maximum character length exceeded - I shall instead provide links to .txt files you can read

http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/monster_gaunt.txt
http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/monster_gug.txt


Please note: I haven't thought up these monsters because I'm a raving Lovecraft fanatic; literary zeal aside, I conceived them as appropriate additions to the Quake bestiary because they would fill a role in the gameplay I have felt during many mapping sessions to be noticeably empty. 

here are the illustrations from the Call Of Cthulhu RPG as reference - I would deviate some way from these depictions in actually modeling them for Q1 though.

http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/gug.jpg
http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/night-gaunt.jpg
[hoot]*chirp* http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/pitch-black.jpg 

good ideas, both of them. i like the pitch black version with the vertical hammerhead bone better than the illustrated picture, much more cooler. :D

i think the pickup/drop thing would be hard to code well... 

Sounds cool. But no matter how far the player is dropped, he only ever takes a maximum of 5 hitpoints. Consequently, it's good that you noted the player should take damage while being carried by the gaunt; however, I think 5 hitpoints every 2 seconds is too lenient. As you said, though, that would be refined during testing. 

Gugs sound interesting, and I think a better substitute for an end boss would be rather nice. But the attack system has me a little concerned. If the damage delt is too much, then it simply becomes a matter of starting the battle with more health than the gug (or dealing damage at a faster rate than the gug); but if you balance that by making the gug slower than the player, then it will be too easy to avoid it. It seems to me that the amount of damage delt by the melee attack should be about the same or perhaps a little more than the shambler's, and the speed should be pretty much the same as the player's. At least you're not really planning on a "smash" attack, as I think that would definitely be too much.

Drawing the player out with the bilebombs sounds pretty cool, especially if the gug's speed and melee damage are balanced properly. Hopefully it would actually work that way, instead of turning into a poorly implemented feature that serves almost no purpose at all.

BTW, if this sounds like unintelligible, delusional ranting, that's probably because I'm in a rather unintelligible and delusional state of mind right now. 

I had an idea for a monster. It was basically like a guy wearing a human skin trenchcoat and mask, and he had a chainsaw or some similar weapon, and he could like walk on walls and stuff. I got the idea after watching the Matrix Revolutions, and combined it with Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I decided to call them Skinnies. I also thought the Gugs would make a great monster for Quake, it seemed perfect when I was reading the Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath. 

well if you've added a custom monster it emans you must already have tampered with the game code so you could just as well change the way falldamage works although you might not want that because it could come as a terrible suprise to a player who would expect it to woek like they're used to when playing quake. 

If I wanted a monster that slung shit at me, I'd piss off Courtney Love at a concert. Changaboom. Thank yoooou! Good Night! 

But no matter how far the player is dropped, he only ever takes a maximum of 5 hitpoints.

Unless it's into lava etc wooooohooooohooooo 

yeah, there could be little shalow pools... that way, it would also depend on how fast the player gets out of the lava to minimize damage taken... so the player still has a chance the help himself after he's been picked up. 

But no matter how far the player is dropped, he only ever takes a maximum of 5 hitpoints.

Unless it's into lava etc

Exactly. R.P.G., falling damage wouldn't be the primary hazard of being gauntdropped. It would be whatever the mapper built under the info_gauntdrop. Falling damage should remain unchanged and would always be a possibility with gauntdrop, but is likely to be the least of your worries...

If I wanted a monster that slung shit at me, I'd piss off Courtney Love at a concert.

Shit? Uh, wrong orifice, dude. It comes out its mouth. It's called a 'bilebomb'. So you'd be better to piss off...umm...Courtney Love? Hmm, one above and one below :/

Zwiffle: sounds interesting. You do realise that the Quake ogre is based on Leatherface from 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'? 

Bile - a yellowish green fluid made by the liver from bile salts, bilirubin (broken down red blood cells), cholesterol, and other substances; the fluid stored in the gallbladder; the fluid released from the gallbladder into the intestine to help fat digestion

That really would be a nasty substitute for spit though. 

I want to see a flying enforcer :(
I know that there is QC for that, but no models involved :(

Besides, most of Q1 monsters suck ;) 

I like the drones used in OUM, forget who made them. Their constant muzzleflash is really annoying but easy to remove from the QC. 

i'd like to see some more modifications to current monsters... like in neh, the vores could walk on the cieling, and there was a stronger version of the fiend which walked more upright and windmilled it's arms at you...

maybe there could be a version of the scragg that used it's tail to attack you, maybe swatting you around or something... :D 

The "vores on the ceiling" still fill my nightmares, hehe.

I must admit, i dont remember the fiends you describe though. 

are probably my most favorite monster from quake, followed by the ogre, so it'd be cool to see some more vore-type monsters. I can see a vore that explodes when it dies and spawns little vore ala headcrab boss from halflife. BTW is it Vores or Vore for plural? I'm not sure. 

i had a 'normal' quakec version based on that neh upright walking fiend but it didnt look right because the animations weren't very long, and didn't look that good on engines w/o interpolation. if the animation was smoothed out & cleaned up it would r4wk. i'll try to dig it up when i get back home in a few weeks, might not be as bad as i remember :) 

Because the general thread has moved on a bit, I'm gonna post this here, but it's actually an addition to the skin mapping stuff I said there.

I said then that there were two ways of fixing the skin while keeping under the vertex limit. It turns out that saying it without trying it is rather dangerous...

You can't weld vertexes back up in QMe to try and get back under the limit. Sorry, I said you could, and it's just not true. The way Qme decides whether a model is Q1 compliant is by comparing the number of model vertexes to the number of skin vertexes. If total skin vertexes - number of seam vertexes(as they count twice on the skin) = number of model vertexes, it gets the thumbs up.

The kicker is that merging vertexes only does it on the model, not on the skin. So if you merge them, you'll never get your model to run in Q1, as the skin vertex count will always be higher.

Oooh, and I'm making a night gaunt model, but as you might guess from the above, it's not gone smoothly so far. Pics once the skin works and I can start skinning it properly. 

It's finally skinned, so here's a shot or two. I may still mess with the proportions a bit, but adding new stuff now would be very tough(for a start, it's exactly 1000 vertexes as it is) I've been making the skin as a 24 bit TGA, with colours that convert reasonably to quake colours. This is why the black skin is done in shades of green, as it's the best colour in the quake palette for highlighting black.
Shot of the .TGA skin:
http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/gaunt1.jpg
And a shot of the quake colours skin:
http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/gaunt2.jpg

It's not quite what Lovecraft described, it's not even what Kell described, but hopefully it'll work out. Animations to follow... 

...that'd be bitched about for not fitting into the game. Dark green skin? God, that's hideously out of place.

Make it a brownish flesh color (like the fiend's skin) and it'd be great. 

wow, man! that's awesome! the colours really work good in quake, especially the dark green.

i have a few suggestions, if i may...

waste a few polygons and give it some clearly defined teeth. maybe about 6 or so (maybe 3bottom, 2top or viceversa)

could you maybe stretch the rear or the head furthur back,and make the curve more... 'vicious'?

i'm also concerned it won't mix in well with the other quake monsters... for the most part, all the hellish looking ones have fairly light skin, usually pinkish... the dark green is really different... i don't suppose you tried it with shambler type white or the greyer vore color?

good luck with animations and all that! 

The mouth looks a little funky. Maybe too wide?

And like Scampie and necros said, I think the dark green doesn't fit in well. A color set similar to the fiend, vore, or shambler seems like it would be much better, IMO.

Otherwise, it seems pretty good to me. 

i'd like to see some more modifications to current monsters...

Flying Polyp For Quake 1

linkage to .txt file for further perusal:
http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/monster_polyp.txt

pic from the CoC rulebook:
http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/polyp.jpg

my custom skin on the spawn model:
http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/polyp-mdl.jpg

I did try several eye designs and other stuff, but they just didn't look right. So I left it as a 'big flying mouth'. This is also my first skin :/

I have also put together a bunch of sound effects for the polyp. And some for the gug and gaunt too.

polyp:

idle - http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/sound/polyp/idle.wav
sight - http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/sound/polyp/sight.wav
ranged attack - http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/sound/polyp/windblast.wav
invisibility - http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/sound/polyp/invisi.wav
weirdness while invisible - http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/sound/polyp/murmur.wav
back to visible - http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/sound/polyp/visi.wav
melee attack - http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/sound/polyp/chomp.wav
deathsplat - http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/sound/polyp/death.wav

This is everything. All it needs now is for someone to do the qc.




gaunt:

sight, or maybe idle - http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/sound/gaunt/sight.wav

That's it. I'll forego the gug sounds for the moment since there isn't a model anywhere.
I also updated the txt files with further ideas/refinements, but I won't post them in the thread for the moment.