[mitsubishi]

(that'll be long, sorry)

hello, I decided to start a map

It will be completed in 2012 but anyway.

I don't want to spend months of my time doing serious mistakes that could be avoided by suggestions of experienced mappers in a minute. So, I have plenty of questions and I'll be as public as I it can be on what I'm doing before going any further into this, if I go any further into this.

I've already googled and searched on this forum my questions but I may have missed a lot of already answered issues. I'm sorry if that's the case.

Ok, first of all right now on a rough work on it, it looks like this, that may change, but:

and this

and this

ok first question, judging from those pictures, do you think a map so WHITE can be played? Are there any serious playability or technical problems? I've noticed r_showtris shows white lines. On white textures that can't be seen easily, any way to overcome this? Another question on texturing. I've found confirmed public domain and gpl textures. I know I can use the pd'ed, can I use the gpl'ed on q3 and et (some linux users may know better about this issue)? Finally, are urt's textures available for use? At the moment I'm mostly concerned of making the basic layout, but I've not used any non-free textures anyway.

Ok, on to my most important issues.

I have made this layout on autocad to use and *copy as it is* on gtkradiant:

At the moment, I'm taking exact distances with the dimensioning autocad tools and simply applying them on the floor brushes. That's very time consuming and it's easy to miss a lot of the basic layout.

My basic problem: I can't make it to be shown as a background using the bkgrnd2d plugin. I've placed the images in baseq3, q3ut3, I've tried png, jpg or tga, 'selection', 'limits', no image appears. I use radiant 1.4.0 on linux. I've tried 1.5.0 from binary and I compiled my own but on those versions, plugins don't work at all. Am I missing sth? Please help if you can on this, I've googled nothing relevant on this. Has anyone at least tried using a background image and found it works?

Another issue, on that layout

- yellow lines are walls
- red lines show stairs or ground going gradually underground
- blue lines show planes going gradually overground
( - the white lines are walls, blocking routes that I decided to not use at the moment)
( - the pink arrows are of ctf)

First question on layout, do you think that layout is too simple? Too complicated? Does it "work"? Do you see any serious flaws on it?

Sth more urgent on layout: If you noticed, it includes many compicated polygons, or "rooms" made of polygons. This is intentional, I want to keep it that way. However I've realized it's a tough job to make the *actual* rooms or walls for them (I don't want to leave none in the open, it will spoil the routing). If it was all made of squares, I could just make a room or a couple of rooms and just rescale, copy paste, make slight changes and that's it. So, do you know of any trick that could make that job easier? A trick to make various polygonic rooms with not working for hours on each one of them?

Ok, sorry for the long text. That's all.

[NulL]

As for the background plugin, after configuring it from the plugin menu, click the (xy) (xz) (yz) buttons on the plugin menubar to toggle showing them on and off. There the 2nd 3rd and 4th buttons along.

[mitsubishi]

[quote name='"$NulL"]As for the background plugin' date=' after configuring it from the plugin menu, click the (xy) (xz) (yz) buttons on the plugin menubar to toggle showing them on and off. There the 2nd 3rd and 4th buttons along.[/quote']
yey! thanks a lot

[HoboHumpinSlut (old)]

please stick to the polygons....i hate cubeland

and the white should actually work fine (for those who don't have tweaked the gamma to the maximum etc). at least it looks really nice.

[tub (old)]

White should be fine. Sometimes it reflects to much and becomes overbirght, but you can just darken the texture a bit to fix that. (If you want pure white then yeah, you could run into brightness issues)

With the layout from looking at it for five seconds I'd say there are too many passages without enough rooms. Generally you only want a small amount of passages in a map. And short ones at that.

[mitsubishi]

Quote

please stick to the polygons....i hate cubeland

I will not go into clear squares, unless of course, they are limited. thanks =]

[mitsubishi]

Quote

White should be fine. Sometimes it reflects to much and becomes overbirght, but you can just darken the texture a bit to fix that. (If you want pure white then yeah, you could run into brightness issues)

With the layout from looking at it for five seconds I'd say there are too many passages without enough rooms. Generally you only want a small amount of passages in a map. And short ones at that.

thanks tub for commenting. I'll darken the marble textures a bit keeping the sun light white, when I go into some fun texturing work, making new ones among other things. I've not 'studied' q3map2 and light effects at all at the moment, but at that time, it would probably be a good idea.

The layout.. you've confirmed some doubts about it, especially about the central area but also the sides). If I don't end up making a new layout altogether, I will add rooms in open areas of the current layout, do alterations, make an illusion that passages are shorter, and probably extend it.