speedrun anyone? 

Mandel did a run in 17 seconds :)

post #139 

anyone got some tips on speeding this thing up?
the snow level was fine, the rubicon/base level was fine. as soon as i entered the castle it ran almost to halt. like r_speeds of 1!
my command line looks like this...
nehwarp.exe -quoth -game warp -HEAPSIZE 90000 -winmem 1000 -width 800 -height 600 -conwidth 768 -gamma 0.4 -texgamma 1.2

i'd really love to continue, but its unplayable with these settings. 

Ooops, I meant 100% kills :D 

Try changing the heapsize option to lower case -heapsize 48000 and removing the winmem/texgamma options (not valid here).

Gamma is best adjusted in-game if possible, try that first before resorting to the gamma option. Most "modern" cards support hardware gamma I think. 

Yeah, I think the heapsize command isn't used when in capitals, so yours [kona] will be defaulting to 32 (engine default, original Quake being 16) which is pretty much unplayable.

If you still have problems go into the autoexec and remove the gl_exttex line (monster skins) and try upping the heapsize even further - 64000.

I'm not 100% those would work - turning off the external textures would only speed up loading, for example, but both can be worth a try.

inertia, maybe I'll give it another try, but I always end up killing myself trying to jump over a too-big pit or reach some semi-useless item with rocket push . . . I'll try today. 

I forgot about the autoexec, if there's a line gl_max_size 2048, try removing that line or lower the value by cutting in half (i.e. 1024, 512, 256). If your gfx card texture memory gets exceeded, you'll get really bad performance.

Similarly, if there's a line gl_texquality 2, try removing that as well. 

Those are both in there and can be reduced / removed to help performance.

There's also another bug :| in that I forgot to remove developer 1 from the list - if you get rid of that the number of returned bugs from console will drop by 90%, although the warnings at map load will remain. 

Nearly made it all the way through . . . got distracted near the end at the Drole ambush.

http://shub-hub.quaddicted.com/files/demos_singleplayer/warpd_ijed.dz

It shows all secrets (I think) and gets through around 90% of the map.

Bah.

It's in dzip (not 7zip) because my zippers are incomplete at the office - I was going to rar it, but thats not a Quake format :) 

Completely this early. Went fairly smoothly after last night's debacle. I managed to miss out one area by all the confusing bridge up and down switches. Albeit it meant I got stuck somewhere and had to get back by a rocket jump.

So yes. 637 / 666 monsters, 7 or 8 / 11 secrets. Several hours or days playing I forget.

This map....it is good but I didn't like the style as much. It's bleak, but also somewhat bland in places....back to more empty rooms again. WarpC had some striking styles / micro-designs that gave it a good look, but this doesn't gel together as well. There were some cool bits - the teleporter hub, the fleshy bits, the moving jigsaw floors, some of the pillar designs and cool floating details. Some good sounds too.

The void aspect was a constant niggle, it's definitely more present than the hazards in the other two maps, along with the bloody laser shooters. Obviously part of the "progression" :P. I found it grated on my nerves, it was entertaining in some places, and surprisingly I hardly fell in, but over a whole map it was more of a constant irritation. I did get the vibe of the enviroment being hostile to me, but I'd prefer that hostility in more interesting or dramatic ways than an omnipresent grey pit.

Gameplay was the usual stuff, again I picked up the vibe with the MegaHealths....you really have gone all out to make this as nasty as possible eh!! I found the health situation was okay, but I was constantly below-par on ammo. A bit more, shells in particular, would have helped. The gameplay was even tougher but still pretty well balanced through the most part. Quite a bit of it could be worked around with some cunning, which was good. The blend of tactics and hardcore twitch fighting was good in places, I got into that. There seemed to be a few "impossible first go" situations - I got through one of them (dropped floor + 5 Fiends + already low on health) first go somehow. Some of the other ambushes were cool though, a bit more hordey which worked in some places. The ending situation was quite easy as you could escape it.

One more thing: The layout is mind-boggling when you reconnect with the earlier bits later on.It's all very big! 

But as you can see from the demo I put on the hub there's not enough ammo - I should have put around ten more boxes of shells scattered around throughout the map.

It's missing more of the meatech machinery, like the spinning or floating bits - I just ran out of time.

The void thing is a constant hazard torturing on the nerves, as well as the multidirectional laser traps. It was indeed part of my progressive trap masterplan, it worked, but its pretty grim. Kind of the style for the whole map.

The end I kind of spoiled for the benefit of speedrunner, towards finishing the projst.

Before if you fell off you hit void that seperated the large central area (top from bottom) - I removed it so speedrunners could rocketjump to the top (like Mandel in his demo).

It would have been better if I'd used some of the func_togglewall tricks that are in other places of the map to funnel monsters - if the player touches it then it vanishes (via trigger_once) shots can go through it but monsters can't. Of course I'd have to include a trigger_hurt that's killed so a rocketjumper would deactivate the 'trap' anyway. Ah well, I think its the median strip. 

my zippers are incomplete at the office

That's what usually gets me in trouble. 

*Nods* 

Indeed -HEAPSIZE wasn't working. Lower case and everything was fine. Continued from where I left off at the start of warpc and didn't move my ass till I finished the whole thing. Took nearly 4 hours!

Gameplay was fantastic ijed. I would have gone for many more massive battles, but it wasn't really necessary. I was playing on normal of course, but the whole thing was pretty well balanced for me. Died lots of times, mostly in the near lethal surprise ambushes and a bunch of times on the traps. But never got stuck on any battle, and I was never low on ammo and always had heaps of rockets/cells. The few times health got a bit low was only in warpd, and there were many MH's scattered around. It's just a little annoying having to go on a trek to find one you passed earlier. The battles at the end of each map were fantastic. The end battle, I would have done differently though. I died several times... each time either falling off the edge or killing myself with the quad and PG/RL combo. No void, much more room, and maybe no quad at all would have made the battle longer. Completely missing the RA in the last battle and going in with no armour didn't help.
Found about 4 or 5 secrets during the entire game, so they weren't really required for normal. A couple were RA's, another a pointless rune, the rest were powerups I didn't bother using anyway. Didn't get SNG until halfway through warpc, and the RL until warpd, but if I had them alot earlier things would have been MUCH easier. Not sure if the RL shows up in an earlier secret...
Anyway I'd give gameplay a top score.

The design of the levels is great, especially considering this is your first release (I think?). The layouts were all fantastic. I didn't really mind the size of them much at all... they were well interconnected. The only problem for me was nearly getting lost several times because the design was quite repetitive, especially in warpd. There could have been more big setpieces. There were a few maze areas, 2 particularly in warpb and warpc, that I didn't like. Those 2 levels were the best looking, especially warpc - that was a fantastic looking level. warpb was great looking, great level design, but I'm just not a big fan of the texture set. The third main level, warpd, I didn't like the texture combination at all, and some of the design was pretty bland. I've never been a fan of void maps, but that's just a personal preference. Of course, if you add much more detail to everything, you wouldn't be able to make such huge levels, so its a tradeoff.

Anyway fantastic pack ijed. Certainly in my top 10. Can't wait for you to make more, but I would prefer more medieval like warpc. 

Kona;

The pointless rune you mention - I'm almost certain it was n warpc. The reason it exists is because it allows access to another secret. There's two like that in warpc.

It was a design decesion to make warpd bland - large open floorspaces bordered with void, blocky architecture with buzzing light fixtures. It's not too cool looking but it does function - Just needed more of the details that are scattered around, like I said.

Both the SNG and RL are obtainable by secret in the map beforehand - proceeded by a message 'something opened . . .' but they're not too easy to find and only there in the final 1/3 of the map.

Incomplete zippers are a major problem - something must be done about this blatant disregard for public decency. 

... given that I don't have windows. I have joequake on linux (running under parallels, so gl performance sucks, could install linux natively) or vanilla glquake on os x (the fruitz of dojo build), the source to both and am willing to hack a bit.

Ideas? What are the features of the warpspasm engines that I'd have to reimplement? 

special custom engine features that need to be added for this pak to run, i.e. any Q1 engine should be able to run this pak if just all the bugs were fixed and unnecessary limits were removed.

All files are in plain Q1 format, although utilized to the hilt. There are no q3bsps, md2/3, mp3 or other non-Q1 stuff in it, not even png or jpg. Just plain bsp, mdl, wav, tga etc.

Since WinWarp can run it, there are no required extensions. It'll look better with skyboxes, fog and external mdl/spr texture support, but it's not required to run it.

And those extra items are all in the most common formats that many engines support, e.g. tga skyboxes/textures. The external mdl/spr textures are e.g. in JoeQuake style (inherited from FuhQuake, I think)

You'll need to expand the engine protocol to accommodate for the higher limits, but that can be done in any way you see fit. The only time the protocol makes any difference is when playing MP (e.g. coop) or recording/playing back demos. In those cases, you'll need to have the same protocol in all clients/servers.

Otherwise the protocol is just an internal engine method that can be implemented in any arbitrary way. My implementation is as simple as it gets, just expanded fields for mdls and sounds. 

yeah i read that the runes open the secret level earlier. what i meant was it was useless for ME, since I wasn't on nightmare and never found the other ones. i just noclipped to the secret level anyway, hehe.

so ijed have u started your next big q1 pack yet? :) 

I played it fine using wine. :) 

Not working quite righ for me, but it's an interesting idea... I'll hassle you over details in IRC some time! 

Shouldn't be too hard. All I have installed is wine, wine-utils, libwine, libwine-alsa, libwine-gl. All 0.9.25-2.1 from the debian repositories. I had to append -noipx to the commandline (wine glwarp.exe -noipx -quoth -game warp). I had sound crashes (resulting in lots of noise) every now and then, that was annoying but I think it is my crappy onboard soundcard. 

Well, I'm messing around with some stuff and have a couple of test maps, and I'm maybe going to learn some Qc, or how to copy + paste it, anyway.

Nothing like the size of Warp, maps topping around 200 monsters or so. 

... spent the best part of last weekend(in and out) trying to get the last 2 secrets of warpe. To no avail. I only found crushing, ballache and fearless. Could not figure how to get to sneaky and , of course, the last one's missing(rune?). Please, oh, please anyone willing to lend a hand?
Pleasee... 

Here's some hints:

Jump through a hole in the wall near some Shamblers and Gaunts for sneaky.

The lost shrine is the final one, though it has no rune. Search for it after you've dropped through the Vermis pit teleport. 

Several attempts, obviously.

Does what it says on the tin really. Hard gameplay and a brief but brutal final battle. Not much finesse but fun enough. The challenge seems to come from the lack of cover, and those flying things getting where you can't hit them. It was pretty good. I like the architecture better, it had hints of WarpD but enhanced on it with increased grandeur and more fleshy bits. Being considerably shorter the void and the challenging gameplay didn't get tiresome. I do think a bit more variety in gameplay would have been better though.