at last jago did it! :)
very nice level with impressive brushwerk and lighting! i liked ceilings especially, the most detailing ceilings ever!
gameplay is relaxing, the map is more for looks than for massacre :)

jago you rock! 

Excellent work Jago...very detailed map in terms of brushwork and texturing. Extra points for nice pipe work in Quake. There were no "boring" areas at all through the whole map. The combination of Speebaze and IKbase is pulled off really well too, with no areas that clash or look isolated from the rest of the map.

Difficulty levels are well balanced, although I did get raped by the two fiends on my first try. I liked the use of the custom monsters...it wasn't too overbaring, and even though it didn't really add to the overall atmosphere too much, it was a nice change of pace from the usual base monsters.

OK now a few complaints...

It did crash on me once in Fitzquake...kind of annoying being 10 minutes into the map and having it crap out and crash to the desktop. Something to do with one of the models caching...I don't know if Fitzquake's fault or whatever but it was kind of discouraging.

Some of the non right-angle brushes suffered from being too "fat" compared to their right-angled counterparts -- now this might just be something that only bothers me, but it was kind of noticable. It's weird because you adjusted properly for slanted brushes in some parts but others. Even if it was a design choice and not a lack of attention to the brushes, it still didn't look right to me.

Finally, I think some areas had too much brush detail where instead, those brushes could have been used for gameplay. The areas themselves looked fantastic, but most of the time they weren't really used to their potential in terms of traversing the map. I suppose it's a minor issue really, but some of the more length-crazy Quake players might take issue.

Overall it was a really well done map with good gameplay and lots of slick brushwork and detailing. Congratulations Jago! 

About the crash, this is very weird indeed. The engine I've been testing the map with the most was FitzQuake (ocassionally playing it with Darkplaces and vanilla GLQuake a couple of times). I haven't encountered any crashes and neither have my testers. Can you reproduce it and tell me what was the exact error message? 

Design is very good, detailing is great and some really nice designs. Some nice varying paths too. Custom monsters fit in nicely.

Gameplay in the base is very easy until near the first outdoor section. As Blitz said a lot of the structures could be used for gameplay - you could have had twice as many base monsters in and it wouldn't be horde combat as there's so many underused places for them to lurk. Conversely the final arena is a lame setup and one of the worst fights I've played in Quake, being boring, extremely difficult, and just plain shit. Thankfully you can just stand underneath armagon and telefrag him. 

Yes, the brushwork here is the main achievement. There's a good relationship between the brushes and the textures; it doesn't look like one was dominating the other.
The level of detail in the brushwork was consistent - it wasn't just a case of 'here's a cool techy thing I built in the middle of the room'. Anywhere I looked around there was an interesting concavity in the roof, an angled bulkhead or a pipe. Although, talking of cool techy things, the exit teleporter is the best I've seen in a base map.

The lighting was good, though I wouldn't say great as there weren't that many shadowcasting features to complicate the scene with contrast. The outdoor areas could have taken more daylight - there's some good rocky stuff out there that I had to crank my monitor gamma up a bit to really see.

The gameplay was well paced and stealthy. Unlike Shambler, I'm glad the map wasn't stoked with weak base monsters. There were some small areas of neat arcitecture that had no monsters at all so I had much more opportunity to feel I was advancing my way through the installation and not just a series of repetitive firefights clad in ikbase. I really liked that.

The custom monsters were sensible inclusions and not used to spam the map with novelty, though the mega-enforcer sounds are still complete shit.

Items were on the whole adequate without being gratuitous, and I think you must have spent a fair amount of time deciding what to place and where. There was only one location on my first run where I ran out of everything except grenades and tried to do an ultimately suicidal runner under a hail of blaster fire. Other than that, I never had too little - or too much - ammo, which suits my conservative playing style nicely.

The endgame with Armagon was ridiculously easy, though I'm not really complaining. It would have been a more involved combat if you'd simply built a pillar in the middle of the room and spaced the weaponry around the perimeter instead of delivering it all in the airlock. As it was, I just circled behind and assraped him with the LG.

Overall, a solid chunk of baseness with a well developed sense of place. 

dont work with joequake :( 

I simply didn't/don't have the time to test the map with every single custom quake engine out there. FitzQuake and Darkplaces are the most popular ones (and I'd say also the best ones out there) and I only tested with vanilla GLQuake due to pressure for compatibility from some fellow mappers. I was actualy surprised it did run with vanilla GLQuake as I had suspected that my map would've crossed some original engine limitations seeing as there are ~6400 brushes and 730 entitites.

Out of curiosity, what is the error/problem you are getting with joequake? 

The problem with Armagon is that killing him without having any cover seems to be ridicuosly hard for some people and ridicously easy for others. I myself, belong to the latter group, you just keep yourself behind his back and use the lighting gun on him until he's dead and use a couple of rockets to finish him off if you run out of cells.

However, since many people don't know this "easy" way of killing him, I nerfed him a little bit to give them a chance. His rockets do a maximum of 70 damage in a direct hit (in SoA they do a maximum of 90 dmg). I have also reduced his health by 500 hitpoints to 2000 on Easy, 2500 on Normal and 3000 on Hard. 

At work atm, so I haven't had a chance to play this yet. But from what I've seen so far this looks spankingly good.

Trinca: use a proper engine.

(PS - Jago, Armagon's rockets do 120 max damage in SoA) 

Heh, I must've missed something in my calculations then. Anyway, the maximum rocket damage has been dropped by 20 or so points. 

bit of greyflash, but upping r_max{surfs,edges} will take care of that.

I even recorded a 'first play' demo, but it's really boring... and I die in an inept way after 11 minutes or so. 

Just had a quick blast at it on skill 1 and I died on the fiend section (1 spawn right by my head), it was probably jsut my lack of quake skills.

The level and texture go great and the lighting is also nice, and to where I got upto the weapon and ammo distrubution looked spot on.

Nice work I love it, now back to those fiends.. 

Worked fine for me 1280x1024 -bpp 32 -mem 64 

I can't believe I didn't mention the new monsters, a nice touch and it spiced up gameplay, some of them I have never seen before. 

is that killing him without any cover is an interminably boring and one-dimensional combat.
Keeping his attack dmg higher ( though not neccessarily as high as in Mish 1 ) while providing an asymmetrical warren of crates, a narrow pillar or two or - my personal favorite - 4 func_train pillars that alternately lower and rise in diagonal pairs, while also providing a multitude of low-power items a good distance apart gives the player options but encourages them to move as well as shoot during the combat.
This allows both combatants time for moving and aiming as well as shooting. 

thks for trying to help me out!!! was a joequake 0.14 problem...i put again the version 0.13 and it work realy cool!!! great work...the map is fu**ing greattttttttttt nice work!!! 

Congrats on pulling off the Ikbase/spedbase combo so well... i tried that myself once and found it very tiring to do so it looked any good. General architecture was excellent; as vondur mentioned, the ceiling detail rocked. The architectural style was also pretty distinctive, which is a good thing. One thing i liked in particular were the curved ramps that showed up a couple of times.

Gameplay was, as many have said, very easy at the beginning, as you well know. Personally I liked this a lot, it made the atmosphere a little more moody, and gave me the chance to examine all the architecture before the bad guys turned up.

As for negative points, i agree the ending was slightly naff, but nothing too bad. Lighting wasn't great in general though, particularly outside, where you couldn't see the shape of the rocks. Inside, it would have benefited from some more spotlights, and less areas where it looked like the lighting was courtesy of minlight.

Enough negatives; good effort, good map. 

I am sorry, but the screenshots of this map really don't make me want to download it. It looks like something I could've cooked up in less than an hour. No offense. 

go map 

Good post :) Didn't I read something like this recently somewhere? :) 

Awesome! Base maps can look really good. Great brushwork, oh what a very high level of detailing thru the map. Good lighting, interesting layout, nice gameplay, but I was kinda dissapointed when I saw only ~70 monsters in a >6000 brushes map.
But final battle was easy even for me. Not a big complaint but anyway. 

My hard drive ate Quake but I'm sure the map is totally boss. 

I didn't get aroused by it though. 

I liked the colors and textures very much. For me almost too much detail. If you had used 30 more monsters combined with additional armor you could almost convince me to base style maps. I have recorded demo on skill 2 during first play - nothing spectacular in it, but maybe someone likes to see it. (packed wit dzip). The final battle was short but I liked it - the best fight in your level in my opinion. It forced me to move and think quickly for the first time during play. That was a good map.
http://republika.pl/quake_1/araivo_ankh.dz 

i'm going to play this when i get home. must seen cool cieling details. ;)