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.
