256 Player Group Mapping Project

[peewee_RotA]

Edit:  Attached Phang for anyone interested...

Very cool structure. Qoole2.5 right? You can see the edges of the large horn/bone structures distorted as if it was a Qoole2.X made map. It's got a fortress of solitude/classic quake look and feel. The gameplay would probably be good for a quake1 CTF game.

As for quake 2, it is laid out more like a single player map and the weapon placement needs a little work. If there were no large open areas then it would probably play fine with the current item placement. For the moment it would be just to easy to camp with a railgun. Another way to solve this would be to make places more accessible with more teleporters, ladders, and elevators.

Don't get me wrong. I am very impressed with the look and feel. I think that it would be an incredible map with a few tweaks. Spawn girl? Interested? 

[Jay Dolan]

Yeah, when you go for natural looking rocks and such, it makes compile times horrific.  I made a map called Phang, which is not terribly large (about a good 4-5 person map), which is all open areas and "natural" rocks and such.  It took 14 HOURS to compile!!!  And that's on a dual P4 x64 at 3.2MHz!  Most maps I make, including the hated Fours2d.bsp on Mutant, which is all simple angles) take about 10 minutes to compile...  I would definitely keep the polygon count down, as well as keeping angles right!  After reading up on what QBSP actually does, I can see how these things end up as a severe clusterfrak!

Edit:  Attached Phang for anyone interested...

Failing to use hint and detail brushes correctly, or at all, sloppy brush work, and poor layout planning can all lead to terrible -vis times, as well as high r_speeds.  Particularly, sky boxes that can "see" each other will often pose a real problem for the PVS algorithm.  Also, the Quake2 BSP compiler is a total piece of shit.  Mine produced this .bsp in 18s (-bsp -vis -light) on my box.

[Yendor]

Jay - That's a right purdy scene... love the specular floor texture!  I certainly do not claim to be any kind of expert about mapping - I just love the game.  I just learned what hint and detail brushes are (whilst reading up on what QBSP actually does)... the rocks in Phang are mostly tagged as detail, which helped, but alas, I really don't kow what I'm doing

Anyhow, thanks to all for the input - the map is indeed not quite right, as my friends here at work who comprise our little testing/fragging team all agree.  It's "almost cool"!  That's why I didn't put it up for Mutant (especially after my ill-received Fours2d)...

Interesting note about it being a good CTF map - yeah it seems it would, with a little modification... Phang is a main arena, and a loop of a canyon that goes around the outside from one end to the other.    And no you can't just camp with the rail - if someone makes it to the little button just below the rail camping ledge, >BOOM<, Mr. Rail Camper dies, and there's a nice little earthquake afterward.   Suffice it to say, it has not been a problem (and there area a couple campers in our crew, including at times, myself). 

So, I'm still learning, and always welcome input (which is why i posted it in the first place).  I find it very interesting how the games actually turn out, compared to how I plan/think they'll turn out when I make a map.

Since I made this map, I resurrected a very old program I wrote that generates random boulders for Q2 - it works great (will post it later today), and makes for better frame rates, if not faster compile times. 

I'd be interested in your ultra-kewl BSP compiler if it's available anywhere.  I've heard of other, newer compilers, but haven't tried them.

[peewee_RotA]

And no you can't just camp with the rail - if someone makes it to the little button just below the rail camping ledge, >BOOM<, Mr. Rail Camper dies, and there's a nice little earthquake afterward.   Suffice it to say, it has not been a problem (and there area a couple campers in our crew, including at times, myself). 

The platforms above the GL and the red armor ledges do not explode and would be the main spots to control the map from. Also, the long hallway near the first platform that travels above the ammo pack area would be an easy place to camp. The resulting earthquake is a nice touch, and would knock someone off the red armor ledge but not the platforms above the GL

[Yendor]

Ahh, fair enough - although I've always preferred to camp up top on the ledge with the mega-health and two cells.  If things get sticky it's an easy jump down to the Quad

I've pretty much scrapped this map as far as further development goes - the next one should be good, give what I've learned both about map layout and hint, detail, and areaportal brushes... now it's just a matter of time.

And yes, Qoole always leaves its tell-tale brush mis-alignments everywhere!  It broke up all my phangs!

[peewee_RotA]

It broke up all my phangs!

Now I get it 

Just think of them as serrated. 

[Yendor]

Or just British...
 

[Whirlingdervish]

if you do choose to make more realistic looking boulders/rocks/terrain in your maps, Jdo's right about using the hint and skip textures to tell your bsp compiler where to make certain planes in the finished map and which order to do the cutting in.

say you have one triangular brush that makes up part of the ground on your terrain.. You'd need to make a brush right on top of it that is the inverse of the terrain face, and set the face of the brush to hint on the plane that the two share. the rest of the brush you'd paint with the "skip" texture to keep the bsp compiler from using those vertexes and planes.


I made this simple little one-area rail map a while back and without hint brushes (with skip on every other face so they are ignored) it took 2 days to get through vis on my old p4 1.8ghz.

This is because the compiler is forced to figure out what the best cuts are that it can make on the map to turn it all into triangles thru pure math if you dont use hint planes to tell it what has preference and what needs to be cut exactly as you've created it.



I eventually went back into the terrain editor that I used and figured out that I needed to tell it to generate the hint brushes for each plane of the finished terrain, and once I copied and pasted this into the map and wiped out any extraneous brushes (in the large areas that were fairly flat I replaced the 100 small triangular terrain brushes with 2-3 large triangular ones) the map was able to run thru bsp vis and arghrad in a matter of hours instead of days.

for the size of the map tho, the complexity of the terrain was still the deciding factor and I don't think it would have been playable if made any larger due to how open it is and how much of that terrain is visible at any time.

I could see pretty much any full sized map with a lot of terrain being gamebreaking for Quake 2, since you can really only have about 800-1000 triangular polygons visible to the player at any given time without causing a drop in framerate on their end and a really crappy feel to the map when played with lots of players on a server.

It's definitely a thing to use in moderation on a q2 map, but in case you want to try it, here's the page for the terrain editor I use:

http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=8



btw, Yendor, here are some more recently updated compile programs (qbsp, qvis, arghrad) that have worked for me many a time.

http://dervish.tastyspleen.net/files/buildutils.zip

[[BTF]adam]

Or just British...
 

Fuck out, get it.

 

[Yendor]

Or just British...
 

Fuck out, get it.
 

Actually, I'm sorry to offend (just couldn't resist). 

[Yendor]

...all you said...

Thanks for the info!  That's all good stuff indeed!  I will definitely try that terrain generator, AND the build utils!
~Y

[peewee_RotA]

Or just British...
 

Fuck out, get it.

 

Did somebody miss their tea and crumpets today? 

[peewee_RotA]

An update on the project. Windows crapped a brick all over the old ben2.exe. The process got blacklisted and fixing that is a hassle I'd like to avoid.

It works fine on my work computer but finding the time doesn't always work. I'll have the starting .map available by friday.

[Yendor]

An update on the project. Windows crapped a brick all over the old ben2.exe. The process got blacklisted and fixing that is a hassle I'd like to avoid.

It works fine on my work computer but finding the time doesn't always work. I'll have the starting .map available by friday.

You need to make Windows your little bitch!  How the heck does a process get blacklisted?  Was it the latest version of Ben2 (the one posted above on the very thread) that got screwed up?  Sounds weird, or like some over-zealous anti-virus software.  I scanned the file before uploading it - I think it's clean and free of viruses...

If you continue to have problems, I can send the debug build, which has more safeguards against memory leaks and such, although I think the program should be reasonable well-behaved.

I look forward to seeing the MAP 

[[BTF]adam]

Or just British...
 

Fuck out, get it.

 

Did somebody miss their tea and crumpets today? 

1, i'm not offended don't worry

and 2, damn I haven't had crumpets in a long time, (tea daily though of course) i'll make sure I buy a packet next time I'm at Somerfield. mmm buttered crumpets fresh out the toaster.

anyways, gl on the mappy map map