the worst thing about center print messages is that it is center :) If it would be in top or bottom of your screen it would be far less in the way. 

Eventually I figuered out how to avoid the white lines by brush technique. I don't know if it's the same problem in both cases though.

well, all those chamfered corners are func_walls, so it's possible that on some settings there's a visible seam since those areas are not one full mesh.
if so, then the flicker is unavoidable. making the bevels a func_ was pretty much necessary-- it cut vis time down from astronomical units levels to a mere 3 hours. this is with willem's/tuna's multicore fix and only 2 cores.

the autosaving was VERY meh, autosaving realy is consolegame crap to me.
this made me quirk my eyebrow, to be honest. not autosaving and restarting the map from scratch when dying seems far more consoleish than an autosave.
i never enjoyed those early console games like sonic or mario because the thought of starting over from scratch drove me crazy. when pcs started getting fast enough (and programmers started making them) emulators were how i finally did end up playing all those old games and i have to say things like platformers are a lot more fun when you can save whenever you want.
even now, if i have forgotten to quicksave during a map, i'm likely to just drop it and not bother trying again if i died.
i suppose that's the main reason i implemented an autosave as i really tend to make stuff for me. :)

in any case, i'll see about removing the centerprint to make it more seamless (heh, ironic we're talking about seams above :P).
i think maybe the placement of the triggers could have been done better. instead of making an autosave right before an event, for example, make them in general lull areas instead of something. i've never worked with autosave points before so i'm just learning. 

autosaving realy is consolegame crap to me. So unhardcore, its for the weak at heart and mind

Whereas the ability to save at any time, anywhere, an unlimited amount of times is teh hardc0re 

..it was kind of a cool feat you figured out not seen in quake before (atleast i havent). But since you even mentioned it stuttered the game i geuss it's not 100% satisfactory implemented. And i do agree its nice to have a option to safe, but I dont realy see the added value of having it automated if its at the cost of perfomance (especialy if your map is already stretching the limits quite bad), since "as zealous says" we already have an option to safe at any point.

About the Eyebrow quirking i was overexeguarating a bit i dont have have a peebottle either, honoustly (well ok i had one but now it serves as my favorite drinking cup).

I geuss everyone has their own favorite way of playing maps, and i noticed (and i can imagine from a mappers PoV) its popular to post first time demos here. I have been trying that on some of the latest releases and it can be fun to not want to die on that first exploring attempt (but usualy die not being able to withhold myself from taking chances:)).
But my classic way is to examine the architecture explore the monsters & items potentialy using god/safegames/quad/allweapons/notarget/trigger visible/ to see if hard moves are possible etc etc, then plan a route and then start playing for real.

For recording demos i kind of dislike the level change without a proper intermission screen with time and stats, but thats not a big one at all. 

Kudos! 

ideally, i'd love to have it completely transparent like hl2 does it where you don't even know it's autosaving until you die and the autosave is just there.
quake doesn't seem to write save files very quickly though, for some reason.
it's not like some games where the save file is 20mb or whatever so i don't really know why it takes that long. if you look, your typical save is less than 1mb which should be written almost instantaneously. maybe hl2 and newer games have a background saving process whereas quake halts everything until it's done writing? i dunno. :P 

func_walls is where I got them also. I got a square hole filled with func_walls to get a circled hole. In the middle of all 4 sides, 2 triangle brushes meet at a pin point. If the texture behind this pin point is not the same as the func_wall, I'll get white lines.

If some videocards get beyond this, then that's great. 

tjunctions maybe? You should be able to at least make them less apparent by using gl_clear 0 but then noclipping is borked. 

yeah, i was just thinking that spirit.
splitting the geometry that way prevents the tjuncs from being created, i suppose. 

Didn't have luck with gl_clear 0. It's best if the videocard takes care of this automatically though. Mappers shouldn't have to worry about func_walls. 

When you first time enter the corridor with eight bouncing bombs, look back and you'll see the most distant walls being clipped:
http://www.primefan.ru/stuff/quake/clip.png 

yep :)

there are a few spots where this happens actually.
the bit that disappears is actually an external bsp model. (go in that hallway and type r_drawentities 0 to see which ones).

i was literally scraping the bottom of the barrel near the end for more vertices so i made a couple of the ceiling areas in those hallways external bsps to free up enough verts for some secret areas.

half the coffins are external bsps as well. specifically, the ones by the SK and the ones with the 4 golem room (where they pop up out of the ground).

if i had the patience, i think i could have gone even furthur and made ALL the ceilings in the map external bsps. the rooms are so huge that dynamic light rarely needs to be shown on them. but there'd probably a lot more flickering that i'd have to manually fix. (you can fix it by adjusting bbox size of the external bsps, but it has to be just right or it might go over the limit of # of leafs that an entity can be in) 

the limit of # of leafs that an entity can be in

Interesting, nice to know this will be a problem as I replace geometry and such myself :E 

Best thing I've played in a long time. Great work necros, loved the look and the mood! Quad barelled shotgun was pretty cool too :D Not much feedback I can give really. Just awesome work. When it comes to autosave, I really appreciated it, forgot to save and died 3/4 of the way through by a stupid mistake, and was very happy to find out it had autosaved, otherwise I would have surely stopped playing. 

I set the monster way of moving through path_corner. Will it still use path_nodes to find the path between path_corners? 

no. path_nodes were added long after the map was built, so all path_corners were already set up to 'baby' monsters.

it's something i want to do though, since it really makes sense. otoh, how i did pathfinding atm is fairly hard on the cpu so in a way, it might be a good idea not to do that.

i might create a completely new walking method for path_dynamic_corner in the case of path_corners bound to moving entities or something, while still leaving static path_corners with their light-weight ai pathing, or maybe just a flag you can set... 

Have you looked at the Lazarus method?

It seems the documentation has vaporised, but what they enabled the mapper to do was include various chains of path_corners which linked up major areas, but weren't continual from one side of the map to another.

What a monster would do when alert was pick the nearest corner to the player and then work backwards, checking which of the path sections it would need to follow from its current position to reach the player - the ends of each section having to be within 256 of each other in order for it to follow.

Whilst idle it'd choose a random chain within 256 and follow it to its end, then repeat.

We've got a 'smart figgin' system which doesn't require path_corners, although some mapping concessions have to be made for awkwardly shaped areas. 

Why not just use FBX waypoints in singleplayer, guys? Shouldn't that be a really obvious possibility? 

What a monster would do when alert was pick the nearest corner to the player and then work backwards, checking which of the path sections it would need to follow from its current position to reach the player - the ends of each section having to be within 256 of each other in order for it to follow.

he was talking about inactive walking monsters. active monsters already behave this way.
you can read the first section of this: http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/2011/07/how-to-map-for-ne_dynamic/ for a description of how the new pathfinding works.

Why not just use FBX waypoints in singleplayer, guys? Shouldn't that be a really obvious possibility?

that's exactly what it does. there's just no code for searching for items and weapons, but the map is full of interconnected path_nodes. and if fbx uses A* then it's probably very nearly identical. 

this just occurred to me, but it'd be pretty bad ass if you could define certain locations as 'important' and then have monsters patrol between important areas randomly via nodes. 

Kind of what I was suggesting. Active monsters don't intelligently follow a player - they just point to wherever they are and run in that direction, getting stuck in corners or wobbling back and forth on ledges.

Maybe didn't explain it well.

And yeah, FBX simplifies it a lot since the code is already there. 

Can this really be quake?

It's a long time since I've had quake running properly, and this was a good map to start on again :) I've been playing it in stages and have gotten lost a bit, but it's seriously awesome. Oh, and I haven't found a single secret yet :) 

I probably missed some points, but I didn't want to bog it down too much than I've already written. http://taw.duke4.net/2011/07/quake/the-altar-of-storms/ 

good read and i agree about the boss fight and the underused stuff.

the healing pools during the final boss actually do run out, but i think i set their health too high at 100hp each.
they are different from the pools in phase1 too, so if you used up all of the phase1 pools, you'd still get fresh pools in phase2, so it's a total of 600hp.

if i had been placing health packs, that would have been 24(!) large health kits. :P

probably should have at least linked the phase1 and phase2 pools and maybe lowered it to only 50hp each or something. 

Less would have definitely helped. Heck, maybe be cruel and turn them into lava when they run out, ha!