Kinn Takes A Look Back (part 2)
This is part 2 of the companion interview for the
Must-Play Quake video posted here.
5. How long did this take you to create and any fun testing anecdotes?
I think its development spanned 6 months, but I was in full-time employment at the time, so was only able to tinker in my spare time. I think I was one of the laziest in terms of playtesting back then - by that I mean: the preceding map (Bastion) had absolutely zero playtesting apart from my own playthroughs, and Marcher had something like just 2 other playtesters giving it a go about 2 days before I just decided to release it. I can't recall even changing anything as a result of their feedback! (it was a long time ago, I may have made minor changes and forgotten about it), but really I think I mostly just thanked them for playing and then hit the "submit" button. I was a pretty awful, stubborn person. With more testing, I could have picked up on the outrageous coop-breaking bug that the map shipped with (and still has to this day), but of course I never tested in coop. I later made an excuse that co-op was "not supported", as it was "incompatible" with my system for spawning groups of monsters, err, "procedurally" as a way of working around the WinQuake entity limit in map with over 350 monsters.
There was some truth in that of course: monsters were placed in the map file as individual entities...but if WinQuake was just to load the map up like this, spawning all the monsters, then it would hit the edict limit on map load, and crash. The workaround was a bit of sneaky QuakeC..... as the map loaded, and a monster entity was spawned, the basic info for that monster (classname, origin, angle), was added to special fields in a "monster group" entity, and the individual monster entity was deleted before the next monster entity was loaded. This way, I "compressed" multiple monsters into single entities, and spawned that group of monsters back into the game, mid-way through the map according to some trigger. I also used the same trick for pick-up items. This way I managed to make a map with the highest monster count to date, all working in vanilla WinQuake. This highly scripted order of monster / item spawning according to player progression would have been really problematic in co-op and would have taken a lot more polish to get working smoothly.
I then proceeded to completely undermine the whole point of doing that, by bundling the map with a high-capacity engine anyway, that had a huge entity limit. I think that was mostly to avoid packet overflow glitches in the final battles, and also to let players see the skybox.
Oh well, it does work in WinQuake
6. Any specific inspirations for this map?
czg's Insomnia (the 3rd map) - The Tower of Babel, and Minas Tirith from the 3rd Lord of the Rings film, with a little bit of Helm's Deep thrown in (from the 2nd film). I was an enormous LotR nerd at the time, pretty much living and breathing that stuff. It even has "The Brown Tree" which is a (hopefully) pretty obvious Quake-paletted tribute to the White Tree of Gondor. If I had the resources back then, the whole thing would have been a full-on LotR-themed map with orcses and goblinses and everyfink.
7. Is it me or is there some kind of sound code that muffles the monsters when occluded????
I can't remember ever doing anything like that! Weirdly, it's the sort of over-the-top detail I'd probably have thought about, but I'm pretty sure I never mackled up any kind of sound occlusion code. I may have messed with volumes and attenuations on certain monster sounds here and there, but nothing that would have been changing dynamically like that.
[NOTE:] The demos were played back in Quakespasm-Spiked when recorded, which is a new workflow for me. So that could be the reason the sound felt different. Maybe Spike will weigh in.
Thanks for your time Kinn. And.... great map!!!