It splits large surfaces into chunks to fit lightmaps, it would be a waste to make large scale maps in 96, besides id wanted sp maps to be playable in DM, so the designers made nice looping layouts. I still marvel at those.
I have to admit I got lost in Romero's e2 maps when I first played Quake, they were too confusing with all the nonlinearity and a fair bit of swimming. 

This is such a cool map pack on so many different levels. The lower level (tomb) is not over populated (initially) and the suspense of turning a new corner is brilliant. This is how the game should be at time, the pause between encounters is fantastic for building tension. Plus it gave me a chance to look around and be familiar with my surroundings.

Played the map on easy and died a couple of times! Yeah I know I am not some Q1 god but most of my deaths actually felt cheap. A couple were to mobs spawning behind me (the running zombie things) which felt cheap like in D3 spawning cupboards. One other death was to the blob creatures, it shattered from a vase behind me and I pretty much died instantly. Besides that the game play was flawless. I even died on the corner lava trap! :P I got caught on the stupid vases and could not get out in time, my own fault.

The textures and architecture was a thing of beauty, the place felt structural sound and the texture detail matched the shape of things perfectly in places. I loved the whole deserted feel to the place, the dark ceiling space pushing down and the various misc models (used extremely well).

The new monsters certainly had me running circles, especially the spawner one's. I must of killed a whole army of ogre's at one point. I could not reach the spawner creature at the back and it seemed like forever trying to kill the ogre barrier.

The final boss was extremely clever, well scripted with good defined waves. Certainly felt like a boss but I got a bit bored with the second phase (through the teleporter).

A very original release, certainly hits all the right notes with layout, pacing and finally a map with proper skill levels! Amazing piece of work necros, something to keep in my collection for a very long time :) 

thanks :)

i admit the zombies spawning behind the player was a little bit me just showing off the pathfinding (they spawn quite far back and have to path through a fair amount of map before they get to you), but in retrospect, i should have realised the player would never appreciate that nor care. :P
otoh, they only hit for like 3 damage and have 5 health... so i kind of don't really feel bad for you on this count. :D

sorry about the tarbaby thing though. that sounds like just dumb (bad) luck. i toyed with lowering the explosion damage, but i preferred just slowing them down (neg calls them tamebabies, hehe).
it's the golem stomps that cause them to break though, but it takes more than one stomp so the idea is you either try to lead them away from the vases or be prepared for them, but it's not really an obvious thing.

re: respawning armies, i think i should put internal cooldowns on individual monsters so a single monster can't be resurrected in quick succession. there were a few times when testing where it looked like it might be an issue, but it wasn't a major one so i just let it be at the time. thinking back, the archvile in doom moves a lot more spastically and so doesn't exhibit the same kinds of problems because it tends to not be in position to resurrect the same monster again. that or i should have used weaker monsters instead of ogres there.

about the boss, i agree, the second phase seemed to be a common complaint and my only excuse is i ran dry on ideas at the time. oops!

glad you enjoyed it! 

I do think it is worth stressing that an essential part of Q1 was traps and the lava trap you have in this map was awesome! Yes it killed me (my own stupid fault) but it made me smile because it was something I could have avoided. I have not seen a good trap in a custom map for such a long time I forgot they even existed and to be wary of them!

Also damn you necros and you grease lightning zombies who chewed my ankles off and killed me! :P

Yeah the re-spawning monster was a little hard because I don't think the spawn rate was linked to a skill level. It just keep spawning new mobs faster than I could kill them. (especially the ogres) At first I did not even know the re-spawning monster was there, I just kept seeing ogres coming down a corridor at me.

I never liked the tarbaby even in Q1, any mob that can one shot kill is cheap in my books. What confused me was the vases could only be broken by the stomp attack and not by me, so I assumed they were just window dressing and ignored them. They should of initially been presented in a better way to the player. Saying that, I did like the surprise, just it killed me! 

well, vases have 100hp , but the axe does 3x damage to it (it takes 2 axe hits to kill a vase, but like 4 or 5 shotgun shots).
it follows the HL model except for different reasons-- to avoid breaking them open from stray shots in combat.
my one real regret was not finding a better way of communicating that the tarbabies in the large vases didn't count towards kills.
i think a few people went out of their way to kill them all which probably made it harder for them seeing as how the map wasn't balanced around that much ammo usage.

the 'tamebabies' are much slower now though. what happened must have been just bad luck because they are no where near as lethal anymore. neg actually said once they were too easy now. :P

i think flattening out their explosion damage would help a lot-- keeping the explosion radius the same, but lowering damage all around creating a more 'shallow' damage curve.
or even just replacing it with the quoth poly 'hurting gibs' damage model. dunno, needs some thought.

heh, anyway, i could go on all night talking gameplay. :) 

When I first saw the vases I thought 'wow that looks awesome I wonder if I destroy them!' I shot one bullet at the vase and it gave off white dots which to me means 'this is like a wall and will not take any damage', I was disappointed. If the vase had used a common visual clue of red dots - meaning 'take damage' or something different to the usual white I would have taken it a stage further. The visual clues are important and if they give the wrong message, players will have different expectations.

I am personally against any monster in any game that can one shot kill a player with explosion/combo/critical hit damage. The exception to that rule for me is bosses, because well they are bosses! They should be able to hit harder and being more dangerous.

I have always hated the tarbaby because it can one shot kill most times and even bounces around the screen like crazy. If there was ever a list of retro game mechanics, that would feature on it! After I knew about the tarbaby it was fine because I could plan for it and death by it would be my fault. 

I really enjoyed them... perhaps they do need some tweaking in some way, would have to go replay it to make any suggestions, but I enjoyed the 'moving explosive barrel' effect. I usually tried getting them all out in the open when big fights started and tagging as much as I could :) 

If the vase had used a common visual clue of red dots

this. usually the argument is realism. :P
i was really on the fence about it when i implemented the grey particles. there was some big discussion about this here or on i3d at the time.
otoh, blood sort of indicates you SHOULD damage it. the vases are somewhat optional, providing only 25 armor after many coins. like a non-secret secret.
and the large vases most definitely are not meant to be shot. :P
i guess the real problem with vases is that there is nothing like it in stock quake.
when you see something moving, you shoot it. if you see something on the ground, you pick it up.
there were no decorative yet destroyables beyond barrels which only showed up in tech maps and had an animating texture.

this is serious business. ^_^; 

If the visual language is missing from Q1 about breakable objects then something else could be done instead. Maybe use a 'cracking' sound clue?

I suppose the ideal solution would be a damaged skin. I've got no idea if Q1 can support them or if QC can switch to a damaged skin based on health, maybe it could be possible?

I can see hiding a monster in the vase is cool, like a jack in the box type surprise but when the surprise is lethal at close range it feels unfair. Something like that should offer clues, otherwise it is just random. Like someone finding out if they shoot a certain wall texture an ogre falls from the ceiling on their head. Could be funny! :P 

Vases were blueish no ? Then particles of same color as the vase, simulates bits of vase chipping off there you have slight realism + indication of something different happening as its not usual white/grey particles. 

Destructable objects that aren't monsters emit yellow (vaguely like sparks) particles. 

I went back and forth with this on rubicon2 ... for a long time Floyd had yellow blood (to resemble sparks.) But then I thought, why do shootable buttons bleed then? Should I make them emit sparks too? And then I realized, if I'm changing how shootable buttons work to make Floyd make sense, that must mean there is already a convention in place (all damageable things bleed, even non-organing things) so I changed floyds back to red blood. 

I actually hate bleeding funcs. You get more than enough visual feedback when they move or change textures.
And yes you could make breakable models change skin on damage too.
Even worse if you play with proper blood particles instead of dots.

Breakables don't bleed anywhere.

On a sidenote RMQ's lazer prodicing ogange particles hitting brushwork was... sigh. 

I don't think different colours is a problem providing it's introduced to the player. I like replacing shootable buttons with things to blow up, but you need the player to know it's they're doing something right and I agree it is weird when random objects bleed :p

Best solution would be a multiple colours thing where you set up patterns. You just have to make sure a negative is always gray so a different colour should become a sign of 'ah, I shoot this'. 

I can't remember if Quoth Breakables can trigger things when they die, but I put triggers over them to shoot anyway because I want the hit indication. 

I'm with metl on this one - the blood is an obvious cue to the player that they've just hit something and now they can expect a result. It's one of the conventions of the original game.

Of course, if you're happy to stray from the conventions of the original game then you can do whatever you want; otherwise - use blood. 

I like ZQF's suggestion that grey = fail and bright color = success, which allows different bright colors for different object types.

But I would also like shootable buttons to play a "success" sound that's more obvious than the subtle hydraulic hiss or soft click that they normally play (which is often lost due to the louder weapon sound anyway.) Usually the button triggers a nearby door or machine, and that object is moving and making noise, but it's not always on screen and not always audible.

I also felt it was a (minor) design flaw that rockets don't give damage feedback, so for example I spent way too long firing rockets at Chthon the first time, assuming that it was working. When I ran out and switched to nails, suddenly --- "Aha." (And now that I think of it, Shub gives misleading feedback too. Though you can kill her and crash the game with direct damage, it's not part of the design.) 

Yeah, another option since weapon fx can make such indications difficult (seeing a bunch of sparks/blood through a rocket explosion) is a couple of lines around the crosshair or something that blink when damage is caused (like Battlefield), or sounds, but again sounds can be missed in the same way as game fx. 

holy shit!

Before I write my thoughts about the gameplay, I have a quick question though - Did you do all the terrain by hand in radiant? Or do you have some way of exporting it from a modelling app...?

I remember when i did marcher's terrain entirely in the map editor and afterwards I said "never again". Your terrain is an order of magnitude more ambitious so i'm curious as to your method ^_^ 

pretty sure it was hand made. 

yeah it was hand made. by far the longest part of making that map. :P
i remember when i was about 1/3 of the way in, thinking "fuck, why did i want to do this again?"
if you're bored, type:
notarget
sv_friction 0
developer 5
to activate ski mode, then use impulse 103, 104 and 105 to teleport to the different peaks and ski down.
ski mode is the only reason i stayed sane. 

Never a more patient man has graced Quake's hallowed halls as you, necros.

That ski mode is hilarious - I think my current record is around 1500 units/s off of slope 2, and I'm sure I was airborne for at least half the journey :} 

turning up sv_maxvelocity helps too, because it'll cap you at 2000.
it'd be pretty awesome to use the bsp2 format and make a super huge slope map for something like that slide mod, which i still think is awesome.

how did you do your terrain?

for me it helped a lot to sort of build the whole thing at once.
when you do something that takes so long, you've got to be able to really see it coming together or you're gonna loose interest.
i built all the highest peaks first and then expanded them all outwards simultaneously so that i could see the shape of the terrain very early. 

There is that old terragen thingie that makes brush trisoup from a 2d hightmap. Then you load it in a map editor that lets you drag verts on multiply brushes at once and change w/e you need manually. Not that hard to do.
But then qbsp shits on you with collision problems and you spend 10x time fixing than you spent making it. 

how did you do your terrain?
I did it all in quad prisms first (and occasionally higher sided prisms) to get a nice polyflow, and a rough height pass (imagine all the prisms differing in height by jagged steps) then when that was all done I chopped them all into tris and lowered/raised the verts as appropriate to get smooth height variation. Final tweaks like "turning edges" were a pain in the arse as you can imagine :}

There is that old terragen thingie that makes brush trisoup from a 2d hightmap problem with that is that the heightmap is based on a regular grid, which is really ugly - i need my nice polyflow :}

To be honest, I might have a go at banging out some melscript that takes a bunch of triangles from maya and projects them up (or down) to turn them into tri prisms, and then spits out a quake .map file. Shouldn't be too hard to do... (another thing to add to my ever growing list of shit :)