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Just a quick update this time. I thought I should mention that I have found some unexplained visual errors in parts of my map due to the use of my skip program (from the below update). What happens is that certain polygons disappear when you stand in a particular place in the map, facing a particular direction. Almost like an error in the visdata except that it happens without the help of vis.
So if you are going to use it on a map you plan to release, make sure you are pretty thorough in checking it before you put it out the door. I'll let you know if I come up with a fix...
Work on dm map number six is coming along nicely. Very nicely. Yes, I think you're going to like it. I just need to force myself to stop playing against those pesky omicron bots long enough to get some lighting done and fix up a few rough edges. There's plenty of FFA action to be had in here and it happens to play quite nicely as a 1-on-1 map. This was the one I planned as FFA only by the way. My other DM map has fallen behind a bit since this one started going so well.
I hit a bit of a snag with Tronyn's OUM map which I'm just finishing up now. We had some trouble with an actor jumping off a boat when he was supposed to ride along, but Fatty seems to have gotten that sorted now. God knows how this project is going to feel when we put it all together, but I guarantee[1] that there's some fun to be had in there ;-)
In the process of working my DM map, I got rather annoyed at the number of wasted polygons in some of the scenes which were obscured by brush based entities, yet still getting drawn (and adding to the r_speeds). So I spent some time going through the Quake engine source learning how it works out what to draw, and come up with an idea. I wrote a small program that goes through a compiled BSP and takes any faces with a texture named "SKIP" and removes them. It seems to work fairly well from the tests I have done. You can try out a preliminary version of the program here if you are adventurous (very minimal instructions). I will post another version with some decent instructions and source code soon (probably next update). If you do try the program, let me know how it works for you.
One more little thing, Tronyn asked me if he could use the tree prefab from Moonlight Assault in one of his projects, so I decided that I may as well put it up here and anyone else can use it too. You can download the (tiny) map file here.
And the results are in... I passed my exams! Actually everything happened really fast and I had my graduation on the 21st of December and it all went great. So I'm not the proud owner of a piece of paper that should open a few doors, jobwise (...and if "jobwise" isn't a word, then it should be).
Later,
Tyrann - BSc Maths/Comp Sci
[1] Guarantees may not be honored.
Hi again. Well, my exams are over and now begins the waiting game... waiting for those results to be posted. As long as I've passed this lot (and I pretty confident I will), then I'm done with uni for a while. That's it, I'll have my degree and then it's off to find some kind of job out there... It's a bit scary actually.
But you don't care about that, you want to hear about Quake stuff right? Well there's quite a bit happening behind the scenes here, but there's not too much I can show you right now. I've been working on those two new DM maps that I mentioned last update and there both coming along pretty well.
One will be focused on FFA play for about 4-8 players, while the other is meant for duels. I'm trying to get a bit of a slower playing duel map for more tactical battles. Both Elbow and EDC were really very small which lead to short but intense battles. I'm trying for something a little different here.
OUM. What can I say, progress is being made. "Shut up and show me the PAK" I hear you say. Well, call me optimistic, but I plan on seeing OUM out by christmas. I can't guarantee it on my own, but I'll be doing everything I can to make my little self imposed deadline. (especially now that I've stated it publicly).
To diverge away from things Quake for another minute here, I've also been doing some more programming lately. I've been messing around with a few things in Linux, in particular, using Gtk. Having never done any GUI programming before it's pretty interesting changing to an event driven programming model. Not nearly as hard as people had me beleiving it would be though. Nothing too exciting yet, but most big things need to start out small...
And just quickly jumping back on topic again (I'm all over the place today, aren't I?) I've updated my links page. I can't beleive how badly out of date it was. It still doesn't have too much on it, but it does show you some of the sites that I visit and recommend. The authors section is looking particulaly dated, but at least I fixed up all the broken/dead links.
Well, it's been bloody ages since I've updated, so I thought I'd let people know what I've been up to and what I'm doing at the moment.
Unfortunately, a lot of my time has been spent away from the editor, getting on with uni projects an other commitments. I can now say that my map for OUM is complete, at least until we place all the maps together. It may need some tweaking to get the balance right when flowing from the previous map, to mine and to the next. Right now I'm doing some work fixing up Tronyn's map since he was feeling a bit stuck on it. Since he's already done so much work on it, it's taking me a while to learn how it all fits together, but Tronyn is helping me with that.
Right now I also have two deathmatch maps partially completed from which you may see a screenshot or two soon. I probably won't have time to finish and release either these maps before my exams, so it might be up to two months before they see a release.
Well I did promise to release the source to TyrLite eventually, so now I have. Since id re-released their tools under the GNU GPL, I have used the GPL as well.
Now, before I let you at it I must say: don't expect it to be too pretty.
Besides me not having written any other C programs, I coded this thing to serve my mapping needs, not to make a beautiful program. I think that my changes are pretty self explanitory but they may not appear that way to someone else. I am happy to answer questions about the way the code works if anyone cares to ask. I am also happy to take advice from coders who want to share their wisdom with me. Becoming a better coder is something that I do want to do, but usually takes second place to my mapping. Enough rambling from me, go the the utils page and grab it.
Ah, it's been a good couple of weeks. I've had plenty of time to spend mapping and I've gotten a lot done. In fact my OUM map has reached a beta stage and a copy is in the Fat Controller's hands right now. He's updated the OUM Project Page with a few screenshots. So Go there and check it out.
Oh, and while I'm here I may as well mention that if you haven't stopped by TeamShambler Quake Level Reviews in the last week or so, you really should do so. There's been *5* new maps reviewed, each well worth checking out (and we expect no less of the Shambler ;-).
See ya soon.
About time for an update. I've been pretty much buried in my study lately so there hasn't been a great deal to say. I've been working on my OUM map a fair bit though, and it's starting to come together nicely. Apart from a couple of wierd clipping bugs where you seem to just sink into the floor (qbsp doesn't like undulating terrain =), it's looking very good and I think it's some of my best work so far. Since there's not much else to say and a few people have requested this before, I thought I'd post a shot of the map in the editor. (click the image for full scale shot ~400k)
As you can see, the geometry is getting pretty complex and hard to work with due to the combination of hi-tech and natural terrain. It's all worth it to see it in the game though.
I've just uploaded a new version of TyrLite. This is version 0.7 which has quite a few improvements over version 0.5 which I expect most people would still be using (unless you've been playing with the colored lighting support in the 0.6 versions). So head over to the utils page and see if this program is for you.
**note: Until the mirror sites update, they will still be to version 0.5beta. Use this link temporarily (file will be removed from here at a later time).
Now for something far more interesting: Peej 'n' Fribs is gone! But wait, it's actually good news. You see Peej has been hard at work coding a wonderful new site that is totally dynamic and community driven. The site is called Qmap, and you can have a look by clicking the funky new button on the left of screen. In case you've had a really hard day and don't feel like moving the mouse right over there, I've provided a closer link here. Gee I'm good to you, aren't I?
Ok, I keep talking about these things that I'm working on but you haven't seen any of it yet. So here are a couple of screenshots from my map for the upcoming OUM mission pack. Most of the level is indoors (you are exploring the base after all), but I think I'll keep that experience for the finished pack =).
Nice and brown, just the way us quake players like it =P. Seriously though, I think we're going to have a pretty cool set of maps for this one, and hopefully we'll be able to back it up nicely with a background story and plot - I haven't seen much of the story yet, but apparently it's coming along nicely. Ok that's all I've got for now, cya next time.
Yep, I started back at Uni today, but this year it's gonna be quite different. Because I have almost finished my degree, I get a very light subject load this time around, in fact I only have to attend three days a week =). I don't plan on getting extra work during this time, instead I'm going to make the most of the next six months, spending my time pursuing my interests and improving my abilities in areas that I like.
What this means is that I'm probably going to be churning out a bit more "Quake Gear" than I have been recently. I won't be spending all of my time on mapping though. I'll be spending a significant amount of time improving my programming skills, and one way I intend to do that is to design and implement a few mapping tools. That way I get the benefit of practicing my skills and hopefully getting a useful tool at the end. I'm not going into details now on what I have planned because it's going to take a while (since I'm still learning the C/C++ languages).
It pisses me off that they refuse to teach this stuff (which is the most commonly used in the real world) in university, because the lecturers are too caught up in their ideals. I agree that there are (a lot) of superior languages, but that doesn't mean shit if all the job ads say: requires experience programming in C/C++. Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest :-/
Anyway, getting back to the point, the discussion on standardising BSP formats has moved to a private mailing list, but not too much has been discussed yet. The general feeling is that we will use a seperate file that contains all of the extended information (e.g. colored lightmaps). As soon as the details are worked out I'll be looking to push version 1.0 of TyrLite out the door - and when that happens I hope to release the source as well.
Progress on my OUM map has started to take off finally, which is good. Apperently we are aiming to release late March or early April. I haven't looked at my deathmatch map for a while, so it's still stuck where it was before. I'll have to do something about that soon =)
Hi all, my apologies again for slow updates on this site, but contrary to what this lack of updates might suggest, I've actually been doing some work! And it's Quake related work too! (actually, it was quite embarressing when the main PQ newspage gave my work some coverage, but I hadn't updated my page yet!)
The most exciting thing that I've done lately is to add coloured lighting to TyrLite. This is largely thanks to the guys from the Quake Standards Group website, who posted some tutorials on enhancing the standard light tools. Well, I followed their file format, but implemented all the extra features you've come to expect from TyrLite.
All the attenuation formulae work as before, but you also get the option of coloured sunlight and coloured minlight. It's been tested by a few people, and seems to generally work well. I'm still tracking down a few specific problems, but if you want to try it out and help with testing, then you can grab the file here, and a copy of the text file is available here. Because this version still needs some testing, I'm leaving version 0.5 on the utils page until I'm sure this one works properly.
I wanted to keep it so that there is only one Tyrlite executable needed to do both standard lighting, as well as coloured lighting, so this version is completely backwards compatible with previous versions. So even if you don't want to use coloured lighting, please give the new version a try so I can squash any compatability bugs that may have crept in.
I'm currently discussing with several groups, the possiblity of a unified format for 'extended bsp' binaries. This could go one of two ways - we could decide upon one agreed bsp format that can contain arbitrary lumps of extended information for lightmaps, shaders (ala Q3), etc. The other way we could go is to produce a standard BSP that is compatible with the original Quake, and another file to go with that which contains only the extended information. The advantage of this is that people could distribute their maps as a bsp file, along with the extended information file, and then anybody could play the bsp. If they wanted, they could use a newer Quake executable and take advantage of the extended bsp format. The downside is more files in your map directory.
Any comments on these issues are welcome. You can send them here.
As far as the mapping is going, the answer is good but slow. I'm really happy with what I have gotten done so far on my OUM map, but progress is pretty slow. I expect this to speed up as a reaquaint myself with th IKBase texture set more, and I'm getting the hang of those rotating entities too. My deathmatch map has come to a virtual standstill. The layout feels killer, but the texture set just won't gel. I'm thinking of starting again from scratch, working with the current layout as a reference, but with a completely new theme.