About difficulty levels. What exactly changes with each ramp up in difficulty? I know most mappers have additional enemies they flag in for each difficulty, but what else? I also know nightmare makes ogres and shamblers attack faster, but that's about it. Do most people add enemies from hard -> nightmare too? 

That's a good idea for adding autosave feature to quoth map 

What exactly changes with each ramp up in difficulty?
Basically what you put in your map: that's up to the mapper to put extra monsters/items for each skill, which is why balancing skill levels is tricky. AFAIK, nightmare doesn’t add monsters, only makes them more aggressive. 

So enemy health pools don't increase? Is there someplace I can find specifics? 

If you want tougher enemies per skill level, make maps for AD: Sock has designed his mod so that enemies aim better, shoot faster and do more damage (and possibly have more health but I'm not sure about that) in higher skill levels. 

Still working on it, albeit rather slowly. No release date yet. 

What's that Thief project? 

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146501 

monsters attack faster on nightmare (the exact mechanism+magnitude differs per monster type).
monsters don't respond to pain so often (once per 5 secs max), this also increases their fire rate.
cthon has a measly 1 health on easy, and 3 on all other skills.
cthon uses different aim logic on hard.
vore projectiles travel faster than you're meant to be able to run on nightmare.

so no, skill does not affect health, except for cthon who's a special case - he's the ONLY monster that acts differently between easy+medium+hard skills. The other monsters only change for nightmare, with the other skill levels being handled exclusively via spawnflags (ie: count and types). 

Thanks for the specifics. So between easy -> hard, the only thing that changes is the monster count? 

provided you specify in your map for which skill they'll be available. Like I said, if you want monster stats to change, map for AD. 

and you can change some stats in each enemy and be free to use any mod you want, if you want any. 

@sevin, AD scales many things based on skill levels, its not just different enemy setups

* Monster projectile speeds increase
* Pain resistance increases
* Attack Reaction times decrease
* Z aware monsters increase accuracy
* Nightmare only spawn flag exist
* Monster damage/HP are never affected by skill level
* Can delay spawn any entity in the map for different skill setups 

Wow, looks awesome! Thanks for the link. Bookmarked. 

Very cool. Thanks for all the info everyone. I was actually talking about vanilla Quake, but I assumed some of the features sock just mentioned for AD were vanilla Quake, so that's very neat. I didn't realize only AD added a nightmare spawn flag. So in base Quake, the only things that changed in nightmare were monster pain responses, ogre/shambler attack speed and vore ball speed/agility? And Cthon health/prediction if we're being picky. And between easy -> hard it was just monster count and item pickup counts? Didn't realize it was so primitive, I guess I assumed more of the features I'm used to in AD were actually vanilla. 

Do demos persist through death or do you need to start a new one? 

Mark V has an autodemo feature that keeps your last three lives as demos. I think it works. Haven't had any luck though. I have no idea how to use it properly as there is no freaking documentation for the engine. You have to guess, scroll through cvarlist for clues or search the thread here.

Will some kind coder please update demotools (or something similar) to stitch together Protocol 666 demos? I die at least once per map and oftentimes need to stop and continue later. WOuld love to be able to stitch demos together into one. 

Didn't realize it was so primitive
Heh, 1996 was still videogame Middle Ages... PS1 had democratized 3D only one year before. 

I'm sort of comparing to what I thought vanilla Quake was, even though some of that is AD. I think that's one of the hardest things to keep up with as a newcomer; the variations of the standard features of Quake. What's vanilla and what's not? Hard to keep track of that. 

what is the command to force quakespasm spiked to run in a window? Thanks! 

Add -window to the command line options. 

http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-interviews.pdf 

I've got a map almost ready. It would be awesome if someone could take a look at it, and comment on "good level design" without playing it, before I do the final gameplay balancing. It would probably mean notargetting through it following the player path and pointing out stuff that doesn't work.

Gameplay currently has only hard, and it should be nightmarishly hard. I would like to balance it after all geo changes... 

 

as well :)