Wanton Hubris

A quick shot of what I’m doing in my E3M4 remix. What lurks in the towers above?

Here’s a shot of my in-progress remix of E3M4. It’s coming along but there’s a lot of work still ahead of me.

-: CLICK FOR SHOT :-

I finished implementing Quick Groups today in ToeTag. It’s really interesting to me how I figure out the features that the editor needs simply by using it. I was constantly having to copy things like light fixtures or complicated wall structures and other things made of many brushes/entities. This sucked a lot because I had to reselect everything from scratch.

With ‘Quick Groups’, if you are diligent from the start of your map, you’ll be sitting pretty once you reach critical mass of detail. Every level designer knows what critical mass of detail is. That’s the point in the development of your map when you’ve established the visual theme and now you’re heading for the finish line. You’re working on gameplay and new areas but the visuals are more or less established. With ‘Quick Groups’ you’ll be able to copy complex brushes/entities from earlier in your map without a hassle. You select one brush/entity, hit CMD+OPTION+G and then all the other brushes/entities that are part of that quick group are selected.

It does smart things too. If you copy a group of brushes/entities that are part of a quick group, the new brushes/entities that are pasted into the map will be placed into a new quick group automatically so they will be selectable as a group as well.

Creating a quick group is easy as well. Select the brushes/entities that you want to be grouped together and hit CMD+G.

This is hugely powerful once you get the hang of it. And I’ll go even further and say that it’s more powerful than a prefab system. There, I said it.

Prefabs are a great idea in theory but when it comes to Quake levels you tend to customize things in every level. Your prefab library tends to morph to keep up with your current levels requirements. So you might as well use quick groups and work within the level itself.

And let’s face it - level designers like designing levels. They don’t want to use a bunch of stuff that someone else built. They want to build it themselves.

Sure, sometimes you need something standardized like a slipgate or a teleporter. If that’s the case, just open another map in ToeTag, copy and paste what you need. Prefabs be damned!

I decided to try something out yesterday. I’m trying to figure out how to get an OBJ file to integrate with ToeTag in a seamless fashion. I had many ideas but then came up with the one that I felt was ideal : have QBSP simply insert those triangles directly into the resulting BSP! Why fool around with trying to create convex shapes from the OBJ file or extruding the polys backwards or other techniques that can get messy?

Well, because the QBSP code is horrifically complicated. Well maybe not for some people but for me, it is. I can’t make heads or tails out of what Carmack is doing in there. Global variables everywhere, obscure variable names, oddly structured function calls - ye gods. So that idea is dead. I thought that I was close at one point as I had it reading the triangles in and I was inserting them into the BSP but lots of stuff was breaking and they weren’t rendering and … well, just forget it.

I’m going to do a more traditional implementation of it now. ToeTag will read the triangulated mesh into the editor, break it down immediately into a set of brushes and then you can work with it freely.

I will offset the pain of this somewhat by implementing a feature that I will call “Quick Groups”. You’ll be able to select a set of brushes, hit CMD+G, and then those brushes will work as a group. If you double click on one, it will select all of the others in the quick group. Any imported triangle meshes will automatically go into their own quick group. Should work well enough I suppose although I really would have liked to have gotten the QBSP solution working. I guess that’ll have to wait until someone who speaks Carmack better than I do can take a look at it.

So I can’t decide on anything to work on at the moment so I’m taking part in a fun little project over at func_msgboard. We’re remixing various Quake maps. Remixing means different things to different people but for my part I’m going to add a bunch of detail, optimize as much as I can, add a few secrets and maybe a few small additional gameplay areas and call it done.

For my part, I’m doing a remix of E3M4 (Satan’s Dark Delight). I’ve always loved that map but felt that it was somewhat lacking in the visuals department. Hopefully I can make some improvements on id’s original work!

Oh, and I think the email stuff is sorted out. Maybe. *sigh*

New version!

http://www.wantonhubris.com/qonquer/Qonquer.html

Direct download:
http://www.wantonhubris.com/qonquer/Qonquer_v1_1.zip

Anyone who found it too easy before will hopefully find that it scales a little better if you play on Hard or Nightmare.

Changes:

- added “impulse 12” for cycling to the previous weapon with ammo
- fixed the ‘Elder Arena’ on Easy skill (no monsters were spawning!)
- minions will no longer hurt each other or the player
- made the minions stand further away from the player so they won’t trap you in the corner
- increased various limits, tweaked various times, based more values on skill level
- added finale screen (take a screenshot, impress your friends)
- proper respawn for the player after finale

As I build the arenas for Qonquer, I find that I’m really enjoying the challenges of level design at this level again. I use Quake in it’s pure software form in the engine that id shipped. This means I have to worry about r_speeds and all of the fun that comes with that.

Quake can only do about 800 polygons before it starts dropping polys and you see entities flickering. It’s been a great challenge for me to design within this constraint again. I shell out an area with basic shapes and then start adding detail until the r_speeds monster slaps me on the wrist and says “enough!”. There’s a great feeling of satisfaction once you’re done tearing up an area and redesigning it so that it runs better and then that moment comes when you’re hovering at about 780 and you decide, “OK, that’s enough”. And you’re done.

I love it. Modern engines don’t care much about polygons anymore and throw 5,000+ triangle meshes around like they were nothing. It’s nice to get back to my roots. It’s fun and it keeps the mental wheels greased.

It’s official - QuakeC is fun!

I created my own class called a “func_mover”. This will move along a chain of “path_corner” entities when you trigger it. If a “path_corner” has a wait time of -1, the mover will wait there until triggered again. At that point, it will continue on to the next “path_corner” and so on. This will be critical for a level idea that I’m working on.

I then stole an idea from the Quoth mod and made all monsters have a new spawn flag called “Spawn via Trigger”. If that is checked, the monster will add itself into the total monster count but will not actually spawn into the world until you trigger it. This is HELLA useful because now, instead of putting the monsters you want to warp into the level off in those annoying little spawn closets outside the level you can just place them as normal and spawn them in when you’re ready. SO NICE.

I’m probably not going to do a ton more coding because the requirements for the level I’m doing are pretty small but I’ll likely roll these changes forward into the next level and the next one and keep adding snow to it over time until it’s an avalanche of awesome.

Oh now this is interesting! I never played with QuakeC back in the day but now that I’ve dabbled in it, I think I’m hooked. I now have a bunch of level ideas that I could do considering that I can write my own behaviors for things and create entirely new kinds of entities.

If you’re on Mac and want to play with QuakeC download the eQuake Utils from here:

http://developer.chaoticbox.com/quake.php?tab=mactools

The FrikQCC compiler inside of there works great and you’ll be up and running in no time!

Time to play…

Yep, spent time on some of the more boring elements today.

I got undo/redo working which was something that was nagging at me. Undo/redo is the sort of feature you need to have implemented at the start of a project like this. I’ve been down this editor road before and I didn’t have a decent undo/redo feature because I didn’t plan ahead properly. Having it working NOW, when the editor barely does anything useful, is key. Now I can make it work flawlessly with any features added in the future!

I also added a few keyboard short cuts for changing the grid size.

Speaking of the grid, dragging of stuff is next up on the Big Board of Features…