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Map Jam 5 : The Qonquer Map Jam RELEASED
The Conquer Map Jam contains 8 new levels where your skirmishing skills will be pushed to the limits.

Fight to the death in multiple arenas, many of which contain traps and tricks more deadly than the enemies themselves!

Thank you very much to the authors who submitted their work for this jam :

Arrrcee
FifthElephant
Hypnos
Ijed
MFX
Scampie
Skacky
WarrenM

Additional thanks to Onetruepurple and Primal for additional testing!

Download Map Jam 5 : http://www.quaketastic.com/files/mapjam5.zip

Screenshot : http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/MapJam5.jpg

H Y P E ! ! !
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Dont Use Dp 
never! 
 
#64
Lots of func_detail I guess, and I run level4 VIS. 
 
darkplaces is a great engine. i don't understand the hate against it. i love quake game mechanics but it doesn't mean i have to play quake in oldschool graphics. i'm not a purist. i've been playing quake since 96
for its gameplay mechanics but the oldfashion fitz/qspasm graphics is not appealing to me anymore.

to warrenm: your map is fastvised only? well.. that expains a lot. it's a pity, architecture is impressive. i thought that today's compilers with extended limits capabilities are able to crunch anything.

to skacky: level4 vis is not everything. your levels run usually faster than other level4 vised maps. even the smaller ones. admit it, you are simply good. :-) 
 
I dunno. The source was included, I think, so take a shot. I was never able to get a VIS to complete. It gets to the end and just ... sits there. 
 
No, DarkPlaces is a pretty engine (depending on your tastes). It's also, from my understand, the least compatible. :) 
Dp Compatibility 
been using darkplaces for more than a decade now and have come across only a handful of incompatible maps/mods... and by handful i mean like six. 
 
Others can go into more detail. I know it's been an issue in the past. 
 
you're right.. there were problems indeed. nehahra was playable only partially with dp, but back then nehahra had its issues with any engine except for nehahra.exe. travail was pretty fucked up in final levels. there were others too. i know about only one persisting game breaker - zersterer.
-
there are still some issues with strange shadows here and there... yes.. that's anoying. 
Dp 
Sock has convinced me to use dp and im liking it now after tweaking it.

I had a look at warrens map and I did notice on some of the angular stairs that it wasn't flush with the wall. Stuff like that can cause leaks leading to failed or long vis times. 
 
It doesn't leak. It just won't VIS. 
Revising Warrens Map 
i'm trying to recompile warrens map... currently at cca 19% of fullvis, but something is wrong. whole process got stuck 4 hours ago. however, vis is still running.. i'll give it some time and we'll see. temporary vis file is about 90megs right now. 
It Might Not Leak 
but it's not going to help VIS if your map has areas where it's not sealed 100% in areas because it will have all these other areas that it has to work out visibility for.

I'm not saying it's 100% that but it might help. 
For The Record 
I haven't noticed any real performance issues with Warrens map and I'm still running on my surface pro (not exactly a powerhouse of a computer). I've not run it on dark places, I'm using Fitzquake. Infact Skacky's map runs slower for me than Warren's map. 
 
i thought darkplaces used its own vis system calculated at map load time, which would mean vis data is ignored. Anyone know if this is true? If it is it would account for wide variance of performance on the same map in different engines. 
 
to meltslime: it sounds unlikely to me. there is a huge performance gap between fast-vised and full-vised version of the same map. on-the-fly fullvis during just a few seconds of loading? it's too good to be truth :-) 
#71 
That you haven't noticed them doesn't mean that they aren't there. If you don't know what is the intended behavior of a map you can't know if it isn't working well or not.

An example: i made a map where it doesn't work as i intended only in DP due to exploboxes behaving differently in that engine. The possibilities of the player noticing that something is wrong is zero as exploboxes are still working, but it still affects the map. 
 
Darkplaces uses it's own real time portal culling technique, controlled by "r_useportalculling" setting. Try setting it to 0 and seeing if your performance improves. The version of DP I have on my machine defaults to 2 and causes flickering all over the place on Warren's map. With it set at 2, I get 90 FPS in some of the worst spots. With the setting off or at 1, I get 160 FPS in those same areas. (using darkplaces 'showfps' command) FitzQuake lacks this command, but from what I can tell from external sources is that the engine is capped at 72 FPS, and I was maxed at all points of the map anyway, so it's difficult to compare.

Load jam5_warren in Darkplaces, note that it takes several seconds to load, and then note the million "Mod_Q1BSP_RecursiveNodePortals: WARNING: new portal was clipped away" warnings in the console after it loads. Those are because Darkplaces is trying to do basically what the compile tools do and generating it's own portals for the map when loading the map for the first time, but the same error that exists within the .bsp that prevents it from being properly vis'd is also preventing Darkplaces from generating it's own portals to do it's real time visibility culling tricks.

I'm guessing the broken portals are being hellish on DP's portal culling system and the slowdown is the result of the engine spending more time trying to decide what to render, and thus spending more time than if it just rendered everything.

So really... half the map's fault, half the engine's fault. 
Tip 
for checking fps in fitzquake or quakespasm, do:
host_maxfps 1000
scr_showfps 1

note that this will mess up physics, so only use it for benchmarking, and in quakespasm at least, make sure to reset host_maxfps back to 72 because it's archived. 
 
to scampie: thanks for the clarification. i'll try r_useportalculling command and see what happens. i tried to recompile warrens map with h2map.exe but the whole proces failed immediately after basevis due to the error described above.

vis.exe continues fullvising the even after the warnings but the process is extremely slow or maybe it has reached some infinite loop... 
 
I think I pushed the architecture too far. Too many weird angles, too much stuff off the grid, etc. 
@Skacky's 
Since I come here a lot asking for stuff and this forum is always helpful, I felt like coming to just congratulate Skacky for his beautiful environment art. I wished the higher levels was playable too, but it's wonderful the way it is.

There are other specially beautiful levels in this pack (the floating castle, the chained city, ...) and I should congratulate everybody, but this blue arabic dream just got me. I'm dazzled. 
 
That's some awesome looking maps guys, wow! People still making these kinds of levels for quake 1 when the 20-year anniversary is just around the corner, who would have thought? 
Some Extremely Nice Maps 
but I dont care for the mod personally.

Would love to see skacky's map made into a real map. And mfx's too. Others a bit too arenas-ish to be proper maps. 
Been Wandering Around Skacky's 
without having qonquer on and my god is it beautiful!

mfx's has great brushwork.

scampie's has great lighting imho, those hallways were lit perfectly! 
Skacky's Map 
is where mappers go when they die, if they were good. 
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