Before Halloween, I was working on a map..and the direction I was going with it was "what if a nuclear reactor took LSD and decorated itself for halloween?" and CorePanic came out.....but it was very rushed, and while parts of it look cool (I think) it didn't accomplish the gameplay I was looking for.
So now, very un-rushed, I'm working on MiniPanic, which is what CorePanic should have been.
I'm going to be making a lot of custom textures for this one, because I can't find any built into Q3 that really look right, plus I'll be able to make higher-res ones myself anyway.
But for now, this is what I have. Thoughts?
Sorry for the awful image quality, these were "rendered" on my laptop, which has the Intel 945 graphics chipset, which to anyone who's ever tried to use one, knows it's more of a graphics decelerator than anything actually useful.
I might post a brighter, higher res shot of the really dark side on my computer that actually has a GPU.
That video is part of why I'm physically/emotionally glued to Quake 3.
When I was applying to colleges, I'd go to open houses and often times the Computer Science people would come out of the woodwork and play quake 3...and I steamrolled a good deal of the east coast that year. Those were good times.
On my best day, in my highest state of alertness on every stimulant known to man, I do not hold a candle to what ever that monster is killing every living thing in that video.
Seeing him hit that jump pad and just....not stop murdering everyone over and over, that really stuck in my mind and I wanted to make maps that would allow that kind of gameplay and put a focus on building a 3d-space that'd allow, nay, encourage people to try to pull of totally insane frags.
I'll pass the map though my dedicated compiler later and get some bots in there so you can get a better sense of scale.
Look up videos of the clan I'm in, team event horizon, on youtube for more information if necessary.
I can see why you'd want to make a map of such scale and structure. RA3 may have been one of the best mods I have ever played. The fun I had in that mod is almost unrivaled by any other.
We will be able to criticize more when you release the map to us. Don't worry.
If I were you I would release it when you are a bit more finished (since you said you have some more stuff to do with it). We would be happy to look it over whenever you'd like us to, though.
Here's this...it's barely a release, no version numbers or anything...just a map....In it's current form, I think it's fun and has the potential to be more fun, I just need to add more weapons and tinker with their locations.
I wasn't able to add bot support this time because I've had an awful headache today and it's probably not that important at this point anyway.
I was mostly hoping to get feedback about the feel and design of the map, and what kind of "flow" it has, if any. This is more or less what it'll look like when it's done, I'll just go back and add custom textures so that all of the pipes are different...and don't look like wet poo.
You may have also noticed the name is wrong; you're correct. I need to clean up some of the scripts and files so that it can be distributed without the CorePanic texture pack (inside the pk3, you don't need anything extra) However, this map is going to be called MiniPanic when it's done, and thus it'll be minipanic.bsp
for now, I suggest calling the map up by entering:
I'll probably download and run it tomorrow - But what I can tell you now, judging from the images, is that I was very perplexed to see that you've made the checkered tiles out of seperate brushes. Is this to delay texture creation, or to stress the engine to see how far you can push it?
That's my way of kinda seeing how I can stress the engine a little - all of my maps are like that, at least for now. However, this one is made on a much, much smaller scale than my other ones, so it shouldn't end up being all that stressful. With this map, instead of having a ton of moderately detailed work, here I want to have an extremely high density of lots of high-red art work. I also like the sharpness it provides, the brush-made checkerboard pattern, even high-res textures get all filtery looking and by this point I'm really splitting hairs, but, it's kinda my thing. When I compile the bots into the map, I'm sure to put one big brush that's "bot clip" so it doesn't hinder the AAS system too much. (often the bots won't compile at all if I don't make provisions for them, or if they do, the bots act....bi-polar)
Other senseless/reckless things I tend to do in my maps:
*compile without -fast
*compile with no less than 12 bounces
*globally set the lightmap resolution much, much higher than it should be
*compile with -patchmeta whenever I can
*compile with bouncegrid
*other dumb things I can't remember which might be more irresponsible
Obsidian and I had a brief discussion of these practices, as he was giving me advice about how to fix some compiling issues I was having, his (very good, and totally reasonable) advice was to map clean, maybe turn off some unnecessary options during the compile, try to reduce the brush count, etc. I've kinda..signed the "I understand the things I'm doing are awful" waiver and eventually the resolution to my problem wasn't to do any of those things, but rather, to run out and get 16GB of ram. In the end, what he said was "What you're doing is completely insane, but it looks cool."
That's roughly all I'm going for.
Sure it makes a lot more sense to globally increase the lightmaping brightness, and compile with fewer, brighter bounces, there'd be almost no difference to the human eye in the end. But.....that's not my goal, not yet anyway, right now, I wanna showcase what quake 3 can do with sheer, unabridged brute force behind it with no shortcuts and no tricks. I know a lot of maps already do that really well, in fact lots of levels I've seen look spectacular, but I just wanted to throw my craziness into the stack so that someone could look back and say "wow, quake 3, this practically ancient gaming technology could keep up with this monster? that's one hell of a game engine."
This map is huge. I don't exactly like that the items have 4 ammos around them, but in a map this size I'm sure you're shooting for ra3 style gameplay. I love the "fence" of fire above the jump pad. It looks really nice and contrasty with the dark parts of the upper ceiling. The only thing I would add are more of those grates in the upper ceiling (and clip them better), and some more surfaces (maybe even levels) upon which to fight/stand. Good luck with further development. It looks like you will have a fun map for a bus load of people in a few weeks.
And yeah, I need to add more of those pipey-gratey things, I like them too, some of them don't have the right texture on the right side so they don't register as solid brushes, that's in the works.
I'm glad I sensed enjoyment in that first review though. I kinda group the ammo per weapon around the guns so that players running through at high speed have a little something to work with. How would you spread the weapons/ammo around? I'm open to change.
Well, this map is a bit different from the ordinary. The ra3 feel of your map definitely welcomes the way you distributed the ammo, so it's fine to leave it as it is.
Did you take a look at Razztazzmagoria? That's the size map I'm happy making. MiniPanic is like, 1/10th the size of Razztazzmagoria. and MiniPanic is enjoyable so far? Is there anything that'd make it amazing?
Well, I don't think one can make a huge map like that totally amazing. Some of the classic maps like Aerowalk and Blood Run are amazing. Innovative maps like Pyramid of the Magician and Map on the Edge of Forever are amazing. Your maps lend themselves to amazing gameplay, but the maps themselves cannot be as amazing in the traditional sense. Unless you really put forth time to detail everything, you will likely end up with a moderately enjoyable map and nothing more. This is essentially beyond your control since the bar has been raised so high, but with enough time you could definitely turn it into something amazing. Just don't expect it to be done within the month.
Last edited by Anthem on Fri Nov 19, 2010 4:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Yeah, for Vanilla quake 3....it's hard to make a large open map that's really spectacular - come to think of it I haven't even seen any for unreal tournament 3 - but I did later find that razztazzmagoria loaded up into the Corkscrew mod was pretty awesome. Any other takers on MiniPanic?
VolumetricSteve wrote:
Other senseless/reckless things I tend to do in my maps:
*compile without -fast
*compile with no less than 12 bounces
*globally set the lightmap resolution much, much higher than it should be
*compile with -patchmeta whenever I can
*compile with bouncegrid
*other dumb things I can't remember which might be more irresponsible
Obsidian and I had a brief discussion of these practices, as he was giving me advice about how to fix some compiling issues I was having, his (very good, and totally reasonable) advice was to map clean, maybe turn off some unnecessary options during the compile, try to reduce the brush count, etc. I've kinda..signed the "I understand the things I'm doing are awful" waiver and eventually the resolution to my problem wasn't to do any of those things, but rather, to run out and get 16GB of ram. In the end, what he said was "What you're doing is completely insane, but it looks cool."
Go for it mate!
If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.
-Lee Trevino, golfer who actually has been struck by lightning.
I had a quick run through the map a couple days back already, but didn't get to posting my thoughts as I lacked the time afterwards.
I had hoped to see some more areas, but that's just based on my expectations I suppose. At any rate, the scale is way to large for my liking; Even for ra3 standards it would require more intermediate platforms; cpma movement, and decreased gravity would be interesting here, but that's kind of the same point.
About the checker-tiles: I see they're also using totally different shading, so that's probably a good excuse for separating every single tile.
If you plan on sticking to this method, you may want to try pushing it even further and bevelling every tile's edge allowing for some interesting lighting effects. If you end up having loads of detail because of which you'll need to decrease the brush/triangle count for the floor, but you still want to maintain the different shading methods (which seem refreshing to me), an alternative would be to stack a very thin brush atop of the floor with an alpha channel that cuts out either one of the two types of tiles.
As far as game play is concerned, it appears there are only a couple elements for the players mind to feed on;(significantly large) floors all the way at the bottom of the map; a couple of tricky, narrow surfaces, and a seemingly ever-continuing staircase; This won't keep players interested for very long. I personally would lower the vertical scale, add (broken) pillars (on the floors as well as adjacent to the staircases) and break up the floor to add some height variations. The scales in the other dimensions don't necessarily need to be decreased imho.
Most detailing and different types of structures seem to be separately packed in very specifically defined areas; Intertwining the girders and pipes throughout the map could make it a lot more interesting.
The graphics reminded me of some maps in Portal (not the clinically clean ones evidently).
I hope you don't get me wrong if I say that "it sucks, but has lots of potential", because I am truly interested in seeing how this progresses.
corsair, excellent, excellent feedback, that's precisely what i'm looking for.
I actually agree about the staircases, which is why i've been starting to use jump-pads in my maps, but I still feel like they look cool, and if you use the haste power-ups I post around the stairs, they're slightly more bearable plus I'm assuming the player will be chasing/running from someone while going up the stairs. The stairs kinda came from my oldest mapping staples which kinda gravitate around "thinking different" but different isn't good if it's not fun, so I'm still kinda working it out.
I've pushed this method really far, particularly in Razztazzmagoria. Take a look.
What do you mean about intertwining the grates and pipes? I thought I kinda did that, but if there's a way to make it more....mixed, maybe you could explain more?
Also, have you tried MiniRazz? It's the map this one is based on actually because people suggested that I stretch it out vertically and just kinda remix it with additional artwork/structures.
My map publishing/planning process is kinda starting to feel like ...linux distributions....building a core, which spawns a few major changes that branch off, and then those changes spawn their own little families of sub-types. I think I'll just keep re-working MiniRazz because...it's fun to play (for me) and fun to work on (because it's not one of my soul crushing ugly monsters like Razztazzmagoria) and it's just a neat little map that I built totally on a whim (actually, I built it on a 2GHz coreduo and I wanted to make a map that could compile in "final" in less than 30 minutes and still look like one of my maps.)
I'll probably finish this one out with my portal-ish details and...I dunno I may tinker with the weapon placement but I'm not sure how I'd go about switching that all around.....really doing it any other way than how I've been doing it is just alien to me, so I'd need a lot of pointers.
Some crazy silly guy wrote:
The new compiler has arrived. Six-core AMD T1055 Phenom 2. 4 gigabytes this, SSD that. It's fast. Fast enough that it compiled Q3DM17 with 8 light bounces in just under 32 seconds.
It's chewing away at the VIS process for RTGM2 right now, it's been going all night, but it's still making progress. Prepare yourselves.
Warning: you won't be prepared.
Love, Ventolin
Are you fuckin' mental? I have to go look at this Razz map now... brb...
If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.
-Lee Trevino, golfer who actually has been struck by lightning.
This is not a precise display, and is more chaotic than what'd be user-friendly - but I hope this helps explaining that which my words didn't succeed in :)
I tend to think there are two major 'concepts' for this, and a third which puts these two into the map with a grain of salt.
Item power = Risk of obtaining (like a highly exposed red armour)
Item use = Location (a grenade launcher where the bouncing and curved-trail characteristics of the grenade come in handy)
Then, the grain of salt would be to not stick to this too much - especially the latter one could take out the pace of the game. So these may have to be shifted a bit so they are only just near their locations of 'best' use.
If you'd make a game like q3, the beginner maps would stick to this to the extreme; so players are taught these values more effectively. For maps accomodating advanced gameplay, sticking to this could eliminate the fun and diversity of play
Go for it mate! 
I have to go look at this Razz map now... brb...
