dmc2m5 

 

TBF I know the community largely outcast Kell is total bullcrap. There was a bit of sniping and he stopped posting here. I have a lot to say for Kell, he was one of the first people who really helped me a lot with the mapping n stuff. Infact I think he pointed me to this website in the first place. 

Kell made good, inspiring maps. Didn't know him very well. 

he didn't stop posting because of any kind of sniping crap, he stopped posting cause he's got a life outside of func. :P 

I was afraid he stopped coming here because I kept pestering him about Contract Revoked 2 :( 

I'm a fagot, lunaran. 

I want my open source Quoth 3! pppppppurrrleeeaaaase :p 

I don't know what the reason was to not release the source. The ironic thing is that nothing in Quoth is rocket science. A good look at the Scourge of Armagon, Custents and Chapters source speaks volumes. I'm almost thinking the intention behind Quoth (as far as mapping features and coding go) was to create Scourge++.

Most Quake mods only cook with water including Quoth.

A lot of the source for mapping entities such as sound players, hordespawn, triggers with more target fields (that can wait to be triggered), breakables, pushables and so on can probably be found in things like Scourge of Armagon, QIP, Extras, Custents, Chapters, Drake and RMQ.

Personally I think a major roadblock for Quoth was the idea that it should never challenge the player's expectations. Meaning, it should behave like Quake and run in any engine (that supports Scourge, because of the HUD - another unfortunate limit).

This idea makes it attractive to people who just want "Quake++" (or Scourge++). But at the same time, this mindset in itself, plus the closed source nature of Quoth, is a restriction for everybody who wants more.

And that's why Quoth is not the base of most singleplayer mods, which it probably could have been if it had been managed better and with more foresight. For example Quoth could have been the base of RMQ if it wasn't for its restrictive nature.

Again ironically, Quoth does change the Quake formula quite a bit by introducing monsters with more hitpoints, but at the same time keeping weapon damage to vanilla Quake levels. This means it takes longer to kill individual monsters, which slows down the gameplay. This in a game that's famous for fast, no-frills gameplay almost as much as Doom 2.

It's OK to give the Gug a ton of hitpoints. But the concept is also applied to lower level monsters that have traditionally been cannon fodder for good reasons. Take the voreling as an example. Too much health.

The introduction of the Trinity does potentially offset this, but only a little. A powerup that grants the player 2x damage or 2x the rate of fire across the board would have done more to alleviate this problem. Or just raising the damage of certain basic weapons, which is done a lot recently (Drake, RMQ, Necros' latest map). 

Suggested that we port the Qouth enemies to RMQ but we decided to keep our own identity.

And the Quoth team's stance was to keep their source closed, so we respected that. Although playing a Qouth or Nehahra map under RMQ should swap out the majority of entities to our equivalents, but not some of the more complex trigger entities.

I did consider porting the Rubicon enemies, but that was voted down for the first reason. 

crazy 

good points gb. I'm using quoth for the map pack I'm working on because it's a perfect fit for what I'm doing. almost everything i want in terms of custom entities is included (mapobject_custom, corpses, breakables, etc), and I love the monsters. The high HP of the high-level quoth enemies can slow down gameplay, but I think the mapper can mostly mitigate that problem while still using them..

e.g., have there been any quoth maps that used the plasmagun as a primary/major weapon? - something you get early on and get enough ammo to use it half of the time or more. I'm thinking of trying that in at least one of my maps. I can't recall using it much at all in any released quoth maps, but I really like the feel of it when testing. it gives gameplay more of a doom-like pace in my experience; you can blast through situations with it that are a hard slog with the nailgun (taking out a gug or a couple of droles). the only danger is gameplay getting dull from having such a powerful weapon.. but i hope that won't happen. 

try ne_deadcity or ne_tower. there's a PG in ne_tower's very first room as a secret, but you still get it half way through the map as a semi primary weapon.
the small ammo sizes for cells can also be a great way to make sure it's not overused.

also, trinity + NG is 1.5 times as powerful as the SNG giving it a nice boost without going into quad damage territory (ie: crazy overkill).

this is the spooky old town type map right? excited to see that. :) 

Totally worth blatantly copying:
Drole
Deathguard
Rocketeer
Bob

I think these monsters really flesh out gameplay potential. You are right that they missed adding stuff at the lower end of the roster but I think Quake was in more need of new tough enemies than weaker ones, especially given the lower counts people generally use compared to Doom, and all of them are very adaptable.

The Gug misses this opportunity via it's earth quake attack. It's an interesting idea but means you can't tune an encounter that well as the player will take random amounts of damage.I think that leads to a need to overload an area with health because you know they'll need at least some. 

Rocketeer: They'd be better if the rockets did as much damage as Ogre grenades. They already have a health bump and red armor that screams "DANGER", why not make them an actual threat?

Death Guard: I think 200 health is too much for them. About 150, or something similar would make them a better alternative to the Ogre - with faster movement and better melee/firepower, but less vitality.

Droles are great. Bobs are cool, and I'm tempted to make a medieval Quoth map and replace their model and sounds with the Nemesant from Zer, just to be a cunt. :P

I'd really like to see RMQ's Berserk Ogre in action sans all the weapon "rebalancing" - he'd be a good equivalent to the Pinky Demon I think?

ericw: warpb.bsp. 

You've clearly not tried placing a group of rocketeers at a high angle above the player. You need pretty precise dodging to avoid the splash off the floor, which I love to use for hard difficulty

Really if they did more damage they'd be quite annoying. P 

I'd really like to see RMQ's Berserk Ogre in action sans all the weapon "rebalancing" - he'd be a good equivalent to the Pinky Demon I think?

The pinky demon went down to one shot from the DBS in Doom2. You could bag sometimes two or three because of its spread as well. 

Melee monsters in Quake a very different due to the fact A: Some can attack while moving and B: they have a long range.

Pinkie demons have a range of barely a few inches, hense how you can have a huge herd very close but take little to no damage. You can dead zone them like a shambler incredibly easily with almost no space. Same in Quake doesn't work. A horde of knights in a tight space will rip your bum off unless you have a powerful weapon as they move and swing with a few meters of range very happily.

You can see just how pathetic the pinkie demon really is by watching it attempt to infight. Even the slow shuffle of a Baron is enough to move out of range and avoid taking damage. 

The only time when you got in problems was when a herd would corner you. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc5dKqoFtKk 

if we had a place to upload scraps, including scraps of past mappers and sources of finished maps that the mappers released, how many people would take part? I think this would be interesting. We often use the metaphor remix for maps, why not have the original source available, it might let people mix architecture together in unexpected ways. 

I'll gladly host scraps. no user uploads though. in my opinion it would be best if there were accompanying screenshots. also they must have a proper readme and some form of license that explicitely allows people to use them. gpl is nice. 7z or zip.

some _src packages are in the filebase but that never felt right. I'll sort them out. 

I like the idea, that it has to be source files (and in my view, those HAVE to include the textures and some documentation). Screenshots is another important point. The exciting thing about this, is that there's still CZG scraps out there. Dead mappers ghosts could be included. BUT, who knows what this section might receive from active mappers. Anyway thanks for having the section, I'll assemble a properly documented scraps/sources/textures part. 

http://www.quaddicted.com/files/maps/sources/

There is a problem. Many people package the sources right into the release (bsp) zip (which is nice but not for this project). I think making a wiki page where screenshots can be added could include links to those bundled sources. I do not want to duplicate files. 

it might be nice to make one further distinction between map sources for completed maps, and map sources for scraps.

if you're just searching for stuff to make a new map out of, you'd only want scraps, for example.