about having difficulties with the demo file play back, and it may need to be broken down with Keygrip due to the legnth -- or just redone from the start at a quicker pace perhaps. 

thanks for that. there was no demo though... 

Should i have an email thread where people can ask each other whether they recieved various emails? It seems like it would get a lot of use, considering the last few months... 

Just add a private messaging feature so people can use that rather than emailing each other...

Or don't, because that'd be a whole lot of work and not really necessary. I seem to be volunteering you for a lot of work lately, feel free to tell me to get bent. :D 

I think that would be a really great idea. The conduct of e-mail in these past few months has been unbelieveable. Necros, I'll do another demo run of the map tommorow night (tonight I am one tired little Quake Guy). 

alright, thanks a lot. i appreciate it. it's been hard to get beta testers lately. 

I was joking. Just get email that works! 

Ok, my map is ready to be unleashed on the world, but being a noob I don't have access to any sort of file hosting.

It's a 6 meg zip. Can anyone recommend anything? 

ignore the above post - i've sorted it. 

it was worth a shot 

Sorry, it turns out I haven't sorted it at all. Ok, I know this might be a bit of a stretch (being new round here 'n' all), but would anyone here be willing to accept a ~6 meg email attachment and stick it on a server temporarily until I get some hosting sorted out? 

Then we would see a lot of posts about "did you get my private message?" 

But when has that stopped any of us? 

. 

To reply to your post in the bastion thread - what are marksurfaces exactly? 

are contained in one of the many data "lumps" that the compiler and other tools put in the bsp, you can see the amount in the bsp summary at the end of the compiler log.

I don't know what they are exactly, but they're probably related to the faces in the map. Metlslime explained more about them earlier in this thread.

In your bsp, the amount is above 34k and most Q1 engines cannot properly handle more than 32k. There seem to be some fuzzy margin that the amount can be exceeded by without causing obvious problems (like crashes), but I don't know how large this margin is.

I know for sure that exceeding the 32k limit can lead to engine crash. In my engine, you'll get a warning when loading a bsp that exceeds certain limits, e.g. the marksurfaces.

I can't say that you'll have to do something about it; other released maps have exceeded this limit and still seem to work. I only mentioned it because some players seem to experience strange engine behaviour while playing your map and this is one possible cause.

I actually blasted through the entire map in god/quad mode as brutally as possible while running the engine in debug mode to see if anything bad would happen, but nothing did. Only packet overflows, which wasn't very surprising.

The gameplay *was* a bit insane at places. I fear that I might not make it through the later parts alive without cheats ... But I'll try! 

Thanks for the info. It seems that marksurfaces are a bit of a hit and miss thing.

Also very encouraging to know that the map handled a god/quad blast through, especially now that the monsters produce even more gibs. :)

The final area is tough, but search around for a 666 (easy to find) and a quad (hard to find). 

Thanks for your help a few weeks back -- I finally got the time to take your advice and (click my heals) that thing is finally sealed. A few days working on the texture alignment and it'll be out the door. 

Where's the best place to go to look for Quake 1 texture sets?

I've stuck with originals and Q2 textures, for now, but I want something else and preferably with some kind of preview which is hard with ftp sites like gamers.org.

So where would you guys suggest looking? 

check out this thread for texture sets:

http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=11317 

i tried to watch the demos, but they refused to load. it looks like you used DP to record them? so i downloaded Dp and tried again, but still no luck. what should i do? 

yeap, I used DP for its effecient rendering -- that's a whole heapin' lot of polies there.

I believe I know the source of the problem. I checked out my hunch; not only is dark places demos incompatable with older versions of Quake (thus the problem using KeyGrip earlier) but versions of DP are incompatable with one another. I tried the demo with a slightly older version of DP and it didn't work,

Here is the thing. Lord Havoc has neglected to update the site info in some time, so the latest build showing is the one from December. This link will get you the newest Beta which I used for recording.

http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/darkplacesengine20040331beta1.zip 

well, that worked, thanks for the demos man. really helpful! :) 

What are the "recommended" map compilation utils for Quake maps these days? I am using wqbsp, rvis+ and tyrlight, but I keep hearing of some newer utils. What are their advantages and where can I download them? 

i recommend all of aguire's compilers without any reservations. they are simply sooo awesome.
http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/

the qbsp is robust and handles almost any kind of brushwork
the vis has a freakin' save feature which pwns me
the light has sweet new things like _softangle for spots, delay5 to keep overbrights for going nuts and just anglesense so that lights on the same plane as other faces get lit.

i'm a fan now. :D