Your best bet is to ask at the Q2 Cafe, they're more knowledgeable on the Q2 scene. 

isn't your best friend for this kind of things, you have almost the same chances for finding Quake 2 maps than for finding the map of some earthquake. Instead, check the link sections in Quake 2 player or mapper's communities, and this:

https://www.quaddicted.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=1305#p1305 

 

ten-four forum continued to be active for a long time, though it doesn't look like it's too active now. it was mostly q2

http://tenfourmaps.telefragged.com/phpbb2/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=575b9b6ccec82a139b3bd00a969e7fe1 

I'm a bit surprised by how small the Q2-community has become. In fact, the Doom-community is probably more active.

Granted, I prefer Quake over Quake 2, but the latter was the very first game I played with my very first graphic card - a Voodoo2 - so it will always have a special place in my gaming memory. 

I think the trouble is that Quake2 has a fairly limited creative palette. It's Stroggos and the Strogg. Quake and Doom have more options so I think that keeps people more interested. 

You're probably right. The bestiaries in both Doom and Quake are more fun and more diverse. The game worlds are more ambient in them as well, although Q2 has a solid engine and still looks great IMO. 

I laughed. 

Yeah, the things that made Quake2 more cohesive as a game made it less appealing to make content for. As art grows in fidelity and art direction tightens in consistency, it squeezes out the end user's imagination. I've written about this before (albeit poorly). 

The question is, is the dress blue/black or gold/white when looked at under orange light? 

 

I think he was joking. The Doom dev community is more active than all Quake communities combined at least on quantity of output. 

has really good and consistent design, but it's fairly bland when you think about the theme compared to Doom and Quakes abstract environments. 

It's just that it sounded like Doom community is also very small and/or dying. It's probably not what was meant, but I interpreted it this way. 

Shouldn't have had any humanoid enemies in it, and should have had a bigger variety of areas than 'Strogg base'.

Also, the player is a forerunner of modern FPS's - a low speed tank where the game becomes less about dodging around enemies and more about retreating while shooting.

Q2 happened at a time when 'realism' was supposedly the brass ring everyone was going for - which is fucking depressing when you consider the game it could have been. 

I actively avoid apologizing when making games.

This is where the 'realism' thing comes in again; things are like they are because I wanted them that way - the game's internal logic must speak for itself.

It's a pretty arrogant view, but it holds true that people often don't know what they want until they see it. 

Also Q2 had much more of an emphasis on instant-hit weapons than Q1, both for player and enemy, which makes it more of a "find cover" type game.

However, it was definitely Half-Life that killed off the doom-style shooter and ushered in the "realism" era 

quake2 wasnt the culprit, it was faster than say Unreal.

HL definitely was the success that others wanted to capitalise on, and so they concentrated on both 'realism' and slower pace. 

^ And on pre-authored story, and levels on rails, and the invisible hand of the designer always guiding you through what he wants to happen to you.

Critics hold up half-life as pivotal and amazing and perfect, and then also decry games that give you no choice and hold your hand through everything. I often wonder what they're thinking. 

It pays to be first. It pays big. 

And when it's done paying, it pays to be retro! 

>> Critics hold up half-life as pivotal and amazing and perfect, and then also decry games that give you no choice and hold your hand through everything. I often wonder what they're thinking.

People often don't know exactly why they like one thing and dislike another. But when your job is to look smart, you have to find a reason why a certain game suxxorz. Linearity is as good a reason as any. Or the lack of plot. Or anything else, really.

When in fact a linear (or plotless) game can still be good or bad, these characteristics don't define everything.

Then there's the matter of novelty, of course. If you repeat a certain formula many times, people will grow tired of it, no matter how good you are. 

Wait, are you people actually hating Half-Life (1)? 

I'm not. 

Was it any more linear than Quake 2? 

I really think the realism in Quake 2 and Half-Life is pretty limited. Cyborgs, Stroggos, tentacles, mother of all headcrabs. :)

But what I actually wanted to say is that Quake 2 does have a few different themes, it's just that the base theme is so iconic that few people used, say, the orange waste theme. I think The Reckoning does a better job at variation, and it has damn good level design on top of that.

https://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/xatrix1.jpg

https://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/xatrix2.jpg 

The Reckoning is good. The only flaw I can think of is that it doesn't have its own final boss.

I have the impression that Ground Zero is usually considered superior, but I don't understand this point of view. 

One of the Q2 mission packs was full of these really annoying fixed turrets, and that got old real fast.

Anybeans, was there ever an actual significant backlash against linear design in FPS games from the general games-buying public and/or the media? It certainly hasn't hurt the review scores, or sales, of the half-life games, and other "AAA" shooters in the last 15 years.

Not saying I want linear - I don't - just saying I don't think there's ever been a reason for developers to change :( 

"Linear" is a fuzzy term anyway. It can be stretched to describe any game unless that game is a complete free-roaming sandbox free of any ordering between events -- and it often has been, just as a shorthand for feelings of dissatisfaction.

Half-Life was good at giving you opportunities to figure out where you needed to go next & how to do so. In retrospect the successful path through/out of an area was usually quite limited, but I'm fine with that.

By some criteria one could for example look at all of the encounters necessary to get through the Blast Pit area and call that "linear", but I'd be happy if shooters had more of that kind of design. 

 

That's Ground Zero.

It also has an annoying tendency to run out of mission objectives mid-level, so you have to play the rest of the map in dead silence. 

I'll check out The Reckoning. I was less than impressed by the two mission packs when I played them - but that was ages ago.

Also, I think it's very cool and says a lot about the game that the Doom community still is so active. And Quake as well. I was just slightly surprised when just recently returning to the id classics that the Quake 2 community isn't, comparably speaking. 

has level design by mexx, so reason enough IMHO to check it out. 

make sure you check this out, best q2sp in years :

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60973 

are IMHO very good examples of linear games that dont feel that way as Johnny Law says. Trouble is that part has not been concentrated on as much by all the copycats. 

most copycats can copy all the superficial elements, but generally fall down on the "make it good" part.

"make it good" is the bit that Valve tend to do well at. 

Thanks for the tip, nitin, I'll surely check it out. The screens look great.

Also, love mexx's Quake SP maps. Had forgotten that he was a level designer for The Reckoning. 

few people used, say, the orange waste theme.

what are you talking about, everybody used that theme 

Yeah, those were some of the coolest textures and they were super easy to work with. 

Just finished the vanilla game. Disappointing boss fight. The Receiving Center is one of my favorite levels in the game - looks great and utilizes the features of the engine nicely - plus it's just slightly bizarre. If I made a map for Q2, that would probably be my starting point.

BTW, I really appreciate Knightmare's KMQuake II. Wonderful engine, staying true to the original game. 

Oh, the Processing Plant is also cool, by much the same reasons. 

Maybe that will lead to some new stuff also. Here's to hoping! 

using TB2. I haven't prioritised as much as my quake 1 work. 

So I've started playing The Reckoning - and it is very good. Well-built, detailed, often at least a sense of nonlinearity - plus clever and slightly sadistic combat, which reminds me of mexx. 

It's the community itself that didn't show enough creativity to use something other than Q2's same old base themes. There's plenty of texture sets for the Q2 engine, but no one ever really used them.

Any of the Quake themes could have been done in Q2. The enemies don't fit the theme, but does that really matter?

Sadly, there's probably only a handful of non-base themed Q2 releases (4 of which were mine). 

Then please tell me which and where to find them. I am dissapointed by the lack of custom textures sets for Quake 2, and almost all of them are base themed. Apart from that, what can be relied on are texture sets from other videogames. Even Tastypleen's huge texture pack is like that.

In fact I had to transfer some Quake 1 textures to .wal to have some non-base textures to map with. 

like quake wads, you can convert a lot of things to .wal. There isnt exactly a whole lot of textures created just for quake either. 

kona's q2 maps, especially the later ones, are very nice. 

>> The enemies don't fit the theme, but does that really matter?

I think it does.

Sure, you can shove aliens in a gothic castle, but it will always look a little weird. Certainly weirder than demons on a spaceship. Demons can be anywhere, you don't even need to explain anything. 

Although the main problem seems to be that the aforementioned aliens are perfectly explained: we know what they are, we know where they belong, etc. 

That's a pretty solid view of the problem, IMO. The Strogg are a known quantity. As you said we know what they are, where they come from, where they live, etc.

There's little mystery.

Quake 1 and Doom were large heapings of WTF ... in a good way. 

If you want to put Strogg in a medieval castle I don't think that would bother me at all.

"Evil cyborgs from the future sent back in time to a medieval world to find the MacGuffin / erase history / do whatever"

There, that was easy - and that is literally as good and well-thought-out as the official plot to Quake. 

The plot of Unreal was literally "spacefaring aliens invade a low-tech medieval-like world", and no-one complained about that. 

Title of this game: Terrafusion

"It's all out FUTURE VS FANTASY as worlds collide!" 

If you think about it long enough, you can justify anything. Still, it's kinda nice when everything feels right without rationalization.

Unreal wasn't a medieval mod for a sci-fi game, it was like that from the beginning. No expectations, no archetypes, so we took everything for granted.

And it was still a little weird. Like someone took Quake's mess of ideas and tried to make it plausible. No wonder they dropped most of the fantasy elements in subsequent games. 

The idea that you should only make maps/mods for games that fit the expectations and theme of the original game is all wrong.

Subvert player expectations, do something surprising. I think I'd be much more interested in playing "Stroggs in Hell" than another warehouse map. 

I'm pretty sure this is going off at a tangent - I don't think mappers have much of a problem with the idea of doing something different to the original theme of a game - the problem is the availability of assets - and that it would involve a lot more work to create the required texture sets and assets to break free of the usual Quake 2 theme. 

The latter is boring, the former is hard to pull off without it looking forced.

I remember a wonderful conversion for a sci-fi game Marathon called Excalibur: Morgana something. In addition to eponymous Excalibur and Morgana le Fay, it features dinosaurs, spaceships, medieval knights, and an AI that's literally a reincarnation of Merlin. All possible thanks to time travel and magic, of course.

While the premise sounds hilariously goofy, I can't help but admit that it's a great adventure with a surprisingly captivating plot.

But it's a whole total conversion made by a group of dedicated people. A person willing to casually map something for a game is more likely to pick one of the existing themes that work well already.

The easiest theme to pull off in Q2 is a futuristic base. Q1 has a wider variety of themes out of the box, and is vague enough to tolerate deviations. I can understand the appeal. 

The Reckoning was nice, although a bit of a slog as you couldn't move a meter without someone trying to kill you. I dislike Ground Zero so far, though. Lackluster architecture, lackluster combat and confusing layout as well. 

I kinda disagree, the GZ brings some crazy great architecture. The combat on the other hand was as an unfair and boring as shit.
I did the maths and the most common "monsters" were the stupid turrets! 

was all of ground zero's good architecture in the second half then? I remember starting GZ in anticipation of a whole mission pack worth of Reckoning-level awesomeness and quitting after a few maps of total cdrom.com-level brushwork and gameplay. 

i can not remember exactly, with that all greatness of the GZ, but i do remember that i've been blown away with the level construction, aside to gameplay 

Since Ground Zero begins in a set of mines, I'd say that yes, the beginning looks pretty boring, especially compared to The Reckoning. Although I wouldn't call it incompetent:

http://i.imgur.com/Jye9nQM.png
http://i.imgur.com/7BqJpUG.png
http://i.imgur.com/qEha5Do.png
http://i.imgur.com/0U3FNp9.png

(the shots were made some time ago using a modified software renderer by qbism)

Despite the overabundance of crates, Ground Zero has its moments of purdiness, mostly because of the lighting:

http://i.imgur.com/wk7hSwf.png
http://i.imgur.com/xTChZ53.png
http://i.imgur.com/IiHtK3J.png

Also, that giant canyon that I won't spoil.

The main problem lies in the combat. I think they taught the AI to randomly attack the last place where the player was seen. Which means that the player will spend much more time camping behind cover, afraid to catch a random rocket from a small, hard to hit wall wart.

Dudes with grenade launchers are also very mean with this ability.

I also had the impression that the turrets can lead their shots. I mean, it's all "smart" and "realistic" and all, but I'm not sure it works very vell in a Quake game. 

I just realised that mexx did not make maps for The Reckoning but Zaero, the free mission pack (or at least eventually free).

So get that too. 

Well, so far the levels are uninspired and rather ugly at that, but I'm just at the start of it so it might perhaps get better.

One thing I dislike in Quake 2 in general: this repeated "COMPUTER UPDATED!" you get all the time - and very often when you are fighting for your life so you can't really take a break and hit F1 to calmly check out what it wants. Annoying. 

One thing I dislike in Quake 2 in general: this repeated "COMPUTER UPDATED!" you get all the time - and very often when you are fighting for your life so you can't really take a break and hit F1 to calmly check out what it wants. Annoying.

Just be grateful that it doesn't require you to read through a bunch of insipid emails which may or may not contain the locker codes to weapon stashes. 

"I'll just record this super secret passcode in a publicly accessible data recorder that I'll leave sitting out on my workbench ... that'll be fine." 

 

Plasma weapon to shoot open the locker. 

 

ijed ... Haha, yeah, that's something we've always just had to accept.

"This door is opened elsewhere"

Yeah ... but I have a rocket launcher. I ... OK, I'll go find the key. 

I'd use a mod that limits the "Computer updated!" audio to play just once. No wonder all other marines seem to have been killed with that ringing in their ears during combat. 

Well, killed or captured.