https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tskNnSxENcaGH12hrsqMsQqDnqyDvHaGagui8rp4hIQ/edit?usp=sharing

All of it subject to change of course. Will probably scrap the customisable weapons... but maybe not. 

This seems like an ambitious and complex ordeal. Even moreso if you can't seem to figure out something as simple as logging into your func account.

Maybe you should team up with Baker and split the difference on the embarrassment. 

Apparently my email in my actual account doesn't exist anymore so couldn't recover it.

Thanks for the encouragement in any case - and best of luck with your projects as well :) 

 

best of luck with your projects as well :)

Look out ijed, these include a highly anticipated texture set and writing journals for his schizophrenics anonymous class... 

One Jealous Troll will One Jealous Troll the same as he always contributed.

When you make stuff and publish it online you quickly learn that 1 "hate" = 5 "likes" and the only real negative is apathy.

So I was being sincere in my response. And he's right to some extent, it is a pretty ambitious project... but I've got a bit of experience with those.

I moved it to Unity becuase I was putting in basically the same amount of effort to Quake anyway. Coding, modeling, rigging, animating, texturing, mapping, audio and all the other nitty gritty made me wonder why bother remaining in the Quake cul-de-sac.

It's a cool hobby, but can never be more than that while it remains anchored to the legacy content.

I suspect others who have worked on these types of mega projects tend to have a similar brain itch by the end. "n% of the project was made from scratch.. maybe I should do it 100% for the next one.." especially since as you make more and better projects the n% gets higher each time.

Of course, this is just my opinion. Quake is and remains to be a lot of fun to both make and play. Largely for its accessibility for those prepared to make content.

Going completely out of the frame work and community to work on Exarch is making things more difficult for myself, to say the least. Rome wasn't built in a day and for a greater risk comes a greater reward.

I was tempted to 'get the band back together' and reach out for help in the Quake community, but it's a very different skillset. Mostly what would help now is concept art and Blender since although I can do those things, I never really achieve the quality needed because I get impatient with the time investment needed and jump back onto one of the hundreds of other tasks needed to advance things and stop myself getting stymied.

There's also the money aspect for what may one day be a viable commercial product. I have some experience in these types of endevours and have seen a few pre-funding models which work, but it'd still be a necessary conversation for anyone wanting to contribute.

https://www.quaketastic.com/files/exarch/WeightedCompanionCrate.PNG 

I've got two fractured fingers and am learning how to type again. 

5 hates to a like, but a hate being nearly as good as a like.. 

Looking at the screenshots, it makes me wonder if I would enjoy exploring a world made of samey-looking modular parts assembled into a giant maze. Individual rooms feel very flat and the overall levels appear to lack distinctive architecture or landmarks.

However, I assume this is all just a proof of concept for your map generation system, and later you will make a bunch of interesting rooms and hallway pieces?

But basically, what's the plan to get to a point where the levels being generated are as 3D/vertical, and as interesting, and as varied as the typical hand-made quake level? Or, is that question missing the point of this project since it's more of a procedural roguelike where the player is mainly interested in the combats and the progression of their characer abilites/stats?

Regardless, this type of giant maze-like map seems like it would require a doom-style automap to help the player keep track of where they are and where they are going -- is that planned? 

Yeah, the interesting areas are divided into several categories and are incomplete or not implemented yet.

The outdoor sections for example don't have water or waterfalls and their walls are just interconnected circular blobs without much interest to the shapes. I've paused improving those to work on the objectives system, which is going to change the level generation quite a bit, more on that later. The outdoor areas are a sub tile set which is invoked under certain circumstances to break up the monotony - I plan on adding three more types, each of which can have subtypes.

What you're seeing in the shots is very much v0.1 with the idea being to expand areas to include both more internal verticality to each tile and make the vertical links between them more interesting - I was happy to get cliffs / amphitheatre type structures working the other day.

Each tile type can have multiple subtypes which are chosen at random. Currently there's 1-3 for each and all based on very similar designs.

Another thing to mention is that the objective system is incomplete. This is important because right now it's generating as many dead ends as it can, and most of them without anything to do there.

Once the objectives are in I know how many dead ends I need and so stop creating them once I hit that number and prune away any useless ones.

Essentially, there will only be dead ends which are part of a/the critical path. On top of that, the more important dead ends (aka DEnds) will become one of the sub tile sets called a 'Fusion' which are essentially large set piece tiles taking up several spaces on the grid.

Think hand made horde battle arenas, puzzles or whatever takes my fancy as I build each one. They also contain a lot of random within them to avoid the 'not this one again' factor.

Getting procedural to compete with a hand made level is very difficult. There's nuances and such that it's difficult to build a complex rules system for so your supposition is correct - it's more about combat flow (as per a lot of my Quake stuff) and character unlocks / progression. There are ten character 'classes' planned with multiple smaller mods to apply to them. Most of this stuff based on ideas stolen from Quake mods and power ups. Flight, double jump, vampirism, invisibility etc etc.

As to an automap, I'm not sure yet. A cool 3D wireframe is super easy to implement since I can just apply a shader to the level geo and show it through another camera which can be superimposed on the world without too much fuss. I am tempted to go for simple objective markers that are visible through walls (which makes more sense once there aren't pointless dead ends all over the place).

Final thing to mention; the screenshots show levels that are stupidly big. 100k tiles was more of a silly test to see if it'd work. Ideally to get replayability I'd want the player to see hopefully 20% of the possible content for a given level type on each playthrough. How many tiles this is remains to be seen, since the levels will be big enough to encompass all of the objectives they player can take in a single level, which will grow over time as they unlock more persistent stuff.

So I need to make more sub-tilesets and level templates to provide enough variety - basically going back to the actual mapping part once I've got the world building logic sufficiently robust and versatile. 

https://www.quaketastic.com/files/exarch/cratesv2.PNG

Need to get them in game so the pixels are nice and crisp and I can see how washed out, or not, they are. Just a case of exporting, but got some (intnetional) intersection making Unity freak out.

I've got the code and a nice alpha cutoff dissolve for destroying them... but have decided against it. Crates are the go-to FPS furniture and I want to avoid players feeling the need to systematically kill all crates just because they're there.

Will still have breakables and explosive barrels of course.