Quake3World

The red/white stacked houses are cool, but would look better IMO if it wasn't one flat surface along the height of the building. Instead make indentations (like you did for the very top one) or even stack them "crooked" like a stack of blocks off kilter.

Juggernaut : sense of scale... for me it's the cliff texture's scale that makes it weird

This i looking very good Sere. When will we be able to play it? =)

even though the screenies look very good as is, what wviperw is true (imo) - a bit of variation in the angle of the walls would be good and add to what looks like the theme of the map.

Your blends are still messed up, you have sand and grass blending nicely, then it just shoots to rock right next to it. For example look at the base of the rocky bits.

Looks correct to me. Rocks jut out from sand, they don't blend at the edges.

UPDATE Beta1

Colors cheat, it's for Q3 not Q4..



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Hope to get proper Feedback, it's near to be finished..

cheers sum :icon31:

Foo wrote:Looks correct to me. Rocks jut out from sand, they don't blend at the edges.

Yeah, maybe just add a few smaller rocks and boulders next to the base to make it look a little more natural.

Hipshot wrote:This i looking very good Sere. When will we be able to play it? =)

i'm going to do a valve-style episodic release, and there's another two maps to go after this until what i think is the 'natural' conclusion of episode one (or possibly three, if i divide this map into two instead of my original plan of one, i.e. there's another bay beyond the cliffs)

obsidian wrote:

Foo wrote:Looks correct to me. Rocks jut out from sand, they don't blend at the edges.

Yeah, maybe just add a few smaller rocks and boulders next to the base to make it look a little more natural.

good idea, but as you can see the fps is already getting low, and that's without any action. in any case, i'd only put fade distances on them so you probably wouldn't see them in some of those wide-angle screens anyway, only from somewhere closer

Just a little something im whipping up for q4. Im not sure why I'm mapping for q4 still, but I am. Pre-beta atm.

Why is it Quake 4 always looks so... Flat...? I mean the shots above are great but it STILL looks so bland and not "alive" like a Quake 3 shot would do? Ambient lighting in Quake 4 obviously plays a big part in "washing out" things a tad but I've yet to see a Quake 4 level that looks amazing simply because EVERYTHING still looks flat. Take Storm shadows shot, it looks great. In fact if it was in Quake 3, it would probably be a stunner. But it just looks so dead and un-alive, like something is missing from the shot? Fog? Enviromental effects? Or is it just that local maps in Quake 4 seem to not do an awful lot compared to other engines?

Anybody get what I mean?

No, I don't get what you mean. Stormshadow's screenie looks badassed... looking forward to seeing more of it. :icon31:

I get exactly what he means, and I think in that shot it's all down to lighting. I don't mean the surface interaction stuff, but the actual large scale lighting of the scene. Almost everything in that shot is either fully sunlit or fully ambient, with no pleasant transitions between the two values. There's no real gradients or interaction between light and shadow, and that makes for ugly flat lighting.

It's hardly storm's fault when the tech permits little else, and I know that point lights and stencil shadows are all that's practically achievable in realtime for the time being, but that doesn't mean they don't suck ass.

EDIT: forgot to say, given all that the map looks rather fine :icon26:

Map looks great, engine sucks fat dicks. That is all.

I think a lot of it has to do with the monochromatic texture set used...

Also I think the texture settings may not be high or extra, and the texture blend mode doesn't appear to me to be anisotropic, muffling the textures up at short range even in the area of map seen in that screenshot.

My comp is a mid range system so I run q4 on lower graphics mode which is part of why the screenie looks a little flat.

However, you really are limited as to how many lights you can use due to performance issues, so a) complex lighting is pretty much out of the question, b) your really pushed to not overlap light volumes, and c) your almost forced to use an ambient light which, as stated, does tend to leave you with a slightly washed out look. So yeah, you get a lot of 'flat' looking q4 maps as a result.

I actually tried to get a good contrasty look going but its more difficult do that while maintaining adequate light to play. I think the map looks pretty good considering Ill try to have a beta up within the next few hours.

Stormshadow, I'd like to help you out with some feedback, is it for duel? Or FFA? Or What? Post the beta!

its up!

duel map, or small FFA if your into that sort of thing...

Bump/specular maps aren't the greatest on this texture set. This, in combination with a bit too much lighting baked into the diffuse maps (after all, they were not originally made with ppl in mind) doesn't really help with per pixel lighting.

I never was very fond of the bump/specular mapping in any game.

Just looks... so fake in my opinion. If you're going to have something look fake have it look like a game (Quake 3 and before).

Silicone_Milk wrote:I never was very fond of the bump/specular mapping in any game.

Just looks... so fake in my opinion. If you're going to have something look fake have it look like a game (Quake 3 and before).

I think a big reason for that is that we currently use way too much bump/specular because its still a novelty. New techs tend to be overused in the beginning simply because its new eyecandy to look at.

Yeah, just look at quake 2 Colored lighting!