What engine to map for...? Thread

Hey all,

I've been a (more or less) faithful Source mapper for a while now, after playing around with Warcraft III, SAGE and GoldSrc. Nonetheless, I find the engine growing obsolete even faster as time passes by, the lack of modern functionality and seeming escalating amount of bugs killing its potential for further games. I'm generally an interiors kind of guy, and I've always found horror mapping rather interesting. I know some disagree with me here, but try to bear with me and my opinion: Source's clumsy lighting sure doesn't make this easy, though, which actually applies to many aesthetic aspects. Thus, after yet again being pissed off over Source's failure to sanely lighting a simple environment, I figured, what are the alternatives? The reason I originally picked Source (apart from it being the first FPS engine introduced to me in terms of level design) was the games' wide variety of content; the HL2 series offers a wealth of props and textures for a number of themes and environmental settings unmatched by any other I know of. This does, however and in my opinion, not make up for an outdated engine and (concept of) editor. So, what I want to ask is, what engines feature both modern technologies, an effective editor and some extent of variety of content?
I'm sorry if I stole too much of your time there.

Thanks.

EDIT: Oh, and Anthony, I'm not screwing anyone over so no need to get your blood pressure up again (although the how-to-leave-a-mod thread was rather amusing, retrospect)!

Edited by: krainert

Thanks. I'll base my work on a game/mod rather than building anything from scratch (since I map, not code) so that'll have to be UT3. One thing comes to my mind, though, UT3 doesn't have any actual single-player mode besides from that "multiplayer-with-bots-equals-single-player" campaign, does it?

while I'm not a source fan, think HL2 is a piece of trash, I'll also say that the same lighting technique has been used successfully over the years to deliver just what you're wanting.  Everything from Quake 1 to now pretty much uses that type of lighting.  It might not be the tech limitations limiting your ideas, just that it's been done so much you're not seeing any more possibilities. 

Anyway...  Check out doom 3.  it's got softshadow & HDR support, so the only thing you can't (practicly, it can be done & has) do is large Farcry/Crysis islands.

Thanks, I actually never considered Doom, but it may be interesting. Regarding the "limitation", you're right, of course, one can build great maps for Source and the remaining Quakes - but you can do even more with more updated engines which is what I'd like to try.

And Hendrix, I'm not spontaneously leaving 1985.

Real scripting system? I'm off to buy Doom 3 then Source's trigger concept always gave me some serious spasms.

krainert wrote:Real scripting system? I'm off to buy Doom 3 then Source's trigger concept always gave me some serious spasms.

yeah a C like language even if i'm not mistaken
you can do entity chains to for small things, but i found a tutorial where they created a barel factory (barel comes out of machine, gets picked up, put on conveyor belt wich deposits them in a bin wich another machine shoots away), to bad i can't find it anymore, didn't finnish it first time and i want to try it again D:

Edited by: Sigma

Thanks again.

Just wondering: Is there a united Doom 3 modding community website? I can't really seem to find anything.

there's the two I posted, first being a reference wiki, second being a dev site.
Planetdoom.gamespy.com
Katsbits.com
Iddevnet.com

there's other misc sites (I have a small one).

just stay out of the political topics or you'll get sucked in to a black hole... it's like talking about steam here.