As the title says, I sometimes dream about mapping.
I know a lot of us do, but I decided to share the memories so we can see how bizarre it gets.
One of the oldest mapping dreams I remember was being in a castle, in Hammer 4.
The castle's brushwork was fine, but there were no textures. In fact, there were lightmaps so it had that blurry lighting. At first I thought I was maybe in a map viewer like Crafty, or using Hammer's ray-traced preview. But then, I encountered a sprite which was on top of a torch. The sprite was oriented to face away from the wall, and it wasn't parallel to the player's view like most sprites are.
I compiled the map, and the sprite was scaled 10x more and it was parallel. Odd.
Next up, I dreamed a huge mapping collab 2 days ago. So, a bunch of people from the Sven Co-op mapping scene (Trempler, Puchi, Aurora, Nih, Keen) and I were doing a huge collab map. But the thing is, it was in a unified "multiplayer mapping" solution that allowed Hammer, J.A.C.K., Sledge and even Trenchbroom users to work on a map in real time, like in Cube 2 Sauerbraten. Brushes were spawning in front of my eyes, I was so lost, but it was just beautiful. Mappers were represented with light bulb sprites, with a nickname above them. It was a huge map set somewhere in the mountains. I remember that one mapper (Trempler) was making a fence along one path, and I was turning it into func_detail and adding CLIP brushes. When we compiled the map via the network in 30s or so, we ran it on a dedicated server and it was just amazing.
And last night, I had perhaps the most unusual one. I was teaching how to make maps. But not in any software - in QuArK. But not to anybody - to a vortigaunt from Iran. Yes, a HL vortigaunt from Iran. How is he from Iran, I don't know, he probably teleported there from Xen and came to Bosnia.
I was driving a car (another thing that isn't real) through my village, and came across a house where the vort lived. I remembered he told me to teach him QuArK, so I did. At least I started. I said "QuArK can be used as many things, a map editor, a model editor and object viewer, a texture editor and browser" (I don't think some of those are true, but hey, it's a dream) and then my phone started beeping like the "computer talk" WAVs from Half-Life.
Then the dream ended, and I woke up at 5 in the morning. Now it's 6:26 and if it weren't for this last dream, there wouldn't have been this thread.
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