Wanton Hubris

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!

Mattias Worch made a great post regarding his new Quake level that I found hit a lot of the same notes that I hear in my head when working on Quake stuff:

http://www.worch.com/2008/08/24/bbelief2008-level-flow/

The whole notion of planning levels out completely beforehand is a side effect of the modern game industry. It’s not a bad thing but it is a necessary thing. Games are too complex these days to let level designers try to wing it anymore.

I’m working on a Quake level in my spare time and I’m using the same methodology as I did in the early Quake days : start laying pipe and see where it leads. In those days, all you needed was a basic idea of the kind of environment you wanted or maybe all you had was a texture set that you wanted to try using. Maybe you had a cool idea for a room and the level sort of filled itself in around the edges of that room.

It’s fun to work this way as I believe it keeps the creative mind agile enough to still be able to interject spontaneous stuff into whatever scripted level you’re working on at the office.

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

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*