It's almost as grating as reading posts from a certain non-mapper. 

Careful who you're calling grating with that Donald-Trump-at-70 voice at 50. 

 

Not sure if I was "on" last night but at least the first two levels felt pretty easy to me. Died immediately on 3rd but that was the end of the day. I'm wondering if this is an intentional result of design or the gameplay changes?

Or maybe it's time for me to embrace Skill 2.

Opinions? 

Am I understanding correctly that armor type is now just derived by the amount of armor? So if I have 123 armor, that is yellow, and as I take damage and it ticks down to 100, it suddenly becomes green? And if I pick up another green armor, it adds to my pool for a total of 200, and then becomes red? 

- Applying all those small bandaids to the core experience, while ignoring the biggest problem i.e. the extremely ineffective monster pathfinding, was the single biggest missed opportunity in this mod.

Giving quake monsters good pathfinding sounds like a great idea...until you actually give them good pathfinding...and then you play it...and then you proceed to spend 10 X the amount of time again, coding a system that makes them just as bad at chasing the player as before but this time using "AI"

:p 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLaQ07ockeo 

Once you have >=100 armor, you can no longer pick up green armor. 

c0burn's Slipgate mod is shaping up nicely but perhaps Copper's "Oh I give up" system is a nice compromise (at least for infighting):

Infighting monsters who fail to successfully damage their target for 15 seconds will give up on the infight and revert to their previous enemy, so Ogres on plinths no longer accumulate permanent fan clubs milling around their feet. Monsters who do not have a ranged attack will give up after 10 seconds.

It would be nice to have something similar for monsters stuck on geo. 

Giving quake monsters good pathfinding sounds like a great idea...until you actually give them good pathfinding...and then you play it...and then you proceed to spend 10 X the amount of time again, coding a system that makes them just as bad at chasing the player as before but this time using "AI"

This was exactly my experience.

I went full a* node network, the works. When the map is as navigable for monsters as for players, monsters very effectively drain out of every room straight toward you and never stay remotely where you put them. This makes initial placement of monsters basically meaningless, in a game where your position relative to monsters can be very important.

So, I started adding exceptions and soft 'breaks' in the network to try to corral them into behaving the way I expected or desired ... at which point I realized how stupid I was being.

The lesson was that Quake's shuffly bump-around pathfinding is actually pretty important, as flawed as it seems.

In a mod like In The Shadows, though, where there's entirely new gameplay built around managing the danger of monsters being able to follow you really effectively, it's critical. In run-and-gun Quake, though, not so much. 

...is a tether that will keep the monsters in a certain radius. Limited and I am not sure what maps have used it. 

I get that for some people, monsters chasing you around might feel cool (for a bit), but again I will double down on my initial statement. I'm glad Lun shares the sentiment.

The lesson was that Quake's shuffly bump-around pathfinding is actually pretty important, as flawed as it seems.

This is one of quake's great laws imo. 

Is there any middle ground between "keep this monster in its general area" and "let this monster freely roam the map"? In the vast majority of cases, I would say probably not, so a on/off spawnflag would solve a lot problems.

The AI being insufficient was very noticeable at the end of map 5 when the two Shamblers very obediently failed to follow me when I retreated up the staircase. 

A brand-new monster type whose entire shtick is his ability to chase you perfectly around the map could be one way of slotting it into quake without breaking the rest of the game.

Con: but he may just draw attention to how dumb the other monsters are and make the player think "why don't all the monsters chase me?", at which point I'll just do a picard-style facepalm. 

I spent a lot of time just exploring the start map and the first map. The start map was such an awesome concept and it's crazy how well you managed to transform e1m1. I managed to work my way to the quad and the pathway to get there was genius. It felt like exploring an entirely new map as I worked my way backwards. I wish that the quad lasted longer and I'm curious if it's possible to clear out all the enemies before it expires. I only gave it one shot and I wasted some time while the powerup was active trying to see if I could find the SSG but it still looks like you really have to haul ass.

Like I said, I'm taking my time to go through the pack in order to really savor the experience but the start map and first map are already excellent. The combat in the first map was especially good. It was challenging without being unfair. I did get a little frustrated playing through saveless since the grunts shooting through the grates combined with the ogre grenades was a bit tricky during the trap sequence, but it was still fair and that's the kind of challenge that I expect on higher difficulties. I'm really glad that you released an entire episode to accompany this. 

In modern shooters there is generally a volume representing an "encounter zone" which enemies won't leave. This is an easy way for designers to keep all the enemies in a room/combat from following you into the next room/combat space. (also necessary because rooms are streaming in and out of memory pretty aggressively as you progress.) In MMOs there is often a tether distance from the spawnpoint. Something like that might be a sufficient bandaid to help reign in monsters with out too much hand-authoring of behaviors.

Or, "monster clip" brushes placed at connections between major areas, could serve the same purpose.

You still need extra behaviors to handle all the edge cases this creates, such as what to do if player is inaccessible. You probably don't want all 30 monsters clumped up at the doorway where you left the area -- maybe they need to give up and go into a wander/guard behavior or something. But the current behavior creates plenty of clumps just from trying to walk blindly towards you, just the clumps are smaller and take longer to appear.

So yeah, it's not a simple addition. Maybe there is a version of it that solves the worst of the current AI problems without changing the character of quake combat too much. 

rein, not reign. 

Also just to confirm that I haven't been getting lucky, ammo pickups no longer disrupt the player's melee attack animation, right? I didn't see this addressed specifically in the readme but it was always annoying how you could eat a shot to the face from the second grunt in e1m1 on skill 2 when you pick up the shells while trying to melee him to death.

On the subject of sounds, I don't have a problem with the backpack sound. I actually like all of the sound choices so far, especially the axe making noise when used on an enemy. If any sound strikes me as a bit odd though, hitting a secret door with the axe kind of sounds like smacking a beanbag. Not a problem for me, just notable if I'm going to be nitpicky about sounds. 

Is there any middle ground between "keep this monster in its general area" and "let this monster freely roam the map"?

There is, kind of: Quake doesn't hard-lock monsters into their start areas unless the level designer does it with doors/platforms/etc, but it does soft-lock them with their own derpiness. While they don't always find their way out, sometimes they do, and when is more or less random. Encountering a monster that's not where you left it is an emergent surprise, the kind of thing that feels better when it's serendipitous than when it's a calculated monster closet backspawn.

I'm beginning to feel that part of level design for games like Quake is relinquishing the need for total control and configurability down to the spawnflag, and accepting that while you place every monster with a purpose and to fill a role, each one is also kind of a wildcard. At the end of the day, the player is an even bigger wildcard, and they have more fun when you let them be that.

If they move to a more advantageous position and get some easy kills, let them have that reward, especially if you just put them through three torture arenas where advantageous positions were nearly impossible to maintain. 

I wish that the quad lasted longer and I'm curious if it's possible to clear out all the enemies before it expires.

Yes it is. You have to haul ass but yes. 

I took the backpack sounds straight from AD because I didn't remember anyone complaining about them then. :( 

I like the new "door locked" sound a lot. 

I just quickly took a look (listen, rather) in AD 1.70 final for backpack pickup sound. It sounds exactly like regular ammo pickup, just like it was in ID1. At least those backpacks that were dropped by monsters behave like that.

I loved UDOB. Thanks a lot for provided entertainment. Highlights for me included

- raising platforms for ability to breathe
- gibbing some zombies with voreballs
- fake exit ambush
- secrets behind 3 golden keys
- that area when a lot of spawns... spawned
- arenas in the next to last level, especially the one with square platforms sinking in lava

Found Ring of Shadows at "appropriate" time only in one level, it was funny to watch monsters being confused. Other times I ended up finding them later when stuff around was dead.

Visually everything looks great but that goes without saying.

Can't say I'm a fan of such Chton style (I think it was similar in Contract Revoked?). That's the only major thing I didn't like in UDOB. 

AD backpack is a secret item that gets equipped onto the player, the sound makes sense. Having the same sound play for enemy drops is a bit too noisey.