Pritchard

What a smashing (hehe) map. I really liked the execution. I wish khreathor's model was available for the jam. Oh well. We'll just have to wait for his mod then make him some maps :)

I think you balanced this quite well, but it is worth mentioning: There is a danger with too many movement obstructing objects (breakables in this case) that gameplay will slow down. Also giving the player too much geometry to exploit the weak quake enemy "AI". I thought that this could have been an issue, particularly earlier in the map where there are cramped rooms.

Pretty amazing job man. Well done.


Newhouse

Lots of people have been saying that your map doesn't fit the theme. I sorta think it dips its toe in the theme then backs out. The execution of the map, like Pritchards was extremely well done. A huge map considering the time frame.

I know you've put a lot of effort into the map and it shows. I have a little feedback though. I felt like the pacing was a little off. There is foreshadowing with the eliminators? (flying enforcers) and the zombies, but then there aren't many encounters until the zombies awaken. I would have liked to have seen the zombies (maybe one or two from each group) awaken a little earlier and then maybe scale up in numbers later. I'm not sure.


Overall I loved the theme of your map, noir or not. I liked the contrast between the tech and the brickwork city.

I have one complaint, and it is a stylistic one, rather than anything important. I hate the entrance to your map. It was the same in your last map aswell. Something about it just really frustrates me. So, take that with a grain of salt :)


Ionous.

What can I say man, I want to play a full version of the map, the concept is great, and having you explain it in your playthrough really sold me as to how it could work when executed well. I didn't find the breakable secret because I tried breaking a couple of the black walls and they didn't break. I didn't notice any difference in the breakable one to make me think I could. I guess that is part and parcel of a rushed map.

So all in all, thanks guys. You created some really interesting "worlds", to the point where I want to know more about each of them. That should say something about what you were able to achieve.

I really like when people are able to tell a story through something so simple. 

...very well executed b&w theme.

Black future is the absolute pearl here, awesome in oh so many ways. Been a long time since I experienced such tension in a Quake map.

Buried by Time and Dust - kinda nice, not very much to do, great sense of place.

One Ranger Two Boomsticks - definitely has its moments and does a good job of making you forget the funky taylor those space age gangsters use. Ogres charging through doors preceded by a mob of grunts are awesome.

Hackeropolis - brought back shivers of one of the absolute best Quake levels ever. Unfortunately, it crashed 4 times Quakespasm on me when I tried to Quicksave. Did not restart it the fifth time.

The start map is all kinds of awesome.

All in all, feels a bit like Painkiller: disjointed levels with brutal action and some tricky parts. 

And I like it. Especially the start map, wandering into an old cinema felt so satisfying.

Pritchard - Most faithful to the theme. All of the breakable doors and boxes and windows really made it feel alive, and you captured the film noir essence very well.

Ionous - An interesting premise, I just wish there was some combat to go along. Breaking into an abandoned building was neat, but nothing but zombies and an axe to fight them off with, kind of ruined it for me.

Newhouse - Quite a large map for a jam, shows you worked hard on it. I managed to avoid the fiend pit the first time purely by luck, which had I fallen victim to I might not have been able to finish the map alive.

Shamblernaut - What.

The black and white color palette may have gotten stale after awhile, but the film noir theme is really unique, and I wouldn't mind seeing more it. It's nice to see new environments in Quake for a change, even if it doesn't always work. Good job everyone. 

@newhouse
Yep, first finished Quake map! I've released a few maps for Cube 2 and Tesseract (Cube 3?) in the past but this was my first finished product for this game. I'd definitely say my experience working in that engine helped me a lot when figuring out what kind of quality I wanted, and although working with brushes is quite different, I don't think I'd want to go back to how those games do it...

@khreathor
I wouldn't mind coming back to this map and extending it if it's possible to include it in your mod release, although as time went on I began to include more and more AD entities (the elevator is something i'm quite proud of, and AD allowed me to turn what was a map hack into something more sensible), so you'd either have to borrow a fair bit from that mod or reimpliment it yourself for it to be compatible.

@Shamblernaut
I totally get what you mean about the risks of my map. I think if I were to do it again I'd probably change the design of the double doors especially; it's too hard to get through them if only one or two sections are broken. I tried to hold off using them excessively for that reason, and having monsters target and destroy them (that's a pretty cool feature!) if they're in the way helps a lot with saving the player from having to axe their way through too much.

Personally I think the AI handled the smaller areas pretty well, the biggest issue being the grunts' tendency to run away rather than through the hole that gets broken in the wall in the office. I could have polished that up with a monsterjump to make them leap through when it breaks, but that probably would have been tricky to get right and I never tried. The area with the troughs turned out pretty well though, the biggest issue being that sometimes the monsters there trigger early if they spot you through a pixel or something...

@the silent
I'm glad you liked it! I'm also glad that you actually saw the door being charged through, watching demos etc. a lot of people missed it as they didn't commit to that section of the warehouse and instead hung back as they finished the first set of enemies, which meant they didn't get to see the others arrive...

@Orl
It's funny that i'm getting this feedback so much; that I captured the theme so well. I really wasn't expecting to, since aside from a few neo-noir films (Scarface, the newer one etc.) I don't actually know that much about the genre or what makes it tick. I guess I lucked out! 

I'm definately going to make an different entrance to my map, this was just the temporary solution to be honest. Like iounous mentioned about it in his stream, it felt like it was kind of added during the last minutes.

About zombies, in a city center. There will be couple alive even first time visiting that area, but just in a shake of demonstrating couple mechanisms which I couldn't have as enough time as needed. Basically for this version there is 2 places where you can shoot part of the tech structure (ones that sparks so much, smoke or are even in flames). When those tech/pipe things explode those would kill so many zombies at once. It will be a bit technical part of the gameplay.. can you use the environment and be clever. It will need a lot of work.

I was thinking to demonstrate it by showing it in front of the player when player enters the city center first time.. zombie(s) wakes up, smoke+sparks coming from this specific brakable tech thing and kaboom. Player might wonder what happened first.. and maybe right after that just letting there be one of those things without any danger (just pure curiosity.. maybe I will try to shoot those things.. and then player experience the "Eureka" moment) 

I keep that in mind, that's why it need some proper planing and designing from my side. No rush.
I want to make everything to work as expected, so you don't have to spend some extra work on this. 

Running DarkP at 1920 is very choppy - which engine do you recommend?

Cheers
Doc 

Have you tried Quakespasm? 

I made a 2nd DP install without the fancy textures and it works well now... mostly.

1. In the start map, the car poster to the right of the gas station (where there's the Diesel sign) flickers and disappears in the distance like it's sharing the same space with the wall brush behind it.

2. In NewHouse's map, the teleporter at the beginning doesn't work properly and sends you back in front of it. Please fix this for the updated version, I want to play this map with DP's superior lighting - speaking of, is it normal that I'm seeing some blueish lights in both DP and QS?
It is generally not a good idea to design a map for one specific engine. Keep that in mind for future releases. BTW, what happened to the music you wanted to use? Oh and don't worry, the latest DP build does support alpha masked textures.

Quakespasm 0.92, on the other hand, brings another issue: I have to load levels manually via a console command because entering the movie doesn't work. 

Unfortunately, mappers for Quake can't afford QA teams /s

The fact of the matter is that DP breaks a lot of things vs. other engines, I mean it has a whole set of cvars to revert behaviour changes (I wonder if fiddling with those would help your problems? I'm not familiar with them at all), sv_gameplayfix_*, just so that it can be made to work more or less like the original engines.

The outcome of this is that people who don't test against DP (like myself, I did try loading my map in it for a lark but I never played it all the way through) tend to produce maps that won't compensate for its quirks. There's a reason I only listed one engine as "Designed and Tested for" in my readme.

Anyway, minirant that's been said a thousand times before over...
There are a few coloured textures in map, specifically anything that wasn't touched by the palette such as fullbrights (this can be seen on the various mdl light fittings, which have blue and yellow tints), and I think the start of NewHouse's map is supposed to have coloured lighting. .lit information isn't affected by the palette, but no one seems to have been brave enough to use it to add colour highlights anywhere other than NewHouse, and they did it quite subtly.

It's interesting that you're having those other issues especially though, since I've had none of them. The car poster sits a good few units away from the wall in my copy of the start map, which is strange since that doesn't match your description of it. And although I didn't get that you're supposed to attack the movie posters to select the film which made me think something was broken, once someone told me it worked fine.

The only difference that I can think of is that you said 0.92 rather than 0.92.1 for your QS version, but I'm not sure what changed and I doubt it was anything so significant. Weird stuff... 

I get a 'not type 2 or 10 error' with Spas but that might not be the maps fault...even at 1280 with DarkP it's choppy... 

Try: r_useportalculling 0 in Darkplaces and let me know if it helped with a case of flickering.

It is generally not a good idea to design a map for one specific engine.
Yes, but Darkplaces has many parts rewritten. It treats physics and other stuff differently. It even can't "emulate" original Quake 100% accurately. For example, map works in all engines, but is broken in DP, because it calculates some shit differently. So if I hear map is broken, I already know what engine player is using.
DP is like a beautiful but handicap girl. Looks nice but need special care. 

That's... One way to put it, I guess. Poor DarkPlaces... 

I used DarkPlaces just fine for this mapjam, no issues or choppiness :) It's my preferred engine and since this 'jam was based on Arcane Dimensions prog's I figured it was okay.

Now mapjam7 with Quoth, well that's a different beast there. Had to use QS ofc.

But I ask, is it really that difficult to have updated versions of each engine and if your preferred engine is not working just use the current defacto standard(QS)?

That is what I do at least. 

To be honest, I really wanted to make it work on DP as well, but had to make some fast decisions which probably made it unplayable in DP. Things like invisible walls don't work in DP? So I simple thought I want to focus on Quakespasm at the moment. Also my previous jam map wasn't meant to be played on DP.

Though it didn't know teleports doesn't work in DP? Maybe it is handling player's position and collision detects differently.. or maybe even player's collision box is bigger or something. I have no clue something like that is changed even in DP, if that is the case here?

Standalone version(s) definitely will be tested to be played at least with the current version of DP, isn't Quakespasm going to have many of the same features like DP as well? Even mankrip is working on his own engine thing that looks so far a lot like DP. 

By "invisible walls" I mean wall with the rmq_transparent wab's texture invisible "pinkish texture". I heard it those didn't worked in some engine and it might have been DP.

So why I used invisible wall instead basic skip? Well for some odd reasons when placing skip brush between func_breakable bricks and button behind them, for some reasons lighting didn't liked that at all and button's front face was pure black. Maybe I just didn't placed it correctly or something.

Teleports should be placed well for at least Quakespasm. 

I'll take responsibility for the start map issues. Although I don't think anybody has had issues with it in QS with the supplied palette and mod.

I didn't even test it in darkplaces, in fact I don't even have it installed.

I used the latest version of quakespasm and packaged an older verson of AD (from link at the top of the AD thread) with it. Hopefully that hasn't introduced any bugs. 

Could you please shared where did you even download newer DPs. I tried to look at Moddb site but couldn't find the actual download button.

Is this the right site even?
http://www.moddb.com/engines/darkplaces-engine

I have plenty of time, so I will try to make it run on DP, if it only requires couple changes and not massive amount. I will share updated version here. 

DP's teleport problem in NewHaouse's map can be resolved by jumping into this teleport, instead of walking into it. 

Okay I tried this darkplaces-sdl engine:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855VnBjaDJpU2xwWVU/view?usp=sharing

And this happened in many places inside this old factory area. I'm not quite sure how Dps handles drawing. 

Does anyone that frequents this forum and maps for Quake really give a fat rat about DarkPlaces? I know I don't.

Complaints about how DarkPlaces runs Quake maps poorly, while at the same time mutilates game play and ruins the appearance of them, probably belongs in the DarkPlaces forum. Not here.

That of course, is nothing but my personal opinion. 

 

For a long while DarkPlaces really was the best Quake engine out there, and a lot of the conventional wisdom floating around the Internet has solidified around DP. If some random person is aware that modern Quake engines are a thing but has not really followed developments for the past few years, they will probably be enthusiastically recommending DP to whoever asks. Ditto for a lot of older webpages that have tips for running Quake.

So a lot of folks use DarkPlaces, for better or worse. I wouldn't blame a mapper for ignoring it, but there are benefits for your (potential) audience if you check your map to see if DP breaks it.

I actually don't want to sound like I'm throwing shade at DP because it does a lot of impressive stuff -- it's a huge amount of technical accomplishment and I'm just a guy typing on a messageboard about it. It's just that DP is occasionally a bad choice for playing vanilla-ish Quake content, so it's unfortunate that it still has pole position in the info that is out there for new folks wanting to play Quake. The situation is what it is though.

Anyway... someone above asked about recent DP builds. You can check out https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/files/?C=M;O=D 

I need to make couple changes to some places, I basically need to cut some brushes so every vertex point is connected to someone else.. that might be the reason why in some views some parts of the map when running in DP doesn't draw faces that should be visible. 

You spend weeks working on a map, yet can't be bothered to spend one more day to test it in the most common engines and make sure it works there... DP sux, Quakspasso 4eva etc bullshit. Go test it properly; everything else is just lazy and unprofessional!