This was a nostalgic experience. I've played tons of DooM wads and these maps, aside from the enemies, felt very DooMy. The layouts reminded me of how wad makers strived to make 3D looking levels with the restrictions imposed by DooM's inability to have a sector over a sector. Of coarse the 3 Quake maps didn't stick to this limit but the styling of the map and it's fairly 2D layout really captured the boxy and angular feel to most DooM maps where the most curvy thing were the curved stairways. Very nice lighting and progression, again, it felt very DooM-like in which each zone had it's own design and often progression was based on getting through a series of zones to open up new areas. These maps reminded me more of the better user wads then of the id maps since user wads were often much bigger then the ones that shipped with the game.

Okay, bug time. I confused myself after trapping myself in the area where you release the shaft locks. I took the elevator down and then hit the button at the bottom to raise the elevator to see if there was a secret. Elevator was DooM style, just a solid block. I moved on oblivious to the fact that the elevator button at the bottom was now blocked by the lift itself. After searching around for a way out, I ended up noclipping up the shaft.

Near the end of NE_marb and in ne_marb2, I couldn't change weapons. I don't know why but I would see a flash of the RL but then it would dissapear (a similar problem was in Red777). Is something wrong? I had to cheat to kill the last two gugs since the shotty was futile.

I loved DooM and these maps were a nostalgia trip. If it had Cacodemon's, Barons of Hell, Imps and the odd Lost Soul, it would have been DooM to me.

The non-DooMy parts with mechanisms and spinning brushes and craggy sticky out things were great too. You used enough of Quake to make it feel fresh but kept the DooM disguise convincing. And nice skybox too. 

about the bugs, i've heard a couple of people mention something up with the rocket launcher and weapon switching... i never personally noticed anything, but i'll definatly look into it.

also, re: getting stuck by the lift, that was really funny ;) i never considered that possibility, but i should have. :P 

...got me too, when I went back looking for the secrets. Underneath elevators is an auto-check when secrets aren't forthcoming. :P

Another elevator-related thing I noticed in that map, too: looking down the gaps at the sides of the really elaborate final elevator, I could see some teleporter fluid beneath it, but I didn't find a way to get back into that area (to go under the elevator) after the elevator raised. Was that a planned "way back up" that didn't need to be used in the end, or did I miss something there? 

that is for coop :)

because of the fact that the lift is a one way trip in SP, other players wouldn't be able to get up. underneath the lift, there's a teleporter which will bring other players up top. 

Should have thought of that, and in that case, I feel slightly silly: at first I thought that tele must have been the one secret area I was missing, and spent at least five minutes trying to find a way to get into it in single-player. DAMN YOU COOP MODE! 

See Post 107

FYI, I play Quoth with FitzQuake. That may or may not be a factor in the weapon glitch. 

i just read through the quoth mapping tutorial and must admit that my initial doubts were unfounded. the new or modified progs are very useful indeed and maybe i'll use them for a map i have in mind... 

I assume the wish is there so I'll try to get it done somewhen in the near future :) 

in quoth_tutorial.html#func_hordespawn

"spawnclassname + spawfunction" 

Found 13/14 secrets - not where's that 14th... 

This map should have been posted to the SM pack #104 (Secrets Map) ;P 

Great job. All my feedback is basically nitpicking. The gug skin doesn't quite meet with my taste, and same for the new grunt and enforcer skins. Bob doesn't fit in, IMO, but his crash animation rocks. All the other monsters are pretty thematically accurate and fun. Red777 and ne_marb are great; red777 is super marvy cool. Including e1m1quoth was nice.

I'm really, really eager to see Kell's next project. 

the newfound chapters:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=281268 

I'll make this quick, because I have to go use the bath right now (yes, I stink).

I really liked the vermis test map where there is a two-tiered platform surrounding a pit. However, I do agree that it could use some extra tactics (yes, like an old school shooter!) to make it more interesting.

In fact, I love how so many (predominantly Japanese) games put a lot of attention into boss monsters to make them interesting to fight. I hate 95% of FPS game boss monsters, because they are just the same stupid shit. It's either figure out some kind of crap puzzle, or just shoot it a lot whilst it performs the same crappy attack over and over. To overgeneralise, boss monsters in western games tend to look like an afterthought, whilst those in Japanese games look more like they have had a lot of time and effort put into them.

The only FPS I can think of with good bosses is Metroid Prime. That's it. Seriously. (Painkillers were ok I suppose) 

However, I do agree that it could use some extra tactics to make it more interesting.

Understood.
With our monsters, we tend to stick to the Q1 simplicity whereby monsters have 1 ranged + 1 melee attack. It's not an absolute of course; vores are so range-oriented they have no melee, and the knights' greatest weakness is that they must reach melee to make any attack at all. ( note that the fiends' leap is their equivelant of a ranged attack )

The Vermis is mostly there as a one-step up from Chthon and Shub. At least the vermis has a melee attack, and an unusual one at that. Both its attacks are such that they can be more influenced by map design than Chthon's hotrocks. It also isn't limited by a one-trick kill method that wouldn't stand up to repeated appearances. That's pretty much it.

Crafting a sophisticated boss is not out of the question, but does demand a lot of focus and testing. The servitor races would not permit me to elaborate on such development, but we have done more than consider the possibility. Ther vermis was intended to be the capstone combat to chapters. I still consider the vermis one of the most successful projects by necros and I; it took only 6 days from concept to completion, and another two days for external playtesting. The sort of boss you're describing was well beyond the time we had in the midst of the chapters project. 

It was amazing when it snatched and tossed you the first time (and when it did that to a fiend later too :P).

It's probably map design and playtesting that would have to be done carefully here.

Ie, not permanent cover that makes the gameplay just corner-wanking. 

Quoth is awesome, you have both done a fantastic job of making all the new stuff feel fresh yet very at home in the Quake environment. I am currently making a large map for Quoth (it's taken over from my more important portfolio boosting hldm2, because it's way more fun*) and although Quoth has a lot of awesome stuff, I am greedy and want more. Feel free to ignore me of course, but here are some suggestions:

exploding wall code
PLEASE! As I mentioned before somewhere, I have some modified Zer code which is very flexible and works well. We can currently use killtargetted func_walls, but it's not ideal.

extra shooters
I want to be able to fire cthon lava balls, and other monster missiles from shooters and have them aim at players (targetting within a specific angle threshold and perhaps varying targets in coop) or specific targets. It would also be nice to have them fire at set intervals, semi randomly, if the player is in sight/range or only on trigger. For my map, I only need the cthon lava ball, and I am going to try the hack in the "teaching an old progs.dat new tricks" thread, but a specific shooter would be nice.

gug modifications
I really like the gugs, but their eathquake attack really pisses me off. Even though it doesn't do a lot of damage, it just feels unfair. You might not like the idea of mapper configureable monster behaviour, but I would like the ability to set range, frequency and timing of the attack, as well as having flags for whether the gug does it only when he has seen the player within the last 30 seconds (i.e. the player could be hiding somewhere, or could have gone somewhere else in the map). Setting the frequency timer to 0 should disable the attack completely.

Having said that, I like the idea of the earthquake attack, it's just that at the moment it feels a bit cheap.

In addition, it would be nice to have an extra target that gugs can fire when they use their attack, as I would like to have scenery that breaks when they are using their attack.

bob as player helper drone
I mentioned this earlier on in the thread, as I actually though bob was intended to be a player helper drone powerup when I saw the pic. Although I am not personally making a base map, I think it would be fun to allow bob to work as a player helper.

In addition to having a separate player helper bob skin, he should have a power up animation for when the player finds and activates him, along with a power down anim for times when he might not be able to come with the player (trigger toggles power on/power off).


*HUGE RANT WARNING. Hammer is a total pile of shit. How Valve actually made it worse to use since 1.6 is beyond me. Aside from the easier to use camera controls and accelerated 3d view, the more recent changes to the interface are annoying (double click on a brush to get to visgroups...) and some of the HL2 specific stuff is so shit I can't understand how it has been made the way it has (displacement editing with an airbush only, stitching depends on brushes rather than displacement vertices...) Crashes MORE than wc1.6. Takes ages to load compared to WC 1.6, requires Steam, and HL2 takes forever to load. Why the fuck have the modelling tools not evolved AT ALL since wc1.6? What the hell is with that? Making maps with it is not much fun basically. I used to think WC was better than Radiant. However, Radiant has been hugely improved over the past 5 years or so, yet WC is almost the fucking same. WC editing is fine for simple games, such as Q1/2 (still using 1.6), but it is pretty hopeless as a tool for modern games imho. 

I forgot to add that the explosion hack seems to be a bit broken in quoth. The sound wasn't playing back earlier. I know there is a triggerable sound entity, but that's another ent, and more hassle to set up.

Since the explosion is a hack, maybe you could add some of the more useful hacks in as proper entities? (explosion basically). 

i want to map for Quoth :( but still dont know how with Quark! 

I was working on a Quoth .qrk addon file for QuArK but it turned out to be much too time intense for me. You can always just rename entities, triggers are whatever to what something is called in Quoth. Then add or delete specifics with the + and - smybols. Not a fast way but at least you can map for Quoth that way.

Let me guess... You want the hordespawn, eh? :D 

i just want to add some monster... if possible i whould like to add in this big map i�m making now! it feat very nice some of the monster�s :) 

Don't forget to add the Quoth pack nt the tmpQuark directory where the map are compiled.. it's usefull to be able to launch correctly the map with all Quoth pack feature included... 

exploding wall code:

what do you want for this, exactly? i mean, if a bmodel disappears when triggered or when killtargetted, is there a difference? :P or do you want some kind of rubble spawning?
can you describe what the modified zer code does?
i suppose rubble spawning wouldn't be a bad idea. could probably get away with only using one precache, and having multiple rubble models in different frames with different skins. But then how do you make rubble to match different textures? have a billion skins for any possible texture colour on top of having different skins for the different rubble frames?
we'd have to look into this. kell has mentioned wall breaking stuff though, so there's a good chance.

about extra shooters, (even auto aiming ones) that shouldn't be too hard to do.

about the gug though, i'll be honest with you and say he's working pretty much as intended.
there is only one thing though, as we never considered that the player might be able to run from a gug and not get back to kill it. having the earthquake attack eventually time out and stop being used might be a good idea for those occasions. possibly even making it toggleable via a trigger, but we'd have to test something like that.
kell and i discussed configurable monster behaviour a fair bit, and we like to stay away from that as much as possible because we want behaviour to be obvious, and consistent, but your suggestion has merit.

amusingly, we have discussed the possibility of having the gug be able to earthquake at specific times and trigger off targets to break walls down and such.

on bob... well, for this i'm really not sure... Ai tends to break down into tears when it's forced to do anything 'non-standard' (remember the helper monsters in hipnotic? :P)
if something like this were made, it would be something general that all monsters could use, i think.
again, we'll have to discuss this, as i can sort of see where you're going with this, and the possibilities it might produce, but it seems to be moving a fair bit away from the quake 'feel' as helpers aren't really what quake is about.

one thing i definatly want to do, though, is some proper logic stuff. if:or/and... pissed me off that i had to build all those stupid lightning + door tricks in marb. :\

i will be honest with you here and say that i'm not sure when any of these changes can be made. kell and i aren't actively working on quoth at the moment. 

 

I wasn't sure if you were still working on stuff, sicne Kell mentioned something about a new boss monster earlier.

Anyway, the exploding wall code... I can email it to you in a couple of days. It's potentially buggy because I wrote it, but I never noticed any problems. Here is a list of features:

health: amount of damage to take
rubble: amount of rubble to spawn on destruction

various damage methods: either explode by trigger or taking damage. Optionally toggle one hit kill only, which causes the walls health to reset if it is not destroyed in one hit (i.e. for explosive/quad ssg only destruction)

BBOX or BSP clipping: either use a regular bounding box for clipping (as in Zer) or use BSP clipping (same as doors, plats etc.) so the players or monsters can walk on it.

styles: built in styles include brick, metal, wood and gib (maybe another I forgot) , but use 2 models I think. This could be modified into one model using three different frames easily enough I guess, but I don't know how to edit q1 models. Each style has it's own sounds.

In addition, styles can be overridden and any models or sounds can be used. e.g. set model1/model2 an/or noise1/noise2 (explode and gib bounce sounds) for custom effects, such as spawning gib explosions using quakeguy heads :)

Also, I think the force of the damage to the wall affects the velocity (maybe just speed) of spawned gibs.

There might be a few more options for it, but I don't have the code to hand, so I can't check right now.

Regarding the helper monsters in Scourge, I rather liked them. It was fun to have a Shambler spawn and do half my work for me :) The horn sound that summoned them was cool too if I remember it correctly. The early mod cujo was quite fun also, as was the axe of persuasion.

As for the Gug stuff, what you are considering is pretty much all I need really. I want the gugs to stop earthquaking after they haven't seen the player in a while, because I wanted to put one near the start of the level, when the player can't kill it. My current idea is to just put it well out of range, but I don't know exactly what the layout will be yet.

By the way, I don't particularly want the following features for my map, but they could be cool to have included in Quoth (for subsequent maps) if you have time.

Basically pox extras. Some of the coolest mods I have ever seen for Quake, yet nobody has actually used them in a map afaik. The main features are flowing water, advanced trains, and water that can be attached to func_trains (and behaves exactly as you would expect it to behave). There are some particle features that are quite interesting, although I'm not sure of a practical use for them, although the weather and dripping effects are quite nice.

Even if you don't want to include them, they are certainly worth a look. http://developer.chaoticbox.com/quake.php