Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

Some websites to check if you are interested in Quake 1 modding community:

1. Celephais is the forum Q1 modders meet and showcase projects:

www.celephais.net

2. Quaddicted stores hundreds, if not more Quake 1 mods:

https://www.quaddicted.com/

Recommendation of the following oldskool Quake1 map-packs:

- Soul of Evil

- Nehahra Project

- Operation: Urth Majik

- The Altar of Storms

All five star map-packs on Quaddicted are worth a playthrough.

*********

Back in early 2000s I dreamed about working as a level designer so I was pretty interested in the modding community of Quake, Half-Life and Unreal. It was the golden age of individual modders: The engines are starting to pull off to show good graphics, yet not good enough to persuade modders to go away (modern engines take a LOT more effort to create contents for). The companies encourage modding and provide full tools (with patching) for it.

The communities are still vibrant but many left throughout the years.

Check out the mapping tools like Trenchbroom or J.A.C.K (both compatible with HL/CS1.6).

[1] https://trenchbroom.github.io/

[2] https://jack.hlfx.ru/en/

You can use the shareware versions to create maps too. See also the doom mapping community.

Trenchboom is good. I watched a few videos and was thinking about going back to mapping. Should be fun LOL.

I'm curious on others' takes, but that's around the time the FPS genre got playable by modern standards. Any earlier and you'd have 2.5-d, low-resolutions, or bad textures.

Doom, Duke3d and some other 2.5D games still have vibrant modding/mapping communities, especially Doom. But yes Quake seems to enjoy the biggest one.

Seal of Nehahra was an excellent machinima, especially when the entire voice acting was done by one person, iirc. Scourge Done Slick [1,2] is also another well done machinima/film showcasing the speedrunning community.

[1] Part1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SibdQvgsGJo

[2] Part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlnDvsa-Ork

> (modern engines take a LOT more effort to create contents for).

Aslong as you are contempt with prepared assets it should be no more effort?

I think the main reason for less mod support is that they can't sell as much low effort DLCs.

Even if mappers want to use premade assets, it still takes a lot of effort to make a level. Starting from the era of DOOM 1/2, the making of a sophisticated map-pack went from weeks to months and then to years. It's just too much.

I have made no-name maps for BF2, and it was "just" sculping terrain, dropping assets, painting woods, roads and ground terrain.

But when I think about it I think you are right regarding "corridor like" fpses, like Half-Life or Quake, where you need to make the buildings.

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