Cool map. Very nice visuals. Great texture use and good architecture. The build quality is also top. I liked the layout and the combats. You should put some info about the need for quoth in the news text. Found it only at the very bottom of the txt file. My first try was without quoth and i quit frustrated after 5 minutes (guess the same happened to Vondur).
Anyway the map is very good. Keep up the good work. I'm amazed that you made it within two months. You didn't get that much sleep lately right? :)
I have recorded a demo on skill 1 but shubhub doesn't seem to work at the moment. 

Lots of detail and the theme changes were cool as well. Also lots of cool features - the bulletproof X's and the exploding X were fun.

I thought the Gugs were a bit underused, they could have been spread out a bit more (second appearance) and in higher numbers (first appearance) to be more challenging, on hard at least.

I did have alot of cells all the way through but I just left off using the PG too much and it was ok.

Anyhow, again an excellent map and I think you made a good decision there, switching from packs to a single concentrated map.

Also, Preach, I noticed this again here (probably you already know), but another bug in Quoth1 is the impulse 12/10 for weaponswitch. If you have both RL and PG but no ammo for one or the other (I forget) then only 10 or 12 works. 

I tried this without Quoth. I had to g+rj past one bit and noclip past the end. Doh.

Have a first run demo, one "death" from lava (a sort of "oops I'm in lava, quick put god mode and no clip on" death...).

I wouldn't say this map is the flagship standard bearer for smooth gameplay balance...

I did enjoy it though. I though the overall theme was rather good. 

...Doh!

Would perhaps one of the moderators do the deed!! 

I played skill 2. As I betatested it earlier I had some advantage to a new player but still it felt pretty unbalanced. Apart from that it is a nice map!

http://shub-hub.com/files/configs/thehand_fr_spirit.zip 

work better: http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/thehand_fr_spirit.zip 

What is the "proper" method to select the plasma gun?

I bound impulse 9 to a key and unwittingly it kept giving me full ammo as I played every time I selected it. 

you're actually not aware that impulse 9 is the give all cheat in 99% of all Q1 mods? Bind impulse 255 to another key (hint: Q) and see what happens ... 

I always use the "changeweapon" key to switch to plasma or any other weapon that uses a different impulse besides 1-8. Much easier I think. 

so is impulse 12 the PG? i.e.

"bind 9 impulse 12"

would work?

:-/ 

you're actually not aware that impulse 9 is the give all cheat in 99% of all Q1 mods?

Sure, but Quoth is a mod can define that itself.

Maybe in Quoth 2 some impulse will be dedicated to selecting the plasma gun, as it seems that it is only available using impulse 10/12. :(

For horde maps, I prefer being able to press, say, 5 for the SNG and so on to choose a particular weapon. 

Baker: Impulse 250 will set the PG directly, see Quoth docs.

Ricky: I found a problem with your map; when you use the fog command, you forgot to add the newline "\n" at the end of the message. This may cause strange effects when passing those areas, e.g. player movements might not work properly.

Preach: The above important info is also missing in the Quoth docs for trigger_command etc. 

In the demos you uploaded, the total killcount is wrong in the later demos (328/352, should be 306), do you know why that happened? I tried to reproduce it both in my NehQuake and TyrQuake using a similar savegame/demo handling but couldn't.

Also, did the engine crash during the demos? You died once without getting an obituary. 

Excellent Base map indeed, Ricky! It was nicely built and textured well. It could have used a teleport or two to assist with backtracking for those of us who fell in the laser machinery room :) Good surprises and no nasty ambushes like your last map ;) Looking forward to your next map... 

Couldn't something be put in worldspawn or somewhere that allows an engine to auto-detect a Quoth map and then, say, an engine like FitzQuake could be modified to automatically switch gamedirs to Quoth?

Some of these more recent Quoth maps really use the extra characters/powerups/etc very effectively, but every Quoth map is somewhat of a pain due to the command line and it seems like it is not always made clear (this map, the one JPL made with "too many" Bobs) that a map requires Quoth (I tried to play it without Quoth at first).

/Anyways 

this map, the one JPL made with "too many" Bobs (...) I tried to play it without Quoth at first

It is title Slime Refinery Complex (SRC)... and everybody should read the txt companion file before playing any map :P

Anyway, it is a good idea that could be extended to any mod, and for such particular query, as example for Quoth, you should ask directly to Quoth team (Preach, Kell, necros,...) and to metlslime who is fitzQuake owner. 

Monster count - I was gonna ask about that. One of my testers got the same thing, but I tested it a few more times and got 306/306...?

AguirRe - I was unaware of the \n thing, allthough I have seen it in a few .map files, wandered what it does. Can you use the same syntax to create double line centerprint messages? Also, is there a way of making centerprint messages stay on the screen for longer?

OH also - "bind 9 impulse 250" = plasmagun working

Spirit - Trying not to shove my foot too far up my own ass for the lava thing... :-o 

Oops, I used Darkplaces (shame on me), just because it supports loading of multiple gamedirs. I think I made it use the normal Quake protocol for demos somewhen in the past but that might be an additional source for errors. The missing obituary might be due to a frustrated "disconnect, quit". No crashes. ;)


Baker: No good idea. You would be lucky to find one person to implement it to his engine. And looking at the poll at Quaddicted the two most used engines are a pity for Singleplayer anyways. If aguirRe's glquake and Fitzquake would support it, it would be great of course. But it would not help the "generic stoopid user" as he is using some other engine (with questionable SP capatibilities) anyways. Better preach people to read the manuals and learn to use their OS accordingly. 

I used tyrquake. Darkplaces was for some Warpspasm... 

tyr-glquake to be more specific. Compiled from a git snapshot ~07.12.2007 (a66c5fdc68c62bb3ff8e6c617a8df60843a06fc4). 

And looking at the poll at Quaddicted the two most used engines are a pity for Singleplayer

I could write a whole book on how that's the wrong attitude. I agree that the poll results were a little surprising, but it isn't that unexpected either.

Better preach people to read the manuals and learn to use their OS accordingly.

People don't want to read readmes, they wanna play.

If I decided to release the following, it would be downloaded countless times:

http://www.quakeone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2856

But I'd actually prefer to see if I can add this type of capability on the engine side. 

The player is going to tell the engine which map to load, then the engine reads it and sees what entities it's using. So it holds a cross-mod entity database and points at the correct folder if it exists? Message: "You need to install mod X" or "Loaded mod X".

It's not a bad idea but there's only so many good Q1 mods out there, and lots of guff. Also, I can imagine lots of stuff being shared between mods that could make it a headache - theres large differences between OUM and Zer, but lots of shared resources as well.

Typically problems happen when the mapper forgets to put 'use this' in the readme. I did the same with the documentation in my last pack, describing what to do but without those two simple words; underlined, in bold 82pt.

Anyhow, its sounds interesting; like an internal frontend. 

I suspect that having engines that automatically load the right mod is going to cause problems - would there be a way to override this if you really did want to play it in a different mod? As a softer option, how would a message that's printed to the player in-game if you aren't using the correct mod sound? The idea I have in mind works like this: You add a string key called "mod" to a trigger, and you fill it in with a keyword. The keyword doesn't have to correspond directly to the mod directory name(since you can't control what the user calls it), but let's call it "quoth" for sake of example.

Then the mod is programmed to ignore/remove any triggers which have a keyword corresponding to a mod they handle correctly. In our example, a trigger with "mod" "quoth" would be removed when we load the map in quoth. Then you just make sure the trigger has a "message" key saying "You need the QUOTH mod to play this map", and put the trigger over the spawnpoint. Of course, since the id progs(and all mods to date, but never mind that) doesn't check for "mod", it'll load the trigger and so display the message.

Since the trigger functions in the usual way, you could use it to trap the player somehow or make the map totally unplayable, although I wouldn't recommend that. If it's a soft option like a text warning then it doesn't even matter if mods give false positives. For instance a map that just uses entities from the current version of quoth but also adds a keyword trigger to warn people. If run in the second release of quoth(with this hypothetical system added) there would be no warning message at all, in the older release there would be a warning but it could be safely ignored.

A mod wouldn't be limited to a single keyword that it responded to, like for instance subsequent versions of quoth might support "quoth3" and "quoth", the former indicating you need features from the 3rd version. You could even add a key called "id1" that warns when you load the map in a mod that's not backwards compatible - although the problem is that would also set off the warning in the id1 mod, so probably not a good idea. Since this is mostly an issue for mappers, as long as future mapper-targeted mods practised this it could work. It'd even be ok as a standalone quoth feature not adopted in any other mod, but standards are always good things. 

People don't want to read readmes, they wanna play.

True, but if it doesn't work when they're installing/running it wrong, they have no one to blame but themselves. I don't see how adding a few words to a command line makes running the map a pain in any way. 

..those who did read the readme will have seen the note at the top saying about using an engine which supports coloured lighting, and joequake users typing "loadsky tramonto" - I was very worried about the player seeing the level with white light and normal sky and then thinking it looked shitty. I should have just added another line saying "RUNS IN QUOTH", maybe even with the address of the Quoth homepage...

duh!

BTW - I like joequake plenty, but why did they have to be different with the F@*&%ng "sky" key!!?!?