"20 Brush" level compo! WIP / discussion thread

    Allowing infine amount of faces for general brush rule is a mistake in my opinion. In UnrealEngine you can merge huge amount of brushes together. Damn, I even could turn 10000 brshes into one if I wanted to. I think going from unlimited to 20 sounds rather reasonable IMHO

    Whaa? At that point, is it even a brush, if you're merging all these solids together?

    Okay, I've added a definition of brush to the rules:

    Quote

    a "brush" is a single convex primitive that was built in a level editor, whether additive or subtractive.

    Does that address peoples' concerns?

    I don't know how Unreal does it, but in most Quake-based engines I can't imagine more than 40 or 50 faces on a brush, and even then that's really pushing it. But if someone finds a way and makes a single really awesome brush with 100 faces, why should I stop them, with my personal lack of imagination?

    Unreal supports some crazy boolean operations and allows solids with coplanar and concave faces. You can perform an intersect operation on as many brushes as you want and they'll be merged into a single solid. It'd be way more awesome if the tool weren't so clunky, but it's definitely a way to cheat the contest

    Yeah, UnrealEd's bsp tool is basically the most clumsy traditional 3D mesh editor imaginable. You can in theory sculpt anything with it.

    ... which I forgot about when replying to crazy, above. sorry! I am guilty of engine-centrism.

    I think all of us know the spirit and purpose of the competition.. I don't think anyone here would try to make a huge, complex level, merge all the brushes, and submit that. Even if they did, they probably wouldn't win because it isn't the purpose of the competition. I know when I go to vote I'm looking for small, simple, clean, and creative.

    A question: do we want to allow specialized brush / displacement editors? I'm referring mainly to Microbrush2, DispGen and Twister. On one hand, they're not level editors... but on the other, they can do really cool stuff and people might make cool stuff with it. I can imagine some awesome effects with Twister especially, and if it encourages people to go out and try / learn these tools and bring it back to their other work, isn't that good?

    Quote from Campaignjunkie

    A question: do we want to allow specialized brush / displacement editors? I'm referring mainly to Microbrush2, DispGen and Twister. On one hand, they're not level editors... but on the other, they can do really cool stuff and people might make cool stuff with it. I can imagine some awesome effects with Twister especially, and if it encourages people to go out and try / learn these tools and bring it back to their other work, isn't that good?

    let's just keep it simple, there's no real reason to make this overly complicated. people make maps with 20 brushes, end. not models, not props, not other bs.

    Concave brushes, isn't that good rule? I mean, UDK/UE also splits the brushes into pieces actually so they're all concave, but merged as one "brush".. right?

    Just to clarify, I assume the brush has to be visible non-sky to count right? Or do sky brushes in editors that use them count towards the limit? What about in, say, source, nodrawed brushes used to control vis/csg? And since you can have pickups/objectives I'm going to assume that triggers and special effects brushes directly related to those things are ok (like the respawn room no entry visualizers in TF2 wouldn't count) or would they?

    May want to use a no displacements/patches rule just to keep it more in the spirit of brushes. I know my ideas rely heavily on displacements to not be flat.

    Quote from Mr. Happy

    Just to clarify, I assume the brush has to be visible non-sky to count right? Or do sky brushes in editors that use them count towards the limit? What about in, say, source, nodrawed brushes used to control vis/csg? And since you can have pickups/objectives I'm going to assume that triggers and special effects brushes directly related to those things are ok (like the respawn room no entry visualizers in TF2 wouldn't count) or would they?

    A basic skybox is free, as is a sky mesh for games that work this way (I'm looking at you, UE3).

    Quote from Mr. Happy

    May want to use a no displacements/patches rule just to keep it more in the spirit of brushes. I know my ideas rely heavily on displacements to not be flat.

    Quote from Serenius

    Just for clarification, would setting up terrain in Unreal count as a brush or would that be DQ'd?

    Tough call. Terrain in UE3 isn't much different functionally than patches or displacements in id tech/Source, but can cover a much larger space at much higher detail levels. There's some clever patch and displacement work in the ld.nl entries as well as in CJ's sample, so I'd hate to exclude those. Is it too nitpicky to allow displacements/patches and not terrain? I don't think we want to get into a situation where we start having to customize rules per toolset. I think our options are:

    1) Patches and displacements are allowed, but heightfield terrains of any kind are not.

    2) Patches, displacements, and heightfield terrain are allowed, but must adhere to a maximum poly/subdivision face count

    3) No patches, displacements, or heightfields are allowed.

    These contests were way easier back in the day when no one had any fancy toys to play with

    Rule-wise, I say let's try to get a revised draft up tomorrow or so so we have time to review it and finalize it before the "official" start on Saturday.

    Quote from seir

    I know that "20" is just fine but for me that's something like stoling the idea. I don't know...

    There's been a lot of variations on this contest over the years across different sites and communities (same with the 1024 challenge we had ages ago). The recent leveldesign.nl take on the contest is absolutely an inspiration and should be credited for getting people excited about trying the idea over here. I've been making sure to credit them as I've posted about it, and plan to continue doing so as I'm updating things on Twitter and in any official threads here.

    Quote from seir

    I know that "20" is just fine but for me that's something like stoling the idea. I don't know...

    Well, I wanted to do one right NOW, but they just finished theirs so they aren't going to do another one for a while. Plus, they have judges and scores, but I prefer something casual and relaxed and democratic. (They spent a month or two to plan theirs!)

    And re: the patch / displacement / terrain question, I think we should just disallow height field terrain AND disallow use of displacement and patches as terrain? (I mean, it'll be obvious...)

    Here's another draft:

    Comments / feedback / changes?

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!

Register Yourself Login