Lack of oriniganilty is one thing.
Thank you for your feedback parubaru, so thoughtful! :D 

moved to the drunk thread. 

Swampy was absolutely amazing. The design was as delightful as I'd expect - the second swampy area in particular is as good as medieval shizzle as I've seen. Secrets and layout were great too.

Gameplay was much better in this. Some bright spark obviously looked at the mod and thought "hang on, trickier weapons and trickier enemy, lets put a bit more health and ammo in" and wtf amazingly that works. Also helps that there usually seemed to be plenty of space to escape and work it out, even if that usually meant falling into the swamp. 

Criucla or whatever it was called. Very cool just as the original was (perhaps not as exciting as playing the original for the first time). Gameplay again was mostly better except for the Bobs which were shit in Quoth and combining them with projectile shotguns is the worst idea in the history of mapping. Other than that the modified Quouth enemies were not too grim and the situations were reasonable. 

Played this on Normal skill to see if it helped (also started the above maps on Normal skill, got bored, and put them back to Hard). It was fine. The end arena was really cool and fun. I didn't like the textures as much in this one although the design and layout were good of course. 

Zombie Knights - very cool and characterful.

Poison / Fire effects - just as annoying as usual. Who actually plays this and thinks "oh this effect is really fun". Balls.

Skulls are kinda annoying and Swampy was good because it waited until you had decent weapons and escape routes before spawning the cunts. Although there was one bloody awkward situation with two spawners and a Vore. I think I only had grenades left after that, thank fuck for the respawning stuff after GK door. 

Poison / Fire effects - just as annoying as usual. Who actually plays this and thinks "oh this effect is really fun". Balls.
I think debuff effects are on the same level as environmental hazards, they exist and they are something the player has to manage. There are several ways to negate the effects, the environmental suit is a godlike artifact in this mod because it protects against so much and picking up any health pack will instantly remove any fire/poison debuff. 

Yes, I mean that several aspects of the mod, especially regarding 'new' monsters, lack originality.

I also mean the readme file's content should have been separated into two files: one devkit.txt with all the technical stuff, and another with engine, installation, gameplay change information, along with a proper credits section with all the authors whose work served as inspiration. 

Gameplay again was mostly better except for the Bobs which were shit in Quoth and combining them with projectile shotguns is the worst idea in the history of mapping
I liked the bob enemy in Quoth, I just wished it had less health, which the Jim version does. It moves in a similar way and does all the usual tricks and has that awesome attack sound. I can see how it can cause players to panic and be frustrated, but its less annoying than spawns! 

proper credits section with all the authors whose work served as inspiration
The readme file has credit for ALL the assets used by other people and thanks you for ALL the people that helped. If you feel someone is missing then please let me know. 

one of the things I discussed with sock was that none of the AD team would get the monster setups and balancing nailed down until sometime after the mod was released, there's so much new stuff that it will take the community a while to figure it out 

also +1 centurion. 

There was a glib saying at one of my old jobs that a tv show re-run was "new to you" if an audience member hadn't seen the show already. Having not played Quoth ever and not having played the Quake mission packs or even Hexen 2 in many years a lot of the content in AD was pretty fresh and fun. I think you can forgive sock and the gang for using those assets for a number of reasons, but the main thing is the mod is fun, it's free and making mdls is extremely difficult and always has been. (Note everyone shitting themselves over Skiffy's new Shambler.) They gave credit for the assets and knocked the mod out of the park. what have YOU done for the Quake scene that's anywhere near as cool?

Huh? Yeah I thought so. 

I hate that argument. It's stupid. 

"what have YOU done for the Quake scene that's anywhere near as cool?"

Yeah, that's a terrible argument.

Have you made a movie? No? Then never give me your opinion of a movie ever... 

Models are hard to make because of the archaic tool chain. I know there are better ones now, but even so.

Now, try picking a job to do from here:

* Texture Art
* QA
* Code
* Modelling
* Animation
* Mapping
* Project Management
* PR
* All of the Above

To a greater or lesser extent, making a mod for any game is forcing yourself to take the last one on that list.

Re using assets is a way to reduce part of that crushing workload. And remember you're supposed to be doing all that for fun.

Getting others to help you make a mod is another way, but people are incredibly flaky when it comes to doing hard work for free (fucking weirdos).

Most players of games rarely acknowledge or know about the huge efforts made on their behalf.

Here's a simple way to put it. If you'd paid, say, $10USD for Arcane Dimensions across Steam you'd be well within your rights to expect all the content to be original.

But you didn't. So you have to settle for 'only' 90% of the content being original.

I reskinned the robot from Shrak for RRP because I know how blinkered player perception can be. It helped a little bit, I think.

As a side note, I'm not sure how much of RRP could fairly be called original content. Much, much less than AD. The maps, the Hunter, some code for the Tarbaby's a few odds and sods stolen from RMQ.

All told it's probably around 20% (and maybe I'm being generous). And I didn't even properly document all the places I stole content from - nowhere near as concisely as Sock did for AD.

---------------------

The Centurion is cool. But I did find myself wishing he'd had more acrobatic death animations. Like the hoverboard crashing like a Bob and throwing the guy off to gib against a wall.

I did start to code in a death where he'd accelerate as a projectile and splat, but gave up before I'd started because of too many other things to. 

RRP is probably more original than 20%. But only because of the maps made by MFX and Hrimfaxi. 

what have YOU done for the Quake scene that's anywhere near as cool?
This is never a good argument and always ends with everyone getting defensive and angry. Its fine, let parubaru pour all the hate he wants in my direction, I am sure one day the shoe will be on the other foot!

I feel proud of the AD MOD, it was a good experience, I worked with a lot of cool people, learned a ton of cool stuff about MOD teams and finally understood that you cannot control everything, A MOD team is very much about embracing diversity.

I also had the chance to create my own interpretation of monsters and weapons and while some worked better than others, it was interesting to see how everyone reacted to certain designs. Probably the most important thing for me is that all of the assets are open source. Anyone from the community can take the MOD, change around stuff or merge into their own Quake projects as much as they like!

Standing on the shoulders of giants

There is rarely ever true originality, all projects and ideas are based on something that has come before. Its never about who creates something first, its about embracing new ideas and letting everyone change, re-arrange and explore new creative directions. 

And will be the bases of many epic maps for 2016! I cant find much to complain about there. Enjoy it folks because its free and was done for the joy of it by all the devs in this thread. 

yeah, i do wish he had a cooler death -- hoverboard slipping out from under him and crashing into a wall, while he falls to his death separately, is kind of what i pictured.

Or having it explode and gib the guy is a cheaper way to make it cooler. 

I'm not giving much feedback yet, because there's tons of stuff in this mod and I want to experience everything first, to understand the cohesive vision behind the details. But so far it's amazing. 

Or having it explode and gib the guy is a cheaper way to make it cooler
I added a bunch more skins so a pack of them can look slightly different. He now fires plasma instead of nails and his gib death is a large sprite explosion and a shower of gibs! 

Was just a jab not really intended as an argument of any kind. Immature on my part. My bad. 

I quicksaved right before the exit of Swampy, thinking "great, I'll go explore later and find the silver key for the roof secret and all the other shit and those books".

And then I went into ad_end to check it out, saw if was a floating map, and promptly overwrote that quicksave.

FML. 

we really need engines to store up to 5 incremental quicksaves before overwriting the oldest one