How much "balance" would be broken if their shotgun blast was split into, say, 6 consecutive shots, and the pre-attack wind-up was made longer?

This would effectively make them chaingun Enforcers... which sounds pretty badass. 

Sentinels are not replacement bobs - bobs are fun to fight, sentinels are not. 

They are okay. Unless they come in groups and without cover. 

 

haha, well, it's funny because the complaints about bob are basically exactly what bob is supposed to be.

He is supposed to be a hard to hit medium threat monster designed to slow down the player and force them to pick their shots. 

Defenders are fine when you are aware of them. Should more be a note to mappers to not be dicks and constantly place them in close surprise ambush positions. In close range with open ground circle strafing works fine.

Bob: "They're annoying to fight" err no, mobile enemies are awesome fun to fight and their death is great. The screechy sound is annoying though :(

I suggest adding:

> A 'non-boss' gug that doesn't have the earth quake attack, because A: unavoidable damage is super fucking lame and B: it makes health balance difficult. Could perhaps have reduced splash radius on it's projectiles, but I otherwise like the gug a lot. The earthquake just makes it too difficult to use as much as Shamblers or Droles :(

> Ammo pack item that doubles shell, nail and Cell capacity (not rockets though, 100 is fine there :p ). Keeping with Quoth's design, it would be a useful item for mappers that make levels with large monster counts but can be happily ignored by those who don't.

> Another item that upgrades the lightning gun making it pierce enemies. With that I think it would be more of a proper super weapon. As it is it's just another tier of nailgun which mappers never use.

> Extra shotgun would balance out the health of most of the new monsters being higher in places where quoth monsters are used more. But again apart from the Voreling I don't see much of an issue with that. You just need more shells :E

> A flashlight with unlimited battery :p 

I suggest all this shit as extra items that could be added so as to not affect any maps already using Quoth too :E 

is a cool attack except that it still damages you when you are swimming. Did he shake the water too? 

Add RMQ. And Zer. And Shrak. 

I think I understand the decision of not releasing the source, now... 

Surely you should conclude the opposite? (: 

now how fun would a modular class system like Unreal's be. 

I like the Gug. He is ridiculously overpowered, but that just means he should be saved for proper crescendo moments. A weaker version would simply dilute the psychological effect of the stronger version.

Re: Flying Base enemies, I think my design preference would be to add another type of enforcer or grunt but give them a jetpack and a hyperblaster or laserbeam attack.

Ultimately, I think what we can all agree on judging by the renewed interest in this thread lately is that Quoth 3 is well overdue. :P 

haha, well, it's funny because the complaints about bob are basically exactly what bob is supposed to be.

He is supposed to be a hard to hit medium threat monster designed to slow down the player and force them to pick their shots.

Fighting bob and the sentinel is ok, but both models suck, look out of place.... Maybe just rip-off or mod Rubicon2 flying platformers, which are ace. 

does anyone have a copy or know where to get the quoth fgd? my backup hdd died a few months ago, and doing a google search for it gives me no results, except for this page and the link is dead :( 

I can't find the Quoth2 fgd anywhere on the net.
Should be the right one but I may have modified something.
file date is 6/14/09
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?goczizd2h3b8ix3

If it's correct I'll send it to quaketastic

Why FGD & DEF files are not included with the official Quoth dev files? why!
=====================================
BTW does anyone use that scorpion enemy?
and Leave bob alone, he's ok. If anything give me a weaker version of the vorling. One shot kill (there supposed to be bugs right?). How bout a skin and spawn flag for weak vorling and I'll drop 50 of them on the player. 

That would be a horrible design decision. Players wouldn't know which kind of voreling they were fighting, which would be incredibly frustrating. 

:) 

...would probably function about the same as necros zombies, and everybody loved those. To really work though you'd probably need a new skin, new sound set, and maybe even a new model possibly scaled down (which in turn would probably make them look like the terrorbites from time crisis. ehhh....)

Centroids have a few prominent appearances in dom3m1 and the other dom3 maps as well. 

Just change the default one. Come on, surely that's the one change that everyone can agree on. 

nt 

I like the Vorelings as they are and they do their job perfectly: being really annoying, sometimes dangerous and jumping everywhere. 

It's pretty silly having a head crab annoyance enemy thats tougher than a grunt and isn't gibbed by a direct rocket hit :p

But whatever it's an easy enough hack to reduce it's hp within your own maps 

tougher than a grunt and isn't gibbed by a direct rocket hit

At least change that. Dropping it 65 to 50 HP wouldn't unbalance much.

Also, Sentinels, why exactly are those stronger than Scrags? :( 

 

Yeah - those indestructible head crabs really pissed me off in half-life. Why can i blow away a whole alien planet, or whatever, but but a few vorelings are just too much. 

Health tweaks would be fine but they shouldn't be fucked with otherwise, they are one of the most perfectly themed Quake additions ever. Spot on custom monster. 

Just to be clear, Preach is the one working on the patch and gameplay changes and new monsters are outside of the scope of the patch.

Fast zombies worked because it was very obvious what type of zombie it was. it's behaviour was drastically different and immediately apparent. Also, there were no normal zombies in the mix which made things even clearer. Adding a new voreling variant with different health without drastically changing it's appearance and behaviour would be very confusing and changing the original would unbalance existing maps. 

changing the original would unbalance existing maps.

Come on... nobody's saying to give them 1 HP or something, just a very small decrease. 

If the chance is enough to change the gameplay, then it changes gameplay. If it is not enough, then why chance.

- The Mighty Spirit 

Some food for thought, voreling health has already been decreased once, so it's unlikely to drop further. 

OK, time to get things moving. I would like to invite everybody who has created a map for Quoth (1 or 2) to send an e-mail to me - the address is on my profile. I'll reply with a copy of the 2.2 beta and what to look out for. 

 

really excited for a second but sad when it wasn't a real update.
Is the axeman going to be in this update? He's my favourite enemy type from the drake mod by far (Something Wicked made really good use of him) 

The quoth 2 fgd download link is broken!
Y U NO POST A NEW LINK?! 

I have the new fgd ready to go, but it's for version 2.2, so it'll get released at the same time as that (just waiting for the go ahead from testers now). 

Any word on whether or not the mapping guide will be updated? There was a lot missing from it before and I seem to remember Necros acknowledging this. Anyone know if it will be updated? Necros? :) 

Not from me, at least not right now. I don't even have time to do the wiki stuff. 

Due to the ongoing delay, have the updated docs:
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/quoth/tutorial/ 

NVM about that, I already found it when i downloaded hulk256 by Ijed. It's all good now. 

Thanks for those docs. Not sure I'll be using them for now, but I do remember some bits and bobs missing from the old docs when doing my previous Quoth maps.

Quoth is awesome btw :)
Will there be any new content in the new patch, or is it just fixes and small additions to the existing mod? I did test some things a while ago, but that was just map compatibility really. 

Have you ever considered adding the QdQ code for speedrunning Quoth maps? 

I'm not really sure the demand for that would justify the difficulty involved. Adding some code that echoes your time down to the milliseconds would be straight-forward, although a bit strange to expose everyone to it.

The rest of the stuff (setting starting params, grenade counters, extra impulse commands) would require some serious porting for two reasons. One reason is that the the stuff that prints to the screen like the menu and the grenade counter is going to fight with the existing quoth code for the flashlight meter.

The other is that Quoth has made lots of changes to impulse commands and the meanings of the starting param variables (that's where the mapgate and endgate entities store values). So the menus for those would have to be rewritten accordingly. It would be a lot of work, not just a case of including their .qc files. 

Would be interesting, like in Doom. :) 

 

If the digits are realy easy to implement then pls do so in whatever new stuff there ever might be to come out. For runs under a minute a high or low decimal is a big difference wheter improving your run is within reasonable possibilitys.
The other impulses realy arent that important: trigger info/triggers visible is just an exploring thing in most cases you could load the map without the custom progs get a bunch of errors but stil find out what and where the triggers are and do (unless its a negke-hax-map). Ogre grenade timer is pretty horrible since it wil usualy swap to a different grenade then the one you want to jump off, grenade timer, meh most runners can do wihtout, overall it will increase succes rate a bit, but an easy GJ is very doable without and the harder ones usualy require movement anyway so its not like your watching the counter go and press jump when it hits 0, and the fast ones are usualy grenades tossed ahead into your line of movement or bounced of enemies.

Within most of the new engines the realy easy way to do a GJ (throwing a grenade straight up and wait for the second bounce)is actualy pretty hard (unless you script wich im realy against) since you can aim straight up more then in the original engines

If i had the skills i would have made a QDQstats improvement with some extra features:

easyer map exploring:
-tracking of buttons and triggers: a line between the button or trigger towards what it actualy triggers
-impulse to make invisible walls visible
-easyer way to spot secrets
-max damage of explodoboxes

Run comparing:
-a ghost option
-possibility to set checkpoints

-monsters
some form of health display (maybe a colour scheme wich gets brighter the less percentage hp is left)
-a way to track monsters behind walls
-a way to check wich monsters are left after you finished (with an id so you dont only know that it was an ogre but exactly wich one)
-voreballcounter

setting some notifications: did monster #x die?, status of door #x?(did it get blocked?) etc)

Probably forgetting a couple of things i tought of over the last decade but this post is already gettign slightly of topic and out of hand ;) 

Within most of the new engines the realy easy way to do a GJ (throwing a grenade straight up and wait for the second bounce)is actualy pretty hard (unless you script wich im realy against) since you can aim straight up more then in the original engines

This can be fixed in fitzquake at least, by modifying cl_minpitch and cl_maxpitch. -70 and 80 will restore vanilla quake behavior I think. 

I just time it to 4 secs, but this sounds like an easier way. 

for the minpitch and maxpitch values that might come in handy someday 

then you life in a slow world, in my world they explode after 2.5 :) 

My input on quoth was almost nil, apart from a few maps.

Hope you like space hulk :) 

Example map using Quoth info_command
60 seconds of speed

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tb0t1vaw3bxhz67 

That's cool. People who have cl_sidespeed and cl_forwardspeed set low may not feel the full benefit of the powerup - but be careful about changing those values to fix it! The danger is in trying to restore them correctly to whatever the player prefers. I think the closest to a good way is to send "exec config.cfg" to the player at the end of the powerup - this restores the values to what they were at the start of the session (with the minor side-effect of also resetting anything else the player has changed this setting ...)

Finally, the powerup won't work correctly in co-op as it is. Is there a way to make it only affect one player? I'm hoping negke might take a punt at that question... 

Preach I agree. I was going to change fov also. fov 60-70 but what to set it back to? exec config.cfg is a good idea. Things like r_wateralpha I think are ok for a map to mess with but fov and others maybe not good. I also think the idea could be extended to a custom file exec custom.cfg to create a custom environment. Setting back to "normal" will be the trick. A way to write all cvar's to file before messing around would be good.

BTW Preach how is the Quoth update coming along? 

I know in darkplaces you can use variables and set command to temporarily save the value of a cvar.

here is an example:

//=============start of example==============
//save current user-set value of cvar
set fov_value $fov
set sen_value $sensitivity
set sound_volume $volume

//change cvar value to whatever you want
fov 999
sensitivity 1000
volume 9999
playdemo demo1

//restore user-set cvar value
fov $fov_value
sensitivity $sen_value
volume $sound_volume
//=============end of example============== 

Yeah, new version is feature complete, it's just the testing and fixing any bugs that have arisen. It's not helped that people keep releasing maps for Quoth faster than I can complete them twice on easy and nightmare. 

new quoth?

GIEF SHINY NEW TOYZ PLZ 

I want to say "the flashlight meter sucks anyway", no offense. Could make it faintly beep or flicker when the battery nears its end -- absorbing the UI element into the game itself.

I always found the flashlight meter to be one of the less polished elements of Quoth. Slapping that consolefont all over the middle of the screen seemed distracting to me.

The less HUD, the better, IMHO. 

flashlight would only be usefull in combination with a magnifying glass so you get a laser like weapon :) What the idea behind the flashlight anyway?i cant think of any uses for it except using it as a melee weapon (no i wont ever come down from my fullbight cloud) 

Does that mean you always play in Fulbright? 

is a little bit of a weird addition IMO.
I can't see myself ever making a flashlight map unless its functionality was more like Half-Life. 

Just an extra option. Agree with go re flickering rather than countdown bar on screen. 

dotn see any reason not to, if i want to see beautifull stuff its not a videogame :) 

This discussion about whether the flashlight should be removed or reworked is kind of getting away from the point I was trying to make, which makes me worried that I didn't explain myself well. The flashlight is one example - the most visible one but by no means the only one - where there is a contention between a resource the Quoth code assumes it controls and the resources that the SDA code assumes has sole control of. This is why they are hard to integrate together. 

I never run out of battery power anyway. 

you should make the battery one of those crank ones... that way you can add a battery crank mini-game using quicktime events. ;) 

zaikor