New Location, The Chapel of Saint Corthright Image 1Image 2

New player weapon model, The Shadow Axe Image 1
... with 5 sets of animations, 5 different skins to show amulet status, new swipe/amulet sounds and various blade particle effects. 

I think the chapel courtyard could use some vegetation .mdls to accentuate the brushwork - which is spot on. Maybe the floor outside could be scabby grass as well?

Internally it's extremly neat and strong. The angle's a bit tricky but it seems like the red circular window will be a good focal point.

Does the knight stealth the player with that crossbow? I can imagine a poison version working like the HL2 poison headcrab...

The axe looks badass, nice and detailed but still rough and quakey, especially with the blood splatter. The lines suggest that it's throw-able, but maybe that's just me. 

I know it is going to sound crazy but the Chapel of Saint Corthright is just a test map for the AI and particle effects. I took various bits from all the other maps and mashed them together, which is probably why it looks familiar. It is a real shame that the fitz engines (0.85/MarkV) do not have alpha texture support. I suppose I could create vegetation models with the alpha flag enabled.

I like the idea of a poison bolt Death Archer, I will need to think about a new skin otherwise it will be impossible to tell at distance. It certainly would be cool to have the Black Crab game mechanic, it always creates tons of fear when fighting groups of enemies.

Haha, I never considered the new axe to be a throwing weapon! The axe is based on a model by Lunaran (lunsp2) which I took in a different direction. I wanted something that feels like Quake but new and different from the original Axe. Plus this new model does not take up huge amounts of central screen space which is good for when in stealth mode. 

That internal area did look a bit like one in another map which had lightning shooters.

Don't know if you saw these:

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/vines/

Which work without alpha and are pretty versatile.

Maybe you could also raise / lower the axe v model depending on how close the player is to an enemy, or if they're in stealth mode or not? 

You just begin the texture name with a curly brace... like {alpha.pcx or whatever. Also you need to use palette colour 255 (the pink one).

The images look excellent, I'm glad that you're still doing work on ITS because I am a huge fan of the Thief series (and, obviously, quake). The work you and others do thrills me so much I wish I was working on a full game with you and the other inspiring mappers on this board! 

at that being a test map. you are crazy sock! 

@ijed, for organic stuff to really work it needs decals, texture blends and alpha support (I believe these features are limited to a few engines). I don't work with a specific Quake engine which is why I have avoided it. Broken or ruined architecture is a different matter.

@Fifth, I believe the curly bracket thing only works with specific engines, I have not seen it used with Fitz engines.

@Nitin, I have plenty of square box test maps, the second phase to AI testing is proper map architecture which is why I did this little mash up. I know it sounds crazy but it produces really good results for the AI. 

RMQe, FTE and I believe Dark Places are the engines with fence texture { support. 

With fitz too.

Trust me. 

Alpha yes, but { textures not. 

If you want small amounts of engine-neutral alpha masked textures, and you're willing to bake the lighting into the texture manually, you can use the technique from the grates in Quoth. Add a sprite with flags set to Oriented instead of VP parallel and you've got a single face with alpha masking. It can be a bit entity-intensive if you need lots of faces, but I know that's one place where ITS is willing to push the envelope : - P 

preach, i seem to recall you had some really cool method of dynamically creating ground clutter with entities... did you ever finish work on that? it was really cool.
i know it required the array compiler extension though... was that what stopped you? 

@Preach, the problem with sprites is they cannot be scaled and they are stupidly big if you want to do any fine detail. For my dot particles they are perfect but I still offer a polygon particle solution if people want it.

Organic plants need the ability of alpha textures, good lighting and easy scaling/rotation. The Fitz (+ code forks) engine does not offer any this as a single solution. You either have sprites which can be alpha textures and rotated but not scaled or models which can be lit and scaled but no alpha texture support.

If the Quake engine community could agree to fix this sprite/model issue then Quake levels could finally look semi organic. 

Sorry Sock, I wasn't reading your post in context and thought you were just interested in alpha textures in general. I suppose a decent way forward would be for fitzquake to support alpha channel tga textures on sprites, then you could create sprites with rubbish low-res fallbacks for very old engines and have proper high resolution tgas to replace them.

necros: It wasn't very automatic, it was just clever entity management behind the scenes. I'm still working on it, there might be some blog posts later in the year on one half of the technology - it's also useful for managing gibs, sprites, all those kinds of dynamic things - reducing the amount of packet overflow and keeping network traffic sane. The application to mapper-placed entities would be easier with arrays, yeah, but there's another way... 

Ah. I thought you guys meant alpha on bsp or brush entities. 

@Preach, no worries, I just wish there was an easier way to get all Quake engines to support a core set of features. I can understand why RMQ eventually decided to go with their own engine. For the moment I still want to support Fitz engines as much as possible.

When I released the new screenshots I was not expecting much of a reaction because it is not a huge impact thing (+weapon and test map) but I checked the stats for the MODdb page and was pleasantly surprised! A special thanks to spirit for pimping the link on facebook, it drew in a nice lump of traffic :) 

I just wish there was an easier way to get all Quake engines to support a core set of features

Winquake was last patched in like '97, so it may be too late for that.

This tongue-in-cheek post contains a kernel of truth... 

Been playing around with large brick to small brick transitions as the player goes deep nnderground to investigate the crypt ... 

technically, rmqe IS a fitz engine. :P
using fence/alphamasked textures will at least still run in any engine. if anything the use of the feature will encourage its adoption - so long as the engine is still maintained.
fence textures are required as a core part of halflife bsps, so any engine with support for that should also support fences.
its a pretty trivial feature to add to an engine (glEnable(GL_ALPHA_TEST), and replacing index 255 with a different alpha value), but you should generally ensure that you only use such textures on func_walls etc unless your qbsp explicitly supports them.

as a side note, hexen2 (and thus fte) does support certain .mdl flags for different alpha modes, which can allow alpha testing or paletted alpha, but its not well documented and will likely need tool tweeks to do it properly.
32768=blended without culling (some weird 4-bit palette with 4-bit alpha value, quite quite horrible and likely unsuited to quake's palette)
16384=alpha tested (palette 0 is transparent)
4096=blended (odd palette indicies are 50% transparent)

one thing I like about making features compatible with other engines/games is that you can blame other people for terrible apis. :P 

As per usual. 

opening at top, is it possible to not make it square? Or at least not totally square and perhaps a diamond from the player's prespective? 

Maybe make them a rougher / darker texture like rock4_1? 

using fence/alphamasked textures will at least still run in any engine. if anything the use of the feature will encourage its adoption - so long as the engine is still maintained
It would be awesome if QS/MarkV could support this feature, it would be a step in the right direction for mappers. :)

@nitin, the top is a large metal frame around a hanging grate (recently added). It should make more sense from above because that is where the player is coming from.

@ijed, yeah rock4_1 is an awesome texture, I will give that a try. 

ok I see what you mean. I thought the map was going to be set inside and that was like a 'viewing window' opening. 

Just looked at the code. MarkV does already have fence texture support. So no excuses. :P