@Orbs, wow that nightmare demo is just amazing! The telefragging of monsters is awesome stuff, i never thought of that. I like how you do all the shortcut stuff, get SSG/NG early, drop down for GL and have fun with the Quad. Perfect demo! :)

@Ricky, I can understand how you think the triple shamblers is hard but the encounter is about producing fear with the player. You are on a lift going down towards overwhelming odds, why would you jump down? The idea is either use the secret, pick them off from the lift or jump down when there is only one left. That encounter does scale depending on skill level, if you play Hard then expect hard encounters.

@Spirit, I can't play your demo's, MarkV does not recognize them. 

demo https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33279452/daz_mstalk.rar

This was really fun. Great fights and I found 6/10 secrets on my first run through :D

Not being able to get through the broken hole in the wall to get the LG was annoying, wasted most of the pent getting stuck on that, it looked big enough!

The final combat area was great fun. Very well balanced with a trap mechanic that was actually useful (imagine that).

I give this map 3 shub tentacles out of 3. With bonus wobbling effect. 

@FifthElephant, got your demo, very cool. I am glad you got the LG early, I wanted people to recognize (visual language thing) the demon face to mean secret, plus I thought it was cool how the LG was delivered to the player.

Sorry about getting trapped with the NG/GA demon. I did not realize how cautious quake players would be and how often they try to escape situations by pulling back. I like the way you did the final battle circling the room using the traps, it was awesome! :) 

Glad you enjoyed it, I tried to do a nightmare demo today but I died on the final encounter.

As for the NG/GA demon area I thought there was a secret under the lift (it looks like another room under there!), I wasn't being cautious :P 

I played the vanilla version today in nightmare mode, and in the final room, most monsters were exploding by themselves with tons of gibbs falling down ! It was really funny and I said to myself "WTF !?" with a grin !

I presume this is a small and hilarious bug... 

Hindsight is always 20:20 - but how was I supposed to know to save the pent before getting in the lift on the first run? 

when I looked at the .map files at the lack of detail brushes! 

There's a lot of teleporter problems in the standard .bsp version of the map. Lots of baddies telefragging each other that don't in the proper .pak version. Especially the final room, ogres and vores telefragging each other, almost the entire first wave of baddies telefrag each other.
(this seems to be even worse if you run the map in RMQ) 

@ricky, my point is why would you jump off a lift with three shamblers below? You had plenty of ammo to kill them safely from above. Also the pent is in the lift room, you don't have to save it!

@FifthElephant, the map architecture is so simple there is no need for detail brushes. Also AI in quake is really bad (navigation) around complex brushwork, I learnt my lesson with my ITS mod. 

I could see the shamblers, but I was running out of ammo for the SNG and I saw the health next to the wall, and I thought 'if I get to the bottom and run out of ammo, im fucked, so I'll go for the health, hopefully Ill have enough time to find some cover and some moar ammo' and jumped.

Ended up being not much cover and the bugger tagged me. Oh well. It was fun though :) 

just puts the brushes into a separate part of the compiling process so the vis times are lowered, they're still just normal brushes added to the worldspawn. Having faster vis times is a real god send IMO and as far as I know it doesn't really affect AI.

I'm messing about with the map to see if I can figure out why all the mobs telefrag each other... (and to admire the lovely brushes) 

@RickyT23, I wanted the design for this map to vary the normal fight patterns for the payer. Some fights require caution, some aggression, it is my way of trying to vary combat pacing and stop the player being bored.

@Fifth, the map takes 6 minutes to full compile, the right amount of time to make a cup of coffee! I rarely do full compiles, I compiled the map once in the first week of construction. Once you get an idea for how the scale of things are, you don't need to compile much. The real time sink is lighting, I probably wasted hours trying to get that right.

I checked the optimized version (1D) with Fitz 0.85 and Mark V and got no problems with spawning on any skill level. What engines and configs are people using that are getting problems? 

Make sure Quoth is not active. With Around the U Bend map it caused telefragging. 

occurred for me on the latest version of fitz *whilst using quoth* (reduces monster in-fighting, makes the game harder)... RMQ you get telefrag problems even without using quoth. (I know it wasn't tested for this anyway)
Also in the first wizard spawn room (when you pick up the silver key) you get a sv_touchlinks error. Dunno why this could be. 

Both of those examples (fitz + quoth, RMQ) are not vanilla GL engine setups. You should be using the original 1C version. 

The telefragging occurs because Quoth v2 makes point-sized triggers have a 64^3 bounding box if not custom value is defined. This causes the monsters in the teleporter closets to touch more than one trigger. It will be changed in the upcoming patch.

Works fine in RMQ for me.

I don't see how playing normal maps in Quoth cab possibly make them harder. Infighting is only disabled for the Death brigade. 

is why it's harder ;)

Besides, who says I'm not toying around with making myself a quoth version? ;) 

For the time being, the trigger issue can be work around by giving each of them a "mangle" "1 1 1" field. 

@ricky, my point is why would you jump off a lift with three shamblers below? You had plenty of ammo to kill them safely from above. Also the pent is in the lift room, you don't have to save it!

I did this on my first play through and then the pent ran out before the shamblers ran out of health and I died. 

Here is a collection of 13 demos from various people posting in this thread. The zip file is roughly 24mb, not a quick download.

Midnight Demos 1c 

recounting the shambler lift area... went well for me - drained all my grenades while lowering, knowing it was kind of dumb... didn't see secret til after doing that then slowly nailgunnig the shambs to death. then got it, and it kind of expired at the start of the arena... Which was very easy for me. Didn't use the spike traps for a while - assumed they'd shoot me at 1st... just kept circling round the room til I figured that out, then used them sparingly.

Like I said, 2nd run demo soon! 

The Shambler lift was about making the player panic and wonder what to do. The secret in that room is for the Quad (sorry not the pent as I said earlier), but the player will be distracted with the Shambler situation.

The hardest thing about Quake or any old game is players expection of how things work. It does surprise me why anyone would jump into a pit of lava and expect to survive, but that is Quake, driving into a shit situation and coming out smelling of roses!

The spike traps in the final room were the hardest thing to get right. I had the spikes on the ceiling (you can still see the holes) for a long time and I was forever moving the button around. It was touch/shoot button, large/small sizes and in lots of different positions.

Eventually the light bulb came on and I realized that I was designing the button for the player not a trap. I knew the monsters were in the middle most of the time and then I realized the spikes should be shooting that direction. Once the angle was right and the button behind it all clicked into place and became really good fun to use, for the player! 

I dunno as soon as I heard/saw them, I just started shooting them from the lift. That was my gut reaction. 

Same. 

"look before you leap" things gamers can never be expected to do.