What kind of tutorials are needed?

(hummer) #1

After the Indy project is done, I plan on spending time writing tutorials for a bit, rather than mapping.

So, what kind of tutorials are needed in the community… what gaps are there to fill? Name anything, and I’ll see what I can do. Keep in mind, it may be weeks / months before I get to this, I’m just thinking ahead.

Anyway, one idea I toying with, is building a curriculum for mapping. As you may know, I’m a HS technology teacher, and eventually, I’d like to convice my school district to let me teach a class on quake 3 based mapping. ET is free, as are the level design tools, so all we’d need are machines. I might even teach is after school to see how it goes… make it a “club” or something.

So, I was thinking of building a mapping curriculum in the long run. However, in the short term, is there anything that people are having trouble with or have had trouble with where a tutorial might be useful?

Keep in mind, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. There’s plenty of tutorials on like, box maps, for example. I’d like to do tutorials that fill a void somewhere.

Another possibility is editing / adding to the ET Leveldesign documentation…

(Black Death) #2

Making terrains :disgust:

(Machine for to kill) #3

Redfella already started a thread like this
http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4990

see if you can do any of the stuff that’s requested or maybe help redfella

(hummer) #4

Ah… thanks for pointing that out… will do :slight_smile:

(Black Death) #5

But a descent terrain tutorial would be cool! :-X

(MindConfusion) #6

yes, a descent terrain tutorial would be nice, for easygen and other terrain programs.

In depth detail on how to mix and match the textures.

(Machine for to kill) #7

Most of you asking for easygen tutorials are probably asking because you followed all the tutorials already out there, did everything right, and for some reason things still don’t work.

I’m sorry to dissapoint but it’s not because of lack of knowledge that your easygen doesn’t work. I know this from personal experience after struggling for it for a long time and my textures not showing and then one day it just worked. I didn’t do anything different from what i had done before but it just somehow worked…and today it continues to work. These software are unreliable and many times it is almost impossible to pinpoint what exactly is wrong. Sometimes everything is right and things still don’t work for some reason.

(SCDS_reyalP) #8

Much of the problem with terrain is that easygen (and many of the tutorials) have not kept up with q3map2 development. Instead of easygen hiding all the gory details from you, it requires you to go in an tweak the output.

(Black Death) #9

The problem is, I like easygen and it’s very easy to create a first terrain. But say you imported it to radiant, and you want to edit a small thing. You’d have to redo the whole terrain. Or is that just me lacking knowledge?

(rgoer) #10

You can use the radiant vertex editor to hand-edit EasyGen terrain after export. It’s a bit tedious, but by no means impossible.

(hummer) #11

In fact, thats the best way to manipulate terrain output by easygen… open it in radiant and tweak it.

(redfella) #12

Its the only way. :stuck_out_tongue:

and btw, I plan on making a couple tutorials here about terrain. The first one will be a simple guide on how to go from a bitmap image to a playable map. The second one will focus on tips and tricks during the process. For example, what filters in photoshop will help add realism and methods on how to manip youre terrain in Radiant.

Plan on seeing something in a week or so.

(SCDS_reyalP) #13

This, I think, is the biggest misconception newbies have about terrain:
The idea that is something special, not just a collection of shaders, brushes and entity keys.

That is why I try to point people to PJs original terrain manual, even though it is sadly out of date.

BTW, rather than tutorials, people might consider updating the existing documentation and submitting it to the radiant team. Many of the existing tutorials and FAQs would not even be needed if the documentation was reasonably up to date.

edit:
The best way to send corrections is to create a bug in the zerowing bugzilla http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/bugzilla/index.cgi and attach your fixes to it.