Did anyone here ever made Maps for
the various online-shooters like UT, Quake, Counterstrike etc?

There are so many nice maps for these games to find online,
but a rather poor scene for 3dgs compatable maps.

I think that is manly caused by two reasons:

No standardized and fun core platform to run these maps
(so why should on make a good map if it can be run in a decent shooter on 3dgs)

and the limits of Wed, that makes map making cumbersome compared with the
professional Map Editors for the mentioned games.

If WED would offer a workflow to implement the many Quake compatable maps
for example, it would be much more fun to set up a shooter based on that.
For example a method to use the compiled .bsp maps from quake,
where only the entities must be adapted to 3dgs.

i disagree.

the reason is that those games are made by professional gamedevlopers and huge teams. with time, knowledge and money.

lots is possible with gs but who would take the 6 months of work as a lonewolf to create something comparable (for just one single level...out of maybe 12-16).

time. a very underestimated value!

cheers

The hundreds of fan maps are not created by professionals.
These are hobby modders, and the maps outperform massivly what i see
posted here in the forums. Skilled map makers simple dont create for 3dgs, since
there is no use for the maps.
I am referring here to all these nice deathmatch, capture the flag etc maps.

If I could use these maps, I would have much more fun to create a shooter for them.

i don't know if this actually works, but cant you just import the .bsp into quark (or any other .bsp style level editor), export it as .map and then reimport it to WED? I know that exporting from WED to .map and reimporting to quark/torque engine works, so maybe the other way works, too?

first of all its a huge difference working with given assets or setups or having to create your own stuff from scratch.

the best mod maps are from people out of the scene (gamedesigners).

and it takes them a few months to finish one mape that will be used as reference and portfolio work.

my point is: you can create the same work with gs if you are willing to invest the same ammount of time.
its not gs workflow or anything else but the simple fact that such work consumes months and months of very hard work.

one map is fine...so it will be for one given mod or game. but gs is not a game and one map will be worth nothing here. so you will have to create 10-14 such maps (3 years of work if you are fast). this is a large lifespan, especially for gamestudio. not many people i know here are working with the engine that long.

i simply doubt that having a moding environment would help anyone here.
and if you are willing to pay, you will get the same maps as evey other game (or at least as good as gs can handle).

either have budget or have lots of time and you will have the same results.

cheers

take most of the quake3 maps: the geometry is rather simple, only the rounded arches stand out of the block-like levels. it's mainly the textures that make them appear juicy, and lighting. most levels die due to their bad lighting. like blattsalat said, it's completely different to work with "modules" than from scratch, it's like lego compared to a raw piece of wood. if you have already hq art content, you can focus on the geometry and the lighting, and even that takes weeks to months for the best maps, and not days for the whole process like most 3dgs-originated maps look like.

This simple design is actually what makes these maps so advanced.
Its easy to creaty everything with many blocks and adding
models in every corner.
But these guys make maps for games! and not for showing
how nicely they can make certain deatures of the map.
The performance is an key issue.

Also the maps are made in a clean style. Blocks are snapped to
even coordinates.
Wed ist doing the biggest error, for not snapping the edges of blocks
on even values by default. Thats why all the people here complain about
the long visibility calcualtions. (wich then are switched off as a result)
When I do a map cleanly with the righ alignment of blocks, then the
visibility calculations only need some minutes even for big maps.
Many users dont even know about these technical requirements of BSP.
They put blocks and use the BSP Subtract option so that the result looks nice.
But they overlook the problems with that to the BSP routines. Its simply
not the same as in Modelling programs, where only the polycount is important
and not the position of the polys.

Also everyone talks about pure model maps. But a decent BSP Map done correctly
with good textures and lighning is looking still better than what I see
as "model only" maps. There is still so much potential in BSP,
its just that making these maps need skill, technical knowledge and
a good editor.

This is for example a map from Unreal Tournament 1,
and it runs on rendering technology from 1998/99.
There are no huge textures, shaders etc.



BSP is still very powerfull if the user has the skill in it.

---

Recreating .map from compiled bsp levels, unfortunatly works
very poorly. The blocks are messed up then, it more for looking at
the way the leveldesigner handeld certain details.
If I could run precompiled Quake BSP maps from modders on 3dgs, it would be great,
since acknex levels are very much based on the the old quake format.

the only reason modelmaps look worse then bsp maps is the lightning. gs is still not capable of rendering correct lights and shadows. this is a huge lack of the gs engine and not a big advance of bsp rendering.

cheers