Q4 - What is up with Q4 Mapping?

[AEon]

Been out of it for some time now, so I was wondering how seriously the folks here and in general are taking mapping for Quake IV?

Back for DOOM 3 I was seeing some interesting stuff, but never had the feeling it really took off like it did for Quake 3 Arena.

Has that changed / improved for Quake IV?

Would some kind folks point out what additions vs. Q3A and vs. D3 have beed added to Q4? E.g. what things make mapping Q4 interesting / compelling / fresh?

IIRC there was not Bot support for MP maps. But in one thread I read something about an included aas file for a beta Q4 map?!

[Foo]

I can't bring myself to do it.

I've all but stopped playing the game as well. It's clunky and extremely poor quality in comparison with Q3.

On top of that the editor is a bugfest, no bots, the multiplayer maps all look like shit (and you can't help but make levels that look like shit too - performance is so poor).

All in all, any time I would spend on Q4 mapping I know would be better spent on unreal or such, where there's actually a well polished game, large fanbase, and solid tools.

[Hipshot]

Its the light and the editor, it will take a while I think before I can make something nice in Q4, that's what I feel right now atleast.

[AEon]

Hi Foo,
hmmm that bad?

I read some comment on the SP game "challenging" the hardware, but was not aware this was also a problem for MP. But if MP really still needs "work" I can just as well try and finish my last Q3A map with a clean consience.

Question is, how likely is it that the "problems" will actually get fixed. IIRC even id never really "significantly" changed their engines via patches after release. So should those "problems" be fundamental...

How much do Q4 custom maps get played? Has that somehow improved, compared to Q3A?

IIRC there is a custom mod for MP AI, anyone tested this and how did that go?

[Foo]

They could surprise me, it's always possible. But I don't expect any of the issues to get fixed, and if they do it's still gonna amount to a pretty crappy multiplayer experience overall. Hence my attitude towards the game. If it does get fixed, down the line, then I'll change my stance, but I think it's extremely foolish to be one of the flock saying 'wait until the next patch and it'll be better', because it won't. The game is fucked.

Still, I take solace in the fact that Q3 is still excellent and there's bright things on the horizon with ioquake and a few other things happening.

[Hipshot]

Its a shame it went this way really. I hate it. Q3 was so soild in every aspect, graphics, gameplay, overall quality, editorvise, modvise :/

[wviperw]

Realize that people look back on Q3 with rose colored glasses AEon. Not everything was as peachy as it seems for Q3 in the early days. Almost all of the maps were lacking in the gameplay department. The only reason there were any good maps at all was becase of the shear number of maps included (iow, they got "lucky"). Not to mention the bugs and performance issues pre-1.17 patch (iirc). Plus the fact that we didn't even get that great of a level editor until GTKRadiant came along.

As far as Q4, yes it has a long way to go, but I think it has a pretty good base. Custom maps seem to have a *much* larger potential to get played for Q4 since players don't seem to want to play the maps out of the box that much (at least in the competitive scene). If you look at the Winter CPL competition recently, there was only one standard map (dm3) played and even that was a custom version put out by the community.

Finally, regarding bots, there is a lot of work going on. The one you're referring to that has been released is the SABot, which is pretty decent considering. Q4Max has QRealka on their team (maker of the awesome spiterbots for Q3), so you can look forward to some good bots from them. And who knows, maybe Raven/id will even release bots in a future patch.

[jester!]

Q4 custom tourney maps are played. I am sure any TDM, or CTF maps would get their time as well. I doubt many FFA players would have enough desire to find a custom map, and with the state of autodownload being what it is I doubt server operators would bother as well.

I also dont think its as bad as foo says. Monsoon is a decent enough looking map and I think good looking maps could be made at least on a structural level, the lighting engine is a detriment to smooth MP gameplay, and its not going to change. If you have the horsepower to push the lighting engine around its not that bad but for the majority of gamers hardware isnt at that level yet.

If the sound can be fixed and some of the other bugs can be ironed out Q4 could be fun for a good while.

[Hellfog]

I am also recently getting back into the mapping community as well, and hearing all of this is depressing. I am still mapping for Quake3, but when I get a new computer I would like to move to the next big thing, but it seems like there is no solid next big thing? Of course I am still really not up on what's hot and what's not. Where is the mapping community strongest right now? What game?

On the up side it seems like you don't really have to worry about performance for Quake3 anymore as everyone can probably run it. I still like mapping for Q3.

[Lukin]

It is really not that bad as foo is saying. Far better than "Doom 3" at least. I'm fine with the current editor, and GtkRadiant 1.5.0 soon will have "Q4" support too.
Of course you will need to get use to the lighting system - it might be not as good as pre-rendered lightmaps were (mainly in terms of performance) but soon all engines will use similar methods, so there is no escape from this. Actually making map for "Q4" is more fun than for an old engines - you've got the real time preview, you don't need to wait to see the effects of your work, you don't need to worry about the switches for q3map2 or shader codes, etc.
And the maps can look good: "Tremors" from Quakemas Pack is beautiful and "Campgrounds" for "Q4" looks better than its' archetype.

[o'dium]

Take my advice, jump on now. With next gen games like ET:QW and UE3 Powered games, if you dont mess around with Quake 4 now the jumps going to be to much for you.

Everything has changed so much that the workload has gone up 10x just for a wall.

[pjw]

Like Lukin said, the biggest change is the lighting, and the learning curve is a bit steep there if you're used to Q3, but the learning process is fun and cool and entertaining (w. real-time preview).

What I'm really looking forward to is people putting out some SP stuff (and I'm not talking about some gigantic incredibly-polished map complete with custom everything--I think people could make some simple but genuinely fun SP maps pretty quickly just using existing stuff). I may put out a small tourney map of some kind next, but am really tempted to jump right into some funky SP stuff...

I have been accused of being stupidly optimistic (and I am, of course, biased), but I think the Q4 map scene will continue to grow and produce some amazing things.

[Johnny Law]

IMO the biggest obstacle to Q4 mapping in general is the lack of out-of-the-box MP bots. Even if the third-party bots get really good really soon, there's always a barrier for most of a game's audience if they have to download mods to do something.

You wouldn't think that people downloading maps would be averse to downloading bots, but IMO folks on message boards way underestimate the number of people who liked to dork around with the Q3 MP bots even on the standard maps. That was a lot of the audience that then got interested in downloading more Q3 maps, and also in making more Q3 maps. We don't have that driver for Q4.

Of course, Q2 and Q1 didn't have out-of-the-box bots, and they had interesting mapping scenes... and like Q4 they benefitted from having an SP component that mappers could get into. So it's not all gloom and doom. But the FPS audience wasn't as divided back then, and Quake was fresher, and maps were much easier to make.

So *shrug* I don't expect a huge mapping scene for Q4, not as big as Q3, but probably bigger than D3 if for no other reason than people have more experience with the tech now. (And IMO multiplayer is more fun for Q4.) Hopefully there will be enough folks to keep things entertaining, and if the pond is smaller I guess we will be bigger fish by default. As for Foo's original post in this thread I'll probably have to agree with the people who think that it's not as bad as all that, and that in most ways that a mapper cares about (excepting hype and audience size) Q4 is starting out better than Q3 did.

[surgeon62]

Although I am still relatively new to mapping (I am still finishing my first serious Q3 map and I only map as a hobby), I have watched the Quake community for years. There are definitely many problems with Q4 and IMO Raven made a huge marketing miscalculation in not taking care of the MP audience :icon32: (The SP will get them some sales in the beginning, but 3-4 years from now the MP community will drive sales for the game and will be the base for sales of the next Quake game).

That said, the Quake community has latched onto this game (How long was it before the first mods? 2-3 weeks after launch? ...WOW!). I predict that the community will drag this game kicking and screaming along until we have something worthy of the quake series to work with. That along with the improvements that we all will eventually make in our systems should insure a significant following for the game.

Hopefully, the developers for Q5 Arena will learn from this debacle. :icon25:

[Oeloe]

I like what people like Method, Stormshadow, Geit and Lukin have churned out. Quality is increasing by the week. If you can step on the Q4 mapping train now, i'm pretty sure it will pay off. Although it's hard to say how the Q4 community will develop, i can't imagine it will not take off once it's quality will get close to current Q3's (and more people will have the hardware to get decent performance in it).

[AEon]

Woha... lots of feedback... thanx everyone.


wviperw,

Realize that people look back on Q3 with rose colored glasses AEon.

Right... I never thought of becoming one of the folks that just does not move on. I used to look down on the "Quake" and "Quake 2" folks in that manner that would not move on. But D3 did not do it for me, so I was hoping Q4 would. Far Cry was kinda fun (though I find adding custom content a real pain in that game).

One of the things I really miss in Q3A is high poly mapping... well "relatively high", with 100K tris. That way geometry could be made more detailed, without resorting to models. I also miss LOD that would let folks add nice vegetation like in Far Cry... alas that never was a id-engine thing.

The AI mods you mention, sound promising. I only wish it had been part of the game. Anything non-default is always problematic, because folks may not have or want to install the mod the map requires.

jester!,

... the state of autodownload being what it is I doubt server operators...

What state is it in? I am aware that one of Q3A's problems was the really slow (because limited) bandwidth for map downloads (of 2-3K IIRC). A better way would be to let admins set a URL to the maps on a different server, and let the folks download them at full speed. The client would thus open a separate connection to the maps via FTP or HTTP, and not boggle down the game server. Has anything like this ever been done? I wonder.

On lighting... I have downloaded several MP movies. The maps almost did not have shadows at all, as if some sort of "full brite" was happening. Is there a slightly different approach to lighting MP maps than SP mapsin Q4?

Lukin,
on Lighting... right noted that with Doom 3. I really missed the good old shader lighting, that lets the mapper splash hundreds of light shaders all over the map and not have to worry about them. Though unified "real time" lighting should really be hailed, I still feel the loss of shader lighting is a pretty bad feature reduction for a "the next best thing" engine. Also I had trouble getting the real time lighting to look "consistently good" (sure its a skill thing), but with everything in real time I had hoped lighting could be done more quickly. But getting the lighting "somewhat right" still takes a lot of time.


On a more personal note. I am noticing that online play has less and less appeal to me, sure I only have ISDN, but why stress myself with kiddies. That is the reason I prefer to play offline more and more. Thus the mapping for Q3A is still fun, because the bots can be made interesting enough for a few games, plus are great for map tests.


Finally: What is up with the net code?
Can folks with ISDN play MP? With D3 that was not possible.

[pjw]

On lighting... I have downloaded several MP movies. The maps almost did not have shadows at all, as if some sort of "full brite" was happening.

IMO, you're talking about a couple of different things here. The first being that many people play MP with settings turned down, shadows turned off, no spec, no normals, detail lighting killed and/or all of the above, so if you're watching a movie, you're watching however that person's specs were currently set.

That being said, lighting in Q4 MP is difficult. MP maps should not have any pitch-black areas (IMO), but making sure all areas are lit impacts performance. MP maps are generally more open than SP maps, which impacts performance as well.

Performance vs. aesthetics is a juggling act, and there are a few different approaches a designer can take to this issue, but ideally (again, solely IMO), you will at least:

1. Have some form of very low ambient light in the map. If you crank this up at all, it kills the normal maps and stuff looks like ass, but a very low value is enough to ensure no pitch black areas without washing things out. Note that, depending on the design and layout of the map, ambient may not be necessary at all. YMMV.

2. Make maximum use of the lights you have. This means pulling the center out on volumetric lights and moving it to the optimal location, choosing a color/texture for the light that will serve your needs the best, deciding on a light-by-light basis if you really need specular, etc.--basically taking the time to do it right.

3. Carefully use light detail level to ensure that all of your lights won't be drawn for everyone, and that the less-vital lights will be culled based on user performance settings.

Good information on performance/lighting here: http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/LevelEditor_Performance

[Hellfog]

Lots of good info here. I didn't know that there were no bots in Q4. I would say 95% of all my Q3 testing and play is with the default bots. hmmm. Looks like I need to do some reading. :icon25:

[DooMer]

URL redirection works, but the bad thing is that you have to have all of the files on the server or you can't join. Even if it's a map that isn't being played. That's the only thing preventing me from putting custom maps on the q4w server. Lots of servers don't even use URL redirection, so you have no clue what maps you need. It's a real hassle for new players who just want to play.

[Todtsteltzer]

Moin, AEon .

About MP with ISDN: You need at least a double channel ISDN connection to play Quake 4 online, but I haven't tried it yet (because I think my ping will suck).

...and be aware that you can't play on servers running the us/uk version if you own the (crippled) german version and vice versa :icon33:.

[Lukin]

AEon, go on with SP then, I really like "Q4" single player campaing and would love to play some more
Considering the lack of bots - well, they never played good at my maps, I've always was focusing on "real players" The good thing about "Q4" is that those real players are hungry for new maps and if you ask they will give you a big feedback. I don't know how long this state will last, but it's impressive.
Considering the technical issues once again: I second what you said about "Q3" - I felt more and more tied with the tris limit. When I don't have to deal with real time lighting then I would like to play with the geometry.
The best game for that was "Painkiller", also it has great multiplayer gameplay. Sadly it has a lot of bugs too and almost no one played this But if it would be still alive I woul map for it, and wait for the point release patch for "Q4".

[obsidian]

Realize that people look back on Q3 with rose colored glasses AEon. Not everything was as peachy as it seems for Q3 in the early days.

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.

But people upgraded their hardware and went broadband, bugs were fixed, GtkRadiant came along and Q3Map2 changed the way our maps looked. The community makes all the difference as long as they are willing to stick with it.

[Foo]

Realize that people look back on Q3 with rose colored glasses AEon. Not everything was as peachy as it seems for Q3 in the early days.

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.

But people upgraded their hardware and went broadband, bugs were fixed, GtkRadiant came along and Q3Map2 changed the way our maps looked. The community makes all the difference as long as they are willing to stick with it.

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. 6 years down the line we should be leasily able to create better looking levels throughout, have more robust technology to work with, and be seeing a lot of the development work that's taken years in Q3 be wrapped forwards into the new game.

But we're not. We've got a game so fudged they've had to seperate the Mp and Sp games practically into completely different code bases. An MP portion which barely forms a playable online experience, let alone a rich and rewarding one.

The basic message lots of people are putting out is 'yeah so what, we can make it a great game'. Sure, but years down the line according to your own arguments. There's barely a player base at the moment, and it's not going to get better with a patch (at best it'll slow the abandonment in favour of more robust games to base creations on).

If you're not bothered about working on the latest and greatest game and can stand to work on a less popular or even broken game - great... but then why not keep plugging at Q3? At least you're not facing 5 years of waiting for barely adequate tools, since we're already over that for Q3 and are facing it again for Q4.

It seriously seems retarded (in the literal sense of the word) to develop for Q4.

[GODLIKE]

I personally think it's a matter of potential. (I honestly, really, am not that mad about how Q4 is right now. I want the bugs fixed, but I'm having fun with the game.).. I won't make new content for Q3 because it's pretty much maxed.. I think that Sock, Lunaren, and a few others pretty much created that which there was to create for Q3 arena.

Q4Max, Q4W are pretty good, and should improve. The patch, when it finally arrives (rgoer?), will hopefully solve some of the little hassles that keep some people from playing the game. (Map download, leaps to mind.)

As for "regressing".. I think we've regressed because the new shit IS harder. There's a lot to do, even before you factor in custom textures and terrain editing. Experienced Q3 mappers are finding that they have to re-learn stuff, in order to make things look good and play well in Q4.. But I think it's coming, and I really don't think it's a waste of time... or I wouldn't be spending all the time when I'm on hold during the day putzing with the Q4 editor. :icon26:

[Johnny Law]

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.