alright so it wasn't nearly as done as I thought. sorry, April was a panic for many reasons & I must have somehow mixed up files. I'll put out a revised version of the episode (maybe finish the other couple unfinished maps) for QEXPO, alongside Unforgiven. 

yeah, that'd be awesome. the techish one (arc7 i believe?) is really awesome looking. 

necros: Re-check arcanum3, then. And all maps have monsters in walls. But that's not the problem here.

Tronyn: No worries. Despite the rant, I did enjoy the release after all. Like surfing on a partially polluted shore - fun ride but not without splashes of bile. BUT DON'T YOU DARE MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES WITH UNFORGIVEN!!!!! ;) 

i see no falling out items in arc3? i fixed them all, afaik.

i intentionally left the monsters in wall for 2 reasons, i never noticed any cases where monsters were stuck in bad places and there's sometimes good reasons to stick the into walls, so that they don't move and you can use them as snipers. 

As long as it doesn't take too damn long. Wvis.exe -level 4 -threads 8 and clight.exe -extra4 -threads 8 should be good right? I have a core i7 with 4 physical cores that are all hyperthreaded. clight.exe is mh's bengt jardup's light.exe with colour support (i think :p). 

I vised one of them that took most of February iirc. It was the small one. 

don't need to light them. just extract a prt file with bspinfo and then run wvis. 

I stopped it after a few minutes because I could see it was going to take hours. That was arcanum1. These maps are big and open. Not vis-friendly. Im using 4 threads at 5Ghz per thread! 

His doesn't look like it's going to work out. Too much heat from the laptop also. :p 

or I just have a properly calibrated displayu that I use with lights off for quake maps :) 

tronyn, thanks for reply. i'm looking forward to the new patched version. i don't like the first level and i would suggest that you leave it out, but the rest is incredible. i generated the lit files for arcanum with mhcolour and i really like it. some might say it looks quite funky... but quake doesn't have to be black/grey only.
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jakub 

just fix what's there and add more maps if they fit in (if they dont, release them spearately). 

Anyone tried the Hell skill level yet? 

Just when I thought I was done with this thing!!!!

Anyways, a little more rant.

Did not mention how much I like the WAND. It's the Quake equivalent of the Painkiller: a multi purpose weapon, jump booster, potentially lethal, if you're out of ammo but you have cover. WONDERFUL.

All maps seem to run perfectly on my 2004 rig, even without vising, on all skill levels...

A few more nits: a coupla centerprints keep appearing when passing through. Most notably the message about the magicians in last room, but there are more that I don't remember right now.

Also, can anyone (Tronyn?) confirm what I said in my spoiler about an empty secret with no way out? Am I missing something?

And last. Don't get me wrong, I like this a whole lot!

On to hell. 

I hit that too - in a well in map 3 or 4? I figured it was a bug.

Oh boy, there's a hell difficulty? I've only played skill 0 so far :0 

jt_: Please do light them while you're at it. It doesn't take long. I just did a quick -extra4 run (with fade gate 1 to speed it up) and the shadows looked much better. Though I foolishly overwrote the original maps and couldn't compare. The jagged ones were only really noticable on the ceilings iirc.

necros: So it's all intentional now? Hmmmm.. Fair enough, though I did notice at least one ogre that was stuck but (imo) wasn't supposed to. Two items fall out in arc3 on skill 2: a box of rockets at -448 1544 38 and a box of spikes at -528 1544 38.
In arcanum5 the doors "wtfvore" and "wtfvore1" have an unmatched target "lightning".
There're also invalid fields in worldspawn (mapversion, wadversion, 0.85). And a note to anyone who intents to use the .map sources: Be sure to delete the multiple worldspawn entries in some of them!

A drop-in-the-ocean hotfix for people who are affected by novis slowdown:
Download visbjp.zip and extract bspinfo.exe and vis.exe to the same folder as the maps. Then run bspinfo -prt arcanum1 and vis -fast arcanum1; do the same with arcanum4 and arcanum5. This will not make the maps super-playable, but the polycount will be a bit lower in some areas which should make for a slight increase in fps.

Haven't checked out the other two maps, were there precompiled versions in the source zip? 

I tried to open the source in an editor to check things, and it looks as THERE ARE items in the pool(25 health, rockets, cells).

So, these fail to spawn? Or did an unfinished version of this map creep in? 

Yes, there are precompiled versions in the sources pack. 

i'm not sure which pool exactly you have in mind, but i encountered one pool with this set of items in arcanum3 (not sure, i'll check when i get home) and all the items were knee deep stuck in a bottom of this pool/well. i had to noclip to pick these up (darkplaces).
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jakub 

..Let's say rough: many people (I for sure) hate Vising their maps simply because is boring, time consuming and liable to errors.

so as a(relatively) new mapper I ask you: IS IT REALLY NECESSARY TO FULL-VIS EVERY MAP ?

replies needed :) 

applies to 95 % of maps 

Ooooh, yeah I think I went into the final wizard room with invisibility, but I assumed that was going to be the final battle and didn't realise you were supposed to run right past them upstairs. I don't search around much - found maybe 4 secrets in the entire pack. So instead I fired a rocket into the toughest, then madly strafed around the room until they were all dead. Couldn't have done it without full lg and ra though. But shit, going upstairs would have been easier!!!

The battle I really liked was those 3 big ogre things that run fucking fast towards you. Basically double-sg only enemies. They were really cool!

The 1st map I didn't like much either. The underground looked good enough, but all the annoying zombies didn't enhance gameplay. And you need to have put the chainsaw in, not a triple-hit-gibbing-axe.

2nd map was great, but got confusing sometimes. After the bridge extended to the sk, I couldn't see how I was supposed to get back up without backtracking over a large amount. Some good fights though.

3rd level was really good, definitely my favourite. battles were tough and epic as well. The textures all looked good.

4th level was good, but it seemed like a huge room filled with lots of different levels and stairs, etc. Which weakened it. Moving into the final area was good though and improved it. The ogres and vores scattered on distant ledges were just a pain in the ass.

5th level was good. The constant noise from the pool was annoying, but apart from that a good final level. Apart from the epic wizard fight it was all pretty easy though.

Anyway great pack! Enemies were all good. The only one I didn't like so much was the super bastard hell knight that blocks all your weapons expect dsg and lg, and fires those red cunt projectiles at you. That's a quickload nightmare taking him on unless you have lots of space for 1-direction-only strafing (which seems to be his only weakness). 

It's good practice to fullvis your stuff for the final release. Find someone with Wvis and a fast machine and ask them to do it for you.

What would be even more awesome is a distributed vis system like Vis@home... � la distcc, only for vis. 

What would be even more awesome is a distributed vis system like Vis@home... � la distcc, only for vis.

Now that would be an awesome idea!