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Avoozl

What game with map editing support first got you into making maps for games?

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Mine was Quake III Arena which I acquired during a multiplayer session at TAFE while I was on a break sometime in 2004, not long after I found out that the game had mods and custom maps, I found and downloaded a map editor for it which I think was GTK Radiant.

 

Since then I have pretty much been into modding and mapping particular games, I think I mainly tried to make maps for most of the games using QIIIA's engine, SWGB and earlier games like Quake 1, 2, Hexen 2, etc with Doom following eventually.

Edited by Avoozl

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Doom :D

I remember before I got Minecraft I was super excited to make a custom map for that lmao

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Hard to say, I was very young back then. Could have been Age of Empires. I loved creating maps where everyone starts on their own island surrounded by trees (so that there is an initial peaceful period of just developing your base).

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That‘d be Wolfenstein 3D then. I discovered a map editor on one of our shareware collection CDs around 1993 and tried it out. It even featured a sprite editor, iirc. That was my first experience in level editing and after that was a looong time nothing. Skip to 2018 and suddenly I am doom mapping. What?!

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Tenchu 2!! When that came out and included a custom mission editor I totally freaked out. I made over 70 levels, it was so fun and creative. A few were bad but most of them were decent and i got better with time. Sharing them online and playing other people's missions was the highlight of my week. There were websites and a small online community. Good memories. Some people made some great missions. 

I still have most of the missions ever released on the net, maybe one day I'll play them all and stream them and put them on YouTube, just because i can. 

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I think it was around 1996 when I bought the Doom Hacker's Guide. I installed DEU from the attached CD and followed the mapping tutorials from the book. So in my case it started with Doom.

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1 hour ago, elend said:

That‘d be Wolfenstein 3D then. I discovered a map editor on one of our shareware collection CDs around 1993 and tried it out. It even featured a sprite editor, iirc. That was my first experience in level editing and after that was a looong time nothing. Skip to 2018 and suddenly I am doom mapping. What?!

What was it called?

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DOOM! I was better at it in 95 - 96 with worse tools than I was in 2006. The catch is, I spent far more time at it in 95 - 96.

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Doom. IIRC an old school friend gave me a floppy disc containing Windeu and though the tools I've used have changed, I've on and off edited/modded Doom ever since.

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Doom! My dad bought me a book called the Doom Construction Kit that had a bunch of editors on a CD. I could never work out mapping with DEU, but I became a demon with Dehacked.

 

After that I modded strategy games like Dungeon Keeper and C&C Red Alert, but really got into mapping with Quake 3, and later Doom 3. Then came full circle and got back into Doom mapping.

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It was Lode Runner on my Commodore 128, years before there was Doom. I made well over 100 levels, and they all fit on one floppy, with room for many more.

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If you count GCS type things, Adventure Creator on the Commodore 64.  Otherwise, probably Fire 'n Ice on the NES, although being a NES game you couldn't save your work and that sucked.  Those were some of my first experiences with "hey, you can design your own stuff" that got me interested in that type of thing, though.

 

There's also the fact that the C64 in general came with the now long-past, but common in the 80s, notion of getting programs as a BASIC listing that you could type in and therefore, by definition, tweak as you wanted if you had the desire and knowhow.  I remember spending a lot of time messing around with the stuff from one of those Usborne BASIC game books that were common at the time; I think I even adapted some of the simpler programs in it to QBasic after the C64 stopped working.  The closest modern equivalent would be FLOSS games I suppose but those often seem to have a higher hurdle in just getting them to compile and run in the first place let alone tweak anything.

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PopCorn. First game with an editor I could run on the severely outdated hand-me-down PC I started with.

 

Doom (including Doom II and Heretic) was next as soon as I got a then-modern-though-still-low-end PC.

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I suppose it depends on what you consider "map editing support". The first game I played with anything resembling an editor was Sonic 2, where you could place objects in levels. Hardly a fleshed out editor, but fun. I did a lot of prop modification in GoldenEye with a GameShark long before anyone had truly hacked the game to support anything resembling what can be done today. Half-Life was the first game I played with a true editor, though, WorldCraft came on the CD.

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None of them particularly - being a child with a wild imagination ever since the age of 2-3, I personally imagined myself a ton of self-made DLC's of many different games I grew fond of, far before most editors would even come to existence. These games include multiple genres, including but not limited to slide-scrolling platformers (Cyril Cyberpunk, Prehistorik 2, Duke Nukem 2), puzzle games (Stone Age, Oxyd), real-time battle RPG (Diablo I-II) and of course FPS (Duke Nukem 3D and Doom all around).

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Jetpack, an old DOS platformer that included a level editor. I spent more time making levels than I did actually playing the game.

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Wolfenstein 3D. I remember being around 10-11 and finding a map editor which was essentially about as easy as using MSPaint. I however did not at all understand floor codes or the patrolling paths very well, so I'd create levels in which every enemy would be alerted upon one gunshot. Never did anything serious with it, nor have I really considered serious mapping for any game since.

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Doom and Duke3d. Only was able to make mazes and the like for Doom... but with Duke I learned scripting things 5 years before I could make a proper Doom door...

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Funnily enough, Doom was the one for me. 

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The earliest I can remember using was Radiant for CoD1. I made a few of what are called "jump maps." They are like climb maps from CSS but in CoD1.

 

I also dabbled in the Far Cry 2 editor quite a bit and even made E1M1 in the editor, as well as some jump maps there. I recreated the canyon path "El Camino del Rey" inside the editor as best I could based on an old video. This place to be exact:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caminito_del_Rey

 

Made a few tracks in Trials Evolution and messed around with tracks in Trackmania Sunrise back in its glory days.

 

Now I only do Doom mapping.

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When it comes to making maps in general then my first games would probably be SPORE: Galactic Adventures, Super Mario Bros X. or Raycasting Game Maker (i rememer using this somewhere around 2009 or 2010).

 

When it comes to actual modding then that would probably be SDK Hammer actually.

 

I've always been interested in map-making ever since I was very young and I still do a lot of modding and mapping nowadays, but any actual form of modding looked very intimidating to me when I was young, so I stuck with easy level editors that weren't actual modding tools until around 3 years ago that I started doing mods for Portal2 and Doom.

 

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'Monster Truck Rally' on the NES had a track editor if that counts?  You could make a somewhat Escherian track that consisted of 99% downhill sections that still somehow formed a complete circuit, heh.  That's probably the earliest example I can think of.  For PC, Warcraft II and Age Of Empires II are probably the first ones where I might have actually put a limited amount of thought and design into it.

Edited by DooMAD

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