...As stated before, I had the opportunity of betatesting the maps, and played through again just a couple of days ago(as usual, no time to write comments)and, while pretty tough, I found that the thing that really saves your precious ring from being violently raped is to never, ever gib any enforcer and pick up all the cells you can, also keep an eye on armour and health supplies and go for them only if you really need them.

I survived the shamblers going back and collecting ammo and armour I had left behind (still a tough call, anyway).

Played on hard and had an average hour of play time to beat the longest maps.

I'll go back to the maps on NM during the weekend.

Secrets are a real bitch, though, Ijed, how about preparing a walkthrough of all secrets for those lazy dumb slobs like me, you may post it as a txt or pdf so only those interested can download it.


I think lots of people would appreciate, what do you say?


Great stuff. What next? 

Nah, a 100% demopack would be much better :) 

...You just like to see people sweat!!!

; P 

100% NM - its definately not the fastest it can be done (I'm no speedrunner) and I reckon demos like this for the big three would drive the makers insane.

http://shub-hub.quaddicted.com/files/demos_singleplayer/warpa_ijed.dz

Only watch if you want to know all the secrets and loopholes. 

As well as this there's plenty of room to retreat - I experimented with closing the player in the corridor or even just the room behind locking up to counter this, but its wasn't necessary (until the end at least) - the battle is tough enough.

Not true - on skill 2 the corridor is locked behind the player when the 4 Shamblers appear.

If it stayed open obviously it would be an entirely different matter.

Thus the question remains.

(Also, obviously, if you reload from anywhere around the Gold Key itself, you're going to manage supplies for the second attempt, that goes without saying. I'm interested in how it's possible on the first attempt, with the supplies the player is likely to have) 

(until the end at least)

I was talking about the earlier battles, which are fairly standard - you open each door and tougher monsters come out each time. When you open the final door the difficulty spikes because you're locked in and its four Shamblers (with zombie chucking gibs through the bars behind).

It's a test of how well the player has managed thier resources in the earlier door battles.

It can make the problem of forcing the player to backtrack when there's nothing to ambush them (assuming they've cleared previous areas).

Or else just running out of ammo and trying to sword Shamblers. But if you're completely fucked by that time and have drained the level of ammo you can still instigate infighting between the Enforcers and Defenders (not too difficult) and have enough plasma to waste the Shamblers. 

this thing sounds insane, can't wait to try it! 

This is the wtfness i mentioned "after the gold key" meaning after gold door. I cheated some ammo on that, all i had was a quicksave from 1 min ago and a save from 1 hour ago.
Otherwise final fight was easy enough having taken out the gaunts with the quad and a few nails
Good job ijed, its been a while since ive enjoyed a q1sp so much. (kells bell tower map :P) 

I haven't played this (yet) and thus not tried the engine in question but as someone who primarily uses a laptop with 16:10 screen I have to chime in and say that it's rather important to support custom aspects these days because I'd hate to have to play with everything squashed or a re-scaled blurry image.

When it comes to the maps I'll probably try them when I have some time but the reports of the scale/play time per map frightens me a little bit when maps like moonlight and marcher are close to what I can cope with in terms of q1 sp maps in one chunk. 

I found that everything not just the skins to be darker than usual. maybe there was a palette change?

I just upped the gamma 0.2 points and it looked fine. 

100% secrets and 520/522 kills, 48 minutes.

http://shub-hub.quaddicted.com/files/demos_singleplayer/warpb_sw4848.rar

There are a lot of comments about the maps being too large or too difficult; IMO the size is a matter of taste; I for one like to get lost in a huge map and explore, the immersion is much higher than in smaller maps.

And I think Ijed did an outstanding job balancing the gameplay, if you want to finish on the harder skills you have to find the secrets/plan the use of powerups etc., as it should be, and it increases the replayability. 

. 

So there is no solution.

I would hate to think what happens if you quicksave before the Shambler door in the almost certain position of having burnt up ammo on previous encounters.

The balance otherwise is fine, as I said. 

hm :( 

...Not that I have anything relevant to say, except that I love the 100th post position!

And Ijed, nice work, man Helpful demo!

Sielwolf, thanks, right now I'm at work, nut tonight I'm dowloading and have a look at your demo to sort out the secrets (I found 75%).

So, in the end I hda something to say...

On to the 200th... 

posts on your map episode, Ijed. That is the measure of success in the world of Quake SP mapping :) 

Cheers. Mind you, I reckon I counted for a fair few of them.

Sielwolf - I'll watch your demo in about an hour . . . if it's anything like the old city6 (very old warpc beta) demo it should look pretty amazing.

I tried a run through warpb but melted myself trying to get the Wasted Life secret.

I can see that one and the Ballache secret in warpe causing problems for 100% demos. 

Back to map the second.

It is a good map. The style and effects are good. I like the use of sprites. Archicture is generally good, occasionally great. Some areas were relatively bland and it could have done with more detailing. The pipe machinery and organic bits were really cool, as were the sound effects for them - very effective. The sound is good overall, it fits very well.

Gameplay was mostly good apart from the two "trick" sections mentioned above. The new Enforcers were interesting, and good to face once one learnt they were utterly deadly close up. Having room to move around helped. Sometime the slime was a bit annoying, a constant nagging. Secrets seemed good but generally pretty hard - Vondurian in fact. There were lots of details that could have been secrets but weren't, which made it sometimes tedious to find them. The jumping ones were all cool.

I think, odd exceptions aside, although the maps are - let's be honest - pretty continually hard, the difficulty and balance is pretty good.

HOWEVER, I do agree with people about the size issue. I don't think the maps gain any overall benefit from being so large and monster filled - the benefit of an impressive level of immersion by playing something so vast is outweighed by the maps just being a lot more gruelling than actually fun. Sometimes it feels like hard work keeping going and keeping track of it all. Like Metl says, holding it all in your mind - and fighting "high level" Quake for 3-4 times a normal large map.

Having said that, I can see they'd appeal to a particular taste. There must be some people out there who really wanted something very big, tough, and time-consuming, and this is great for them. Myself, I've tended to enjoy Quake in shorter, funner bursts. So I don't think I will be trying to play the rest of the maps in one go (which will reduce the immersion admittedly, but enhance my sanity). 

I just made it through warpb on normal. It was one hell of a slog. Whilst I didn't find it particularly difficult, I did die once, and would have died a couple more if I hadn't noclipped out of slime after falling in (which I don't normally do, just this map was so huge I just wanted to get through it).

All I can say so far is that the maps have an incredibly hostile atmosphere - more so than any other maps I can think of - maybe some of zerstorer, but that's all that compares. The ambience (sounds make up a lot of this), scale of the architecture, number of enemies, relentless ambushes and MASSIVE size of the maps makes you feel like there really is no end...

...and then there is.

Sealed City here I come!

btw, I like the map names and also the way you named the secrets - it all fits with the map ambience very nicely. Also, when I was killing the second of the two beasts it appeared a bit earlier than I expected it to - quite a long time before I managed to reach the items on the other side of the room. That was great :)

I did find the map a bit too large for my taste to be honest, but it was still fucking great. I'm just worried that warpc and in particular, warpd (I already checked out the monster counts) are going to be a bit too much for me. I'd love to try it in coop mode with three others though :) 

again 100% secrets, 539/543 kills, 62 minutes. Could have been faster, but not much; this is the hardest map in the pack IMO, it�s easy to run out of ammo and then there�s the final battle...

Also included is a short demo how to get the RL right at the start which should make the map alot easier.

http://shub-hub.quaddicted.com/files/demos_singleplayer/warpc_sw62.rar 

While playing warpb, I noticed that polyps will only do damage to armour while you have it, because of the very low damage they inflict per attack. Is this what's intended for them, that they strip away your armour to leave you undefended? It seems a bit odd that the attack will never hurt you directly, perhaps some modification to the way quake handles low damage attacks might be in order.

One idea would be to keep a running total of fractional damage for attacks that get totally saved by armour, tracking how much each one has been rounded up by. When that running total reaches a whole integer the amount of damage taken from the attack that tipped it over becomes 1 to health and 1 less to armour. This is the 'starcraft' approach.

The other option I had in mind would be a 'statistical' method. When considering the amount of damage to inflict, look at the fractional part of the amount saved by the armour. If this fraction is more than a call to random() round up the damage to armour, if not round down. So if 5.6 damage was saved(eg red armour on 7 hp damage) it would cause 6 damage to armour 60% of the time and 5 damage 40% of the time. 

The Polyps were toned down after Contract Revoked - thier attacks used to be a bit more fearsome and rapid fire. Now its fairly rare to be killed by one, unless they're used next to a hazard - lava / slime, where thier push ability comes into play. I'd be in favour of just upping its damage to 2 or 3 (I think it's 1 per hit now) and maybe doubling the rate of fire - resetting them to how they were to be honest.

The difficulty of the maps is there from the start and continues all the way through. Its fairly easy to get blaise about always playing on hard / NM - then play Nehahra on NM and realise Quake normal on NM isn't too tough.

The secrets range from stupidly easy (Haunter of the Dark, Bile Plant) to very complex (Shadow Tower, Sealed City) but there's so many in each level that casual players will almost certainly come across a handful.

The scale of the maps is too massive to cope with - its a bloated Nurgle of a pack, but something of this type didn't really exist before. Future projects will be different, since I think I've exhausted (beaten like a dead horse) this play style, for now at least.

The naming of stuff I generally come up with when hungover, which is where the sarcasm / grim humour comes from. The best thing I named in the pack is Harsh Angled Edge, poking fun at my own mapping as well as creating an allusion to Lovecraft - his descriptions of R'lyeh.

Sielwolf, those demos are excellent. The mental anguish practically leaks out of the screen, especially on warpc. Sorry ;)

Again, I tried to make a demo of warpc during my lunch hour the other day and failed miserably upon reaching the church style chambers after the tower - fried by a Gaunt. 

But will there be any QC source release? Or the Quoth QC is not releasable? 

AFAIK Kell + Necros will release the source for the current version of Quoth once the new version is finished.

The only reason there's a Warp Spasm folder (as opposed to running inside the Quoth folder) is because I swapped out some resources (models, sounds) apart from those it can run inside the Quoth folder normally, assuming its own engines are used. 

+1 informative.

I think the Polyps serve a useful function that doesn't require increasing their damage. They are mobile, relatively hard to hit, unnerving in their appearing act, explode with damage, AND although they do little damage, the effect on screen is as if there is a lot more damage being done. They are a tool not to damage the player but to unnerve the player, IMO.

On the subject of Quoth monsters. The "Shambler-class" monster with 4 tentacle arms that shoots fireballs at you - is that a Gug or a Drole? Anyway, I really really do wish that they actually had to make contact with you to hit you, rather than randomly slapping you and damaging you from several feet away with no contact. Not that it makes them any different to fight, but it does bug me.