Q4 - What is up with Q4 Mapping?

Post by **Foo** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 7:36 pm

Johnny Law wrote:
Foo wrote:It seriously seems retarded (in the literal sense of the word) to develop for Q4.
...wow.

I think I'ma excuse myself from this thread now.

I guess that looks like a flame, but I'm developing bits and pieces for it so I'm tarred with the same brush.

What I perhaps should have said is that the situation is retarded - I'm not suggesting you're mentally deficient to be developing for it. Rather that the state of editing has retarded back to a level seen back when Q3 was released - and we shouldn't be there right now. We certainly shouldn't accept blindly that we're back at that stage again.

Post by **corsair** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 7:43 pm

Foo, I havent ever heard you saying such nonsense ;P

I havent gotten myself into this thread before, because I hardly see any use in this discussion whatsoever, it is only interpretation by a very, very narrow sight. Although, all of the people contributing, make it more broad - but still, only time will serve improvments and knowledge.

And I'm sure that it'll be - but I think it already is good.

The worry about performance also has gotten me quite amazed, I've got this map in progress where I've done about everything one shouldnt do, if I should believe the iddevnet q4performance article - and I'm currently, with no optimalisation, crappy lights (meaning rather much pink and white in lightcount), no vis, shitloads of textures ignoring draw efficiency, .fx entities, and whatnot, at a fair 20fps at its lowest. and it surely looks better than what I couldve realised in quake3.

Just wait and see, what time and community will do to quake4. Sure it sucks now, so idd quake3, and quake2, no? lol. indeed. no.
btw, q4 is being massively being played if you ask me, and on a pro level also.

I'll leave myself out of this topic again, bleh.

Post by **Johnny Law** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:15 pm

Well, I'll peek back in because I don't want to leave Foo hanging... no offense was taken (hence the smiley), and I sorta knew what you were getting at with the "retarded" line. The followup explanation did make it clearer.

Post by **AEon** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:28 pm

obsidian,
Mapping for Q3 in the early days was just as bad as Q4 is today. Q3 ran relatively slow on hardware back then, most people on dialup couldn't play reliably online, lots of bugs crippling the game, q3radiant had it's own little querks. I didn't play Q3 the first year it was released and I didn't start mapping for another year, instead working with Half-Life.

Hmm... I wanted to say for me it ran on ISDN all along (Q3A that is), but then remembered I played Q3A at University with a 10 MBit connect. So I have no idea how Q3A ran on ISDN in the beginning. But later on it ran great, or as good as a game can run on ISDN. Whereas with Q4 I have the feeling it will never run that well. Dual ISDN, as Todtsteltzer points out, to me sounds like "forget ISDN". But as long as I have not tested it online, I am withholding any judgement.

A point I'd like to make anyway is this: Back for Q3A I was playing every test version and demo, and got Q3A as soon as it was released. Presently I still have not bought Q4. So some of the "must have right this moment glam" seems to have gone. I still think that Q4 SP will be nice, and definitely be worth playing, just presently I can wait (BTW: Fear is another case were I will wait for the Bargain bin). In both cases I am hoping for patches that optimize FPS.

Another personal point: Usually I would get excited about new tech, if it would actually let me make something that was previously not possible. Well for Far Cry it was (easy editing) terrain and massive vegetation, with nice SP AI for stunning never before seen outdoor landscapes. And most of the editing is happening in real time.

With D3 that was also a step into the real time domain of editing. But the light source counts are such a limitation IMO, that all the fun is taken out of mapping. Especially because I do *not* want to do horror/dark maps.

I could imagine giving Prey a try though, should they have come up with some nice gaming additions.

As that may be, I respect those folks that actually do something. And once I have Q4, I am sure I will download the MP maps, just to see what can be done.

Post by **corsair** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:33 pm

you'll be amazed, theres simply tons of more posibilities than in q3

edit: bleh, I thought i'd stay of of this thread - well anyway, guess I'll use this opportunity to say Foo shouldnt interpret my comment about him never having said such nonsense, thats probably untrue, he mustve done so on many more occasions 8D
jk, dont take me too seriously on what i said, I probably just dont understand what you meant ;O

Post by **Foo** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:38 pm

corsair wrote:he mustve done so on many more occasions 8D

I'm gonna stop beating (what is in terms of my own points) a dead horse anyway. I'm prolly just bitter

Post by **GODLIKE** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 10:31 pm

AEon wrote: With D3 that was also a step into the real time domain of editing. But the light source counts are such a limitation IMO, that all the fun is taken out of mapping. Especially because I do *not* want to do horror/dark maps.

This thread really doesn't need more content, but just a $.02 niggle:

It's not light counts, so much as "light counts on an individual brush". With smart design for performance.. It's really NOT a huge limitation. Carve large brushes up, is all... You can have three or so lights on a brush with no noticable performance chewing, and that ain't so bad.

Post by **Kat** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 10:40 pm

corsair wrote:you'll be amazed, theres simply tons of more posibilities than in q3...

And here-in lies the problem, so far no one want that type of map and instead have opted for 'Pro' stype maps al-la what were being produced latterly for Q3. But I'm biased.. and I've never had any problems with D3 or Q4 editing aside from the steep learning curve (I must be doing something wrong based on the problems people have been having!!).

Post by **Hellfog** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 12:21 am

Since I have not tried editing for Quake4 I have no idea what the state is, but I do not remember really having a lot of problems with Quake3, and I started mapping right when it came out. The only issue I had was it was extremely slow compaired to the newest GTKRadiant, and if I recall it crashed a lot more. Okay, so maybe I have just contradicted myself, but thinking back it doesn't seem like it was all that bad, it just got better with time.

btw, what is the word on GTKRadiant for Q4?

Post by **surgeon62** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:36 am

Foo wrote:You're right, to an extent - most of my beef is that with Q4 we've regressed rather than built on what's gone before.

If we were facing entirely new problems brought on as a result of evolutionary improvements to the game I would be agreeing with you - teething troubles which will be eventually be worked out.

But we're not...

I would have to agree on this point. If you look back into FPS history all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D, you have a leap to Doom, then another leap to Quake then a leap to Q2 and to Q3. However, Q4 feels like a leap in technology in areas that don't matter as much to the target audience as the leaps in previous games. It could be that we just haven't had enough time to find the greatness yet (and Raven perhaps overestimated the rig the average player would be running now) or it could be that they were off-target with the kinds of advances the Quake community would like to see.

A little bit (or a little bit more) of market research to discover the needs of the Q3 players/mappers before Q4 was developed might have made a difference.

Post by **Oeloe** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:47 am

You're forgetting Q4 is basically D3, which wasn't made to be an 'upgrade' to the Q3 engine. It's mostly the technical changes in the engine that make mapping for Q4 (D3 based games) different but also the stock map assets while there are very few custom textures, map models and so on...

Post by **obsidian** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 3:04 am

AEon wrote:Especially because I do *not* want to do horror/dark maps.

That sounds like Doom 3 and FEAR. That's where Q4 comes in - it's not dark and not horror.

In terms of regression, I feel that Q4 isn't so much a regression so much as not such a huge leap in technology as we are used to. The leap from Doom to Q1 to Q3 were all pretty big. This one is more like the leap from Q1 to Q2, which isn't all that different.

It seems as if the market is also being saturated with FPS games, which is why many will complain about the "lack of ingenuity" in the industry. Playability and design wise, we've pretty much hit a bunch of limits as to what we can currently do or at least what we can think of to do, which is why so many companies are focusing on graphics - it's the easiest envelope to push and sell.

But I do know what Foo is getting at. That some of the stuggles that we faced to overcome with Q3 should not be repeated again now.

Post by **Oeloe** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 8:01 am

Well i think that the experience we've built up as a mapping, modding and playing community with the superb quality of mods and maps and gameplay design (cpma for instance) just doesn't match the experience of game developers. Apparently it's still not possible to expect a release that's free of major bugs, but that's probably because of poor internal playtesting. Perhaps if the trend of game dev companies hiring people like pjw, Nunuk, rgoer etc. will extend to the programming side more so that they'll hire people like arQon, it will get better.

Post by **AEon** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 5:57 pm

Well reality is usually a lot more trivial and brutal. I suspect there was a very strict time limit and budget on the game. Take D3 recode it to yield a "different" SP than DOOM3, and then rewrite the MP code to be more Q3A'ish (if I read the interviews on Q4 correctly). So the developers will probably have been happy to get it to work at all.

Polish is luxury

Post by **unitool** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 6:06 pm

I'm excited about the idea of mapping for Q4 and I have started a map (converting an unfinished Q3 map to Q4), but I'm just not excited enough to work on it for more than a few minutes here and there.

I never finished the Q4 SP game, and while the mp game seems fun, I have no interest in supporting Q4 with custom content until Raven fixes the problems with connecting to servers with custom maps on thier rotation. It's a lot of work to make a fun, nice-looking map and I'd just as soon play BF2 as pour my precious free time into a map people will never see.

I do know for a fact that awesome stuff can be made for Q4 MP. Wait until you fuckers see the bomb quaker-x is about to drop on us! So cool.....

Post by **wviperw** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 6:51 pm

Wait until you fuckers see the bomb quaker-x is about to drop on us! So cool.....

Oh, now you're just teasing us. :icon23:

Post by **Robcq** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 8:05 pm

I do know for a fact that awesome stuff can be made for Q4 MP. Wait until you fuckers see the bomb quaker-x is about to drop on us! So cool.....

Man you have said to much already. Now you have to tell everything.

Post by **unitool** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 9:32 pm

No details - all I'll say is that I felt really inadequate after I got a look at what he's been up to in Q4. I think it was at that point that I decided I'd rather spend my free time playing BF2 than building a Q4 mp map. :icon28:

Post by **obsidian** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 9:33 pm

unitool wrote:Wait until you fuckers see the bomb quaker-x is about to drop on us! So cool.....

You're lying! You need to prove yourself. Post some screenshots if you ever want to reclaim our trust in you ever again.

Post by **unitool** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 9:37 pm

the pressure!

Time is one my side, tho. I just have to be patient. I know for a fact that a couple guys here at work will drop sweet Q4 goodness, hopefully not too long from now.

Post by **hemostick** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 1:13 am

Muahah, I'm with obsi on this one. Get your LVLSHOT tags ready !

Post by **Oeloe** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:51 am

I'm not taking cover for that bomb! :icon25:

Post by **Shadowdane** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 4:02 am

ID's engines have always challenged hardware.. hell when Quake 3 came out I played it on my Pentium 2 - 400Mhz on nearly the lowest detail setting at 640x480. It ran but not very well.. when Q3 was first released I think somewhere around 550 - 650Mhz was top of the line.

Same goes for Doom 3 / Quake 4 right now only the top-end systems can really get you a good playable experience. And even then its just barely playable.

I'm sure over time the engine will improve as they patch & tweak things but hardware should catch up soon to get the performance we want. I think a lot of people me included found it unplayable cause of the low framerates during heavy fire fights. My framerate is fine until you get a ton of player models and a lot of dynamic lights flying around the map.

Post by **Lukin** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 12:08 pm

I don't understand this whole loathing of the "Q4" mapmaking. You don't want to do this, it's not fun for you? Ok, so just don't make maps for "Q4". No one force you to make a one. Live and let live.
Someone else could whine about "Q3" in the same way (what's shaderlist.txt?, where's media browser?, hours needed for compilation, buggy punkbuster, people play only pro-q3dm6, stupid bots, etc.). It would be pathetic and pointless.

Also, for some mappers there is one big advantage of "Q4" over the "Q3": single player mode. Simply the best way to show your art skills - without caring that much about performance, item balance, bots, competitive mods, servers, etc.

Post by **v1l3** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 1:19 pm

Q3A shouldn't have been a part of the Quake series. It is it's own game which became the perfection of unity between Doom & Quake, with the point of the game being modification of it own .pk3 guts to change it to your own preference.

In my opinion, mappers should check out Q4 to stay current with the times. Nothing is going to beat out Q3 though. They can update Q4 to be like Q3 in ways, and have the graphics of what Q4 offers. It's just repetition of what's already been done though, with new coding and maybe better graphics.

It's like people want things to be so graphically enhanced, that it'll really look like your killing someone in real life. What's the point of that? Murderfest?

People still play sports that are hundreds of years old. People still play the original DOOM.wads's. 50 Years from now someone will still be playing Q3A, just likes athletes playing sports still.

I just wish someone would figure out how to get the damn lines out of the skybox.