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. 

 

Ghd, the problem is gone for you then? Because if it is, that would mean that I have a modified palette, too, although I wouldn't know where because my paks are unchanged. Where did you find yours? 

So you can't replicate this? Does it look fine on your machine? 

The weapons:
- I started to use DBS for one shot kills mostly. waiting for the reload is very unpleasant and it slows down the game.
- the SG replaced the DBS for ogre fights (4 shots is enough)
- I like the knock back from the weapons
- I like that the grenade explosions can push monsters (and my other grenades also)
- SNG spread is ok
- RL didn't change I think but feels overpowered as always
- the new laser thing - I didn't notice the behaviour you described, it feels much overpowered
- I like to use the nail gun
- underwater weapon behaviour is ok but don't punish the player with using up more ammo, maybe the grenade launcher could still work underwater
- the limits on carrying ammo work surprisingly ok

other things I like:
- monster wizard teleporting
- shambler lightning
- knight zombies
- hell knight missiles
- health regeneration - although in standard quake it wouldn't be needed
- monsters follow the player better - they can surprise even on standard maps

things I don't understand:
- quad behaviour
- fall damage - to complicated
- why do I need to wait for zombies so long
- is anything changed with monsters going into pain animation? Fighting ogres with SG they usually go into pain after first shot and I can fire 2 more before they recover.

For me the gameplay is ok. It feels like quake with some small modifications and surprises which is good.

I have recorded some demos on quake ep1 if anyone is interested:
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/Quake_ep1_demos_with_rmq.7z 

Funny you expect the game to hold your hand these days. "Retro" level design with some free exploration and several routes is so much better than waiting on the AI squadmates to unlock another door and get another objective in an absolutely linear tightly scripted map. Proof: DE:HR.

For the texture mish-mash, E2M1 actually uses a fairly true to the original Q2 set remake, but obviously some textures are by different authors or not properly repainted placeholders. I would ease up on using aggressive grid and grates patterns everywhere too. The rest seems fine.

Randomised stuff ironically could make it easier on hard skill, when you can get random big weapons, MHs or armors.
Btw scaled hp and attack with higher skill is used almost everywhere, ie in HL2 (such a disaster of a game ain't it). 

Modified pal only makes the internal textures look noticeably brighter and stand out. Check e3m1rq near the start below the lift and straight to the locked door - one of the wall panels texture is an internal low res.
If you have idgamma leftovers its either gfx/palette.lmp or a small .pak with it in /id1.

I didn't notice any overbights with new textures, so I guess its just the way maps are lit and the textures being dark, like I said. 

have you tried playing with the contrast slider? if you up it along with the brightness it can improve the 'overbright' look without making the darks too washed out. similar effect as a modified palette i guess, but it affects everything rather than just the lo res textures 

And brightness are both at 50% atm, will try your suggestion later. 

I've watched demos where the player was randomly shooting as he was wandering along. Took me a long time to realise that he was doing it to light up areas he couldn't see in. They looked perfectly visible to me and I must assume that they looked perfectly visible to the mapper too (otherwise they would have been lit differently).

Now, I did have an old PC in work (until about 2 weeks ago) where the desktop and other OS stuff, as well as other programs, looked no different, but Quake was incredibly dark and dingy looking, and I had to crank gamma to about 0.8/0.75 (lower numbers being brighter). 

We need a reference map with lots of lighting levels and stuff. 

The randomisation is completely controlled by the mapper.

Ankh:

The Quad starts with ten or twenty seconds, and gains 5 seconds for each kill you make. This still needs its times tweaking.

Fall damage too complicated??

Going to change the Zombies...

How often a monster goes into pain is unmodified from id1. I'm not sure if there's a damage threshold for Ogres that remained as is - that would cause problems since the shotgun and Ogre health has changed a lot. Will look into it.

Glad you liked the mod, and thanks for the feedback. 

I don't know much about the Quake lighting model, but maybe the factor that the new textures seem darker is related to the size of the texels during the lighting process. They are larger on the low res textures so maybe they collect more light? 

Why don't you give me all your lighting related settings as a cfg file and I'll make some screenshots for you - that way you can compare. 

The lighting process doesn't actually read texture data at all, and texel size isn't relevant here.

What I'd like to see however is a comparison made using the ID1 start map. I'm suggesting that because otherwise there are too many variables in the equation - new maps, new textures, new lighting, etc. The ID1 start map is a known constant and takes all of those variables out. We're left with engine and replacement textures as factors that must be considered, and nothing else to distort the analysis.

There are 4 things that must be compared to make the comparison complete and scientifically valid:

- ID1 start map, native textures, RMQ engine
- ID1 start map, external textures, RMQ engine
- ID1 start map, native textures, other engine
- ID1 start map, external textures, other engine

That's the only way you're going to get anything out that's not tainted by subjective opinion.

I haven't done a direct comparison yet, but I believe that a histogram of standard external textures (Rygel's or QRP) with native ID1 textures will show that the externals are darker overall. They do look that way to my eyes anyway.

On overbrights.

Seems to be some confusion here about what overbright lighting is and what overbright lighting does, which may be leading to the statement that the engine doesn't do overbrights.

It's quite clear that the engine does do overbrights - you can check some of the well-known trouble spots to confirm.

Overbright lighting doesn't make things brighter; what it does is increase the dynamic range of lighting. Any light in the standard range won't and shouldn't appear any different, any light above the standard range will be clamped without overbright lighting but won't be clamped (or - at worst - will be clamped at a higher level, although that doesn't apply to RMQ) with overbright lighting.

There are a few different ways of obtaining overbright lighting, with the standard being to shift down by an extra bit when calculating the lightmap then double the result after you multiply texture by lightmap. Q2 and Q3A double the texture and leave the source lighting fairly dark (they weren't written to target the required GL extension). DirectQ encodes a scaling factor into the alpha channel of the lightmap texture which is then decoded in the pixel shader. RMQ blends multiple lightstyles entirely on the GPU so it gets this as a natural result.

They're all just mathematical operations on numbers though, and the operation is the same whether the texture is external or not. In that case, if a different result is achieved, then the inputs must be different.

There is actually a second source of lightmap clamping going on too, and that's in the light tool. We have a solution worked out to address that, but nothing coded yet. 

In Ricky's map, I have seen enemies being rendered at the wrong position for a single frame. It was always in an area where I hadn't been before and the enemies in question were there for a single frame, then vanished and it didn't happen again. I have actually caught this in the demo posted above, in that case it's a dog. I just saw it again though and this time it was enforcers or grunts.