What do you map for professionally? :) 

http://ompldr.org/vN2NtcA/home.png

I plan on making a left 4 dead 2 map of my neighborhood/city, so I started with my house. I'm pretty sure it's not to scale; I plan on actually measuring tomorrow, but that's basically what my house looks like. I just need more time to work on this. :E 

What do you map for professionally? :)

I've worked on a few things through the years. I'm probably happiest with Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna, Quake 4, and Wolfenstein. 

L4D2 still uses Hammer?! Fuck me, that game must look average. 

But there are a lot of hi-res assets, and the engine has great lighting. The animations are very good, and the character models are of an extremely high detail level. TBH it looks like a DX9 game (cause its is I suppose) but the bulk of the maps are of a high standard, the art style is basically realism-based but with a B-movie poster style. But the most hi-res thing about the game - the gameplay! 

Well, WIP L4D shots I've seen usually look less "eyecandy" than Crysis or Unreal, though by no means bad. It's just that a lot of people tend to build a couple boxes with orange textures, then slap brick textures on and scatter broken cars all around.

> It's harder to find resources based around demonstrating the design side over just pretty things.

Yeah, it seems so.

I can only suggest looking into neighboring categories of games, such as platformers, RPGs etc and trying to find what makes them interesting. I myself am making it a point recently to play major titles from the recent years and analyze them. Since established mechanics in FPS are kinda worn out - escort the NPC, defend the camp, collect X items, kill X enemies, etc - looking into other games can be inspiring. Nothing against established mechanics, if they're pulled off solidly - but if something's old, I wanna put a little shine on it...

I am guilty of shamelessly stealing from Tomb Raider: Anniversary when it comes to traps - that game is like a trap constructor's manual and many elements can be transferred to Quake for example (and still work).

Reading this thread at quakeone.com:

http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-talk/chat-o-rama/6276-you-find-yourself-e1m1.html

I was thinking it could be insanely cool if you could really construct new weapons in an FPS by finding a broken rocket launcher and combining it with, say, an explobox and batteries to create a flame thrower... if you could really make that feel as if you had freedom in constructing things.

U-Invent machines come to mind. 

The word/role level design is used differently at different companies. Often these days it's split into different parts so that building the level and doing the scripting is different jobs. And the building part will look very different too, a lot of the pretty geometry may be done by an "environment artist" and not the "level designer".

So you don't really have to learn lua or some other form of scripting unless that's the part of levels you want to work with. 

Yeah my passion is very much about building the level, scripting and gameplay. Art is a necessary evil to make it presentable :p 

Hey, I've just got that crazy idea about remaking original quake maps (few maps, episode, all episodes?) with alternative paths :). Quake community did a lot of weird things in last 15 years, why not make a campaign, or whatever you call it with old single player maps reworked, so the are not linear, or at least you can finish a level by more then one way. It could be cool, as it doesn't require as much work as making new sp maps, and it still could be really cool, with new places, new paths, secrets and stuff. I would like to see every map to be possible to finish in at least 3 different ways, so you can play and experience sinle maps few times, and it would be different all the time :). Probably just crazy idea, but you never know... 

 

i had a similar idea to remake episode 1 with the exact reverse player progression: every exit becomes a start, and the start points become exits, and you work your way from e1m7 back down to e1m1 ... maybe even repurpose start.bsp as a boss arena. 

That would be ... how would that work? 

We once had a speedmap pack where we reversed maps. Or remixed them, can't remember. I made one start on its end but only implemented a small part of the rest. I loved that idea and it very interesting. 

well, it would definitely require some creative adaptation, like moving keys around, adding buttons or triggers, etc. 

here's a map you can try out: http://necros.quaddicted.com/downloads/ne_qep1_ext.zip

it has the same basic structure as that ne_qep1 map i made a year or so ago. it is e1m1->e1m7 glued together into one giant map, except this version has a huge outdoor area built around the original maps to connect them together and the path to the end is different.

there's no source map in there, though... this map's source was lost last year when my hdd died so it will never be finished (there were a bunch of areas that are unfinished) but it's playable to the end, at least. 

please note, the above map may not have enough ammo to complete...

it was originally going to be for that melee mod i've been trying to make. in the old version of the melee mod, it played a lot more like an rpg game... sort of like a 3d 1st person diablo, really. you had to level up by killing monsters or getting secrets, so most of the monsters were placed without any thought for ammo since the player was using mana that recharged and a melee weapon. 

one last thing: the map is only fast vised.
since the map source was gone, i couldn't generate a new .prt file for a new vis session.

bsp2prt just plain crashed (i guess the map is too big?) and the quakeforge bsp, while successful as creating a prt, the prt was not compatible with aguirre's vis and the quakeforge vis crashed trying to vis with the prt file. so yeah, epic failure. :) 

bjp's bspinfo -prt 

well, i'll upload a full vis when it finishes. :P

thanks random nameless person. 

99% of crashed hdd's can be recovered necros, if it's got stuff u really wanted on it. 

bloody hell that is fantastic!

dz: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/ne_qep1_ext-Feb-09-2011-224403-SpiritQuaddict.dz

ugly sunlight in the outside parts though. 

i've been thinking of doing another one like that for ep3 or 4. it's really a lot of fun to do, if anyone else is interested in trying. just grab the id map sources (romero's link is dead?) and start copy/pasting away. ^_^ 

here's the map again: http://necros.quaddicted.com/downloads/ne_qep1_ext.zip

same link as before, but i replaced the file.

vis, level4 + light, extra4
runs a lot better.

btw, thanks for the demo, spirit. that was fun but fiends ate you! :D 

..is there some sort of new levels ?
or is only a collage of pre-existent parts?

can you explain better the "alternate paths" ?

these type of works are not my cup of
tea(reminds me of a mod called "E5") ..anyway I'll take a look 

map is utterly awesome up to the end of gloom keep, but e1m6 is almost completely unplayable as it appears to have been rotated 90 degrees without most of the door & teleport destination angles being adjusted accordingly. it's first noticeable at the silver key door and every door after it does the same :(

gold key bridge didn't work either and the hallway crusher was ~128 units out. and i couldn't work out how to exit after killing chthon? the usual teleporter leads back to grisly grotto (where the ziggurat vertigo entrance normally is)

such a shame as i was loving it up until then.. great fun to explore and quite a headfuck in places seeing all those familiar places from different perspectives. would have loved to see the big outdoor areas more polished though (the rock surfaces in particular) as well as the new link-up areas

the thing putting me off from trying it is how much tweaking to the architecture i'd want to do and i'd be too tempted to redesign whole rooms a la rmq :)