at my site

http://www.planetquake.com/underworld/quakerev040522.html

Kinn, excellent custom monsters [Flak Ogres, Sergeants, Shufflers], hope to see them again in other maps [by you or anyone else]. 

Great review. Love it :) 

Kinn, I have no idea what might be going wrong with the demo... I was told on IRC that it was playable for at least a few other people, maybe it got corrupted on download or decompression. Anyway, don't worry about it too much, just get on with the rest of the episode :-) 

and I enjoyed it very much, thank you. Even on this archaic p.o.s. computer, it didn't crash, or run at below 1 fps. Definitely epic stuff, very much in the necros style, but where his lean towards the Insomnia aesthetic, this map reminds me of vanilla q3 stylistically. Lots of decorations, pillars, arches, etc were very similar to those in the original q3 maps.

Architecture was really epic, lots of towering spires, good verticality. Some of the less open sections could have done with more detailing; there were some corridors and the occasional room where a wall would be completely plain, and not split up along the horizontal. I couldn't load a skybox to pretty things up (blame my PC again) and I thought the gray sky was a bit bright for the overall light level.

The additional models and QC worked rather well... the large flame model was very swish; it filled part of the massive gap in the quake mapmodels department. I didn't think the Q2 exploboxes were really neccessary, nice though they are, but maybe they'll fit in better in the next maps in the series.

The monsters were a slightly mixed bag i felt. The flak ogre I felt quite neutral to, didn't really get too excited by it. Better than a nail grunt or something though, might be worth using in the right situation. The shuffler was o.k.... might have been better on a higher-spec computer. I would have preferred it if it didnt have a range attack, but instead had another melee one. Looked quite good though.

I really liked the Q2 dude though... that was an amazing conversion to Q1. Really fills a hole in the quake bestiary. The skin conversion in particular is flawless. I liked fighting him too; felt like a real quake 1 monster that had been playtested and refined. Who converted this guy? If it was you Kinn, congrats. The only minor negatives were: the sprite he fired, which looked a little OTT. Also his skin, though it was good, is still a Q2 skin, and doesn't fit in seamlessly with the Q1 ambience. I might try to give him a more Q1 skin at some point.

Great map, more please! 

Nice to know it worked on a low-spec system :)

You raised some good points. I should possibly have gone with a more gothic-ish model for the explobox (or removed it entirely), but in the end I just didn't get around to changing it (and I can't stand those standard quake fullbright .bsp boxes).

With the shuffler, you're right in saying that it works better on a higher spec computer, as his running animation requires a framerate of 20 fps or higher.

For the monsters, I did all the model conversions and QC myself. The new sprites were made from scratch in Photoshop, apart from the rocket/grenade explosion which came from an unknown source.

The Q2 dude does seem to have gone down well. You may be interested to know that I did a similar conversion with the Q2 gladiator, although he didn't really fit the style of this map, so I left him out.

Again thanks for playing, I'm glad you liked it :) 

Some nice architecture and QC additives, but bunching ammo/monsters I didn't like. Good job on the immense/environment feeling. 

Utterly loved the map. Even to the point of making a shabby speedrun of it =)

So here's the easy run in eight and a half minute. I expect this to be severely beaten. Who's up for the challenge? Morfans? =)

http://myth.as/files/bas_8min.dz

I can't praise the map any more than has already been done. It's a masterpiece, and a top five favorite map for me. GG! 

I get a 404 on that link. 

Sorry. 

Although I can't seem to run the demo - I have exactly the problem as with mwh's demo posted earlier - it crashes to the console a few seconds in. What engine did you record it in?

And of course, many, many thanks for your excellent praise of the map :) 

to record this run. I think it's basically glquake with zquake graphics and stuff. I like it because of the timer (try it and you'll see). Grab your copy on the link below =)

http://delfin.unideb.hu/~sj0002/news.html 

and played the demo. Excellent work Kay, and immensely entertaining :) 

Wierder and wierder. The Joequake recorded demo from mwh (above) crashes regular quake as soon as the flak ogre fires his nail burst. Also wierd, but irrelevant (for now).

In regular JoeQuake the demo plays fine and for me all the entities look correct! That is to say when mwh is cirling around an entity saying "wierd, huh?" it looks absolutely fine for me.

I usually use heapsize 64000 but even taking that down to 32000 it displayed fine.

I couldn't test it in joequake-gl as anything gl doesn't work on this PC.

If anyone manages to record odd entities in winquake or glquake I'd appreciate seeing a demo and a list of hardware and quake parameters if possible.

So, no real answers but one thing I have established is that the entities are not changing themselves (either model, model number or entity number), it's just the way that they're being displayed on some systems. But then that's kinda what we all guessed from the start... :-) 

I got the mwh demo working once I installed joequake, and this time I saw all the model errors as described.

I too used the software joequake.exe, and I haven't tried joequake-gl, but I assumed it would show the same.

Is it safe to say that this is most likely a joequake-only problem?

I have checked my spawner qc top-to-bottom and I can't think what could be causing it in the qc.

The only other quake mod that I know of that spawns monsters mid-game is that one which spawns monsters continously in deathmatch levels. Can anyone remember what that was called because I'd love to see if I can reproduce the same oddities in other maps/mods? 

Is that what you are thinking of?

http://wouter.fov120.com/maps/dmsp/ 

I will check it out this evening :) 

...in his post above he's had the same problem in regular glquake. Ho-hum. 

60:47 *grin*

4/5 my secret finding skillz 0wn j00

306/306

First attempt, normal GLQuake, no bugs.

Kinn I have a 2.8meg Dzipped demo if you're really fucking bored and have an hour to spare =).

What can one say? Awesome map and you know it. Anything that relates to custom engines, I don't give a shit about it, it worked fine in GLQuake. Most noticable aspects for me:

Map design was great. Good style & use of gothic. You should know that though, it's bloody obvious. End area was spectacular. I like the real gothic touches too.

New sounds completely unneccessary. Ambient sounds were fine.

Custom effects well used. E.g. exploding walls and sprites.

New monsters... Flak Ogres are fine. Enforcers are a pain in the arse due to their continuous attack. Don't like the bolts either and should be reskinned. Minotaur was okay....not quakey enough and the anim was a bit strange. Didn't like their bolts either.

Gameplay....I liked the abundance of ammo especially rockets....the ending was hilarious....sure not desperately hard but plain fun! Armour balance was a little funny, I needed a bit more near the grinder room and a bit less elsewhere. It would have been cool to give the player the *choice* of a quad/pent at the end.

Any criticisms are in the context of it being a generally excellent map of course. 

Great comments :)

A few people have mentioned the armour imbalance, so I'll definitely look at that when I re-release it in its full episodic context.

Monsters have been a bit of a love 'em or leave 'em thing overall. Did you spot the White Shuffler's little trick? I can see from your monster count that he pulled it off once ;)

Of course I would love to see your demo; if you could give me a download link that would be great :) 

If someone can host0r it for me, all my site access is down... 

You can email it to me if you like :) 

Well....can you take all that girth??

P.S. Dunno what the White Shuffler's trick is, it didn't seem to spawn anything?? Does it eat other monsters to regain health? 

I've sent 6.5 meg attachments before, so I can probably receive big 'uns as well.

As for ol' Shuffles, stick godmode on and just run around without killing him; sooner or later he'll start unleashing his fiendish power. Only the white one does this though. 

...It's TOO BIG to fit.

Yahoo don't like it. Actually I'll try blueyonder... 

Got your demo - just finished watching it.

Good job with those secrets - you made me crack up when you got the pent and jumped into the lava :)

You missed a quad secret near the end, but it looks like you didn't need it.

Also interesting to see how you tackled the first big fight in the final arena by provoking a lot of infighting.

Good demo - I certainly enjoyed watching it :)