You can obviously work on whatever you like, no objections there. I just take issue with your defense of spending time on something that nobody except you will ever notice because it takes time away from other things.

In a hobbyist environment, that's fine I suppose, since you don't have to ever ship really. You can work on it indefinitely.

I just find it hard to think that way anymore after 10+ years of making retail games. I can't reconcile spending time on a feature/content that nobody will notice. 

Oh, and this:

"There are no bad ideas, only ideas badly done."

Is flat out wrong. Please. :) 

Yeah I agree. There are most definitely bad ideas.

"Hey let's play Russian roulette!" is not an idea done badly, it's just a bad idea. 

PlanetQuake Neharah page is dead: where can I get Neharah pack and tutorial for mapping ? 

I disagree that nobody will notice the AI enhancement discussed - monsters that don't wander in circles underneath you but instead navigate to your position, or can follow you across a map is a noticeable feature.

Ok, bad ideas do exist. 

@JPL: The Nehahra pack should still be downloadable from Quaddicted (http://www.quaddicted.com/). 

"I disagree that nobody will notice the AI enhancement discussed - monsters that don't wander in circles underneath you but instead navigate to your position, or can follow you across a map is a noticeable feature. "

Not to belabor this too much longer, but the point is that you'll never be watching that unless you're out of ammo and the monster is in your way. Otherwise, the monster would be dead. 

 

 

Oh come on. You know anyone who tries to trick monsters and have them hunt you instead of just blasting them? I have serious doubts. 

Well IF monsters behave differently then so does the player - the reason you play the way you do is because of the current monster behavior, but if that were suddenly to change in drastic ways then I would imagine the player would adapt his/her play style to the new monster behavior as well. If monsters are likely to seek me out now, perhaps I can use that to sneak by them (they notice me, so run up the stairs to where I'm at, but then I drop down to the stash of items they were guarding) without a fight. Or lure them into a squishy floor and then push the button. Or whatever other different things you can do with monster behavior. 

This discussion is killing my brain. :) You'd have to redesign the entire game for that to happen. You can't just give the monsters this new seeking behavior and then expect that players will suddenly start sneaking around and tricking monsters. Rocket to the face, done. 

Thanks ! I'll check Quaddicted !! 

That was merely an example (you should know that!) The point being new behavior alters the player's reactions. And yes, new behavior would mean changing the game. 

ijed : I think you should do whatever you please. It's up to you how you spend your time, so don't let others dissuade you from your vision. On the other hand, there are a grand many things in Quake coding (i.e. complex navigation routing) which are much easier in theory than in practice. 

I'm more designing than coding it - on that side I'll be support. Which means I have to be extra certain its not a waste of time.

I tend to be pretty hard-headed about a design I believe in - I've seen too much stuff go to pot because the leadership (or design ideals) weren't there to keep the game design clean. 

Know what you're in for is what I'm saying. There's a reason that I concentrated on combat AI rather than navigational. 

I learned a lot by looking at what you did with V1. 

Earlier today, I was going to say that I won't be including new cutscenes. But then, I stumbled on a 30 minute S-O-N style episode 4 intro I completely forgot that I scripted.
All I need to do is light tweaking and recording the WAVs. I suppose I have no excuse now, do I? 

Yes, that was a rhetorical question to no one in particular. 

Speaking of monster behavior, in his DPmod, LordHavoc changed the way teleporter functions so that monsters can be teleported if they stumble on it. For example, in the silver key room of e3m2, if you don't kill the fiend there, some times it will walk through the teleporter and go to the second floor. The first time I saw this happen, I thought this was neat. I still do. Though this has really nothing to do with monster navigation, it does provide something new and unexpected for an old game. 

i think a lot of doom2 maps used that feature. 

like it should be implemented, seems to be a no brainer really. Does it require quakec or can it be done on the engine side? 

That already works, I used it in my goatse-ish looking bouncing monster from teleport to teleport speedmap. 

Monsters being able to use teleporters is the default behaviour in quake, which is why you get those boxes outside the map from which monsters teleport in. The option to make a teleporter player only is available in a spawnflag, so you'd just need to omit that flag. The trick, unless you're writing new navigation AI, is to position the teleporter so that the monsters will navigate into it.

To put this into practice, you could even set up a monster whose patrol route required them to walk through a teleport. You'd probably want to have the player able to observe the whole route without waking the monster and see both ends of the teleporter at once. Maybe that's too much effort to go to for a patrol route though, since people rarely watch them for that long.