Looks pretty rad.... 

Doom 3. 

I like it, the ceilings with the inset bits are cool, but the overall shape of that area is quite square. I think it would benefit from either changing the floor height in some parts just up and down a bit or making that left wall bow outwards a bit and to get some angles in there.

Nice vegetation models, btw, are they yours? 

the overall shape of that area is quite square.

doom3's rectilinear light volumes perversely encourage you, for performance reasons, to build areas of the same shape.

that's about as good as rooms in doom3 get! 

Yeah... I dabbled in D3 for a bit and really disliked that about the lighting. :(

Still, I doubt many people would have trouble running a map with 3 or even 4+ lights on the majority of the surfaces if they are small like the above screenshot these days. 

This is just really a little passageway between areas, if it gets expanded out more then there will be more interesting shapes for sure.

Vegetation models are downloaded from some stock models site, can't remember the name right now. I've been playing with different material techniques to try and get some plants in Doom 3 that don't look like total arse. Having nice assets to start off with certainly helps.

With regards to light counts, Doom 3 is ten years old. I just operate under the mindset that so long as it runs on my five year old machine I don't care about things like light counts. 

I just operate under the mindset that so long as it runs on my five year old machine I don't care about things like light counts.

I think that's a safe assumption to make. I'd like to see some doom3 maps that are in the same vein as modern q1sp where you just make whatever as long as it runs good on a modern machine. 

I'd been paying so much attention to getting some nice faked bounce lighting going on that I completely forgot to check what any entities looked like in the area. Stuck an imp in and it was half in darkness with ugly solid black shadow that didn't fit in at all with the lighting of the area. Pulled out a couple of the lights and replaced them with a larger one which doesn't look as good but at least things fit into the environment better.

I should have remembered to check that earlier, been caught out by it in the past. That's what I get for not doing any serious mapping for a few years.

Fucking unified lighting. >.>

So not much progress to show, apart from that I've just been experimenting with various lighting tricks like god rays, thanks to help from Zombie.

http://www.mapsbytron.com/images/random-temp-stuff/lobby2.jpg
http://www.mapsbytron.com/images/random-temp-stuff/lobby3.jpg 

isn't there a way to use shaders to apply lighting only to some shaders and not others? you could make a new shader for the monsters and have lights that only work on them and not the world. lots of extra work though. :( 

Was discussing that idea with Zombie earlier tonight, it's a crazy amount of work though since the tools aren't set up to do it easily. 

is really painful sometimes. tho it's very powerful, it's hard to make everything look good 

If you have the time, painting special light shaders can help a lot.
If you are making world geometry in a 3d editing suite, there's the option of baking on lightmaps as well.

But yeah, it's mainly inflexible unless you are willing to dump tons of time into it.

However, these days I think you could get away with making oversized light volumes with the exponential light shader and lighting areas like you would a quake map... 

I painted unique volumetric lightmaps for a silly Quake4 map. Results weren't bad, but it took a while and meant even less flexibility.

Raven added a little fudged normal map contribution to the ambient light shader in Quake4 (Doom3's was just flat diffuse) because we just had to use it so damn much. Every multiplayer map except DM11 had one big ambient light covering the entire thing, because otherwise nobody could fucking see the other players. 

Replayed Strombine just yesterday checking out that lighting technique you used, I think I'm definitely going to be stealing that gui based interaction system you came up with for it. 

I read Tron as Tronyn and was pretty confused. 

I forgot I even did that. It's a GUI plane with nothing in it, right? So you get the interaction with nothing displaying? You should probably take it a step further and have some kind of glowing interaction hint display in worldspace, like the hand icon in RTCW.

It might not work in Doom3 though, I think D3's GUIs had to have an opaque background? If it doesn't you could fake it with doomscript. Doomscript was the only good part of that engine and it was great.




also I think Tron, Tyrann, and Tronyn should merge into a superentity and do battle with DazDranz and negkcros. 

Doomscript was the only good part of that engine and it was great.

Hell yes. I loved that scripting engine. 

Jim Dose took it with when he left id and now it's in L4D2/Portal2 and called Squirrel. :P 

I'm all in favor of this super-entity idea, so long as I get to be one of the arms.

Been playing around with creating a custom ambient texture, Strombine style. Produces some nice effects around vegetation when a bit of colour is introduced for the filtered green light and I think it's definitely getting adopted as a standard technique by me. Can't really see it in effect in this shot, but I figured everyone can enjoy a fine wall of Imp ass.

http://www.mapsbytron.com/images/random-temp-stuff/lobby5.jpg 

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/q2map1.zip

No screens but it's a really, really, early look at what I've managed to do with TB2 so far. I have to say this is going to be an awesome time for Quake 2 players when TB2 is finally here. 

 

I had to edit the .map file cause I couldn't find the way to edit the face properties. (I kind of copied whatever the properties from an identical file in quark, fairly easy to do actually but a real ghetto way of mapping also)

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/q2-tb2-1.jpg

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/q2-tb2-2.jpg

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/q2-tb2-3.jpg 

The warm lighting fits with the textures, but the cooler lights don't as much, maybe you'll need to tone down the saturation on those ones, except on the third screenshot. 

I'm just gonna sneak this in here before I go to bed...
http://quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=50439 

overgrowth and bare fluorescents go well together. are these your textures? the ornate copper floor and ceiling are beautiful. also pipes and ventilation vanes!

probably the most visually boring is the mineshaft...