Nice rig btw :)

Is it a Mac though? I mean OS, engine etc... 

You don't understand, you need to properly light the map with contrast lights so it looks fine regardless of the gamma in the areas that are important for the progress (not secrets obviously) and use functional lighting to lead the player. (Unless you want to pull Doom3\Amnesia)

There are no overbrights on external textures, they always look darker http://i.imgur.com/722XZ.jpg 

an interesting point. Er... MH? 

What engine is that? 

Mac Port of the engine. 

is by far not as dark as e3m1rq, although it's missing overbright lighting, too. 

Lighting in fitzquake should not care whether it's an external texture or not (and i assume RMQ hasn't changed this) -- do you have the "idgamma" patch installed? That would cause brightness on 8-bit textures to be different. 

don't forget that you can use gl_max_size and gl_picmip to reduce the texture sizes and memory needs...

(gl_max_size will reduce only the largest textures, gl_picmip will reduce all textures by the same amount.) 

 

Sleepwalkr: so you see the same issue as shown in the screenshot in post #279?

Sleepwalkr or Ghd Fladjern Tilbud: does the problem in the screenshot go away if you set gl_overbright to 0? If yes, then it sounds like you're right and the overbright doesn't work on external textures. (again, this assumes RMQ behavior for that cvar hasn't changed from fitzquake) 

Doesn't exist in RMQ. 

i've noticed there is a difference between external textures and internal bsp ones. i just assumed it was due to the palette subtly changing colours when i palettized the textures. 

@ijed, I went back to the original Q1 and the basic marines are a couple of shots with the single barrel rifle. In RMQ they are one shot, it feels too easy compared to the previous game. (I did nothing to change the skill level)

If you are changing health based on skill level then that is indeed a bad idea. Get the designer to swap AI units around based on skill not fix it with code. Let players understand the AI better by knowing what to expect (damage wise) to kill them. Tweaking numbers based on skill is a recipe for disaster.

@RickyT23, good luck with the textures. Ideally you should start with a proper unified set that is actually designed to work together. At least fix the texture density so they are all consistent. It is the first thing I notice and makes me stop and stare even more. 

okay, guess it's changed enough from fitzquake that i can't really help much :) 

There are overbrights on the external textures; there are overbrights on all textures and the fragment shader code is very explicitly texture * lightmap * 2.0; I wrote it and I know that that is what it does.

Saying "there are no overbrights" makes precisely zero sense because we are talking about an explicit mathematical operation here that does not distinguish in any way, shape or form between whether the texture is external or not.

Convince me that "TEX diffuse, fragment.texcoord[0], texture[0], 2D;" or "(l * 42.5f) / 255.0f" is capable of distinguishing whether a texture is external or not.......

None of this means that I'm saying that problems don't exist - what I'm saying is that if there is a problem - you're barking up the wrong tree. It's coming from somewhere else. 

The map is way to big and it lacks encounter focus. Let me give an example:-

The location of the map around the HQ building has a long corridor section pointing towards a bridge area. When I come into that area I am facing towards the HQ. There is AI firing at me from 180 degree's, the dead end to the left and stuff from the bridge area. I am not saying the area needs to be more linear but the encounters need to come from a small angle. Introduce the AI over near the bridge when the player goes there not before.

Also I accidentally found I needed to go into the HQ and then engineering to get the bridge to work. I was lost for ages and for some reason that area is like a slide show for me with <10 fps. Once I finally got to the bridge area all the AI had died and it felt like anti climax when I got there. I don't think you need to spawn stuff so far away, it feels like a sniper game.

The flow of the map is broken and misleading where to go next. Let me give an example:-

When you finally get the bridge to lower, there is a platform with crates and a locked door. (There was some AI stuck in the door as well). I could not see anyway to go (obvious) Then I started jumping around on crates and jumped to the rock ledge to the left. Apparently this was the way forward because it got me into the complex. I assumed that was a secret area not the main route. I was expecting a door, a ladder or something that was going to lead upwards. The flow of the map should feel natural and not misleading.

Will play more later! :) 

It's not obvious that the rock ledge is the way to go, true. I'm not a mapper so that's not my provenance and it's best if I don't get involved in this side of the discussion.

My provenance however is very much the < 10fps experience you had in the bridge/HQ/engineering area. Can you give me some info on your hardware and setup as it would be useful to me in addressing thing in future, please? 

 

(replying to health)

The random variation in health is very slight - rarely it'll take one more shot or one less, depending on the weapon. Mostly you won't notice the variation unless you're using nails.

It was geared to this for the players who knew exactly how many nails it to for enemy X - I was one of them.

The reason why the grunts take one shotgun blast rather than two is because the weapon itself is more powerful, but also much more range dependent.

The balance in general is towards mobile enemies being more vicious and unpredictable, but also easier to kill, depending on the methods used.

Grunts circle strafe for example, and versions like the Axe Grunt have a one-off axethrow that causes heavy damage at short range.

You'll notice the ammo system has changed a lot to accommodate this as well.

Finally, the difficultly sliding is throughout everything - how frequently monsters use special attacks, how fast their shots are and so on. The health increase is fairly minor.

The design focus is to make the game more unpredictable - not stupidly so, but just enough to keep veteran players on their toes.

Ideally we want to promote the same fear and tension in a veteran has they first had when playing the game for the first time.

Maybe this all sounds a bit anal-retentive and hubristic to someone on the outside. 

I have a very clear memory of The Dismal Oubliette from then, definitely moreso than any other map (aside from e1m1 and e1m2, perhaps). I recall the feeling of mounting tension, the sheer dread, being soaked in sweat and almost collapsing as I finally got there.

These days I can do the standard route in a few minutes of course, but aiming to capture that feeling again is perfectly fine in my book. 

It makes balancing things much more complex, but nobody said it'd be easy.

It does have some harmful side effects as well, that need to be patched. The randomised wake up time for zombies, for example.

From the demos it seemed to make player very nervous 'when can I gib the little fucker?!' but I think it borders on annoying.

Open question - should zombies (and any corpse) be gibbable by explosions? No shotguns or other weapons, just explosive blasts.

I'm breaking the rules of games design asking that here :) 

zombies becoming completely invulnerable when falling down doesn't really make any logical sense nor does it provide an interesting gameplay element beyond making the player wait (which is always bad).

i don't think this is behaviour that needs to be preserved. 

There's been a lot of talk about zombies recently. They're definitely one Quake monster with huge unused potential, and ways of making them a more interesting and varied opponent are being discussed.

One example I came up with (which I hope the folks don't mind me mentioning) was in relation to zombie gibs. Obviously you cannot kill that which does not live (but you can blast it into chunky kibbles) so an argument can be made that even zombie gibs are not exactly dead. So what can be done with zombie gibs to make them reflect that fact? And how can something cool gameplay-wise come out of it?

No decisions made, of course, but it is one potential idea into the cauldron. 

I double checked and indeed I had a modified pal lmp that I had completely forgotten about, so never mind about external\internal.
Its just the way maps are illuminated and the way particular textures give back the light.

BTW if you want to save on texture memory, you should start with those 17 1024&#178; door textures that differ only in captions on them.
There are many other textures that have tiling going on inside them, so you could cut the texture size in 4 with no quality loss. Typical 'cranking up resolution for resolution sake' case of replacement content.

And last note for The Silent, in-engine gamma adjustment could conflict with other software or drivers and make no effect. 

All so far? That's only e2m1rq and about half of e3m1rq though :-)

I'm the oddball running linux on intel graphics (and a pretty crappy monitor -- I'll see what it's like on the internal display soon). r_lightscale sounds like it might be a useful hack for me.