A comprehensive collection of everything related to mapping in Quake 3 and other id Tech 3 titles.
📺 Full Video by Ryan_H
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A map for Defrag World Cup 2019 in collaboration with LicktorR.
When my friend approached me about testing his map, he had already established it's monumental visuals and beautiful atmosphere. I ended up helping out by creating gameplay and geometry for the second half, optimization, shaders and lighting.
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After getting into mapping in 2019, I was looking for ways to achieve animations beyond the very limited deformvertexes shader. Since Quake 3 does not support real animations for map objects, it was clear that it had to be some sort of stop-motion.
So I started experimenting with all the different methods to hide and show meshes in sequence. Eventually i learned about the func_door entity and realized that it's perfect for this task. Each frame of animation has a separate mesh which is moved into the map one after another. This way, only one of the meshes is visible at a time while the others are thousands of units away, making this method incredibly performant.
While I already had a proof of concept demo in 2020, I never got around to actually implement this in a real map. In 2024, I finally decided to create a proper tech demo in light of Quake 3's 25th Anniversary.
The Hunter model was made by rudolfs
📺 Full Video by n00k1e
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For the longest time, there was a consensus in the Quake 3 mapping community that custom models can only be used very sparingly and have to be low poly. And understandably so, because after lots and lots of testing, I found out that there was a bug in the compiler that would cause this huge performance impact.
This was soon after fixed by Garux and now high poly models were absolutely viable. But only if they were vertexlit (no lightmaps). They could have lightmaps generated by the compiler, but that would completely nullify the newfound performance gain, so not an option.
So I set out to figure out a workflow to bake my own lightmaps in blender. Since each surface in Quake 3 can only have one UV map, I figured the easiest method would be to just use two meshes. One with the regular textures, and one with the lightmaps. This worked very well.
With the workflow mostly figured out, I wanted to make a proof of concept map, but I wouldn't have enough time to build something massive entirely from scratch. I always thought it would be cool to have a Trackmania map in Quake 3 Defrag, so I decided to port the most iconic map from Trackmania Nations Forever, A01-Race.
The final map performs incredibly well, with 280k tris and no vis optimizations. It's a very enjoyable workflow for me and I hope that more people will give it a try.
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Pretty much just a shader study.
All movement here is done with various deformvertexes techniques. By slowly modulating the alpha channel, the dolls seem to dissolve in different patterns determined by the texture's alpha mask.
The Matryoshka Doll model was made by 5thElement
The idea for Dodgeball came when I learned that you could replace projectile sprite textures in a map via trigger. So plasma balls turn into colorful dodgeballs. If you get hit, you have to start over again.
It can be played online as well, there is a wonky queue system in place that only lets one player onto the track at a time. The other players can watch while they wait for their turn.
Mesh adapted from vj_loop_003 by Midge Sinnaeve