Quake3World

Hi everyone, as I slowly get back into mapping again with Quake3 I am wondering how it compairs to Quake4 mapping. If you know Q3 mapping fairly well how much of a learning curve is there to Q4 and what are the major changes? How are textures/shaders handled?

I was also wondering how intense the mapping is on the PC compaired to the actual game. The game runs quite slow on my computer, but I'm wondering if I can map anyway for it. GTKRadiant runs liquid smooth for me for Quake3. I'll be upgrading soon anyway.

The learning curve would be pretty flat "Its the same - but more advanced" I think you can say.

The biggest change is the lighting. You also need to learn how to use visportals and few other minor tricks, but making a multiplayer map is still relatively simple.

I think you'll be able to run the editor, however you should be really careful when using realtime preview (turning the "Cubic clip the camer view" option off can potentially blow your system away ).

More about visibility:

In Q3 you needed to build the vis-blocking skeleton of the map using structural brushes and then do fiddly bits with detail brushes. You could also go all ninja with hint brushes to fix up some excess-visibility problems.

In Q4 there is no structural/detail categorization of brushes; brushes is brushes. You're not concerned with the same sort of faces-making-vis-splits issues. Visibility is controlled with portals as described on iddevnet. I haven't gotten to the point of visibility-tuning yet, but it _seems_ like compared to Q3 it is a somewhat simpler process. On the downside, perhaps, I would bet that you can't be as aggressive with portals as you can be with hint brushes, in terms of micromanaging sight-lines.

Cool, I played with hint brushes a bit, but I don't bother anymore. Even the most intense Q3 levels run fine on today's computers. Maybe by the time I get to Q4 it will be the same lol.

Eliminating detail brushes sound nice. Was always a pain when you forgot to make details and found your map takes 50 hours to compile. lol.

So are shaders the same then? I was hoping it would be easier, shaders are pretty crazy in Q3. There was a shader app, (I forget what it was called) that helped a bit.

Hellfog wrote:... There was a shader app, (I forget what it was called) that helped a bit.

I think you're talking about Q3ASE (Quake 3 Arena Shader Editor). You'll also find some links to helpful tutorials on this site.