Damn, I am stuck at the same place where I was stuck that very very long time ago when I played a beta of this. Seems like my head has a specific route damaged which results in weird behaviour on this map...

http://s1.image.gd/o/6e/6e6bb40f5af5cbc52d9298c96e032bbae95faa5f.jpg

What am I supposed to do there? I went through that secret passage way earlier. 

That certain switch to toggle the lift actually was not toggling the lift but some ambush. Stupid me. 

drew: with the extended qexpo, i want to try to finish it by the end, but we'll see.

negke: i really like the look of the screenshots on your site for your vertical map. it looks really complex and intricate; really looking forward to it.

trinca: frustrated game play and slow like hell with few guns for the amount of monsters
hehe, that's what i was going for. :P i'm glad you liked ne_lend at least. :)
i'll check out your demos when i get home, cheers! 

necros see my demo in ne_doom :\ poor me...

chif :) 

Im working on ne_lend at the mo. Loving the gothic surreal theme, also the lava-fall. I have found the YA secret (wow), but I think there is a bit more exploring to do yet, and I think that leaps of faith may be in order (?).

I keep dieing at the three shamblers on skill 3. I suppose it serves me right for playing on skill 3. Ill get it cracked soon. There's enough nails lying around. Fun gameplay!


Thanks Necros 

ne_lend is great, one of my new favorites. Great atmosphere, fun gameplay and a nice sense of dread. Top notch lighting btw, I'm pretty sure I've commented on the flat lighting in our previous maps :)

ne_doom looks great too and also has a nice atmosphere. But gameplay is annoying rather than interested IMHO, especially when you get into this map after ne_lend which is a vastly different style. Still, nice experiment. 

...for ne_lend, skill 2, killed everyone, 2 secrets i think, never died (although I was saved by good luck more than one time)

http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/ci475_ne_lend.zip

When I'll have another free moment I'll record ne_doom first run, until then

Thank you necros! 

I played them in REVERSE ORDER.

Ne_doom: interesting map, interesting atmosphere. The combination of generally worrying architecture and sparse combats was pretty cool, something a bit different. I fell into the void around the silver key button which was annoying. Other than that it was good gameplay with a good challenge. It felt like a sort of....warped usage of IKBase textures - less chic designs, more weirdness.

http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/sham_doom.dz

Ne_lend: Would win a Qoscar for the most ammo and armour per monster in a map. Not that that's a bad thing - I liked the refreshing change from the hardcore F6athons that characterise many modern maps. I played fairly cautiously but could easily have had a blast through with just as much fun. Although the end was exceptionally easy. The rest was cool and the path around the central room was great. There were plenty of cool gameplay moments too. A good map with a good Quake+ feel to it.

http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/sham_lend.dz 

ne_lend was nice, great visuals and good balance. More ammo than i needed, but that just made it less stressful -- i normally conserve nails and use SSG to slog through enemies when i'm not in danger of dying, and SNG when i'm in trouble, but this just let me use SNG most of the time, which was fun.

I've played a lot of "giant lava caverns with the route slowly circumnavigating the main room" levels, I guess it's almost a genre in iteself -- though i guess most of them were necros maps. (Mike Woodham has made at least one, though.) Not saying it's a bad thing, though. It's sort of the ultimate incarnation of the age-old idea of a hub that the level keeps returning to, just with the hub being a much larger area and being only accessible a little at a time.

ne_doom is cool, nice unfamiliar feeling, though the drastic reduction in ammo/health from, the previous map is a bit jarring. haven't actually finished it yet. 

could you fix it?
demo (the void bug) ne_doom
http://shub-hub.com/files/configs/spy.rar

silly me once again i've uploaded into the wrong folder (sorry spirit) :((( 

I hate that I cannot require the user to pick the directory all by himself. :\
Moved to
http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/spy.rar 

it's 4am so i only watched your ne_doom demo (i'm gonna watch the rest over the weekend)

it's no wonder you were frustrated in ne_doom. you were playing with coop 1, which has about 3x as many monsters as normal single player and isn't really designed to be beaten solo (unless you die multiple times and respawn)

try with coop 0, it's a lot easier. :)

btw, just in case no one knew, ne_doom has extra monsters and more ammo for coop play. :) 

i just tried to watch your video, but it looks like it's corrupted or something.

although: if you are referring to the two pits in the NG room, yes, you're right, the trigger_voids are missing there. :( 

> although: if you are referring to the two pits in the NG room, yes, you're right, the trigger_voids are missing there. :(

yeah, correct 

Very nice textures/geometry/atmosphere, I liked the moving geometry too (gave it that good old DOOM feel). Combat was ok but a bit annoying in places. The shambler ambush was just ridiculous, I tried it twice and then just used god mode to get through it. (Played on skill 2). Some of the other ambushes were just a little bit annoying as well, at one point I wondered if I was playing Doom 3... ;)

Other than that it was fun, I enjoyed the abundance of ammo (I'm not an overly cautious player, so I don't like maps that are too stingy with the ammo). I found 3 secrets and got credited for 2, not sure what was up with that.

It has already been mentioned but the extra environmental sounds definitely added to the atmosphere. Lighting was quite nice too.

And hey kids, it runs in FitzQuake... win! 

k, watched the rest :) well, i couldn't watch shambler's. i got the same error as spy, so i guess it was a different engine and not corruption? i'm trying to play it in fitzquake.

in anycase, i noticed a dumb mistake on my part... the lift right at the end isn't consistent with the big round lift. the round lift is a button press lift, and the end lift is just a get-on lift, but cause of the first lift, everyone thought it was a button press lift. :( sorry!
what i'm doing now is hiding the 'recall buttons' for lifts until after the player uses it for the first time. this works better because there's no question on what to do, but then the option to recall the lift for whatever reason is still there.

also, it looks like more people find the secret path than use the normal one, lol!
i noticed right away what was happening in your demo trinca, and when i saw ci475 do it too, i knew i had screwed up.
there's confusion over route progression because after the death knight and fiend ambush, the player can go both ways-- forward and back along the normal path. :S

CI475: one thing i noticed is you seem to hate nails, or at least, hate using them :P at one point, you axed a death knight when you had 150 nails and 100 nails in boxes in front of you. :P i'll have to keep this kind of thing in mind... i might make a map with no shells or something... >:D (j/k) but yeah, kell was always on me to put more shells in my maps too. :P originally there were like half as many shells in ne_lend. :P

Frib: i try to make skill levels relative to current day's standards... i guess. i don't know if that's necessarily bad or not, but i guess it can be bad to people who are expecting one thing and get another. i'll try to go back to id standards for skill levels. :)

cheers guys! 

Especially ne_lend.
ne_doom looks a bit like Prey :) 

ops necros... didn�t know that :q i will try when i get back home ;) i�m in holidays out of my city :) 

Yeah I'm just crap I guess, that's what it is. It isn't that spawning 3-6 shamblers in a very small, confined area with little to no cover and no escape route is a bit unfair. (You could duck back into the tiny hallways where the buttons were placed, sure, but there were so many shamblers that they'd come in from both sides, so you were fucked either way).

Put it this way, I had no trouble at all with the difficulty of the rest of the map, but in this one area I felt forced to use god mode (which I very rarely do) to continue, rather than quit in frustration. So regardless of how the skill levels are implemented compared to id maps, I found that one area to be very inconsistent with the rest of the map.

It's worth noting that I DID cheat past it and continue. In 90% of other maps I would have just quit... this one was good enough to bother. :) 

i see what you're saying. :)

i usually play on normal mode, and i can only beat that fight a little more than 50% of the time.

the trick i've found is to stay in the button alcoves at the start and to try to take one shambler down asap. after that, if you stay in longer, you'll get surrounded on both sides, so you have to run out and do the 'shambler-dance' trick, except you have to remember to interpose one shambler between the other so that the lightning from the second one doesn't hit you.
if the third isn't dead but you have to run out, then it can be tough... you have to finish off the third shambler while doing the dance with another and interposing the second with the first. o.0

you can try running all the way out of the room back into the small cavern too i guess, but you'll get toasted a bit by lightning (but there's a bunch of health back where the water is).

otoh, i've had time to analyze the fight so realistically, i can't expect players to get it right away. thanks for the feedback on that fight, i'll try to keep things smoother in the future. :) 

I'm sure it was possible, but I got smashed on the first 2 attempts and wasn't keen on trying 3+ times... I'm too impatient. Besides which, I'm not a quicksaver and I tend to play through from the start again if I die.

I guess this means I can get overly frustrated in these kind of situations. If I die 3+ times I'll either give up (most maps) or I'll replay it and allow myself 2 or 3 manual saves throughout the map (only for the best maps that I'm really enjoying!)

I really wish Quake had autosave points or some other kind of checkpoint system that gave the level designer control over that kind of stuff, rather than forcing the player to worry about it. For me, manually saving breaks the immersion and feels like cheating... 

I really wish Quake had autosave points or some other kind of checkpoint system that gave the level designer control over that kind of stuff, rather than forcing the player to worry about it.

i just checked and there's a save command... it could be possible to have trigger_commands run the console command "save autosave" or something, it's just that the saves don't show up in the menu, so you'd have to know to type in 'load autosave' 

There was some discussion about this a while back, but I don't think anyone was able to come up with a fully satisfactory system with current mods and engines. 

A great map. I loved it. Excellent gameplay lightning and architecture.
I played on skill 2 and it was real fun. There was plenty of health and always enough ammo. The ambushes were ok for me. It is a good idea to put the player under some pressure from time to time. I didn't have any problems with the shamblers but I was fully equipped at this point. I didn't find any secrets. I also liked that the quoth monsters weren't overused.
Thanks. I will replay it again for sure.
Here is my first play demo on skill 2 recorded in joequake:
http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/ne_lend_ankh.dz 

The shamblers on skill 2 ne_lend were a real pain in the ass for a first run, but not impossible. There were 3 or 4 cover points (the buttons with nails alcoves), for example I didn't die.

I've played also ne_doom now, very different gameplay, more claustrophobic but well balanced.

It's a very good thing that you enhanced the coop play, as I think it's very important and adds a dimension to the map, you can also play it alone this way virtually adding a "skill coop" level.

cool