Here is what I want, now code my mod. But don't expect me to map for your mod. That's gonna work!


I played OUM today, you will like it I think. 

Yeah, no, sorry; I did read your post on the thread, er, half forgot!!

I think its very true what you say though. The thing with Quake2 and 4 which annoys me (as I believe you may have said, pretty much) is that the player is unable to move quickly enough IMHO. I mean you can say it's a multiplayer thing, but I like running around frantically and shooting things! The combat it what does it for me! Call me old fashioned... 

I designed a large landscape to manouvre the camera through, and it works perfekt, I can make demo's of it.
But I move backwards! Is the steering of the camera that difficult or do I have to read more zerstorer manuals?

ijed: same thing I had with phantompholly, I used the mod for its exploding barrels and moving water. But I had to add the earthquake trigger.

Why not make something like inside3D? All parts of the qc code in a questioning forum.
Like you search something like earthquake and you can find it like:

http://members.home.nl/gimli/Q1EarthQuak.htm 

That's kind of the thing I'm doing now; c+p the stuff I want into a progs dat. I'll probably continue with it after I finish each project, so new stuff will get added over time.

I've broken from traditionalism with a replaced weapon (axe) but I can't see anyone crying over that. 

good post, I think you are correct in how you draw the contrast between plot-driven objectives vs. the quake and doom style of more abstract gameplay. Mechanically they are the same, and it's really just window dressing that makes the difference between "plant an explosive charge on the anti-aircraft guns" in medal of honor and "press the button in the random room to open the door" in quake.

But, a couple of counter-points:

1. the heavily dressed-up objectives in quake2, moh, etc. are still fairly transparent. The biggest problem in a MoH type game is that the objectives are realistic and cool, but the mechanics around them, the ones that force you down the linear chain of events that the designer pre-scripted, are just annoying. Blowing up the AA-gun is a good plot device, but there's no reason that when you do that, suddenly a nearby explosion breaks a hole in a wall to allow you to continue -- and yet this is how they often end up being designed most of the time.

2. Quake and doom are abstract games, and the abstract objectives actually suit them well. To some extent, understanding too much about how the environment works or why it was built makes the world less mysterious. The push towards realism in level design may be cool for realistic games like sci-fi shooters, WWII games, etc, but in Quake it often makes the environments feel too literal.

Some exceptions -- most base maps can be fairly realistic and it works. Some medieval levels try to create realistic environments, and it works there too. But the cool thing about levels like The Wind Tunnels is that it is an alien, ancient, and only semi-comprehensible place that is not obvious in its purpose or inner workings. If you start explaining how it works, why the monsters are there, etc, you undermine the vagueness and inexplicability of the map's visual theme.

So I guess what i'm getting at is, in quake, you can go either direction, but I do not consider "realistic objectives" and "storyline" to be automatic improvements on any quake map. 

You meet a dying soldier in the Wind Tunnels - he croaks out some random phrase "Those flying things . . . " then dies. Lying next to him is an SNG.

That's pretty much the limit of what I meant I would want for Quake storyline, unless you're talking a full film type treatment. For example Nehahra's epic; which I enjoyed allot but wasn't so fond of when some small pieces of it arrived in between levels - the change of pace kind of jarred.

It makes no difference if the player listens or even notices the dying guy, he makes no impact on the progression, but the thing he does (if noticed) is heighten the the confusion and fear of the player, and give a reason why a futuristic weapon is in the place. Unless the bad sampling makes him sound like Darth Vader.

It's details like this that can really make a map, or episode, or even game. Nobody will pick up on all of them, but the overall feeling of completeness and quality is just there.

Ok, room 5 finished, onto room 6.

Or:

Dying soldier room finished, onto the room dingy cryogenic room.

I always try and have some sort of story in my head about what the place is. Most times its never obvious in the end result, but I find it also helps me to build, because I have more fun.

The design style of Quake and Doom is basically throw monsters at the player while they go to a number of areas, hitting switches or pressing buttons, until they reach the exit. Which is all fine and good. But when a mapper or group of breaks this mould into storyline tangents well then the project takes on another dimension - 'more than just another map'.

Operation Urth Magik
Contract Revoked
Zerstorer

Are the first that spring to mind. Varying qauntites of uninvasive storytelling that fit perfectly in the pace of the game, for me. 

Get in. 

You can imagine a scene which may spawn the idea for the level. Its how you manage to get it from your head into the level. And how much of what the player experiences comes from his/her imagination?

This is what I like about the abstract quality of Quake. The idea of monsters from other worlds/dimensions suddenly appearing. Where
did they come from? Where are their native environments? Or the creatures which have no origin, just pass from reality/dimension/world to reality/dimension/world for eternity.

Imagine how many places they could have been to?

Its like the idea of infinity. If there truly is such a thing as infinity then literally anything is possible. 

The vacuity and nihilsm draws the reader in, wanting to fill in the intentionally empty spaces. The history lesson embedded in At Mountains of Madness was one of my favourite bits of the whole.

Very craftily written, by intention or not. 

Wow. 

You didn't really cover things that I haven't put thought into, but you lay it out very clearly, and that makes it worth meditating on.

Sort of an inner mapper debate we have here; say that if we take it as a given that we are in the process of evolving the state of Quake mapping, so to speak, do we want to go the way of more pure game play, like the very mechanics oriented Metroid series, or do want to veer into more realistic or story oriented territory, like you would find in Half-Life, to give two excellent examples of very different game play approaches.

When I map for Quake, I find myself thinking about the story oriented approach, but I always end up with a more purist map in the end through refining game play. 

"but I always end up with a more purist map in the end through refining game play."

This is key, I think. I did mapping for Quake2 and tried to wrap a story around my level unit (called "Bad Seed"), but it always felt very tacked on and transparent.

Quake is about stripping away everything until you're left with the raw metal. It's about cool looking locations and minimal reasons for being there.

I don't want ALL games to be like that and I certainly like the story elements in modern games. But games from Quakes era don't really need them. 

Slave was never gonna be the peak of realism.
Run and gun! Bouncy bouncy!
The only modern game which I think comes close to Quake is UT3, which isnt really because its predominantly a multiplayer game. But it has the same sort of movement (fast) and similar combat in that respect, and also things like the layout and the fact that guns hover in mid-air before you pick them up. Although the mission statement is different.

But I think anything you can throw into a level which improves the immersion factor and captures the imagination of the player could be a good thing.

Quake is getting more realistic, with Quoth anyway - things like breakables and ladders are features of realism which have been added and can be used to make things *slightly* more realistic.

If you wanna talk about gameplay elements and Quake being surreal but having good combat then look at "Carved in Flesh" by Kona. Such a fantastic mod with fun fun fun gameplay. The set piece is fantastic, but very much surreal, but the monsters - you really get the feeling with that mod/map that you "never know what's coming round the next corner", because of the diversity of the monsters used in the map. But it's by no means realistic.

(one of my favorites for sure!) 

tried invein? 

The tack on objectives and scripted encounters often feel a little campy. But hey, if you think about it, games in total are a bit campy.
It's dancing on the line of getting the player to go with the flow and magic... And often being vague helps in this.

Quake could be a frantic experience where you just fight in a strange world and don't really have time to figure out how things work as you can just barely try and desperately push some buttons and try to make your way forward and survive. I find that these narrative elements like generator shutdowns etc kinda give the player too much control and can detract from the hopeless and mysterious atmosphere because of that... It's like when a horror flick loses the horror when the main character pulls his/her socks up and starts hunting the baddie.

Of course, quake is not just about the horror, it's about action too.
And there are a million ways to do things. And the monsters don't that much scare you anymore anyway as you've seen them a million times. And they're cartoony anyway.

What I'm trying to say perhaps that it could be a stylistic surreal cartoon instead of a b-movie trying to act as dramatic but ending up as camp. Cool places, monsters, cool and exhilarating gameplay moments and mechanics - but no campy plot.

You can see a lot of conflicting points in this post, it's just food for thought. 

...that has a Sin City rendering mode?

(it is)

Just after all of that talk of horror flicks and stylistic surreal cartoons! 

No, no, no.

If you do it at all, the plot has to come first. Like, "OK there is [device of doom] and player must take it out so we can send in troops." The device is preferrably big, inexplicable, and sitting in the center of the map in its own chamber. Then you build the map around that idea. Tagging it on never works. I'm playing Ground Zero atm and that (tagging on) is exactly what they did, and then they saw it was bad, and so they tossed more monsters in and those idiotic turrets. :-/ that's how it goes.

OUM btw is really good, but the story serves as a template more or less. It could go further, i.e. plot built into the map, with brushes actually. Visible. Blow-uppable preferably.

You guys will find this funny:

http://www.gamerevolution.com/oldsite/games/pc/action/quake_2_ground_zero.htm

the guy tells it like it is. In the end, it's about what you like though.

Ijed: The plot variant of the dying guy with the nailgun would be the following:

"Ah... those flying things."

"Listen, you must carry out my orders."

"Find the [device of doom] and neutralize it, so they can send in the troops."

It doesn't need to be more elaborate. Then when you blow up [device of doom] you get:

"Mission accomplished."

"Join our troops in [place where the exit is]."

That's all I'm asking for... I'm glad Quoth brings a number of possible plot devices, like monsters dropping keys. Imagine you have located [device of doom] but there is a [door, forcefield]. It could also be en route to the exit, of course. On a timer, even.

"Some monster probably has the key."

"Try the barracks."

So now you have some rudimentary info about this place you're in. The knowns:

There is a [device of doom]
There are barracks
There is [place where the exit is]
There is a monster with a key
There is a dying comrade
Your troops are waiting to come in
Optionally, you're on a timer etc.

There are still enough unknowns to keep it mysterious. Imagine those were the only facts about some military operation known to the public. There would be an uproar. A scandal. Some b0rked up commando operation. The unknowns:

What is this place
Who is the enemy
Why is this all b0rked up
Who is responsible (in the end, only you)

So the knowns really don't take away from the mystery. Not even in Quake 2. You just know the enemy is called "strogg" and you're in a fucked up military operation because apparently they started a war. You don't know that much about it all, really. You just know the place is peppered with dead comrades.

With Quoth, to return to the example, the Quakeguy would find an area that he could identify with barracks, and some monster [probably a tougher one] would drop the key. You could substitute barracks with [$control_room] and the key could be placed in a little receptacle.

It's not much really, it just neatens it up. So yeah, the overhead would still be low.

The coolened-up variant would be "collect 5 [$key] all over the map to access [$device_of_doom]". Like in Day of the Lords, where Glassman used the runes for this purpose. They were only used to open the path to the exit, though, so any plot was still missing. Since he used stock id1, he could not use external models for the keys, either. Using the runes has the benefit of not needing an inventory, since they are displayed in the status bar. It would get old fast, though. Hence the need for $key. 

he could not use external models for the keys, either.

You can have your models with a judicious use of brush models. I have been thinking about this sort of scenario for my next map: You put in an objective:

Quake (to player): When you kill the Hell Knight who betrayed me, bring me his decapitated head.

Action: Kill knight, Use a func_wall as a brush model for the decapitated head and set it to appear in the Hell Knight's Arena.

Action: Bring the head back to Quake's communique beacon. // Either kill a func_wall hiding the model, or the brush head model rises too quickly for the player to see it.

Quake (to player): You have done very well, grunt. Now I will ensure your death is quick and merciful. 

I started off in my above post trying to answer your well thought out one, and ended up rambling, as it goes.

Headthump, I did something similar to what you describe with a hub / Lazarus system in Quake2, the hub had a chapel to the war god, bringing back a commander head awarded you a (q2 savable) quad. Bringing back three heads got you a BFG. Shame I never finished it.

Also had an armoury where you collected the weapons - there were none in the maps. Completing more levels opened more caches in the armoury. 

I had this idea to develop a monster in the form of a basic 64x64 cube. It would been disguished as a stone and come alive and act as an endboss. By defeating it the same place it had been placed would become an new exit.
For so far I 've done well, although the lumpyness of the monster made me have my doubts. It took me quiet some time to construkt it. And now I have this wizz thing like...

Monster is in a separated place with the player. As the monster wakes it walks to the player leaving an open exit space, which is covered by a door after the monster spawns. The player attacks the monster untill it dies and opens the door to the exit.

Seems logical to target the door to the monster so it opens the door after its death. Point is that the monster is already targeted by a trigger_once in game to waken it.

So I targetted the door to 30 sec and then it opens. But sometimes the monster isn't killed yet and the player can escape.

Might have placed this on mapping help but as it is a monster using game potential (substituting a door, covered in stealth stand) it's here. 

The trigger targets the monster and the monster targets the door. I don't see the conflict there. 

Indeed, thats how I started. There's something more.

If I trigger the monster with the trigger_once it takes a delay of 4 sec Untill the monster gets out of the wall. So the same trigger I use for the monster I use for the door. This gives the monster time to move and the door (in fact the func_train) time to delay 4 sec.
Then it jumps up to the free coming space and waits 30sec.

But it has to move when the monster dies which is impredictable, The path_corner I can't trigger. So maybe a trigger_delay should work. 

 

 

I don't want ALL games to be like that and I certainly like the story elements in modern games. But games from Quakes era don't really need them.

I don't feel you have to bash someone over the head with a story and mash it down their throat, as most modern games do, but that gameplay and enviroments can tell a deep story that the player can discover and claim 'their own'. I feel that approach is more rewarding to all parties, and completely within the scope of Quake, or any type of game.

A dead Quake Marine on the ground tells a potent story, especially if whatever killed him is right around the corner. After Biff released his recent SP map, I suggested to him that he could've up'd the 'storyline' a little if one of the crates you started near was opened on the side you start on, explaining how you may have snuck into the particular base. Placing monsters in a room all facing toward an altar of demonic power tells a story. All these sorts of small things build up, and add richness to the experiance without removing anything that makes Quake fundimentally enjoyable.

A great atmospheric effect can also tell story. Can't remember the map, and think it was likely an oversight of the mapper, but it started in a large empty room. and there was NO ambient sound. none. It increased the feeling of lonelyness in the map, and made it all the more suprising when all of a sudden monsters appeared. A commonly used atmospheric effect is blinking lights, but anything broken can be used to make the player question, if only in the back of their mind, 'I wonder how that happened?'

One of Portal's great story telling aspects is when all of a sudden the player finds themselves on their own after the game having basically shown them what to do thus far. That's not so hard as you may think, something as simple as following a sign on a wall pointing to where the silver key is, only for it to disappear (ala Vaults of Zim) or otherwise not be where it SHOULD be, and now the player must strike out on their own to get it.

In short, story doesn't need to be simply written in a .txt file as the explaination of the level, not does it have to be as heavy handed as a machinima with fancy explosions. But just the smallest details can tell big and powerful storys if used correctly and with style, and don't have to steal away any of the Quakeiness of Quake. 

had a neat little device with the translator and the messages you got near dead bodies.

Sometimes they got too long and repetitive, but done right they added a fair bit without getting in the way of gameplay. 

Ok, but I didn't find the Quake2 enemies scary at all. The Gladiator was pretty vicious, but being basically the q2 Shambler he should have been. The rest were pretty low fear factor because of what you mention - wear em down until they keel over.

I know id tried to make a tactical element to the gameplay - gunners hiding behind those black and yellow barriers in the toxic refinery springs to mind - but they failed dismally when compared to, say, HL1. The soldiers would duck behind cover to throw grenades, run from threats, fire in bursts etc. They didn't need a high health (although they had, as well as stupid bulletproof parts of the model) because they were tactically enjoyable to kill. I think the biggest error Valve made there was needing a full 30 clip to drop a soldier, and the Xen grunts were just stupid in the amount of damage they could take.

Because id didn't have this kind of clever (node) Ai they instead just kept the same as Q1 but gave them more health. Made the whole thing a bit more drawn out.

If I'm hitting a Q2 boss tank (the big one) with a futuristic rocket launcher I'd expect it to die reasonably quickly, but with one false move it'd splatter me all over the walls. The model has two nubs on top of its tracks that look suspiciously like Warhammer 40,000 Rhino grenade launchers. I wonder if there was a chance missed there.

Scampie, that's pretty much what I was trying to get at before. 

I like the combat in Halo. Good balance of AI/Gameplay. The player could move at a reasonable speed, enemies died at appropriate times, they weren't too tough or soft, they weren't too stupid.

Shame, it wasn't as dark as other shooters. A wee bit immature for me... 

http://www.quaddicted.com/wishes.html

The map opens with a simple message.

"You sense danger everywhere."

It's non-linear, in a way that you feel like you're exploring, not lost, as you wander. There's ordinary buttons that do ordinary things, but the subtle mystery of what those buttons could be doing in this level you haven't seen the entirety of yet is enhanced by the centerprints that someone railed against so hard.

"A bridge has extended ..."

That did more to draw me forward and encourage me to explore and discover than any hackneyed dying quake dude with some hackneyed dying message for me that was meant to 'explain' my purpose.

The fun of Quake is the lack of explanation. The fun is in filling in the gaps with your imagination, like metl described. It's eerie and mysterious, because things don't all make sense.

Mexx7-9 had a 'story' that didn't try to override anything that made Quake what it is. Levels were still unexplained buttons and near-senseless architecture, but you were given an overall goal by the level end texts that gave you an umbrella of meaning. The level where you storm the Bishop's tower started with a tower rising above you, and was generally vertical in progression, but it didn't try to make any more sense than that. The rocket launchers weren't explained, the chainsaws weren't explained - that was just the eerie mythos.

There's plenty left to do with Quake, and making it more like Quake2 is decidedly not on the list.

Discrete choices aren't necessary when the absence of linearity has a purpose, which contributes to the design of the map instead of just being choice for the sake of choice. How about a map where Cthon moves? The whole map spans a lake of lava, with islands and pools and antechambers, and he wades through the lava following you, occasionally diving under and resurfacing to keep you from escaping. The entire level is a drawn out series of battles with him, as you scrounge enough cells for your lightning gun to do him in for good.

None of the encounters would be planned, and the map wouldn't be linear - there's just a lot of ground to cover, a lot of lava for him to manifest from, and a lot of monsters and mini-levels between you and each little battery cache. Something like the last level of Contract Revoked, without buttons. 

 

 

I didn't really like the amount of ammo you need to drop a soldier or combine in the HL games. It's not too bad on normal, and at least grenades and shotgun blasts to the face generally take them out, but it wasn't particularly satisfying to shoot a guy wearing no headgear in the face 10 or so times before he would die.

One thing I hate about the Half-Life difficulty setting is that if you increase it the enemies get stronger, so this is even more of a problem. 

It's not like Half-Life(2) are the only games that suffer from that though, is it?
Stalker is shit for this. Assault rifle wielding 'zombies' that shoot with pinpoint accuracy, even on the lower skill settings, but take 3 shotgun shells at point blank range without flinching?
I mean most devs can't even spell playtesting. 

Quake is more realistic than Half-Life, after all. A shambler takes several double barrel shots to kill because a grizzly bear charging your ass takes several shots to kill, as Meriwether Lewis found out on that fateful trip.

A grunt and a dog go down with a single slug or two, and an enforcer who is more heavily armored takes a few more rounds than that to kill.

Then the fiend, being pretty much a leathery, perhaps eyeless, wolverine also takes many shots like the Shambler. This is due to a constant, likely arcane, adrenaline frenzy. 

I doubt it. 

Painkiller, Serious Sam, etc. Doesn't mean they're better by virtue of being fast paced.

P.S. A lot of interesting replies so far. And quite a few that have strayed away from Gameplay through to Story and Modifications ;) 

doom?? 

There was a nice map, from some speedmap package I think. Player inside a "bird-cage" (a _large_ one) was lowered to some kind of labirinth with fast moving blocks. Map was small, but it took me nice couple of minutes to figure out how to get out and then some more minutes to find the exit. I liked the idea and the scary part "is this the right way?" or "wtf? dead end? *gib*". 

Umm... it's worth to mention I think, one of my favorite maps in the past: The Well of Lost Souls. Good gameplay, few traps, great fight at the end and the start on some graveyard with "Abandon all hope".

And I like the buttons idea. It could be scary if you think about some machine, just standing there for 50 or 100 years, and it _just_ works when you start it. Like one said that there's a knight, standing behind a door. He's not from our world, he stands there for thousand years, covered with the dust, not even blinked once through all this time. But when you open this door, he's immediately ready to kill you. 

Always annoyed by the axe - you're a game stereotype futuristic soldier hitting another with a fireaxe in a two-handed swing.

The only trouble you'd have after the first hit would be dislodging the thing from between his vertabrae - you wouldn't have to smack away at him two or three times.

Maybe the grunts are full of adrenaline or whatever, but it should't give them iron skin. 

it's been a while since i played HL1 so can't recall, but were the skill levels basically like HL2 where a higher skill just meant your weapons had less effect on the enemies & theirs had more on you?

i remember reading this before playing HL2 and went straight for easy skill. i fail to see how either dying more often or increased enemy HP add to the fun factor at all? had the differences been in quantity of monsters (like quake) or enemy AI then i'd want to try it on multiple skills, but as it stands i have no desire to replay it on anything other than easy

i can't say i remember having issues with enemy HP in HL1 so i'm guessing it was the same 

ijed

The Quake dudes axe doesn't look particularly sharp. 

 

But it's still a lump of metal, or polygons.

At least it could be used to batter the enemies to death a bit better.

I agree with Romero in that the weapon balance of Q1 is crap, compared, say, to Doom.

There's almost no reason to use the SNG when you have a DBS - maybe when the map design breaks down and you're sniping an Ogre from range. Same for NG / SNG, but with even less utility.

The Doom Shotgun had a meatier punch and the DBS was a devastating weapon, offset by its very slow firing rate.

I'm not saying the Quake weapons should be Doomified, but they could be much better balanced to provoke tactical decisions. Which = fun. 

sielwolf: aint that the truth ;/

ijed: i'm working on rebalancing the weapons a tad for my episode.. the shotgun now has a tighter aim & does a little more damage. for the SNG i was considering making it scatter the nails a little, so the player has to choose between power & accuracy. the axe also does 2x the damage now & gibs zombies (thank you zer!)

i also thought about replacing the lightning gun with a low-end cell weapon, something like the gun the enforcer uses maybe 

That sounds good - pretty much what I have in mind for my own episode.

I haven't changed the weapons much as yet, apart from the axe (now Ogre chainsaw, gibs zombies). I've also tried to make a version of the Enforcer Blaster, but not to replace the LG, just to sit inbetween the SNG and GL as an extra weapon. 

Do you want to go onto the playtesters list?

I'll have a one map beta in the next couple of weeks. 

and the rest of the game stays pretty much unchanged you might want to change the visuals or sound of them to make the player aware that it's not business as usual 

bear makes an extremely important point. It was very hard to get some people to get this in a certain other game as there were multiple versions of the same weapon with the same graphic and name (except the other was capitalized) - and they had different behavior. 

it'd be cool if you could like cut the monster's hamstrings with the axe and have them move slower or something. or maybe it could just make them bleed for 25 damage every 2 seconds. give a chance to make them go into pain and also a decent amount of damage.

or like, in quoth, if the warhammer dazed monsters and made them move slower or increased the damage they recieved.

basically, anything to give an excuse to use melee weapons in the game.

doom chainsaw was kind of like that. it kept monsters in pain frames almost constantly, but was a little unpredictable because of the way it pulled you around and wasn't really an option with more than 2 monsters. 

Quick ideas to make the axe feel more useful - Monsters are more likely to go into pain frames when hit by the axe. Monsters receive triple damage from an axe hit if they're not in their running mode when initially struck.

The axe could make quicker successive strikes, up to 3 in a row, on a single target, or in a fan of 110 degrees, target up to 3 monsters to strike a single time, pausing briefly every few.

Not particularly Quakey, but it could make it more useful.

Also, holding attack when no monster is in melee range could have the player draw the axe up into an overhead strike for more damage, a la Morrowind (I loved doing that with the Last Rites). 

couple that hold fire for drawing a really good long two-handed log-splitter's overhead strike and a damage enhancer for non-alert monsters from the rear... (Think of the mapping potentials, for example coupled with invisibility!)

It gets complicated quickly though.

Btw chopping wood is one of the most therapeutic things ever. 

Good discussion. I wonder what will come of it.

Can't think of much more to say. 

And I like the buttons idea. It could be scary if you think about some machine, just standing there for 50 or 100 years, and it _just_ works when you start it. Like one said that there's a knight, standing behind a door. He's not from our world, he stands there for thousand years, covered with the dust, not even blinked once through all this time. But when you open this door, he's immediately ready to kill you.

This could work if the buttons gave the sound of some machinery turning etc, and/or if you could see part of it. Too many buttons have a line of "electrical" cable leading away from them, or just sit on some post like in Zer, and go "phhhht" when pressing. Well, I don't want to go there again.

I'd rather have doors "magically" opening (no buttons at all). This would go well with the "it's all inexplicable arcane forces at work" theory. If you're not supposed to know how stuff works, buttons are the worst thing you can do. :-P because it gives a super-simple explanation. ("it must be some machinery.")

Now if you indirectly admit the existence of machinery (buttons), think what a missed opportunity it is to not use that machinery to create atmosphere, by actually building it. 

There's the classic id texture of machinery that tended to be nearby any button operated door. Replacing it with some rotatings / chains / pistons embedded in the walls and floor.

Good idea. 

even keys are better than buttons that just go "phhhht".

For example in e1m2 there are 3 doors (4 if you count the exit, 5 if you count the fiend cell.)

One is a key door. Another two open magically. The exit opens magically (why is there even a door there...) and the fiend cell, which is not a player-route related door, does have a button which activates some floating blocks. At least. That's a bit thin, but it's enough. OK, it also moves the bars but they're right next to it.

The only other button extends the bridge, which is something I'm willing to assume a button could do. Especially since it's around the corner. A shootable trigger reveals the YA, which is rubbish but acceptable on the basis of being a game. (Human) Armor on some pedestal in the Quake world isn't very likely either.

Some secret doors (really moving walls) open by being shot (could be a breakable) and by approaching/magic. This is pretty much acceptable on the same basis as the YA thing: game gimmick.

Buttons that operate lifts are acceptable based on immediately interacting with something next to it, that obviously uses compressed air or whatever (sound.) The medieval lifts at least have the chain (?) sound, as do some doors. The press-style buttons don't fit them too well, levers would be better. So in this case, the lift _is_ the machinery and that's OK then. Buttons right next to their related door are rubbish on the other hand, at least in medieval maps, because they can open magically.

What I find hard to accept is that two buttons on opposite ends of the map just go "phhhht" and say "1 more to go..." and then some important door opens. This is a case where I'd personally like to see the thing that connects it all.

It works better in base maps, since we can assume there is electricity at work. But that's not so satisfying.

If you go "magic", you shouldn't use too many buttons at all IMO.

e1m3 has 3 doors that I can think of, 1 is a key door and 2 open magically. So that's in line with the "magic does it" approach. The button that opens the zombie closets below is a small miracle, though. Opening 4 doors would require quite some levers etc, and it being controlled from such a tiny button, with nothing else visible, is too much for me personally to believe.

well. I just find lonely buttons that do something on the other side of the room/map a bit hard to swallow. Except in base maps, where it's the more buttons, the merrier. 

And I like the buttons idea. It could be scary if you think about some machine, just standing there for 50 or 100 years, and it _just_ works when you start it. Like one said that there's a knight, standing behind a door. He's not from our world, he stands there for thousand years, covered with the dust, not even blinked once through all this time. But when you open this door, he's immediately ready to kill you.

I think this paragraph for me sums up Quake very well! Well done to the original author! 

id just removed the use button from quake to make it faster and more arcadey compared to doom (and wolfenstein) - it was pretty redundant anyway. :) 

That static discharge from the air to the ground
was not caused by the Gods being angry at you. 

Wii remote mod. With the axe.

I know people have been modding/hacking to get wii remotes to work on a pc.... ?

I mean the potential is endless!!
I recon a lot of people wlll have access to a wii remote too :) 

zomg, waayyy too hard. died twice before quitting, both before the five minute mark.
doesn't really feel like it's nonlinear because it's basically a one atrium map (as far as i got) and the options aren't really made obvious. the feeling was more.. well, i look around this corner, and there's some ogres, and then i'm practically forced to pursue that path because ammo is so sparse. no real choice at all :(

it also has fucked up d3 style teleporting monster right behind / in front of you places, and invisible teleporting places, and 'better don't fall into the lava while you balance over that beam while being followed by a death knight, and you only have 20 life left', oh, and don't forget the 'this jump looks like it's possible, but you won't make it, and there's slime below it in the dark and there will spawn several wizards while you frantically try to get out of that slime'. 

A lot of the bizarre nail traps the author claims were to alter bot navigation and keep them from always jumping into the slime, which I agree is rather dumb, and there are some cheap ambushes. What I like about it is the fact that, yes, it is a one atrium map, with a warren of unique side passages and spaces above you that you're continually unlocking and discovering ways into.

It's a concept I find myself wanting to explore - take what I thought was good about it and polish it, remove the gunk. What I'd aim for would be ways for the player to feel more and more sure of his navigation, having unlocked enough passages to essentially turn the map into a deathmatch level, except in a way that he still feels he needs to be ever on his guard. New caches of monster population can be left in unpredictable and not necessarily 'sensible' places, so that the player can't count on the assumption that an area is empty once it's empty, or on the equally predictable fill-the-last-room-once-the-player-has-found-they-key backtrack repopulation. 

Forgot to mention, he made it as a deathmatch map, hence the bot thing. I think as single player it actually works pretty well, and the deathmatch basis lends it a very unique sensibility a truly linear-minded single player mapper would never have discovered. 

that IS interesting.

The major issues that pop into my head are indeed:

1) choices need to be obvious (and deadends need to be kinda obvious, too e.g. his ssg deadend i didn't walk into at first because i decided to take another path, so i ended up not having the ssg the first try). This probably means emphasizing the doors to the alternatives with architecture and lighting, and it could in turn lead to interesting 'secret' paths that aren't emphasized, but not hidden in any other way.

2) the quake ammunition problem: in a lot of maps i find myself having just enough ammo + a dozen shots or so to finish all the enemies up to the next ammo pack (or i'm just using sg too much). This decourages peeking into alternative paths.

3) The gameplay/monster encounters should be 'predictable' from at least one corner ahead or so, so you can go back if you don't like the particular situation. If you had alternative routes in a d3 level, it wouldn't give you any advantage - you can't know what enemies will tele in before they're.. well, teleing in. E.g. in descent, there's often situations where you take a peek into a largish room, and find yourself up against a particularly tough robot (frmo that position!), so you look at the automap, see that the room's probably accessible from the other side and decide to go that way. Maybe it's just that: the fighting space needs to be predictable 

Nice idea with the Wii remote. There are some open projects to use the remote on standard PC. Like this one: http://wiiuse.net/ (and many more I think ;)

Also, there's a _nice_ idea by Johnny Chung Lee - "Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote" - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/People/johnny/projects/wii/ 

a friend who tried the headtracking; he was 'very underwhelmed'. it looks perfect in the video because the camera is tracked perfectly and it's just a 2d image, but your eyes would need two seperate images. 

Did raptor have anything more than just a raptor against humans?

Why not make some other suitable dinosaurs, possibly Strog-style / Edie style dinosaurs with cool weapons attatched...

Er, I've never made an mdl in my life, or any other kind of model using a wireframe, let alone gone through the painfull process of cell-by-cell anuimation, but I could try.

I.D.E.A. 

now this idea wont leave me
What about an open-world with some semi-random events combined with quake combat gameplay? Huge world to explore, very replayable, with NPCs and emergent gameplay.
I`v been thinking along the lines of 'stalker quake'. I even built a sort of a 'technology prototype'.

Bur Im pretty scared of the ammount of work it would take to make, and the tech difficulties I will run into. And Im not a coder at all... 

Ill map for a project like that!
Put me to work
AguirRe quake sounds like a perfect platform for such a project!
I wouldnt want to trade off too much detail for scale - I imagine small winding valleys and gulleys, a bit like the first level of SOE, or even the start of Carved in Flesh, only on a bigger scale?

Ooh! 

it uses q3 tech and nothing is defined 

....for president! 

You could extend that on a somewhat smaller scale by adding randomness to the regular game. Add a lot more traps and monster closets and such to your level but have them trigger randomly. That way the player would never quite know what to expect when playing through. 

Simply adding random events to a system won't lead to any meaningful emergent behaviour. For things to get interesting, you need to get your system into a state that is on the edge between order and chaos. There already are games that feature emergent behaviour. Sim City is an example.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence 

Oh sure, I wasn't saying that was a replacement for emergent behavior. Just that it was an interesting idea. 

that this concept is only valid if you can guarantee that the level is interesting enough that your audience is going to want to play it more than once. 

The imagination boggles! 

Im not going for any complex systems, 'living world' and 'fuzzy logic' - its just random numbers. ie the ogres wont simulate social life, hunt and wage a war on enforsers at the mood swings of their leader`s AI - there is just a probability of them wondering around and getting angry at anything in sight

but so far Im just dicking around with modelled terrain, hopefully getting it look as bad as rtcw/cod 

You guys are not so bad but I have read through many forum sites where everyone who post write in such a way that it would be safe to assume Daniel Dennett taught them all to roll over and play fetch. 

it will probably be very hard to make the behaviour not either

-totally random
-converge to certain places or set behaviours

but it could be cool to prototype it. It's probably very sensitive to tuning, and you'd have to be able to simulate with the game code separately.

Does q3 support heightmaps? And if you put fog can you load additional areas during runtime so huge maps are possible? 

cant answer yet

no streamloading, terrain is a mesh
big anough, like stalker maps 

definately can make nice terrain, but not streamload. but, well level connections aren't so bad, as long as there's a lot of them. 

(ijed) There's almost no reason to use the SNG when you have a DBS - maybe when the map design breaks down and you're sniping an Ogre from range. Same for NG / SNG, but with even less utility.

(rj) i'm working on rebalancing the weapons a tad for my episode.. the shotgun now has a tighter aim & does a little more damage. for the SNG i was considering making it scatter the nails a little, so the player has to choose between power & accuracy. the axe also does 2x the damage now & gibs zombies (thank you zer!)

Your fix will only end up exaggerating the problm that you are trying to fix. By making the SNG less reliable, and the shotgun more reliable, you give the player even less reason to use the SNG...

The SNG is a very tricky weapon to balance, and I think that part of the problem is the way that it is put into some maps. It often feels like it is arriving far earlier than I actually need it, and it only ends up making monsters a joke. The only time when it can be used without it being overkill is if you have several monsters that are attacking you, and would bring you down from a well protected 100h/150ya down to a very dead 0/0 before you can bring them down with other (weaker) weapons. And if the player is playing sensibly (by trying to stay alive and not rushing in head-first or trying to speedrun), then they should never be in that sort of position. It makes me wonder if the SNG is even worth putting into maps, or modifying to try to improve it. I don't think that there is any middle ground between it being "generally weaker than the SSG" and "overkill"... 

It makes me wonder if the SNG is even worth putting into maps

This statement worries me. Why?

The problem with basically all of the weapons below SNG is that they're all, well, quite shit. Before I continue, please understand that I'm talking about the "feel" and fun factor of the weapons more than their actual utility and effectiveness.

Axe: awesome in theory. Rubbish in practice given the absurdly weak damage and rather boring model. It's melee only, so I don't see why the damage wasn't higher (given the risk involved in using it).

Shotgun: In a word, pants. This is one of the shoddiest (heh heh) shotguns I've ever seen in any game. Crap model, weak sound, low damage, this one is so poor that it's essentially worthless (as a weapon to HAVE FUN with, again I'm not talking about actual usefulness).

SSG: This one is kind of fun simply because it is fairly effective (in single player, at least). However, compared to many (most) other video game SSG's, this one is pretty lame... it doesn't have any "oomph". It could use a beefier sound, and a bit more damage (even if that came at the cost of speed). Doom2 and Q2 shotguns were decent, what happened here?

Nailgun: The less said the better, really. Low rate of fire + weak damage + insubstantial/crap model = teh suck. At least the sound of the nails bouncing off the walls is cool... :)

SNG by comparison is the dog's bollocks! Awesome damage and ROF, sound is beefy and satisfying, and it has 4 barrels that spin around in a circle!?

Now obviously I understand that the weapons are meant to get progressively stronger as you obtain them, the problem is there's too big a jump between the "weak half" and the "strong half", and more to the point the lower ones feel gimped out because they're both less effective and less FUN to use (the feel just isn't there).

In conslusion... well... I actually don't have a point. I'm just complaining. 

In terms of feel and satisfaction, Quake's weapons were a step down from the awesomeness that was the Doom1/2 arsenal. Doom 2's DBS still holds its ground as one of the meatiest and most satisfying FPS weapons ever, although the DBS from the Doom 3 missionpack was a fairly decent tribute.

Quake 2 was a step in the right direction, as things got louder and beefier, but then Quake 3 dropped it right back down into soft plastic nerf gun territory. Pretty sad that the most significant feedback you got from the Quake 3 weapons was that little "beep" it did to tell you that you hit someone.

Doom 3 struck a largely underwhelming middle ground that probably veered mostly into toy gun territory, with a couple of exceptions. The shotgun felt chunky I guess, and the plasma gun felt like a plasma gun. Were there other guns? I dunno I didn't use them. 

I like those lower end weapons. I think the sounds and enemy reactions and deaths in Quake are good enough that there is enough of a payoff to use a ng or shotgun. Also, those weapons are pretty good at range and are essential when you don't have sng or rl.

By the way, I'm sure everybody here has a feel for how long to hold down fire before releasing it and watching the last nail finish off the ogre they were shooting by now. That's a pretty satisfying feeling too, and only available with the sng AND regular ng. 

Quake's low quality (in terms of khz) sound seems meatier somehow than the clear sound of modern games, and I think that helps the weapons feel better. Sure, the low end aren't as awesome as say a quad sng or rl, but I think they all shit on the feel of the q3 weapons and shouldn't be compared :)

Q2 SSG was niiice btw. Massively powerful close up and with a nice beefy firing sound. RL was pants though :( 

if the shotgun model and sound was a pistol cause that's what it really is gameplay wise and the double barrel was a regular shotgun.
Ok, then there's the ammo issue but anyway... 

i replaced my q1 SG/SSG sounds with the below modified quake 2 samples, if anyone's interested:

http://isoterra.co.uk/stuff/shotgf1b.wav
http://isoterra.co.uk/stuff/sshotf1b.wav 

Axe: shit. Next to useless. A joke.

Shotgun: Terrible (and annoying)
DBS: Good, one of the better weapons, but pales in comparison to the same thing in Doom and Q2
Nailgun: Good. I like the model, I like the slower speed of fire so you can actually see the projectiles. I enjoy spamming low level monsters with it.
SNG: Shit model, shit generally. I actually prefer the nailgun.
GL: Awesome
RL: Overpowered for SP, great for DM
LG: Good

Q2's arsenal was way better. I hated the hyperblaster, and the machine gun was gay, but other than that I thought it was well balanced. Q3's was even better I thought - sure they fucked up the GL HORRIBLY (it was still useful in Q2), but they did manage to balance the Q1 RL and the Q2 Railgun in one game. 

is that they didn't even bother giving it an impact sound when you hit flesh. Genius. 

the balanced weapon set is a GOOD thing.

I don't get what the problem with the sg is, though.sure it doesn't feel that 'right', but it's a nice weapon and very useful in places.

the q3 gl is, well, bouncy. a bit too random :( 

That Q2 had a good weapon set. The DBS and RG were good, the rest was pretty pathetic in just about every department - audio, video and gameplay.

My current project replaces the axe with an ogre chainsaw, as I mentioned a while ago, but changing the other weapons isn't somthing I want to do just yet.

The weapon set could have been better done (I reckon its more to do with the balance of damage done verses the monsters) but if they're used well by the mapper then they're still good. 

have never really got the "slot 1" weapon right IMO.

Enough said about Quake's axe. In Q2 we had that stupid peashooter, but I'd have prefered a blunt melee weapon - a broken-off length of concrete rebar for example - to bludgeon things to death with up close.

Doom 3 dropped the ball even further with the utterly pointless "fists" - why the hell not just give the player a wrench? Half the zombies are carrying one. Shooting slow zombies with a pistol was shit, I'd have much prefered to have just wandered up to them and bashed their skulls in with a bit of rusty metal. Ok, we eventually got the chainsaw, but at that point in the game I had so much shotgun ammo that I never had a reason to use it. 

Oh come on, the Q2 Chaingun was freaking great, hand grenades were cool, rocket launcher was different but well balanced, the Q2 GL was good...

Kinn:
Yeah the only good melee weapon in their games is the Doom chainsaw. I don't understand why they always make the melee weapon such crap, it wouldn't unbalance the game to have a powerful melee weapon. 

has a nice slot 1 weapon imho. it needs skill and can be effective in certain situations. 

"Doom 3 dropped the ball even further with the utterly pointless "fists" - why the hell not just give the player a wrench? Half the zombies are carrying one. Shooting slow zombies with a pistol was shit, I'd have much prefered to have just wandered up to them and bashed their skulls in with a bit of rusty metal. Ok, we eventually got the chainsaw, but at that point in the game I had so much shotgun ammo that I never had a reason to use it."

Because it was Doom. :) You had fists in Doom1 and Doom2 so it follows... 

Chaingun - too much flash, not enough bang, when compared to doom 1/2. The windup meant it could have done more damage or had a higher rate of fire, but it was normalised for some pussy reason.

Grenades - pretty good, but why are they still selectable when I have the GL? More importantly, why does my current weapon and item change to grenades when picking up new ones (from 0)?

Rocket Launcher just sounded and looked weak. Gameplay was alright.

I know these might sound like petty nit-picks but when its an FPS the first thing they should nail is the weapon loadout. The best weapon of the lot was definately the RG, a great evolution of the straight line weapon from Q1.

If you compare the standard q2 weapons with say, the Awakening set then there's no comparison. "What the hell were they thinking!?" was what a friend of mine said when we set up an Awakening LAN - talking about the original weapon loadout. 

I just don't see it. I hated Q2's clean/boring theme, even Q4 was more grisly/conventional id, but I really enjoyed the DM. Sure, Q3 topped it, but even now I am surprised by how enjoyable Q2DM is.

One thing which always strikes me as shitty is that they never really got monsters into Q3. Fighting monsters in Q3 would have been great. 

The guys who made the only SP mod for Quake3 - The Dark Conjunction.

It wasn't too bad, lots of bugs in the monsters and strange behaviours, but it was basically three of them in a cupboard for six months. I remeber the explanations of how they made the npc's work. They had to sit them on top of invisible trains so they could move (!) with pathfinding having to be made from scratch as well since it's based on item placement in the original.

Apparantly the end boss had a bug in the final build where if you didn't dodge it couldn't hit you, so they had to wake the programmer up after no sleep for a few days.

It's a pretty stylish tc, but the monsters are irritating.

Also, SidRial (other q3 tc) doesn't count because it only had traps.

They're the same guys working on this http://www.aceteam.cl/zenoclash/ but with a bigger team. 

While I respect the shitload of work they must have put both into that TC and to their current project, after checking out that site I have to say..

Holy Flinstones! 

Dark Conjunction is very :(((( 

they were rather nice in multiplayer because you could cook them and throw them so they would explode almost as soon as you let go, so you could catch people unawares and get them even if they dodged the grenade itself. 

But they did have monsters in q3. 

Does serve as a decent template for developing Single Player games and mods for the Q3A engine as the code is available for it, despite the aesthetic displeasure that game can give you.

The Dairyman site which is oriented towards single player game code is also worth checking out if you are into that sort of thing. 

is the best base for developing single player mods/games for the Q3A tech 

. 

Got em.

Did think this thread was never really concluded.

Reading back I see that I kind of derailed it by mentioning TDC. Stand by what I say though - it was the only mod to put singleplayer into Q3, doesn't matter how fucked alot of it was, there was an SP game there.

Here's a breakdown of what I've got atm;

Monsters:
I have z aware ogres, I tried it for the zombies but then lost the code doing a rollback, I mean to replace it. Didn't make a big difference but they played more real. Ogres made a big difference. They can hit you no matter where you are, but they don't lead there shots. Always thought it was strange that they have this complicated weapon but don't know what gravity is.

The Hk now uses all his animations for various attacks on the same theme - same as in Travail, courtesy of Patrick Martin's code.

Grunts use a slide, similar to the scrag but floorbound.

New Monsters:

Axegrunt - stole the idea from concentric, but they're now just grunts instead of knights with a different skin. Easy to kill and don't do much damage, but when placed well they're about as dangerous as normal grunts, discounting long range grunt sniping.

Berserk Ogre - No GL, two chainsaws, so does damage more consistently in his anims. I upped the damage a bit because the fat git is a bit slow to be dangerous. Really he needs to surprise the player or be in hordes. A bit of variation, really.

Player:
Chainsaw replaces axe, basically a copy of the Ogre version, but it gibs zombies after three hits.

That's it for code changes. I've toyed with various ideas but don't want to just vomit creativity onto a piece of white paper. When there's a need in the maps I might try some other stuff.

Having said that, some of these ideas came from things I always wanted Quake to do - is there anything anyone here always wanted to see in Quake? Nothing brand new, just behaviours that weren't believable or seemed stupid.

Fiends getting stuck I can't really help, but if anyone has any advice on that then cool. 

I hate z-aware ogres. Just like strafing grunts. I like them a bit stupid. With puppy-eyes and clumsyness. It's a huge part of the attractivity of Quake for me. 

was for running around te levels slicing away to se how far you could get otherwise known as a
"axerun"
but ofcourse you use the shotgun for secrets and explodeboxes ...and scrags ofcourse

and personally the ng is the only wep i usually use for the game
cool sound
cool model/animations
cool effects 

So it probably won't be liked then. Ah well, thanks for feedback in any case. 

Thought a bit.

Spirit,

fair enough, but I don't like being able to ignore ogres because they're too stupid to aim at me.

Then strafing grunts thing is something I might remove, I need to send out the betas for gameplay feedback. When they're done, that is.

meTch,

Sounds like you're talking about competition stuff there. That's fair enough, but I'm aiming for a more immersive sense of place than the original levels present in current FPS design.

Everyone's got their own style. In third party maps I like using the scrag groups to hurt each other before chucking a grenade into the cluster for some chunky gib rain. 

I hate z-aware ogres

it's crap the default behaviour can be exploited so easily, neutralizes completely their main strength.

The previous discussion about weapons I found quite interesting; at release time many were still playing with the keyboard only.

The question might be how to enhance them without turning Quake into Halo15 with crap like alt-fire etc.


Ijed: looking forward to your mod :) 

But next build maybe a month. 

the double chain saw Ogre :) The Ogre replacement I'm working on has talons set on the pinky. I would show the concept art, but its only rough and functional and only exist for alignment purposes in Blender. 

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/concept2_2.jpg 

Quite as creative as yours (all I did was c+p the chainsaw and 'animate' it) but he's working, anyhow;

http://shub-hub.com/index.cgi?action=uploadcomplete&serial=5bac275dfd77138ea59c78bbe5acfd38b82a99fc&numfiles=1&elapsedsecs=1&totalsize=31361&somefileswereblocked=&action=upload&f1name=ogreb.JPG&f1urlpath=%2fimages%2f&f1size=30524&

Are you think metal for the talons, Edie / Q2 style, or organic? 

Recall the alien weapons in System Shock 2 you could specialize in? The monsters in that game didn't really match the weapons in design temperament, but here I look at most of the monsters as extensions of weapon types.

Oh, and here is the Scag replacement :)

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/Naga.jpg 

A bit . . . Legend of Zelda - need to see it with a suitably evil and blood splatterd Quake skin. I know it's an early version but maybe make it a bit more emaciated and bony as well?

The SS2 organic weapon was it? Can't really remember. Or was it that crystal thing that you put together piece by piece? 

make it POINTIER! 

give it some tallon claw tings on its hands with som barb-like thinngs stikking oot ...oh and make them bloody 

http://lunaran.com/pics/ogrehard.gif 

 

What about Quake DM? What features define that gameplay?

If you would want to translate that to a modern game, for instance, the new Id Tech 5. What would you need to make that gameplay feel like Quake DM? 

Ok, so I need to put him in a level with flashing coloured lights, then. 

The red armor and the rocket launcher. Mostly. 

I've been thinking about is replacing the tenticle arms with needled fans of the Pan's Lybrinth like variety. Could be a good weapon to replace the spit attack too.

A bit . . . Legend of Zelda - need to see it with a suitably evil and blood splatterd Quake skin. I know it's an early version but maybe make it a bit more emaciated and bony as well?

I like the bony, emaciated idea, and it probably will look more so when I simplify the body a bit. I haven't played Zelda, but they were probably using Nagas too. They come from Hindu historical literature, I believe. 

The wings that made me think that, but like I say its an easy parallel to make.

How are you thinking the attack - being spat, or thrown? 

then she whips the fans forward for the attack as she hisses at you.

Lol Lun! Partying Ogre Style! 

Better than the Scrag's shoulder bullets thing. 

I don't think that using the downward swing to fast its flame attack is very effective. I'd much prefer to see something else used there. Also, he has several sword movement anims while running, and some are similar to his magic anims, so maybe enabling him to run and shoot? 

"NIET" to z-aware Ogres!! 

z-aware ogres PWN your arse and you know it XD 

make the ogre marksman z-aware, and visually differentiate them a bit, with a different colored jacket or something. They're the smart ones, then. 

make the ogre marksman z-aware, and visually differentiate them a bit, with a different colored jacket or something. They're the smart ones, then.

That's what we did with the quoth flak ogre. 

He works fairly well in that he becomes less predictable, but its not such a great change as z-aware ogres (although they stay in). Basically for his magic attacks he does a standard spread, vertical version and direct shot (straight line). His close combat attacks are expanded to use all anims as well, with slight differences in the when and how much damage factors, but mainly a visual difference.

What I should do is have him only use the vertical flame attack when the player is above or below him - z-aware hellknights anyone?

Allowing him to run and shoot is a pretty large gameplay change, I reckon.

I like Z-aware ogres - I now see the old ones as unfinished code. You get used to them. In base progs everone ignores the Ogres - normally you just let them get on with their thing on the upper levels, because their grenades are only dangerous if you're stood in the wrong place. When they actually aim at you you have to treat them as an active enemy instead of something to kill later on, in many cases when you're on the same vertical level as them.

The different skin solution seems a bit odd, tbh. If there's both types in a level it's more of a confusion for the player to adapt to the new ones - red ones aim at me, green ones aim at the horizon.

I'm not wanting an argument - this is the way I'm building my mod - but opinions are good. I can see there's going to be a problem with the Ogres . . . 

smart ogres and dual chainsaw ogres sounds cool

also i like the axe but a chainsaw sounds cool to

but will the shamber have larger claws? like how he holds his hands up so his points are facing up, will the points reach to his mid arm...err .. elbow? 

sorry but i just wanna say im looking forwards to this mod a bit :) 

While I agree with bambuz that Quake DM is largely defined by the RL and RA, keep in mind that it has a very unique movement set (bunny). 

Changes to the Shambler - not necessary, IMHO.

You'll have to wait quite a while. 

:D :D :D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m96AsXjUMhk

Yup 

 

What's the general opinion on Vomitii? 

monster in Quake mapping, other than the guardian from Dissolution of Eternity, both creatures get worse press than they deserve, and conversely the ogres are way overrated. 

Ogres are overused because they're fairly multifunctional, apart from the aforementioned aiming dumbness.

I never really played the expansions much, I always preferred the community stuff. Think I'll give them a look now though for resources / ideas. 

to move the discussion along with a little heresy . . . 

A monster that leaps quickly and spastically at you, but also explodes fatally when you kill it, is pretty clearly a bad idea. It's telling that Romero's main intent when he came up with them was "this'll really fuck with the keyboarders!"

I'd do one or the other, but not both in one monster. The kamikazes in Serious Sam lent some nice tension without being overly cruel, even if the sequences they were in were pretty stiff shooting galleries, and the fast headcrabs in HL2 were also good without also killing you when you finally nailed one with the shotgun.

I forsee a revival of the original plan for the vomitus - a slow but deadly exploding monster that vomits out the small fast spawns that don't explode.

(Isn't 'tarbaby' kind of a racial pejorative?) 

I've revived a version of the Vomitus that gobs zombie gibs and bursts into damaging gibs when it dies - kind of like a polyp, but has a bigger splat if gibbed with a rocket.

It was originally supposed to create spawns? Bloody hell.

I like exploding tarbabies / spawn - although granted, for keyboarders they're probably not much fun.

The name Tarbaby - kind of like Goomba's.

And I reckon this thread is the place for heresey. 

Anyone know where I can get the source for Scourge of Armagon?

Spike Mines. 

There's a hipqc on quake's, but you have to search
http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/idstuff/quake/
meanwhile, here you are...
http://members.home.nl/gimli/HIPSPIKE.QC 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/Hipqc.zip 

Cool:

Spawn (being well used these days)
Vomitus
Ogres
Spike Mines

Uncool:

DOE Guardians (crappy, ugly, badly themed anti-Quake bollox)

Jury's still out:

Z-Axis Ogres or whatever the fuck they're called. 

I've downloaded the source now, but the qc that you looks to be the gremlin or fiend - odd.

The guardian - thats the egyptian enemy? always thought they were crap, tbh. And a bit gay.

The Vomitus and Zombies are also z-aware, though I'm thinking to cap their max throw distance so they hit the ceiling less. 

How do I open the Resource.7 files? 

Hipqc.zip is packed with winrar. 

(Isn't 'tarbaby' kind of a racial pejorative?)

It comes from folk lore:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br'er_Rabbit

term refers to a type of trap which describes the hellspawn though they don't actually stick to you. The id guys were probably thinking of a bugs bunny version of this where the tarbaby was a lit piece of dynamite that the antogonist could not shake off once he grabbed it. Boom! 

It was winrar that reported the file as corrupt. 

used to be the enemy everybody hated. But, they can be used (and as shambler says, have been used) well, and they are great for causing panic.

Also, spike mines are simple and cool. 

Sweet mother of christ when will this madness stop?!?!

Actually I think they'd be a lot better balanced as z-aware than the Ogres would... 

stop being a pussy and admit you only don't like z-awareness because you suck :p 

Has anyone worked on making the monsters hunt in packs, or any sort of group behavior? 

yes, my homepage got overloaded.

Try again, it's right now. 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/doe_qc 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/doe_qc.zip 

when I'm soberer

Inertia, like I'm always banging the drum for - lazarus q2.

They had damage groups. When an enemy gets hit by another it gets angry at it, damage groups meant that one group could get angry at a singular other enemy. It was meant so that a player couldn't snipe a group with the railgun without the others waking up.

Thanks for the link Madfox, I'll check try and integrate it tommorow, on hangover sunday. 

I think that making ogres z-aware shouldn't be the same thing as making them infallible, continuous dropshot lobbing monsters. Sometimes it looks a bit odd when they're actually firing down a flat long corridor and the regular shot would work fine, but they lob into the ceiling instead. What I would try is:

1. Have them check the intersection point of the regular shot trajectory with the ground level they are standing on (might have to go 1 unit below to deal with the edge case). If this is solid, then take a regular shot, and if it's non solid assume you need to lob. This is obviously a fairly crude decision process, but places it might break down like broken ground/uphill will only look as odd as it did before one way or the other.

2. Have the ogre decide the elevation in advance. Make a separate function that calculates elevation, and call it from say two attack frames before the grenade is fired(is that ogre_nail2 ?). Then store that elevation in an unused field on the ogre, and use the value when you fire. Of course, y-axis yaw should still be tracked accurately, that would be a penalty too far.

I'll admit I've not gone away to create and test an ogre like this, but I think it might help them feel less robotic in the way they aim. At the same time, it wouldn't revert back to the point of being safe from an ogre simply by putting a chasm between it and you. 

I should make them check for low-lying beams etc. since that's their foul-up atm. I've compensated by not placing Ogres in places where it's shown off, fairly crude, but it works.

Madfox, you posted DOE instead of SOA . . . no mines :(

I tried the older link and it gives me an error message in Dutch (?). 

alright, then I started searching on the game org.
Here's your part for DOE as well SOA qc.

http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/more_idstuff/

I couldn't find your spike mine either, might be encapsulated in one of the other files. 

Was in items, thanks again Madfox.

Now to integrate it. 

think the firs qc I offered was the real spike mine.

It has an substitutional qc as the gremlin, but then I realized it would only work in order with the whole qc script. 

Has anyone worked on making the monsters hunt in packs, or any sort of group behavior?

kell and i had several ideas about something like this but nothing ever came of it.

i'd love to see a boss that uses minions in some creative way.

i liked the guardian in d3 because it's sight depended on the seekers. i think something like this, but much more complex could be cool.

i'd also love to see bosses with phases, healing, interruptible abilities or something... 

has the zombie master, but that is simply a creature that ports in zombies.

Over the past few weeks I have revisited Max Payne 2, and played Gears of War. After dealing with frustrating bosses I have to conclude one of Quake's strengths and an element that helps the game flow is the absence of serious boss monsters until the very end. There is Chthon, but he isn't that big of a deal to fight.

It has led me to redesign the hub scenario I am fiddling with because boss fights just stop everything in their tracks until the fight is resolved. It seems to me that better game flow can occur by allowing the player to work the boss fights around
his personal schedule of play.

How many people have dropped a game altogether because of the boredom and tedium of a boss fight? I would have likely stopped playing GoW but I called my nephew up to come over and fight it out for me. Not that I couldn't do it, I just despise repetition. I probably have a condition that is the exact opposite of obsessive compulsion whatever that may be :) 

...boredom and tedium of a boss fight...

I think you can make a non-boss climax just as boring, tedious, hard, or frustrating as any boss fight. I've played some giant horde endings to levels that i had to play through 3 or 4 times, and they're long, and tedious, too.

And surely if you can make a fun horde finale, you can make a fun boss fight.

I think quake would benefit by more good bosses. 

should of had some sort of boss, due to it was the more metal theme

metal refering to the original map types
base
metal
midevil

at least i think that was the episode

also i have z aware ores andzombies

where zombies are no a problem due to unintentional fast move ment making them hard to hit, strifing all round
the ogres on the other hand i have seen the beam problem where they will shoot it too high and hit a beam and bounce it on to them selves,
but when there health rech lower than 25 they start shooting and strifing round like crazy, all the monsters due that now, the draw backs i have ran into was the knight and the fish, the fish are fine now but the knight runs in to a problem where i had to give him a th_missile attack and now when hes far away hell start slashing, so i might try and make him fore some kind of spike :P 

but I just saw HT's new Scrag and simply had to comment.

Quake's hordes should defy explanation. The scrag is scary because it flies without the aid of [big butterfly] wings, and doesn't have any arms. It's like a ghost.

Quake's anatomy should always be slightly questionable. 

Like Fiend and Shambler and Vores WITHOUT EYES.

The essence of Quake. 

I think quake would benefit by more good bosses.

I agree with this, but I feel there are some barriers which are difficult to overcome. The best bosses are designed with their environment in mind - the map and the boss as designed in tandem. So some sort of compilation mod containing 10-15 ready made bosses for quake isn't going to produce great results.

On the other hand, if a boss was made specifically for one map, then one benefit is uniqueness; the reward for reaching the end of the map is something you've never seen before. The problem of course is that you need to have co-operation between a modeller/animator/coder and a mapper. I wouldn't mind giving this a go though, if someone had a map in the early stages and an idea of a boss.

In terms of gameplay, there's one question I'd like to ask about making quake bosses. Typically when you face a boss in quake there's no reason not to just continually fire on them with your most powerful weapon. What ways are there to break up this pattern? 

Firstly I pretty much loathe boss combats that are all based around some gimmick that involves not fighting the boss i.e. somehow know in advance that you have to destroy some arbitrary power crystal that looks like every other sodding part of the boss arena whilst getting pwnd by 200% damage projectiles and balancing on beams above lava. Fuck that shit homie.

Other options.

1. Boss manouverability / teleportation.

2. Other monsters present.

3. Varying boss vulnerability to weapons.

4. Necessity to use enviroment to help destroy boss (not total reliance).

5. Boss actually not very tough but very dangerous so tables have turned to survive rather than just shoot. 

Descent teleporting bosses have:

1. Boss manouverability / teleportation.
latter, kinda slow.
2. Other monsters present.
Some bosses even generate monsters.
3. Varying boss vulnerability to weapons.
Large invulnerable spots on the front. Sound is VERY important here though, descent has one default 'can't shoot this' sound all the time.
4. Necessity to use enviroment to help destroy boss (not total reliance).
Various goodies, missiles, invis, invulnerables in secret rooms around the boss room. This isn't what you meant though?

In descent it works kinda great, the bosses are the enemies you need to be most careful about, and they're fucking tough, but still managable, and very rewarding.

They're mostly very dangerous, but the levels don't just drop you in one giant room with em with no way to go, so you can see how you kill them best, etc. The room itself mostly has hiding places, etc. They're never just a box. 

I think quake would benefit by more good bosses.

I think Quake would benefit from nicer AI. Cleverer animation. Quality sound effects.
I know it's been done before, but it would be nice. 

Typically when you face a boss in quake there's no reason not to just continually fire on them with your most powerful weapon. What ways are there to break up this pattern?

Selective monster/weapon interaction maybe? like shamblers taking 1/2 damage from asplosions. Your boss could be immune to lightning, or nails could ricochet off of him. Stuff like that encourages a certain weapon set/play behavior without absolutely requiring special behavior X (like chthon).

You can also reduce the player's stores of ammo by throwing cannon fodder at him for a while. If players tend to have too many grenades before a boss fight because you overused ogres early on, just make him wade through a sea of zombies, for example. A pair of shamblers will encourage the player to burn his nails/cells pretty quick too. 

I like having to lure bosses in to specific areas of the environment to reveal their weakness, as long as it's logical [and therefore obvious] enough. Somebody earlier mentioned making a level that involves discharging the LG in the water with a pentagram, so perhaps a boss that you can lure in to the water would be good? Obviously you'd have to script it so that the pent doesn't become available until the boss is in the water [perhaps it smashes some bars that made it previously inaccessible].

I quite enjoyed the big dragon at the end of the Rogue Mission Pack. Gravity Belt + Large Open Space + Fire Breathing Dragon = FUN. Shame about all the lava.

The best boss monster I've ever come across in any game would have to be the three tentacles in a giant silo half way through HL1, but that sort of thing requires complexity that would just seem out of place in Quake's dimension. 

well ever sence i have messed with the ai i came to a bug, but more like a feature where chantion moves around in his lava, his move ments are kinda creepy and somtimes he will move in your way if the path and get his hit box to stop you, then u r dead cos u cant get by him 

Quake would benefit from nicer AI
See Nehahra. Most people seem to dislike the new monster behavior because they want to play Quake like they're used to - predictable.

An unknown but potentially cool boss has just been discovered at Quaddicted: The Anaconda. Nothing too special in the end, but impressive wakeup animation.

Initially unkillable monsters roaming the levels or chasing the player should be used more often. As for bosses, some slight modifications to the standard ones might make for an interesting change already. Obstacle monsters like the HL silo tentacles or the Xen trees are nice, too. 

This afternoon I've been playing around with a new monster idea.

Monster Name: DreadGhast

When veteran deathknights have achieved all they can with the sword, they have been known to sever their own arms and legs in order to better hone their extra sensory powers. These 'DreadGhast' as they have become known by the few who have survived an encounter with one, have learned to levitate and are now capable of ten times the firepower they once were. Should you manage to bring one to the brink of death, then in one last vitriolic act he will erupt in a beautiful but deadly lightshow.

Attack1: The same fiery excretion as a DeathKnight, but more trails get fired in one shot. Can also fire whilst moving.
Attack2: Suicide bomb. DreadGhast only resorts to this when reduced to 1 HP. Body explodes, releasing a volley of above mentioned fiery trails in all directions.

Behavior: Floats around at slightly slower speeds than a scrag, but can take much more damage [three times that of a DeathKnight].

I've also used my very limited modeling knowledge to edit the DK model:

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a155/text_fish/DreadGhast01.jpg

I'll work on a proper skin at some point too.

Any opinions on the general idea? 

Three times of a DK's health is a lot (750HP), I'd suggest giving him 450 (slightly more than the vore) or something. Also, getting an enemy down to 1HP doesn't happen very often, personally I'd rise that to 10% of his starting health (whatever you decide it to be).

Otherwise it's a fine idea. 

I thought I might be going a little bit wild with the HP. :P

Good idea about the 10%. Thanks for the feedback! 

I like Armagon a lot :) 

the model and idea are pretty cool, a floating torso seems pretty Quakey. Perhaps some particles moving around him. And part of his skin looking whiteish like the wizard. Lower part perhaps. 

give him a blood trail i guess, i think u can do that in qme 

 

I'd like more bosses in Quake as well. I'll be making one for my pack, but not yet.

I reckon they should have the puzzle solving element of the original 2 and not be killable conventionally, but there's no need for such a behavior to be irritating. 

but it could work in quake. People will often achieve snake/sandworm kind of things by having a bunch of segments that are all unconnected models but move in a line, with one following the next and a head at the end that drives the whole thing. 

 

I have disturbing yet fond memories of the fucking noise that thing made. 

Between bang and clang.

It was a bit crap in Xen and the desert where it was just tapping on the rocks / sand. 

That's an interesting sound hint. 

How about a mapping scenario which would require some progs jiggery-pokery - a "migration"!

You could have (for example) a ravine/gorge environment with a constant supply of monsters (say feinds for example) running into the map at one end through - for example - a cave exit which is too high up for the player to reach.
The feinds would then run through the entire length for the map, probably following a series of path_corner type entites to an exit at the other end. The exit could be at the other side of a deep trench, the monsters having to go through a monster_jump entity so that they could reach an exit which the player wouldn't be able to.

The players mission could be to carry out a mission for another exit, fighting humans or other non-migratory beings with the constant trickle of feinds running through the map. The emphasis being on running.

Or it could be a survival mission, with little weaponry and other monsters placed around the map.

Migratory monsters would only attack if attacked, returning to the path after their attacker is killed (in the instance of infighting)

Is their any way of doing this without new progs, Quoth or otherwise. It wouldn't be too difficult using the info_multispawn so long as THREE things I guess:

1 - the monster will move towards the first path_corner when spawned.

2 - the monster will spawn RUNNING

3 - the monster will not attack thre player on sight.

Please help me obtain fruition! I would love to put something like this in me episode... 

Fucking cool idea, Ricky! I love the idea of having a trickle of fiends creeping up behind you at all times. Keeps you moving and keeps you on edge constantly. That would be a neat element in any map, really. Monsters that walk a very long path and are continually spawning to fill up their ranks if any are killed. Would add a lot of randomness to the level.

I did a bunch of that sort of thing in 'White Room' although it might not have been too apparent. I have wandering code that makes monsters wander around instead of waiting for you to show up. Every monster was in motion when you encountered it in 'White Room'. I think that sort of thing is a lot more interesting than the norm. 

sitting around thinking about stuff... imagine this:

boss monster with unspecified normal projectile and melee attacks.
boring, but here's the interesting part. The attacks do a fair amount of damage but decent armour (green or yellow) is provided (that respawns) along with lots of megahealths (that also respawn).
the respawn time is short enough that getting health isn't really a problem.
the boss, unfortunately, has a self heal that can only be stopped by using explosives on it as well as a special attack.
the special attack is a stacking effect that gradually reduces the amount of health the player gets when they pick up a health pack.
So, let's say it does the special attack every 15 seconds (it is NOT avoidable).
each 'stack' of the effect reduces health gains by 5% (additive).

this means that after 5 minutes, the player would not receive ANY health when picking up health packs.

the challenge would be the race to blow the shit out of the guy while stopping it from healing with explosives before you stop being able to get health. 

special attack goes like this:

you start the fight, a mega health gives you 100HP.

after 1 attack, you only get 95% health so a MH gives you 95HP.
after 2 attacks, you only get 90%.
3 = 85%
4 = 80% and so on and so forth. 

another interesting idea would be to make use of the side effect of picking up many different mega healths.

in case you aren't aware of it, each time you pick up a different MH, the 'tick down' effect is added, so if you pick up 2 mega healths, your health ticks down twice as fast. if you pick up 10 MHs, you health will drop very quickly back to 100.

imagine a shambler like lightning attack but with a longer 'charge up' time.
the attack only hits once, but hits for between 150 damage.

NO armour is provided and should be stripped away preferably with a lot of trash fights with lots of health but not much room to avoid damage before entering the fight with the boss.

basically, another arena fight but with mega healths placed evenly around on fairly long respawn timers. (say 30 seconds).

the trick is that you want to make sure you are topped up with more than 150 health at all times so that you don't get instantly killed if you don't dodge the attack. the problem is the more MHs you pick up, the faster your health ticks down, so eventually you'll be picking them up faster than they respawn. the only thing is that if your HP drops below 100, the tick down effect is cleared, so if you do get hit and you are over 150 hp, the health 'degredation' is cleared and you can slow down the rate you pick up MHs. 

then there's this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbcC8qd7Zw
i won't explain it right now, because i'm curious to see if anyone can figure out what's going on. o.o 

i welcome interesting boss fights. When designing them, you should be asking yourself what it means to the player -- what strategy is needed to win? Is it possible to figure out, and is it fun to actually do it? And does the boss really need to be that complicated to achieve that gameplay experience.

For example, your first boss takes 3 paragraphs to explain, and the resulting player strategy is just "blow the shit out of the guy, but save your rockets for use only when he's healing."

Okay, that sounds interesting but maybe a simpler boss design can provide the same strategy, and as a bonus will be easier for players to understand. For example, bosses in quake don't have visible health meters, so any healing effect won't be clear to players.

How about a group of like, 5-10 enemies, and if any of them are dead one of the other bosses will periodically attempt to ressurect any fallen comrades, and an explosion will interrupt the spell. Resurrection is visually very obvious (unlike healing) and the spell-casting effect could also be pretty obvious. The only thing that might be hard to guess is that explosions are necessary to stop the spell.

Now, you could communicate health if you had a series of like, 8-10 pain skins, each where the boss looks more damaged than the last. Then when he heals, there is a visible reversal of the damage. 

actually... i've been thinking of just making a sprite that looks like a health bar that hovers over a boss' head... o.o 

There was a "health bar above monster head" mod at Inside3D about 4 years ago. 

those skingroups that are being discussed in the modelling thread to implement damage skins? Possible? 

No, because they automatically animate - like a flip book. You can't control when each skin in the group shows up, other than controlling the timing of the frames. 

We were thinking of having pain skins, but there's multiple gameplay problems (no technical ones). It drags up locational damage and stuff counter to immersion. At least we're all used to not being able to blow a grunts arm off.

Shooting a Q2 enforcer in the legs to have his head vanish is still goofy.

Granted that's model changes, but the same applies to the Q2 pain skins. 

Having a 'health crystal' lodged in the bosses forehead that changes colour is pretty straightforward, though more arcadey.

And nope, they only automatically animate if part of a skin group - they can also be separated into different groups in the same way as normal frames. 

Quake 1's weapons are sufficiently lacking in finesse [no sniper rifles etc.] to get away with general blood spatter and changes in facial expression on the skins. Bullet holes would indeed be somewhat jarring though. 

Is there anyway if incorporating a health bar as a gif in the HUD? Or, how about something like the flickering skull that appears in the upper corner when Quake is running s-l-o-w? The background could fill up slowly with blood as damage is dealt.

BTW, the Anubis-mummies in Hexen 2 would lose limbs and still cahse the player around. 

grrr... 

those would be engine modifications, sadly, and beyond the scope of what i would be willing to do. 

How about destroying a background environment as the boss dies (takes damage). So background cliffs would collapse the lower it's health got.

A similar idea, stolen right from Mario, is reducing the playable area the longer the fight goes on.

For Quake I always thought it'd be reducing the amount of cover. Tried it in warp for the end battle (compeltely different to what ended up) but the Vermis couldn't break stuff.

Back to the question at hand - I'm thinking something like the pack complete map of rapture, lava etc. but with the player pretty much shut in with the boss. Each time the boss reaches a health threshold a load of scenery collapses, until by the time they kill it the player is left looking at some impressive skybx and open area. Time for a cinematic cam? 

But in RQuake Team Coop, whenever you're fighting Shub or Chthon, the health remaining is centerprinted to all players. Maybe that could be done instead.

If you didn't want to display the actual numbers, then you could show a percentage, or even NetHack-style descriptions: "Shub Niggurath is barely scratched" etc... 

Is a bit invasive though. You know the final idea/plan for shub.

As to a classic boss being damaged visual / audio clues are always better I find.

Apart from in arcade.

A perfect Quake boss for me would vomit blood and limp whilst injured, or better yet, detroy the player's static defences. Pretty much what I was getting at above. 

a health bar at the top of the screen, or in the HUD, would seem to break immersion less than a bar over a bosses' head.

Or, taking inspiration from oldschool gaming... have the enemies get darker/more red as they take significant damage. Bosses change attack patterns and/or move faster when they get closer to death.

I've been having a resurgence of love for Super Metroid, and so I've been thinking about ways to incorporate that style of gameplay into Q1. That is to say, item-based non-linear progression. The multi-level hub system may remain out of reach, but I'm thinking about exploratory puzzle solving based on weapons you have. Like, door won't open unless you shoot explosives at it, or you have to shoot lightning down a tube to hit a switch. Too bad the environment suit can't be saved for later or made permanent (or can it? lol varia suit). 

A super-metroid style quake mod would be awesome. In a way that is what metroid prime is, but putting it on the PC so you can use WASD+mouse would be even cooler -- it would allow tougher combats, and more complicated secrets.

You could even split it into multiple levels with backtracking, since one of the cornerstones of the "metroidvania" genre is the respawning enemies. So no need to worry about saving level state (means your interactive objects like doors and bridges can't save state either, but remember: the point is to use weapons/items as gating factors, not doors and lifts.)

I guess you'd want SOME permanent changes across level loads, and you could use the serverflags variable to store them -- maybe 1 bit for each boss you want to stay dead, and then 1 bit for any other special one-time events or changes in the environment. 

I always thought it would be nice to have something in the level which would give an indication of the health of the boss. Like if you had an array of statues overlooking the arena you fight in, and as you do damage to the boss, they shatter one by one. Or some kind of plinth that decends into lava as you do damage. Perhaps if the whole floor was to descend, it would add an additional challenge to the fight - sections become seperated by the lava as it falls.

The other advantage of that is that it's easy to accomplish in quake, where additions to the HUD are more difficult. I suppose the most important thing would be to make the connection explicit between the damage taken by the boss and the changing environment. Perhaps by making sure that the changes occur in delineated "steps", and that the boss goes into pain each time it happens. 

You know the final idea/plan for shub

Yeah. Lots of damage, and avoid everything that it shoots at you, while at the same time also trying to not die to everything else that's in her pit. Or fall into the lava. At least you respawn after you die... 

don't confuse quake with a puzzle game. It's not.

I, for example, have zero fun playing puzzle games. Everytime some random puzzle flash game comes along, it bores the fuck out of me. I don't want to figure out stuff the designer made up. Even games like Commando (1) feel the same: I just need to find out the exact sequence the designer made up to beat the game.

I never quite got the console boss fights, because in their stereotypical form they're just puzzles.

An example: had to refer to a walkthrough to find out how to kill the robots in bionic commando that are only vulnerable on their backs. I just couldn't figure it out. I tried any combination of weird fighting moves, tricking them into positions where I could use special moves, etc., but looking at their backs (or shooting at those) just didn't occur to me as plausible in the game world. Nothing else I had ever had to look behind before.

So be careful with them. Charon (?) had those quake buttons that you had already pressed dozens of during the game, and I'm not sure i ever completed shub before I know the secret. 

Saying Charon (who's a very good Q3 mapper) in place of Chthon tells me you're not as anal retentive to worry over these details. But at the same time you say you hate flash puzzle games is a bald faced lie. If you hated them, you wouldn't knew they existed.

Reamek Quake will never be a puzzle game. As much as I liked liked the metroid series, it'd never get to that state of bar battles either.

You fire enough rockets at the thing, it dies. I always like having weak points for the savvy (remember the shambler has, inverted) but health bars and so on aren't for me.

I try not to be an arsehole with RMQ's design, but there's still stuff that's been negotiated that I want to scrap over.

Fuck. Ignore this post. Fell off the wagon. 

A super-metroid style quake mod would be awesome. In a way that is what metroid prime is, but putting it on the PC so you can use WASD+mouse would be even cooler -- it would allow tougher combats, and more complicated secrets.

You could even split it into multiple levels with backtracking, since one of the cornerstones of the "metroidvania" genre is the respawning enemies. So no need to worry about saving level state (means your interactive objects like doors and bridges can't save state either, but remember: the point is to use weapons/items as gating factors, not doors and lifts.)

I guess you'd want SOME permanent changes across level loads, and you could use the serverflags variable to store them -- maybe 1 bit for each boss you want to stay dead, and then 1 bit for any other special one-time events or changes in the environment.


This sounds fucking awesome. You're making this, right? If it helps, I can bring you cups of tea and danish pastries while you work. Team player. 

Continued from

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60400&start=100

The map that is scheduled for the next RMQ demo has a pretty brutal multi-element trap at its core, as well as other gameplay novelties that are part of the environment. I didn't make any sketches, I just roughly knew where that trap would be and when I got there, I built that section around the trap. Same for the other, weirder element, which I can't disclose now :-P

I had this rough idea that an environmental hazard is in area X, while a certain form of movement is required through area Y, and some other obstacle might be in area Z. And I just built that while I did the blocking out. These things aren't actually hard to do if you're blocking out anyway. But I think a map should have 2 - 3 non-monster related / environmental challenges, some parts that require alternative forms of movement, plus a couple corners that are worth exploring. That should allow you to halve the monster count while keeping it interesting.

I hate to repeat it, but even without turning it into QuakeRaider, TR games are pretty good sources of inspiration when it comes to traps and non-monster challenges. Watch/hear this guy flip as he plays through the famous trap gauntlet in "The Great Wall":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_dP53CPuk0

It's just trap after trap after trap. You think you're through it, and then you turn around just to see another spiked wall come at you. You stop to calculate distance, but the floor starts crumbling. The secret pickup in the crushers is also a nice detail. This whole thing must have caused countless fatalities, without a single monster in there.

A collection of crusher based traps, and some moving blades/combination traps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2tgFOIAo2Y&feature=related

Most of the basic elements of these exist in Quake; they have to be built while laying out the level though. Of course Quakeguy is a lot less nimble than Lara; you can't duck, climb, balance, and whatever. hence the traps must be slightly dumbed down for Quake, but not much.

- Doors aka crushers

- small landing spots or thin columns

- nail shooters

- lava or other threat when falling

- rotating entities

- trigger_hurt

These can be combined to create more interesting traps. The basis of these TR style traps are usually crushers, danger of falling, having to land on small spots, and shooters. There are also the good old pendulum traps and rolling blades/boulders/whatever. I find these a bit boring, unless combined with shooters. That's because the player can just stand and wait for the right moment. However, by adding shooters, you can force them to think on their feet. If they stand and calculate for too long, their health gets spiked away. It helps if you can set the shooter's damage (easy to do if you use a custom progs).

Finally, you have breakaway floor with spikes underneath, or just lava. This can be done in Quake, too; there is a testmap in RMQ that does this. Naturally, you could just retract the floor like in e4m3. Best to combine this again with jumping through something that you have to time, because an added timing element makes the trap even more precarious than just taking away the floor. Most traps in Tomb Raider are combinations of something that requires timing (crushers, pendulum, blades) or skill (grappling, wallrunning), and something that reduces the time you have available (shooters, breaking floor, retracting ledge, application of physics). Make the way dangerous, and at the same time pull the floor away underneath them.

You can do these things in Quake, you just have to remember building them in the blocking out stage already. Although to a certain extent, you can use existing corridors as the base for a trap, like they say here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL71UuPB8Gg

Flak ogres / nail ogres, and other monsters, can be used in place of stationary nail shooters to make the whole thing less predictable and give the option to kill part of the trap to make it easier. It should be obvious that you can use monsters as part of traps or puzzles (like having to kill certain monsters to give you a chance at fighting others / pass a trap).

And so forth. These crusher based traps tend to work well (DOOM did that a lot, too), the crushers just need to be wide enough to counteract the Quakeguy's moving speed. Moving through a wide crusher takes longer than moving through a thin one, thus the crusher has a larger chance to hit. They can be staggered, of course, like in that first vid I posted above.

An element that can be nicely used against the player is that you can't stop immediately in Quake. There is still some movement after letting go of the keys. This makes it that much harder to land on a tiny spot without falling or sliding into the crusher...

It's pretty fun to design traps in Quake. 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=49776&end=25

Good point about traps in id1. Seems modern user-made maps are more difficult in general and have less traps.

My favourite trap of all time was the sequential nail shooter from Koohoo that fired in a circular spread until a few buttons were pressed.

All traps and puzzles in all games have a single goal - to make the player feel clever. That shooter from Koohoo made me feel clever because it was itself clever. Deactivating it wasn't, it just gave the time to figure out how it worked.

Simple but the quintessential Quake trap.

The most important thing about it was, I doubt anyone who played the map died from it, although every single one will have perceived it as being just as dangerous as the room with multiple Shambler spawns. 

Heh, I don't know func_ by heart exactly - old threads can be very hard to find. Shambler linked me here.

The idea is to make the trap at least as memorable as any monsters in the map, yeah.

And traps are just one option to break a map up a little, to give a different kind of challenge from the monster onslaught. 

creating a 'dazed' effect on the player by reducing 'sv_maxspeed', 'cl_yawspeed' and 'sensitivity' cvars...

or would that just be annoying? 

for a very short amount of time. 10-15 seconds?

Or do you mean a permanent effect? 

If it corresponds to the map/gameplay, then it might work. If it's during a horde arena battle, then maybe not...

Same goes for a mangle'd teleporter. 

Can you make it feel like the player has lost his sense of balance and is leaning one way or the next, and the put that right before an area with giant machinery-type things that can squish the player? Might be really annoying, or really tense. 

In runequake there is a rune that gives you the ability to drug people and one of them makes the player's view shift all over, can't remember the command though and also sometimes the players view would be off centerd when the effects wear off.
Perhaps you can use the command for this? 

default 0, increased a little during intermissions. can go up to 100 (or more?) for some seriously nauseating effects! 

Is an incredibly long time, really.

Screwing with the players view is fun but tricky - if you get it wrong then people who suffer from motion sickness won't be able to play and lazy people won't want to. 

hahah wow, v_idlescale is insane at high levels.

anyway, i was only thinking maybe 3-4 seconds at the very most. v_idlescale might be fun to mess around with but i don't think i'd go over 20ish.

mostly the dazed effect is really just daze-- making the player feel sluggish. like when you get blasted by explosives in war fps games. 

 

I was not aware of this feature... in FitzQuake it's more like walking on a boat in the open sea... I tried setting it at different value and indeed when it is higher than 20, it is almost impossible to play. I tried to play e1m1 with v_idlescale = 100... and I had to finish the game with the axe as it was impossible to shoot precisely...

It gives me an idea for my next project: black operation onto a boat in a open sea... (like Navy Seals intervention, or something equivalent).... hhhmmmmmm I have to investigate what could be done... 

I plan to use something like that to create a very short lived "drunk effect" in one of my maps.

:-) 

Did any Quake map to date make creative use of the following:

- Pushables (they're available since Scourge of Armagon)

- Physics (Gyro, ODE) (available for years)

- Rotating entities (not as simple doors or decoration, but as parts of the gameplay, be it as traps or as means to proceed through the map)

- Moving water (includes raising/lowering the water level, or using a current as a means of transport or a trap) (qc is available for years)

?

Why is this stuff available, but unused? It seems making the environment itself part of the gameplay has gone out of fashion? The three maps I played lately (Trinca's, Madfox', and neggers' unreleased) all rely on combat for over 90% of the gameplay.

Environmental stuff exists, why is it not being used?

Why is the environment not used to tell stories, either? All it does in most Quake maps is look cool.

As if there was a self imposed limit on creativity - "Quake needs no stories, and Quake is only about shooting." 

A lot of that is ... "extra stuff."

Pushables - I don't know how to make something pushable. I don't remember there being a func_pushable or somesuch.

Physics - had no idea, dunno what Gyro/ODE means.

Rotating entities - think one or two of necros' maps used these a lot. Negke's 768 map did as well (I think.) Probably others.

Moving water - had no idea water could move up and down. If it involves using qc, I don't want to futz with it. 

It does involve using qc. However, quite a few maps used their own progs.dat, like Marcher for example, and madfox' latest. Rotating entities are in Hipnotic and Quoth, pushables are in Hipnotic and Nehahra, moving water is in extras. All of those supply a progs.dat that's ready to be used I believe.

gyro is a set of qc files for Quake, allowing you to add physics to an object. It is very much plug and play. ODE is an open source physics engine, which for example darkplaces, and I believe FTE, have support for and is apparently very easy to use.

Rotation - I was looking for rotation directly as part of the gameplay, for example as a means of progression (like hopping from one moving gear to the next in a sort of clockwork etc). 

To mappers who don't use all the wonderful stuff that's lying around, but the reason is that monsters are easier.

Traps tend to get underused as well, even 'tricky' terrain, just because you have to test it a lot before it works right.

I remember that zigzag walkway in ProdigyXL that was over a slime pit - very simple, but effective. 

@gb ...

Has a story line to some degree. One of my favorite maps ...

In particular, it has an opening demo to tell it ...

http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/sop123.html

Obviously the following Quake maps have a story line of some semblance:

1. Hell In A Can

http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/casspq1.html

2. Starship 1/2

http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/starship.html
http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/starshp2.html

3. ... I forgot the 3rd one. 

http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/sgodrune.html 

I remember that zigzag walkway in ProdigySE that was over a slime pit - very simple, but effective.

i think prodigyxl might take exception to people walking on him, especially over a slime pit :d 

Why is the environment not used to tell stories, either? All it does in most Quake maps is look cool

i'm not sure i follow, can you give an example of an environment being used to tell a story? 

What I mean is "forensic detail", like that doom3 level where "suffering" etc are scrawled on the wall in blood, or simply dead/injured marines, barricades made from crates, burning ruins, Quake 2 scenes where pods crashed through the roof, open books on tables or scattered on the floor, anything that gives the impression that some event occurred in the environment, or is still occurring. Malfunctioning doors, SOS messages that no one answers, bloody altars with gibs on them, machines with their parts scattered around (or simply running machines), parts of buildings damaged or collapsed as if an attack happened (or they rotted away), furniture and pottery giving the effect of some sort of life going on in the level that exists by itself, independent of the player.

Sure shamblers probably have no furniture, but grunts/enforcers might, dogs might have cages or kennels, prisoners might be held in cells, and ogres or knights might use stuff or have places where they live, camp, torture, cook, or whatever else it is they do. There is an ogre cook, after all (in Nehahra).

Some forklifts or jeeps in some garage go a long way to suggesting that the place normally has a life. You'd have to find equivalent things for the Netherworld, etc. Like the unholy altars. That can't be all, though. 

suggestions noted. it does seem easier to convey in modern/realistic settings, for sure.. maybe less so in your typical quakey blocky medieval/runic map

i think that's one thing much of quake was characterised by though; the mystery of why everything is just *there*, seemingly not functioning or having any real purpose other than providing a gauntlet to run the player through. that said i do think little details like altars can compliment that effect, providing there is still an air of mystery as to why they are there... 

Good and inspiring stuff. I like all these ideas in different ways. Kinda proves the potential is there! 

~Mario/Wario/Zelda inspired monster ideas

Monsters don't go after the player but stay in their area. Some might not even have attacks but they just block the player's progression.

Monster with a shield/forcefield in front of it that damages the player if touched. So it is only attackable from behind. Basic monster in many games.

Monster with a rotating armor of some kind that has a hole in just one place (maybe 1/8 of the circumference). The player can only damage the monster by shooting through that hole (or from above?).

I also wrote "spawn creeps around and explodes" but I have no idea what that was supposed to mean.

Another piece of paper I can throw away. :-)

Also I think some faked multi-part monster could work amazing as either level decoration or boss fight. Think tentacles reaching out of holes, a scrag swarm moving in a bird-like rollercoaster path (like the Boss dragon but sucking less) or someone carefully spawning monsters or throwing things at you (not in an open space like the usual "range-attack monster on top of pillar").

Generally Quake could use some stationary monsters. If you place then interestingly and keep in mind what weapons and how much ammo is around, they would not suck. 

monster spawning monsters is not what I actually meant. Oops. 

kamikaze spawns, from behind? 

A Vore Queen!!! Wheres Kell.....
Necros? 

Also I think some faked multi-part monster could work amazing as either level decoration or boss fight.

i'd love to see a huge monster like this. ironically, there was a really cool boss in WoW called c'thun. it was huge and you only fought bits and pieces of it at a time and it could even swallow you temporarily so that you could damage it while you were in it's stomach. 

Some time ago I played an unreleased Q1SP episode by Kaiser. One of the WIP monsters was a huge blob that spat tarbabies at the player. When killed, it exploded into more tarbabies. It think they were toned down versions, though.

Or imagine a swarm of mini-tarbabies that don't do much damage when they explode individually - firecracker-style. But if they cornered you, boom. 

The mini-tarbaby thing is cool. Shame models can't be scaled...

I can imagine miniature ones combining by touching during their random bouncing to become the regular size, then, later, larger ones that are heavier (slower) but make a louder boom.

Or maybe has to be broken by damage into smaller ones, that then go boom.

Tarbaby boss?

-> Shoggoth 

That posting had some eerie QMD-feel to it. 

this http://quotes.fov120.com/?show=single&quote=631 

i like the idea of small bits being able to combine into a fullsized one. it would be cool to combine the two ideas into one.

fullsized tarbaby that breaks into maybe 3 or 4 pieces. if you don't kill the small ones, they recombine into a fullsized tarbaby again.

you could add something like lightning damage would disperse it by fully vaporizing it without any pieces or something.

if you wanted to go further, you could make it immune to shotgun and nail damage (would need to communicate this somehow like zombies) and only rockets can break it. (the small ones would be killable by normal means). 

Necros I was going to suggest something like lightning stunning it, during which time you could safely kill it without it exploding or something like that. Stop stealing my ideas you warlock >:( 

 

something like lightning stunning it, during which time you could safely kill it without it exploding or something
ohh i also like this! players who are good shots could just ignore this mechanic and blow them away quickly, but others could opt at stunning them so they can destroy them at their leisure.

T1000babies
TOTALLY what i was thinking of too. i love that scene near the end where those little globules are skittering across the floor into a heap that keeps growing ominously. 

Stunning Tbabies / daddies - wobble on the spot animation + sparks?

I don't think it'd work too well for the LG though, since that's a constant high damage weapon. Maybe if it were only whilst 'held' by the electricity and another coop player blasted it then.

Completely different game though.

In a boss context it could be a type of trap - activating a current that runs through metal plates placed in the level, the player having to lure it onto them. Maybe even make the biggest version immune to normal damage, rockets, nails and so on just bouncing off.

Making it a regular monster feature would mean making it spawnflag enabled, so all maps with tarbabies wouldn't automatically start creating minibosses. 

i think that was more along the lines of 'stop jumping around, you mother fucker', but that could just be me. ^_^; 

I was thinking that for the bigger versions - the bigger they get, the heavier they are, so can't go flubbering around the place.

I'm also thinking of Voreling style hanging spawn, maybe a wall version as well, Aliens style. 

Yeah. It could hang on the ceiling and when the player gets near, 'drips' down (upside-down jump animation) like some sort of demolition ball and explodes when he touches it. 

just to confuse the player - the pause before it starts leaping will be less predictable if they're stuck all over the place.

On the other hand, having them lie in wait and then drop on the player's head could be fun as well, nice living trap behaviour. 

of the slime monster from Duke3d that would attach to your face and you'd have to shoot them off (or kick them off? I don't remember if you could do that or not.) 

Micro-Goombas: http://www.mariowiki.com/Micro-Goomba

;) 

let's say a boss fight has two methods to defeat it. the gimmick way and the shoot it dead way. the gimmick way is not immediately obvious and must be discovered. (like telefragging shub)

so, for this example, let's imagine if it was possible to defeat shub by either shooting her or telefragging her.

easy skill: it is easy to telefrag shub but shooting her is more difficult. shooting her might be considered one skill level higher.
hard skill: it is easy to telefrag shub and shooting her is very difficult, bordering on impossible.

in both scenarios, the fight is designed to be defeated via the gimmick but the penalty for not using the gimmick is worse in harder difficulties.

should the penalty for not using the gimmick then always be death so as to not fool the player into thinking they don't need to use a gimmick? or is it better to offer this choice in lower difficulties?

or perhaps makes the gimmick the scaling value instead of the shooting option?

ie:

easy: telefragging shub is simple but shooting her is very difficult.
hard: telefragging shub is difficult, and shooting her is the same difficulty as it was on easy (very difficult)

..and my batteries are running out so i'll just post this. :P 

Scaling sounds right. Easy: telefragging Shub is 'simple', shooting her is more diffcult. Hard: telefragging her is hard, shooting her is much more difficult.

Of course it depends on other factors as well. Like the environment and if/how the boss fights back.

I tried the scaling model in my coag3 tower fights. The monsters are intended to be killed through special tricks/gimmicks, but shooting them is also possible (at the cost of a large amount of ammo). It wasn't done in a very sophisticated way, however, in terms of balancing - still they do take more damage on harder skills - and properly getting the player to realize how to gimmickill them to begin with. 

Personally I wouldn't split it. Just give the player the single path to victory with a boss fight. It must be assumed that a boss fight is going to test the player on what they already know, but with the difficulty cranked up.

In this respect, I'd say the original id1 bosses are somewhat broken since they both require a trick.

If you allow a trick then it must be very clear what it produces. Either it kills the boss dead (and is the only way to kill it) or does massive damage saving the player some time plugging away conventionally.

The worst case scenario of having a trick that kills it or being allowed to plug away for ages is that a player might do the second one for what seems like ages, then accidentally come across the trick and feel cheated for wasting all that time shooting at the thing.

Time is the most important resource of the player and they get pissed if they feel like its been stolen. Same could be said of intricate labyrinths without any guiding factor pointing to the exit, or a seemingly unfair save system. 

 

What do you consider gimmicky weapons? I love it when some game company comes up with a 'new' weapon that behaves in a way I never thought of, or that allows me to do things I can't do in most other shooters. Bulletstorm is a good example of this, the weapons are a big part of why I'm excited for that game. 

You bring up some good points. What I like better about DOOM is that the overall speed is higher. In Quake, it takes NINE shotgun hits to kill an ogre, and still 4 to kill an enforcer. That's outrageous.

Quake is also very snipey because of the shotgun. You can snipe a Vore dead by wanking corners with the shotgun, while in DOOM, you'd blast said shotgun into the monster's face and move on. I prefer the latter.

Quake's weapons suck. The shotgun is boring, but effective, which makes you run around with a boring weapon a lot of the time. Often, the double barrel shotgun is given right at the start to make things more exciting. That's a band aid which doesn't solve the underlying problem. The axe sucks. The shotgun sucks. The nailgun sucks. Deathmatch is about grabbing the rocket launcher first. Why even have all those weapons?

The individual monster designs are more interesting in DOOM IMO. I'm not saying they work better, but things like the Archvile and Revenant are just pretty crazy. Far-out stuff. The monster lineup is bigger in DOOM / DOOM II, which makes for more variety. Also, Quake has no imp. DOOM's imp is a perfect low-level all-round cannon-fodder monster design; little hitpoints, melee attack, hurls fireballs, can be used in hordes, fits everywhere in the game. It's a great monster, much like a cannon-fodder version of Quake's hellknight. And the combination "imp + shotgun" is superb. Imp + shotgun made DOOM, and it beats anything Quake has to offer.

Quake is missing a lower-tier all-purpose melee/distance monster. Why they didn't give the Grunt a melee attack is a mystery to me. Then again, grunts don't have the general usefulness of the imp. Imps fit everywhere, the same can't be said of grunts. Plus, grunts don't die in one shot.

The pinky is almost as good a monster design as the imp; it's still relatively low HP, ubiquitous, and when I first played DOOM, pinkies were even scary because of their attack. The Spectre variety is genius.

Lost Souls clearly leave the Scrag in the dust, although the scrag is a nice monster (one of my favourite Quake monsters). DOOM has two other fliers though: the Cacodemon and the Pain Elemental. I'd say DOOM's air force outclasses Quake's.

I agree that some individual Quake monsters might be more interesting to fight, though. The fiend is the prime example. Ogres, vores, and shamblers are also fun. Hellknights are similar to imps, but have a lot more HP which can be both good and bad. The knight tries to be a pinky.

Quake doesn�t have the tech to include huge monster counts

This is incorrect. You can have 100 knights or 20 fiends coming at the player pretty easily. Especially with halfway modern graphics hardware and current engines.

I mostly agree with the rest. 

 

That map is rather extreme. You're right, something like that might choke Quake. I was thinking of slightly more normal maps than that :-P

Although Tronyn's latest maps contained a fuckload of monsters, including things that shoot projectiles, at the same time. And running those maps wasn't the problem, surviving them was. :-P 

I agree with your comment about the Imp by the way gb. Quake has no light ranged attack beastie to fit into its medieval/hell areas.
Crossbow knights could work, but personally I'd go for some kind of modified Ogre type enemy. Deformed human.

Demons > Medieval stuff. Demons can be put anywhere and work. Knight is essentially the same as the Pinkie demon, but you can't put knights in base levels without people complaining!

Toss to a mod remake of Duke 3D, someone should do a current gen remake Doom II...I don't trust iD to do much good with Doom 4. Expecting them to just miss the point as with Doom 3 :( 

Crossbow knights are promising. Need a lot of tweakage though, and should ideally switch to the sword when in melee range, like the hellknight does.

A crossbow in melee doesn't make much sense, if you're wearing a huge ass sword.

The base variety of this would be a grunt that switches to axe for melee.

Both of those are harder to kill than imps, though. At least with vanilla Quake weapons. 

 

I think the weaponswitch would have to be around about as fast as the player's. 

and should ideally switch to the sword when in melee range, like the hellknight does.

I think the weaponswitch would have to be around about as fast as the player's.

I suggested exactly this for our Crossbow Knights, guys, months ago :( 

I think it was one of those things that have floated around for a long time (I suggested that as well) but needed time to settle.

ijed: Yeah. 

...but I didn't get the why. 

first, let's look at what makes bosses easier in coop mode.

1. There's that aggro juggling aspect present in standard quake progs where a monster will only attack it's last attacker, so two or more players firing at the same monster basically makes it freeze in place.

This kind of thing is easily fixed by implementing a basic timer that enforces a wait before shifting to another player.
You can get fancy and calculate the relative damage rates of each player or factor in visibility of the current player vs visibility other others, distance, % of time spent visible or whether the player is in front of the monster or not. probably even other things i never thought of.

2. Focus fire creating huge amounts of incoming DPS (damage per second). If all players are equipped with the SNG (a reasonable assumption considering they are fighting a boss), each player is pumping out 180DPS. With two players, that's 360DPS (more than a single player with the LG).
With four players, that's 720DPS. Imagine, if you will, a shambler with a measly 600HP. It would take less than a second to drop dead.
Bosses who are shootable will survive for extremely short amounts of time in coop.

This one is more difficult to solve.
In WoW (and i guess all mmos), this problem is solved by giving bosses ridiculous amounts of HP. Where players would have about 25-30k HP, boss HP numbered in the millions.
This, obviously, only works because those bosses are not designed to be killed by a single person.
In quake, this is not an option as we need to have a boss that is killable alone or with friends.

So... what options do we have to somehow increase a boss' uptime without making it a chore and bore to kill alone? 

One option to reduce the effects of focus fire is to artificially gate the encounter.

Chthon is one such. He is killed by a gimmick and the gimmick (electrodes) require a certain amount of time before they can be used again.

This is effective in making the boss have more uptime but at the expense of not rewarding players for playing in coop.

This does bring up a point in that players playing in coop mode are expecting... not a reward, exactly, but some kind of compensation for taking the time to play in a team, as opposed to just loading the map up alone.

A certain amount of quicker killing is then probably expected. 

In WoW (and i guess all mmos), this problem is solved by giving bosses ridiculous amounts of HP. Where players would have about 25-30k HP, boss HP numbered in the millions.
This, obviously, only works because those bosses are not designed to be killed by a single person.
In quake, this is not an option as we need to have a boss that is killable alone or with friends.

if (!teamplay)
self.health = 3000;
else
self.health = 6000; 

It seems to me that a reasonably 'boss-like' mechanism to make co-op damage less of a problem is to make the boss invulnerable for some or even most of the fight - with periods of vulnerability where the players can team up to do the required amount of damage to move to the next boss phase.

The periods when the boss is invulnerable are then mostly about staying alive against his more dangerous attacks. If the boss is also less dangerous during the times when he's vulnerable, then the increased damage rate would have the effect of intensifying the battle. You'd spend more time (relatively) fighting him in the dangerous passages than in the safer ones where you can harm him.

This still doesn't fix all the problems though, an extra player will still be a resource. Unless you do some kind of sniffing for coop players, the fight will be always be easier with two. 

One aspect of quake juggling is it's trivial to do, since any amount of damage will switch the boss's aggro. In a game like WoW the bosses have more complicated aggro rules and so juggling actually becomes a tactic which requires some attention. And usually the bosses (and player classes) are set up so that you really need to manage aggro.

Of course you want a boss that is still beatable in single player, so you can't create something that requires two players to survive.

One thing you could do is scale up his attacks instead of his health. So if you had three players, chthon could launch three missiles with a single swipe, and each missile would aim specifically towards one of the players. So effectively all players have the same frequency of missiles to dodge as if they were playing SP. 

chthon could launch three missiles with a single swipe, and each missile would aim specifically towards one of the players.

yes, this is more along the lines of thought that i was hoping to go for.
simply increasing health is a boring way to make a boss last longer.
otoh, this still doesn't really address the focus fire problem, because players are still capable of firing while dodging. unless this is some kind of overpowering attack that you have to hide completely from, like a doom bfg ball or something.

make the boss invulnerable for some or even most of the fight - with periods of vulnerability where the players can team up to do the required amount of damage to move to the next boss phase.

this would work, but making the boss completely invulnerable feels kind of heavy handed, especially if it only does this during coop play.

ideally, you'd want a mechanic that is the same in both sp and mp and yet somehow slows players down more in mp. 

one thing that jumps out is a health leeching attack that hits everyone in a radius+LOS.

the more players present, the more healing it would receive. 

this would work, but making the boss completely invulnerable feels kind of heavy handed, especially if it only does this during coop play.

I totally imagined that this would apply to single player as well. It's a classic arcade boss set-up where you have to spend most of the time forcing the boss to expose its Achilles' Heel, then take advantage by doing some damage, before repeating until the fight is of the desired length.

An example which can be found in a fps and so relates well to quake is the end boss in Half Life: Opposing Force. The weak point is inside the creature's stomach. However, to get it exposed, you have to use mounted guns to blind it temporarily - and to reach the guns you have to use the grappling hook the game has trained you on. Once you hit both eyes the stomach opens and you can pop at it with whatever powerful weapons you have. After a short time the monster resets to being able to see with a closed stomach, and spawns a monster for you to fight while you start the sequence again.

The difficulty ramped up a little bit midway through the fight, as parts of the level collapsed, making it harder to get to the mounted guns safely. It was a nice touch, but it's a shame it couldn't have been explored a bit more. It also didn't communicate the need to shoot the stomach very well, I think I needed to look that part up after having shot the eyes successfully 5 times without making progress. 

There is an old chestnut of a setup where a big bad monster is only vulnerable to their own attacks turned against them. This would certainly deal with the problem of coop focus-fire, but would it leave each player with too little to do?

Maybe if the boss's attacks are e.g. sometimes homing projectiles and sometimes bursts of direct fire attacks you'd be set. Everyone would be at risk and occupied by the latter, plus whoever has a homing attack target them has to try and turn it back on the big bad. 

ah ok, i see what you were going for. 

I like a lot is when enemies or bosses leave attacks on the floor, temporarily closing down the playfield. This could be combined with a directional weakpoint (say 25 degrees to the front) to make the boss playable in both SP and coop.

Delay timed scatter attacks aka airstrikes and area attacks work well as also since they don't necessarily aim at anyone.

My ideal is to change the mechanics as little as possible depending on the game mode - so more health or COOP only mechanics (Cthon with an extra button) are things I'd try and avoid. 

temporarily closing down the playfield

yeah, i like this too.

it's a mechanic that shows up often in WoW. ironically, it's usually regarded as the easiest mechanic in WoW.
still, it works very well in fast paced quake combat. 

Like cheap? I'm not a WOW player so don't know how it works very well.

To be honest I've seen it best used in the recent crop of 3D mario games - back to the arcade but with the third dimension allowing skillful players to avoid it.

I'm looking into atm for some Quake stuff, hopefully it'll work out well, but as always making pools of stuff as opposed to a map tat adapts to the boss (eg. sinking brushes) can be expensive in time (to do) and resources (to use). 

as in simple to do. there's a glowy thing on the floor, don't walk into it.

probably why it works well in quake. it's visually obvious with a straight forward penalty.

there's a few other mechanics i haven't tried yet like requiring the player to defeat 2 monsters at the same time, or they resurrect. or the opposite, 50% damage is transferred to another monster in a pair so they both die at once. 

Are you talking about more of a modified boss already in quake/quoth or like a ground-up boss? 

And yeah, that should be good for Quake - most obvious being lava, which tells the player right away - don't touch it.

Reminds me of the trog ball attack - which would pull the player to its centre before fragging them. It was actually fairly easy to escape from, but the effect made any player pretty much kark it with panic, trying to get free.

For the clones - got another one that (when finished) will spawn mirror images of itself at reduced health an without all of its abilities. Not quite the same idea but thought I'd throw it out there. 

Or a powerful homing attack (e.g. Chthon ball) that requires the player it's aimed at to run/dodge and the others to shoot the missile in order to save their mate and be able to proceed the attack. 

neg: interesting, but i don't know how you could get it to work in both SP and MP.

if you provide an out in SP to avoid the chthon ball, other players in MP will just let you use the SP out. you'd have to specifically disallow the SP out in MP and then you've got a mechanic that behaves different, which is ok, but not great. :( 

I meant it more as an attack the boss uses only in coop mode. If that's possible.. 

oh yeah, the coding side of it is quite simple. you just check if a var 'coop' is set to 1.

mechanics that are different in sp and mp are ok, i guess. in WoW, you can opt to run a dungeon in a 'heroic mode' and bosses and mobs are significantly harder with different abilities. a fair comparison if you were doing alternate mechanics for q1sp/q1coop.

for me, that's more of a plan b. ideally, the mechanic should somehow scale with the players on it's own without requiring alternate abilities.

the key then, i would say, is focusing on the players and not the monster's attacks. or at the very least, giving it an attack like a chain lightning that is technically active in SP mode, but you would just never see it unless a monster was nearby. and then that might even be a viable strategy to take out extra monsters. 

just was thinking of this...

it might be interesting to give the player access to an infinite supply of quads and pents.

then have the boss have the ability to 'steal' the powerup off you and use it himself.

would be an interesting risk/reward where grabbing a quad would let you take him down real quickly, but at the risk of being on shotted.

pent would be more annoying though... it would just take longer to kill. 

...in one of Tronyn's episodes I think...

You had to grab the pwoerups before the boss or he took you to pieces. 

no, the boss has the ability to absorb the powerup off of you. you would have the option to not pick up the item and take him out the long way, or risk picking it up and then have him absorb it a little later and one shot you.

of course, if you were amazing at dodging whatever attacks it had, then you'd be home free. 

If the boss had a homing attack, launched an attack at each player simultaneously and each hiding spaces was only big enough for one player, that would at least make things more stressful with more players? Might work? 

That's interesting. Maybe allow multiple quads - each one affects you both, so if you're very fast you can pick up all 6 (?) and one shot the boss - but one hit from him and you're splattered as well. 

might be cool, but i wouldn't want to change how the quad damage functions.

maybe make a new powerup that can have a cumulative effect and use that instead. 

i kind of like that. the thought of all those players scrambling for the same cover makes me smile. :P~~ 

what it would be like if a boss was balanced around it fighting another monster (or monsters) while it fought you?

say you made a gimmick monster like the one i talked about where you have to kill both at once or they return to full health. or even an anti-boss monster that has special abilities solely for fighting the boss.

a special aggro system would need to be written for the boss to handle this type of combat of course, and the 'helping' monsters would need a special ai as well, so they would go back to attacking the boss after being attacked by the player (so that one missed shot wouldn't mess up the whole thing).

then you could either weaken or remove the monster in coop without affecting the boss itself. if the helping monster was accomplishing a role, it would let you know what other players need to do in coop when it is not present. 

I'm 'working' on my own progs, and was thinking about implementing something like threat from WoW for coop. It obviously wouldn't be as complex (it's not complex to begin with, but I can't think of another adjective) as threat in WoW. Any thoughts? 

that idea was already being discussed. I should have read before posting. 

i've done this for an unreleased coop mod.

it didn't function exactly like WoW's threat, mostly in that it wasn't cumulative.

in WoW, threat is a number that always goes up.
in quake, this doesn't make much sense because multiple players aren't going to engage a monster all at once, one may start and another player may join in later.

so you need a system that will allow for random players jumping in, yet it can't be too finicky such that a player can fire just one shotgun blast and pull aggro off another player who's been firing nails for the last 6 seconds.

what i ended up doing was having threat decay over time based on a few factors such as distance to the player, time since the monster was last able to attack and visibility of the player.
monsters with melee had special modifiers for melee range so that if you walked near a melee monster who was fighting another player at range, he would change to you. 

I've played with this sort of thing but haven't yet arrived at an adequate 'anger' meter for monsters. I was trying to use it for scaling attacks and combining too few variables.

Health (being low on), attacks received recently and skill level. This could be applied to each player, or even all potential targets to define not only the attack used and its relative strength, but who to attack.

Means rewriting a large part of ai.qc though.

I can imagine a finished version allowing the coder (or mapper in the case of our NPC's) a personality profile that would control its fighting style.

Probably overkill, but it would allow for more complex behaviours, like retreating. 

I was thinking of doing this: if the player gets within a certain viewing distance, the monster gets aggro'd by the player. That would give the player some threat, lets say +1, with the player starting with 0. Then if the player starts attacking the player, add some more threat, +x. If the player doesn't attack, and runs away, the monster does what they do now, and if they can't catch the player, they go 'home' and reset threat to 0.

If you have multiple monsters, they can pull each other, attacking whoever has the most threat. I'll think this over more tomorrow. 

i came to the conclusion that it's really not necessary.

first of all, most monsters never live long enough for threat to matter.

second, since there are no classes (and thus, no tanks vs dps) there's really no need to worry about who is being attacked.

the only important thing is to create an intelligent system to prevent ping ponging monsters when being attacked by more than 1 player.

after that, a simple secondary targetting system to spice things up every once in a while is all that's needed.

the only place where i'd see a true aggro system being worth it is for a boss fight. in that case, you should be designing the boss around the aggro system, and not the other way around. 

I forgot to mention that I was mainly thinking about bosses when I wrote my previous post. I know I said 'monster' a lot, but I was thinking of bosses. 

i wanted to mention because there was some talk a while ago regarding quake's shotguns and how they suck.

there's a pretty serious bug with all shotgun type attacks involving the method id uses to combine all the individual pellet damage calls into one big call.

in case you're wondering, this is what id did: (heh)

when a shotgun is fired, a loop runs where it traces each shotgun pellet.
however, instead of dealing damage each time in the loop, the progs starts up a counter (which is always reset when a new shotgun shot is fired).
each time it compares the target it hit last time with the new one. if the target is the same, then it just adds the damage to the counter and moves on. if it hit a different target (your shotgun blast hit two targets), then it dumps the current damage into the old target and starts a new count with the new target.
this keeps going until all pellets are accounted for.
note that, because shotgun spread is random, it's actually possible for pellets to hit two targets in such a way that each pellet is forced to dump damage individually anyway.

anyway, the bug is that there is no check to see if the current target is going to die from the next pellet.
what this means in game is that, if there are two grunts, one in the back at full HP and one in front of that one with 1 HP, even if you blast the nearly dead grunt with the SSG, all the pellets will hit that grunt and none at all will hit the grunt behind it.

this has the effect of giving the SSG the ability to gib enemies, but at the same time, seriously nerfs the damage that it can cause.

in doom, you can line up 3 or even 4 zombies and take them ALL out with a single SSG shot. in quake, you can even take out 2. :(

so yeah, while the quake SSG *is* indeed weak, this bug further gimps the weapon by not allowing pellets to pass through dead targets.

this is also why mods that have included more powerful shotguns still feel weak. even if you made a 20barrel shotgun, a single monster with 1 HP would stop all pellets.
note that the riot controller from zerstorer sort of got around this problem by delivering two separate shots.

the fix is actually really easy, and it bothers me that id didn't notice it. it does require creating a new helper get function.

here's the original code:

void(entity hit, float damage) AddMultiDamage =
{
if (!hit)
return;

if (hit != multi_ent)
{
ApplyMultiDamage ();
multi_damage = damage;
multi_ent = hit;
}
else
multi_damage = multi_damage + damage;
};

note the last else statement. this is what we need to change.
first we need to make a new function to find the effective health of a target:

float(entity e) getEffectiveHealth =
{
return e.health + (e.armortype * e.armorvalue);
};

this function takes into account any armor the target has and translates that into health.

now, we change the last else statement from this:
else
multi_damage = multi_damage + damage;

to this:

else
{
multi_damage = multi_damage + damage;

if (multi_damage > getEffectiveHealth(multi_ent)) //this hit would kill the current multi_ent. apply the damage now and start a new count.
{
ApplyMultiDamage ();
multi_damage = 0; //reset accumulation count.
multi_ent = world;
}
}


now, instead of just continuing to add damage to the multi_damage counter, first is checks if the current damage pool + the incoming damage would kill the target, if true, then it goes ahead and does the damage and then resets the counter and the entity container so the next time addMultiDamage is called, it will start a new tally. note that this does mean it will cause a dummy ApplyMultiDamage with 0 damage on the world, but there's a check in T_Damage that will stop that call right away before it causes any trouble.

the only unfortunate side effect is that you don't sometimes gib low health targets. but the plus is that the SSG is now a little more effective.
note: quadded SSG shots still do gib zombies. 

This could be real improvement to add this code part ! Let's think about put this in Quoth 3 ;) 

Our SSG is more Q2 in style (slower firing, heavier damage, wider spread), but that bug got past us as well.

Railgun style shotguns were considered, but abandoned.

Seems like we missed an important piece of the puzzle. 

> in doom, you can line up 3 or even 4 zombies and take them ALL out with a single SSG shot.

That is just overpowered, IMO. The result is that you'll rarely use another weapon anymore.

Regarding the 'bug', hmm, needs some testing I guess. 

But when this is done well it makes the weapon very satisfying to use.

The shotgun in L4D1 for example was great, the power being offset by its slow reloading.

Shame they consoled all the weapons for L4D2. 

This was brought to my attention today; however, the more I look at the code, the more I'm sure that it doesn't do what you want it to do.

The mess that is the shotgun code originally does this: For each pellet in turn, if the pellet didn't hit the same thing as the previous pellet, the previous thing hit gets all of its damage applied to it now.

This ensures that all of the damage goes to the right victims, but often in small chunks instead of a larger chunk. Which means that enemies that should (in theory) gib sometimes won't.

This can be demonstrated by lining up a quad SSG shot at 2 zombies standing right next to each other, and aiming directly between them. 38% of the time, neither will gib. (It needs 4 pellets in a row landing on the same target, to do the 60 damage needed to gib).

Assuming no changes elsewhere to the code, all your code will do is apply the damage needed to kill before processing the other pellets. Which will prevent that monster from accumulating enough damage to be gibbed, as the check to gib only happens when the monster takes lethal damage (and after that, Killed(), which calls .th_die sets .takedamage to DAMAGE_NO). Meaning that they won't gib unless the damage from that pellet is enough to take them below gib health.

What it won't do, is prevent all future pellets in this attack from hitting it. They still will. At least, not without changes elsewhere...

If you want future pellets to hit whatever is behind, you need to have the monsters become SOLID_NOT in their .th_die functions.

If you want Doom-style damage passthrough of the remain damage within a pellet (Doom does this for all bullet attacks, and the shotguns fire multiple bullets), then it's a little more complicated, but having the pellet traceline after every point of damage almost gets you there.

If you want future pellets to not be aimed at that monster, it's much more complicated. You're on your own on this one, because of the potential for runaway loops.

If you weren't trying to do any of that, then what were you trying to do?

Also, your implementation of getEffectiveHealth() is incorrect, as it doesn't account for health running out before armor does. Not an issue for most monsters, of course... 

It could be that getEffectiveHealth could account for zombies and make it so that their effective health was considered to the level which would gib them rather than kill them - a special case. The function would need to consider armor correctly as you say, so returns false if either armor+health> damage or health*(1-armortype)>damage (this may have an off by one bug if the rounding is not done correctly, not bothered to work that through). Also in Quoth there's the case of the 50% damage reducing shields - you can see why the decision gets delegated to a function.

None of this fixes the existing zombie bug. The way to do that would be to have each entity accumulate damage on fields, and add a new field like .chain to create a linked list of everything that took damage from the shotgun shells processed so far. Then until something passes the effective health test, you just accumulate things in the linked list. Finally, you work through the whole list applying damage which wasn't taken. Now your only problem is that monsters often aren't non-solid in the first frame of their death sequence... 

this is not quite correct w/regards to zombies. zombies don't actually have a gib check. their pain function is what resets their health, not their death function.

since the method i used will apply damage if they are about to die, they will get gibbed because th_pain() is called later in the t_damage function than killed() is.

otoh:
Assuming no changes elsewhere to the code, all your code will do is apply the damage needed to kill before processing the other pellets. Which will prevent that monster from accumulating enough damage to be gibbed, as the check to gib only happens when the monster takes lethal damage (and after that, Killed(), which calls .th_die sets .takedamage to DAMAGE_NO). Meaning that they won't gib unless the damage from that pellet is enough to take them below gib health.

is true. i've implemented this code change into a large mod with extensive changes, one of which being a self.solid = SOLID_NOT right in the killed() function. this is what actually makes it work. the multidamage change only makes it possible to work. 

thinking a little more. i can see what you are saying about zombies. if two zombies were hit in such a way they the damage ping ponged back and forth between the two always at sub 60 damage levels, then you're quite right in that they would never gib.

it might be worth trying to implement preach's much smarted linked list method to only consider damage after every random pellet has been traced.
a cheaper lamer way to do it would be to created a few more temp var pairs of entity and float pairs a shotgun could hit a max of like 5 or 6 targets before bugging out. 

rewrote the thing to use linked entity lists.

hopefully a better programmer than i will be able to tell if i have royally screwed up (it seems to work ok in quake though...)

float(entity e) getEffectiveHealth =
{
return e.health + e.shieldValue + (e.armortype * e.armorvalue);
};

entity multi_ent;
.entity multiDamage_nextNode;

void() ClearMultiDamage =
{
multi_ent = spawn();
};

void() ApplyMultiDamage =
{
local entity node;

node = multi_ent;
while(node)
{
if (node.dmg > 0) //hasn't already been used up
T_Damage(node.enemy, self, self, node.dmg); //apply all accumulated damage
node.think = SUB_Remove;
node.nextthink = time; //next frame
node = node.multiDamage_nextNode;
}

multi_ent = world; //break this link just to be safe.
};

entity(entity e) multiDamage_getNode =
{
local entity node, newNode;

node = multi_ent;
while(node)
{
if (node.enemy == e) //this node already exists
return node;

if (node.multiDamage_nextNode) //there is a next one
node = node.multiDamage_nextNode;
else //this is the last in the chain
{
newNode = spawn();
newNode.enemy = e;
node.multiDamage_nextNode = newNode;

return newNode;
}
}

return world;
};

void(entity hit, float damage) AddMultiDamage =
{
local entity node;

node = multiDamage_getNode(hit);
node.dmg = node.dmg + damage;

if (node.dmg > getEffectiveHealth(node.enemy))
{
T_Damage(node.enemy, self, self, node.dmg); //do the damage
node.dmg = 0; //this node's damage is consumed
}
}; 

I was wondering about this, as it tangentially relates to the shotgun problem. How long does it normally take for a dead monster to become non-solid? Because, I'm pretty sure I've seen the second shot of a riot controller uselessly hit a corpse as it's in the process of falling down. (grey particles instead of red give it away) 

quad posting, sorry.

the previous post is still reliant on the SOLID_NOT in killed() to work correctly. 

grahf broke up my posting string. of course, now i'm starting a new one as i cross-posted with him. :P

in answer: setting non-solid is done in a very weird and inconsistent manner. usually it is set on the second or third frame in the monster animation. for fish, it's terrible. stock fish have their nonsolid setting like near the end of the animation. it's why end.bsp you can actually start to choke when swimming through that little underwater tunnel because the fish take so long to become nonsolid, so you can't move past them. :P

i was wondering though... does changing solid setting that could potentially be in a touch function (like when a missile hits a monster, instead of shotgun tracelines) be bad?
fitzquake and other engines have fixes to most of these types of problems but is it possibly a crash waiting to happen? 

Zombies actually gibbing at 0 health, and having their health reset by .th_pain is the only reason why they gib, and the reason why they are the only monster that gibs... 

thinking a little more. i can see what you are saying about zombies. if two zombies were hit in such a way they the damage ping ponged back and forth between the two always at sub 60 damage levels, then you're quite right in that they would never gib.

Yes. With the example I stated, it's 14 coinflips without getting 4 in a row the same (which is how I was able to calculate it).

I was wondering about this, as it tangentially relates to the shotgun problem. How long does it normally take for a dead monster to become non-solid?

Most monsters become SOLID_NOT in the 3rd frame of their death sequence. The Riot Controller fires its second volley 0.3 seconds after the first. Fish don't go solid for nearly 2 seconds in unmodified progs.dat, as necros mentioned.

Killed() isn't the correct place to set SOLID_NOT, as non-monsters use that function as well. In the monsters' .th_die function is the best place, if that is desired.

i was wondering though... does changing solid setting that could potentially be in a touch function (like when a missile hits a monster, instead of shotgun tracelines) be bad?

Killed() sets .touch to SUB_Null so it can't touch anything else. This mostly stops dead fiends and dogs from doing damage when leaping, once their dead. I don't think there's a potential crash issue, as touches have all been calculated before they are processed.

As for your code snippet: What it looks like you're trying to do, is use the linked list of nodes to track which entities are hit, and how much damage each entity needs to take, and then once all of thed pellets have been processed, do the damage in turn. A solution that works as long as you don't have a shotgun being fired because of a .th_die function. (This is why exploboxes were broken when setting each other off, as T_RadiusDamage() uses findradius(), which creates a linked list of entities that are close enough, and exploboxes explode in their death function. The well known fix is to make the explosion happen next frame.)

However, I'm not entirely sure what your code actually does... 

If your Killed() function checks for FL_MONSTER before making them SOLID_NOT, then you're probably safe. 

> in doom, you can line up 3 or even 4 zombies and take them ALL out with a single SSG shot.

That is just overpowered, IMO. The result is that you'll rarely use another weapon anymore.

i don't see why that's overpowered... zombies are the weakest monster (two, sometimes three pistol bullets to kill) and doom's SSG spread is huge. if you're further than ~192 units away, half your pellets will miss a standard sized monster (ie: not fat or huge ones).

i think if you were fighting a closely clumped up horde of zombies, the ssg could probably take out a dozen or so.

at the same time, it's very slow firing and requires nearly melee range. using the RL or plasma rifle is nearly always more desirable.

plasma rifle has insane throughput and RL's is nearly as high (but with the added bonus of splash damage). 

I noticed this reading comments on the Remake Quake demo and other releases. People would say that it is or isn't proper Quake. I myself are building a level that certainly doesn't play like a typical iD style Quake level, and I started pondering exactly what it is that makes a level classic Quake style. Is it about exploration, being more non-linear? Key hunts? Something about architecture?

So, I thought I'd ask you chaps what your thoughts are, and perhaps more importantly, post example custom levels that you think really got to the heart of 'Quakeiness', and what you look for usually in custom levels. 

post example custom levels that you think really got to the heart of 'Quakeiness'

czg03, most of Terra and Warp Spasm (specifically warpc) all accomplish a feeling of a journey through a monolithic, oppressive, hostile location, built for a purpose which yet remains unknown for the end explorer.

After some thought I thought of many more I could list, like lunsp1, or starkmon, or Trinca's latest, and figured that an interconnected layout definitely helps click things forever in a Quakey way... it may be simply because that's what the original maps did, though.

You may find this thread interesting: http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=27785 

ta for the thread link, I didn't notice that one :E

So its not necessarily about being somewhat non-linear, more that classic Quake levels always feel like one big place that you fully explore, and that this exploration leads you back to original areas but at different positions. Compared to the more modern approach of a long corridor of different locations.

Something like Painkiller's Docks are a big environment that you go through in a zig-zag pattern, but you never return to an area you've previously been to. So I suppose that's it mainly :E 

A reasonable summing up, but for me the ultimate Quake level(s) are those inside Insomnia. In terms of level path you go through loops, continually returning to previous areas, but coming from different directions, until you complete it.

The best map for it was Push Underground (Underworld reference?) since the central canyon is visited minimum four or five times, but never gets boring or confusing in terms of layout.

It's sad to see modern games relying on the lineal path, just because it doesn't take any thought. 

Not even THAT hard except spawns that deal 100 dmg. I should rant on that later. I have a demo but its paused near the last ~third of map (

Also why does it look broken in DP? http://i.imgur.com/690G4.jpg 

The post was obviously meant to be in Roman Wilderness Of Pain thread http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60400 

Quake levels actually are largely linear, often with a dedicated start area that you don't see ever again (lost entrance to dismal oubliette anybody?) and the single overarching goal of finding the exit.

There are typically loops or hub areas (e2m6 is a good example) that connect different parts or branches of a level, and as was said the player does the loops through that part, often for keys or buttons that open the next loop.

Then there also often is a dedicated linear end area.

e1m1 is a perfect example for a very linear Quake map, with a couple optional loops only explored for secrets, and a few dead ends (nailgun room). No one would argue it isn't Quake though.

e1m2 actually also is largely linear, in a circle shaped layout, again with a dedicated start and end section, and a couple optional loops again typically for secrets. The main diversion is that you can enter the main circle from both ends. Clever.

e1m3 is very linear apart from the large loop for the gold key (which in itself is also pretty linear) and a few (small) optional loops and dead ends.

In all 3 maps there is a very obvious and pretty linear main route, augmented by loops and dead ends which are actually often optional to explore.

Yet, many people like episode 1 and some say it is very Quakey.