Posts by Obsidian

[Blocked Image: http://www.wings-of-stone.com/q2_logo_type2.gif]

Saw this contest being posted and thought some of you might be interested, especially since the Q3 contest wrapped up with some fantastic entries...

Quote

Greetings fellow Mappers and Quake brothers!

We'd like to invite you all to our Special Q2 Mapping Contest that we're kicking off on February 15th! All capable mappers and judges are welcome to join before that date to make something awesome with us

Currently we have 13 mappers signed up, coming from different backgrounds, games, and editors. We offer a competitive challenge with an interesting set of limitations to test your skills and see how you stand against our panel of old school mappers. It's like going back in time to the basics.. returning to the drawing board of simple arena styled level design, where things might get very interesting and fun. Many of the mappers are using old school Radiant but some are now experimenting with a new version Trenchbroom (V2), which happens to be the newest breed of editing. It features intuitive full 3d extrusion controls ideal for speed mapping and rapid prototyping. Here's a preview of V1:

External Content www.youtube.com

Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.

Display content once Display all external content

Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

We all have Quake flowing through our veins and with map formats being fairly interchangeable most should have no problem jumping right in. And since everyone loves a good challenge, we want to see some skilled mappers claim the top spot. The Contest starts on Feb 15th and ends midway through March. You'll get over a month to create something awesome, and we hope many of you can represent. We currently have 6 Judges standing by to help rate your creations. So if you don't mind a little competition, please stop by Q2Cafe and join the Contest:

http://leray.proboards.com/board/81/10th-mapping-contest

Display More

Quote from Conrad Justin

I enjoyed mapping for this game and even though I failed to create quality map this time

You're being overly hard on yourself. You had a really great map entry, it was sadly hurt by some of the technical hurdles that it takes to getting a good working map in an engine that you aren't familiar with. But it was great in concept and played pretty well too. I hope you fix it up and see more stuff from you to come.

Overall, I would like to thank all the competitors for their efforts and proving that even after 15 years the Q3 level design community is still running strong with maps created both by seasoned veterans and new comers alike. Thanks to my fellow judges for their dedication and trying to get the results out during this busy season. Huge thanks to Sprony for organizing the event and gathering sponsors for some awesome prizes. It's been a fun one!

In case you guys haven't seen it, the rankings have been posted!

There is a delay in posting the individual scorecards. Sorry about that, but I'm working on that right now...

Instead of using Excel like everyone else, cityy decided to fill his scorecard out in Numbers and sent me a .numbers file. I tried exporting it to .xlsx, but it still broke my master score sheet. I now have to copy/paste every single cell from Numbers into Excel. FFS, cityy!

Lunaran decided to write an essay for each map so I fixed the layout a bit to accomodate. SyncError decided to use decimal scores which I did not take into consideration when doing the maths on the master score sheet.

I probably should have provided better instructions to the other judges. FML.

Congrats to all the participants for some valiant efforts, and expecially a big congrats to the top placing winners, much deserved with some amazing maps that have clearly surpassed my expectations.

Here are some extra smilies!!

UPDATE: Scores are up!

[Blocked Image: http://zero.robotrenegade.com/forums/MapCore2014LDContest/Scorecard-Totals.png]

Download all the individual judge's scorecards for detailed comments.

Some good points there Pat. Judging is always going to be subjective, but we try to be as fair as possible. I think what we wanted to prevent is too many undefined points floating around without any clear guidelines on how to use them. In the same way, this can cause equal imbalances, do we give full points to someone with amazing texture work but ignore the fact that their lighting is weak? They do need to be docked points for things they do poorly. I'm not saying one way of judging is better than the other, just that both methods have their inherent flaws.

On the flip side, the Creativity section is kind of a point free-for-all, if a map displays amazing lighting and atmosphere, a judge can easily award full points for lighting as well as full points to Originality of Design and Outside of the Box, resulting in a total of 15 points.

This is the general scorecard that the judges will be using to score each map. There are 4 judges, Adam "SyncError" Pyle, Ferdinand "cityy" List, Matthew "Lunaran" Breit, and myself. Scores from each map will be averaged between the 4 judges and winners selected from the highest scores.

[Blocked Image: http://zero.robotrenegade.com/forums/Scorecard-RC.png]

We haven't come to a conclusion for when we'll all be finishing the judging procedures. With the holidays coming up, we'll all naturally be very busy with work/family/life, etc. There are 16 completed map submissions in total and we hope to run though each map thoroughly. Please be patient and we'll try to come up with decisions as fairly and promptly as possible.

Best of luck to everyone! Hope everyone can polish/complete their maps in the meantime, there are some really promising looking stuff coming out of this contest.

You can still finish it apart from your offical contest entry and release it as a final final version later. Especially after you get some further feedback from the judges. It's a great entry none-the-less.

Best of luck to all participants! I enjoyed watching how these maps evolved and seeing some really impressive stuff being built. For now, you guys get to sit back and relax for a bit while the other judges and I have to start biting our nails and try to make up our minds on how to score each map.

Currently, I'm working on a scorecard that the judges will use to score each map. It will contain a breakdown of judging criteria, points to be awarded, and definitions on how each category should be judged. I think it'll make judging easier and participants can see how they were scored and what they could improve upon.

Read this:

You can upload it anywhere, but no further updates after the contest has closed. Make sure you test your map, and make sure you aren't missing any files in your .pk3 (textures, shaders, .arena files, etc.)

Ah, BSPC.exe was developed internally at id Software for a very long time due to a bunch of licensing issues and bot code. It was released with the Q3 source code GPL so it wasn't readily available in the past.

For your ivy, the issue is depth testing. Your ivy's .tga file has an alpha channel, but the lightmap doesn't know that you want to use the same alpha channel on the lightmap as well. Depth testing tells the shader that you want to use the ivy's alpha channel for both shader stages. It works like this:

textures/map_reco/ivy
{
	qer_editorimage textures/map_reco/ivy.tga
	surfaceparm nonsolid
	surfaceparm trans
        surfaceparm alphashadow //uses alpha channel to cast shadows
	cull disable
	polygonoffset
	{
		map textures/map_reco/ivy.tga
		alphaFunc GE128 //A.C. tonal values greater or equal to 128 are opaque
		depthWrite //write this alpha channel to buffer
	}
	{
		map $lightmap 
		blendfunc filter
                depthFilter equal //apply the alpha channel in buffer to this stage
		rgbGen identity
	}
}

Alternatively, if your shader doesn't need a lightmap, you might be able to get away with a vertex lit surface. Because this uses only a single shader stage, you don't need to do depth testing.

textures/map_reco/ivy_vertexlit
{
	qer_editorimage textures/map_reco/ivy.tga
	surfaceparm nonsolid
	surfaceparm trans
        surfaceparm alphashadow //uses alpha channel to cast shadows
	cull disable
	polygonoffset
	{
		map textures/map_reco/ivy.tga
		blendFunc blend
                rgbGen vertex //make this surface vertex lit
	}
}

I'm not sure about your stained glass window issue, depth testing might fix that, but I don't know what the shader for that window looks like. It looks like you don't even need any special shader for that glass window, so maybe just make it an opaque normal texture.

You seem to have a lot of health. I recommend you do some play-testing to see if that much is actually required, or maybe space them out elsewhere in the map.

The website has an archive of a lot of old versions:

http://icculus.org/gtkradiant/downloads/

It's a little dark. I'd add a little contrast by using some strong directional light sources (like spot lights, etc.).

Even the lava doesn't seem to give any glow.

If you're doing things properly (detail brushes, hints, etc.) most maps should take only a few minutes for BSP and VIS. Light stage can take a while depending on a bunch of factors.

devmap mapname (without the extension)

Love the lighting on this one. Mmmmm....hmmmm.... alpha shadows!

This map looks stunning!

It's hard to tell how it will play from a gameplay perspective based on the screenshots, seems like a lot of symmetry which typically doesn't work very well for a deathmatch map.

Quote from Thurnip

And my radiant (1.6) is having some problems to compile bot files (aas, correct?)... there's some setting i need to change to make it work properly?

Any error messages?

That's an old version of the manual that someone is hosting without permission. See this instead:

http://q3map2.robotrenegade.com/docs/shader_ma…ng-shaders.html

Also not sure if you need that first stage, but if you do, I'm pretty sure you also want that to have blendFunc add.