I thought he used TB? Could be wrong... 

Most of the brushwork was done in TB, as it is much easier and faster.
But as there is no etp support by now in TB, i merged the whole thing in Quark.
Quark has some features, i really miss in other editors by now....
Dont say floating point coords.:) 

I don't understand why it seems so tough but I'm not doing very well.

Seems like there's maybe not enough health and ammo? I dunno. It's graphically very good overall (there's a few weird texture choices but it's mostly good).

It's easy to forget how powerful the new quoth soldiers are. It's easy to get a rocket/grenade to the face or get blasted by a plasma gun. I'd use the new enemy types sparingly to be honest.

I'll come back again when I've actually licked the damn thing. 

Firstly I've got to say that nobody is more excited than me to see all the mapmodels in this release - I believe it's the first map to be released using mine! It was great to see them integrated so well with the geometry and the map in general - coming up through a broken section of tape at the beginning set the scene of the player intruding, and it was helpful in other areas to mark dangerous cliffs. I really must bite the bullet and make a version of the tape with a more practical skinmap and some variant skins...

Anyway, enough self-congratulation, onto the map! The build quality was top-notch throughout, lots of verticality in the open atriums, hatches and windows all over the place to look into areas from different angles. I had a cool moment result from all the shortcuts that open up as the map went on, where two enforcers split up between the main door and a new side door to perform a pincer movement. It was a good battle on two fronts, more fair than enemy-spawned-behind attacks.

Like the title suggests, I played through on nightmare, which made the enemies spawning behind even more unforgiving (I did see the attack at the broken bridge coming). No demo as I didn't switch back to Quoth 2.1 for the playthrough. My first attempt got to the Edie just after the gold key, I tried to backtrack to replenish health after killing him and got trapped by a lift. The second attempt got to the final fight, but I didn't have the firepower (or enough seconds left on the trinity) to take down one of the shamblers and survive the retreat to cover.

Ammo was tight at first - on the first run I used my last shotgun shell to kill the 2nd voreling - and nails were always a valuable commodity. But it was at the end of the map that things were really too tight. The only armour all map I had was the green from right at the start. I got annoyed by several secrets which I had spotted, and found the door that leads to them (lightning, s-nail, r-armour) but had no idea how to progress to open them. Still, I managed to beat the final fight on skill 1 just now so these things weren't essential.

I'm gonna take a peak at the map now, see if there's a way to fix all this greyflash business... 

which point to a vising problem. I wonder if some hard limit was hit with visible objects? The map doesn't even load in DirectQ for me either. 

Reason for the huge hom is a ugly portal error, caused by a func_detail touching the void.

I looked at the map file and it has a huge amount of detail brushes. To be honest, I didn't really see a need for any of them. The map isn't that big and there weren't any really huge areas. It looked like it would vis fine with no detail at all. But then, I have no idea what kind of computer was available for vising, so I don't know. 

I'm having a serious writers block at the moment, so I'll simply repeat what everyone else has said in that, I thought the map was great, and the Quoth monsters really added a sense of danger and variety, as they would to any base map. Not to mention the use of those fine models, especially the tape. Very good work :)

First playthrough on hard skill, two demos since I died once. I didn't make it to the exit, the final shamblers killed me, but I didn't want to bother creating another file for just a thirty second demo of me finishing.

You may notice me stopping and looking around, when I do that I'm just admiring the details, and there were quite a lot in this one.

http://qrf.servequake.com/~orl/misc/orl_mfxsp17.rar

Protocol 15, should play back in any engine. 

Fresh feeling map which i enjoyed plenty :)
Nice secrets, and good use of Quoth base enemies. Loved the tape-lined caverns, end gateway, and trident secret.

The eddie trap was a bit meh though. You're just not going to hit it first run through. Also had a graphical anomoly near the end. 

is normally be cheap, but quite enjoyed it here. 

https://anonfiles.com/file/ac088ff37686ddee4030d0fb599e9434

Demo.

I'm almost surprised, but: nice map.

Some muscular brushwork and detailing there, you're pretty much doing everything right in that regard.

Got trapped behind a crate near GL - more playtesting would have prevented this...

Found dogs a little annoying, especially the ones spawning into my back. Meh. Might want to drop that idea for your next map.

Thank you for actually making skill 0 acceptably easy, 99% of mappers don't manage to do this, but you did it here. This means I could actually enjoy this map until I got nailed by an edie without any cover available.

Almost got lost once because there are so many connections that lead to previous parts of the map.

Quoth monsters are still pretty imba but thankfully you didn't use hordes of them so it was bearable.

If I could request one thing, have your maps be playtested by more people (not just 2 or 3 veteran players) and make skill 0 still a tad easier.

But nice map. 

And have a 50% demo that's waiting for me to complete it. I got distracted by a task making some things for a thing.

The back spawning dogs everyone's complained about are just a bit b0rky IMO - they appear right next to the player without tfog. If they had of appeared from inside the crates or monster jumped from above you could have got them arriving just as quickly (and a bit more spectacularly) and nobody would have complained.

I see what you wanted to do with that crate ambush - don't be put off; keep experimenting with stuff like that, it makes maps interesting.

I might be able to finish this today, if I can get those other things done. 

Demo here: (first run)
http://quaketastic.com/files/demos/mfxsp17_ericw.zip

I had a few nitpicks; the lava in the start room would look better at 1:1 scale. There was a lift button that looked pushable but was disabled until later (IIRC?), and unfortunate about the HOMs.

Enjoyed the red key trick, I was wondering if there was going to be an actual red key :)

Played on skill 1, died once around midway through after losing a lot of health on an unnecessary grenadejump... other than that, I made it to the end where I was careless with the trinity and the shamblers got me a few times. Skill 1 felt good to me, though. Maybe I wasn't paying attention but I didn't notice dogs spawning in; I thought they were just hiding behind crates - so after seeing that for the first time, I was cautious about ambushes in areas with lots of crates.

Overall, thanks for the awesome map. Superb interpretation of the quoth idbase look & feel :-) 

finally got to play it, nice gameplay balance, good secrets.
though i lost all armor and alot of health after being stuck under the lift (had to cheat out of there to save my life), hence i died at the last ambush.
but overall proper base level, good job mfx!

demo: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b3r76tfk55dbflg/v17.zip 

I came across the same sorts of issues as others, also dying on the end battle. I feel that could have been improved if I'd known what to expect more.

Maybe a short button hunt to activate things beforehand.

Demo, where I complain about people bugging me while trying to play;

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cfxizyyqdqqznkk/ijedmfx17.zip

Some encounters felt a bit forced. Sentinels are a great enemy and were well used, but the Pyro and Plasma troopers feel oddly balanced and it seems you didn't place them as well as other enemies because of this.

The Chicken Centaur (Edie) was fun as always. I thought the end battle could have been better with them than the shamblers actually, since the compact areas would have left the player herded up against them and their buzzsaws, while not having cover to avoid attacks wouldn't have mattered as much without the hitscan shambler lightning.

Oh, and I got lost after finding the lightning gun secret. The shortcut turned out to be the long way round :) 

 

coming soon.. 

i'm tempted to change the gameplay a bit, what do you think? 

But it's not the army. If you think the changes will make it a better map then go for it. 

Nah, gameplay was good overall. Fix the main bug and move on to the next map. 

Would be maybe staggering the final ambush? 

I think ijed made good suggestions re dogs. 

I like those dogs. Traps are awesome. Dying is ok. You can quicksave all the time. Have you guys ever played games in the 90s? 

its not so much their surprise factor but the taking out of immersiveness factor because as someone else above pointed out, they can actually spawn out of nowhere while you can see it happening.

Ijed's ideas retained the surprise element but also retained the immersive factor. 

ah, didn't see that. yeah, I had an enforcer spawn in my fov too. 

That if the player is constantly worried about being cheap shotted and as a result is hammering the quicksave key at every possible moment then that is a sign of bad level design, it hurts the level in the long run.