Indeed, it's the perfect theme for Halloween. 

I had gray fog set in my map, but looking at the screenshot, red really does look better and suits the theme better. So when you get into jam3_tronyn, pull down the console and set "fog" to "0.13 0.4 0.0 0.0" (or at least that looks pretty close to the screenshot settings).

I am so looking forward to playing the rest of the maps. Congratulations to all the authors, and to OTP for organizing it! Great work guys it is seriously hard to believe that this has been one of the most content-intensive years for Q1SP ever! 

That was brutal! I played all of these on Nightmare and stremed the thing. It will be uploaded on my Youtube channel soon I hope.

Daz: I love the atmosphere here, it's proper zer. Cool layout overall, good use of monsters and nifty secrets (especially the useless one that's true to its name). The architecture is great for the most part, especially the central part. I especially liked the blood elevator. The ending is rather abrupt though. Good balance.

Ericw: Interesting take on zer, I like it a lot. It was properly brutal in some areas, especially the ending which could have had one or two health kits just before entering the final room. Architecture wasn't anything crazy but it did the job correctly and I liked the verticality.

Ionous: The most zer of the maps, I gotta say. Architecture was really gorgeous and really evil. Loved all these spikes and arches everywhere with the red windows. The main room with the blood basin was especially impressive. Gameplay is rather well balanced overall. It's a tad linear but other than that I think that one is one of my favs.

MFX: The king strikes back. While not as true to zer as, say, Daz's or Ionous', it is still properly evil and brutal. The rockwork is amazing, progression is cool and the secrets are, as usual, clever and rewarding (I especially liked the quick moves one). The skybox is insanely good especially, and all these floating rocks and moving parts were awesome. Lots of monsters to fight overall. Great woodwork and scaffoldings as well. I managed to "break" the map at one point but it's nothing too bad (just have to noclip a bit). My favorite of the pack.

Scar3crow: This is obviously a beginner's map but it was still funny and evil. I loved all the zombies, hacking through them with the chainsaw was properly satisfying. I especially liked the bloody vent that produced gibs after it was activated, hah! The map was visually plain and didn't really convey the zer feel but it's not too bad. The final arena on the other hand was a pain and not really fun, though I did like it when I panicked for obvious reasons.

Tronyn: Holy shit dude, how do you manage to create maps this huge so quickly? While having next to no zer vibe that was evil as fuck in its own way. The architecture and vistas are amazing! It really feels like a Doom map in terms of scale, it's quite something. While not as big as Something Wicked it's still goddamn big. The textures are very heterogenous but it works quite well. Good use of colored lighting as well, especially in some indoor areas, such as the libraries or the spiral staircase behind the gold key door. I liked the freedom you gave to players. The map was overall rather balanced with huge fights (seriously, all these zombies and grunts in the main area were really fun to kill), but the end fight is just way too hard. Had to godmode through it after several tries. In retrospect I should have left the quad and pent in the main arena alone, but oh well.

Overall, that was really really cool. Two hours of pure carnage in very hostile environments. 

I played your map with red fog and it definitely felt more sinister and evil than with the regular fog I got when I reloaded after quitting the game by accident. :p 

The fog is red on map start for me. 

since I already used it in ARWOP, Nyarlathotep, and the last map of Something Wicked; it's like it's my go-to evil move to make the atmosphere full of blood. But I could justify it in this map, since there's supposed to be rain and a moist atmosphere, pouring into a floor made of flesh, skull and bones, out of which the trees grow (thus the canals).

If the fog is red on map start that's great; it's probably because I only set the intensity, not the colour, in the map worldspawn, so it just uses the colour from previous maps/settings, as opposed to "neutral" (0 0 0 ) colour. Sweet! 

thanks for the feedback; I'm sorry about the ending. For future sufferers (lol at the whole crufixion idea in the Zer context), I included a secret in the end temple that could make it more doable. 

jam3_tronyn has a fog setting of "0.01" which seems to pick up the fog colour of the last map played (at least in fitz/qs).

Fun watching your stream, Skacky :) The pack looks awesome, I can't wait to play everything.

Also, I forgot to credit Quoth for the stars skybox my map uses, which I tweaked slightly to remove some jpeg artifacts. 

jam3_tronyn has a fog setting of "0.01" which seems to pick up the fog colour of the last map played (at least in fitz/qs).

Interesting, this is technically a bug in how fitzquake reads worldspawn fog ... 

From all of you!
But Tronyn, man i can�t believe this map is not bsp2. What a map!
Thanks to otp!
And thank you ericw for helping me out with that progs and all. 

Thanks skacky, yeah I skimped on visuals to get the entities close to done. Pretty much everything you see there, I learned to do right then and there. The Screw Cannon can be a bit terrible, but I was trying to avoid having any id weapons as far as I could help it.

The ceiling crusher was meant to keep the arena from being a continual circle strafe with in-fighting, however the whole rhythm got fouled up by monsters getting into the blood pool. Also, I had some messages not printing, which was frustrating to witness on the stream... Anyways, I wrote a post-mortem on the map and my mapping experience in general: http://scar3crow.com/2014/10/quake-map-jam-3-post-mortem/ 

Congrats to all, no time to play now though, soon! 

... unless a zerstorer map collection is the ideal way of introducing my 2yo to computer games?? 

Here's the twitch VOD on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhZ0T_3e7r4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ifo4T1-xwY 

 

There is a problem that only occurs on systems with case-sensitive filenames. Windows users don't have to worry about this. Others will find that a typical Quake engine will not look for PAK0.PAK and PROGS.DAT, and won't load them. These files have to be named pak0.pak and progs.dat in environments where filenames are case-sensitive.

You have to rename PAK0.PAK and PROGS.DAT to pak0.pak and progs.dat yourself in the jam3 directory!

The problem is that without doing this, the user can still start playing the maps and won't immediately know that they're not working as intended. Luckily, I knew what was going on from having the same experience a month ago with the original Zerst�rer.

- - -

I want to thank all the mappers for contributing and OTP for organizing the jam. I'll be enjoying this one for quite a while. 

Played ericw, scar3crow's, ionous and daz's. Leaving tronyn's until I have more time.

otp you didnt have a map? 

jam3_daz - Best overall imho. Great balance of visuals and gameplay. Plenty of room to maneuver. Ran well even though it had a large open area. Only got lost once. Felt the most Zerstorery to me.

jam3_ericw - Had a lot of fun despite the ugly floor texture. Couldn't figure out how to get the Quad damage, but otherwise it was a fine map - ran well, played well, never got lost.

jam3_ionous - Tons of detail and atmosphere, but suffered from some gameplay issues. Kept getting hung up on awkward detail on the floor, especially near the curvy stairs, same with some enemies. Got lost because of the button in the water was small and hard to see - didn't make much sense that it was there or what it did. Got hung up for ~5 minutes because of that button. The gold door teleport/ambush felt bad. Looked great, but I felt game play suffered.

jam3_mfx - Looked great, ran terrible for me. I'm not sure if there's some trick or setting that I have to set to get these huge maps to run well, or if it's just my old computer, but this map stuttered consistently for me, and usually in the worst places ie ambushes. Got lost a couple times, first time primarily to the 'dead-end' that opens up when you get near it.

Got hung up on some of the little details - took a couple of Vore blasts because I fell into a little pothole or got hung up on some edge of something. Didn't feel too good about that. Great map overall with heavy performance problems for me and some awkward geometry which hurt gameplay a bit.

jam3_scar3crow - Not a bad map, but I couldn't beat the level because of some weird bug involving one zombie becoming invincible. The final assault went something like this for me:

Got Quad, killed first wave, ran out on second wave, died.

Killed first wave, got quad, missed some monsters in the pool, quad ran out, third wave, died.

Killed first wave, quad, killed second wave, fell in pool, couldn't get out, died.

1st wave, quad, 2nd wave, 3rd wave, spike ceiling out of fucking no where, died.
1st wave, 2nd wave, quad, 3rd wave, jumped in pool to survive spike ceiling, invincible zombie bug so I couldn't finish the map.
Moved on in frustration.

jam3_tronyn - This is maybe my least favorite map of the bunch. It's not a bad map, but it ran so terribly for me and I was so lost that it just became a slog to play through. Found 9 secrets overall.

The middle area was completely overwhelming. I just ran around like a mad man killing everything I could until it became a bit quiet. Only found the quad/pent secret after I had killed most everything. Killed I think 2 ogres and 2 grunts with the quad/pent. Felt bad. Got stuck in the little blood rivers more than once. Felt bad.

I'm not going to go into detail about why I didn't like this map, because it's not a bad map, I just don't agree with the gameplay or the performance. To be fair the stuttering could totally be just me, my PC, or my settings. Also, even with the quad secret, the ending felt frustrating. Died 4-5 times at the end. 

Bad performance in Tronyn's map is understandable, since the epoly reaches 100k in some places (one of them being the very start). But bad performance in mfx's is very odd. What's your engine? 

I'm using QuakeSpasm 0.85.9 with the commandline copied right from the Readme

-heapsize 65536 -game jam3 +map start

Video Options
1920x1080
32bit
Fullscreen On
VSync Off 

I was going to say try mark v but quakespasm handles mfx's map fine too for me. Regular fitz has some framerate problems in mfx's map and quite a few in tronyn's map.

Tronyn, in the readme it says your map does not work in fitz but apart from slowdown, it seems to run ok without any other issues? 

I may not have set Fitz right, but I used the latest version (0.85). I couldn't get it to load, but since it was just before the deadline I had to just assume people would use QS.

Sorry you didn't like the map Zwiffle. I was trying to make something Doom-style, but that design does not work in Quake the same way it does in Doom. 

It should help with the slowdowns in mfx's map. 

0.85 is extremely outdated by now. 

Glad to see you back on func, Zwiffle!

Now go map.