caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

Fighting the level design tools they used gives me a whole new respect for Deus Ex. Man, fuck UnrealEd, even when it's not crashing or silently, mystifyingly failing to actually save the things it said it did. I think as software goes, the UI may be the worst I have ever struggled with.

I have a distinct sense of accomplishment for the three-room map I've created. Three empty rooms, bare-bones textured and lit — two boxes and one half-isocosahedron, two of them linked by a crawlable linking duct with hatches both ends, and a button that raises/lowers a recessed cage from the floor of one room, containing a Delightful Surprise™ gun turret that shoots you for your trouble.

I suppose there are worse things I could be killing time with.


caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

I can see why pretty much everyone who tried their hands at large-scale Deux Ex modding burned out on it, though, even beyond the usual problems of ambition colliding with reality; the sheer fucking impedance imposed by the tooling on everything you do with it is never going to go away or lessen.


AmanitaVerna
@AmanitaVerna

This reminds me of how easy it was to make maps in Duke Nukem 3D's BUILD engine's map editor. I don't have the map anymore, but I built one with two towers facing each other, a river between them, and you could go under the water to sneak into the back of the towers. It had working doors, multiple z-levels, the water I mentioned which was technically an advanced feature because water is a kind of portal iirc, spawn points for multiplayer, weapon and health kit spawn points, etc.

Years later, I tried using valve's source map editor (I forget what it was called), and found it so difficult that I just decided it wasn't worth the effort to try to make anything with. The way you draw maps out in BUILD was a million times easier and more intuitive.


bck356
@bck356

This conversation makes me want to shout out Lunar Magic: https://fusoya.eludevisibility.org/lm/

It's for Super Mario World, and it might be the best level design tool that mods an engine instead of writing to one from scratch. It's so powerful and good that an entire community sprung up around it, SMW Central at https://www.smwcentral.net/

It's led to the creation of what is probably tens of thousands of hours of Super Mario World content along with a community that, at least when I was part of it, was one of the coolest and open on the internet.


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