UT Level Design

More fledgling level designers should pick up UT design rather than Q3 design. Epic's in-house designers owned id's moronic box-with-gothic-trim look, mainly by building on the last decade's worth of level making. And so you got complexity, old-school connectivity, and fast-paced layouts. Continuing in this direction, the result is a host of interesting custom work for UT and a ton of wide-open rubbish for Q3 -- Q3 mapping being mainly the football field school of level design.

The *real* cool stuff is still being made for Q1, of course. May well be for years to come.

Is this the level design that makes UT fun??


Oh wait that was the original level design in the game!!

B00m b00m!!

But seriously though, as much as I wouldn't use Q3A to wipe my arse, I must admit that both games have their fair share of great and innovative user maps, solid and decent user maps, boring clonish user maps, and hideous newbie box maps.

One redeeming characteristic of UnrealEd is that it doesn't take quite as long to compute the lightmap fully. I can remember Q3 maps taking hours on end just for the lightmap.

Quake lighting takes long to compile because it is a good light model. Unreal uses rather crappy additive circles, similar to what Quake does in real time with light halos as rockets fly by surfaces. The radiosity of Q2 and HL is actually a surprising accurate lighting model, even if the lightmaps are generally rendered at low resolution.

If you have too much trouble with leaks, you're probably not a terribly good level designer. CSG is the way the world works, so you better get used to it. Soon enough 3DS Max and Maya will take over level design as bsp/portal fades away. As The Carmack has stated about the forthcoming new Doom, everything will soon be rendered the same way, with no distinction between how world and entities are rendered. If you don't like standard CSG, you're in for a big surprise in the coming years.

UnrealEd is the best. I love it's high level style of editing as opposed to Quake's low level set one brush at a time style. Plus, I was blown away by all of the special effects, music, and sound effects at my disposal. I could spend hours in the editor just going through all of that content.

Never been to Computer Games Onlien...

yea yea, I'm a nitpicking anal bastard... sue me

TIHS TUTORYUAL IS COPYING FROM TEH Q3 TUTORYAL TIHS MORNING!!!!!! AGAIN EPIC SI COYPING ID SOFTWARRE!!!!!!~``~!!!!~

there, it's been said

Hello?