Stuff you can't do in a Q4 map that you could in Q3

Post by **Johnny Law** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 8:36 am

Just what I've stumbled across so far... I'm wondering if I'm mistaken about any of these points, or if anyone has more to add.

- Can't have teamed pickup items.
- Can't randomly choose from a set of entities to spawn.
- Can't make player-swimmable water.

Post by **o'dium** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 8:39 am

1) Yes you can.

2) Yes you can.

3) Yes, of course you can

To do the first, its a flag on the item entity. Its ""team"" "marine"" or ""team" "strogg"". Then the other side cant pick it up.

To do the second... I dunno, I haven;t done it myself, but i've seen a map where the quad reandomly replaces the mega etc.

To do the third, well you DO need a mod to do TRUE water. But you can have water with impact effects, a nice water material and splash sounds in any VQ4 map. You can hack it with gravity but that sucks a bit, so people are messing with shallow water at the moment.

Post by **Johnny Law** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 8:46 am

o'dium wrote:To do the first, its a flag on the item entity. Its ""team"" "marine"" or ""team" "strogg"". Then the other side cant pick it up.

Well, that's not the original meaning of "teamed pickup item" ... maybe the lingo has changed. In Q3, a team of pickup items would only spawn one item from the team at a time; after it was picked up, some other item from the team would spawn.

Experimentally speaking, this no longer works, at least not by the original method of setting a team key on the items. Perhaps there is another way to do it though.

o'dium wrote:To do the second... I dunno, I haven;t done it myself, but i've seen a map where the quad reandomly replaces the mega etc.

If you can remember the map where you saw this I'd appreciate knowing what it is. I suspect it's not the same behavior that I'm talking about, but who knows. The mechanism I would have used in Q3 would be a target_relay with spawnflags set to randomize its target selection, but it doesn't look like Q4's trigger_relay has the same capability.

o'dium wrote:To do the third, well you DO need a mod to do TRUE water. But you can have water with impact effects, a nice water material and splash sounds in any VQ4 map. You can hack it with gravity but that sucks a bit, so people are messing with shallow water at the moment.

Ain't player-swimmable water though. Sure you could do just about anything with a mod, but that doesn't help when mapping for VQ4.

Post by **o'dium** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 8:51 am

Im pissed at id/raven. All that bullshit about how Doom 3 can easily do wate its just they dont think it worked for mars and we believed it. Now we have Quake 4, a game where made after Quake 2, which had water in nearly every level, and we get NO swimable water of any kind...?

What the fuck is that about? There wasn't even any lava?

Post by **Johnny Law** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 8:55 am

I agree that that's the weirdest omission. Sure you don't see deep water/lava much in duel maps, and I guess that's what Raven concentrated on... but in team DM and CTF maps it's fairly common. Oh well!

(Edit: not to mention singleplayer...)

Post by **Dr4ch** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 1:00 pm

Thats really bad we need a mod for proper water, a shame they didnt implemented what the community has done...

Anyway I think water will be possible in the near future as there are assets for d3 with proper water+physics, we at x-battle will build this into our mod and I hope most other mods will do that too because its not hard to do and takes almost no time.

Now the next problem... swimming animations anyone ?

we should get a community project going to achieve this but I dont have much hope

Post by **CheapAlert** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 5:46 pm

Swimmable water is being phased out

look at the new unreal engine games! All the water is, is a stupid plane thats shiny and warpy.

Post by **jester!** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 6:45 pm

CheapAlert wrote:Swimmable water is being phased out

look at the new unreal engine games! All the water is, is a stupid plane thats shiny and warpy.

But why? Because the players dont want it just like coop mode, or because it adds nothing to the graphics improving gameplay argument currently believed by id?

Post by **CheapAlert** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 6:53 pm

also valve limited their water to water level only, you can't do cool water brushes anymore. Why?

they're too stupid to write dynamic surface reflection shaders and must rely on fixed positions. Like everyone else.

ugh.

Post by **unitool** » Tue Dec 06, 2005 4:48 am

holy schmack! Johnny Law, my hero! Good to see you, dude.

Post by **Johnny Law** » Tue Dec 06, 2005 7:14 am

unitool, my nemesis! ... Or something like that.

Hey bud! Do you (unlike me) still have a website lurking somewhere?

Post by **unitool** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 3:07 pm

yeah...I have my crappy web page at http://toolcrib.gotdoofed.com/

I live in Los Angeles now, work at Treyarch, and get paid to design and build maps.

Thanks again for all your help and encouragement back in the day. You went above and beyond to help a newbie figure out what to do or not do. Your help played a part in getting me where I am, and I appreciate it more than you might think!

Post by **Fjoggs** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 3:11 pm

Stop talking and finish punkys whips already!

Post by **wviperw** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 6:09 pm

Unitool: Just wanted to let you know that you've got some disturbing pictures on your website.

And I leik it! :icon32:

Post by **79DieselRabbit** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 8:36 pm

wviperw wrote:Unitool: Just wanted to let you know that you've got some disturbing pictures on your website.

And I leik it! :icon32:

That's him sitting at his computer desk neked. Wish we knew that before we hired him...

er, we now return you to your regularly scheduled topic.

Post by **unitool** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 8:39 pm

Get in mah belly!!

Post by **Johnny Law** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 11:48 pm

That's great to hear about the Treyarch gig, uni. If they're treating you right, that is.

I'm currently a hax0r for VMware. Haven't done any mapping for a long time ... I put some effort into trying out UT2k4 mapping but the whole process (doing any interesting stuff in Maya rather than in the map editor) and the bugginess of the editor finally got the best of me and I gave it up. Q4 editing looks much comfier so far.

It's a shame about the lack of MP bot AI. Hard to do basic gameplay testing. I think I'm first going to try to translate q3wcp15 into Q4, so I can learn about Q4 textures, lighting, and idiosyncracies without having to worry about the overall map structure.