ANNOUNCEMENT: Quake Live Invites

[Castle]

Castle: it would be very interesting to see someone really explore what q3map2 can do. Post some pics if you get the urge to play around with those ideas.

Major features I would look into first would be:
1. Radiosity light compile feature Ydnar added (Vastly improved lighting in every way if I recall)
2. Ability to raise lightmap density to 1 to 1 ratio (Might be viable to do something like that now...)
3. Ability to allow for Q3map2 to acknowledge if a material has a normal map on it and bake that information into the lightmaps themselves. (IMHO genius concept.. hard to get it to be truly obvious to the naked eye but it helps a lot in many ways visually )
4. Ability to force vertex lighting on surfaces that are very large and do not need to have normal/lightmap data. (Might be good if you want to have large open vistas and true size skyboxes like UT3 or Gears.)
5. Ability to import ASE models as level geometry with collision and lightmap data (This one alone is pretty big. You can change your strategy of design considerably with just the ability to place lots of models in a level.)
6. Ability to add lights that flicker or strobe into the level (pretty out there how it is done but it does work)

I imagine fully taking advantage of just those features would make it possible to do some pretty amazing things in a very old engine. I stopped using q3map2 while it was fairly young however and I imagine many more features have been added since then.

But yeah, ill let you know how well these features work if I can find some time to play with them soon.

[obsidian]

*cough*workingonit*cough*

Whatever happened to that castle_power map? You had some neat normal map generated lightmaps in that one.

4) I think you have it the other way around, terrain is usually vertex lit by default (Team Arena), Q3Map2 added lightmaps to terrain (Wolf:ET, JK2, JA, etc).

BTW, work in progress (need to fix those 403's):
http://www.robotrenegade.com/q3map2/

[Castle]

*cough*workingonit*cough*

Whatever happened to that castle_power map? You had some neat normal map generated lightmaps in that one.

4) I think you have it the other way around, terrain is usually vertex lit by default (Team Arena), Q3Map2 added lightmaps to terrain (Wolf:ET, JK2, JA, etc).

BTW, work in progress (need to fix those 403's):
http://www.robotrenegade.com/q3map2/

Id start with something fresh if I was to work on a map for quake 3 again hehe..
Its a long story but the map you speak of died long long ago hehe...

To best take advantage of the above features I imagine a method of design closer to what you would see in UT3 would work best. Lots of basic model geometry and props used creatively ect..

As far as terrain anymore I would easily prefer a ASE model thats vertex lit over the previous implementation wouldn't you agree?

[obsidian]

I think I would prefer a lightmapped ASE models for terrain. For example:
http://www.katsbits.com/htm/maps/kat1024.htm

Or lightmapped brushes:
http://www.simonoc.com/pages/design/maps_q3/pom.htm

The only thing to watch out for is clipping of models. The autoclip can be a little tricky.


There are times when vertex lighting looks better (smaller models with dense triangle tessellations) and other times when lightmaps look better (larger polygon solids like walls, floors, relatively low tessellation models like terrain).

[Castle]

woah!

yeah I will second that!

Though I was referring to large vista proper scale backdrops you commonly see these days in games like gears and UT3. In other words areas that are not playable space. I have a feeling I am vastly overestimating what quake 3 can do these days however. But I do recall GTK having a massive world grid coupled with another feature q3map2 added; increased block size.

Awesome looking levels you have there!

edit: Wait are you the author of the second level? Wasn't that Sock who did that one?

[dichtfux]

edit: Wait are you the author of the second level? Wasn't that Sock who did that one?

The links point to the websites of kat and sock, so I'd assume they are the authors.

[obsidian]

Oh yes, I see... you can create a vertex lit backdrop for various performance reasons with lightmapped playable terrain in the foreground. Furthermore, you can use _skybox entities to create a projected portal sky for some extra large world effects.

No, I'm not the author, sock is. Dunno how you got that idea.

[Castle]

wow that must be one of the features I wasn't around to see added.

You can do skybox portal in quake 3 now?
Ydnar is a mad man...

Oh and sorry I thought you implied both maps were yours hehe .. don't know why.
You know what though with the memory req we consider standard these days you could most likely lightmap everything even full scale sky backdrops.. though I wouldn't recommend doing that with a 1 to 1 ratio on everything LOL!

might want to stick with a lower density light map for that kind of thing hehe....

[ix-ir]

But I do recall GTK having a massive world grid coupled with another feature q3map2 added; increased block size.

0 FTW and cut giant areas by hand. :P

[dev-null]

If you could send me an invite, that would be great!

Mail: dev-null@gmx.ch

[Castle]

But I do recall GTK having a massive world grid coupled with another feature q3map2 added; increased block size.

0 FTW and cut giant areas by hand. :P

block size 0?
hmmm.. I think that would cause some problems hehehe

[ix-ir]

dev-null - You need to give your first and last names as well as your rough skill level for the sign up info.

Castle - why's that? It doesn't try to infintely cut the BSP, it just doesn't perform any blocksize cuts, if you're worried about 0 you could alternatively set it to a huge number. Blocksize seems like a really bad way of ensuring no portal is more than a certain size. Additional portals are a waste of compile and run time.

Having a look through the q3map2 manual I find 'fur', could that be used to do grass? Does that even work in q3?

[Castle]

dev-null - You need to give your first and last names as well as your rough skill level for the sign up info.

Castle - why's that? It doesn't try to infintely cut the BSP, it just doesn't perform any blocksize cuts, if you're worried about 0 you could alternatively set it to a huge number. Blocksize seems like a really bad way of ensuring no portal is more than a certain size. Additional portals are a waste of compile and run time.

Having a look through the q3map2 manual I find 'fur', could that be used to do grass? Does that even work in q3?

hmm
Well with no base cuts to begin the BSP tree I think quake 3 engine would have a harder time traversing the tree at render time. From what I remember the base blocksize cuts are effectively where the BSP begins and then branches out from there.

Have you tested this before?
Does the base engine have limits in place like how deep a branch of the bsp tree can go?
Because I imagine that you would have one very large branch that traverses the entire level. That and correct me if I am wrong but the Quake 3 engine itself expects for the bsp to have base cuts that break the level up into blocks for various other reasons too right?

I speculate that if blocksize 0 does work its using some interesting algorithm to get around such issues.
Ydnar did do some crazy things though so I don't doubt it does work.

edit: Though I suppose most of the issues I mentioned are not a problem anymore because of how much more powerful our PCs are these days. *shrugs*

Would be interesting to test this and see how well it works for myself.

[Castle]

Also too I believe that I just remembered a feature that if I recall was first seen in Q3map2 that allowed you to simply have blocks with shallow data be merged automatically at compile time thus removing the need to ever change blocksize.

Cant remember when/if that was added though.. hmm.

[dev-null]

dev-null - You need to give your first and last names as well as your rough skill level for the sign up info.

The name is Thomas Baer and the skill level is, i can beat hardcore bots. I used to play a lot, but now im a bit out of shape.

[wattro]

Isn't there a default cut at 0,0? I seem to remember people having problems compiling maps that don't cross the 0,0 boundary (and possibly also are inside the specified blocksize dimensions).

[obsidian]

Disabling blocksize will work, but you have to be very careful about doing that, and more or less a hinting pro. Not something I would recommend to novice or intermediate mappers. Blocksize helps to limit the size of portals, so you don't end up with all the portals criss-crossing each other needlessly.

Fur:


It does work for Q3 and it could potentially be used to make some sort of foliage, but use sparingly since it comes with a relatively large performance hit, especially when you have a lot of layers.

[Shallow]

I was never a fan of the fur feature - it just didn't look that good to me and resulted in massive overdraw.

One thing that did come out of it though was give the facility to get q3map2 to clone and offset faces at compile time. I always meant to build a map that used that to have a sort of sine-wave field of levitating coloured squares, but could never quite get the arrangement of shaders I'd need right in my head.

[obsidian]

Look what you did, you made that tribble frown.

It can be useful with lower clone values to say, add more volume to a pile of leaves or something. But yes, you really have to watch the overdraw.

I'm not sure if you've used deformVertexes move for that effect, but particles work that way so I'm sure you can get your coloured squared to move that way.

[ix-ir]

Nope, just tested to make sure, maps don't need to be on anything cut by the blocksize command nor 0,0 to compile. Why would you need to be a hinting pro? Just cut the rare room that's 1024 units or more in any dimension.

[DooMer]

If they do have community map competitions, you're probably going to be limited in the crazy technical stuff you can do. Since they said the maps are going to be pushed down to everybody, older hardware has to be able to run it decently.

[Drivenby]

ho2range@gmail.com , if anyone still has mercy....

[Coesez]

If there's still someone with an invite left.. Plz send me one ?
coeses@skynet.be

Thx

[foralarx2k3]

Can I be cheeky and ask anyone who still has an invite to drop me a pm.

Thanks

[fKd]

yeah i'd be keen for a invite too

kitd2005 at hotmail dot com

chur