Using “fence textures” on func_illusionaries with an origin offset hack in QC to get them closer to the surface than 1 quake unit. Thanks Spike for the idea.

Texture scale, rotation, and entity alpha for variation. Et voila, copious amounts of blood on the floor. Can be extended to anything else you’d use decals for – rust, stains, general damage, signs, letters, light fittings, bloody hand prints… all without having to make extra wall or floor textures, in keeping with the “saving texture memory” mindset.

Animated decals also possible, if you want the blood to drip down the wall in real time or anything.

A stains decal makes a repetitive texture seem a little less repetitive.

Check to see if .dds textures are loaded – yup, they are.

The engine has had .dds support for a while (ripped from the Doom 3 engine I think), and I finally made the switch today. I used DXT1 compression for nearly all textures. The uncompressed TGA originals are kept around for work, modification, and a possible hi-definition texture addon pack when we release.

The filesize of the individual textures goes way down, so does their memory footprint, and the loading time. DDS images have hardware support – they get uncompressed directly on the GPU. I hope MH is happy now.

The quality is surprisingly good; I guess this says something about the quality of the source images, the uncompressed TGA files from Moon[Drunk]‘s Quake Retexturing project. Only in a few cases, such as animated textures, are compression artefacts apparent. I’m debating to revert to TGAs for those, but haven’t decided yet.

Future RMQ releases (starting with the demo this summer) will require DDS texture support.

I hope we can implement DDS support for model textures as well.

Funny to think that our more conservative players might actually welcome the quality loss from the texture compression…

… while Crysis 2 and Rage devs got practically cyber-lynched for the supposedly low texture resolution in these games.

People are funny. Gamers – don’t get me started.

Perhaps I’ll use trigger_lerpfog to have different fog intensity in different parts of the map – and I think I’ll increase the fog value as the player moves downwards throughout the episode.

I think the underworld dungeon theme allows for some relatively strong fog; I’ll keep the fog level controlled in the more surface – or open-air type maps. RMQ also has some fog related triggers that I haven’t explored yet.

I tweaked the floor tiles to be more reddish now, in order to get the floor to contrast more with the walls. My first attempts came out even more red than this. I reduced the intensity a little because it clashed with the rest of the map. The result is more terracotta than red, but it looks very different depending on the amount of torchlight hitting it. I left the small tiles mostly alone, although I toned down their extremely green hue a little. This gives me both different structures and complementary colours to work with, and I can have them more or less apparent wherever I want.

I think the white brick texture (usually used for stairs here) creates a really nice highlight; I should probably use it a little more.

Anyway, red floor tiles yay or nay? I think yay.

I should eventually go over e1m2rq to make use of the same colour scheme and lighting. Another reason to like the red is that e1m5rq uses the red elder world theme, and this should tie the episode together a little better.

Can’t go much more detailed with a Quake map, because the grid size has a lower limit of 1. That’s one of the first things I would change if there was an RMQ map editor and map format. You can go below 1 unit in Doom 3 for example, but original Quake uses a fixed ratio of 1 unit = 1 pixel (while D3 uses 2 units = 1 pixel) which apparently makes it pretty hard to get rid of this limit.

There is more detail like this in the map, for example I copied over most details from e1m2rq (ladders, benches, tables, banners, drapes) and stole Sock’s bookshelves (I created a few different shapes though). I also reduced the diameter of most iron bars in the map (there are tons of them) and simultaneously raised their polycount. This means the vertex count of the map has gone through the roof; over 110,000 vertices (old BSP limit was 64K) and the BSP file (e1m3rq.bsp)  is 35 MB (fastvised and -lit). To my knowledge, this makes it the biggest Quake 1 map ever.

It also makes it the map most in need of detail brushes. I know MH is still working on those – it will remove a burden when that is finally done and working. On the other hand, I noticed that most of these very detailed structures don’t create any shadows to speak of. And this, in turn, is probably due to the very low lightmap resolution of this game.

With the stairs, notice there’s a candle right beside it, and there should be intricate shadows, but they’re totally missing. Lightmap resolution too low. Instead there is a lighting bug  near the bottom of the staircase. Argh!

So these are pretty much the absolute limits of the Quake 1 map, BSP and lightmap formats.

Most of these detail structures can be treated like props and just reused wherever they fit. A lot of this remains to be done still; many “props” are still standing where they’ve been built and await their use elsewhere (even across maps – I find the more props you build, the easier it becomes to detail new areas). On top of the detail brushwork, I’m going to sprinkle the mapmodels, most of which gnounc has created for us; urns, books, sarcophagi, boats, lanterns, candles, even plates and bottles. He made a lot more than that, but not everything fits the necropolis theme.

I think I’ll change the colour of those large floor tiles to something more terracotta-like in order to better define the floor and lead the player, too.

I should be using the golden ratio a lot more in the future. It works pretty well in Quake levels, and the Fibonacci sequence is very helpful in creating geometry according to the golden ratio – you simply have to count 8 wide, 13 high, or 8:5, or any other pair of numbers in the sequence. But since the number 8 is everywhere in Radiant (4 boxes = 64 quake units…) the 8:5 pairing works quite well. So does the 13:8 one. These approach the number phi (1.62) relatively closely (for an application such as this).

It introduces a decidedly more … modern feel into the level. Less primitive, one could say. I won’t be using it for everything, but the player seeing a golden ratio once in a while probably doesn’t hurt.

Notice those fat pillars not conforming to the golden ratio. Ugh. Must fix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

So it is apparently worth it to invest hours upon hours into lighting your map. I finally found out what made my lighting so flat looking. Those of you who use Jardrup’s compilers, beware of “delay 5″. It does *something* fishy and somehow limits the headroom of the lights in your map.

I came to this conclusion by making an actual testmap for lights, because I wanted to see what the different falloff formulas did, mostly. It turns out light in real life follows what is known as the inverse square rule – put into maths it looks like 1/x². Look it up if it interests you. The light tool actually does have a setting that does this – “delay 2″.

Experimentation led me to combine torches (coloured light) with white point lights, as I had been doing, but to change the white light from “wait 0.5″ to “delay 2″ – the inverse square formula – and remove “delay 5″ (the kinky one) from the torch. Instead I increased the torch’s light range (“wait 0.35″). I also removed delay 5 from all my candles which made them appear brighter, but have a shorter range.

It seems using delay 1 or 2 on a coloured light produces colour problems – looks like lit files still get the evil clamping. Hooray for green walls. But the combination method works well and creates the same overall impression of brightness due to the white component using inverse square (the orange torches use Quake’s default, which is *linear* falloff – quite unnatural).

For some reason all of this gave me super-vibrant light. I don’t know if delay 5 was interfering with MH’s HDR lightmaps or something. Anyway the contrast is now pretty good, the dynamic lights (shambler lightning!) are almost blindingly bright now, and the game seems to finally come around to do something *remotely* like I want it to.

Hmm. Looks almost Doom 3-ish in places despite the lack of normal mapping etc.

It’s dark in there. Yeah, I know. And that bridge is in dire need of maintenance. Yeah… I know. It doesn’t matter, because dead people don’t need bridges.

This is why I built the cave huge – the bridges had to fit in. It just took a couple years for the damn things to be delivered. Typical.

This being a necropolis, a place of the dead, what’s depicted here is pretty much the mythical way to the underworld, the Road to Hel, and the bridges are the main obstacles in this level; the original’s gold key door transformed into a raised drawbridge the player has to activate. And just like crossing the mythical river, they are put through a number of trials in order to do so.

The overarching theme in Episode 1 is death. You’re taking on the role of someone who is dying and going to the underworld – the typical shamanic journey, complete with a return portal at the end. Which is a very, very long way to go.

Building the entire thing is pretty much the same – only slower and more painful.

Updated Episode 1 screenshots page… as you can see, I’ve been working a bit on e1m1rq and a lot on e1m3rq. Says Supa, “it’s not hard; it’s just tedious.” Damn right she is. Motivational screenshots for you me.

While others were still trolling our demo release thread at the 4chan of Quake forums, func_msgboard, I went and listened to Slash and sank a good 30 hours into expanding e1m3rq, Necrophilia. I made good progress and built the long-missing entrance area as well as one of the missing challenge rooms. What’s a challenge room?

Basically, it requires the player to press a switch. The challenge is either getting there, or getting to something you need in order to press the switch. I introduced pushables into RMQ years ago, and we gradually improved them to the point where a pushable box can travel up and down lifts, can fall down when pushed over an edge, can be stacked upon another, can serve as a mobile grapple point (and be pulled with the grapple), and can even activate a trigger. This room I just built revolves entirely around pushing a box down onto a button. The challenge is getting to the box.

Instead of building a nice looking area and then putting 400 monsters in because it has to have gameplay, as is done in Quake mapping much too often, I placed the gameplay elements first. I also built this room separately from the rest of the map, then moved it into place later and connected it via a dogleg corridor in order to block visibility and improve performance.

I started with the button. I knew that I wanted about two mini-tasks required to access the box, so I put two more buttons in on two higher levels, of which I pretty much built only the floor plan. Then I built a high tower with a platform at the top.

We just experimented with walljump in single player; so I made the first level accessible by walljump. For the second, higher level, I chose to place a grapple point smack dab in the middle of the room, and high enough to be inaccessible from the bottom. Finally I decided that the tower would be climbable via a ladder on the inside. For the last couple meters from the ladder exit to the platform, I chose moving platforms – straight from Super Mario.

That gave me the basic progression. The entire thing was somewhat influenced by certain puzzle rooms in Tomb Raider, because I originally wanted to homage three classic games in my map; Final Fantasy VI, Vagrant Story, and Tomb Raider. These ideas were however toned down in the progress of actually making the map, and reduced to inspiration instead of obvious homage.

The classic TR uses a shitload of water; the Egypt levels, for instance, often have water at the bottom of a room. I suspect this decision was made so you could have very vertical areas without the constant threat of fall damage; water would cushion the fall, and in those levels the platforming was extreme so the player would fall quite a bit. Same here. I decided to put water at the bottom, which then led to building a small back room connected by an underwater passage. I made this back room house the access to the tower.

Only then did I build actual walls and ceilings and some details.

As a result, this area allows for some of the craziest grappling, platforming and walljumping in the entire episode. The swinging grapple really shines here; the size and verticality of the area allow for great freedom using the hook. A skilled grappler can use various shortcuts to get around. I didn’t limit the grapple freedom because it rewards skill; all I did was make sure the player had to do at least one of the sub-tasks in order to get at the box. Hence, one of the buttons now releases the pushable onto the platform by a little mechanism.

The other button opens access to the platform for people who are less proficient with the grapple.

I put some traps in to round it off. These aren’t complete yet; I intend to use RMQ’s accelerating/decelerating rotating entities for a couple pendulum traps, for instance.

All this results in a strong Tomb Raider vibe, as originally intended for this part of the map. The area could practically have been from the original Tomb Raider game.

Necrophilia is planned to have three such challenge rooms, whose completion by the player is required to ultimately get at the Silver Key. Each challenge is of a slightly different type. Room 1 houses a pushable box puzzle similar to a three-dimensional Sokoban. Room 2 is this platforming one. Room 3 uses a moving light to mark the way across… something. That one still needs a lot of work.

I’m unsure if I will require all three challenges to get the silver key – admittedly that’s a long time spent pushing boxes in a game that’s mostly about shooting. Maybe I’ll let the player choose one or two. @ classic Quake fans: Not to worry, this map also has over 220 monsters on Hard skill, and it’s not even finished yet. I suspect it’ll be around 300-350 monsters and a broken vertex limit before it is done. All hail MH for giving us BSP2 so we can make even more bloated, sprawling levels.

This, by the way, is the beginnings of the entrance area. There was a hole in the ground, and in the hole lived… zombies. And strangely black placeholder trees, and misaligned textures. But it’s a start.

I hope to see this map, and the other one I posted tons of screenshots about (e1m2rq, the Castle of Something) in the next RMQ demo, along with a couple of new things that will make Quake veterans faint from shock. I’m aiming to deliver it this summer, but by now we all know what happens to deadlines in our project. The same that happens to BSP format limits – you hear the snapping of bones and grinding of teeth as they flash by.

The horror, the horror.