Read #15262 please. 

Fear my use of compliment sandwiching in the screenshots thread, for example;

wrath, I like your levels. But kek you, you kek. At least I laugh occasionally you miserable cunt. Also, I like how your name is monochrome.

;p

2 birds 1 stone, this internets thing is easy ;) 

nonentity, now with smileys. And self-congratulating... What the hell, have you learned nothing?

I hope you die in a fire. 

I'm sitting in a thai internet cafe surrounded by schoolkids playing counterstrike in the ugliest box map ever. seriously, the only design 'flourishes' are boxes. But they fucking love it. 

Go rape those schoolkids.




In counterstrike, I mean. 

Skill 2 is set in my autoexec.cfg. I've been playing this game long enough that I think I'm pretty good at single player, I know how monsters are going to react and I know how to fight them. I expect a map on skill 2 to be challenging but fair. I expect to die quickly in tough spots if I'm not careful, but that my skill should see me through once I know what to do. I quicksave often, proportional to how scary the map is and how likely I think it might be that I'll die around the next corner.

Dropping the player into an arena with no cover, instantly surrounded by 4 shamblers, 5 vores, and a gug, would not be "challenging," just dumb and unfun. Just an extreme example there, can't think of any specific maps that actually did that.

I only turn the difficulty down when things are insanely hard and I'm frustrated, or I'm getting shitty framerates and can't fight and react properly. Generally I'd expect there to be less monsters, or less difficult types of monsters, on medium/easy. Ammo actually might balance itself out, consider this: a less skilled player on a lower difficulty might be less accurate with his guns, and so need extra ammo, but a player on a higher difficulty will need more ammo to kill the greater number of monsters. So, pending testing, the ammo count could stay the same, or even add a little more on skill 2, if there are large horde fights. 

what metl told me he does is that he just populates the map and puts in enough stuff that it feels okay to him when he plays it, and then makes that Hard difficulty because he's got the home court advantage, then scales it back from there.

when I made that stupid speedmap with the teleporters I didn't have skill levels set at all so I guess the map was technically skill 2 since it felt okay to me. Just to save time on testing I totalled up how many of each monster there was, figured out the total monster hit points in the entire map, then figured out how much damage each ammo item allows the player to do, and then placed like twice that much ammo. And people still ran out. 

The best quote on difficulty I ever read was in Game Developer magazine. They did a special on Half-Life and it's development process. This is NOT the quote but I'm paraphrasing:

"You're good at your game. You just are.

HARD difficulty should be whatever you find to be manageable. It should be a challenge for you but not too bad.

NORMAL should be a little less than that - something you can handle easily.

EASY should be easy. Tune it until you can't believe there's anyone who couldn't finish the game on easy. Then make it easier." 

I don't think skill levels are ALL that relevant in Quake maps these days since the audience is so small and generally they are long time Quake players. But it's still somewhat important I guess. 

See Also: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=42640 

I once said on here pretty much what's been said above. I use my own play as a marker for hard, then just scale back monsters.

Adding extra ammo shouldn't be necessary since there's less to throw it at, but I've proved myself wrong so more ammo as well can't hurt.

Having weapons earlier or easier to get is a good idea - don't think I've seen this in a map before, but then I don't usually play on other skills.

One thing that could be good is having secret pointers on easy. So you make a func_wall that only show in easy and basically has a big arrow pointed on it showing where the secret is. I say this because there's not that many who actually use easy now, though that depends on the map.

You could go even further with this for labyrinthine maps and make a series of direction pointers - a bunch of arrows showing which route to take. 

He plays the banana with the mouth.

take that as you will. 

That Scampie and Lunaran's mules are punching each other all the time. 

 

and prosper

may the enchanted qcode entangle our carved editors to rejoyfull gathering
may the broken ruins of map failure rotten for good in their homfilled hallways
may the leaks groan the muddy slime from their infected off grid placement
may the andrenaline quotum from the best maps howl their echoes through the nightmare stage of subconsiousness

may the id of gilgameshes quest to the deeper dwellings of revealment have its detiny. 

pardon my lyrical ofcursion,
must have been mapping to much. 

. 

looks like the post-qexpo euphoria wore off and everybody crawled back into their caves. 

Im back from my "holday" as of yesterday.
My mapping will recommence v.soon.

Project is "on the go" - no-one has seen it yet except for me :P

Finger is a bit better than it has been, but guitar playing is still fucked. Which is probably good for mapping.

Willem - old chum of a few months - great to see you are back - hopefully epic havent crunched you too much.

Looking forwards to playing your map! It looks very tasty.

Also Necros. Looking forwards to playing you map too.

Fuck - I have a lot of catching up to do!

Also Madfox - if your map is boxed then send it to AguirRe! He is a genious with finding leaks! 

I wonder why there wasn't a best booth log chosen, just like in 2006. After all they all were winners but it would have been nice to see some kind of logs with most hits.

Rikcy - I did, but he is working with the Q2 engine. Ijed mentioned something like finding the leak, which I did. Think it will vis better now. 

And In My Cave . . .

That's where MadFox goes to groove with
the Picts. 

well, seems like Quake is dead again. 

... Scampie post here, Quake dies :P 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/scamp.gif