BBelief 2008 – Racing Towards The Finish Line
September 28, 2008 · Print This Article
Every level in progress reaches a point where it’s not much fun to work on anymore. It’s those dreaded last 10%, which usually consist of applying a lot of polish – and getting to all the work that the author just didn’t really want to do (but has to 
). When you’re just doing the level for fun, it’s even easier to procrastinate on those areas – and eventually hit a roadblock. I hit that spot a week or two ago, and stopped working on the level for a while. For me, the breaking point was mountains.
Making mountains in Quake has always been a bitch. Clipping brushes to get natural looking formations is difficult and tedious, and usually the end result don’t even look good. I think Levelord was the only professional Quake LD to achieve a “wow” effect from his outdoor areas back in 96/97 – and even those levels from the Hipnotic pack look decidedly crappy today.
Back in the days, it was easier to justify bad mountains by pointing to the limited polygon counts. My Beyond Belief levels just had vertical walls with rock textures that were angled at the top. I was happy enough with that! But that doesn’t fly anymore, and I wanted to invest a bit more energy in getting decent outdoors this time around. It’s been an exercise in frustration 
The main problem with these new mountains isn’t even the shapes. It’s the lighting. Quake 1′s light entities are extremely primitive and don’t even offer separate controls for distance and intensity. Lighting outdoor areas is difficult, and it’s impossible to get a decent directional look from the light – which in my mind is key to getting an outdoor look that works. Instead, the mountains are uniformly lit, with the occasional black spot that further destroys the illusion. Like a badly lit “outdoor” studio set, my outdoor areas in BBelief2008 just don’t feel right.
I’m sure I could achieve a better look if I invested more time in this area, but to be honest, I don’t feel like it. The fun/feeling-of-achievement ratio is too low on the fun side. And I just want to finally finish this level! It’s been dragging on longer than I anticipated, and nobody is going to download BBelief2008 because they expected to see great terrain in the first place. So I’m battling my way through mountain creation this weekend, and hope to get to the polish part soon afterwards. I’ve come up with a bunch of fun situations involving zombies and the lack of a grenade/rocket launcher, and I want to get the level to a point where item placement is final enough to try out those situations in context of the entire game.
P.S.: One more thing I hate hate about these mountains: they increare VIS time by a factor of at least 10. One hour instead of a few minutes – for absolutely no benefits in actual occlusion.
Love to see you making progress on this! And I agree about mountains – holy hell, what a pain. I generally will use skewed cylinders for random wall bumps and stuff. For far away mountains, I like what you did there. I might try that next time.
On a side note, I don’t understand how you can use that grid. It’s blinding!
“One more thing I hate hate about these mountains: they increare VIS time by a factor of at least 10. One hour instead of a few minutes – for absolutely no benefits in actual occlusion.”
Well, if you were on a Mac and were using ToeTag you could be benefiting from the use of a multi-threaded VIS program but …. you’re not.
BSP has a second grid option that draws points instead of complete lines, and I switch back and forth. Didn’t even notice how blinding the lines are, though, I must have gotten used to them. As for a multi-threaded VIS, buy I’ve been looking for one! I have a quad-core at work and been running a bunch of very CPU intensive simulations recently, and the 4 threads are a blessing. I’d use the VIS one in a heartbeat – if I had a Mac
BTW, and you probably already know this, but there are more modern compiler tools out there that do things like sunlight, ambient light, and other effects. You don’t have to use the default tools.
It might make your mountains a lot easier!
The ones I see recommended a lot are:
http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/
Hah, I did not know about these improved versions. I always thought there’s got to be some out there, but didn’t bother to look. Gonna try them out and see if my workflow improves!
Dunno how they compare to Bengt’s tools as I’m not particularly familiar with either, but LordHavoc has compiling tools as well, you can grab em from his site here: http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/files/hmap2build20080616.zip
Also on the DarkPlaces download page he has various other utilities, (under Various Utilities) some of which you might maybe feel useful.
And ToeTag is the only thing thats made me want to use a Mac… I’m gonna give Radiant a try though, and if that doesn’t work out, re-attempt BSP.
Looking forward to the map, it’s looking excellent, though I’m gonna judge it harshly, bearing the name of Beyond Belief
Heh, I’m holding it to a high standard myself, and I think that’s the reason it’s been taking so long. I started making the map just for myself and with the belief that I can easily whip this out after 12 years of industry experience – no pressure, easy work. And then I started getting into it and saw that people were interested, and all of the sudden I’m trying to make stuff that’s much more inspired than I ever had plans for it to be.And realize how much fucking work it was!