Had no idea it was seeking :P I'll mention that in part 2. 

Would you happen to have the high quality versions of the Drake sounds laying somewhere? 

#36 posted by ijed [200.73.66.2] on 2012/12/20 22:14:37
This is the up to the minute compile tools and engine:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/88336058/s...

"This application has failed to start because SDL.dll was not found"

help? 

it's included in the package on the RMQ site 

now it just crashes immediately on start. No useful error messages. 

I get about 1 second of garbage graphics and then the program crashes. Never had any problems with any other quake exe. Ever. 

try sticking SDL_net.dll in too?

no idea besides that 

yeah did that, i've got everything in the right place because I "uninstalled" and then tried again with the package necros posted earlier, which includes the dlls along with the rmq quake exe.

Now, this is a laptop running XP that copes fine with games like Doom 3, Gears of War and Oblivion. I'm inclined to think that I'm doing everything right at my end.

I also tried giving it various different heapsizes, but it makes no difference.

This makes me sad because an over-the-top Tronyn map is like a Christmas to me, and every Christmas I look forward to Santa coming down my chimney and emptying his sack into my stockings.

Only this time I can't get into my stockings. 

what about FTEQW?
I personally still haven't tried it, and I didn't even that it supported BSP2 until after I released this map, but apparently it does. If you haven't tried it yet, it might be worth a shot:
http://www.fteqw.com/ftedownloads/experimental 

I played through the whole thing with the experimental build of FTEQW, works like a charm. 

So it clearly works OK sometimes... 

You know, if I was in a room with three others - Hitler, Jimmy Saville, and the person who thought this http://www.fteqw.com/images/phocagallery/fteqw/new_bloom_stuff/thumbs/phoca_thumb_l_fte00073.jpg was a good idea - and I was given a gun with two bullets and had to figure out which one of those three people to spare...I think I'd just shoot myself in the head twice. 

Also works. 

I tried using the Darkplaces build 22 dec 2012, and it said it couldn't load wickedstart.bsp because the map was of unknown type. 

It should be supporting BSP2...

A lot of people have had trouble with RMQe, but we weren't able to fix these issues when it was being developed because none of the problems occurred with people on the team.

In the same way, Mac support was impossible because nobody had a Mac. 

I believe two engines support bsp2, and they aren't even compatible implementations, sadly (darkplaces has an altered spec for it, for some reason.) 

and it seemed to work at first - i played through the start map and a little way into the first main map, and then as soon as i got to the first "Baron" knight thing, the game crashed with some "cl_parsetent" error.

I tried restarting and quickloading, but the thing crashes if I try to quickload, so that's as far as it looks like I'm going to get with this one. 

I finally managed to play this after Negke sent me an older build of FTEQW that didn't crash when loading a game.

That said, it felt a bit buggy with quite a few graphical glitches that I never get in Fitz. Also, the player movement physics felt a bit...fucked. I'm not sure what the problem was exactly but whenever I was moving on stairs or slopes, it felt like control was partially removed like I was sliding around on ice or something. This caused me to plummet off ledges more times than I can remember and I just got used to hitting noclip and flying back, which kind of killed immersion. Also, the music stopped playing early on and I never could get it back.

I think all this resulted in an experience that was quite a few notches below the level of enjoyment I had playing the extra arcanum maps yesterday, but that's not your fault Tronyn.

The main map is a monumental construction, and to be honest I found it overwhelming at times, but amazingly I didn't get too confused with the layout and it seemed reasonably easy to find my way around it once I'd opened it up a bit.

The scale of some of the spaces is mind-boggling. It would be very interesting to see what could be chopped out to get this to compile in normal bsp format, whilst retaining as much of the epic feel as possible. I'm fairly certain it could be done.

I played on easy, but even so the Quoth enemies do my head in quite frankly so I was a bit dissappointed to find out I had to fight Droles and those flying lightning things.

If this map had vanilla weapons and a skew towards mainly vanilla monsters and worked in Fitz, it would have been one of my all-time favourites, I'm sure of it. 

The build I used to play it allowed me to save whilst dead for some reason. I found this out the hard way during the end map. In the chaos, I quicksaved whilst dead. That was fun. 

that's an odd bug.
I'm sorry this didn't work out as well as it ought to have, though at least you were able to play it at all. And I'm glad for the enjoyment you did get. I do feel your pain though since I don't like messing around in unfamiliar engines. I hope that more engines eventually support this format (at inside3d I was basically told if you build it they will come).

I think that the map could possibly be split in two (the Tyrann castle front/first cave for map 1, and the Necros courtyard/associated areas/second cave for map 2) and compiled in normal bsp. The thing is by the time I got to that point, the layout had become so intertwined on both sides ("swiss cheese" as someone remarked) that it would have been really artificial to cut things up that way. The size of the map is kind of exhausting even for me and as a result I made the decision to split other forthcoming maps in two.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback on this and the Arcanum stuff too! Cheers! 

I should add, that I have nothing against the BSP2 format, and would love to see it supported by Fitz (or whatever we're calling "Fitz" now, Mark V or QuakeSpasm or whatever.)

From what I understand from reading mh's blog, BSP2 is a completely reasonable and minimal change to the BSP29 format, and I think if we didn't have to go through all this engine pain to see it in action, it could be used for good things. 

Having played the second map several times in various formats, I enjoyed this version the most :)

The start map looked great with its blue sky, message plaques, and hidden entrances to Nightmare and Hell skills. It might have been nice to see that sky echoed in the other maps, though.

The final map was just as spectacular as the other two, but a bit frustrating until I realized that I could handle the hoards without breaking my neck to get the power-ups ;) I loved the monster variety, BTW.

The ambient sounds and music in all 3 maps really enriched the experience!

Congratulations, Tronyn, on releasing the best BSP2 map to date! 

why Tronyn doesn't use that extra special Canadian technology in his maps.

Best I can figure, he's been holding out on that. 

I posted a new darkplaces build today with support for this fine map pack and a number of other fixes for existing maps with issues like hip2m3's shalrath now work properly, and sv_gameplayfix cvars are off by default (the disruptive ones, anyway) so it is a more authentic Quake experience.

Congratulations Tronyn, this is a great map pack :) 

Thanks a lot, I will try it out right away!

I'm glad to see Darkplaces supporting this format, since I have a couple more forthcoming maps that are also too large for normal BSP format, and I've always liked playing in Darkplaces.