Make this golden 30k post a divine moment... 

 

 

 

 

About as useful and informative as the average killpixel post. 

 

I was blown away by AD when I first saw the screenshots of it a couple years ago. Considering it now, I think it may be that Quake's world and engine are manipulating how I process the geometry. In Quake, there are no props outside monsters and packs of health or ammo. There are no displacements. The detail of maps is comprised almost entirely of brushwork. Simon and his compatriots in the AD mod just seem to be able to create these amazing curved, arched, rotated, spiraling structures that I can't even conceptualize in Hammer. Like Kinn said, I guess it would probably be possible, but you'd have to be going completely ham with the clipping tool to do it.

Judging by Simon's readmes over the years, he's been using SDRadiant 1.3.8 for over a decade, an editor I can't even find on Google. I just feel like Radiant (and maybe TB) must possess some more intuitive and speedy ways of shaping the complex geometry that they create. 

How did you take Kinn stating this: "There is literally nothing that you can do in TB or NetRadiant or Jack that you can't do in any of the others." into "I guess it would probably be possible... "?

I'm not trying to be argumentative or aggressive btw. I just don't see you comment as being valid.

I know Ionous was part of a few maps included in AD and he only uses Jack only. I'll ask him the next time he is streaming.

Cheers 

Any complex curvy structure is just a composition of simple convex shapes that can be made in any editor. Some operations may take one or two less clicks to do in this editor versus that editor. But then that editor might do another thing with less clicks than this editor, so it balances out.

Really, the choice of editors is down to which interface you prefer. The level you make comes purely from your imagination. The difference in quality between maps is 100% about the artist, not the tools. 

or Quark. Fuck those two. 

It's probably just me who can't envision it. I would really like to see someone recreate a room or two from ad_sepulcher or something of the like. So many map editor tutorials on YouTube and 90% of them are "here's how you make a box and put a spawn point in it". 

Some cursory searching has revealed that SDRadiant is the Splash Damage version of Radiant - this pastebin claims it was for Wolf:ET! Certainly a curious choice of editor to still be using after all these years, but I suppose if something ain't broke, you shouldn't try to fix it.

Now, where you get SDRadiant from is another matter... Does anyone know if it's packaged in the Wolf:ET download? It'd take me about four hours to check with my speed... 

I must have consciously picked up on SleepWalker's Radiant inspiration when I tried TB out. I have tried nearly every editor out there. However, I have logged the most hours in Radiant. Both for Quake 3 and COD:UO mapping.

TB also reminds me of the first editor i ever used Quest.

There's no "best" editor IMO. I think TB is elegant and easy to pick up after not havbing mapped in many years. That's why I use it.

I could jump back into xRadiant any time. I just choose not to. TB is too much fun. 

Why are there so damn many forks of Radiant? 

...do THIS? 

Escher mode 

Challenge accepted. 

I'd like to see the tris and how well it lights! 

I didn't try compiling it into a map. It's just a bunch of cubes with offsetting, rotation, shearing, vertex editing and a bit of triangulation.

Anyway, it was a bit disappointing to realize that the alt+rightclick tool for texture alignment is unable to make the texture alignment actually follow that path. Due to this, I couldn't use a scrolling texture to get the same effect of the animation linked by OTP.

The Quake BSP format uses a 2D projection on a 3D plane for texturing. This 3D plane uses a 3D projection to be rendered to the screen. I suspect that a 3D projection on a 3D plane would be required to properly align textures on structures like this. 

With valve220 and by triangulating all your faces it is doable, I did something similar with obj2map, works fine. 

Killpixel: Here's the mesh.

Bal: JACK's generated .map file has a "mapversion" "220" field in its worldspawn.
But what Jack is actually missing is a Contour Stretch UVs Projection tool. This could help a ton of maps.

And I guess that for such distorted shapes, this would require 3D texture mapping, where the texture can have a depth projected onto the surface plane itself rather than only on the screen. I'm talking about a surface with a texture tiled in a non-linear way like this, rather than like this. Hmm, I guess that "non-linear texture mapping" is a better way to describe what I'm thinking about.
Linearly mapped scaling, rotation and shearing can at best produce results like this. It can't make, for example, a rectangular tile fit a trapezoid surface - and many curved shapes are basically a set of trapezoid segments. 

No 3D modeling app does that though, you're only solution is to have more polies basically to hide the how the triangulation breaking up your UVs.

Still with valve220 + triangulation, you have the equivalent of UVs and can do in quake anything you could do in a modeling app with same ammount of tris. 

Absolute madman.