Terrifying journey through a base, after which the player realizes the terrible journey was actually through his own mind. 

Good to see all these maps started! I just hope this project doesn't suffer from "natural terrain comp" issues. I think that if nobody is able to finish maps they should put them up for adoption and let others finish them or perhaps graft parts into their own maps if possible.
Than - you are a clever man! Can you make a spike shooter target the player so it follows them like a turret in Half Life? Why wouldn't lasers work?
I vote Zwiffle for team leader - though not the best mapper on this thread, he has a strong record of actually finishing his projects. 

There is a Sadlark level that emulates this pretty well with a spike attack. I forget which one it is though. The situation involves clearing out a bunker area. You move from side to side and the spike is positioned to appear to fallow. Pretty cleverly done, but it can be refined even further. 

sadlark 4 wasnt it ? 

It can't follow the player! It would just pop up from the floor and the shooters would fire when it pops up. It can use spikes or lasers. I will try and make it when I have time, but I think anyone should be able to figure out how to do it. 

that could be something for the modified progs.dat ?

A turret that pops up and can fire lazer / grenade / rocket etc...

Could also specify if it comes out of the floor (rises) or down from the ceiling (falls).

Could be quite useful I think, and a model should be easy as it needs no animation (really...) 

Than's idea is a clever workaround, but if we're having a modified progs.dat (I'm not sure it's been decided yet?) anyway, we may as well throw in a shooter that tracks the player. Infact, wasn't there one in the Rogue mission pack? 

Since I haven't played Sadlark in years, I put a few hours of play time in. If you want to do this trick of having the spikes follow the player open up Sadlark9 for examination. Essentialy though, you are putting three or more spike emmitters around the same position and then having trigger_multiples adjacent to one another. In Sadlark9, the spikes emmitter areas are covered by bunkers.

However, Than's trick sounds way cool too. 

Here is an example of what is possible. This is a really simple example, so bear in mind that it could easy be expanded to a more complex setup involving multiple turrets, turrets that alternately fire in orthagonal/diagonal directions, turrets that fire in patterns similar to the one in E2M7 (spiral pattern from what I remember) etc. Not sure if you can set the spikeshooters up to fire from the ceiling to the floor, but perhaps there is a hack. Whatever the case, they work quite nicely on the floor anyway :)

Here's the file: http://than.leveldesign.org/files/floorGunTest.7z 

Whilst I don't mind the idea of a flashlight too much, I don't really like the thought of having to use a modified engine to get it to work, or even forcing players to set gl_flashblend 0, even though it can be done in an autoexec.cfg if the pack has its own directory and progs.

Another way of adding dark areas to a map is to have switchable lights to sections of the map that the player can turn on as they progress. This needn't be as obvious as a light switch, but could be (only marginally less obvious, I know) disguised as power generators that the player must turn on in each section of the map.

Anyway, if anyone wants to add a flashlights mod, that's fine with me, but I don't think we should force people to use a certain engine (darkplaces or whatever) to play.

As for a turret mod, that sounds ok. The ones in OUM aren't so bad, though I'm not sure they can be activated and deactivated at will. I'm not really that keen on the Zer ones either. 

I'd prefer the flashlight as a separate weapon as Metl suggested. It would have to be done really well and implemented into the gameplay effectively to not piss me off though. Always on (and set in WS) is also not a bad idea, and would require no model.

As for level structure, I think it's best that we just have a hub structure similar to that of Chapters, because it allows everyone to be as creative with the gameplay of their map as possible without having to think about what how hard the previous level was and what weapons the player is carrying. It also means that players can check out any map they like at any time, without having to endure a really hard/annoying (e.g. three shambler ambush with no cover and confusing layout) map before getting to one they like.

COOP friendly is also something I am for 100%, so if code is written for the pack, perhaps some coop specific stuff wouldn't go amiss. My thoughts are improvements to existing entities to make them more coop friendly, players keep guns they have picked up (but no ammo or minimum pickup ammo) when they respawn, coop only appearflags (possibly, could be a lot of work) and perhaps some other stuff.

Is anyone reading this versed in qc and willing to contribute? 

You rock. You rock for the floor turrent thingie, too. Also, Asaki has shown an interest in helping out with the coop-friendly coding, but since I'm pretty much ingnorant in this field, I defer to you or Senor Gove in letting him know just what may need to be done. And you rock. 

Give my elite team a few days. I think you guys will like what is produced... 

The turret idea sounds slightly interesting... but I'd like one that could be set to only attack the monsters (like in a real base). Flashlights are also interesting, but surely it requires Darkplaces in order to do the dynamic lighting?

As for monsters/etc... why not just use Quoth, it's got about everything you need. I mean, that's the point of it. 

a flashlight in an engine outside of DarkPlaces will look the same as the light emitted from a travelling rocket, only kept still cause its a flashlight

in Darkplaces it will look the same by default. if you turn on Real Time Dlights then it will look the same except dlight entities (the flashlight, rockets, spawn exploding etc) will cast realtime shadows for their duration. so a rocket exploding will flash the ogres shadow over the wall, and the flashlight will peel silhouettes of grating across the floor. granted if you did DP only you could fancy it up with a cool cubemap and so on, to render the lens of the light, but eh, not necessary.

but yeah, its easy for it to look fine in other engines and cool in DP - or the same. 

The normal way to do it is just to spawn an entity with no model, give it the glowing light effect and then position it at the end of the traceline from the player. Basically, the way the hl 1 flashlight worked. This causes problems in multiplayer because entities with no model aren't updated over the network. A good fix is to make a 1x1 pixel transparent sprite, and set the model to that instead. This isn't necessary in single-player, but is worth doing if you're gonna support coop.

Of course, if you're smart with the way you write it, you could put some checkextensions code in there too, so any engine that supports checkextentions and dynamic pre-pixel lighting uses a true flashlight, and any other engine just uses the cheap method above. Darkplaces supports both these things, I don't know if many others engines do.

Also, while I'm posting, I'll throw my weight behind the always on flashlight if you do decide to go ahead with it. It's the neatest option in my mind, a seperate weapon will cause (some of) the same complaints doom 3 received. 

the special enforcer there was pretty good. I just recently played the map/pack. It had other cool things too, stuff rotating in multiple axis and lightnings zapping. (ouch!)

flashlight, have you looked at asaki's speedmod from qexpo? It has a flashlight that's kinda working. Try it in dp and you see dynamic shadows even! :) I don't know if it works in other clients since it's supposed to work in normal maps that are darkened somehow for the mod. 

The only thing I want from Quoth that isn't included - at least, that I can think of right now - is func_breakables.
The sadlark level was that kind of disney themed one. 8 worlds in one map. What has that guy been up to? after q2 he kind of dropped out, didn't he? 

Also, I still say no progs so you can play it on a QW coop server. 

I thought everyone played with flashblend off, it looks like total crap. Does it cause much slowdown or something? 

After releasing Sadgron 3 for Q2 (1999?) did drop off for a while. I fired off an email to him around 2004, where he said that he was working on a 12 map quake2 mission pack, that was about 60% done. Since then, his email address has become obsolete, so i haven't been able to follow up. 

not all the maps will use a flashlight. I don't plan on using a flashlight in my map anyway. I agree with SB though, who actually has flashblend set to 1? Maybe QW players? They are probably all savvy enough to turn it off, and we can always disable it in an autoexec.cfg as mentioned before if we have a mod.

I had a thought about the start map earlier. Since I don't particularly like the type of start map that is just a series of unthemed slipgates, I think each author should make a little entrance area, which has the same theme as his level, and then one mapper can glue them all together and make the start map coherent and consistent.

For example, if the map requires the flashlight, perhaps it should be made clear by requiring the player to use it to find their way to the entrance. For the flooded base level, maybe a flooded lift shaft that the player swims down (with air pockets along the way. For the spaceship themes, perhaps a small escape pod like module that fires the player to the level. etc. etc. 

Cool idea :) 

that sounds great! 

My level casts the player as a self-aware cyborg.