this is going to be awesome! kind of down after qexpo ended but this will pick me right back up!
re: first three shots, you choice of skyboxes really complements the maps.
re: something wicked, i am amazed with what you turned those few random bits into!

pretty difficult and feature horde combat
hope the ice crossbow is in there! :P

damn. i'm all pumped to play this but it's wayyy too late tonight. zzzz 

Of all things I mentioned at least the shitload of items that fall out in unf2 should have been fixed. Re: empty secret and all.

Admittedly, I probably took too long to respond considering you were about to leave again so quickly.

A Tronyn TC sounds great. But it'll be a lot of work. 

For both you AND the players. 

..nice!
at last some screenshots with proper brightness :)

I'll warm up my glorious PentiumII for all this
goodness 

With directq it kinda works for me, only from time to time i get stuck in the floor and lots of monsters get gibbed spontaniously (only fix i found for it is to restart directq)

due to this i forgot to put skill back to 0 on unf2 wich is done on normal and since i wasnt using timers cba to smoothen it out or add some boosts between GK and SK-door.
quite entertaining demos nontheless due to the nature of the maps.

http://members.upc.nl/verorber/unf1_orbs.dz 

improved unf1, but that one is skill 1 now to:) 

This feels like someone took everything anyone ever thought worth knowing about game design, and then ignored it. It is as if the 90s never stopped. Very nice settings. very interesting to play on God difficulty. Monster counter showed like 1200 kills in the first map? Do the monsters ever stop spawning?

Jaw-dropping in many ways.

It's as if I was back in the 90s playing Doom2 while being supremely drunk. It was interesting to revisit that state.

18/20... LSD in game form. Which is a good thing in this world.

But sriously. Crazy shit. 

I'm not a big fan of huge open levels. I like indoors, and outdoors if it's sectioned off. But not just one huge open area. Now the second level was great. Great design, I loved seeing the snow textures and the castle with moat. This was the best level in the pack for me, as it was much more closed off.

It's the third level that was too open. It felt like one huge arena that just wouldn't come to an end. It took 50mins for me to complete level 3, and when you're not really presenting with anything new throughout, apart from the tower climb which was pretty bland, you get sick of it. At the beginning it felt like monsters are just thrown everywhere randomly and I just started running like hell throughout the whole level to get as much in-fighting as possible, then slowly picked my way through them all. The bosses were all good... dragons were fun and deadly, Chthon took too much damage before dying, the Cyberdemon type guy got stuck on stonehenge so was dead easy. The problem is, I'd saved a couple MH's, RA's, almost all the powerups including the quad and full cells in order to go take out the last 2 bosses. As such, they were both dead in 10secs... I didn't even see what their attacks were. So yeah, while it looked fantastic, this level went on too long. I liked the low gravity and flying around though, that was cool.

And to level 1, this was good if you remove the 180 odd monsters surrounding the castle that starts off the pack. This is horde combat at it's ugliest. A bunch of crappy weapons and a quad that's pointless when you have very few nails and can only use the SSG. I tried a few times to make the quad work, but in the end I did the same as above; sprinted around the castle to get in-fighting then slowly picked them off, which wasn't that fun. Things picked up once I got inside the castle, it all looked really cool and the dragons were a blast.

I liked the music too - it was subtle but nice, instead of some thrashing fucking metal.

So yeah pretty good level pack. I did enjoy Arcanum more as there were less huge open areas with horde combat. In fact SOE and Indian Summer I liked more as well. Still a great level set though. 

downloading and hopefully will play on weekend. 

USeless quad? I just fot up to 1000 kills on skill 3 when the quad ran out. Little nails? there's 180 in the bottom already more at ssg, more at 2nd YA and so on. You start of with SG NG chainsaw and bow before you even get to the quad, and you can reach SSG, alternative grenade launcher and lightning gun or grenade launcher.
You describe it took you 50 minutes to clear a level to have left all goodies for the end fight only so you can whine about the level being to long and the bossfight to easy, doh. Lets whine about your strategy.
But maybe we should continue this when your period is over 

"got up to 100 kills" 

 

Much more than Arcanum for me. It was pretty fun on skill 0 (except when I had to cheat for ammo at some places). Liked how ridiculously unapologetic the first map was with just tossing a bunch of pickups at the player in map 1. The final map feels like a 1996-created Doom 3 from an alternate universe. The gravity change made sense but I'd tone it down somewhat myself.

The Sidewinder felt too weak. Was there a regular RL as a secret somewhere? 

so the final level has 400 monsters, a single quad and 5 bosses. Usually Tronyn's boss fights are insanely hard. So why would I grab the quad at the start of the level to take out the 200 or so weaker enemies knowing that there's tougher to come? My strategy of leaving the quad for later was fine. As for the other stuff, I still had 3 MH's left over, 2 RA's and the stuff at the top of the tower. I'm not even sure what half of it does, but I didn't need it and never even went back for it.

For the first level... yeah I got the alternate GL and it's 5 grenades. That didn't do much with the quad. Nor does a bow & arrow or ssg. The only good weapon to use with the quad was a ng, but there was only 100-150 nails at that point. The problem I had is that the few times I replayed the start I grabbed the quad before heading up. What would make it better is heading up, getting all the ammo and weapons and then returning for the quad. But tbh, that's not good item placement.

Anyway, those are the only faults I had with the levels. Just because someone has faults doesn't mean they're having a period. And who the hell are you anyway? 

The sidewinder was made purposefully weak, to be about par with the nailgun, for two reasons. One, Tronyn thinks the rocket launcher is generally overpowered, and in levels comparable to Quake's stock levels, I would agree. Two, since soldiers drop their weapons when killed, I do not want rocket grunts and the like to drop rocket launchers, and grenade launchers would be inappropriate. Thus, the sidewinder was made as an alternative to the rocket launcher. 

[Kona] did what I would have done. That is, save the quad for the final bosses. 

Liked it better than Arcanum.

But, somehow, you feel all that fantastic spaces are put to waste with all the relentless run 'n gun interspersed by the episodic 2 buttons to push to proceed.

See Necros latest effort. Outrageous looks paired with very well thought out gameplay and progression. A gem.


With a little bit more work on gameplay and situation setup, Tronyn's maps could achieve levels of epicness second only to his brushwork awesomeness.

Imho, these three would have been fantastic bookend pieces for a full episode, and their epic scope would get enhanced by comparison to smaller maps, the way they're presented, one after another, kinda loses the effect. A true pity.

Low grav was quite fun, btw, and, on skill 1, I've been able to get like 150 kills without shooting a shell... Dunno if that's good or bad.

Gotta test Nightmare to see if fun's the same... :D

A good depressurizer after a hard day's work... Thanks, Tronyn. 

...Cyberdemon boss?

Have you never played Scourge of Armagon? If so, you're missing out!!! 

-any remaining problems are not negke's fault, since he pointed out a ton of stuff didn't get to or couldn't do since in time since it would have required another progs, or even worse another map compile (unf3 is 500+ hours vistime - thanks zwiffle! lol). for the "Drake Merger," _everything_ will be meticulously rebalanced, since I'll have a long time to do it. For this release, it was either around QEXPO, or wait another month, which I figured would piss people off (including me) more.

as for the gameplay, I understand the issues, the first map probably should have been more subtle (deleting the hordes outside the fort is a good idea), to build up to the ridiculous levels of the last map, as opposed to starting out that way. After the Drake Merger, when I start building Q1SP's again from scratch, I'm going to try something entirely different, not horde combat, and probably not outdoors either. 

when I start building Q1SP's again from scratch, I'm going to try something entirely different, not horde combat, and probably not outdoors either.

Not dissing 10+ years of your work, but I'm looking forward to that. 

as a warning, if you are using quakespasm, you must use a higher -zone size or the game will crash when you go through the end portal. use -zone 2048 to be safe.
this is a bug in quakespasm and not the mod. quakespasm uses the zone memory in a non-standard way, storing extra stuff in there and causing it to require more space.

as for the first map itself, i loved it! i single handedly took on an entire fucking army!!! :D
quadded up on NG first, then kept moving around, sometimes getting chainsaw action in, and LG on big groups where i could just slice the beam right through them!
i'll upload demos when i finish the pack. 

You're wrong about the amount of nails, have a nother look, or maybe another route ? And quite often when quaded sg > ssg especialy vs small critters since its more accurate at distance and a higher firerate. The bow is actualy pretty decent when quaded but i had to get used to it due to its limited range and the way it builds up power. But i had try's on my run i woudl get the quadgrenadejump up to the tower but miss the trigger wich spawns the dragons, but found out i could quad-quadbow-jump to it :)

Safing a quad for the last boss kinda makes sense i agree, and its a shame the boss doesnt start of shielded so it can do his thing and be a serious challenge.
But having said that the real issue is monster infighting imo and im always amazed the modders leave that unchanged when trying to create these epic levels. Even though most runners love this.
But my point actualy was, you cant expect a mapper to make a map wich nescesarily fits your style of play and go on a rampage about it. I could point out many maps wich would suck for speedrunning but imo i would only make myself silly:) SO i your case i would have given the map another go used the quad on other stuff (maybe on the chton since you said he had lots of hp) and try the last boss without quad but making use of the stuff on the roof (i didnt completly get what the shotgun optimiser does either) and try to finish the map in a decent time, and preferably record a demo worth watching! 

What's up with you? 

...about time we got an EDIT function here... 

Speeds up shotguns' firing rate. With it, double shotgun DPS is close to super nailgun DPS. I decided to add a shotgun upgrade item instead of another shotgun variant, such as Nehahra's auto shotgun, for levels or sections where anything less than 150 DPS is too weak.