Making exciting changes to the earliest part of the map now. Punching things up. Making architecture more interesting to look at and to create more diverse movement and set up more variable combat encounters. One thing that re-playing Doom is impressing on me is the verticality of things, mostly with respect to seeing enemies in high-up places you can’t yet reach.
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found out that snack pack 3 is out now so i decided to give it a look and uhhh it’s mostly not very good, but there are a couple of exceptions.
s3m1_fw:
the first map, it’s lovely! the first maps of these packs always seem to be pretty good. it’s around 4-5 minutes long and consists of a couple really well-tuned encounters that waste no time getting into the action (the quad damage is right there when you start!). it’s not the most beautiful map in the world, but it’s very easy to navigate and to hold the whole space in your head. this is basically exactly what i want from snack pack maps. my only criticism is that i want some more secrets.
s3m5_sze:
this one is slightly closer to my personal sweet spot for map length, coming in at 7-8 minutes. it makes great use of its space, recycling areas fairly often, which helps to keep things clean and navigable. it has the only good instance(s) of the “you’re stuck in a room with a bunch of steadily spawning enemies” encounter trope, which is impressive by itself, and the rest of the encounters do a very good job of making the most out of not-too-many enemies. this is the best map in the pack by far.
dishonourable mentions:
s3m2_grue is also pretty good, right up to the end where it becomes extremely prolongedly not good by throwing you into a 3x3 grid of tiny rooms with walls of liquid between them and 6 gaunts and a shambler all crammed in there and you can’t see them but they can see you and i do not understand what the intended experience is there. it’s just shit man.
s3m7_pinchy is some disgraceful trash. do not bother with this map. i don’t understand how this much brushwork effort goes into making a map this abysmal to play.
the bonus levels are all too long, sb3_comfybythefire is particularly egregious but they’re all a bit shit and do not feel in the spirit of the pack in any way whatsoever.
nice to be playing quake again. i’m going to make a single-player map for class next semester, so i’m excited to find out how bad i am at this.
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Starting production on a new Quake map project, which I am calling “Inch Practice”. I’m taking the time to draw out the entire map before going into the editor, which is not what I did with Nameless Revenge at all. Hopefully this will help me by giving me something substantive to build towards, so I don’t have to invent and reinvent huge swathes of the project in super destructive/disruptive ways. Excited to work with this and iterate on its design. I think I am basically ready to try blocking everything out now that I have what I think is the whole thing drawn out.
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hell yeah! for my new level i’ve also started from a sketch (although much less legible than yours) and it’s made a world of difference.
i’m also discovering that making small levels is wayyyy harder than making a sprawling mess. at the moment this level is around 7-8 minutes long, but that’s if i’m playing it, and i still haven’t finished the top floor + boss!
it’s been really good practice though. i’ve missed trenchbroom. unfortunately i have to put this project down until after christmas cos i’ve given myself too many things to do and not enough time to do them. 
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I have blocked out everything that should be blocked out in the “hub” area of my new map, completing it with a skybox, roof, lighting, and leak-check pass that allows my map to successfully compile with vis. And that’s a first! This thing is coming along quicker, more successfully, and with much more fun and deliberateness than any of my previous mapping attempts. Still lots to do, but I’m celebrating every moment as I go along.
I’m still doing lots of research about trenchbroom and other level design tool knowledge, which is very rewarding. Just one thing I’m in need of is like… a single resource (post, video, article) about why you should keep on grid, and ways that people get off grid, ideally with respect to making stuff in trenchbroom or for Quake. I’ve found lots of specific instances of people learning or being warned about why they should “keep on grid” but nothing quite like that.
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Redoing all this work in the spirit of embodying better practices, creating all my geometry without making any off-grid shapes – for as long as I can, and for only the stuff that truly matters but ideally for the whole thing. So I just restarted the project and I’m rebuilding it all, quicker and i think a bit nicer too. It’s easier to work with when everything is an integer number instead of mashing those against some crazy-ass decimal value blob shape I dragged into existence without a fricken thought about the consequences (demiurge moment)
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Oh actually on this subject of off-grid geometry/verticies, it was kind of difficult for me to find info about why one should avoid these, what sorts of problems they create, and how to avoid them or common ways they are created. I had to ask around in a quake mapping discord, and it felt like asking these simple questions was like bothering the master to remember and unpack the fundamental assumptions at the base of their knowledge, so a bit tedious and naive… Sort of a question that apparently needs not be asked anymore. So I’m going to compile the details of that discussion on my website later this week I think.
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really weird that there should be such a dearth of info on that (another problem with people moving to discords instead of forums i guess). i always assumed the answer had to do with bit depth limitations in older software; if you ask the engine to render a vertex that isn’t on a nice neat coordinate that can be represented by whatever format it’s using then i guess it handles it poorly: in my experience any triangles that rely on off-grid vertices simply do not get rendered if the decimal value is sufficiently whack. but the specifics of what constitutes a “whack” decimal isn’t clear to me either, especially since trenchbroom allows you to use a grid as small as 1/8th.
for me it’s always CSG subtract 
anyway i hope you find sufficient answers. i’d be very keen to learn exactly what’s going on under the hood.
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See, even what you’re saying here is going more into depth than what I’ve seen. I’ll try to confirm, but if you’re right I’m putting this info into my notes.
I just figured its easier to get leaks in your geometry if you go off-grid though I have no real evidence
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That’s definitely true. You also experience things like the game failing to render the polygons of the faces of those off grid shapes. You will also likely encounter geometry that is not actually solid and angles that do not allow players to move over them.
For many many reasons it seems like off-grid geometry is worth avoiding lol
Nobody needs to worry about the technological limitations of the past so nobody cares about that stuff anymore, it’s all lost to time for like 10 or 15 years at least now, like every time someone has to figure out how to make a doom map that meets the vanilla limits again. Only weirdos like us care about this shit…
relatedly I love playing indie games that look worse than quake 1 but have 100x the file size requirement and run like shit, or how like web browsers now use an insane amount of cpu and ram because they can, cuz we can do all kinds of weird shit now and nobody has to worry about dick cuz computers are so strong, except I do because I have a tiny computer that’s powerful and I like when it isn’t engulfed in god damn flames doing two things at once. i hope they never make a stupid fucking web app again like discord that WORKS LIKE SHIT I HATE IT IT MAKES MY COMPUTER HOT
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Never seen a video by this person before, though I’ve heard of him before. I really don’t get what motivates someone to create or discover a way to narratively unify the Quake games. There isn’t any love for incoherency in this video, which is something I love about abstract level design from id and about this series on meta level. The way that t he Quake and Quake 2 remaster episodes unify those two fictional worlds when “multiverse” stories are so common and often used by corporate IP holders to strengthen their branding actually seems less clever than just obvious, uncreative, solution-seeking, and stupid.
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now that the holidays are coming to a close i can continue working on my map.
it’s much too long atm, coming in at around 9 minutes if you know what you’re doing and make no mistakes, so i’ve cut out a huge chunk at the end (which i wasn’t confident about anyway), so that it at least can’t get any longer.
this is what it looks like so far (block-out only):
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oooh that is looking really nice. I love the textures and the chunky look of it, though maybe that’s due to it being a blockout. still think it looks really appealing!
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I have finally remade everything I had built in the old version of this map (inchpractice → inchrevision) and even have an entire dungeon blocked out and connected to the hub.
sharing work like this feels a little embarrassing because it’s so messy and because i feel like it displays some naivety about my craft. i want to make mistakes as quick as possible by completing projects, but i really only work on my mapping stuff for about an hour a day, if I am lucky. i guess i’m in a pretty typical phase with developing an art practice where you’re impatient to do better and be better. if only i could practice more, i think, then i would be better so much faster! i’m not content being the tortoise. 
i want to be the hare!
but i know these things take a lot of time, completing a project and getting better at a craft. it will take as long as a life takes to be lived.
Quake modding symbolizes the opposite of work - it is life. And ultimately this is what the Quake Renaissance is about: when our communities control our own games - from the source code and tools, to the social hubs and archives - we can reinvent it as necessary, and through it, reinvent ourselves too.
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A) it doesn’t look messy to me
B) I find amateurish works in general (not that your map looks amateurish) inspiring as someone who finds these tools intimidating.
So please keep posting your progress!
thank you for saying this! it’s really important to me to share my craft because i remember being someone who thought they could never do anything artistic when all i ever saw was the final “product” of artists. seeing how the sausage is made and showing how it is made feels really ethical to me, because it demystifies the labor and hopefully allows others to understand that nobody makes art without effort and frustration being involved.
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