So there is no solution.

I would hate to think what happens if you quicksave before the Shambler door in the almost certain position of having burnt up ammo on previous encounters.

The balance otherwise is fine, as I said. 

hm :( 

...Not that I have anything relevant to say, except that I love the 100th post position!

And Ijed, nice work, man Helpful demo!

Sielwolf, thanks, right now I'm at work, nut tonight I'm dowloading and have a look at your demo to sort out the secrets (I found 75%).

So, in the end I hda something to say...

On to the 200th... 

posts on your map episode, Ijed. That is the measure of success in the world of Quake SP mapping :) 

Cheers. Mind you, I reckon I counted for a fair few of them.

Sielwolf - I'll watch your demo in about an hour . . . if it's anything like the old city6 (very old warpc beta) demo it should look pretty amazing.

I tried a run through warpb but melted myself trying to get the Wasted Life secret.

I can see that one and the Ballache secret in warpe causing problems for 100% demos. 

Back to map the second.

It is a good map. The style and effects are good. I like the use of sprites. Archicture is generally good, occasionally great. Some areas were relatively bland and it could have done with more detailing. The pipe machinery and organic bits were really cool, as were the sound effects for them - very effective. The sound is good overall, it fits very well.

Gameplay was mostly good apart from the two "trick" sections mentioned above. The new Enforcers were interesting, and good to face once one learnt they were utterly deadly close up. Having room to move around helped. Sometime the slime was a bit annoying, a constant nagging. Secrets seemed good but generally pretty hard - Vondurian in fact. There were lots of details that could have been secrets but weren't, which made it sometimes tedious to find them. The jumping ones were all cool.

I think, odd exceptions aside, although the maps are - let's be honest - pretty continually hard, the difficulty and balance is pretty good.

HOWEVER, I do agree with people about the size issue. I don't think the maps gain any overall benefit from being so large and monster filled - the benefit of an impressive level of immersion by playing something so vast is outweighed by the maps just being a lot more gruelling than actually fun. Sometimes it feels like hard work keeping going and keeping track of it all. Like Metl says, holding it all in your mind - and fighting "high level" Quake for 3-4 times a normal large map.

Having said that, I can see they'd appeal to a particular taste. There must be some people out there who really wanted something very big, tough, and time-consuming, and this is great for them. Myself, I've tended to enjoy Quake in shorter, funner bursts. So I don't think I will be trying to play the rest of the maps in one go (which will reduce the immersion admittedly, but enhance my sanity). 

I just made it through warpb on normal. It was one hell of a slog. Whilst I didn't find it particularly difficult, I did die once, and would have died a couple more if I hadn't noclipped out of slime after falling in (which I don't normally do, just this map was so huge I just wanted to get through it).

All I can say so far is that the maps have an incredibly hostile atmosphere - more so than any other maps I can think of - maybe some of zerstorer, but that's all that compares. The ambience (sounds make up a lot of this), scale of the architecture, number of enemies, relentless ambushes and MASSIVE size of the maps makes you feel like there really is no end...

...and then there is.

Sealed City here I come!

btw, I like the map names and also the way you named the secrets - it all fits with the map ambience very nicely. Also, when I was killing the second of the two beasts it appeared a bit earlier than I expected it to - quite a long time before I managed to reach the items on the other side of the room. That was great :)

I did find the map a bit too large for my taste to be honest, but it was still fucking great. I'm just worried that warpc and in particular, warpd (I already checked out the monster counts) are going to be a bit too much for me. I'd love to try it in coop mode with three others though :) 

again 100% secrets, 539/543 kills, 62 minutes. Could have been faster, but not much; this is the hardest map in the pack IMO, it�s easy to run out of ammo and then there�s the final battle...

Also included is a short demo how to get the RL right at the start which should make the map alot easier.

http://shub-hub.quaddicted.com/files/demos_singleplayer/warpc_sw62.rar 

While playing warpb, I noticed that polyps will only do damage to armour while you have it, because of the very low damage they inflict per attack. Is this what's intended for them, that they strip away your armour to leave you undefended? It seems a bit odd that the attack will never hurt you directly, perhaps some modification to the way quake handles low damage attacks might be in order.

One idea would be to keep a running total of fractional damage for attacks that get totally saved by armour, tracking how much each one has been rounded up by. When that running total reaches a whole integer the amount of damage taken from the attack that tipped it over becomes 1 to health and 1 less to armour. This is the 'starcraft' approach.

The other option I had in mind would be a 'statistical' method. When considering the amount of damage to inflict, look at the fractional part of the amount saved by the armour. If this fraction is more than a call to random() round up the damage to armour, if not round down. So if 5.6 damage was saved(eg red armour on 7 hp damage) it would cause 6 damage to armour 60% of the time and 5 damage 40% of the time. 

The Polyps were toned down after Contract Revoked - thier attacks used to be a bit more fearsome and rapid fire. Now its fairly rare to be killed by one, unless they're used next to a hazard - lava / slime, where thier push ability comes into play. I'd be in favour of just upping its damage to 2 or 3 (I think it's 1 per hit now) and maybe doubling the rate of fire - resetting them to how they were to be honest.

The difficulty of the maps is there from the start and continues all the way through. Its fairly easy to get blaise about always playing on hard / NM - then play Nehahra on NM and realise Quake normal on NM isn't too tough.

The secrets range from stupidly easy (Haunter of the Dark, Bile Plant) to very complex (Shadow Tower, Sealed City) but there's so many in each level that casual players will almost certainly come across a handful.

The scale of the maps is too massive to cope with - its a bloated Nurgle of a pack, but something of this type didn't really exist before. Future projects will be different, since I think I've exhausted (beaten like a dead horse) this play style, for now at least.

The naming of stuff I generally come up with when hungover, which is where the sarcasm / grim humour comes from. The best thing I named in the pack is Harsh Angled Edge, poking fun at my own mapping as well as creating an allusion to Lovecraft - his descriptions of R'lyeh.

Sielwolf, those demos are excellent. The mental anguish practically leaks out of the screen, especially on warpc. Sorry ;)

Again, I tried to make a demo of warpc during my lunch hour the other day and failed miserably upon reaching the church style chambers after the tower - fried by a Gaunt. 

But will there be any QC source release? Or the Quoth QC is not releasable? 

AFAIK Kell + Necros will release the source for the current version of Quoth once the new version is finished.

The only reason there's a Warp Spasm folder (as opposed to running inside the Quoth folder) is because I swapped out some resources (models, sounds) apart from those it can run inside the Quoth folder normally, assuming its own engines are used. 

+1 informative.

I think the Polyps serve a useful function that doesn't require increasing their damage. They are mobile, relatively hard to hit, unnerving in their appearing act, explode with damage, AND although they do little damage, the effect on screen is as if there is a lot more damage being done. They are a tool not to damage the player but to unnerve the player, IMO.

On the subject of Quoth monsters. The "Shambler-class" monster with 4 tentacle arms that shoots fireballs at you - is that a Gug or a Drole? Anyway, I really really do wish that they actually had to make contact with you to hit you, rather than randomly slapping you and damaging you from several feet away with no contact. Not that it makes them any different to fight, but it does bug me. 

 

This is a very important Quake release overall. 

...just went through warpC with the help of oyur demo... Quite satisfying, I must say,but, what happened of the following levels? Especially warpD is a pain in the ass secrets-wise... Would you mind record full runs of those, too?
I'd appreciate it a lot. Nice work, keep it up.... 

This is a very important Quake release overall.
Indeed, ijed has a great gift for creating a freaking evil and hostile atmosphere on Quake maps (which is nice of course). 

Kind of hard to reply to those comments without sounding like a prick.

Thanks.

Hopefully it'll galvanise others so that the Q1 community beomes even more active. 

keep them coming 

all secrets, 664/666 kills, 59 minutes. Ran nearly out of ammo halfway through and was in single digit health several times, *aargghh*

http://shub-hub.quaddicted.com/files/demos_singleplayer/warpd_sw59.rar

Ijed/Silent: thanks for your nice comments, glad you liked the demos :)

P.S. Would be cool to see someone doing warpe or the secret map, those are not that large. 

... If I had da mad skillz to get through a level on first attempt without trusty F6, I'd record warpe and the secret map... wait! Is there a secret map? Told you I needeed a walkthrough....

Oh, well... I'll try and record a coupla demos anyway, so you people will get at last a coupla minutes laughing your **s off at my sorry skills... 

recording a demo on coop 4? I did on demo2 ... 

care for criticism ijed? 

I there's lots wrong or that could be better in the design; criticism means I'm less likely to make the same mistakes again.

Warpe will be practically impossible to speedrun - the end battle is a very tense affair, despite the quad and can boil down to a combination of good skills and pure luck.

The secret level is accessed at the end by finding the four three rune shrines and playing in nightmare. 

In that order? I mean, I must play on NM and get the runes or get the runes and then play on NM?

Also, I already found 2 runes but they don't appear in the HUD, what's up?

And last, on the sheer constructive criticism, there are still items(health, mainly) going through walls with their edges.

But, you already know how huge a fan I am of this pack, don't you?