As proved by Episode 4. 

I think they have a unique enough functionality to keep.
Poor use could be blamed on the player or the map designer but not the powerup IMO.

AD is still early days and even the AD team have not fully realised the potential, myself included. 

 

All weapons are locked except the axe but you kill everything in one hit for a short duration. 

 

Has there ever been a good use of the Ring of Shadows in any Quake map, ever? 

is great in multiplayer. I think Sandy Petersen used all the powerups best, he used them liberally, openly and in very fun ways. 

I think the RoS was used well in the Pain Maze. 

is great in multiplayer

Ah yeah, forgot about that. I guess you could also include SoA's Empathy Shield as stuff that's kinda meh in SP but works in MP.

The Ring of Shadows would be a lot more interesting and worthwhile in SP if you could use it to hide from already aggro'd monsters. 

Ring of Shadows working a bit like it does in ITS might be interesting? 

Ring of Shadows is grear in Zendar. I also dare say it's pretty useful in my retrojam3dlc map. 

 

Hmm, de-agro affect would be neat. Wouldn't hurt balance of old maps either since most rings are hidden away anyhow in those maps. 

The questions that need answering I think are: What domains aren't covered by the above? What powerups would fit into these domains? Will they break the game if we include them? Will they make the gaming experience more fun?

Well, there's movement.

Speed powerups always annoyed me though. I had an idea of a powerup that would allow the player to slow down their fall when the jump key is pressed, though it wasn't a timed powerup, but rather a permanent upgrade. The next upgrade would allow to either hover indefinitely or even ascend slowly.

Such things need a lot of caution from the mapper though. For example, Tronyn's releases based on Drake usually have this problem when you can easily fly to the edge of the world (or really high) and see that the "world" is just a square with everything beyond a certain threshold cut off.

The Ring of Shadows would be a lot more interesting and worthwhile in SP if you could use it to hide from already aggro'd monsters.

This is the main problem with RoS in SP.

Being strategic in Quake is hard and unrewarding, because most of the time you can't know exactly what the next encounter's gonna be (unless you count savegames). So the best use of powerups is when the shit already hit the fan and you know how and why to use a powerup that's presented to you. Any other situation is just guessing.

Except RoS is completely useless when the shit already hit the fan.

Maybe it could be enhanced by throwing enemies' aim off, like it Doom. Just not projectile enemies'. Or, in the case of AD, slow projectile enemies'. 

Nehahra had a Flight power up that let you fly when you jump. 

gravity modifiers are always interesting, although proper situational use probably means togglable low-gravity volumes rather than powerups, although I guess it could also be useful for time limits while jumping around secrety areas. it could also double up as a handicap if you're not careful.
(eg: hipnotic)

one other alternative powerup would be a repulsion field powerup. knights, fiends, dogs, grenades, etc would be pushed away from the player which if nothing else might make QDQ style gameplay a little more interesting.
maybe combine it with low gravity and death-pits to push monsters into...

or possibly just a powerup that electrocutes nearby stuff (a bit like q2's bfg). just make sure it also shoots+triggers buttons even when you might not want it to, so that it makes things interesting.

another possibility for a powerup would be an attack speed one.
you might also be able to rocket-jump a bit higher, so watch out for that.

one way to make sharpshooter more interesting would be to have it change depending on which weapon the player is currently using, something a bit like hexen2's tome of power. axe attack speeds, more precise shotguns, bouncing nails, cluster nades+rockets (yay rogue!), chain lightning, I dunno, probably a nightmare to test.
or if you don't change the powerup itself, just make it impossible to grab unless you're using a weapon that it can actually affect.
maybe also stop weapons from costing ammo for the duration, which might give it a use even when the player has a rocket launcher.

imho, flight is too open-ended for most maps, whereas I kinda view the use of movement speed powerups as an admission that the map is too long and boring. hexen2... *shudder*

or maybe just let the monsters grab the powerups too... I can think of a number of maps that would make that repulsion field thing interesting when held by a monster... racing monsters to the pent's spawn spot might also be interesting... vores with quad... *shudder*. enforcers with biosuits that you need to kill quickly to avoid dying...

just ideas. ideas are cheap. its implementing+maintaining them that costs time.

@sock, re qcc:
sounds like a typo in AD. older versions of fteqcc (but not other qccs) had a bug that caused them to not check properly. if you really want that old behaviour you should just redeclare your function as var and assign to it somewhere, otherwise its a guarenteed crash when you call it. 

So, I got 1.5 to run in a clean DP install and it seems to work fine. However, all the on-screen text (including console and HUD ammo counters) is displayed on a black background, which is quite unaesthetic. And before you claim my install is at fault, I briefly tested with clean installs of several builds including 20140430, the previously mentioned September 22 autobuild and the very latest from November 27. It happens in all builds but didn't happen at all with v1.42. I don't know what you changed but the issue seems to be on your end and a fix would be nice. Please?

I'd also like to report another minor issue that was already happening with 1.42 and still does with 1.5: the menu background image doesn't show up.

Oh BTW, your readme isn't up-to-date regarding versions of listed engines, especially DP for which you still recommend a 2.5-year-old build (also, your statement about DP no longer being in development is just plain wrong). I understand that you wouldn't want to recommend an autobuild but the latest beta is the 20160910 build - necessary for alpha masked textures as your current recommendation doesn't support them. Mark V came out of beta stage very recently and even QS has incremented its version number. 

https://www.twitch.tv/ionous

Thanks to people out there that commented, criticized or otherwise posted thoughts on AD_Magna. 

I think the RoS can be useful if it can be grabbed *before* a big fight with monsters the player hasn't aggroed yet. I tried to use it that way in my map: you can grab it in a secret before dropping down a hole to the final fight arena, which gives you some time to get your bearings and maybe grab another secret... but if you drop down without the ring all hell breaks loose immediately.

Whether that is a good use of the RoS is up for the player to decide, not me, of course, but that was my line of thinking. 

Mugwump, it sounds like your getting exactly as the readme states - "partial support" 

The problem is: it was fine with 1.42, not anymore. Surely, less compatibility isn't something anyone, users and coders alike, would want in an update... and it's probably not very hard to fix. 

The problem is: Using Darkplaces. 

200Meg is a lot for my poor connection. Are the maps separately available anywhere??

Cheers

Doc 

ROS is cool, I like it. It allows you to scope out an area and prepare for ambushes, collect supplies or weapons in advance if you're low, trigger spawning monsters without aggroing them. Lots of potential. 

Speaking from personal experience of RoS, I always felt it sucked because the gameplay would always pan out as follows:

"Oh cack a load of monsters ahead of me, I'll grab the RoS"

/grabs RoS

"Now I'll just walk past all these monsters and find a nice covered position beyond them from which to launch my attack"

/hides as RoS wears off

"Now I'm in a good position but there's a whole new shitload of monsters ahead of me to complement all the ones I avoided initially who are behind me, so in reality I've just trapped myself in an enormous reverse shit sandwich where I'm a nice virginal slice of soft-batch loaf wedged between two huge walls of poo that are rapidly closi-" [dies instantly]

Pretty much every time.