Gameplay felt very unbalanced with not enough guns, ammo or health to deal with all those really tough Quoth monsters. I first tried briefly on Hard and couldn't advance after the first bob horde, no health and no ammo.

I switched to Normal and I must've died over 20 times and then I even knew every encounter beforehand. I couldn't finish the map with any reasonable effort, so I quit.

Taking down five or six bobs in a row with only shotguns? There should've been SNG or PG early on with a lot more ammo to handle this, I felt seriously under-equipped until I found the GL.

I find this apparent trend in making overly difficult maps disturbing. I can imagine that skilled DM players can handle this easily, but this isn't DM.

As for looks, I liked the textures and layout, except for the slime maze. Some textures suffered from the restricted palette. It might've helped with the Malice palette instead (more greyscales), but then the monster skins would probably look bad ...

Like others have mentioned, it was too easy to get stuck on things while fighting and this made the map feel a bit cramped. More clipbrushes might've helped here.

Sorry for sounding negative, but I hope for a better experience in your next map. 

Don't worry to be negative: everybody is free to have his own feeling about a map, even if it doesn't please the mapper.
Someone told me here one day: "it is not a popularity contest", and I've integrated very well the concept...

At least you enjoyed the architecture ;) so it's not totally negative :)

and concerning my next map: you are already experimenting... :P 

I didn't find the map too cramped - at least I didn't get stuck anywhere. Played on normal and it wasn't too hard for me, no problem with ammo and Bob hordes. Dunno how it is on hard skill though. I died two times; once in the slime area which was fairly confusing. 3 secrets.
Although it's nice that someone finally made use of the Doom3.wad, I must admit I don't like the textures. They are too gray and don't really seem to fit with Quake, even though they were used quite appropriately here. The lighting didn't help much either, maybe some more delay/wait tweaking would have been good. Nice curves (and aligning) though.

Preach: Please take a look at the spawn code. Every time monsters spawn in, there are "walkmonster in wall" warnings (this occurs in every Quoth map). 

Is a hard-baked bug (I understand).

Basicly Quake checks whenever a monster is created weather or not it can move - calling it walkmonster in wall if not.

The Quoth spawn code works in such a way that the monster isn't active when this check is made, so is automatically called as stuck.

It does nothing apart from confuse the issue if you have real stuck and delay spawning monsters; but they'll be called at mapstart anyway.

The best solution is to just turn off this warning in-map for delay spawned enemies. 

It's something I know about, my tutorial for spawning monsters on inside3d mentions it. Basically the test always fails because the monster is not "onground", since it's usually not preferable to have the monster droptoground() when you teleport it in. You could fix it by always calling droptoground() when you spawn a monster in, but then you can't have monsters appear in the air from teleports(unless you do it the old fashioned way). So the best thing to do in my opinion is just have the monster opt out of the test at the same time as it opts out of droptofloor(). This means you don't know when teleporting monsters are in walls, but there would be no easy way to check that anyway - you can't distinguish between "still falling" and "stuck in a wall" in a reliable way.

Anyway, it's just moving a } two lines down, so now fixed. 

Ok, was just my mangled explanation of what I'd heard some time ago; good to know Quoth2 has it fixed. 

a few weeks ago, really enjoyed it. In fact, it got me looking up some of your other maps, as well as some goodies on UWF's and Shambler's sites.

I don't complain about the D3 textures, they are a great deviation from the normal q1 base. Keep 'em coming JPL! 

Wow, I was not aware SRC has this side effect on you.. and I'm glad you took some time to play my old maps... I really honored..
Thanks a lot supporting me... 

I find this apparent trend in making overly difficult maps disturbing

- there are skill settings
- nowadays I guess most fps players have played online, so the skill level is higher in general
- playing the more difficult Quoth with keyboard only, you can�t expect to do very well ?! (i.e. there are some ownage Doom speedrunners who play kb only, but in Quake with 3d and all?)

Surely a map should be accesible to a wide range of players, but if a map is too easy on the other hand, I tend to not replay it so often, no matter the looks. 

I found the Bob hordes in this map too hard, too. With Quoth 1, please no more than 2 Bobs and player should have either quad or SNG then. Really. With Quoth 2 beta, it's entirely different, so everybody who finds this too hard should replay it when Quoth 2 is out.

:-)

The rest was manageable.

Overly difficult maps: Well mappers should stay _reasonable_ IMO. For example, three droles with just a shotgun is not reasonable. One drole with SSG + Quad is reasonable (even fun.) One drole with grenade launcher is also reasonable.
Necessary weapons should also be in plain sight, prior to meeting the monster(s) they're intended for, and NOT in a secret area.

But isn't this all pretty standard?

Big monsters -> bigger guns plz.

Multiple tough monsters -> Quad plz. Player should have fun, not stress.

:-) 

- textures needed some getting used to, but again I liked them, only sometimes it wasn�t easy to identify doors etc.

- gameplay was top notch, I�ve never seen the Quoth base monsters placed so well (some comments here about "that ass behind crate" are proof of that :) my only gripe being there were too many bobs, they�re boring to fight IMO. Fun secrets, but too many weapons/ items (but I was glad to have the LG at the end)

- the slime/ biosuit part is my favorite (quick decision required, raised the tension), but there are so many great fights here, like the final battle; had no problems with crampedness, actually I liked that too

Thanks JPL for another awesome map! (demo http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/src_sw11.dz ) 

- textures needed some getting used to, but again I liked them, only sometimes it wasn�t easy to identify doors etc.

- gameplay was top notch, I�ve never seen the Quoth base monsters placed so well (some comments here about "that ass behind crate" are proof of that :) my only gripe being there were too many bobs, they�re boring to fight IMO. Fun secrets, but too many weapons/ items (but I was glad to have the LG at the end)

- the slime/ biosuit part is my favorite (quick decision required, raised the tension), but there are so many great fights here, like the final battle; had no problems with crampedness, actually I liked that too

Thanks JPL for another awesome map! (demo http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/src_sw11.dz ) 

wtf, sorry 

Thanks for the demo, I got it ;)

Just a small comment on bobs 'usage', I replaced some of the sentinel (Quoth2 monsters) by bobs, so it explains why there are so many.... I did as well with pyros and eliminators... I would have been happy to release for Base Pack rather than 'alone on my own side'... :P

Anyway, thanks also to all people who posted here and supported me for this map.. 

Are you going to do a 'deluxe edition' with the new monsters put back in when Quoth2 is finished? That'd be nice to see. 

No.. I will do something else later... if Quoth2 see the light of day... maybe next year ;)

Nasty again... :P 

I'm working on something for Quoth2 - Kell + Preach + crew are doing a good job.

It takes a few weeks to make crap or many months to make something good.

I'd be prepared to wait for two years to see it finished 100%. 

The map really is quite nice after getting used to the textures etc.

If not a "deluxe edition", perhaps SRCv2 with just some of the Bobs removed? Several people have now "complained" (mildly) about that. 

Are you going to package the 24-bit textures along with the next version? Please. Thank you. ;-) 

IIRC he didnt do it because it would violate Doom 3's licensing. 

that shipped sailed with the original conversion.
Id and other companies have long ignored mods & maps that skirt the licenses. 

Well, I don't have the original 24-bit textures I used to create the wad... You can found the stuff in one of the Doom3 .pk3 files: it's up to you...

I also made some tests (with aguirRe's support) in order to see how it looks ingame, and it is not as good as the Quake wad format... Maybe because the wad "creation" process I used is a overlapping "mixery" between diffuse-normal-shadow tga files, and so it looks like Doom3 ingame (more or less), but has nothing to do with the content of original Doom3 at the end...

Next time I'll try to keep all 24-bits texture in a separate folder.... though... 

PRADO 

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/src_drew.zip
nice hallways.
Some minor cheating in this one due to light levels and slime sections. 

Played it again on skill 1. I liked the gameplay this time. I guess I'm used to the quoth base monsters now.
I fared pretty well, without problems fighting bob hordes and green defenders. Unfortunately I died when trying to find my way in slime without any biosuit left for use.
I thought I was recording a demo but it seems fitzquake doesn't support the record command after map load.
First I tried mark V but it messed up the textures.