Quality over quantity - a Pixel Procrastinator's Creed. 

Just saw this thread and I thought I'd say, good job because I loved the palace levels in Quake 2. I hope you make the rooms a bit bigger than they were in the palace levels though. Be nice to have some tank statues in there maybe.

I've seen a lot of (good, bad and ugly) tutorials, but haven't come across that site yet. Once I get back to mapping, I'll have a looksee there.

As for 3dsmax-based mapping -- I'm sure there's some possibilities, but I'm also pretty sure that it'll be harder to control r_speeds and physics issues. I don't really have any difficulty making acceptable terrain floors at this time, but who knows when it might come in handy.

First thing I'll do when I get back to mapping is finish the doom2map01 remake. I'm good for that on every aspect but time. ;]

Damn, now I'm suddenly itching to get back to work on the Doom map... Heh.

Damn fine looking stuff there, Tab.. ..and saying that feels like it's getting old and stale. One of these days, I'll need to examine something with a magnifying glass and cry out at some minute and obscure flaw even though I'd never be able to do any better myself.

I kid, of course. Always nice to see eyecandy from the pixel procrastinator.

That's looking very, very Doomy indeed.  The bird approves! 

Done some more work. Aside from the outside area, which I've tried to make somewhat hilly (screenies), I've playerclipped most of the areas, added ambient sounds and tinkered with lighting.

http://www.tabun.nl/tmp/gen/tabd2map01_pre07.jpg
(don't mind the black lines in the skybox -- I can't fix that with the drivers I'm using on my non-gaming rig)

I still need to properly light the big brown room -- and find some way to do it nicely. After that, I can think about item placement (I'll make one true-to-Doom version, ofcourse, but FFA might be spiced up by a more interesting set-up).

I'm done with setting up vis. The map is really pretty low on r_speeds (max 7000 verts or so) right now. That's the way it should be, because it's still close enough to Doom to be fairly basic. I'm hesitant to add too much detail and spoil the Doomy feel of the thing.

I did hit a snag when I played with the scale of the whole map. It turns out that it is closest to DooM scale at 0.7 times what I've made it, while still allowing you to jump without hitting the ceiling. Unfortunately, when scaling it down that way, curves/patches get disconnected from the brushwork of the map (cracks all over the place). Thankfully, this problem does not occur scaling to 0.75 times. I guess vertices of brushes and patches get differently rounded down or something. The map goes off-grid when scaling smaller (or with odd values), so manual fixes seem to be impossible. Three quarters of the original size works well enough, but it would be nice if I could get it a few notches closer to the way it felt in Doom.

Did some more work - almost ready to make a sort of alpha-test version.

http://www.tabun.nl/tmp/gen/tabd2map01_pre08.jpg

Note that I'm still tinkering with the water shader (it's making some weird pixely blotches, no good yet).

I'm fairly happy with the overall lighting now, just need to tweak the sun a bit. From the feedback (some of) you guys may be willing to give me, I'm hoping to find out whether the map is too dark. It looks ok on my end, but settings/set-ups differ...

I guess most of the work left is technical: fixing some brushes to get better fps, getting bots to work et cetera. That is, aside from item placement.