Wanton Hubris

I’ve been making levels for years now and I’ve come to a realization. I like to listen to music while I work and I’ve arrived at what I believe is the best level design music.

Slayer.

There, I said it. Their music is loud, brutal, and filled with the sort of driving energy you need to kick your creative brain out of bed and get things moving. The drums alone are enough to do it for me (nobody pounds out double bass like Lombardo) but add in the vocals and guitars and we’re home.

Whenever I’m feeling creatively drained, I double click on “Disciple”, “Payback”, “Raining Blood” or “Behind the Crooked Cross” and just let things take their natural course.

I used to think that Venom was the ideal level design music but I’m switching to Slayer.

Looks like “Payback” is up next. Gotta get back to work…

For my own piece of mind - I’m going to
Tear your fucking eyes out
Rip your fucking flesh off
Beat you till you’re just a fucking lifeless carcass
Fuck you and your progress
Watch me fucking regress
You were meant to take the fall - now you’re nothing
Payback’s a bitch motherfucker

Finally, a new release of ToeTag! This one is pretty good as it (hopefully) fixes the WAD loading crash but also adds some good features.

DOWNLOAD HERE (this link includes the APP itself and a separate download link for the source code)

First, you can now create fully custom WAD files now from within the editor. ToeTag can export textures from WADs (to PNG files), read new textures in from a variety of formats, and also rename/delete textures already loaded. All of this combined means custom WADs are go!

Next I added box selection. This is a quick way to select a bunch of stuff in your level at once. In the 2D viewport, hold down SHIFT+CMD and LEFT_CLICK+DRAG to draw a box. When you let go of the mouse button, everything that touches that box will be selected. This is useful for grabbing a whole portion of your level at once.

I added some keyboard short cuts for the hide functionality. CMD+H will hide currently selected, CMD+I will isolate currently selected (aka hide everything not selected), and CMD+SHIFT+H will unhide everything currently hidden. This is a productivity enhancement as it’s a pain to have to click on the toolbar for quick hides/isolates.

On the smaller feature front, there’s a small feature added to the entity menu. If you select a series of path_corner entities you can use a menu item called “Create Route”. This will link the path_corners together into a route. This is great for setting up patrolling creatures. Just create a route and then target the monster at one of the path_corners.

“Little is known about the facility except that it was constructed to study some newly discovered ruins. Scientists working the dig site were reportedly quite excited about what they had found and were continuing to find. Everyone was surprised when we lost contact with the survey team. Someone needs to go up there and figure out what happened.”

This is a single player level for Quake. It’s best if you play this level using a modern engine, like FitzQuake, as some of the areas will grey out on vanilla software Quake (although it does surprisingly well for the most part).

Here’s some screen shots and a download link. Enjoy!

.: DOWNLOAD HERE :.

I added the ability to export textures to PNG files and then import those textures back in again, converting them to the Quake palette. This will make future levels a lot cooler looking since i’ll be able to not only import new textures but export the existing ones to use as reference or builder blocks!

Ever wondered what my ugly mug would look like in a Quake level? Wonder no more!

ToeTag:

Quake:

I’ve seen some talk about screen sizes lately and specifically how it relates to Quake editing. For kicks, here’s a shot of E1M1 loaded into ToeTag on my 30″ Apple Cinema Display. Nothing escapes my notice with this much real estate:

And yet another limit is hit. I’ve apparently used too many textures.

This typically isn’t a problem when it first happens as you generally have a ton of textures in the map that look pretty similar to each other so eliminating the duplicates is quick and painless. After the 2nd or 3rd time, however, it gets a little more brutal. Do I REALLY need that light variation? Does that wall really need to be split to include that extra panel variant?

Such is the life of the level designer. A life filled with choices that make things less pretty.

Writing my own Quake editor (ToeTag) has been a great experience in many ways. One of the good ways, obviously, is that it allows me to work on Quake levels on my Mac! One of the bad things, however, is that when something goes bad or breaks or crashes - it’s my fault. And I have to fix it. Blargh.

Something I’m discovering with my latest level is that ToeTag was a little bit of a memory hog. It was allocating over 1GB of RAM to get that level into memory. I figured out what was wrong this morning and now it fits into about 100MB but those are the kinds of things that you don’t discover until you’re pushing the edges a little bit. Small maps didn’t show this issue. This large map does.

Sadly, it still doesn’t fix the weird WAD related loading crash that I get in release mode. It doesn’t do it in debug at all which makes it super awesome to try and fix. Stupid dog food.

Little is known about the facility except that it was constructed to study some newly discovered ruins. Scientists working the dig site were reportedly quite excited about what they had found and were continuing to find. Everyone was surprised when we lost contact with the survey team. Someone needs to go up there and figure out what happened.

These photographs of the installation were recently discovered.

Library/Research Lab

Front Lobby

I have such a love/hate thing with Quake. I love the feel of the game and I love making levels in it due to the wonderful simplicity of the process. I hate how easily things fall off the rails and how opaque the engine can be in terms of errors.

I’m working on a level right now and it’s gotten fairly large. I’ve exceeded my alloted number of clip nodes and I am forced to do some fancy clip brush work now in order to get the map actually finished (a good way to save clip nodes, btw, is to wrap complicated geometry like ceilings in clip brushes). I was doing that last night when everything decided to go pear shaped. The level no longer loads in Quake. It just crashes. No error message, no indication of what’s wrong - nothing.

Now I get to backtrack through prior versions of the map and piecemeal the thing back together again. Hooray!

::EDIT::

Hey, you know how whenever you explain a programming problem to someone the solution will generally present itself? That’s sort of an unwritten rule of code. The same thing happened here.

The level was leaking but I wasn’t caring about that because the area was being worked on. However, this proved to be the cause of the crash. I’m still not sure why but once I sealed the map to test if the leak was the problem, the crash went away.

Interestingly enough, my clip node count dropped almost in half once the map was sealed as well. This makes some sense as now Quake is free to remove all the extra geometry outside of the level. I guess that was obvious in hindsight but at the time I was blinded by the unexplained crash. Anyway, the level works again so I shall continue on.

Negke put this little gem together and it’s a great example of a level that proves, yes, you can still do interesting things with Quake.

Download here

Tilted maps might become the new thing!