of the maps. I loaded up Sock's map lately in DarkPlaces (which supports Q3 maps) and was trying to imagine it with single player.

I've had the growing feeling of something that is missing which is the single player equivalent of Nexuiz or Open Arena.

I am, ironically, biased against multiplayer as sort of entry level mapping and a complain that you sometimes hear in various pockets of the internet is that there are hordes of free multiplayer games (Nexuiz, Open Arena, Sauerbraten, Enemy Territory) and really nothing that is a basic high quality single player equivalent (Sauerbraten can't qualify; the licensing essentially makes it solely an engine).

Sometimes I see Q3 maps that look like they'd could be great single player fodder and I sort of sigh thinking the main purpose is to shoot Sarge and Major a few more times.

I wasn't looking to offend any of the authors of the maps; the first post comments were -- perhaps unwisely --- posted on a whim when I looked at the themes, thought about how great they looked and pondered the purpose. 

for playing maps with bots.

And fkd's map is damn nice both visually and gameplay wise. 

I might as well say I've played an interesting single player Q3 map for DarkPlaces:

http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1423

And yes, I was wrong to rant here. Somewhere else would have been more appropriate than to offend the authors of hard-made map releases.

My apologies. 

I can definitely see where you were getting at and I've even had similar thoughts about DM maps in general. I'd see these really nice looking maps and imagine how they would play if they were a singleplayer experience.

But that's only because I don't play multiplayer games - besides a small bit of TF2 here and there; which I get sick of quickly - so I feel like I'm missing out because I don't enjoy them much (mostly because I'm awful at them). 

I'm impressed. <--Not sarcasm. :)

I don't see apologies on the internet very often. I think that's because when someone is not face to face with another human being, it's easier to just shrug and say "whatever".

I, in turn, am sorry if I read more into your comments than you really meant or intended.

I thought this was well-put:

a complaint that you sometimes hear in various pockets of the internet is that there are hordes of free multiplayer games...and really nothing that is a basic high quality single player equivalent

There are single-player games out there that you can build for, but most I've seen are either (a) too dated for many people to appreciate (b) handicapped by horrible tools, or (c) too complex, and require too much work and/or too much of a learning curve to get started.

I'm hopelessly addicted to building tracks for Trackmania, which is an excellent arcade-y racing game with a simple modular track editor (and a free version, if you're curious).

While the Trackmania people (Nadeo) are supposedly working on both an FPS and an RPG, I haven't seen any details. I'm hoping that they take their simple-but-deep modular approach to their FPS--it could be amazing, if they do. 

well put pjw.

on a flip side... i am thinking about trying to make a quake1 sp level... not an episode as that would require a lot of work... so, how complex can the brush work be in quake? can i just go nuts or will the engine just conk out and break? (vanilla quake)
thats something i've been impressed with in the idtech3 stuff... i seem to be able to just keep on going and going.. as long as i keep an eye on caulking and detail brushes it just does not break. (much) 

you will definitely hit some limits if you go hog-wild. There are two types of limits:

1. soft limits: high complexity can trigger bugs in the compilers and/or extend vis times exponentially. Aguirre's tools have fixed a lot of the bugs, but the exponential vis times are inherent in the way quake vis is calculated.

2. hard limits: there are various numeric limits (number of leafs, nodes, faces, etc.) which can prevent the map from loading in a stock engine. However, many of these limits have been lifted by some of the popular engines, which means there is a viable audience for limits-breaking maps. (but it's still a smaller audience than if you were compatible with all quake engines)

Engines that support high limits (As far as I know):
Fitzquake - http://celephais.net/fitzquake/
AguirRe's engines - http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/
Darkplaces - http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/
DirectQ - http://mhquake.blogspot.com/

Check out some popular recent SP maps to see what is possible, that might help guide your expectations since you are used to Quake 3 mapping. APSP2, Marcher Fortress, Day of the Lords, ne_tower, A Roman Wilderness of Pain, etc. (check the news archive on this site for map releases) 

I'd bet it be a tech level :) 

lol indeed. ha, will have to call on my old doom mapping styles.. tricks and traps yo :D 

http://www.quaddicted.com/feature/tronyn/driant6.jpg
http://www.lunaran.com/images/maps/lunsp1_1.jpg
http://www.lunaran.com/images/maps/lunsp1_2.jpg
http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/screenshots/gmsp3.jpg
http://quakeone.com/~images/news/livingend.jpg

Map download directory @ Quaddicted:

http://www.quaddicted.com/spmaps.html

Convert Quake 3 to Quake with the click of a button:

http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1975

Although there are a lot of engines that might get used for single player, FitzQuake 0.85 is by far the dominant one. 

People treating each other like people on the internet.

Good luck on the level - just throw it together and it'll be fun.

The wierd thing about Quake1 is the more you try, the less happens. You end up stuck on piddling details... but that's me. 

Well I really touched the limits of the standard Quake engine with my last large SP map starkmon. If you want to see what is possible without breaking any limits then take a look! :)

There are some really massive maps out there which break many limits too, and they did get a lot of play. I always thought it would be cool to just make an absolutely huge map, like a whole episode in one map, with several different areas and levels, using as much of the useable space as possible. Coloured lighting would be out though because if the Tyrlite tool not supporting more than roughly 2000 entities to be in a map. And I dont mean just light entities. But AguirRes light tool would allow more entities than that, so it could be done. 

Ricky, did you have over 2000 lights in the map, or just 2000 entities in total? You could probably get around the Tyrlight restriction in the former case by removing any non-light entities from the map with an entity ripper, then restoring them after the light pass was complete. I suppose you would want to be able to do it from a batch file, to allow for incremental builds, but that should be possible too... 

Well it was entities. I think theres a hard 2048 entity limit in Tyrlite.

Removing all of the other entities for the sake of doing a light pass sounds like an arduous task, but did not try that, and I can see how it might work. I guess.

Somebody really clever could re-work the tool maybe ;) 

Well it was entities. I think theres a hard 2048 entity limit in Tyrlite.

Unless there is something else preventing that, the tool's limit doesn't matter that much because the tool is Open Source.

1. You download Tyrann's source:

http://www.disenchant.net/files/utils/tyrutils-0.4.tar.gz

2. Open bspfile.h and find this

#define MAX_MAP_ENTITIES 2048

3. Change the number

4. Open free Visual Studio C++ Express Edition ...

http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/

and recompile Tyrlite ;) 

That sounds doable :) 

by mh? 

the one that colorizes your lighting? I don't think that uses light entities at all... 

Here is Tyrlite recompiled with 8192 as the max entities. Let me know if it works, it's entirely untested.

http://www.quake-1.com/files/developer/tyrlite_8192_baker.zip

(I noticed it wouldn't compile in Visual Studio, I ended up getting "Cyggy" with it. No you don't want to know ...) 

Now all I need is a map with >2048 entities and coloured lights in it to compile ;)

No, seriously though, I will be keeping a copy of this tool very well backed up and stored on my HDD for when need it :)

I could run some sort of test map too though I guess....