bloody hell ?

aguire,

point noted, will play again. 

this is the kind of map that i love to play, many action and quad runs... :) rockzzzz stuff like these should be made every week :) 

AguirRe is already aware of this... I'm trying to obtain an award for "longest fullvis runtime process ever"... BTW, if it ends correctly, it will prove aguirRe's tool is really bugfree... Anyway, it's off-topic.. I will give feedback about Tronyn's map later... 

First of all, i'd just like to say that I am thoroughly enjoying this excellent map :)

I'm playing on skill 1, and so far I'm finding the combat fine, even with mega-hordes, and the architecture is fantastic :)

But...I'm fairly suspicious a bug is preventing me from progressing any further, simply because I don't remember being this stumped when I playtested it way back then.

Basically, I pushed a button in a large hall, which spawned a quad and a ton of monsters. I killed the monsters and now i don't know where to go. Behind me are some closed bars that says "a beast rots in a cage" or something. To my right is some stairs up to another floor, but the route is blocked. In front of me, lies a series of stairs that leads to some sort of large cage which housed a bunched of shamblers and a vore until I killed them. The door to this cage is blocked.

Any help is appreciated :} 

DarkPlaces, then that's your problem. A shambler ("the beast") is supposed to appear in the cage near the ceiling, but he's gone in DP (this happens in many maps). When you kill him, the closed bars will open.

If you're not using DP, I don't know really ... 

didn't appear in the cage when I played it [using DarkPlaces]. He was just on the floor with the rest of the monsters. Killed'em all and the bars opened fine. 

yeah, he should appear in DP, just not in the cage, and you should still be able to progress... if this doesn't happen, I guess the only thing you can do is noclip through the bars behind you, go up the stairs (there's a button up there which opens the next floor), noclip back through them, and then you'll find the stairs up to the other floor (with the flat doors at the top of the stairs) open.

Sorry about this, I haven't had this in DP myself. 

and the shambler definately did not appear in that cage :{

(for the record, I am sure I am doing everything else correctly, using -hipnotic etc.)

It is probably worth me mentioning another weird bug that I'd never seen before, that happened in that area. The first time I picked up the Quad...it did nothing o_O. The quad disappeared as I ran over it, but I did not get powered up. I quickloaded and tried it again, and the second time it worked. 

<quote>Skill settings are only functional via the console, not via the enclosed start map.</quote>

They appear to work for me.

I must congratulate you Tronyn, this is a very impressive piece! I really liked climbing around on the clifftop, all too many mappers would have clipped that bit to hell.

My only issue with the map, is that I wish Fitzquake could run it, as it's the only engine I've managed to get high resolutions working in. :\ 

Fuck I want to play this, but I'm having troubles.
I don't have the hipnotic pack, so I downloaded aguiRes little 7zip to remedy that.
When I play it in Darkplaces it gets too choppy for me to have any fun with. When I try to load it up in aguiRes custom winquake I get an error message saying "W_Getlumpinfo: inv_laser not found".
What should I do?
Will it run any more smoothly in winquake than in darkplaces for me? I was surprised that it was as choppy as it was, seeing as how I can play any game currently on the market without experiencing that.
thanks in advance for your help. 

That error would appear if you forgot to add the -hipnotic option to the engine and/or if you didn't put the mini-pak in the hipnotic directory. Please re-check these and see if it helps.

And I recommend to play this in GLQuake as the performance (and looks) is much better than WinQuake. WQ requires a lot of CPU horsepower in higher resolutions. 

Do you have a saved game just prior to the quad/shambler issue? I'd like to take a look to see how the entity situation is at that moment. Please send me the zipped savegame file if possible.

Otherwise I don't know what could've caused this. I usually play on Normal and this hasn't happened to me. Do you use the real hipnotic or my mini-pak? 

sadly, I only have a save after the event (with me being thoroughly lost :})

If you feel this would be useful, I can send you that.

I don't have the real hipnotic installed, so I only used your mini-pak. 

please send that. At least I can see where the missing shambler is (if anywhere).

I made some quick runs with both the original and my enhanced Hipnotic progs and both the quad and shambler worked as expected in all cases.

I also noticed that the big button that spawns the quad horde is actually pushable *without* removing the block above it. Oops ... 

mail sent :) 

DarkPlaces, then that's your problem. A shambler ("the beast") is supposed to appear in the cage near the ceiling, but he's gone in DP (this happens in many maps). When you kill him, the closed bars will open.

If you're not using DP, I don't know really ...

For me, he appeared right in front of me, so he died first :-) 

i was really looking forward to playing this today, especially seeing it has 400+ monsters. is that a record?? the design and layout was great, horde combat all set up well, apart from the slightly unbalanced start and end combats. everything in between was great. plenty health, armor and ammo to make it fun. great job tronyn!

however, this level was completely ruined for me due to the choppiness. it's the worst i've seen in a quake map, constantly hitting 7fps in the huge outdoor area, and even through the insides of the castle it was still too slow to fully enjoy. the outdoor area, particular at the very top level, could have been massively reduced in size.

i'm on an athlon 2.6ghz, 512mb, geforce fx5600. did anyone else find it this bad?

off topic, JPL... you've been running vis for 6 weeks?! u sure it hasn't frozen? 

Oh no, it was not frozen at all... believe me... it's progressing day by day, and I'm actually in the last 2 percent of processing... I'm compiling a huge map as well, and I made a mistake of young mapper: it's my 4th map only you know... But you will see the stuff when I will release it... wait and see... :P 

I've got 2.4 gigahertz, 1024 ram, and radeon 9800. Unless it's related to the ram I can't see what would really make it that slow. I usually played at 1152 by 864 and its always ran fine in both GlQuake and DP for me.

Where does Geforce fx5600 stand in the scale? Or what I mean is what is its equivalent radeon card?

PS: Good to see you still lurking around :) 

I've got a pentium-m 1.6ghz, 256mb ram, a ati 9600xt and 5fps... I think more ram could help, I'll install my second 256mb module later and try again. right now it is unplayable :( 

It can't be the CPU or RAM if you're using >1GHz + 256MB. I'm using a P4 1.7GHz Geforce3 and I've no problems playing in my engines (which only require about 85/32MB).

DarkPlaces is a bit choppy but manageable. The latest beta seems to require about 150MB.

I'd suspect some specific engine setting that causes the performance problem. 

I have a p3-700 with a geforce2 and had no problems using aguire's engine. 

Maybe settings are responsible of these differences ? How a P3-700 has no problem to play the map, when PM-1.6GHz seems to be "choppy" ? I know also that this is the assembly of CPU + RAM + Video Card that makes a game running properly... check it...
Just another information: if you are using WinXP environment, without any task running (i.e, no word, no excel, no vis, no screensaver, etc... no nothing), WinXP needs around 156 MByte to run properly, and to be able to "breathe".... I had similar problems, and adding RAM, I solved them..

though... 

well well, seems darkplaces is the problem. originally when i tried aguirRe's engine it crashed, but i just tried again and played with some of the settings in autoconfig and it runs masque like a dream, no choppiness at all. i played a lot with dp's settings, but nothing made the slightest bit of difference.

now i'm gonna have to play it all over again :P 

an error message when it crashed or can you add more detail what happened?

As for DP, these are the settings I usually add:

cl_particles_blood 0
gl_lightmode 0
r_detailtextures 0
r_fullbrights 0
r_shadow_realtime_dlight 0