i think what he's saying is the map needs a fairly major rebuild. either that of can it and start fresh, this time with a clear layout in mind. 

'I am willing to change things (skill or gameplay), if you could tell me how.'

Study the maps that you find to be the most replayable. Get Quark or a decompiler and get a good look at the layout. Ignore the eyecandy stimuli for a moment and look for the areas in the map you find most engaging.

Usually these are places the mapper purposely creates a tense situation for the player to resolve. Figure out how this was accomplished by studying the entities that are grouped together to achieve these effects.

A good example and an easy map to decompile is E1M6 in the second large room there is a good deal of entity intereaction. the floor lowers into a ramp beneath you and doors open up slightly above you where Ogres start popping grenades on top forcing you down to where you are in the middle of the Smasher trap.

Create simple maps that recreate these situations and then once you know how to do them get creative and make your own variations and original situations.

Dont be afraid to include Hipnotic, Rouge or any other Progs.dat with your map even if you don't plan to vary the weapons. monsters or sounds in your map. These Mission Pack progs give you a better variety of entities to tool around with, the mover base ones can greatly ewxpand what you can do in map.

Do address the problem AquiRe rightly points out of it lacking a plan. Create hierarchies in your design. This involves weapon placement
shotgun --> nailgun --> doublebarrel --> perforator --> grenadelauncher --> rocket launcher --> thunderbolt. You don't have to keep to this order obviously, but when you do vary it up, have a purpose in mind dependent on what you want the player to accomplish.

Make a hierarchy of monster encounters. I like to start off with a tense situation to get the player moving, but after that I like to raise the difficulty of combat gradually from each series of encounters. In Quake the usual most logical place for the climatic battles in volves the keys or getting to the gate. After all, those are what the monsters are suppose to be guarding.

Be aware of the physical language of the environment. There are several 'signs' put in the texture set. If you mean for the player to fallow a certain path, then use the arrow sign. Also key marking signs for silver and gold help designate those doors or relevant areas.

Okay, I think that is enough for now. BTW I submitted my first release of fullscale Quake Single player map a few days ago on fileplanet so you should be able to evaluate the usefullness of my opinions soon enough! 

That is lot of advice. Thanks for that.

As this is map 19 in range, I have become a little odd. I tried this map for days on skill settings, and I really get "blinded" by my own meanings.

As for you, playing it fresh, I understand what you concerns are. I will try to have a look again, but working on 27 maps, and make them intercourse, has blown my attitude into a strange direction.

I first thought, I could extend the maps on this board to see how they could be given more tension. Now I notice my mappings have overtaken the idea, to get into a real Quake mission, and I believe this is rather a high card. Because they are still "the diary of a mapper", with all its rights and wrongs.
Thanking the "heaven of sparetime".

Maybe I should put up the bunch on my homepage, so you can considder what this greenhorn has put himself into. But then also the magic of the unexplored gets lost. 

but listen to HeadThump, he's got a lot of constructive suggestions. 

he has, but I have gone over the limit.

Here I am with a mission pack of 27 levels.
They are not all as good as I wanted, but I begin to feel the delay of two years of intensive working is taking its toll.

I tried to put it on my Homepage, but 22.8Mb is just to big. So I'll send it to Underworldfan.

There could be done a lot, but don't forget it was just a good joke to make this thing. And if I keep changing things with your good advice (nodoubt!) I'll probably be working for another two years.

And I would like to keep a good feeling for it! 

this is just idle words here, and i don't mean for you to do anything by them, but i think it's safest to start small with first maps. imagine if you had spent 2 years on maybe 4 maps. you would have 4 maps with the detail of all 27 distilled down. i remember my first release was hard for me because i was still learning mapping and i wanted to do so much more. it was originally twice the size but had to be cut down... so maybe your next project should be smaller so you have time to concentrate on the details...

just idle words... 

but I posted the level for playing, and I could use a good hint to make the gameplay better. 

I have recompiled all levels of the Abandon with Arguire's compilers: TxQbsp1.1 - Vis2.29 - Light1.40 & Tyrlight0.94

Some started with the error: leaks, which I could seal after hard reconstructing. Others
suddenly started spreading HOM's in such way I couldn't imagine I had ever compiled them right.

Three maps I wasn't able to compile because of the new compilers wouldn't clear the leaks.
Still don't know how to avoid them, but I was luky to have the compiling dates of the originals, so I could light them with tyrlight.

Now I can say I finnished the whole thing, and left a conversion with a plain lightning and compiling, wich is of course much sharper
than the original was. 

See: http://pipeline.fov120.com
status :released 

Some of the brushes suddenly become invisible but still solid, so I walk on them blindly. Some others, on the other hand, become illusionary but still visible, so I fall through them.

Quite a lot of brushes are misaligned, so various odd ledges and cracks appear, sometimes player even stuck on them. Some water brushes protrude from the walls.

There's also some bugs with monster placement - I saw an Orb and an Ogre merged together, and also some Dinosaurs placed below the ground.

Some areas are absolutely dark, I think the minimal amount of light should present there.

Keep studying... 

To the moment, I'm very impressed with two maps: start and r3b6.

A strong sense of different reality...

P.S. And, of course, teleport brushes should not appear standalone, they need some kind of portals or slipgates, etc. 

At the time I compiled the maps I only had the compilers, that were available with Thred.
And as I hardly knew what I was doing with the grid settings, I made a lot of errors.
The Thread compiler has no floating point(?) compiling base, so it places all brushes back on grid.

For these reason a lot of things I saw in the editor appeared otherwise in game.
In the end I was already glad all maps were fullvised, although there were severe points.
The pak wasn't beta tested, so there can be doubled placed entities.
The ammu count on SameOlSjo is too low to survive. In some game engines there were entities that fall through the ground, I didn't test them in all games.

I have recompiled half the pak again with the new compilers. Some maps won't compile or only with severe homs which I really concern.
Others I have updated with a static camera, so messages are more easy to gain access.

r3b6-Ames Room, I made when I tried to reach the so-called mathematical idea of a room with two chairs, that look the same seize, but are not and are placed far from eachother.
The startmap is a drawing of my first project drawing of an old medieval chapel. 

Playing end.bsp from Abandon, I felt a strange feeling of deja vu, I remembered I've already played this map a long time ago...

And recently I found the answer:

http://www.primefan.ru/stuff/quake/elden1.zip

That's an old map by Ludovic Texier, named EldenCross. I downloaded it about 13 years ago from ftp.cdrom.com (do you remember this server?), as well as some other pretty good old maps like The Epoch Turning or MadHouse:
http://www.primefan.ru/stuff/quake/madhouse.zip
http://www.primefan.ru/stuff/quake/epoch.zip

Madfox, is Ludovic Texier your real name? I am just confused. 

...just found an answer in the abandon.txt, where you give acknowledgements to

"Ludovic Texier for my morphing of his terrific EldenCross level"

So all the things are clear.

Heh, this pack gives me so many surprises! :-) 

Levelmorpher isn't the end level, but the secret level. I guess you found out , but as there were more people who got stuck in the game I added an overvieuw with all names of the levels.
You can find it here:
http://members.home.nl/gimli/Abandon.txt

When I made the pak I hadn't internet, just some cd's from the BillBoardService.
Some of them had tricks from the QuakeLab which made me decide to build levels around each trick, like exploding walls, real glass, fryer cache, wind tunnels.
It was also there where I found the LudovicTexier level of the Elden Cross, and not to forget Liquid Despair.

It might sound strange, but on these cd's were also levels from Doom and Duke3D. One of them was wrong labelled, I think it was a Duke3D map. When I tried to open it there was an error saying it was no Dukelevel. After some scratching it appeared to be a Quake level.
I have played it, some wide blue level with a strange tower that went down with a big turning round staircase.
After all these years I started to believe I just dreamed it, so I started looking without result. Still searchng as I never saw it anywhere.
My memory of it is so strong I think I can better make it myself again. 

 

thanks, scampbot. ;) 

. 

 

 

Very interesting recommendation spambot! Wow :) 

It might be archived in another link in this, but there's too many posts to go through and see. 

https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/trail.html