Are you planning to upload some content to Quadropolis - Great! Read on!
To avoid comments like
- "Where do I put this?" and/or
- "There's a "texture missing" error ..." and/or
- "Why are so many walls not textured?" and/or
- "Why can't I hear the music?" and/or
- "Please fix your node!"
you should adhere to the following guidelines.
The examples are fitted for sauerbraten content,
the other games are sufficiently similar, or will be commented on in appropriate sections.
The Cube Wiki article Distributing Maps contains the original text of this guide;
I am now only going to add a few notes about Quadropolis postings here.
I just want to share some knowledge and give some tips on mapping. This is for novice mappers as well as for people that are already familiar with Cube editing. For learning the basics of how to edit maps, refer to the readme.html.
Some opinions on certain topics might be influenced by my personal taste and views. I don´t claim this were the ways to do it, but it´s the way I do it and what I find important.
Since I have never made a singleplayer map (I like multiplayer better) I can only talk about making multiplayer maps here.
I will divide this into sections, which are
1. Layout/Performance
2. Gameplay
3. Design (detail, mapmodels, light and stuff)
1. Layout/Performance
Starting a new map, it is always good to have some basic concept or idea in mind.
This is a walkthrough of the editing features of sauer.
One Way Cubes
So - we saw handy do these in his mini_arena
and then explaining their creation in a tutorial included in factory..
also SheeEttin gave a very quick how-to in his comment to the mini_arena-node.
I've decided to put this up as a real guide too though - credits do have to go to those two for the research though! Well done boys - that's the true spirit of this community!!
| Step | Description | Visual | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | First we need a regular cube. We use the default gridsize (3) for our tutorial. |
 |
|
| 2 | Now we push one corner in all the way (left pic), then back one step (right pic). This tutorial has picked the bottom-left, so for each face that's the corner to point to! Use Q+MW to push/pull corners. |
 |
 |
| 3 | Repeat this operation for all four side-faces of the cube. On the right pic you can see clearly how each edge has been pushed in exactly an 8th. |
 |
 |
| 4 | Now go round again, pushing in the last 8th. The left pic is the before, the right pic the after. After corner #3 you'll see the bottom face disappear. |
 |
 |
Hope that helps.
Enjoy!
Entrants should follow the following guidelines for entries into the competition:
Today, I have release Version 1.0 of my Sauerbraten editing cheat sheet. You can download it from my site, or here on Quadropolis.
The cheat sheet's aim is to give both new and experienced developers a desktop help that they can have on hand when editing levels. Version 1.0 only covers basic editing, with future versions to include heightmap, entity and other config settings that users find handy.
Anyone is welcome to download, and contribute or make suggestions to the project, which forms part of a series of tutorials on Sauerbraten I am planning.
I: Thou shall not infringe on copyrights.
II: Thou shall not make gimmick maps.
III: Thou shall not post a map that took less than 12 hours to complete on Quadropolis.
IV: Thou shall not use the clip/noclip materials in thine first three maps.
V: Thou shalt not capitalize file names.
VI: Honor thy Aardappel and Eihrul
VII: Thou shall not create spawn points facing a wall. This includes both monsters and playerstarts.
VIII: Thou shall not use the smallest grid size to create an entire map.
IX: Thou shalt not touch the lighterror variable. Ever. I will break the face of anyone who does.
X: Thou shalt not be a douche bag on public servers.
Although probably not as fun as level design, making skyboxes can add a lot to the experience of creating a map, as well as the atmosphere and gameplay of a level. Skyboxes can be loaded with the "loadsky" command, followed by the path to the files. The "loadsky socksky/desert" command for example will load the desert skybox located in the folder packages\socksky. You can browse to this folder and view the six images that compose the panorama you see in game. This guide will focus on the process of creating a skybox with several software rendering packages.
Many of the Cube and Sauer skyboxes were created with Terragen. You can find a detailed step-by-step tutorial by googling for "Terragen skybox" and "Lloyd M". In Terragen, as well as in the other packages we're about to use, there are a few basic rendering parameters that need to be set for each of the six images so they can blend seamlessly. In Terragen v0.9 (the version used here), all of the parameters can be accessed from the Rendering settings window. Images need to be square, so first click on Image size and set both height and width to 128, 256, 512, 1024, etc. Click Camera settings and set Zoom / Magnification to 1. Below is the camera orientation, which you can set individually for each image before rendering:
HOW-TO play sauerbraten
This document is now unmaintained since wiki:Multiplayer Guide has more current information and more contributors to edit it :)
[2006-08-22] (updated link:2006-12-10)
In this small tutorial I will try to explain how to use Blender v2.36 with the Quake 2 modeller to produce and texture a simple mesh for use with Cube.
Disclaimer: I can't guarantee that the tutorial will be of any use to anyone. If you arise damages from the tutorial, I don't want to know about it.
What we need:
- Blender 2.36 and the Blender md2 import/export scripts by Bob Holcomb
(script files must be put in the .blender/scripts folder in order to work) - The Quake 2 modeller by Phillip Martin and Jaimi McEntire (hopefully v0.91b)
