prengle

quake

quake was initially a game that i ran through once many moons ago and completely fucking forgot about afterwards. it was piss easy to get via perfectly legitimate methods of legally obtaining videogames, it ran well on my soviet era mainframe, and it gave me mad gamer cred because it was old and automatically playing old games makes you super rad. of course, i played it on easy (meant for little kids and grandmas), i sucked ass at it, and i lacked the mental capacity at the time to appreciate trent reznor's sultry voicework, so i cheated through it and put it down soon afterwards.

then mari started sperging over it again, and i, an older, much more gothy prengle, picked it back up, and reacquainted myself with the eccentricities of bunnyhopping and source ports. then i started fucking around with trenchbroom and almost instantly fell in love with it; it took a few months before i actually finished a map, but i had come to embrace the dark, the dingy, and the macabre, and that obsession manifested itself in the four lovingly crafted (<3) maps that you see below... then i got burnt on the quake scene and mari got tarred and feathered by the quake scene and basically everything kinda started to suck.

i do really want to go back and do another big project in trenchbroom sometime because that thing is a fucking divine creation forged from the hot sticky passion of christ himself, but alas - that'll have to wait for now.

i made these maps with trenchbroom and tested them with quakespasm (and yes, even mark v), but they should work with any modern source port, maybe even win/glquake - make sure to read the fuckin' readmes. (if you use darkplaces i will point and laugh at you)

maps

your happier place (dm4jam_prengle, march 2018)

this is my premier quake map, both in its size and in that it was the first that popped out of my ass. it was made for dumptruck's dm4 jam that he ran back in march 2018, and following two weeks of some shit hitting the fan in real life (best saved for a formal write-up, like how the big boys do it) and in the wretched boomer-filled no man's land known as terrafusion, it was unleashed onto the public along with like, 20 other maps. i learned trenchbroom as i was making this map, and tried to use it as a somewhat productive method of cooling the fuck down. the initial version of the map had a ton of issues and resulted in half of my playtesters getting lost as shit due to my endearing ineptness, but i made an attempt at cleaning it up back in april for newhouse's dm4 dlc thingy. then he got distracted, but he ended up coming through and releasing it in september, where my second (technically third) version of the map ended up being released. a lot of hallways had to be cut and some tweaking was done (you can actually see the key i wanted you to see from spawn now), but i think the map came out a lot better for it. i can do a hell of a lot better now, but for a first attempt, i think it's at least somewhat admirable.

i should probably note that i'm linking the third version of the map here - you can download the first, "your happy place" at quaddicted if you're really that curious. the second version really isn't worth looking at i swear.

pygmachophobia (sm183_prengle, june 2018)

mari did his own speedmapping session at the start of the summer, something that went for the most part went pretty smoothly. i was kinda interested in learning how to use idbase textures properly, so i had a go at it, but i wasted like a day fucking around with scraps that went nowhere before i settled on a fish tank, which for some reason everyone who played the map immediately loved the second they laid their beady little eyes on it (i was more proud of the shambler containment thing i made in like 30 minutes but fuck you). the gameplay is pretty rudimentary but i threw in a slaughtery arena bit in the middle of the map, which felt out of place to me, but it was easy to put together, and ultimately i was proud of myself for somehow cramming more than 30 enemies into a speedmap. not bad for a speedmap -- key word here being speedmap. speedmap speedmap speedmap.

sarkistic spite (sm186_prengle, august 2018)

by this point, i was becoming increasingly comfortable with trenchbroom but also slowly kinda starting to lose my mind at the same time; what better way to show that than with an elder world-y map? i kinda tried to channel sandy petersen (the best id mapper, change my fucking mind) with this map, although only a bit of it shone through in the end. i'd noticed that both of my maps had some kind of setpiece (the key chute in dm4, the fishtank/central room in sm183), so for this one i went for a big atrium that you had to ascend and subsequently descend, the gimmick being that there's a giant teleporter preventing you from falling straight back down. again, the gameplay feels very rough, and i kinda fucked up by making the teleporter seethrough in quakespasm - hopefully my incredibly astute tiny playerbase will notice why. this one probably has my best brushwork (and best map intermission) to date, but i'm still not quite satisfied with the gameplay, even if i am a very style-over-substance kind of dude. c'est la vie.

anal bleaching (sm187_prengle, september 2018)

i think this one was for one of dumptruck (or otp's??? newhouse's???) speedmapping sessions but it's been a few months and i'm not looking that shit up so fuck it. the goal here was to make a map in under four hours, which sounded very appealing for two reasons, one because it actually was a speedmap and two because i am a masochist. there's no setpiece or big gameplay gimmick here, i just wanted something that was playable, and after a bit of tweaking it feels ok to play -- i could've spent less time on detail and more time on gameplay, but coming from sm186 i still had a fetish for petersen's maps (and i still do) so this one also ended up being inspired by e4. not especially great but i'm still proud of the level name and me making faces that spit darts in like 5 minutes. i'm sure i wasn't the first person to come up with the idea but i did it all by myself which makes me a happy prengle.

wads

i've also experimented with making some textures for quake, but i'm still figuring out how to do that competently:

prengle_clip.wad (september 2018)

i wanted my own clip textures, so i made them. they're not super remarkable but they're mine and again i made them, so there.

prengle_centralsh.wad (december 2018)

ok this one's a doozy. i was thinking of things that'd work well with the quake palette, so i started thinking about grungy, grimy, spooky and dirty things from the 90s, and the original silent hill for the sorny(tm) playstation came to mind pretty much immediately. not long after i tried figuring out how to extract textures from ps1 games, which i mistakenly thought would be easy as shit. holy shit was i wrong.

while trying to figure out what the hell .tim and .ipd files were, i learned pretty quickly that silent hill does some weird shit with its texture files and palette -- i'm not really familiar with old ps1 shit like this but this forum thread explains the problem i was having pretty succinctly. alchemilla hospital had download links for silent hill 1 textures and tools but those, along with everything cool that i tried to download, were unfortunately dead. i hereby curse alchemilla hospital (both the fansite and the actual in-game hospital because damn that was scary) and all other decade old fansites with dead links that serve no other purpose than to relentlessly taunt me. however while i was scrounging through old forum threads for scraps i found out that the dude who made that ngemu thread i linked also did a silent hill level viewer demo using unity, with a bunch of textures properly ripped. i was kind of impatient and slowly going crazy so i ended up ripping the textures from said level viewer using a unity data file extractor thingy. (if you're reading this giromancy bless your soul)

here's the fun part - instead of using individual textures, silent hill stores its textures like this:

in giro's level viewer you see something like this:

i'm pretty sure the original game stored its textures like this which leads me to believe that this isn't just giro's level viewer. nevertheless i stayed up till 4 am going through each giant texture dump one-by-one and trying to cut out the textures so i could save them individually. i did a pretty shitty job at doing so and i didn't even bother with the cars (how the fuck would you make those in trenchbroom?), and by the end my already barely functional brain felt like it wanted to bore a screwdriver into itself. doesn't hurt to mention that i spent ages trying to figure out why my transparent textures weren't working (here's a hint - use a curly brace, dumbass). in the end i went through 33 images with the spr prefix (textures from central silent hill) and ended up with 638 textures. there were around 140 images with the thr prefix (textures from the beginning of the game, old silent hill) and going through that folder probably would've been the end of me, so i'm not even going to bother.

the results aren't too great:

(quake texture above, original sh1 texture below)

i thought silent hill textures would've worked pretty well with the quake palette, and they almost do but it doesn't look quite right. this could be completely circumvented by using external textures but i like the idea of maintaining some compatibility with older source ports (even though i'm already using transparent textures). i'm uploading the resulting wad i ended up with if anyone wants to have a crack at using these - maybe i'll try using the files i have as external textures at some point, but since i don't even know how to extract more textures i'm kind of at a loss here. oh well.