i've definitely seen an old q1sp map with that idea; you started in front of two open cages, one with the SNG & one with the LG, with a trigger message saying 'choose wisely'. picking up one weapon would close the cage for the other one.

i cannot for the life of me remember which map it was though, for some reason i had tiddles in mind but just skimmed through all of his levels on TSQLR and couldn't see any reference to it. i can't even be 100% what style the map was in.. it was either metal or industrialesque base 

http://www.quaddicted.com/fmb5 

turns out i was wrong on mapper & style, heh.

just replayed it & realised it's actually a bad example, since if you choose the LG then you're fucked as there are no cells in the rest of the level, not to mention shitloads of nails & no regular nailgun! it's like the decision was already made for you. i managed to scrape through with 13 health & 3 shells (after fleeing from a few monsters & instigating as many infights as possible) 

make it difficult to avoid receiving a rocket launcher in the area while being attacked

And you start using a weakness in the UI to annoy the player. -> nono. 

What's this random spawn method in id1, specifically "patented shooter trigger randomizer"?

Before he was a site administrator, he was a world acclaimed author:

http://www.quake2.com/qworkshop/tutorials/logic.htm

I'll put up a map demonstrating how to use this with random monster teleports later in the week. I'll likely use a small GPLed source map as an example just to make it a fun lesson. 

to turn the logic gate into a randomizer, you need to add a few elements, like setting func_trains in between the trigger and its target and have them set off and randomize the timing depending upon when the player reaches certain destinations. Stringing several of these triggers
in the players path can lead to highly unpredictable results. 

You can also use hacks with firing rockets to have a trigger that fires with a specified probability P. You need an info_notnull to target with

use W_FireRocket

Then directly north of this, place a func_wall with the following fields:

health 100 + 20 * P
takedamage 2
th_die SUB_UseTargets

Make the func_wall target what you want to randomly trigger or not.

How it works:
A rocket does contact damage uniformly between 100 and 120 damage, and so the setup is asking whether the rocket does enough damage to "kill" the func_wall in one hit. We choose the health of the func_wall so that it will die a proportion P of the time.
Warning! Do not trigger the same info_notnull twice, as the second rocket will certainly kill the func_wall if the first did not, so the event will be triggered.

Fun fact for the day
With an infinite sequence of coin tosses you can generate almost any random process, including Brownian motion! Sadly the edict limit renders quake inadequate at performing serious statistics in this way. 

make it difficult to avoid receiving a rocket launcher in the area while being attacked

I inadvertently did this in dazsp3, you would teleport to a new area and grab the rocket launcher instantly, while some dogs were attacking you, 9 times out of 10 the player would blow himself up or lose a fair amount of health.

Not fun! 

Interesting stuff! One thing though, in the fields:

health 100 + 20 * P
takedamage 2
th_die SUB_UseTargets

Isn't it actually (1-P)? If you put P equal to 0 in that example, it looks like the event will be triggered every time.

Also, maybe this could be logically extended to randomize between a set of triggers, I'm not sure. For example, you could set up 4 func walls like the one above, one with health 100, one with health 105, one with health 110 and one with health 115, in the same place and with the same target. Then you'd need some trick to find what the highest health func_wall killed was... maybe something with trigger_counters would do the trick. I'm just thinking out loud here, might need to think about it. 

You're absolutely right there, P is the probability of the event not being triggered, rather than being triggered. It's easier to get right when you're actually doing it that when you write it.

I don't think your plan for multiple func walls will work though, because only one of them will get the collision before the missile is removed. The others will get hit by the radius damage, but unfortunately that's a constant radius, so you can't randomise with it. You could have some further logic gate setup which only triggers if the func_wall event doesn't fire. I'm sure there's a good way to do it but I can't see it yet... 

Why? gameplay clichees like that are established elements, in many DM maps the LG is placed underwater etc. I think good old Quake still has lots of potential, even more so considering QC.
But looking at the mixed feelings the community has about maps/mods that *are* different (Quoth/Warpspasm etc.), maybe alot of players don�t want to advance; having the gameplay "down" also gives security.
Might be that Quake�s true 3D is also kinda hindering it�s advance in that regard, it seems many want to make great architecture and brushwork first, gameplay comes second (which is fine by me).
An idea I had was: what about something like HL�s Blast Pit, but with an unvulnerable shambler for the tentacle thing, players would have to dodge it while going from one area to the other, maybe to activate a big crusher.

Also, neg|ke�s idea with random spawning sounds interesting, Hexen had something like that to keep players on their toes while visiting already cleaned out areas. 

I inadvertently did this in dazsp3, you would teleport to a new area and grab the rocket launcher instantly, while some dogs were attacking you, 9 times out of 10 the player would blow himself up or lose a fair amount of health.

Not fun!

I intentionally did the same thing in Ariadat. There is a quad before a difficult room with a lot of niches and crannies and a rocket launcher that is hard to avoid in the middle of it and the quad is only really a semi secret. I put a knight coming out of the Quad secret room to draw the players attention to it. If you don't take the quad you actually have a higher probability of surviving. 

Logic gates then - I've already been using those after someone here mentioned them, (cheers metslime) but what I was thinking was a triggered event that always causes something to happen.

Now from reading the original example I see that firing four or so spikes at the same time with the gates dependant on the same fixed variables could be useful. So having a gate that when open blocks one of the others and when closed the opposite is viable.

Think I'll try experimenting with this, but have to watch the edict limits. 

I think the question is whether it is fair or not to the player to do that kind of thing, I think in your example HeadThump it is more acceptable as the player sees the Quad in the room and its therefore his/her fault if they pick it up and Quad-gib themselves :)

In dazsp3 you have a split second from teleporting to realise you have picked up the RL and see the dogs at point blank range, and then change weapon while resisting the urge to fire, which in my view is very unfair.

Maps shouldn't be tricking the player in this way, its cheap. Maps should really be trying to take the expectations of the player and turn them on their head in the interest of fun.

In my opinion :) 

the shub teleporter. i don't think i've ever seen it used in a decent custom level yet there's loads of potential for it, either for puzzle type gameplay or teleporting to random locations.. or teleporting monsters to random locations for that matter 

seriously. I want the sp creativity coupled with the qw replayability and ultimate toughness.

And voodoochopstiks, finish traveler, it's practically ready as it is, it doesn't have to be elaborate to be beautiful when compared to most dm maps.

This was somewhat offtopic of course.

I suck at making gameplay and I suck at playing and mostly just hide behind the corner and fire nails. It's kinda hard to do good stuff in quake. Movement and dancing around is half the beauty in qw but in sp that kinda almost never works because of the way enemies are and the clunkier control and physics. Oh and death knights are boring SSG fodder that take ages to kill. 

Maps shouldn't be tricking the player in this way, its cheap. Maps should really be trying to take the expectations of the player and turn them on their head in the interest of fun.

Some of the best game play moments occur when you are tinkering around and you figure out how to make an impossible situation plausible. 

seriously. I want the sp creativity coupled with the qw replayability and ultimate toughness.
Where is the "ultimate toughness" with QW? I'd rather think it is way easier (bunnyhopping, weaponscripts, probably even simple textures...). 

You dont punish the player out of the blue. You only punish him for failing a game at the set rules. Such is the difference between annoying and challenging. (there go your hidden snipers, unseen traps and forced RLs - to the 'bad design' bin)

On a replayability issue - you have skill settings. Different entity sets on the different skill levels not only provide the variety in difficulty, but also allow for no less than 3 variants of how a map plays. You dont have to limit it to the monsters and resources, you can also change funcs and keys location (see e2m1) You can even make 3 different starts. Just make sure the players know that the map plays differently at different skill settings.
For some low-scale differences you can utilize the erratic nature of player movement and place small hidden triggers that randomize events (ie going on the left side of the walkway spawns a fiend, on the right - an ogre)
Monsters roaming on path_corners also add a degree of randomness.

Choice is quite an underrated tool in gamedesign. Giving player alternatives that affect the later events and how the game plays creates a good amount of involvment and replayability.
The earlier comparison of books and games forgot one very important thing - games being an interactive medium (as opposed to the totally fixed narrative of the books and movies) thus making it possible to create different experience depending on the player's decisions. So why not utilize this potential to the fullest by giving more choices and creating variable outcomes instead of tightly scripting all the events and clipping out all the possible alternatives. (is there anyone who havent heard me whine about CoD and such shit :)) 

Good idea. A lot work though. Roger Staines' ghost town map comes to mind. 

The player plays through a start map of some description, which automatically selects skill 0 before placing him in the main map; he plays through, before finishing. Just before finishing skill 1 is selected; the map plays through completely differently on skill 1 - player starts in a different place (possibly where he finished the last run) and finishes in a different place, and just before finishing skill 2 is selected;- ready for a different run again!

You could put a different map possibly between runs, the maps could interlock a bit.

Obviously the downside of doing this is that there is no skill selection... 

Isn't done much because of money in the mainstream and laziness in modding.

Why make something not everyone will see?

The multiple starts thing is interesting though - the same map with three different starts depending on difficulty is pretty neat.

Each of those specific areas could have a weapon in it, and weather you have to start with a crappy gun and go find a better one or vice-versa depends on your skill level.

But that's nothing new - I don't think starts can be removed but teleports definitely can. Pretty much what this thread is about - using the same old stuff in new ways. 

First, I don't think there is a problem.

Second, there are some possibilities that have barely been acknowledged:

- Quoth 2's coop features. Map plays radically different in coop. A coop server already exists, and more could be set up.

- Qonquer maps.

- Hub style maps - take several small/medium parts and use Quoth to construct a hub. I always liked this in Quake 2, even in Hexen 2 although it wasn't well done there. I know that there are people who hate this, though.

- Maps which are practically based on spawn-ins like Than's latest.

- Rocket Arena, Clan Arena, CTF, Fortress etc. maps. There aren't many good ones. Personally I'm collecting CTF textures for some time now, because I have this daydream of making a nice CTF map. :-)

HL's Blast Pit, but with an unvulnerable shambler for the tentacle thing, players would have to dodge it while going from one area to the other, maybe to activate a big crusher.

You could do that with Chthon, too. Gasp, a cool Chthon map. (Actually, thanks for the idea.) (Can be extended to Shub of course - think activating bridges etc so you can reach the final teleporter.)

- Race maps, two players race obstacle courses (not necessarily the same one) for the goal, and who reaches it first gets to dump the other in lava (etc). Around the courses, there could be buttons that activate traps etc. in the opponent's course.

The problem is, for the more interesting game modes, you are going to need multiple players and a server or splitscreen functionality. Singleplayer is naturally limited to kill monsters, find exit. The kill monsters part can be simple or really elaborate, or just weight-of-numbers, but it comes down to survival. The find exit part can contain some buttons, keys etc but how exciting can it get...

I'd like more puzzles, like in Tomb Raider, but sadly in Quake there is no way to flag $ITEM as a key or something. Not even to the small amount of Quake 2 (Tank Commander's head etc.) Remember the Lost Valley level where Lara has to collect cogs to activate some machinery which re-routes a river? (Note to self: Need to reinstall it.)

Quake is just lacking in that regard. It would have been rather easy to include the $KEY facility, including a simplistic inventory (Hexen, Quake2) or the possibility of stripping the player of all weapons, but it wasn't done. Nobody is interested in that kind of stuff. (I _did_ suggest it to the usual suspects.)

It's a run and gun game. Deal with it. 

Is in Nehahra. 

Unless you're playing a coop map where people can die and respawn, there's no functional difference between picking up an item to activate some machinery and hitting a trigger where the item would be. It doesn't really add anything to the gameplay, only to the story. So you might as well stick to the mechanisms like buttons that already exist in quake, because it doesn't conflict with a player's expectations.