A more measured way of playing.

The ending could have been expanded on a bit - extra walkways and locking the player in maybe. 

well built and textured. balanced gameplay for the most part.
also a good testament to your editor to produce a nice, clean map like this. :)

the part where you get ambushed by 3 fiends though... and it's not entirely your fault that fight sucks.
the fiends attack you from a slightly elevated area and that increases the chance that they will one-shot you to almost a certainty so i had to accept a much less than optimal position when fighting them because retreating back down the slope would probably have gotten me killed.

it's a good thing i got the RA + MH secret or i'd have been killed for sure. 200 Armour + 140HP down to 7 Armour + 73 HP :P

the excavation area was cool with the half buried stone/met stuff. i wish that area had been expanded upon a bit more but the return to straight base after that was fine too. :)

gj, and nice return to the smaller scale mapping. :) 

the shamblers up on the raised platforms at the end.... boring to kill them since all you have is SG, SSG and NG, and not nearly enough nails so you just duck in and out with SG (you can't get close enough for SSG) and they don't chase you into melee, so doing shambler dance isn't an option. 

You missed the Thunderbolt? 

lol :P that would have made it a lot less boring. :D 

I don't want to mention where it is early in the thread, but it's not in a secret or anything. 

you don't get many cells anyway, so by the time i finished the level i had no nails or shells left, just some cells.

good clean design with standard textures, although it's a safe design aswell. i think it would have been a bit better had there been some custom textures used - idbase has been done a million times, as has that same old earth textures. nice solid, base gameplay. only time i died was on those fiends (which means no demo), i didn't realise the ceiling to the cave was so high, and it landed on top of my head - killing me straight away.

overall could have used a little more detail, but pretty solid design regardless. some more set-piece areas would have been good aswell. look forward to more work from you willem. 

Nice to have an engaging story line. Cheers!

First run:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/3w7qyc 

As stated by others good solid layout, nice fights.

Breaks my #1 golden rule of mapping(Am I qualified to issue rules since I never released something? Hmmm... dunno)that is backtrackability of the whole map. I missed the 1st secret and was not able to go back and find it after cleaning up the level. This left me without ammo to finish the last vore@skill 3 (had to cheat me a RL to exit).

Maybe having the GL in the standard route (not in a secret) would have been nice, given the rocket dropping ogre barrage you get while getting out of the mine area.
In the GL secret if you're not careful, you get stuck beetween the GL platform and the wall, and you have to noclip out. A little more playtesting may have avoided this, I think...

Also, I did not like the way the secrets are marked as being 4 when, in fact, the 1st is a way to get to the 2nd (if you wanna be picky, so is the 3rd to the 4th).

Plus, the onscreen messages got me fucked a coupla of times. No good reading with fiends and ogres jumping at you. Annoying.

All in all, a good work, if a little flawed by the above(IMHO). Looking forward for a larger scale effort, Willem.


Ah, and, of course, I loved to see what can be done with your editor... Now, if I only had the skills to do something this nice... ;) 

Thanks all!

silent:

A larger scale effort? Damn ... this is the largest Quake map I've done to date. Going larger will be an interesting challenge.

As for the secrets, I think you're right. I regretted chaining them like that but it seemed somewhat appropriate. I mean, you MIGHT grab the penta and not think to go looking around in the lava after all. But the GL one, yeah, there was no need for a second secret trigger there.

Kona:

Thanks dude! I wish I had your ability to create custom textures but that's a skill I'll have to work on. I just recently added the ability to import textures into ToeTag so that's definitely something I can start exploring now. I did a few small ones for this level but nothing of substance yet.

necros:

Shame you missed the thunderbolt. :P

You're right about the fiends and I thought about the one shotting issue but they only killed me that way one time so I wasn't too concerned. It seemed like a suitably decent surprise attack so i left it.

Megazoid:

I wanted to do something with a story and I felt this was a decent solution given the tools that vanilla Quake provides. 

One thing I could have done there is provide an optional GL. I did that with the NG ... there's a NG pickup inside the mine that gets destroyed if you get the one in the outdoor area. So if you miss that first one, you'll still get a NG for clearing out the mine. I could have done the same solution for the GL. Hindsight is 20/20 and all... 

What other people said really. The ending surprised me a bit. I like the mine section especially. Was fun.

http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/sham_evil.dz 

I'd love to watch these demos but I can't find any support for the .DZIP format on Mac whatsoever. The only download I found is a command line version that runs in the Classic environment only. :-/

Can you guys post those as normal ZIP files or maybe raw DEM files? Is the DZ thing really necessary? 

Only complaint is the balance of the fights. Overall, I felt overpowered through most of the map.

Nice to see a map with some enviromental storyline as well as the incidental 'radio chatter' bits too. 

http://speeddemosarchive.com/dzip/dz29src.zip :p
That's what you deserve for developing a editor for MacOS only, ha!

The map looks gorgeous. For me the radio messages were more of a distraction though, it that stuff was actual audio it would have been great. Size is perfect. Nice work! 

Not much fun. Slow gameplay and erratic backtracking. I recorded it, though, so I might as well post it....

http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/evilexhumed_nm_thesilent.zip 

Is the DZ thing really necessary?
It has the best demo compression ratio out there, which is why it is used as standard.

If you are still having problems with Dzip, I have zipped both demos, and dropped them into a temp directory on my site -

http://www.quaketerminus.com/temp/evildemos.zip 

"It has the best demo compression ratio out there, which is why it is used as standard. "

Well, the DZip site mentions better compression geared towards getting the demos onto floppies which I can't imagine is much of a concern these days, is it? Anyway, I know I'm the odd man out here so mega thanks to everyone posted Mac friendly demos! :) 

Fails on big demos as well though. 

btw there is a __MACOSX folder inside the zip (hidden on your OS). And it always is a nice thing to make all filenames lowercase to avoid case-sensitive confusion and problems.

Is there a specific length/size where dzip fails? That's kinda :( 

"btw there is a __MACOSX folder inside the zip"

Yeah, there always seems to be. I wish it wouldn't do that. Grumble... 

I don't think that any of



the centerprints in this



map really added much of



anything, since they had no



impact on gameplay and were



otherwise kind of generic.




[ END ] 

Good architecture and lighting doesn't add to gameplay either, and can sometimes be generic. What makes center printed flavour text any different?

I'll agree it seems a heavy handed way of adding story to the experiance, but given the limitations of stock Quake, it's an understandably simple way to convey information. I believe the text bits were simply too long and tended to be distractions at times. The sweet spot would likely be a simple single line of text. 

that describe wierd sensations of terror, cold winds and sulfurous odors, written in the second person. 

I wanted to convey a sense of history and life to the place and I attempted to do that through a few things:

1) The centerprints. These were meant to be like personal logs you found in System Shock 2 and automated messages like the computer voice that spoke to you at times. Really meant to just give the place a sense of history and purpose.

2) The architecture itself. You get mentions of the words "ruins" and "mining" a few times before you actually see them. This should (hopefully() set up the players head to buy into the environment they're about to enter.

3) Since they already know it's a mining operation digging up ancient ruins, the medieval monsters shouldn't seem jarring and actually make some sense as the miners are now brainless zombies and the monsters are roaming free.

This was my first shot at injecting some story and sense of place into a Quake level while keeping the feel of the original game intact. I think I succeeded more than I failed - IMO anyway. :)