News | Forum | People | FAQ | Links | Search | Register | Log in
Quake Documentation Project
Quaketree brought up the idea that the community needs to rescue / dig out the information from this forum and other sources and store it in one accessible place.

Others chimed in and most agree that this place should be a wiki. Spirit has suggested Quaddicted, and I personally agree that it's the right place for such a project, but the Wiki over there seems to be limited. Others (Willem, me) have also volunteered to set up such a Wiki.

Let's discuss this idea further in this thread. I think it would be a fantastic thing to have a community Wiki for Quake level design.

UPDATE: there is now a URL: http://quakewiki.org/
First | Previous | Next | Last
 
Can you please make the font size bigger? It's so small I can barely read it without touching the monitor. 
 
you can get around that temporarily by using the other themes although they don't look as good, but yeah, it is tiny. 
Negke Just Wait Til The Layout Is Final 
To the busy editors, please add some appropriate categories to your pages, that would help structure later. Just at the bottom of the page (or anywhere really), something like: [[Category:Entity]] or [[Category:QuakeC Function]].

No idea if those really are QuakeC functions or engine functions, necros. I am just trying to help! :) 
 
I don't know anything about wiki editing, so thanks for the info. 
 
k, put a few qc things in. need someone who is more familiar with all the trace() globals to check on that one though. 
 
I'm working on a write up 'The Basics of Quake Mapping', which I plan to define brush, entity, making a sealed room, compiling, and playing the compiled map. The aim is for total newbies using Trenchbroom.

Plan to have it ready tomorrowish to put on the wiki 
Basics 
I agree that it is important that we have all the basics. This is because when the apocalypse happens, the survivors need to be able to rebuild humanity, and that includes Quake ;)

Also, I like the level of information in the Doom wiki - we should document the original game, create stubs for all the monsters, maps, weapons, powerups, creators and whoever wants to can add information at a later date. 
Entity Definition Pages 
ok, so I was just looking at the wiki and thought I would fill out a couple of entity information pages before doing some mapping.

So I went into info_player_start and wrote a very short description and then realised that it might be useful to have a table of keys that are supported by each entity as standard as a mapping reference.

info_player_start is not a good example, as it only supports origin, angle and spawnflags, but for other, more complex entities, having a table of keys and what they do would be helpful. However, whether this should be in some kind of standard table format or just as a list I don't know, though I do quite like the format used by Kell/Necros for the Quoth mapping guide:
http://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/kell.quaddicted.com/quoth/quoth_tutorial.html

Whatever we do though, it should be the same for all entities. Also, I think support specific to mods should be contained in a separate page, so if, for example, we transferred the info from the Quoth mapping guide to the wiki, it would be best to keep it in a specific Quoth section. 
 
For the qc section, I was doing something simple with just h4 and preformatted text but maybe that will give you some ideas? 
I Agree 
I did a couple of entities as well (the sigil, episodegate and bossgate ones). I inserted the .fgd entry and was using that to describe what was going on but I think that it ended up looking a bit cludgy. I think that a good basic description of all of the keys and so on would be a good idea, plus it will help those who are writing in the Wiki to maintain consistency throughout the section.

Perhaps also a temporary template page (named entity template) that can be copied (cut and paste style) that has all of the common elements in it. It can be deleted once all of the entity pages are started. 
Formatting And Naming Conventions 
Ok, I wrote up a little extra info on the entity guide page. It might be worth splitting it off into subsections though. I also added info_player_start and info_player_deathmatch stubs. I'll try doing an example of an entity that has got settings.

If you are going to write up anything in the mapping section on an entity, please read the bit I wrote and if you have any suggestions for formatting or naming improvements then please respond here (or should we use the wiki talk page?)

I think we should add images of all the mapping features too, but for now lets just figure out the formatting of each page and write some basic text.

We should probably think about where and how we are going to write up information about specific hacks and tricks later too, though at this stage it's not really important. 
Oops.. 
forgot the link:
http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Entity_guide

Scampie said he was writing some basic mapping descriptions, so maybe that should be merged with what I wrote, or perhaps if it's better organised/written then just remove the bit I wrote. I'm not sure if the entity guide should include the general entity info, or if it is intended to simply be a list of entities. 
I'll Link To Yours 
I'm aiming closer toward 'tutorial' than indepth articles on each and every thing. Yours is a much nicer in-depth knowledgebase than the 2 paragraphs I am writing. 
By The Way 
sorry to keep spamming, but for spawnflags, I think it's important we also include the value of each flag. Still not sure how we should format this stuff though. I think what quaketree wrote for the door was ok, but perhaps we need a little cleaner formatting as it looks a little clumped together perhaps?

I'll have a go at making the page for func_button if that's ok. 
Also 
I really think you should put your information on http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Entity as it's a very good writeup of the information. 
Argh 
ok, I'm going to split off Entity into a separate page, because putting it where I have was a dumb idea. We should have pages for all the mapping fundamental terms:
Brush (Scampie?)
Entity (kind of done)
Unit (done)
Angle?
Position / Vector?
Spawnflags (in entity)
Key/Value (in entity)
etc...

I guess the entity guide should contain a list of entities as it does now, though we might want to later split that off into Standard Quake entities and add pages specific to mods, or even just add a footnote with links to entity guides for mods and keep the standard entities on the entity guide page. 
Obviously 
This is and will be an ongoing thing regarding internal links that was an inevitable result of internal linking using outside resources.

As this develops I would hope that the links will stabilize as common terms are defined within the Wiki (and that punctuation is ignored. Brush links should be hyperinked to brush and not brushes for example. The "es" should be not included in the link unless you are talking about grouping brushes.) 
Quaketree 
yep, I think I did that everywhere. However, I realised that I made a shitty mistake of using lower case for page names, so the page name appears lower case. I haven't checked how to format page names, but we should all agree on some kind of page naming standard, and even if our pages are all named perfectly, we have to format the entity names properly as they contain underscores, which are used by the wiki to denote a space in links :/

I'm looking at this now, but I can't figure out how to do it (I just borked the Entity Guide page and it now has two titles... grr) 
Grr 
I should have read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Article_titles

First letter is uppercase, any actual uppercase letters in names etc. are uppercase, and everything else is lower (sentence case as opposed to title case as mentioned on that page)

God damn :/ 
Oh And... 
{{DISPLAYTITLE:func_button}} Works fine for entity names! Yay.

I don't think you can capitalise using it though, since it didn't work when I tried to "fix" Entity Guide. 
I'm Fine 
I'm also clueless as to how editing wikis is done regarding formatting. I am quite literally learning as I go.

If I'm messing up someones page I expect a flame here. 
"Only Open Source Works Referenced On Wiki?" 
John Carmack: Open sourced Quake. He didn't have to.
John Romero: Open sourced Quake map sources.
Spirit: Open sources; he didn't have to.
Negke: Open sources; he doesn't have to.
Travail: The QuakeC was open sourced by Asaki a year ago; no one made a horrific Frankenstein from it.
The Lost Chapters: Open sourced @ QExpo 2005
Willem: Open sources; he doesn't have to.
LordHavoc: Open sources ... he could DLL stuff and easily has the talent to do so and wouldn't have to.
Rubicon 2: Didn't have to. Metslime did anyway.
TrenchBroom: Didn't have to. SleepwalkR did anyway.

Yes, I have long had issues with closed source works in Quake and not just in single player and I've taken "the hit" for supporting open source willingly and sometimes with "social penalty" without remorse or regret.

[If you would like the <numerous> other examples of challenging closed source works, I'd be more than happy to olige; off hand I think I've done this with at least 15 closed-source Quake projects so it will be somewhat tedious and boring to others not familiar with it ...] 
No 
Can't be the Quake wiki if you exclude Quoth, for example. 
Still Fiddling Around 
omfg, wiki markup is horrible. I want to have a shower after my encounter with tables.

Anyway, here is a little test for func_button. I would like to include more information, such as an image, and some kind of table for spawnflags, but this is all I've done so far:
http://quakewiki.org/wiki/func_button

I don't love tables, but I think tables are a bit clearer than the indented list style used by quaketree on the func_door page. Ideally, we'd create a template for this kind of table, so that it can be better formatted for the specific kinds of information we want to display, and also be easier to edit from then on. wikitable is itself a template, if we had one called keyvaluetable or something, it would be helpful. I'll have a look at that later. 
I Wrote A Few Other Bits And Bobs 
One thing I added was worldspawn. This made me think about non-standard keys, such as _sunlight and other various light options, as well as those specific to modern engines, such as fog (is fog supposed to use an underscore by the way? _fog?)

It would be good if we could think of some nice clean way to add this kind of information and set up a nice, easy to read template for representing it.

I'm taking a break for now. I want to do some mapping instead. 
First | Previous | Next | Last
You must be logged in to post in this thread.
Website copyright © 2002-2024 John Fitzgibbons. All posts are copyright their respective authors.