Quake3World

Hi,
I'm not hoping to pull a Dessicated Corpse here, but I'm going to post about a very, very early "sketch" of a map I've begun working on a month or two ago. I worked on it on and off for a week or so but then didn't look back at it. I was planning on picking it up again but looking at it with fresh eyes makes me doubt if I should continue it. It just doesn't seem a good starting point to continue with anymore. What are your guys thoughts on it? Is it workable into something pretty or is it abysmal?

I know you're screenshot hungry, so here you go







Don't look at texturing, lighting or detailing. I've only used two or three textures for the rough brush work, haven't added any details and the lighting is just there so you can... well... see something. I'm more interested in the general layout and weapon/item placement. To me it feels too much like a figure of 8 layout. This might not be terrible, but it feels a bit uninspiring and not very dynamic gameplay wise. I was thinking of adding more areas but I'm not sure how to keep the flow natural. I'm not looking to build a new ztn3dm1 or something, I'm picking up and learning again, but I do know this needs some work...

download .bsp and .aas in a zip file. Type \map ermap4_layout to load the map.

It's obviously not terrible. At least it's organized and has some good height differences. The layout definitely needs some heavy work, though. I can comment later if you decide to continue this project to help you with making a balanced layout, but right now the map's structure would likely need a bit of an overhaul as well just to fit all the items comfortably. It's not a bad start, though. You can definitely build off of this. The height differences are nice, and with some work you could make this a pretty fun map.

do it, if not for yourself, for us not much has been happening around here lately

I like it, it has a quake 2-ish kinda feeling....kinda makes me wanna post what I've been working on somewhere in this forum. But yeah, I like the layout, it looks like it'll be fun. add a few more tunnels at weird angles and it could look like a descent 3 level, but fun.

It looks boxy, corridorish and seems to be built around singular ideas which occupies those box-or-corridor like areas. It's not aweful, but it's definitely not nearly up to par with the current quality of maps I'm seeing in quakelive for instance. My advice would be to tear down the walls which define the individual spaces, shrink the overal size or by colliding the spaces with one another and then think more in terms of 'connectivity' rather than 'separation' - effectively creating spaces within spaces which are vaguely open, whilst still keeping enough 'walls', 'segments' and 'pillars' to allow for respectively 'hidden movement', 'shelter', and 'obstruction'

nuf said, there seems to be a lack of connectivity, and too much useless space. The most interesting elements (these singular ideas I just mentioned) seem to be not central in the map, but set against the area's boundaries.

As for the natural flow; don't think about routes, but think about visibility of players and (limited) accessibility to locations instead. Flow will follow naturally, if you force it, game-play loses every dynamic it deserves. If something then takes too much or too less effort; make a simple adjustment.

Here's the point where I say No No No and call you all cunts, right?

Corsair's criticism is right. What I was thinking of was tearing the thing down and starting from scratch, while maybe copy/pasting some of the ideas into the new map.

I'm wondering about one thing though. These days most maps seem to feel like one or two relatively open, vertical areas around which corridors and walkways are built. Is it just me or have relatively "roomy" maps, such as q3dm7 or q3dm8 gone out of style?

It basically looks good. IMO it's like 50% too big - there is lot's of space that you actually don't use. Id close off the little gap that allows you to view from the MH room to the RA or at least make it a small window (like at aerowalk GL e.g.). Otherwise you will get lots of stuff being rendered when you worked on details, also it would be really hard to get the RA. Instead add some stairs to the RA area to put the RA on a lower position. You should aswell think of other connections to that room so it gets harder to make sure you got an eye on all entrances when sitting on the RA. You could also look into extending you height levels at some point - most of the gameplay is taking place on the ground levels.

Looking forward to some changes, keep it up.

DM7 and DM8 surely aren't out of style; it's hard to make a map like that correctly. If you asked me to compare this to dm7 in terms of gameplay I would have to say there is little to no resemblance. The reminds me more of dm1-dm3. Dm3 is a nice map, though. It's one of my favorites from the stock q3 ones.

Anthem wrote: If you asked me to compare this to dm7 in terms of gameplay I would have to say there is little to no resemblance. The reminds me more of dm1-dm3. Dm3 is a nice map, though. It's one of my favorites from the stock q3 ones.

Oh no, I wasn't suggesting that my map resembled q3dm7 in any way. I was just thinking that with all the new maps I see added to Quake Live, the more ztn3dm1 or q3tourney4-ish maps seem to be more popular than the ones with rooms that are connected to each other.

I'm not certain what I'm going to do with the map right now. I've copied and renamed the .map file as a backup, in case I find I want to do anything with it. Right now, I'm cooking something else though... I'll make it a toss up between the two maps to see which I'll continue

I don't think there's anything wrong with a little extra elbow room in a map, but I liked what I saw and I saw potential in having a few places where you can quickly run from one place to the next, and the places are all very visually distinct, so it seemed to me the kind of map you could pop into with no experience, run around like a chicken with your head cut off, and basically have the map memorized in a few seconds so you can focus on how fun it is.

I like the walls, where they are, and the purpose they serve, at least to me, is when you're running around, you get a sense of speed and depth when running around a space where the walls are that height and distance from each other as you have in that map.

Hell, if you decide you wanna trash it, send me the .map file, I'd be happy to give it a shot.

VolumetricSteve, you just gave me an idea. How about we make this a collaborative effort? If people like Corsair, cityy and Anthem can give some feedback on things they'd like to see changed about this map, then I could do some basic hacking and cutting in the geometry and we then could pass the map back and forth to get it to a finished product?

If the enthusiasm is there, I'm sure I can find the time for it as well

edit: oh no! I didn't see the download. Hopefully these are still relevant.

I think that it could be something worth pursuing, here are some thoughts just from the SS:

I'd say if you make some changes that several have mentioned (specifically cutting down on open space), you'd have something good to work with. DOO ITT! :P

Seriously though, that'd be a cool idea. You actually wanna post the .map somewhere and treat it like a code tarball, or mspaint + screenshots works better for you?

Kaz, great work on the feedback there! I'll try and work the feedback so far into the map and then pass it on to VolumetricSteve.
Not sure what a tarball is exactly, to be honest. Isn't it a sort of zip file? When I'm done I'll put the .map file up for download for you. Could take a couple of days though (busy, busy, busy) so please be patient

Oh, a tarball to the best of my understanding is when you have a bunch of code, generally split up into files, modules, and sometimes projects, and it's all grouped together so it can be debugged/compiled. I could be wrong, but I think that's the gist of it. I was just thinking it was kinda like the .map file, paired with the scripts folder, textures folder, what ever gets bunched with a map etc etc....I dunno, seemed the same to me.

Whenever anyone wants to, feel free to mail me the map at:

volumetricsteve@gmail.com and I'll take a look. (also, give a list of things you think I should do, otherwise I'll be creative, and no one here wants that)

Kaz, I've got two questions about your screenshots
[lvlshot]http://student.cs.appstate.edu/freemancw/junk/crits/eraser1.jpg[/lvlshot]
What do you mean with height level here?

[lvlshot]http://student.cs.appstate.edu/freemancw/junk/crits/eraser2.jpg[/lvlshot]
What does LOS mean?[/quote]

LOS = line of sight. He means that you can overlook a very large area from the marked spot (which may be bad for both performance and gameplay).

[lvlshot]http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/5804/eras.jpg[/lvlshot]

an attempt at inserting something awesome

what is that? what did you do? It's awesome, I'll grant you that. There better be a quake 3 engine mod that makes everything look like that or i'll be horribly disappointed.

It's a digital painting (!). First I loaded the top image in this thread into photoshop. Using a thin brush I outlined some ideas (platfrom in the front, opening to the right, staircase in to the back of the (broken) statue, and the statue and its platform itself. The latter I imagined would be for use as an intermediate platform for making a leap from one raised surface to another). Then I started using larger brushes, on another layer, to gradually replace the original image with what you see here. I intended on making it quite detailed, but then figured I had 'better' things to do so rushed it off and started abusing all kinds of photoshop's features to at least get some kind of unity in the image making it worthy of posting here.

Oh, and there is no such mod, but you might wanna try to get me hired by id so I could try to do something about that whilst not starving myself o_O

Fucking awesome corsair!

Heh, that's neat.

I've already made a few changes to the layout of the map that should improve things. I think I can post some screenies in the weekend or after that.

Some small changes I made:

Made this area smaller:


Made this hallway shorter:


Extended the "bridge" portion a bit further:


Not really visible in this screenshot, but I've added some more detailed walls on the other side of this area:


Moved the jumppad to the other side:


VolumetricSteve, I'll send you a mail with the map file so you can put some work in if you like. Maybe we can send it back and forth and both work on top of each other's ideas.

I'm taking a brief break from mapping until about sunday-ish (girlfriend is visiting), but I'll be able to run some tests once in a while until then. I got your map in my email, the first thing I did was remove all of the light entities and compile without fast, and run it through 12 light bounces. This map lights itself really nicely, only one or two light entities should be needed to really fix the really dark patches. I'll be messing with textures and shaders soon, the way the space is laid out though, I almost feel like this could be like one of Doom 3's MP maps. (Which I thought were nice to look at, and could be fun, but it needs quake 3's speed and...everything to be fun - this should pan out nicely) Screenshots later to illustrate my point about light.