At the moment, the biggest thing I've done is most of the geometry of Winterhold, as it's one of the more practical environments that can be made into its own map: it's on a big cliff, with only a bridge connecting it to the mainland. The most tedious part of this (not difficult; just time-consuming) will be adding all the details. I will have to add all the stupid benches, plants, trees, rocks, and decals manually, because I can't open large files in Max, which means I can't just rip the entire scene from the game and use that. However, because of this limitation, I might resort to doing a smaller area, such as the inside of Winterhold College's main building. It actually is better for my purposes, since my original idea was to make a, "find the differences" map.
A few weeks ago, while riding the train home, I had an idea to make a scene in Radiant, copy it, and add a bunch of extra details to it. You find the differences, shoot them, and a pretty little ring appears above it. When you find all of them, you finish the map. But instead of looking at a 2-D image, or a small environment through a window, I wanted it to be a large area that you could walk around and look behind walls etc. When I got home, I realized that Skyrim would undoubtedly have some area that perfectly suited my needs. The world is massive, with innumerable details spotted throughout. I tried to walk all over it, looking for any spot that would work for me. I made a list of about 10, and decided to then find out how to actually get these scenes into Quake. This was easier than I expected.
It turns out, there are already a lot of existing plugins for Max to import Skyrim's .nif files, and tools to export all of the resources for the game. All I needed to do was extract all of the models and textures, import them to Max and export them as .ase models for Quake. Compiling a map with them, however, was pretty difficult. If I wanted light, it would have to be very low quality (no high resolution lightmaps or super-low lightmap scale), and more often than not the models would have to be nonsolid. An anomaly I found with this was that my Winterhold scene actually crashes Q3map2 when compiled without auto-clipping enabled, but compiles rather quickly with it on (this seems backwards).
Anyway, I've got a lot of working maps, complete with 2k textures and all that good stuff. Detailing I might save until I can figure out an easy way to copy everything from Skyrim 1:1, but the larger architecture is pretty simple and easy to do.
Before I got into this Skyrim thing (it actually made me pick up Skyrim and try to play through it again, because I was forced to fix all the bugs I ran into when trying to play it last time), I was working on Minecraft maps. I joined up with cpu, some wizard who hangs out on IRC, and got working on mc2map, a tool that does exactly what its name implies: converts Minecraft worlds to Q3 .map format. The early versions kinda sucked, and were heavily limited, but I convinced cpu to add some features and I updated his block id list so that all the blocks were what they should be.
The main problem I faced with working on any Minecraft maps is that brush merging doesn't exist yet. Any world I convert is thousands and thousands of brushes, which my computer just can't handle. I gave up on doing any work with Minecraft, despite having a lot of ideas and good worlds ready to go. There are some incredible texture packs for this game, which make me itch to get everything working right in Quake. The gameplay is also quite good, as Space and cpu have both proven with their previous maps.
This is the end of what is probably my longest blog post. If I used this blog more, I may actually have done a lot more work on these projects, since writing everything down helps a lot with thinking of solutions and finding deeper problems to solve. Now it's time for me to post some screenshots of what I have so far. Here goes...
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