combined with a general air of unobservant spastication that makes it all the more impressive

i know he was talking about you blazing past secrets (i laughed a couple of times at obvious misses), but ironically, i like that you play the maps in your playthroughs in a slow way where you look at the rooms before moving on. i prefer that in a playthrough instead of those ones where the guy doing it just seems to be trying to get it over with as fast as possible (or just jumps all the time or something equally annoying).

i won't go into too much detail about the damage avoidance stuff, but the idea is that if you died in a 'wimpy' way, you are saved but if you got owned, then you get owned (nor does it stop you blowing yourself up).

i know it's kind of an easy mode thing, but i liked that it kept things moving for the player and it just feels cheap stubbing your toe and falling over dead, you know? ;)
and of course, it makes things a bit more lenient for me when balancing the map... i won't deny that. :)
i'd actually say the system is a bit too lenient in ne_ruins... and i might disable it in nightmare (or hard?) next time. 

That was a good thing in a map full of tarbabies, for sure. 

Are the bane of my life, basicly :) I like to find as many as I can in my runs, for completions sake, but usually I give up after a few :)

About how I play the maps in my vids, yes I try and show off the map visuals as I play. The playthrough takes longer than usual as a result but that is ok in my book. It's nice to relax and watch a playthrough and appreciate all the hard work that goe's into creating these maps rather than me doing some quasi-speed run l337ness through it and missing all the cool details! 

Secrets usually piss me off because it often trivialises stuff. It's actually a pet hate of mine to finish quite a tough level, then find that there was a rocket launcher, three quad damages and a pent that I never found. Really, how many levels need to hide powerful weapons and stuff :(

First time I played Contract was on nightmare and it was so exciting and tough and down to the wire. Replaying it a year later I was finding quads and mega healths and stacks of nails and rockets and it felt like it was taking the piss out of my first time playing it :p

I'm gonna make a map with 30 secrets in and they will all have a small box of shells. And a Ring of Shadows. bah! 

I just noticed Daz's playthrough of Marcher on youtube. I really appreciate that you made the time to do that - the nostalgia is smothering me, but in a good way. :) I can't believe it's been seven years.

Speaking of nostalgia, recently I sat down at my laptop and felt an overwhelming compelling force driving me to install radiant and start throwing brushes around. As eldritch architecture began to take diabolical shape, I began to realise that I wasn't making a map - the map was making me.

Did I say map? Oops, I meant episode, sorry. 

Just finish it ok? :D 

That's great news! It would be awesome to see new stuff from you. Any teaser screens? 

\o/ 

Any teaser screens?

Not really - everything is still in the rough blockout stages.

Please don't expect any bsp-pummelling experiments like Marcher, or silly hordes; I am no longer interested in abusing Quake with things like that - the itch for that sort of craziness has been well and truly scratched over the past seven years with other projects.

What has brought me back however is an urge to do something rather oldskool and dark - very Quakey. Quake as I remember it when I played it for the first time - not necessarily what Quake was in reality, but certainly what Quake feels like to me in my memory.

Well, I didn't really want to post anything, but I guess there are a few areas here and there where I decided to play around a bit more.

The following mono-textured doodles are all rather rough and mundane, and very subject to change:

http://i.imgur.com/4fcV0.jpg 

the title "Infinite Shore" comes from this track - which is what the architecture sounds like, if that makes any sense:

http://youtu.be/XfF6WttV_gI 

those shots sum oldskool quake up perfectly; if that's what you were going for i wouldn't worry too much about varying the textures or adding more detail :) 

Good luck! 

Now that you released pics, you have entered into a gentlemans agreement that you will finish and release that thing ;)

Looks great! 

Well Kinn, you may have no interest in abusing the BSP format, but.... now that the RMQ team has made BSP2 format (which massively expands every type of limit), what about abusing the BSP 2 format! Kidding aside I see your point: why force Quake to do stuff that other new engines do better, when you could just do what Quake does well. And from the looks of those shots, it looks like that's just what you're doing. 

the scale of everything in Marcher was really well done. So many mods have you crammed in. 

My view, as stated in an argument less than 2 weeks ago before Kinn himself (or so we THINK ITS HIM - lol) showed up, is that Marcher remains the best map design in a single bsp file ever made, and it will remain that forever. Say some person comes along who is even more ambitious than Kinn was in Marcher, he'll just use BSP2. Out of 1500 bsp files marcher.bsp wins.

If you talk about the gods, and draw pictures of them on the wall, make youtube videos about them, argue which of their achievements was best... they just might.... descend onto the surface of the earth one last time (lol jokes taking it too far... but it IS awesome to see Kinn show up 2 weeks after we had this discussion about how no one would ever top Marcher). 

I can understand that you don't want to do anything like marcher again - it must have been a crazy amount of work to make it perfect. I'm just happy to see you return to Quake, not in the least because it means more new releases for me to play. 

Marcher remains the best map design in a single bsp file ever made
This is debatable. What makes Marcher stand out is not so much a sophisticated design than its huge scale while still fitting into the standard bsp limits. Besides, before switching to BSP2, there's still the 2xBSP1 option. 

2xBSP1: that is it? 

somebody should make a remake of the Marcher! 

Marcher remains the best map design in a single bsp file ever made

It's this kinda stuff that drives people away from making short and sweet stuff :/

"It plays okay, but it's kinda small, not as good as this map!" 

Tronyn - blimey - I'm extremely honoured by your comments.

Marcher was just an exercise in excess. I did not set out to make a statement like "this is how big I think all maps should be!" - it just kept growing, and at the end of it I realised that it was all a bit pointless. By that I mean well before the end its construction, it had stopped being fun to build, and if you're not having fun what's the point mapping?

A couple of things happened in the last few weeks that prompted me to fire up radiant again - basically I was reminded of what it was that I found fun about mapping; and none of it involved making big flamboyant monstrosities - there are far better mediums than Quake for that kind of creativity now - so I'm keeping things small (well, medium), and keeping it fun (for me).

Btw, where can I read about this BSP2 stuff and does it need a custom engine? Just curious - there's no way I'll be using it. 

nothing one should be excited about just yet. it needs a custom engine and there is only one at the moment and it is deeply in development from what I know.



crap, how will I handle bsp2 at quaddicted? it is not much different from other limit breaking maps for the user and even easier to support engine-wise, correct? 

Downloads:

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/sp-demo-3-release/

Mh's blog:

http://mhquake.blogspot.com/

Basically it bumps PC requirement to ~Doom3 whilst removing all map limitations or putting them so high that it doesn't really matter any more.

It's optimised for running big stuff, so would work well on a Marcher level, or several such areas with little to no vis blocking - if thats what you were doing ;)

BSP2 should be pretty easy to support yeah, just matters when LH, Spike etc. feel like doing it, most likely when the tech is more mature.

In any case it runs perfectly well now, and is in development - meaning Mh is needing feedback on features and so on. 

In that case, it won't affect me as my stuff is intended for WinQuake.