metlslime,

on your web site :

http://www.simonoc.com/pages/design/maps_q3/mcourt.htm

there's a superb moody map. Why can't we download it ? I would love to play it. Pppplease ? 

Not a metlslime map nor is it metlslime's website. 

@Barnak, The map is just a doodle. It was something I did just to play around with a visual style. The map has no consideration for frame rate or performance and most of it you can see in the screenshots. Once I get some free time I will see if I can get it organized into a zip for download. 

i just posted this news thread, the actual map (and others on that website) are sock's. 

i just nabbed the texture set, btw. great work on those. ^_^ 

@necros, cool. I assume you are going to try to use them in the Q1 engine? It would be cool to see what you come up with. I will keep an eye on the screenshot/beta section of this forum. 

i decided to reinstall quake and get my editor set up and all that stuff... no promises on when anything will show up though, i'm still pretty burnt out on quake mapping atm. 

Example Puzzle Logic Image - http://www.simonoc.com/images/articles/puzzlelogic1a.jpg

I have always wondered about the idea of 3D scripting with the logic functions being defined as 3D shapes. A couple of years ago I started experimenting with a small set of entities to see what stuff I could create and the initial tests were a lot of fun.

Eventually the test maps turned into a huge single player puzzle map called Edge of Forever which consequently took forever to finish. Afterwards I was going to write an article about the puzzles in the map and then I realized, no one would be interested, the project was a crazy idea to start with!

After two years of avoiding the idea I recently found the time and energy to finish writing the article on puzzle logic I promised. Funny enough it turned out exactly how I imagined it would ... barking crazy!

http://www.simonoc.com/pages/articles/puzzlelogic1.htm

A big thank you to PJW for helping me with the proof reading of the document :) 

geez, I still havent played it!! Will get right onto that. 

Review
After a quick check through this thread, I never mentioned that I wrote a review for this back then and for all this time, you might have been unaware... Throwing the link here just incase you haven't come across it yet; http://taw.duke4.net/2010/06/quake3/the-edge-of-forever/

Article
Read the article and it was interesting. Good, tidy presentation made it easier to read and diagrams were a nice touch.

Its neat to read the author's explaination about the ins/outs of their level, decisions made and how certain things worked, especially the complex stuff. I wish more people did this.

Infact, I should get off my butt and do one for my last release. Plenty to write about... 

@Nitin, If you get stuck there is a demo (completing the map) included.
@Quakis, yeah I saw that a while ago, was very cool, I think I sent you a mail as well. I was surprised to see anyone (from func) review the map because it is Q3.

I do think it is a great shame that hardly any mappers here (func) talk about how they created their maps. I personally find the process of map construction really helpful, especially the fact I might learn some new tricks. I always thought the audio stuff that Valve did was perfect and made me want to play the maps again to see the final thought process. 

to have it on fewer pages. Too much clicking involved to skim over it. 

I guess those puzzles in "On the edge forever" are the peak of q3 mapping art.

Could'nt imagine to do something like this myself, would fuck my brain even more up as it is already.

Cant wait to play the "Florentine Libary"! 

@megaman, I split the article up into pages so the loads times would be better. Page 2 is also setup as an index, so people can choose which puzzle examples they want to look at next. Besides the page layout, what did you think of the article content?
@wakey, thanks, but The Florentine Library was a concept, it is not going to be released. The current screenshots show everything. 

The load times? What is this, the 90s? :) 

willem: browsers have limits on concurrent connections. I have lots of trouble on pages with many images like http://www.quaddicted.com/quake/episodes_maps

if anyone knows a fix (no split pages, no javascript) I would be delighted to hear it. 

What kind of trouble? That page loads smooth as silk for me in Chrome. 

It takes more than one minute to load for me. 

Oh, sure, it takes some time but it doesn't seem like a problem is what I'm saying. I don't care if the stuff further down the page is still loading while I'm looking at stuff at the top.

At any rate, I don't care, you do, let's move on. :) 

Recently my logic puzzle article was linked to some coders newsfeed and got a couple of thousand hits, but I get the impression that most people did not realize that there were several pages. (Someone also commented they were surprised at more pages)

I use the classic word (x of y) at the top of the page and the next button + index at the bottom, is this not obvious enough?

Should I glue the page information (x of y) into the page title and replace the space with a big next button? If people are not finding it obvious that there are more pages I am inclined to think the layout/design is at fault. 

sock: To me it's quite obvious there are multiple pages (which is btw a good thing considering how slow your host is). It even says page x of 7 in the header. What you could do to make it a little (even) more obvious is put a "proceed to next page" link at the end of the text field.

Spirit: Uhhh, I wonder why you put everything on a single page. That's obviously overkill as it now has to load all the ~120 dark screenshots at once. Would be better if every episode had a page of its own. 

page x of y is fine, but just taking a quick look, the numbers on the bottom of the page don't really stand out.

well... not so much 'standing out' but that it's hard to tell that there is a highlighted page and i can see how someone might just dismiss it as random stuff around the page content without really paying attention to what it says.

i think putting the whole thing, buttons and numbers into a div/table with a bg colour would help. maybe the same colour as your subtitle <td>s (#427342). 

You can use CSS sprites for that (google the term). It's usually used for smaller icon type things, but it don't see why it wouldn't work for a page like that too. 

load the images when they become visible. For non-javascript-enabled browsers, fall back to load all on page load. 

@necros, I see what you mean, the bottom buttons don't look like buttons and just look weird. Probably best to create some frame for them and make them stand out more. I think I will glue the page x of y into the title and replace the page number space with a huge (glowing) next button! I don't want to glue all the pages into one mega page, my host is stupidly slow and people will never see anything load.