[Mblackwell]

For Doom 3 didn't id construct "clean" versions of all of the levels in Maya, import the meshes, destroy the scene in various ways, put in some additional detail meshes, lights, materials, "monster clipping", etc, and call it a day?

Not to say it's necessarily a quick process, but the workflow for most games is really more different than you might expect.

[Jimmy]

Loke, on 29 October 2012 - 03:44 AM, said:

Pff, Hammer is one of the easiest map editors out there. The only frustrating and time-consuming thing is when you have to construct shapes such as mountains or cliffs with the vertex tool (talking Half-Life 1 here!). Such stuff is so much easier to pop up in BUILD/Mapster32.

Like I said, I'm an idiot. I can use Mapster just fine though.

If I remember correctly, id used Doom 3's gravity gun to destroy rooms and shit.

[Mikko]

Loke, on 29 October 2012 - 03:44 AM, said:

Pff, Hammer is one of the easiest map editors out there. The only frustrating and time-consuming thing is when you have to construct shapes such as mountains or cliffs with the vertex tool (talking Half-Life 1 here!). Such stuff is so much easier to pop up in BUILD/Mapster32.

Okay, while it's not exactly fun to do in Hammer either, there's no way it's "much easier" in Build. Just cutting sectors into smaller pieces and sloping them is easier in WC/Hammer in fact because of the superior interface and the fact that modifying already-sloped surfaces doesn't fuck them up like it does in Build.

[OpenMaw]

Mikko_Sandt, on 29 October 2012 - 11:35 AM, said:

Okay, while it's not exactly fun to do in Hammer either, there's no way it's "much easier" in Build. Just cutting sectors into smaller pieces and sloping them is easier in WC/Hammer in fact because of the superior interface and the fact that modifying already-sloped surfaces doesn't fuck them up like it does in Build.

As long as you know the tricks, yes. You can very easily generate invalid solid structures in VHE if you're not careful. (I'm talking the GoldSRC version.)

Honestly, Mapster32 is good for what it was always intended for, that is the BUILD ancestry, building 2.5D maps. When you start getting into the multi-layered TROR stuff, I honestly think it becomes immensely easier to build in an editor that is designed for constructing "real 3D" environments. Like Hammer. Of course, I think i'm benefitting from having played with both BUILD and Hammer at the same time. Never having really developed a favorite.

[Plagman]

Running visibility and lighting for ages is something I'm pretty glad not to have to do in BUILD. WYSIWYG is a luxury that a lot of editors still don't have, people are only recently pushing for stuff like that. Also, hunting for leaks.

[Tea Monster]

Loke, on 29 October 2012 - 03:44 AM, said:

Pff, Hammer is one of the easiest map editors out there. The only frustrating and time-consuming thing is when you have to construct shapes such as mountains or cliffs with the vertex tool (talking Half-Life 1 here!). Such stuff is so much easier to pop up in BUILD/Mapster32.

Yeah, but your cliffs in Build will look like this:



While if you do the right thing and put them together in a 3D app, they look like this:



Rock by Hugo Beyer

You can get around a lot of the whole sector-based thing, but to be honest, from what I remember of Mapster, it would be a royal pain in the arse to put something together with models that was at all complicated.

Can one of the more experienced mappers let us know if you could put your typical Doom 3 corridor scene together in Mapster? I know you could do it, but would getting everything to match up and align when they were all separate sprites be a complete pain in the nads?

[Micky C]

You could make some fairly complicated cliffs if you wanted to. Here's a basic example:

[Sangman]

I would wager a Doom 3 corridor would be relatively simple to create compared to that rock formation you posted.

@Micky C: while that looks fine and dandy I doubt the situation from Tea Monster's shot can be reproduced using sectors only. (though I'd be glad to be proven wrong)

[Micky C]

Yeah, that tube-like rock would be impossible without a model.

And I've never played Doom 3, but from what I've seen of photos and videos making such a corridor in mapster would be ok.

[Mark]

Unfortunately I can't show any pics because its a work in progress of a project I'm helping with, but a good looking approach is have regular, but well done, sector based rock structures with only smaller rounded rock face models patched in here and there to cover sharp corners and some flat surfaces. Its a comprimise that can work wonders.

[Micky C]

I agree, combining large rock shaped models in different combinations can make a fairly realistic looking rocky surface.

Diaz, have you seen DanM's Cathedral? There's a pic of it over at moddb:

[Plagman]

Is that a map in WGR2? I haven't seen it..

[Jimmy]

Tea Monster, on 29 October 2012 - 03:51 PM, said:

Yeah, but your cliffs in Build will look like this:



While if you do the right thing and put them together in a 3D app, they look like this:



Rock by Hugo Beyer

You can get around a lot of the whole sector-based thing, but to be honest, from what I remember of Mapster, it would be a royal pain in the arse to put something together with models that was at all complicated.

Can one of the more experienced mappers let us know if you could put your typical Doom 3 corridor scene together in Mapster? I know you could do it, but would getting everything to match up and align when they were all separate sprites be a complete pain in the nads?

Way to pick a massively shitty screenshot as an example.

[Plagman]

It's a screen shot from E2L9, Dark Side, with the HRP. So the map itself is from '96.

[Gambini]

If my opinion is welcomed. I have spent ages in both Build and Hammer (mostly for Source). I also toyed around with several level editors (crytek3, UDK, radiant) and have spent a lot of time too with a couple of modelling programs.

Build has been designed for one thing and it´s awesomely good for that thing. You can build large maps with great layouts relatively fast, and what is best you can apply major changes much much faster than in any other level editor. Is this corridor too short? drag the vertexes of one end and wala!! Is this ceiling too tall? tap the pgdown key a couple of times, and you are done. There won´t be a faster and more intuitive tool for designing bidimentional layouts than Build/Mapster32 ever.

When it comes to more complex stuff (unfortunatelly, what i´m fond of doing) it becomes a pain in the ass. Not to mention about TROR, I dont even want to think of it. But complex spritework, seamless slopes, tagging effects, etc is stoneage-like.

I´d compare Mapster with drawing in a sheet.

Hammer instead is terrible for designing layouts. It requires much more prediction and care and changes are difficult and prone to fuck up everything. It also requires an advanced knowledge about how the engine works (or you´ll have terrible results) and well.... Compiling times.

I´d compare Hammer to a Jenga.

But instead, Hammer is much more stable than Mapster. Crashes are unlikely, corruptions dont exist. Tagging and browsing content (like sounds) is easy as shit, It´s customizable, can stack as many undo levels as your cpu memory allows. Has instancing, visgroups, lot of different manipulation tools ( like terrains). Has a plug-in to create models directly off a portion of your geometry. Is much more suitable for complex stuff, and once you got the hand to its shortcuts it can be almost as fast as Mapster.

I would not hesitate to use Hammer when it comes to any kind of complex stuff. But I´d love to be able to export my layouts from Mapster, to detail them later in Hammer

Ah oh, and I mentioned modeling programs because there´s one, named Softimage XSI that is the Build of the modellers. No fancy shit with one billon options like 3dmax nor an unintelligible layout brought from Uranus like Blender. As soon as you memorize its hotkeys it´s like Build/Mapster in a lot of ways. And it´s free.

[Micky C]

Plagman, on 29 October 2012 - 07:51 PM, said:

Is that a map in WGR2? I haven't seen it..

It's a pic from an unreleased map in the upcoming WGR2 v2 release. It's a great example of what the engine is capable of, and it doesn't even use hires textures or normal/spec maps.

[Diaz]

Mapster can be a pain in the ass when it comes to make details based off sprites, I agree. But the thing is that now you don't need to make details with sprites now. That's what models are for!

The true pain in the ass was Hammer's prop_statics and the like. UnrealEd is much better for handling meshes.

EDuke32 would benefit a lot from having the sprite drawing code modified a bit so we wouldn't have things like models disappearing when the sprite they replace is not directly in view though the model still is. Then we could make almost anything, including those cliffs posted above. The lighting wouldn't be that good, but the 3D shapes would be achievable.

It took me ages to make this thing in the screenshots below with Hammer, it would have taken much less with Mapster32. It wouldn't have looked as good due to lighting, but the workflow would have been much faster, isn't that what we are discussing?

Attached thumbnail(s)

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[Daedolon]

Okay, that first screenshot does look amazing and I don't even like the engine or games that run on it.

[SPYmaps]

More and more do we see more models in games and less brush (building blocks) work made architectures.
Personally i love working with brushes but i do agree that it looks much less realistic most of the times as implementing
well made models. That is also why a lot of mapper/modelers do think that the HL2 editor Hammer is outdated by now,
but this only because they have seen or made maps themselves with lots of brushes. Personally my biggest complained
with Hammer/source mapping is the lack of dynamic lightning, till this day it is still impossible to make a light source move
around (or you should write a code for it yourself). Other then that i still am a great fan of Hammer mapping. It does amaze me a little bit that a lot of people seem to
think the Hammer is much easier as other editors. Because i never had any trouble with COD, MoHaa, Prey, Quake4 or Doom3
mapping. That IDtech editor or the GTK Radiant for that matter is almost the same qua layout and style as Hammer, meaning, quit as easy to use. Even the UDK
i think does feel quit the same as those other editors. Compaired with all those editors the Cryengine is really a different editor, never really tried it yet, but i have
it on the top of my wishlist, lol.

Leon

wow DIaz, those 3 screens that you do show us are AMAZING!! what a quality, and what a detail.
I assume you did need to add some portals and make most brushes detail ones to make it playable, meaning;
having high enough fps so it still is playable. May i ask what kind of map that is, a SP or MP? Hopefully it is a SP, (never
play MP mode, don't like it that much) and are you still working on it and will it be released one day.
Is there somewere a site were i can see more screens of it, and maybe even a movie?
Or could you at least please tell me more about it?

[Mikko]

Diaz, on 29 October 2012 - 10:55 PM, said:

Mapster can be a pain in the ass when it comes to make details based off sprites, I agree. But the thing is that now you don't need to make details with sprites now. That's what models are for!

The vast majority would rather avoid using models altogether. If I were to design a usermap with cars, there's no way I'd go for models instead of constructing them all manually the old-fashioned way. Models are restricting anyway because they can easily stand out unless you use the HRP and/or Polymer, which most mappers avoid.

[High Treason]

Mapping for Duke: Use sectorwork / spritework.
Mapping for a High-Res TC / Indie Game: Use models. With a little code (such as the cars in DukePlus) there are many advantages in the correct environment.

I feel that Build is the perfect engine for it's intended purpose, and in that respect is better than IDTech. When Build was made computers had very little power, even compared with the ones the Quake Engine used, people were also still primarily using keyboards as the main input device as not many things used the mouse yet and though you need one for the editor, a lot of the work is done via the keyboard. More focus went into gameplay mechanics back then, Doom was the only real standard and no matter how you look at it, Doom looked like ass even for it's time, so it wouldn't have been too difficult to make something more impressive once you'd gotten accustomed to the engine.

I could go on about it all day, but I've got a headache and I'm biased anyway, I managed to make one broken room in "QE4" (This was the title of the editor packed with Heretic 2, at least the one I have. Horrible game.) in the space of a week, that editor seemed identical to the one for Quake II (It used Quake II's engine, so that figures) and I could never figure the interface out, I found the color scheme horrible as well. It felt more like a moddeling program than a level editor and I don't do modelling, I can fail at making a triangle in one of those programs.

[Diaz]

SPYmaps, on 30 October 2012 - 07:51 AM, said:

wow DIaz, those 3 screens that you do show us are AMAZING!! what a quality, and what a detail.
I assume you did need to add some portals and make most brushes detail ones to make it playable, meaning;
having high enough fps so it still is playable. May i ask what kind of map that is, a SP or MP? Hopefully it is a SP, (never
play MP mode, don't like it that much) and are you still working on it and will it be released one day.
Is there somewere a site were i can see more screens of it, and maybe even a movie?
Or could you at least please tell me more about it?

Thank you. That map is SP and is finished, but I'm not releasing it because it contains so many ripped models from Gears of War. It was mostly a test, to get used with static meshes in Hammer (prior to that, I used mostly brushes). I posted it to show what can be done with nice models and assets, regardless of the engine.

It ran at 60 stable fps on my computer. Models are quite cheap to render

[Diaz]

Mikko_Sandt, on 30 October 2012 - 08:04 AM, said:

The vast majority would rather avoid using models altogether. If I were to design a usermap with cars, there's no way I'd go for models instead of constructing them all manually the old-fashioned way. Models are restricting anyway because they can easily stand out unless you use the HRP and/or Polymer, which most mappers avoid.

Mikko, I have to admit that nowadays my approach to EDuke32 / Mapster is different than most people's - I try to see it as a "modern" engine and take advantage of new features such as models and per-pixel lighting. Old-fashioned Build engine mapping died for me a long time ago. Perhaps that's why we have different oppinions

[Jblade]

To be honest I would love to work with Polymer stuff but my video card is crap and DEF files drive me crazy (It's not that they're hard, it's just if you have to do CON code AND DEF code, you will go a little crazy in the end) hence why I went back to sprites I think once the shadetable support is added though, then I'll definitly give it a serious try.

[Gambini]

Diaz, on 29 October 2012 - 10:55 PM, said:

It took me ages to make this thing in the screenshots below with Hammer, it would have taken much less with Mapster32. It wouldn't have looked as good due to lighting, but the workflow would have been much faster, isn't that what we are discussing?

After seeing those shots I have been unable to keep reading. I want that thing, whatever it is NOW. No, seriously! Is that mod/map released?

And BTW there´s no way you (nor anybody else) would be able to do such thing in Mapster32. Sorry.

[Tea Monster]

One of the big problems with Mapster is the huge expanses of tiled textures. It just looks chronic.

Oh, and trying to make furniture and even vehicles out of sectors? Just don't go there.

[Mblackwell]

Only a handful of issues (some z-buffer issues/z-fighting, and a lack of being able to overlap a showview with a camera) keep my projects from being Polymer only, even if it would introduce potential performance issues. But right now even with Polymost only custom textures and models are being used for the most part. Models definitely don't remove flexibility, they enhance it greatly when building a scene. Even just the ability to import custom PNGs changes EDuke32 from a simple port of Duke Nukem 3D into a quick-and-dirty game development kit. And that's how I use it.

@Gambini
Not too long ago Diaz actually released screenshots using some of the same assets.

[Gambini]

Sometimes I have the feeling that expressing my idea in its fullest lenght and meaning would take me an amount of time not worth it (mostly because it will likely go unnoticed) but there are so many reasons of why choosing a newer engine when it comes to modern looking stuff. I still love Mapster32 but this is comparing apples vs oranges.

The problem with... meh nevermind you win.

[Diaz]

Technically it's possible to make that in Mapster. Most things are models, and you wouldn't even need TROR probably. What I of course agree with is that it wouldn't look as good, or run as well!

And as I said above, that map is finished and has a little actual gameplay on it (not much though as it was mostly a test), the problem is that it uses so many stuff from Gears of War that I don't think it's releaseable. There's a lot of custom work too (the building textures are actually photos I took myself in Madrid) but that's not enough. My Fusion mod includes lots of things from other games, but at least these are older games, and who knows, I might even have trouble releasing that!

That is why I want to focus on something 100% original after I'm done with Fusion, and I'll probably use EDuke because I'm most comfortable with it. Hammer is a pain because you can't actually see what the lighting will look like until you compile the map, and UDK and CryEngine are engines I can't code anything for. EDuke makes a one-man project much more feasible. So I'll see what it can and can't do then...

[Diaz]

Mblackwell, on 30 October 2012 - 06:22 PM, said:

Only a handful of issues (some z-buffer issues/z-fighting, and a lack of being able to overlap a showview with a camera) keep my projects from being Polymer only

I really think it should be top priority in Polymer work to fix the z-fighting / transparency sorting issues. But that ain't up to me to decide