Level Mapping Resources

[TiM]

Level Mapping Tutorials and Resources

I'm going to try and get a list of useful resources for creating game levels going here. If you know of any excellent tutorials or resources, post them here and I'll add them to the list.


General Resources
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Texture Libraries
SimonOC Materials Page by Simon O'Callaghan
A collection of photographs, environment maps and textures created by Simon released under the Creative Commons License.

The Wadfather - Environment Maps
A collection of pre-made skybox textures.

The Wadfather - Textures
An assortment of textures targetted for and easily converted across several game engines.

The Wadfather - Wallpapers
A collection of wallpapers that would also easily make good ingame textures.

CG Textures
An extremely impressive archive of textures, it's said this site has been used for several game projects.
It is limited by a daily download quota that can be increased by becoming a (paid) member.

stock.xchng
A really nice online repository of stock photographs, all for free!

Mayang's Free Texture Library
Another really awesome online repository of free textures.

General Tutorials
Map Craft
A very impressive archive of mapping tutorials for a variety of game engines.

idTech 3 Engine (Quake III Arena) Resources
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General
GtkRadiant Home Page
Home page of GtkRadiant, the best idTech 3 and idTech 4 engine mapping tool available.

NetRadiant Home Page
Home page of NetRadiant, a fork of GTK Radiant 1.5 with bugfixes and additions.

Shaders
Q3ASE
A Quake 3 shader editor with realtime preview.

Tutorials
Q3 Mapping - Getting Started by James Young
A brief, but very good tutorial on getting the right software to start mapping, followed by links to Bubba's mapping site for additional info.

Bubba's Arena Tutorials by Bubba
A very impressive set of idTech 3 mapping tutorials starting from the very beginning and covering all facets including geometry, entities, shaders and distribution.

SimonOC Articles by Simon O'Callaghan
[i]A very cool set of tutorials by an industry professional detailing several advanced techniques of q3map2.


Source Engine Resources
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General
Microbrush 2
An alternate brush editor, where brush editing works more like in Radiant than in Hammer. Only exports to Hammer, but Quake support seems to be planed as well (also support for curves).

[William Riker]

Oh, awesome! I have some,

http://wadfather.planethalflife.gamespy.com/ - The Wad Father, Hundreds of environment maps and other textures

We've got a load of great RPG-X Tutorials too:
http://www.st-rp.net/forums/index.php?showforum=137

[TiM]

Cool thanks!

I added all of the Wadfather's links and a few of the ST-RP links including the reference to Bubba's site.

I'll go about adding the rest tomorrow...

-TiM

[Merrick]

Theres also http://www.map-craft.com/index.php
Its a pretty big forum dedicated to mapping in a variety of games, with a massive JKA section aswell as Q3A, and since most JK stuff applies to EF, if theres an awkward problem you cant overcome, or your looking to do something abit different, theres a good chance someone has had the same problem/idea at some point and the solution is somewhere in those forums.

[TiM]

Ahhh whoops, I forgot I hadn't added that one yet. Thanks!
Just cruising through there, I saw a really awesome tutorial on how to make more realistic look water by environment mapping a copy of the skybox onto it.

http://www.map-craft.com/modules.php...Cgetit&lid=312

Impressive!

I've also added another one I've found (Thanks to working on Cosmos), CGTextures.com. This site was apparently used quite substantially in the production of Killzone 2.

If anyone knows any more, bring 'em here!

[GSIO01]

Added NetRadiant which is a fork of GTK Radiant 1.5 with bugfixes and additions. The author still works on it and also reacts quite fast to bug reports. There are precompiled packages avaible for Windows and Mac OS X.

In order to make it work with EF you need to do the following things:

• Copy stvef.game folder from GTK Radiant 1.5 install dir to the NetRadiant install dir
• Copy stvef.game file from GTK Radiant 1.5 games folder ro NetRadiant games folder

Also updated the link to the SimonOC Articles.

Also added Q3ASE which is a shader editor with realtime 3D preview also able to load md3 models and bsp files (Only Quake 3/EF bsp files that are not compiled with q3map2)

[Lee]

Will NetRadiant work with EF2?

[GSIO01]

Well only as good as GTK Radiant 1.5 itself meaning things such as terrain, surfaceparm override, and others won't work.

So ÜberRadiant still is the only Radiant capable of doing everything for EF2. Chrissstrahl recently released a fix for ÜberRadiant that fixes some loading errors and also increases stability a bit, anyway ÜberRadiants stability still depends on the ammount of RAM you have.

Would be nice to have some of ÜberRadiants features in NetRadaint though, for example searching entities by key and value.

[Arron Dominion]

An interesting find was Pac DV Free Sound Effects.

I am actually using some of the sounds such as the toilet flush, shower and sink sounds.

[GSIO01]

Added Source resources category and Mircobrush 2.