but just wanted to make clear, 'ballsy' is a positive quality, not a negative one. 

if you are, being ballsy enough to call them apes in oversized jeans is a negative factor 

You have a point there. When I think of ballsy, I think of my pappy with his regulation crew cut walking up to the leader of a bike gang asking him for a light. Could've been negative. For the gang. 

I agree with xen, that the movie was better than the game for Nehahra. I also had the same issues; frustrating gameplay and lack of coherence among the maps. I'd even go further to say some of the maps were not individually great. I think OUM for example had a higher quality average map than Nehahra, and had more coherence in terms of progression and overall feel among the maps. Insomnia is another good example of an episode done better than Nehahra SP.

But Seal Of Nehahra.... I worship it. 

Have you considered using cinematics in your project to the degree they were used in Nehahra? 

And I hated Seal of Nehahra, but liked the mod very much. And tweaked monster AI was excellent. The only thing I disliked in Nehahra was that maps weren't connected to one another, but overall, this was the mod from top shelf.

Soul of Evil was cool! Gratz for Tronyn! 

erm, No. I wouldn't ever attempt something that ambitious myself; Mindcrime deserves every bit of praise he gets and then some for successfully pulling off such a cinematic approach in Q1.

I once considered a project which would have utilized cinematics, the storyline for that is in the arcane wizard thread, but it floundered due to lack of support and when I brought it back in its current form, it was more of a "just make a good map" thing.

which is pretty much my thing too right now; I just want to make massive maps and that's pretty much the limit of my ambition :)

MisYu: Thanks for the compliment. Looking back on SoE there were a lot of things I could have done better, but I didn't really know what I was doing as a project leader and though I thought I was holding off release a lot at the time, I now think I rushed it out the door before a lot of little things that would have added up to a lot could be added. 

Rapture was thick in atmosphere and beautiful texture/brush work and OUM had some interesting ideas and flowed together well. I remember e-mailing FC praise on OUM long before I started coming to func_.
I was part of a machinima team for most of last year, but it fell a part due to the sound guy (a very talented Austin based musician) quiting to get married and start a family. I wrote the screen play, designed the sets, and reskinned the zombies as the characters (a bunch of junkies).
Ultimately, mapping is an easier preoccupation. 

It is obvious, that you can polish up everything you do, however often we don't have enough (enought?) time or eyes to see everything. Anyway, Soul of Evil is cool and stop kicking yourself, the atmosphere (especially when two fiends approached in the dark canyon) rocked, I really liked your mod, respect. 

Och, and talking about mods, maybe it's kinda weird, but I don't call czg07 or some of Kona's releases as mods. Yeah, there are multimaps within, there is modified stuff, but overall, for me, big mod, big pack, big conversion is something with:
- long storyline
- big playarea (lots of maps/episodes)
Not only 2-3 maps included + stuff.

So, I think that OUM, SoE, Nehahra, Zerstoerer, Malice, Armagon, DoE, Beyond Belief, Alien Quake and other "big ones" should be trackted (is that a word?) as mods and packs. 

it would be 'treated' ;) 

Well, I don't know that I'd be jumping to do any more feature-length quake movies. Though, just between you and me, if some coder out there were to look at the Nehahra source and figure out what's wrong with the PAUSEDEMO feature ... and fix it ... and compile an EXE ... and send it to me to use ...

Welll, you never know. I might be persuaded to do ... well, something or other. Otherwise, the engine which Seal of Nehahra was made on is gone ... poof. There's a chance there's a Nehahra mapper out there still has old versions of the engine, and that one of those old versions might be the right one ... but that's a small chance.

Thanks for the compliments on Seal of Nehahra, though I don't know if it's worthy of such praise. Maybe as the creator when I watch it, I don't see the good things ... I only see the bad and what could have been done better.

((Actually the fact that I did a 4 hour movie in Quake seems a bit crazy in retrospect ... well, more than A BIT ...))

As for engines, I understand many lean toward Fitzquake ... however, unless it supports transparency (which metlslime may or may not be up for, that is, to do it properly) ... the prognosis on that isn't good. No, it's not the transparency on the brushes (i.e. for glass) that I care that much about ... but using it for other things ((one example would be the Nehahra Wraiths))...

Btw, you're all welcome to blabber about Nehahra here. Considering Obscurus may end up being a kinda-sorta quasi-sequel type thing ...

In other news, I did find a nehahra.exe with a fixed HUD that Ender did for me ... I never released it because the Sprite 32s were broken in it, but I forgot about the nospr32 cvar which reverts the quake explosions to the normal sprites ... and that ain't so bad ... I do rather despise the weak smoke trails in Nehahra though ... which Ender never fixed :|

- - - - - - - - - - -- - -- - -


I have 3 main Quake related things going:

A) Looking to overhaul/improve Nehahra.
This involves code fixes, some AI alterations, improvements in many of the func_'s ...

B) Obscurus
C) A teeny pet project in my quake/nehrev directory. This isn't what I call a totally serious project, or a big deal whatsoever, but a fun added extra ... perhaps ... If I release it when it's done, it will be a pretty small download ... just a big fat progs.dat file ... You start in Neh2m6.bsp and work your way backwards through the levels to Forge City :D Maps the same, entities and functions different, a lot of stuff "rewired" ... Anyway, it could be fun. I'm only one map into that. I just finished Neh2m6.bsp :>

Things I sometimes think about:

A) A purely PHIL movie ... :D Now this would be FUN ... it would not be work. Seal of Nehahra was largely work. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy ...

B) Neh4mX - Fourth and final episode, though I harbor great doubts there would be much interest from mappers to make it ((I have no doubt there will be interest from players to play it ... that's the silly thing :> )) 

Here's another thing to think about ... I remember when I came to this point in Nehahra too. Should Obscurus support Coop and Deathmatch? Are those two things cool? Sure. Will more than a handful of people even play those modes?

My current thoughts: multiplayer prolly ain't worth it ... and when you eliminate multiplayer and make it strictly Single Player ... welll, you have a LOT more legroom and have the ability to do things you otherwise couldn't.

Thoughts? 

it seems to me like cinematics are the only problem for including coop. Coop gameplay doesn't have to be supported (not like you have to have extra monsters or items for coop or something), but it's pretty easy to *allow* players to play sp with more than 1 player, and maybe code in an option that makes monsters respawn once or something to make it harder. Another potential option that'd be easy to implement is players spawning further into the level after passing certain checkpoints (like 5 minutes work). I like coop, personally.

On dm, I think that's more the mapper's decision. If mappers don't mind trying to make maps that'll play well in DM as well as SP, then great - especially if there's new weapons. 

You start in Neh2m6.bsp and work your way backwards through the levels to Forge City

are you joking or serious? 

Yes, I'm serious ... As I'm already fine-tuning the neh2m6.bsp code for Nehrev and have played it dozens of times, I think it's quite fun. Fun would be the point.

Now if you're asking if this is something that should be taken serious to the same magnitude as a full map-pack release, probably not. Same maps. Different situations.

It should be taken as something fun you can download (with little to no downloading time) and burn some time with :>

If I get ambitious, I might hardcode in an in-level cutscene or two :D Might even throw a little story into it :> 

((I have no doubt there will be interest from players to play it ... that's the silly thing :> ))
I'm curious, how many players, in a rough estimate, would that be, and if you are looking also to update Nehahra how many players would an independent Nehahra pak (like say a Megawad) attract? 

it was a well done pak. 

Actually it's a very debatable subject. I had a good feel for what the Quake scene was like 3-4 years ago. Now, not so. I can only really speculate. I can tell you that I *still* get a fair amount of Nehahra email. I can tell you that's easy to see that the Quake 1 community still lives, while the Quake 2 community is dying an appropriately stinky death ... if Doom 3 has decent deathmatch, Quake 3 might soon become a memory ...

Hell, the old Doom community is more alive than the Q2 one.

That's because: a classic never dies :D

On the heels of Nehahra, I can tell you there were more than a dozen good mappers who I could have gotten on the Obscurus bandwagon.

By the time Obscurus is ready for mappers, there's really no telling what the situation will be (assuming of course that what I have to show the prospective mappers rocks :>) ... What I'm capable of doing on my end isn't an issue. I'm five times, I dare say even ten times, more proficient at this stuff than I was during Nehahra ((let's face it ... during Nehahra, I was a fledgling modder ... but, hey, Nehahra wasn't so bad for a first go, huh?)) The question is: no matter what awesome stuff I have to offer, will it be enough at that point?

There's a chance it might not be. It depends, depends, depends ... on a lot of things. I'm prepared for any possibility.

It's a wait and see thing. 

it was a fine, albeit flawed, piece of work. Both in terms of quantity and quality. I thought the nomonsters cvar was excellent, lets those who like playing with the advanced AI do their thing, and the other can play it in the classic fashion.

I dont think you really need to tinker with nehahra anymore though Mindcrime, just let it be. It's fine enough as is. 

The thing that amazes me with the Doom community is the number of really good large projects -- 32 map megawads that have been made for it. Nehahra is the closest we have to that sort of thing in the Quake scene, and I believe it is one of the few entity sets for Quake that would be sufficiently balanced to sustain interesting play over a large number of maps if it is done with the right approach to game play. In other words, the basic set of monsters and weapons in Quake is an inherent limitation on the viability of any pak that uses it.

I guess you have to weigh a lot of these factors when you design Obscurus whether or not Say's Law is applicable (if you build it, they will come) in your particular situation when you have mappers biting at the chomp to be involved, but then, there has not been as much post Nehahra fallow up modding as you may have anticipated despite the potential there. 

I'm no mapper but I'm sure it's more easier and less time consuming to make a 32 map wad for doom and a 32 level pak for quake. 

making a doom wad is about 1/10 as long as making a quake map.

that's a generalisation, of course, but it's what i have observed.

ne1_q2dm took about 2 weeks to make during my comp class whereas last year i was able to make a doom map of comparable quality in about 8 hours.

i'm sure this has to do with the relative amount of detail in a doom map. usually, you're only concerned with actual geometry, then textures, then maybe lighting (making fancy shadows and what not) and only working in 2 dimensions simplifies things a lot. 

In general, that is true. You can make a playable map in DoomCad for Doom quicker than you can in similar circumstances for Quake. However, for the game play element, the time factor of developing the ideas that propel a level are pretty much the same.

Take Hell Revealed for instance. The typical map is designed so your route choices are open ended -- except for the monster placement factor where the areas and the pick ups in the areas are weighed dramatically differently. The player is forced to think strategically about his route and pick off the weaker monsters and gradually escalate who he is willing to go up against after that. It probably takes a greater deal of time to plan a layout like this than it does for your generally conceived Quake map.

This sort of game play is easier to produce in my opinion with the Nehahra balance of monsters and weapons than it is for unmodified Quake. 

Go Software Engine, it's what Jesus would want. :)