Congrats on the map release. It's been a while since we've had something that is CrankySteve levels of bad so this was refreshing. Theme, lighting, texturing, and box rooms were all awful. No offence or anything but you can look at the first two rooms of even E1M1 to see some consistency and interesting design details etc. At least the gameplay was easy with lots of ammo and health supplies, although it got a lot easier later on. Demo: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/sham_hc0.zip 

Any mention of CrankySteve turns this into a must-play for me. 

The visuals are all over the place, and the composite doors literally fall apart when they open.

Well, a fun romp nevertheless. Quake is a fun game, and it's not that easy to make it boring.

Lots and lots of ammo on Normal, despite the warnings. 

I stated it was difficult because of my experience playing it. Higher skill at Quake means you beat this map easier than those who were less. Of course, "Peripheral Fundament" is easy for at least Shambler because of the ammo and health supplies being a big number count. The map wasn't bad, but it is interesting. On CrankySteve, not many mappers do that quality (especially nowadays with stuff such as for example Arcane Dimensions being largely influential to the current Quake mapping scene), so yes, Shambler's and Kinn's posts are true. 

dwere, you're right, because I made frequent use of texture variety to make it unique-looking. It's a fun romp indeed. 

The map is very unoptimized, being about as slow as a modern eye-candy map.

But Quakespasm seems to run it fine, even on my machine. 

The "difficult" part came from me playing on Hard and to a lesser extent Normal, both where I frequently autosaved to protect myself from the 200 enemies at the former skill (know the Rottfish glitch?). "Higher skill" at the "Yep." post meant being good at playing it. 

The map has a leak and is unvised. Additionally, a whole bunch of items fall out and several monsters are reported as being partially inside walls. These are issues that should be addressed before releasing a map.
For next time: don't include a screenshot in the zip, and if you must, at least convert it to JPG. 

The .map file source was included because it does have a "missing 3 textures" leak. I attempted to have it vised, but those textures came to mind, so yes, the items fell out. I tried to upload it again without the screenshot for the sake of lower size, but Quaketastic allows the uploading process of each single file to happen once, no deletion. Your suggestion to convert the screenshot to JPG is nice as it is more compressed than TGA. Also the small size of rooms with a bunch of enemies meant those monsters were partially inside walls. After all, any first author's maps such as my "hc0" can be vulnerable to issues, so I hope my next work will improve. 

Even the gold key room had scrags partially inside walls. 

I wonder if Quake had monsters partially inside walls, then anyone at id Software can fix this before Quake II was released. Since Carmack's December 1999 release of the source code, this can be more likely done today with a fix/patch. 

But nonetheless this map has been good (at least somewhat), and Quake is great. A downloadable fix/patch to this map just can happen whenever possible. 

If a map leaks, QBSP generates a .pts file. When placed in the maps directory alongside the bsp, you can use the pointfile console command to show a dotted line that leads to the leak, or at least helps in indentifying the area.

Type developer 1 in the console before loading the level to warning messages if monsters are stuck in walls or items fall out. All monsters and items need some space to adjacent geometry (at least 4 units) - their bounding boxes, that is (those are larger than the actual model). This is not an engine bug, but an error in the map. 

Cool 'pointfile' and 'developer 1' tips negke. ;) 

I am good at playing Quake at Easy and Normal. Hard is acceptable. 

The leak is beyond those three textures, one part of it being at where the cells at the supply near the silver key are and apparently half of the lights are among the other parts of it. I am working on a fix to the map. 

I won't go into the technical issues, but just mention some gameplay problems which can be easily solved in your next map...

Played on normal, yet you dished out about 10x as much ammo as I needed. The map is packed to the brim with weapons, health and ammo pickups, but I just grabbed the rocket fairly early on and gibbed everything in my way. Didn't use nails once, yet nail pickups were littered everywhere.

No real structure to the progression. This is mainly because I found:

All weapons are handed out in quick succession meaning no real ramping up of combat difficulty.

The blue key is found way before you even see the blue door.

The gold key is placed in plain sight right next to the gold door, which is rather odd.

Keys need to be placed in way where you see the locked door first, and then later in the level you find the key and loop around back to the door (keyword "loop" - don't make the player backtrack!)

The map exit is unmarked and not in a position that seems like a natural endpoint to the level. I was just walking around and brushed up against what I thought was a blue sky-textured window and the level ended, much to my surprise, even though there was obviously a whole load of monsters and stuff below me which I hadn't even explored yet. 

This is clearly a first map, and a test map at that. The room with all of the liquid textures is a clear sign of that. Reminds me of my first map except I didn't release it.

It is nice to see you play with curves and some interconnection and also unessential areas (SNG, TB, Grenade Launcher) and is shows promise of what you could create in the future.

However it would be wise to submit a beta on the Screenshots and Betas thread to obtain some constructive criticism and assistance on the bad spots of the map.

Skill 2, 1/2 secrets:

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/mjb_hc.zip

Also to find the empty textures in a TB map, you can open the .map file in a text editor and search for "__TB_empty". Then you can just replace the phrase with another texture...like tech04_6.

Good luck with your future mapping endeavors! 

To Kinn: Yes, you're exactly right.
To Bloughsburgh: Good luck indeed. 

So this map is not very good. In fact, it's pretty bad. Theme and visuals are all over the place, no sense of progression either layout- or gameplay-wise, pointless rooms that lead to nowhere etc. With that said, I did somewhat enjoy it in a so-bad-it's-good kinda way. It's just so satisfying to blast away ridiculous clusters of enemies with rockets or grenades.

If you're gonna keep on mapping I'd advise you to be more conscious of progression and a coherent theme - a map doesn't necessarily have to be as detailed and grand as many of the newer releases as long as it plays well and looks polished enough. Also get someone to playtest your maps before releasing. 

I played it. It was fun.

It was also probably just like everybody else's first map in that it had too much of everything: textures, ammo, monsters, areas of no real purpose, etc. But it was still fun.

My suggestion is... don't worry about 'fixing' this map. Just move on to your next map and try to implement some of the improvement suggestions noted here.

This should include paying attention to the technical requirements e.g. run a full vis, and definitely sort out the items falling out of the level.

Mapping is fun, playing Quake is fun. The more you map, the better you'll get, and the more we will enjoy your maps. 

Alright, I give up fixing this map. I agree, it was fun, mapping is fun, playing Quake is fun. 

We all had to start somewhere in terms of mapping. Just follow the advice you were given in this thread and practice making a better map. 

Okay, I have no problem following the advice in the thread, since I like advice. Thanks everyone for it. 

So much fuss over this map so i had to play it.

The map was buggy and ugly 0/10. but the action was actually fun :D

I have yet to release my first map. I have a test map where I test all the functions and features i want to add to my real map, and once i have those figured out i will add them to my real map. I was building my first map for 2 weeks and gave up on it because of extreme vising times. (i didnt realize i had to make details into func_detail entities).
now im making my second map which is on its way to be released.

Good luck on your next project, make more of an effort on your maps, its worth it!