Congrats on the release. 

Can't wait to try it 

Been waiting for this one to go out for quite long time!

Great gift for a good weekend! Thanks a lot!!! 

Is Patrick Martin still active, though? I briefly looked into finding him, bu the trail went dead about 5 years ago.

Also, booths are now open, even though Jehar is yet to officially announce the opening. That will likely come today. 

Yes, he is active, I can give you his email if you want. He is working on a Quoth-like mod (Q1SP-focused set of new features and content) called Drake. Many of the features in this pack are from Drake.

C1475: That's what she said (sorry, couldn't resist)

& thanks for the news post Vondur. 

Finally 

The maps are good - architecture, style, layout, story. All very Soul of Evilish and uniquely themed, especially the third map which seemed like a collection of great features from various custom maps in one large level (ruined cathedral, shore, underwater stuff, "shadow"-pyramid section, church etc). The textures made the maps feel different but cool. The third map in particular reminded me of some of the recent ubermaps for ZDoom.

However, unfortunately not only in terms of style/grandheur but also conercerning the gameplay and difficulty. Even on skill 1, the maps are very hard - and in some situations not in a challenging way anymore. I resorted to god mode in several situations out of mere frustration. The new/modified monsters were cool but hordes of them, or at least a good number with strong attacks, didn't do much good. Archers, knights, vores attacking from a large distance (and with increased speed) became particularly annoying after a while.

The coins and gems were a neat feature, though I couldn't tell if they really helped much in the end. The new weapons came in handy, except for the laser blaster (SG) which I didn't use much. Cool dragons, hard though, and wtf for not being able to look up 90 degrees in BJP. I liked the ghost helper in the first map and the friendly soldiers in the second (though both weren't of much help after all) - well tied in with the story.
The boss area/fight was a nice change from the regular arena boss battles maps usually have. Defeating Bane became really tricky once he started resurrecting the monsters and using his lightning strike.

By and large a nice episode which I should have played on skill 0 however. 

I designed the maps basically in the original SoE package, where the monsters weren't really that much improved, and when PM added a whole bunch of new stuff the monsters became a lot more difficult, spiking the difficulty as a whole. I can barely pass it myself on skill 1, I'd recommend skill 0 to most people. Those who have a lot of patience (I don't) will find the gameplay less challenging; I myself prefer to charge in.

I do admit to being a total asshole with vore placement in some of the maps though (lol). The last vores in the pack are kind of there just so you can blow some away and finally get the better of 'em. 

Because you need just about bloody everything you can get... I'll finish playing through it once I'm less "on the clock" with my map, and then I'll put a review in my booth.

Also: nice to see the anim frames used in interesting ways. 

I enjoyed your first offering tremendously and wanted it to be longer. I am looking forward to this one, thanks! :) 

Fitzquake worked somewhat until level 3.
Darkplaces (deleted progs.dat and renamed progs_dp.dat to progs.dat and it didnt work at all). aguirRe didnt work at all for me and froze up my computer. It was the latest one from the site too.

Guess I dont get to play :/ looks amazing from what I did get to see though. 

 

yeah if you have a recent DP version you should be fine; the only problem I've seen is one clipping error in nsoe3 (map may be too big for DP) where you can walk right through a solid stone. Other than that, it works fine.

can't imagine aguirRequake not working - it's really fast and always works for me. What's your system? 

I don't know how that follows. It doesn't have the +/-4096 wraparound. Could be a corrupted brush, maybe?

DP works for me, but I'm using a July 2008 build (not using the release build yet, waiting for a bug to be fixed)

I'm gonna have another go at playing this soon, on skill 0... 

...bearing in mind I've heard all the jokes/gasps about my weirdass control settings already -- how come I can't bind mouse3 to backpedal in SOE:Indian Summer? 

So good to see you releasing stuff! Your such a great level designer, I hope you find the time to release your other stuff too.

Just played through all of this and it was fantastic. Very similar in design to the first SOE. I really don't think the first 2 levels were up to the standard of the last three. The first in particularly wasn't the right style. Both could have done with some more detail. Still, they were both pretty fun, but only up to ID standards.

Your levels, Tronyn, were fantastic, nsoe3 in particular! I jumped the pyramid hoping to leave those 3 dragons in the dust. Then once I'm finished in the pyramid I teleport back to find them right in my damn face. I got some Shambler/dragon infighting though, which helped. The homage to Shadow Over Innsmouth was awesome.

The next level was good, but I'm biased against void maps. Never liked them that much. Still, this is probably the best void map I've ever played.

That third map is difficult though. I got past the first fight pretty easily with just the DSG, then the next one aswell because the bars closed just as I backtracking out again, so I just lobbed a dozen grenades into the cage. If I got stuck in that cage, it would have made the dragons and Bane incredibly difficult. In the end all I had left for Bane was DSG :o Those dragons can be quite annoying to fight actually.

Some of the fights in this were too frustrating, especially Vores, Ogres and enemies with arrows on very distant ledges. I wouldn't recommend playing it above skill 0 unless your very strategic and patient. You probably should have made this a little easier, Tronyn. All the extra pickups and boost in armour/ammo was helpful though.
But on the other hand, it's not impossible. I didn't need to cheat at all, and I only found 2 secrets which didn't help me much.

Anyway, can't wait for your next release buddy! What you working on next? :D 

I changed it the long way. This pack is rock hard. I don't generally go in for all the swords and sorcery shenanigans and the word 'thee' makes me die a little inside, but the level design's proving quite fun so far, and I like all the monster drops. 

it's true that it is a bit more strongly fantasy flavoured than the original SoE (which was actually going to feature medieval weaponry and player classes - I'll bet you're glad I didn't end up doing that!). But hey to each his own. As for the difficulty, I can only suggest turning the skill level down (if possible) or playing more strategically. There are some secrets which should help a lot in maps 3 and 4 (including one where you get revenge on some vores). The difficulty was a compromise - PM and I play differently - he plays strategically, I play like a rampaging brute (lol) - so he wanted it more challenging, I wanted it less. Anyway hope you still enjoy it.

re: [Kona]

Great to see you back hanging out here. I just replayed Brumal Quest, probably your most atmospheric level. Glad you liked the Shadow Over Innsmouth homage; I've always loved that map. Lol I can't believe you beat the fight at the start of the last map with just a DS. Impressive. Also funny that you found that cage hack, none of us (testers/developers) did. I always barely win the Trog fight and have to recover health at the top. The void map was sort of a reinterpretation of the SoE E2 theme; ijed suggested I remove the vores on the far ledge; maybe I should have, the possibility of falling off makes it fairly tough.

Now I'm gonna start Soul of Evil 3 - maybe do 4-5 more medieval ruins maps, and 4-5 more underground wizard maps, you know. Should come out in another 6 years. Lol. But seriously, I'm just trying to finish the projects I've started. Arcanum has to come next or Pulsar might strangle me. After that I've got Unforgiven. I'll post some shots later during QEXPO.

PS I don't suppose you're going to make anything now that you're back. It would be pretty cool to see a map by you now that so many old limitations have been removed; your maps usually have 2-3 floors, you could make something with 5 or 6 in your trademark style. But as you're well aware this can be a really time consuming hobby and vistimes are a bitch (over 600 hours for my 3 nsoe maps). 

in 2nd map I depleted all my shells on a bunch of knights, and had to use sword, and guess what, I accidentally managed to behead the last one!! (and it's the tougher one with red strips on his body)

This is fun, for beheading an enemy is obviously an instant kill.

I guess I am going to use my sword more often now. Wonder if I can behead a fiend?? 

nsoe3 crashes aRguire's Quake for me as well. The beta did not do that.

:

Excessive clipnodes (44041, Normal Max = 32769) in maps/nsoe3

Call, 2291

bunch of crap about shamber.qc

Pf_Precache_sound: overflow
host_error: program error 

Excessive clipnodes won't crash it (and the final version has clipnodes less than the beta - I removed that painful warehouse area). I'll mail PM and aguirRe and see if they have any ideas. 

Wrong choice of words on my behalf. It doens't crash Quake when I try to load the map, but dumps me back to the console. It won't load, the error I posted is what it says in the console. 

This sounds like the error message generated when you load too many sounds in a single map. Do you have the latest version of aguirre's engines? On the version I have it reports such a warning in the same way as the excessive clipnodes warning for nsoe3 - I guess an older version might not be able to just handle it as a warning. 

Damn, that was hard!

I started at skill 2 and painfully worked my way up until the battle with the Bane. I must have died a hundred times in the previous levels. Those dragons and vores are a killer. But I admit defeat, as I wasn't able to defeat the Bane without god mode during the last half of the battle.

The maps are really great, especially nsoe3 and nsoe4. I didn't have any problems or errors with aguiRe's enhanced glquake, other than some slowdowns here and there in the big areas.

I don't think the gems, jewels and coins help a lot to keeping you alive, but they are nice to collect :)

But overall I thought it was a great map pack despite it's difficulty. I'm surely playing through this again, but at skill 1 this time ;)

Fantastic job Tronyn and all the others involved. 

did you use -heapsize 480000?
I'll let you know when aguirRe and or PM get back to me

doomer: glad you liked the sword. quake's axe was such shit. the sword's less handy in the later maps tho because of the horde combat.