Have you ever made your own level/map?

[DarthMol]

I was thinking back to the days when RTS was the reigning PC king and many of them came with Map editors (Starcraft, Age of Empries).

Did you ever try your hand at making a map? I remember making my own mini campaign in Age of Empires 2 - figuring out triggers on the map and writing bits of plot for the missions. My friends and I used to make a custom map in AoE & AoE II where you divided the map into quarters and filled each quarter with hundreds of the same unit for each of the 4 factions. We'd then "test" the map and watch the carnage (both on screen and on the PC's CPU).

Stonghold had an interesting map editor where the game would "run" while you placed units on the map - i.e. they would move around and fight while you were editing the map. I'm sure you could freeze/pause the action but it was a fun sandbox to mess around in.

Anyone else try their hand at map/level editing?

 

[Sweepslag]

Indeed! I made the odd custom map for Red Alert, AoE, WarCraft, StarCraft, and maybe a smattering of others. Nothing fancy though; usually the aim was to place a ludicrous amount of resources down and give myself a near-impregnable fortress against the AI.

 

[Mister 44]

I made a custom Duke Nukem 3D map of the student house I lived in when studying.
The only thing I recall was that it was a hell of a lot of work and I never got around to populating it with monsters.
Did have a stripper in the one girl's room, though.
She was not amused.

Sent from my Redmi Note 3 using Tapatalk

 

[PsychoFish]

I used to make maps for Doom 2 back when I was in High School. It was usually maps resembling either my house or the school or areas of the school.

Then 1999 happened and it was no longer cool, and seemed a little bit creepy.

 

[czc]

I used to play with the AoE map editor. Also used to post in the AoE section of heavengames.com

 

[FarligOpptreden]

I used to build Unreal (the original game) and Unreal Tournament (the first one) maps quite religiously at school, until Quake III came along and took over that passion. Some of my DM maps in both UT and Quake were classics among our local lanning group.

 

[HavocXphere]

Some RA2 maps but nothing serious.

 

[Dohc-WP]

a custom version of need for speed III (75% completed, stalled at present, unmotivated)

 

[BeoTeK]

lol this brings back memories

yeah back in UT99 days I tried my hand at these things, can't say my level were great but we used to upload them to the unreal.co.za website (wonder if that's still a thing).

 

[PsychoFish]

You fancy kids with your fancy interwebs. Back in my day we had this

Now tell me again about uploading things to this internet you speak of

 

[VirtualForce]

Yeah, I did some stuff, mostly on the Quake 1, 2 and 3 engines. Used Quark (Quake Army Knife). You can work in almost and id tech engine game. A friends and I remade some of the Blood 1 and 2 maps...lost them

But damn, compiling (vissing or calculating light in a level) a map and at times finding "leaks" for light, took ages on my little 200mhz. Learned a ton back then, great times.

You fancy kids with your fancy interwebs. Back in my day we had this

LOOOOL, I remember the first time I dailed up, thinking, damnit, is it gonna make that noise the whole time I am connected?
I also found out how to switch of the modem speaker, so I didnt have to hear that noise everytime, but at times I would leave it on. You would learn the "song" after a few months and could find out if there was something wrong, like if its was raining, it would take a couple of times to connect, or at times if there was even a dail tone.

Fun came in with callmore (WHO PICKED UP THE FRIGGING PHONE!?!?!?) and later one with a feature Telkom had where you could add a pin to your line. Cant remember what character, but a character would tell the modem to wait a second before dailing the next digit. So you would dail the nr, give a second or two by adding the characters and then it would enter the pin.

 

[BeoTeK]

Fun came in with callmore (WHO PICKED UP THE FRIGGING PHONE!?!?!?) and later one with a feature Telkom had where you could add a pin to your line. Cant remember what character, but a character would tell the modem to wait a second before dailing the next digit. So you would dail the nr, give a second or two by adding the characters and then it would enter the pin.

A comma (,) would cause it to pause.

 

[PsychoFish]

Yeah, I did some stuff, mostly on the Quake 1, 2 and 3 engines. Used Quark (Quake Army Knife). You can work in almost and id tech engine game. A friends and I remade some of the Blood 1 and 2 maps...lost them

But damn, compiling (vissing or calculating light in a level) a map and at times finding "leaks" for light, took ages on my little 200mhz. Learned a ton back then, great times.



LOOOOL, I remember the first time I dailed up, thinking, damnit, is it gonna make that noise the whole time I am connected?
I also found out how to switch of the modem speaker, so I didnt have to hear that noise everytime, but at times I would leave it on. You would learn the "song" after a few months and could find out if there was something wrong, like if its was raining, it would take a couple of times to connect, or at times if there was even a dail tone.

Fun came in with callmore (WHO PICKED UP THE FRIGGING PHONE!?!?!?) and later one with a feature Telkom had where you could add a pin to your line. Cant remember what character, but a character would tell the modem to wait a second before dailing the next digit. So you would dail the nr, give a second or two by adding the characters and then it would enter the pin.

Yeah, it was a wonderful time learning the Hayes Command set.

ATDT,,,1234,,08601234567

AT-Get the modem's ATtention
D - Dial
T - Touch tone
, - Wait two seconds
1234 - first set of numbers to be passed
08601234567 - second set of numbers to be dialed

You would have entered additional things like :

M0 <- Stops the modem singing the song of it's people
L0 <- If windows 95 decides to ignore the M0 or you typed something wrong this makes the modem techno as soft as possible

Hell, modem tech changed so rapidly during the 90s it was crazy. I remember having a US Robotics Sportster 14.4k, then telscum allowed 33.6k, so I got one. Then 56K came so I had to get one. It was just bloody painful.

Eventually the 56K V.92 came along and it was STUPID fast for its time.

Then came 384k ADSL and it was the shizz.

People also need to keep in mind that the interwebs looked kak in the 90s
https://web.archive.org/web/19980130155035/http://www.aardvark.co.za/
https://web.archive.org/web/19970103045241/http://www.is.co.za/resources/ftpsite/tucows/index.html

 

[Dohc-WP]

You fancy kids with your fancy interwebs. Back in my day we had this

Now tell me again about uploading things to this internet you speak of

Pfft you privileged people

i was stuck on 33.6 and yet i was considered lucky cause all my friends (well only 2 others had internet back then) were on 28.8 internal modems

ok back on topic !

 

[B1nary]

I made pretty complex Star craft maps back in the day with scripted actions, so it was more like a story campaign.

Not to side tack the thread but has anyone here ever made RPGmaker games ?

 

[BeoTeK]

I also used to make tracks in a game called STUNTS.

 

[DarthMol]

I also used to make tracks in a game called STUNTS.

Aaah! I loved Stunts - we used to spend ages making ridiculous tracks on my friends PC. The problem was that we weren't skilled enough to actually drive the insane creations we came up with.

 

[Mister 44]

I also used to make tracks in a game called STUNTS.

/snip stunts

Oh yeah, now you're talking.

And Trackmania Sunrise years later. Got the demo on a PC Format CD and ordered the full game through the Take2 import feature, iirc. Spent hours building full-speed and platform tracks.

 

[brendanvb]

Back when Tomb Raider Chronicles released in the year 2000, the PC version included the level editor used to make the previous title (The Last Revelation). It had a pretty lengthy learning curve but I was very dedicated to teaching myself how to use it (I still remember we didn't have a printer so I summarised the included e-manual - lots of writing!). I was pretty into it for a long time, but sadly never published anything online. The community is actually still going strong however, and modders have taken the editor to pretty amazing places (it does have it's limits though due to them not having access to the source code). The gameplay below of an upcoming level is a good picture of the level/game qualities achievable with the state of the editor today: