This has been a long time I never felt so immersed in a game (last one was for COD2 and Doom3... so to say...)
Holy shit !! How did you built all that ? You just disgusted me from continuing mapping man ;) !! I will feel so ridiculous with maps now :P

This map is really fantastic, awesome, marvelous, etc.. I can't find words for such jewel. I didn't see something so brilliant since a while... As others said, even "Bastion of the Underworld" and "Marcher Fortress" are far away behind you.
I am so happy to see how much miracles are still possible to build with Quake today.

Really, you made me really happy since a long time, almost you teared my eyes... not to say I was about to cry :) ...

Please we need more Quake mod/maps like this... congratulations, I guess you won the 'mapper of the year" title ;)

Keep it up !!

PS: BTW, it would be cool if you could release a kind of "user manual" for this mod ;)

PS2: metlslime ! We need a double beer icon for necros !! ... or even a barrel beer for him !! 

played an early version of this, and I'm looking forward to reviewing the final release for Quaddicted. I'm sure it will be even more awesome! Great job Necros, & as always can't wait to see what you come up with next..! 

Wow. This was epic. Everything looked beautiful but especially the beginning and the end sequence. Also the high quality new monsters and additions fit the map very well. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
skill 1 demo ( I have lost the beginning after dying from firs encounter with fas zombies). btw. quick zombies are fun.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/ne_ruins_demos_ankh.zip 

i just realized i forgot to include the new skin for the fast zombies.
oh well, i guess it's pretty obvious they're a different type. :P

your demo was pretty funny, ankh! you had me going when you pushed forward after awakening the 4 statues and then hiding out on top of the water wheel mechanism before sprinting into the next room. :D
i was amazed you pulled that off, well done! 

sent us the skin necros!!! 

... Skill 3.

Pretty manageable, I must say, with a little ammo shortage in the rune section, but very doable.

Only found 3/6 secrets so far.

A coupla questions & something to be pointed out..

1- Is it possible to get 100% kills in the intro? I supposed not because of the end boss being there, but I still get sometinhg like 6/11 kills. I guess they should be like, 6/7.

2- On skill 3 I only got like 270 kills, but the total counter keeps growing at the end, starting from 330 up (I quit around 347)... What's up with this?

A coupla observations, as well: I tried to wake the boss from the lower zone, then opened the door with the rune and awaited there, trying to start infighting beetween the boss & Ice golem, but, alas, the monster shot 2 fireballs at me and then got back up through the mountain , getting stuck on the side of the main altar. From there, I can damage him up to the point of having him open the portal, but then it's over. He cannot be damaged and cannot enter the portal either, 'cause h's stuck. All you can do at this point is go through the portal yourself, maul the remaining golems on the other side, then quit and go for a beer (or 15)...

One last thing: the lavababies summoned by the boss are teh aw3som3, but they fall too far from the player, freezing before having a chance to attack. Is this intentional? Their ranged attack is fantastic. 

trinca: http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/zombie2.zip (156kb) (.bmp and .psd, although the psd probably isn't very useful as i tend to just palette shift manually when working with quake skins (ie: open up an image of the quake palette, pick a colour using the dropper tool, use magic wand selection tool to select all pixels of one colour on the skin, and replace them in one batch.))

in my mind, the original zombies are the zombies that have been around for years. their bodies held together purely by whatever magic or somesuch. if that magic was removed in one go, i sort of picture them just completely falling apart. (like that one guy in cube zero who gets sprayed with super acid and melts within seconds).
the fast zombies were freshly converted, still retaining some of their humanity and their minds marginally functional. hence why they can run and know it's not generally a good idea to tear pieces of themselves off of their bodies.
the skin was supposed to reflect this and look like he was 'fresh' and still had some skin that wasn't all rotted off.

the result just looks ugly and there's a fullbright i think i missed. honestly, it's pretty bad, and i'm sort of glad i forgot to include it.

the silent:
Is it possible to get 100% kills in the intro? I supposed not because of the end boss being there, but I still get sometinhg like 6/11 kills. I guess they should be like, 6/7.
not on the initial run through, definitely, because the boss counts as a kill.

On skill 3 I only got like 270 kills, but the total counter keeps growing at the end, starting from 330 up (I quit around 347)... What's up with this?
there's a monster count bug somewhere... i don't know exactly where though. i tracked down (i think) all the instances where total_monsters is modified in the code, but i must have missed something.
that's why the kill count is inflated in the second map. this was very very frustrating and i just gave up since most of the maps (2/3) don't have the intermission screen anyway.

A coupla observations, as well: I tried to wake the boss from the lower zone, then opened the door with the rune and awaited there, trying to start infighting beetween the boss & Ice golem, but, alas, the monster shot 2 fireballs at me and then got back up through the mountain , getting stuck on the side of the main altar.
i was experimenting with a tethering code for monsters. anyone who's played WoW will immediately recognize the behaviour where, if you run from a monster for a while, it'll run back to it's start point and have it's health reset to 100%.
the WoW engine has fairly decent pathing that allows them to get back to wherever they need to go. unfortunately, quake doesn't, so i basically made him noclip through the world if he doesn't get back into his spot fast enough.
i must have messed something up though, because it sounds like he didn't fully reset position when noclip was turned off resulting in him being left partially inside geometry.

the lavababies summoned by the boss are teh aw3som3, but they fall too far from the player, freezing before having a chance to attack. Is this intentional? Their ranged attack is fantastic.
yes, this is intentional! :D

this boss' gameplay is loosely based on prince malchezzaar from WoW.
in a very early version, the meteor storm was just explosive meteors, and you had to hide out in the towers or risk getting pasted.
at the time, he didn't crouch down, and kept attacking during the meteor storm and this was boring and really random so the meteors were changed to spawn stationary fires.
this was still fairly boring because the fires either had to do tons of damage to make players stay away from them, and then they were unfair and annoying, or they did such low damage that players just ignored them.
so i swapped to monster spawning.
the initial implementation of lavababies was to just keep them spawning in until you were swamped with them and had to take the time to kill them.
this was a bit overkill, as you can imagine. also, that map is pretty rough on the engine with the high wpoly, so having dozens of lavababies running AI and spawning dozens of sprites each was killing even my machine.
so the freezing thing was kind of natural, since it makes a lot of sense with the map and accomplishes the whole 'increasing obstacles' that i wanted without killing the player or his computer.
it also makes it (i hope) clear that killing them is not a priority. 

btw... if anyone's bored...

load the start map and type in the console:
notarget
sv_friction 0
developer 5

this activates ski mode! then use impulse 103, 104 and 105 to teleport up to some of the mountain tops!
you don't need to press any movement keys; you will 'ski' in the direction you are facing. 

The extra skin looks more like snow zombies if anything.

Also, what happened here (sorry for the fullbright):

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/ruinswhat1.jpg
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/ruinswhat2.jpg

? 

Thank you, I snorted so loudly that the people around me (train) gave me weird looks. Can't wait to get home. :D


I absolutely love your monsters. Finally someone who gets it. Blindly attacking monsters are so boring in my opinion. Good monsters have distinct patterns in movement,combat and require (or encourage) specific actions from the player (good metroid games and the like are examples). 

I thought blindly attacking monsters were typical for Quake. 

good lord! that made me laugh too, but a couple of people thought i sneezed.
a hiccup in the spawn checker i guess. must not happen often because i've never seen that before. (trust me, i'd remember THAT).

thanks though, i'll have to look into better ways of checking empty spawn points. i tried a different method from quoth this time, what i like to think of as a 'deferred' spawn check.
the spawner has it's own touch function that is supposed to delay any spawning done. since touch is always called before thinks, this should have worked flawlessly. oh well. :P

thanks spirit, re: monsters. :)
i tried not to make the same mistakes i made with quoth monsters.
in particular, i made sure health stayed low and attacks were dodgeable.
i was also quite pleased to see some people figured out they could jump to avoid the golem knockback. (well, technically, 'knock up' but uh...) 

the amount of thought you seem to have put into this pack and its various elements is very impressive. 

I meant the skiing idea. How awesome an easter egg would be where you spawn the player on skis(?) on top of the highest mountain. 

That skiing thing was ace. 

... 

Nothing much to add here, just to mention that anyone who likes Quake must play this. Even with Darkplaces (which I used), it looks absolutely fantastic.

The architecture, the gameplay, the atmosphere - there is not a single flaw in the whole thing. Besides maybe that it is eventually over and you are screaming for more. :) 

How awesome would it be if the frozen lake was E4-style bottomless? 

Loaded this thing in QuakeSpasm... and the world stopped for 2 hours. This was like a demo of Hexen 3 with Quake weapons. And I just LOVE Hexen 2 and Quake. This map/mod was a journey through the best that FPS games ever had to offer! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

One MAJOR flaw: there was no award for finding and axing all the frozen spawns (or did I miss some?) ;)

I also found 3/6 secrets (and I would never jump to the RL other than circle jump from the corridor, I can't even imagine how would a ramp jump to that place look like!) I rocket jumped to some unfinished rooms, behind some weird player clips in the moutains, but that's all not a problem, just a pity there were no secrets there ;) 

What a fucking experience!!!

This map rockz so much that I'm still with my eyes bleeding of suck a diamond...

The ambience is simple fantastic... what can more be said? You are for sure one of the top 3 mapper in the hole world!

demo... I screw the demo near end because of a bind I had to another map :( I suck :(

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/ne_ruins_trinca.rar 

otp: How awesome would it be if the frozen lake was E4-style bottomless?
which lake is this? sorry, i can't recall.
i did want to do more with that outdoor area, but i was basically at the edge of nearly all map limits and was cutting things out to make everything fit.

trinca: thanks for the demo! you are one hyper player! :D

unsurprisingly, some of the qc is broken by DP. the bouncing trip mine bombs are bugged out and it seems the tracelines used by the frost golem's special attacks fail for some reason. :( 

with the frost golem.

It wouldn't explain the waterfalls though... 

no i meant, what bottomless lake in E4?
i can't recall any. 

The ones in start.bsp and E4M2 where you fall through the water? :P 

thanks necro sorry for the fucking binf that screw demo :(

you rockzzz, god of mapping you make us cry of happiness