Aside from "regular" mods, what Total Conversions have people played that are actually good? I've tried a few but they were just... weird and bad. I get that TCs tend not to be made any more but it seems like a few were produced back in the day. 

I liked it because you could spam d-pad to get a gib fountain. Also 2048 is nice! 

i would pick that travail mod, as a best mod evar 

I think the most useful mods for me are the MP bots Reaper and Omicron bots. Most of my mapping experience over the years has been with MP. I also think DMSP is awesome for a quick adrenaline rush. I would love to discover more SP mods though (besides the obvious Zer, Quoth and AD)

http://mrelusive.com/oldprojects/obots/obots.html

http://easttown.co.uk/quake/reaper.html

http://strlen.com/maps/dmsp/ 

Quake was the Unity of its time. Despite being great for making mods, it was actually awful making TCs for it. Anything that deviated too much from Quake's design was an unstable pile of hacks due to engine constraints, and anyone that tried to replace all of Quake's content with assets made from scratch ended up making awful crap due to asset format constraints in conjunction with limited and/or buggy tools. Things have improved somewhat, but we still get people making Q1 MDL models with inverted normal vectors, for example.

The kind of people who liked to try to push the limits of the engine's flexibility and create wholly new games using it are on UE4 and Unity now.

The fact that most Quake TCs are crap is a testament to how difficult its engine and tools actually were to work with, and to how talented the id Software team was. With this in mind, it becomes easier to judge Quake TCs by what they really are, and appreciate their upsides.

The X-Men TC, for example, had great looking models for its time, and good textures. Its gameplay was panned, but it's actually one of the most polished TCs out there. 

I started creating Citadel on the Quake Engine. Darkplaces specifically. It's limits, even with all the additions and special features of Darkplaces, made recreating System Shock untennable. Specifically crouch, prone, leaning, and any other changes to the player's collision hull size are buggy or unworkable.

Unity is what I switched to.

I still love Quake though.

-Quake Master 

 

I found out recently that the developer of Papers Please (and upcoming Return of the Obra Dinn) was one of the main dudes who did the Malice TC. I have fond memories of that one being fun, and put together pretty well as Quake TCs go.

Wonder if I should ever retry that or if it would not hold up even as a nostalgia thing. 

related link, a cool point cloud fog/smoke effect he's adding to Obra Dinn
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1329818#msg1329818 

Alternate spelling:Cuvfyfy in case Cuvfefe isn't unpronouncable enough. 

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-army-is-eyeing-personal-hoverboard-that-can-reach-10000-feet-2017-5?IR=T 

Parker, quick! Get some pictures. 

In steak form
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3d4Mlk8O9g 

You know the BFG or Lightning Gun Syndrome? Where players hoard ammo for their most powerful gun and end up scraping by on weaker weapons and never actually use their most powerful weapon, because they are saving it for that super tough part that...oh and the level is over.

I wonder what would encourage use of the lightning gun more. 

I remember playing a mod at one point which was a wave combat sort of thing - you'd go into a single arena and fight endless waves of monsters to try and get a good score. I actually quite enjoyed it. Don't remember what it was called though :(

Maybe the DMSP mod? http://strlen.com/maps/dmsp/ 

I wonder what would encourage use of the lightning gun more.

If there was any monster that dropped ammo for it in the levels were we use it.

Rockets can be used all the time against ogres because ogres give back the same amount needed to kill them.

Soldiers give 5 shells, despite only needing 2 shells to be killed.

I find myself always using shells and rockets because of this. I save nails for fights against large groups, and the lighting gun for fights against shamblers.

Enforcers only gives 5 cells, which is a ridiculously low amount, and they only appear in levels where we have no access to a lighting gun. 

It seems to be a matter of scarcity then.

If I leave out ogres and grunts, provide more cells, and skimp on nails...ya that might work. 

i would like slower ammo consumption with the lighting gun. it's not only that it's generally scarce, but it's feels wasteful to fire the gun at the air by accident, or during a horde fight. also when the enemy is dead and you react in one second or 0.5 seconds
the ammo consumption is too fast, so you end up wasting several cells of an powerful weapon by accident. and the hoarder in every one of us don't like that 

assuming full ammo:
sg: 50 secs
ssg: 35 secs
ng/sng: 20 secs
gl: 60 secs
rl: 80 secs
lg: 10 secs

it is interesting to note that impulse 9 gives you 200 cells, while ammo pickups cap you to 100.

imho, the issue is more the abundance of rockets. don't place the rocket launcher, don't place any rocket pickups (other than ogres). place ogres only after the player has already found the gl. Or just make it so the player can only carry 20ish rockets max (requires qc). 

Enforcers only gives 5 cells, which is a ridiculously low amount

In the stock maps maybe, but play any custom base map and you'll be at 100 in no time. For this reason Quoth 2 globally changed the enforcer pickups to 1 cell. IMO, bad decision, though. 

 

/Don't remember what it was called though :(
qonquer 

Really weird article from 1992, mentioning Wolfenstein 3D and post-modernism:
Videogames Are Better Without Mechanics

"it doesn�t simulate at all the player character�s morale or psychic state; there is no mechanic to simulate the trauma of mowing down dozens of enemy soldiers. Enemies, too, simply collapse when shot; there�s no mechanic for talking them down or having a discussion about the merits of Nazism as an ideology."

"If the ultimate bar for visceral grip in video games is set at fairground games, then perhaps videogames will remain stuck as children�s toys even if they escape the stereotypical suburban tract home den. Other paths are possible, and perhaps the most promising ones will bypass gaming�s pointless urge towards simulation.

Night Trap, released in October of this year, both adopts and improves upon this model of simple, direct interaction. It simplifies this methodology even further in that you don�t have to aim in order to trap enemies, demonstrating how unnecessary the aiming controls in Wolfenstein 3D really are."

"The whole way through, I found myself wondering why I couldn�t experience Night Trap without having to trap enemies. What if enemies automatically trapped themselves, and I could simply watch the story unfold?"

"you can make a game that simulates the real world, but what�s the point when the real world already exists."

"The wargamer�s dream of simulation is just a complication of actually doing things, and doing things has been thoroughly revealed as pointless in postmodernity. If there is a future in games, let alone a future where they are anything other than toys for children, they must embrace what they are already so good at: using full-motion video to tell stories."

The magazine went bankrupt in 1993.