Thanks necros etc. for constructive criticism.

I find it not so helpful when a lot of people just say "I don't like X, Y and Z" or "it doesn't feel like Quake". After choosing to, well, not help the project. It's very easy.

Not liking X,Y and Z is a question of taste. Would you rather have the old sounds back? Just because they're the old sounds? You don't like the grunt sounds, well, please create better ones. You'll soon notice that it is hard and time intensive, unlike saying "bah, I don't like it".

I could go on, but my opinion on the func_ bunch is probably very well known. Wrong place to ask if you're doing something unconventional. I'm not alone with this opinion.

Quoth is basically Scourge of Armagon with new monsters. Very cool new monsters. But it doesn't change gameplay or weapons. Incidentally, this results in you facing these hyper-enforcers with the same crummy old weapons. I think Quoth went only half the way, sorry.

Quoth made it a point to never go against the player's expectations (citing Preach here). The player, pretty much, being defined as "the peer group", ie func_.

You can't realistically expect the same from a mod that openly says it wants to remake Quake.

It is unlikely that RMQ will greatly change its direction or philosophy.

Let's see what other parts of the Quake community think. 

You don't like the grunt sounds, well, please create better ones.

I don't think anybody's saying they could do better, just that there's no point in remaking the sounds if they're not going to improve upon the originals.

Furthermore, I happen to believe that 'Deep Impact' is a rubbish movie, but I certainly couldn't make better. Constructive criticism is a wonderful thing, but even people without technical know-how or extensive skills in the expression of thought can have a valid opinion, and if you choose to blinkardly ignore it the only person you're hurting is yourself.

Nobody here has to play RemakeQuake when it's finished, and the more their opinions are ignored, I imagine the less likely they are to do so.

I'd like to second the praise of ijed's decorous handling of feedback so far, and feel that it can only help the mod, so bravo ijed. 

I gave czg03 a go in RemakeQuake a while ago, and it swept the floor with me on skill 2. Ogres and DK's definitely aren't what they used to be :)

Nastrond is also worth a try, as is dm3rmx, with the updated base monsters line-up and the limited supply of shells at the map start (in RQ you start with 10). 

I'm ignoring what I can't understand or put into a clear framework. Other stuff mentioned is stuff we were either testing, is on the to do list or will be looking at again.

Like lighting maps properly :P

Bear in mind that these are the sounds for basically the entire game. And it's not just a case of "don't replace them then" because lots of stuff didn't exist before.

Like multiple sight and death sounds, taunts and so on. If we didn't create those then we'd be working on a much less ambitious project. 

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/rmq_ankh.zip

here are some demos of me playing rmq on stock id maps and hdn. I have started with e2m1-m4, e1m5 and hdn.
You can see how I learned to play the mod.
I like the combat all in all.
There are some problems with the power of HK trail. It was the most often cause of my deaths. Also the vores see me from too far away which causes me to hide all the time. 

 

The sounds are obviously, measurably even, an improvement over the old ones. In addition like ijed says, we introduced new mechanics that needed new sounds, and only doing those new sounds would have been inconsequent and led to an audible difference between old and new sounds. "All new" was the only right decision. But the main reason for the new sounds is that 11kHz really is a pretty bad sound quality, and improving the game would naturally also mean improving the sound quality. I realize this is a matter of philosophy or preference, of course.

And this

I'd like to second the praise of ijed's decorous handling of feedback so far, and feel that it can only help the mod, so bravo ijed.

is really an old and worn tactic. Julius Caesar knew it already. It's pretty low. 

my hasty opinions:

- the low health mechanic is cool

- hard to tell friend from foe in the first room of the level

- lack of lighting in places makes it hard to navigate sometimes

- if you can lose your shotgun, it should be possible to regain it. (idea: some grunts drop shotguns) 

We're all conservative elitist pricks who just 'don't get it', right? I must admit I'm with Text_Fish here. While it's indeed consequent to replace all sounds, it doesn't seem utterly necessary. Whether they are "definitely" an improvement is a matter taste. If they were high-quality versions of the original sounds, nobody would complain, but they are different, in some cases even very much so (naturally, as it's very hard to find proper and free replacements), and often sound weaker (or less frightening if you want) than the originals, e.g. the Vore sounds. Also, I don't know if better quality justifies the file sizes of several MB per sound - even modern games don't use uncompressed audio formats?

Having said that, I think I could live with a complete sound replacement, although my suggestion would be to put them (the sounds that are not immediately needed for the new entities) into a seperate PAK file, so people who wish to play with the originals can simply rename it. Seems like an easy way to please both parties.
My main gripes: Hellknight magic sounds like a laser rifle (the sword swing could use a more powerful/complete whoosh sound); the dog death sound doesn't really sound like a dying dog to me, plus it's too long (maybe cut off the second half); zombie pain sound - female zombies?. Weapon sounds are ok, except for the grenade bounce and the explosion (Quake has a very rich and powerful one, this one sounds rather 'flat'). The nailgun could be a bit 'thinner', higher pitch. No chainsaw idle?
The item pickup sounds are ridiculous - is this Quake or Wold3d?! I would prefer something like 'box pickup->syringe pfff->player ahh', for instance.

I think it's theoretically a good idea to have health vials instead of medkits in non-base maps, though then again it doesn't correspond to the ammo packs (weren't all supplies teleported into the maps by the marines or something?). Also, the models look a bit 'low res', being so clean and all.
The rain drop mdl still looks odd to me. It doesn't seem to have a vertical drop shape, but rather shift to the side. Reskinned (and optimized) nail.mdl might be better - like the single drop (nice effect).

The new weapon balance seems ok at first glance (haven't played many levels). A bit more like Doom, makes one appreaciate the Shotguns more. I don't mind the spread, probably something one gets used to quickly. I don't see why they would explode underwater, though, while the other weapons work. LG decoil, hmm. Would make more sense for the RL really, but I understand your consideration for ballance.

The new Vore missle isn't bad. Might make it easier in rooms with no cover. Of course, you could also have the old behavior appear every now and then, at least on higher skills.
The lava burn is too strong now, in my view - it turns even shallow lava pits into death traps.
Nice teleporter effect.

E3M1RQ: Good work visually. As has been said, the lighting needs tweaking. You've probably tested it on a bright (laptop?) monitor setup, but the dark areas are really dark on other people's. I had to crank up Quake's brightness to 75% in order to be able to find my way (in this sense, it's probably due to the darkness that some people found the progression confusing). And the pitch black areas weren't good, e.g. the slime basement of the map - remember, Quake always renders liquids fullbright, so it looks odd if there're black walls around. Don't use minlight though! A few lower (150-200) sourced lights might enhance the area greatly. And increase the overall light level in most of the rest. It's kind of hard to tell what to do in the reactor room if one can hardly see a thing, for example. In some areas, the rainy sky should give a little more light to the walls, too.
I thought the Ogres didn't really fit there (yes, they're used in many custom base maps, but for some reason they seemed out of place here). Better create a grenade-shooting Enforcer monster, possibly also with a melee attack like some sort of electroshock rod or a handheld buzz saw and bloodsplattered skin.

Finally, I hope you find a way to optimize the maps to work with standard engines 

Heh, you can use the lighting gun to climb and fly now. 

Sounds great :D 

Will the model of the QuakeGuy's hands be changed? If they are going to show up using the shotgun I think they should look better. 

Which weapon? All? 

Were kind of late to the party - you'll notice there's alot more if you find the DBS.

I wanted Quake minions who weren't necessarily demons, and knights would have been weird.

You'll notice that Enforcers will occassionally lob a grenade (or hunter killer if their flag is set) so a 'more grenades' flag could be the solution.

friend / foe in the first room is kind of a grey issue, since they'll generally get killed anyway and sometimes they'll attack you (bug).

It not quite a scripted sequence, but it's pretty close. I wanted to give the impression of a living place - one in the process of being overrun, or that has just been overrun seconds after the player arrives.

The NPC is flexible enough to have them properly fighting the monsters and we'll be using that in later maps for all sorts of stuff. Maybe an NPC rescuing a helpless player or some such.

Citizen Able Q2 maps will be a great inspiration there.

Also HL2's various mission types - the NPC unlocks the door.

And final thing about the sounds - alot of them are higher quality of the originals, courtesy of Mindgrid. 

I think this is a good mod -- more on par with Nehahra than with Quoth (minus the feature-length movie, of course) -- it's just the name that bothers me. I guess what I was half expecting was something more like a Quake HD with higher poly models and 32-bit textures with uber-detailed levels. This, on the other hand, is something different. Gameplay-wise, there are some neat things going on. Sound-wise, there are some no-so-neat things going on. The rest-wise, well, we will wait and see...but I do look forward to it.

Keep up the good work! 

There's plenty of projects that pretty the game up though. Textures packs and a few modeling ones.

Being compared to Nehahra is a great compliment. 

Seems like you had fun with the mod, reliving the levels.

Haven't watched them all yet, but they're pretty morale boosting. 

Remaking a map :) 

We've been playing this game for 13 years, so we know every subtlety of gameplay and design. Every little thing you change will be noticed and mercilessly scrutinized. And there are certain expectations that we have about how Quake looks and feels. Obviously any changes to that will be challenged. The RMQ team has been hyping their mod for a while here on func, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Someone on the team says, "oh this map played really cool in RMQ," or about some mapping feature, "yeah we'll have that in RMQ." So, subtle expectations have been created, and now we finally see it, and it is both less and more than we imagined...

So about those sounds. Yeah, they're 44.1khz. Great. I don't care, if they are bad and out of place, which a lot of them are. Let's look at the grunt sounds. You see, I have a certain expectation of what a grunt is. I imagine them to be half-human genetic experiments or something, a creature far more capable of killing than speech. The originals did not utter a single intelligible word. Did you forget? He is called a GRUNT, not "some guy yelling random shit at me." It is seriously jarring to hear them actually talking and I don't like it. Make a new monster, like an evil marine or something, if you want chatter and taunts, please.

Here's another specific criticism: I don't like it when identical-looking enemies fire different weapons. It breaks my expectations. I do see that the grunts have different guns modeled, but that's not enough to tell them apart in a dark room or the heat of battle. Obviously there's a specific way to engage a shotgun grunt vs a grenade grunt, and if you do it wrong you die. In Quoth, you can learn the differences between the green guys, red guys, orange guys, blue guys, etc, and plan accordingly. For what it's worth, this lack of grunt differentiation annoyed me in Nehahra as well.

Well that's a lotta rambling. I'll say more about specific things when it's not 3:30 am... 

The nailgrunts are supposed to be carrying visually different guns. I'm not a fan of 'new skin = rockets' type monsters, so the idea is for each to be different in outline for just the reasons you mention.

The HyperEnforcer for example will have a much bulkier weapon, connected to his backpack by a cable - just a case of getting the modeling and animation done.

Less grunt chatter, noted. 

My opinion is that Quake moves too fast for outlines to mean much. Large differences like a knight compared to an ogre work, but different guns - no. Colors may seem cartoony but they are the quickest thing to pick up on in the middle of a fire fight. 

And the nailgrunts already have a slightly different armour colour.

The idea is for them to carry nailguns as opposed to a stick. Maybe it'll be worth changing the shotgun to a proper shotgun as well. It's a handful of polys more but visually completely different.

Really, the Enforcer and grunt weapons are like giant cigars with a few lights and stuff.

For the Enforcer he'll have a modified powerpack in place of a backpack and a big cable connecting it to his gun - so it should be visually very different.

Skins will be a matter of course. 

you could make very subtle scale differences between the different types of grunt/enforcer. I.E. taller/fatter/whatever. On paper it may not be a huge difference but I'd say it's the sort of thing people would pick up on and react to subconsciously.

I too find the colour coordinated variations in other mods somewhat cheesy but ultimately, bad game play is a problem ten times bigger.

Not to flog a dead horse, but I hope the fact that pretty much everybody has uniformly complained about the sounds is enough to warrant a major change in direction there. 

Yes, all the weapons, I think Q2 quality hands would be enough. 

There's no way that we'll be binning months of work, but its a big contrast how those here and those on other forums have reacted.

The only mention of bad sounds elsewhere has been the rain being too loud. But yeah, consideration.