OpenArena Message Boards

Hello there,

I thought that after all those years I should perhaps register here. I feel like I should spend some time working on maps again to ensure my craftsmanship in that area doesn't completely rot away.

I very much like how Neon_Knight turned hydronex into something with a much more advanced layout, and I started work on enhancing lighting and detail.

Nothing worth posting yet, so this is mostly a "hi!" and a big thank you to Neon_Knight :)

hi

I thought you were registered here. :P

All the thanks shouldn't go to me. You've done a very cool work with Hydro as well!
I'm currently planning on doing a version of Hydro for OA3, the upcoming OA reboot. Although I'm a very bad teamplayer (:/) and still have to learn how to properly teamwork (not to mention I have to still improve my mapping skills) it would be a good idea to do a joint work on that map. What do you think?

Oh, I would sure be delighted to approach this in a team :)

In my experience, this works best if mappers take turns working on the .map, as it's usually not easy to consolidate changes into one final .map if several mappers make changes concurrently. If a mapper ends his turn he'll provide the current sources to the next team member for further work and so forth.

Just so you have an idea on what I'm currently working on, I have attached a random current state. Changes so far:

• Reworked lighting in the outside area (not yet entirely happy), fancier skybox.
• Overhauled the pool sections. Players now can exit the water without ramps. Lifts are provided as well.
• One can exit the water via the cave above the quad damage. The heading the player enters the teleporter will determine what direction (red or blue) he'll face after teleport.
• There's now underwater terrain, which looks much more natural.
• Tried to come up with some more interesting brushwork for the sides of the center island.
• Some brush and texture cleanup, but not finished yet. There are some badly shaped brushes due to CSG substract operations (those are evil).
• Relaxed some overly steep ramps.
• Moved the whole map a bit so that (0,0,0) indeed is in the center of the map. Helps working with the grid.
• Beveled some corners to make things flow better visually.

... and stuff I forgot. Hope this looks okay so far.

I'll take a look at it.
I was developing ideas for the OA3 version of Hydro as well. I'll sketch them when I can.

Tryed  ;D

Good job, but the map have some bugs  :P

Some invisible walls and non-solid crates.

(http://i39.servimg.com/u/f39/13/33/70/40/shot0010.jpg)

(http://i39.servimg.com/u/f39/13/33/70/40/shot0011.jpg)

 ;)

Oh yeah, be aware that the boxes in my hydros are just models with weaponclip brushes.

Why not just make them boxes?  If you needed them optimized then you could just func_group them or something.

Oh, I completely wasn't aware of the boxes being models instead of, e.g., detail brushes!

Of course, with the spawnflag value being set to 6 these models can be solid without manually clipping them, these models are simple enough for this.

Good catch!

So... it turns out that when moving the whole map to have it centered I did not move the clip and portal brushes. Yay, breakage!

A fixed version is enclosed, with some reworked lighting in the bunker structures.

edit: Oh, found some other things to clean up, will upload new version shortly

edit2: Updated.

Btw, I would love to test my progress with some bots, and I successfully compiled https://github.com/TTimo/bspc

However, no matter how I compile the AAS, I get

^1Fatal: aas file maps/hydronex2-se.aas is out of date

Now, for another fork of bspc there seems to be a proper bug report: https://github.com/bnoordhuis/bspc/issues/6


How would one generate working AAS files on 64bit Linux? (Does ioquake3 really do checksums differently from vanilla Q3? Wouldn't that be a bug?)

Deleting the older .aas file and recreating it again?

-bsp2aas switch?

Ah, there's a solution:

https://github.com/neogeographica/bspc/commit/8aa16e1986a1ac93f5992e144552eccab27035c1

edit: Works very nicely. I'm still impressed by the Q3 bots, btw.

Okay, so here's a somewhat playable version with bot support.