Future plans for Quake 2 Cafe?

[WizardExt]

What are the future plans for Quake 2 Cafe? I feel the forum and the community has gained a bit of momentum since the 10th mapping contest was announced. I also see a boost in the media for the oldschool level design, with a lot of articles/videos about Doom and Quake games. It's great, I love it! With this momentum, I am wondering if there are any plans to update this forum/site/community?

My personal preference is that the forums are really hard to navigate, cluttered. There are a lot sub-forums and I have a hard time catching what's new. Or even find what I am looking when searching or browsing.

[MaRiNe [Q2C]]

I have no suggestions when it comes to changing the forum structure, but I'm also very pleased at the revival of this forum. After the last contest, which only had five people participate, I feared that it would be the last one to be held here. You can imagine my surprise when this one ended up with more than twenty submitted maps. I love it too!

[NIN-Kitsune]

When Trenchbroom 2 comes out of beta mapping will be even easier for lots of people I think! Although there seems to be more options I haven't seen before cropping up that people are using thus making mapping more accessible to everyone! I'll definitely try to make my own tutorials as well sometime to help newcomers get started since I've mastered quite a bit of things now thanks to the simplicity of my editor! Since we have quite a momentum going from this contest, I hope to see another soon as everyone feels up for the next! I'll try to be better prepared as well next time!

Long live Quake 2! I'm glad to see a true revival of what seemed a lost art! Very happy to see so many new awesome maps!

[Null]

There are big plans for the future, but we don't want to get too ahead of ourselves just yet, at least not until we have this contest behind us.
Just know some of us are already working on the next big thing while we wait for the judges to figure out the scores for the current event

[MaRiNe [Q2C]]

Sounds awesome Null, can't wait for whatever is in store!

Mar 21, 2015 21:34:13 GMT -5 NIN-Kitsune said:

When Trenchbroom 2 comes out of beta mapping will be even easier for lots of people I think!

I might just have to check it out when it does. Qoole 2.50 no longer works on my computer and I've been having difficulties adapting to other editors. Maybe Trenchbroom will be intuitive enough to get me back into mapping.

[WizardExt]

New editors and Quake 2 level editing being more user friendly, is all great. Tools and tutorials can be pointed to in a forum post, there probably already is one.. or many. I am more interested in the navigation of the forum. To me it's very hard to navigate this forum, getting a good overview, knowing what's latest.

I really like the forum, so this "complaint" is of good intention.

[MaRiNe [Q2C]]

One thing I can think of is to combine all - or most - of the sub-boards in the 10th Mapping Contest board into a single sub-board. Or perhaps there should be one sub-forum for the judges, one sub-forum for the mappers, and one containing the rules. 12 sub-boards is a little bit too much.

[cocerello]

Three sub-forums sounds good. But maybe would be even better putting the rules and dates apart in the root of the Contest subforum to make them stand out more and make the third the general one, with things related to non-mapping, or using the root of the subforum for that too, and putting the rules and deadlines as stickys. 



Similar to those suggestions, i think that organizing the threads and adding more sticky threads dedicated to important info or a very used tool or engine would be good to attract new blood.

For example, it would be better if there were a list of editors/tools/compilers/tutorials/... in the forum before this contest happened and Le Ray posted one about editors, or at least a thread dedicated to each editor for news/troubleshooting. As it is now, everyone when has something new or just want to ask any small thing open his own thread with its naming convention, which isn't bad by itself, but makes things harder to find and harder to know all there is out there. I personally barely relied on this forum except on a few threads made for this contest when searching for editors, engines, tools, compilers, tutorials, textures, ... as there was barely any centralized info on it and would have to dig for it bit a bit. This can hinder new mappers a lot, having to search for each thing separately.

A balance of the two types of threads would be better: for the most important things have them have their own unique (or two (news and questions)) thread (sticky or not) and for the rest open new ones.

Also, i noticed that there is threads out of its subforums, which makes harder to search for things. Mapping central subforum for example doesn't look like that sometimes.



But first of all, the first thing to do to help this community and probably the most useful would be to advertise it more than what has been done already, if needed on out of the usual places, like those swarmed with people like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, ... and the like. Maybe with that last option we won't get much more mappers but instead players, but could be good enough even with that.