butthole shreds ahoy 

I'm looking for playtesters for my first map in Quake! I have tested it a bit with people inexperienced with the game, but I'd love to hear what you guys think. Mostly looking for some absolutely brutal feedback.

screenshots
map

Thanks! 

I have here a skill 1 demo for you (i usually play 2 but i have not played in a few years ...).

About your map i like the original style, the interconnectivity and exploration, and variety on looks and rooms. You are going into the right direction.

On the things to get better:
- Lighting is dull, while low contrast lighting is nice i think you have gone too far in that direction. The good part of it is that it hides secrets a lot better.
- In general it feels like the scale is a bit small and it is easy to get stuck on columns, but as the map is easy at least on skill 1 it poses no problem.
- Those two silver key doors at the beginning should not be marked for, as they open without a key later, which can be misleading.
- You may want to add a silver or gold key texture like in id maps to make it obvious for everyone they are for that. It can lead to misunderstanding and people getting lost.
- That ring of shadows probably needs to count as a secret.
- Those crates you saw me looking on while on top of them need the textures to be aligned, but it also seems that all of them have the wrong size compared with the texture they use.
- You should probably put a non invisible wall on top of that rooftop or any other mechanic.
- Theres too many green armours, even for skill 1, but better too much than too few.
- You will probably receive complains here because the map is non-linear, but i do think you should pay no attention to them.
- You probably saw how those enemies telefragged themselves at the end ... 

@lpowell I like those screenshots, they look nice. Good lighting and QUAKE style brush architecture.
@FifthElephant - I love heavy, dark, metal, spikey stuff! When I see something like this I know it is not friendly world but evil unknown dimension.
@oprel Good architecture on screenshots, as Cocerello said maybe the lighting is a little to flat in some place but generally looks for good work.

After 10 years pause in QUAKE maps I back and play around with architectures and light. If you like see, here are my playgrounds:
https://imgur.com/a/w7Cul0F 

Seems like you're doing a lot of experimenting with brushes. I'd recommend also recommend experimenting with layouts and monster placement too, make blockouts and then use your brush experiments to detail up the map afterwards. 

I am loving these. Keep going! 

Great looking stuff! 

Oh, thank you very much for good words!
https://imgur.com/a/dgzlA3F I remember very well quad shadow from original QUAKE map "Gloom keep" it's still impresive look. I redesinged the quad shape, it's not perfect, but keeps grid and looks not bad. 

interesting stuff again, feels like a cross between Q1 Episode 4 and Quake 3. 

A beta version of Lords of Chaos is available for those who are willing to playtest it for me.

I request that anyone who downloads the file not distribute it. I also request that ONLY those who are going to play this for testing purposes, download and test it. If you just want to have a look, wait until the final version please. It won't be far away.

The level is almost done. All that is left to do, is fine tuning of the gameplay, which may depend on feedback, and some more tuning of the lighting.

This requires a port with BSP2 support.

This level is on the larger side (about 340 enemies and a play time of 45 minutes to an hour). It is quite non-linear (though you shouldn't be able to skip sections), requires a little bit of exploration and planning. Ammo and health aren't always placed in front of you, and you may have to choose between looking for more ammo and looking for a fight.

In the level, you have to summon and kill seven Chaos Lords. As each Chaos Lord falls, more of the level opens up. But they aren't summoned right where you are standing, you have to hunt them down!

The link is here.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~dennisk@netspace.net.au/loc/locbeta.zip

Screenies
http://members.iinet.net.au/~dennisk@netspace.net.au/loc/locb1.jpg
http://members.iinet.net.au/~dennisk@netspace.net.au/loc/locb2.jpg

Please read the included text file.

Thanks. 

Why is there a "pak0.pak" file IN the "pak0.pak" file!?

Also there's a "config.cfg" file in your "pak0.pak" file, which should never be there.

I'm continuing on... 

Cool! I'll give this a spin and let you know how I get on. 

Thanks damange_inc for pointing that out. Explains why the file is so large!

That probably has to do with a utility I'm testing to create PAK files. I'll have to modify it so it doesn't include the files its creating as part of the files to add.

The 'config.cfg' shouldn't be there. I'll fix the PAK when I next can. 

Ive re-uploaded locbeta.zip with a fixed PAK file. It should no longer have the config.cfg and other superfluous files.

Redownload using the same link I gave in the original announcement of the beta. 

Looking forward to playing this and seeing what you did with progs_dump. 

I've no idea how many CL's I've defeated... might be cool to create a "shrine" where as you defeat them heads are placed so the player can always tell how many? Or have the player "aquire" the heads and have to go place them?

Also I might be stuck? The level is pretty much cleared, 300/"about 340" and my only option is to grenade jump to a "gold key", upon doing that I hear a CL appear but working my way to him and killing him does not do much and doesn't really feel like this was the intended way.

I even noclipped out of desperation. 

The exit needs better protection ;) Unless ofc that was your intention :-P 

A new version of pd_ is coming with custom keys and some updates to breakables.

Not sure of a timeline, but likely a couple of weeks at the most. Not sure if this would have an impact on this project. Seeing how big it is I won't have time to play it until Tuesday at the earliest. I'll definitely record demos of this. 

@damage_inc

I actually thought of a mechanic where you have to bring their heads to an altar, but it might appear weird to have their heads there, because it still appears on the model which is supposed to be now decapitated. Also, its less about just getting all 7 and more about finding the relevant one to destroy, to progress. I could add some QC code and a new model...

I tried to balance the complexity of the 'puzzle solving' with simplicity in layout so the only real backtracking is in seeking the CLs. Not sure yet whether I succeeded, and maybe the sequence of events you need to complete is too convoluted and its too onerous on the player.

Did you find the 2nd silver key, and 2nd silver key door? They aren't far from each other, both in areas just off that room you get to at the end of the corridor which was originally blocked by the ball of flesh. Once you hit the switch in the 2nd silver key room, the 7th CL appears nearby and the door which leads to the gold key (at the end of the long bridge) opens up when he is killed.

From there, you can finally complete the task mentioned in the message at the exit gate. Any additional beasties which just appear from here on in are now only there to give you a hard time and are not involved in the gameplay setup ;)

I'll better protect the exit gate...

Last thing, which I realized I DO need to change, past the gold key door, you find a grave. Destroy the grave. That needs to be more obvious. 

Brace yourself, because I've uploaded my first-run demos, totalling over two-and-a-half hours of gameplay, here. All demos are on Hard skill and are Protocol 666 (QuakeSpasm default).

However, before I was able to play the map, I had to work around a show-stopping issue which I haven't encountered before. When I tried to start the map with QuakeSpasm, the engine would immediately crash, without giving an error message and with nothing useful in the log file. By a process of elimination, I worked out that the crash was being caused by the skybox. In the .bsp file, the "sky" field of the worldspawn entity is as follows:

"sky" "skybox_purple_chaos/purple_chaos_"

I had a quick look at the engine source code, and long story short, it appears that a "sky" string more than 31 characters long will cause a buffer overflow (which may or may not cause the engine to crash, depending on platform). The "sky" string in this case is 33 characters.

I haven't 100% confirmed this because I'm not set up to build QuakeSpasm from source right now, but it looks to me like that's what's going on.

To work around the issue, I moved the "purple_chaos_*.tga" files up a level (out of "env/skybox_purple_chaos" into "env") and updated the "sky" string to just "purple_chaos_". That made it short enough to avoid the crash, and I could play the map!

## locbeta_iw1.dem

This was my first attempt. I finished after about five minutes by accidentally going into the exit portal early. I guess this is the same thing damage_inc was getting at above.

## locbeta_iw2.dem

This was my second attempt. I died after about five minutes.

## locbeta_iw3.dem

This was my third attempt. This time I finished the map by collecting the rune and unlocking the exit, ending with 315/342 kills and 5/7 secrets in 94:51 (!!!) minutes. However, this still wasn't a "proper" run because I failed to find (I think) two of the Chaos Lords.

This run went off the rails somewhere in the middle. It seems like I did an accidental sequence-break by jumping through a window and falling down into an area I wasn't supposed to be able to reach at that time, skipping the fifth Chaos Lord. I guessed what I'd done, and after a while I backtracked so I could attempt to play the level "properly".

However, after I went back, I couldn't find the fifth Chaos Lord, so I couldn't kill him to remove the bars protecting one of the silver keys. I haven't re-watched this demo in full, but in retrospect, what I guess happened is that I failed to find the button which I now know "summons" the fifth Lord. However, during the run, I didn't understand that there was a button that I was supposed to find. What I thought had happened was that I'd somehow broken the map by doing that sequence-break! In the end, I salvaged the situation by grenade-jumping to the gold key (it sounds like damage_inc had the same idea) and then played "properly" from there.

I'm sure you'll be able to tell from the demo that I struggled massively with progression in this map; it might even be that I struggled more with progression in this map than any other Q1SP I've played. Even after I pushed a button or killed a Chaos Lord, I often felt like I didn't know where I was supposed to go next. I ended up wandering around a lot. I tried to include comments in the demo as I went along: hopefully that'll give you an idea what was going through my head.

## locbeta_iw4.dem

This was my fourth attempt, and the first time I managed to complete the map "properly", ending with 340/342 kills and 5/7 secrets in 67:03 minutes.

TBH, it was an *enormous* map: I've typed a lot, but there's a lot more that could be said in terms of feedback. While hunting out the last two secrets, I also found more bugs which aren't in the demos. I could do with going over the map again and putting together a list. I'll aim to do that sometime in the next few days when I have time.

In the meantime, hope the above comments and the demos are helpful! 

Thanks for the feedback, greatly appreciated. I admit the map is much larger than originally intended, and perhaps it should have been two levels. I might either have to simplify the flow, put more information, or divide the level into two parts.

As for Quakespasm, it didn't crash for me. I'm using Linux, so perhaps this issue doesn't affect the Linux client?

I'll check out the demos tonight. 

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/554332281721061396/643585854333517865/spasm0000.jpg

Yeah... I did it!