Quake3World

Hi,

This is my first attempt at making a Quake 3 map (I have made a couple of Unreal Tournament maps before). I would like to get some feedback before posting it to LVL. Please, let me know what you think about it.

Download (file size 5.5 MB): http://menczel.extra.hu/spk3dm1.zip



More screen shots:
http://menczel.extra.hu/spk3dm1_2.jpg
http://menczel.extra.hu/spk3dm1_3.jpg
http://menczel.extra.hu/spk3dm1_4.jpg
http://menczel.extra.hu/spk3dm1_5.jpg
http://menczel.extra.hu/spk3dm1_6.jpg

does it have bot support? if so i'll give it a whirl...

@seremtan: yes, it does have bot support

Nice map, especially for a first one! Nothing glaringly wrong with it. It runs okay and there aren't any visual artifacts or performance issues.

I few minor nitpicky visual recommendations:

• The green slime teleporters - the textures doesn't exactly tile (you can see the edge of the texture), I think that's a stock id Software one, or a slightly modified one, but it looks a bit odd.
• By the red armor, you have some big metal cubes on wooden supports, some with lights underneath them. The ones with lights are slightly smaller, and I thought this looked a bit out of place, I would probably make them all the same size.
• Not sure how familiar you are with Quake3 shaders, but I thought some of those lights and glyphs could use a nice glowy additive stage to them to make them really pop out. At the moment, they look like rather static and painted on.
• I like the round windows, but the cross frames don't quite meet up with the round patches. Extend them just slightly into the patches.
• I think it has to do with the thickness of the walls and the size of the textures, but everything seems a bit large. The room sizes and ceiling heights are fine, but it just gives you the feeling that everything is bigger than it should be. I don't think there's much you can do at this point, but something to keep in mind for your next map.
• I can't really put my finger on it, but there's something about the lighting in this map. It's like everything is too evenly lit and there aren't enough shadows. Or rather, I'll be looking at a wall and considering the direction of the sky light, it should be darker on the other side but it's not. Everything looks too even. Perhaps you're using ambient light? If so, you might want to tone that down a little.
• I really like that coppery metal grate texture you have above the upper green teleporter.
• I ran around the map with r_showtris 1 on and as far as I can tell, the map is hinting pretty well.
• Gameplay wise, I think controlling the large items is a bit too easy. In about 10 seconds I can grab mega health, yellow armor, teleport, yellow armor, lift, red amour and then go back for a second round. I would get rid of the yellow armor near the red one and maybe move things around a bit. I was playing against Bones on nightmare and I would consistently have 200 health and 200 armor and I smoked him 7-0. Maybe it's just me, but are the items also spawning in faster than default?

Overall, well done and a nice little map. I'll be interested in seeing what everyone else thinks.

@obsidian:

Thanks for your comments! I agree with most of your recommendations and will try to modify the map accordingly.

The teleport texture is a modified version of id's slime, I also noticed it is not tiling properly but could not find a better one yet. Maybe I can fix it by adjusting x/y streching and/or scale?

I did use ambient light, maybe too much. I will adjust it down. I do have problems with lighting maps. What monitor and game settings should one use when testing the lighting of maps? I adjusted my settings until the original id maps looked more or less OK, then used these for testing my maps, too. Is this acceptable? Is there a more exact way of doing this?

Speaker

There's no standardized way of calibrating everyone's settings for Q3. I just use the game defaults and my monitor is calibrated for photo editing using Adobe's calibration tools.

Useful Q3Map2 compiler switches for fine tweaking of lighting in situations like this are -gamma and -compensate. Values of 2 and 4 respectively are a good place to start and then tweak the values as necessary. It takes rational number values.