Love the texture set. Nice with lots of open areas to move around in, good verticality. Only potential negatives I can think of is that the final battle with the shamblers and vores was way too easy, and the lighting was overall very flat. But it didn't really detract from my overall enjoyment of the map.

83/83 kills, 5/5 secrets, skill 3 demo 

This map looks really stylish and plays well. Got 67/67 kills and 4/5 secrets on normal. Missed the LG.

Minor complaints: I kept falling down 2-3 floors every time I was looking up for secrets, also I accidently managed to fall almost to the beginning of the map while maneuvering in the final battle. And ammo was too generous on normal.

Anyway this little map feels and plays better than your previous ones and is very enjoyable.
Keep it going! 

NarNar, you're genuinely spoiling us!

Firstly, it's probably a good idea to upload your maps to Quaketastic. - http://www.quaketastic.com/

Secondly, I made you a demo - http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/5cat.zip

Now let's get down to the map!

You have improved a huge deal since your first map. The texture choice in this map is really interesting, although a little flat (it's good to have a couple of different colours in your theme). This could potentially not have been an issue if you had not used 'minlighting' which is setting a default light level in the world spawn entity. If you need a good 'fill light' then I would suggest using a light with a large range.
Try something like -
light 1000
wait 2
delay 5

This should give you some decent results in filling a room with light but not having the "flatness" that comes with using minlight, also make sure you use it nearby a light-source.
I'm glad you took on-board everyones advice to create more open rooms rather than using lots of corridors, the gameplay was more fun in this map than all your other maps. There are still issues, room size is bigger than I would expect for so few enemies. I would encourage you to use monster patrols so that you don't always encounter the monsters in exactly the same place (this small difference can add an extra layer of re-playability to your maps).
Most of the rooms had the same floor height, you can make encounters more fun by having enemies on walk-ways or raised floors. Especially if you use rooms as big as yours it's a good idea to have this height variance.

Overall though it's a huge improvement and I hope you keep mapping! 

kaffi - that demo is fantastic, I was hoping somebody would use the RL to bounce around that last part of the map. and thanks for your feedback

pulsar - ty ty, glad you had fun! yeah there's a ton of ammo, but after the last two maps I wanted to make sure people actually had an opportunity to kill everything :P but ammo balance is something I'll keep working on

fifthelephant - oh no does it look like I used minlight! I definitely didn't, but it's not a great sign if you think I did. I'll for sure be working on my lighting. love the idea of raised floors/walkways, I'll give that a try next time. and thanks so much! glad to hear I'm making progress. having too much fun to stop anytime soon :) 

Have a demo: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/bre_nar_cat.zip

I can agree with Fifth that you've improved quite a bit since your other releases. The textures you used for this map look pretty neat. Oh yeah, keep mapping! 

Pulsar saved me some typing here.

Couldn't find a fifth secret, but killed all monsters.

Speaking of fifth, maybe minlight look is due to these strong contrast textures lighted with plenty of far reaching light sources, wich gives subtle shadows. The darkness painted in the textures shows off more than lightmap shadows themselves. But we can only be sure looking at the source file.

About style (not gameplay), I think you were more inspired in nar_vault. There was more variation. You know, we can now browse your gallery and pick ones we like better... ;P 

Ok, played with the texture set a little bit and came up with this -

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/5cat.zip

And I'm not 100% sure the set is easy to make it look like it isn't min-lit. The textures are fairly light compared to quake. The filesize of the map is quite large simply because I used 50% scale on them, this tends to have that effect. I wouldn't consider having the textures at normal size because they're not designed for Quake.

The room sizes I used are 512x512 I think which is a pretty standard size for a room, bigger rooms are fine but harder to make fun without getting creative with the floor heights and adding pillars for gameplay (which is generally a good idea anyway).

Nice little texture set, would be good for making a catacomb style map. 

As you might notice in the above file I didn't use the wall torches but instead I made my own sconces from brush-work because this is easier to have interesting shadows cast underneath the flames (which can be done with the wall torches but involves messing with the light angles and stuff). 

@Fifth I think you meant to post a link to a level not the same demo? Interested in your thoughts as you took the time to experiment. 

you might want to check them urls... not the same file bro 

Although I probably should have chosen a different filename. 

fifth - yeah the texture set is pretty light, I ended up spacing light sources out quite a bit more than I usually would, even with lower wait values. also I concur with dumptruck, the second zip you uploaded just has a demo in it? I'm excited to see what you came up with

breezeep - thanks so much! and thanks for the demo, I will definitely keep mapping.

adib - I think I agree with you. I had a lot of fun limiting myself to just this texture set, and I think it's a beautiful one, but I was a little sad to not have any wood or metal to add in there. I just love trimming things out in wood and metal. 

Oh right, my mistake then...

Heres the actual file I intended to upload -
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/5cat-map.zip 

All time that I was playing this map I was felling that it needed intense grey fog instead of black. I played this fog values and got this:
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/cat1.png
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/cat2.png

It looks more mysterious imo. The value is 0.04. 

fifth - what a great use of the texture set! yeah those lights are very dramatic, I love the shadows and the sense of detail it brings to the textures. there's so much potential to this set

pulsar - that's some fantastic fog! I agree, greater sense of mystery and it really livens up the textures. Especially in that second shot. Love it. 

I would avoid doing the 50% scale implementation that I did. It increases compile times, reduces how many mark surfaces you can have and can cause some irregularities.
Plus I think the texture set currently doesn't have enough palette variation in its present state. I think having a small variety in colour and tone would make it a better set.
But it certainly has potential! Also Pulsar is right about the fog, I think you have to be careful with a set like this as it didn't stop it from looking flat. I like my fog to have a subtle hue, for example if I have a green skybox I will have a slightly green fog, same if it's purple or blue. 

I'm almost sorry to say this as I know it's such a cliche to complain about this... but this is the histogram for one of those screenshots: http://imgur.com/XvRJ6w7 -- that's not just my monitor or my eyes saying it's too dark to see anything!

Look forward to playing the map though :-) 

fifth, the map is clearly 100% grayscale on purpose, it's not like he forgot to color it or something 

that's the beauty of the chicoruins set... glad someone made something awesome with it! 

this map makes me want to make my own map using this textureset with desaturated pickups' and monster textures. 

I get that. I'm just saying I would have tweaked it a tad, personally. Plus it's a white set, practically a blank canvas that you could have used some subtle coloured lighting like I did in my example map above to add a bit more character.

It's all subjective of course, NarNar can take it or leave it. 

thanks necros :)

Pulsar - I had that thought! I wanted to use the set for a full map after I'd made a lil room with some zombies, and the red blood and gib explosions were gorgeous set against the textures. (They also flew out of world and cascaded in infinite HOM streaks, which looked SO COOL in grayscale world :P) So it would be neat to use this texture set and desaturate everything except the gore. 

This is only your second map and your skills have improved alot. I found the map to be on the easy side, with plenty of health and ammunition, even on hard skill. Nevertheless, it was still enjoyable.

First run demo, hard skill, recorded in Quakespasm: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/orl_nar_cat.rar 

too easy on hard, mainly due to too much ammo. I didn't find the monster amounts to be too small considering room size though.
More varied heights etc in each room. would have been nice, though ths was achieved in some places, with a couple raised ogres, and of course scrags.

I liekd the touch of non linearity the super nailgun secret affords - it's a nice touch youshould consider implementing into secrets for future maps. I found a lot of secrets by accident, with hell knights etc shooting buttons and so forth.

I didn't mind the monochromatic aesthetic. but considering my comments re lighting in 'finally' I guess thats not saying much...
But yes, you're definitely improving! If your productivity and progression keeps up at this pace we all have a lot to look forward too.
Thanks 

You can balance ammo with some quick math and some rules of thumb.

Every 'BIG' box of shells counts as 1000 points of damage. 56 dmg per SSG blast times 40 shells divided by 2 shells per shot, rounded down from 1120 just to fudge a bit for missed pellets. assume an equal rate for the SG, since even though it's actually a little weaker than half a SSG it's more accurate. We're going with an assumed maximum damage of 25 HP per shell.

Every 'BIG' box of nails counts as 450 points of damage. (9 per nail/18 per supernail times 50 nails.)

Rockets are harder to gauge, because splash can potentially do a lot of damage to a lot of clustered targets, but call one rocket ~180 damage, on average. A 'BIG' box carries 10, so that's 1800.

LG, 30 damage per cell, 12 in a 'BIG' box, that's 360 more.

Add up the damage that can be done by all the ammo pickups in your map. Add 360 for every ogre, since they drop rockets in twos, 125 for every grunt and 150 per enforcer (you didn't have any), then add another 625 for the player's starting 25 shells.

Now, add up all the monsters' health. You see where I'm going with this.

You now have two numbers. Are those two numbers close to each other? Is the correct one larger? Is the ratio between them appropriate for the difficulty of your map? Is that ratio steeper on Easy, or on Hard? How much infighting is possible in your map? How much infighting do you want the player to actually rely on?