Daz: Has a lot of great parts and looks very good. It somewhat lacks overall coherence, which is probably because of the time limit. More skilled speedrunners than I would probably enjoy all the grenade jump possibilities. I did manage an OK run of 2:05 with far too many quicksaves and repeat attempts. I'm sure it can be improved a lot.

Ericw: Looks and feels quite Zerst�rerish to me. I enjoyed the fights, especially the ones with monster combinations I don't think you see often. I liked the layout of the whole level, and the architecture was pretty good too.

Ionous: The other traditionally Zerry map in this pack, I think. I didn't quite appreciate the overuse of the red rune tile, but otherwise had a very good look and feel. The fights were fun, except the Vores were placed in places where they weren't very threatening.

Mfx: I enjoyed this a lot, and already mailed Mfx a few comments. To add to them, the overall look with the floating islands in the skybox and on the map was just great. The only gripe would be that it didnt' quite have that Zerst�rer atmosphere. I guess it looked too beautiful instead of evil? Nevertheless, I'd say it's my favorite in this pack. (I managed somehow to avoid the problems some others got into. Hey, when a message tells me to run, I run :-)

Scar3crow: Nice debut. This definitely had the makings of a good map, but would need more work to polish the rough spots. I liked the zombie horde. The big crusher at the end wasn't a good kind of surprise, but I still enjoyed the end fight after I figured out how to not get crushed.

Tronyn: Whoa. This has amazing, impressive architecture, and the fights were varied and fun. It does get a lot easier (well, the end fights have, ahem, difficulties) once you've found a couple of good weapons and I never got low on ammo apart from having to be economical with rockets in one section. There a lot of choice where to go next in midgame, though I'm not sure I will replay this because of the sheer size. However, I'm pretty sure I'll load it up again just to look around.

Thanks again OTP and the map authors. 

well that was an experience. i won't select certain maps. i just wanna say jam3 totally shifted my mind for several days so i return to it with the urge to replay no matter what map. all maps have their sweet spots.

i salute to jam3 authors and wish them well.

here's the track to support the map pack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K3SBNdZCZk 

Dear holy crap mfx, am I even playing quake? Amazing map. I've also enjoyed daz's eric's and ionous's, I guess I mostly agree with the other comments. I also spent a long time hopping around on ledges that did not lead to secrets on jam3_ericw and swimming around in vertical blood on jam3_daz :) 

this album received the most amount of play during mapping (though far from exclusively).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgghSkLkviM 

proper musics! 

Fuck. 

no fuck. 

wololo 

I'm still playing around with Daz's map and grenade jumps. It is a fun map to play normally, but it's also kinda fun to try to speedrun. Though to be honest, by kinda fun I mean some of these grenade jumps are just too hard for me dammit.

What I wonder is can you make a grenade jump from the button that extends the bridge below the exit to the blood liquid next to the exit?

It feels to me that the bone bridge and the exit are too high to grenade jump to directly, but the blood groove could be reachable and I in fact managed to make one grenade jump so I touched it briefly, but not enough to actually swim into it. Most of the time I either don't get enough height to reach it, or get too much and collide with the bone bridge instead.

Can anyone make a little demo showing off their grenade jumping skills and reaching the exit from or near that button, or even from the bridge that you have to wait for a bit to extend? It would set my mind at ease to know that at least someone can do it :) 

I did it on my first lazy try but failed the next 10 times and gave up :P 

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/speed_runs/jam3_daz-Nov-10-2014-184852-SpiritQuaddict.dz

Feels like one should be able to directly reach the exit if you are super good. 

DaZ: Nice zerstyle all over, knew the map a bit from the streams..Solid layout, no experiments here. So still a solid blast, i want more of this!

demo

EricW: A true reinterpretation of the zertheme, the textures work well in this one. Overall feeling was good, missed secret opportunities here and there. I'd put them all oyer the place in this map, but thats just me:)
More brutalistic maps please!

demo

Ionous: I love the brushwork in this map. The light and that HOM fixed, and this map rocks! Map more!

demo

Scar3crow: I couldn�t finish this w/o cheating, later i found out whats going on..
Maybe communicate the ending mechanic a bit better to the player? Anyhow, i liked the corridor with all the zombies in it, looked good! Map more!

demo

Tronyn: Well what to say? What a map?!? Awesome effort, just to get this ready for the zermod i believe, not to mention to map this actually..
The doom layout/prgression isnt my cup of tea really, but i did some serious sniping in this map... Hehheehhe.
I totally forgot to quicksave/save in this demo, so i die somewhere on my path.. Map even more?

demo

Cool contributions everybody, thanks a lot!
And thanks to otp for saving the world and not mapping. Thanks!:) 

Thanks for all the demos! I tried to keep speedrunners in mind when I designed the central area. It's left intentionally open so that people might find some cool routes.

I'm glad people enjoyed the level. I was super rusty with all the Quake entities so I wanted to keep the level fairly simple in order to finish it in time. A lot of you noticed that the quality really tails off at the end and you are correct. The final area with the sk lift -> bridge extension -> spine bridge to exit was made in about 40 minutes and it was about 2:30am at the time! I had to finish the level off and go to bed :)

All the demos have been really interesting to watch. A lot of you seemed to get a little confused after going into the gk door blood maze and opening access to the sk. I think the issue is that it feels a bit weird using the blood elevator a second time to get to the sk room. If I had repopulated the areas leading to the blood elevator I think that would have helped a lot, but I also think there should have been another shortcut that got activated once you reached the second floor of the main arena that allowed fast access back to the second floor. Perhaps barred stairs that become unbarred when the player hits the switch in the blood maze.

I wanted to do more with the swimmable blood as well in the central area but just ran out of time. It would have been cool to have areas coming off of that central structure that were accessable by swimming in the vertical blood gulleys and perhaps an overhead horizontal blood gulley as well.

Lots of ideas for the next map anyway ;) 

Since the wateralpha from quake.rc completely nullifies the surprise Shambler in the blood elevator.

Then again, Zer *does* have an entity that allows you to set it, so... ;-) 

Thank you for the demonstration. 

I should have looked at the documentation for zer in more detail. The Shambler still works in a way - the player gets to think about how to deal with it before they engage! 

i have so much to play! 

I didn't say enough first time around. But this is a great pack. Great theme, mostly great adherence to it, great variety, good contrast to the previous jam packs, and a few very fine maps in there too. Pity more people couldn't enter, but those who did, well done :).

Demos here:

Sorry no Tronyn as I only have 80 GB left on my HDD. Most demos are excessively casual and skin of teeth, apart from MFX's which is excessively slow and I still only got half the secrets.

Maps:

Ionous - very cool, luxurious detailing and design. Well balanced and good fun gameplay throughout the map. A bit dark in places, that's all.

EricW - crudish, but effective. Very nice to have a space floater, works well with the zer style. I quite like that it's mostly progressing through one big cube, perhaps this motif could have been taken further. Well balanced gameplay throughout.

Scarecrow - a bit too crude overall, the designs of the first bit and zombie section were nice tho, and the end arena was fun.

Daz - great stuff, probably the most Zer of the lot, the central structure is amazing and the red fog and industrial look is good. The side areas feel a bit bolted on in comparison. Fun gameplay but not as exciting as other maps.

MFX - quite incredible atmosphere and style. Another great map that pushes Quake into another dimension. Gameplay good and quite tricky, secrets trickier.

Tronyn - ridiculously epic. Chaotic mish-mash of textures and designs, but great fun overall. 

Are often better if you actually include them:

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/shamjam3_demos.zip 

Great map Daz. Loved the shambler. 4/6 secrets i think. Eric's was huge! Entered Tronyn's... God. Am i ready for this !? 

havent played in ages so will take me a while to get some demo's done (got one so far). on that move on daz, yes you can easily reach the exit from there, basic rule of thumb if you can reach it with a rj you can do it on a gj to. Working on aroute for that map now. was hoping to snatch the 4rth secret from this thread :) 

http://members.upc.nl/verorber/demos/j3_orbs.rar

daz: slow lift start makes it frustrating to run a lot, especialy since i wanted to do 2 gj's on 100 hp (or better a double gj) and there isnt any health around at crucial point. gj 3 and 4 can be done in once, thats a pretty tough one
eric:was first trying to voreball jump from GA when i discovered this route, wich leaves health for a ogregj start, but they arent positioned nice enough for me to try.
Ionous did this one on normal skill to get a helping hand :)
Mfx forgot to change back skill setting, was screwing up the rocky stair part a lot!
Scar3: Geez i suck with that cannon couldnt get near as fast killing the zombies with it as goign al the way around getting the chainsaw and do them one by one
Tron: didnt change client nor settings for epic big maps, so played rather choppy. but could find a pretty easy route 

Cool run Orbs. Sorry about the lift :) 

Putting in secrets tagged useless is a great incensitive to proove the opposite. Did you realy think it was useless or did you try to "hide" it?

Improved tronyns by quit a bit, updated the download. 

It was very late and I wanted a secret in plain sight and thought it would be cool to put one on a support up there. There was no regard for game play in it at all hence the "useless" secret :)

So cool that you proved me wrong :D