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! 

A crusher in each pool. 

The fast zombies are genius. Really enjoyed them :) 

ye mwh fun to blast then with NG

was my favorit new monster! but like then all

the two packs in qexpo, this one from necros and the other tronyn and PM, made me lost many hours of fun :) not regretted at all 

This map is insane! I'm a little late to play it, but I couldn't believe the quality of this map, the end boss was especially awesome (and hard, played on nightmare)

Nice touch with the swinging physics gate, that was quite a surprise. And am I the only one who noticed the design being taken straight out of Oblivion :P 

nope. you're also not the only one to miss that in the readme. ;)
the layout is even based on miscarcand. i had just come off another oblivion binge when i started that map.
ironically, i'm playing it again now. :P

oblivion is like quake. you can just keep going back to it. just, quake doesn't crash as often. :P 

It'd be interesting to see what you'd come up with using the Daedric ruins style of architecture found in Morrowind. *nudge nudge* 

something similar to nesp10 ;)
the daedric style from morrowind is pretty problematic for quake though as it's very 'spikey' with lots of bits that stick out from the wall. this leads to huge amounts of vis leafs which can bump up vis times even if you just had small corridors so i never attempted a full scale version.
i do have a recreation of WoW's upper blackrock spire + blackwing lair that i want to get out before the end of the year but that one only uses the layout and doesn't actually look use the dungeon's style. (it's q1met instead of dwarven stone stuff)