Did you do something to the damage boost physics? I can't seem to get any height on grenade and rocket jumps?

Maybe I'm just rubbish :-) 

Just checked and it's still there when I log in. If anyone has problems getting the skybox, contact me and I will email it.

I know this whole situation sucks, but I'm afraid I'm a bit behind the times with this here intarweb thing ;) seriously, once I get some proper webspace sorted out, I'll upload a new pak with 'box included. 

The rocket jump situation...damn I was hoping no-one would bring this up :P.

Ok, here's my shaky justification for it:

Long after I had locked down all the brushwork, I discovered a situation where you could rocket jump up to the switch that activates the main gate to the exit, resulting in no monsters/ammo spawned for the final battle, and general suckage.

Realising that this situation would generally only be encountered by speedrunners, I ignored it until the last minute, when I got paranoid and fudged a quick fix by reducing the self-inflicted damage momentum (i.e. rocket jumps).

I knew that this would be controversial, so I'll probably introduce an impulse to toggle this for speedrunners, when I re-release this as part of the full episode.

I hope this hasn't marred your enjoyment too much :) 

looks fantastic.

No time to play ATM but I'll give this a look whenever possible. 

In that case, if you're going to release is again with the damage boosts corrected (and it'd be great if you did. :-)) can you also remove the invisible barriers that probably only speedrunners will ever find such as the one at the far end of the lava hall.

Outstanding map, by the way. The talk in IRC this morning has been of little else for the last hour or two. Very impressive but the deliberate stifling of the maps runnability has caused immense vexation. ;-)

I can't wait to see what you do next. The only thing I found tricky in my first run through was the lack of armour in the middle section. Ammo was always plentiful and the fighting was bastard tough. 

There seems to be a bug whereby sprites get a bit fucked up... I've picked up health packs that look like those orange nail the variant ogres fire and gibbed a rocket box :-)

The shortcut preventing invisible sprites are annoying, too :-) 

pros:

*FUCKING FUN! lots of killin' involved.

*Great map design, nicely connected, rather than just room after room of stuff.

cons:

*too much hacking :/ This seems to be a problem with overly qc'ed maps. Since quake wasnt designed for whatever addition, youve had to cover up bugs with various little fixes. I had a few problems with monsters turning into sprites, or monsters going invisible :\. Personally, i would drop all the qc and just use your wonderful map with normal quake stuff.

*I cant rocket jump :0 What the heck? i can only go about 1/2 the height with my rocket/grenade jumps!?

*way too much ammo everywhere, i didnt have a single problem killing 300+ monsters, even in the rooms where there were several shamblers etc.

*Packet overflows avast. Especcially when i try to speed run, and rush through the last room without killing anything.

*Invisible walls?? Dood, this is seriously not cool :) In the bit with the bridge over the lava that needs to be pulled up by two switches. I try to take a shortcut with some bunnies and a slope jump, instead of raising the bridge, and low and behold there is an invisible wall blocking my path.

Well.. hope you enjoyed my rant. I definatly enjoyed playing your map ;) 

The reason why some people have problems finding the file in your Yahoo briefcase might be that they're already signed in as themselves and then they can't see anything.

They need to first sign ut and then sign in as you. It took me a while to figure out as well, but I've now got the skybox and will convert it into TGA for FitzQuake. 

Oooooh.. i just had a monster turn into a scrag's yellow stuff. scary! 

The bug you describe where models/sprites are messed up sounds worrying. I've never encountered that before.

Could you please elaborate on what engine and setup you are using please.

Re: speedrunning restrictions, invisible barriers etc...

To support a qc system that allows for 300+ monsters (and all the ammo) in the standard engines, I had to enforce a rather linear gameplay route, and sadly speedrunning attempts can often reveal some of the strings being pulled to acheive this.

I'm afraid i'm going to have to put this down to my relative inexperience, and promise to rectify this in the future release. 

You mentioned a lot of talk of this in irc. I'd love to read some of this but I'm afraid I don't have irc - could someone possibly email me with a log?

aguirRe - good idea with the tga conversion, cheers :) 

Thanks for the hasty reply. :)

Ive tested the map with joequake-gl.exe as well as standard gl quake. i ran both with -mem 32 command line extension. Both had the same problem. Mosnters seem to mysteriously turn into other models, (and sprites i think?), so far ive had an ogres turn into a nails, ammo boxes, and empty space (still killable though), and scrags turning into variouse things, including scrag spew and a grunt(!). Most often this happens when im not looking at the monster, and when there is lots of chaos going on around me. The monsters are still killable when this happens, though im not sure whether they can attack. They seem to take up the same ammount of space, and move about like normal.

Theres not much else i can really tell, you. Ill have a go at recording it.

As for the speedrunning gripes, i wouldnt let it worry you too much. I enjoyed the level alot, but i was just dissapointed when i found out i couldnt run it properly. If you can find ways to resolve the few issues, that would be great, but even so, the level is really fun to play.

-sidd 

27:41
1/5
302/309

Couldn't beat the last beasts, was running low on ammo, no armours, no health packs left, and I've used penta and quad before :)

Excellent layout and gorgeous architecture. Too bad you haven't included a proper skybox (don't give a shit about those, who won't download your map because it's 0.5 MB bigger).
The last area just owned me. I liked the two types of meatgrinders as well, I've even fallen down into one of them ;) Great stuff like rotating doors or breakable walls. Good usage of custom stuff, sounds and monsters- I liked especially nailing ogres and the shuffler (minotaur?), however I don't appreciate anything related to Q2, also I don't think grunts match to that gothic theme.

Gameplay is awesome, I just love such a battles. Also, the moment when you're opening the rotating door with that creeeeeeeeeeek sound was quite scary :) As well as when I first met the minotaur monster. The second big battle and the first one, where minotaur spawns, was very unexpected and nice :)

Summa summarum, a masterpiece, a must see and a must be. Minus for not including the skybox (although- for quite understandable reasons)


Keep up the excellent work =) 

I have to say I'm really stumped. Maybe this is a glquake thing, because I've never come across this in the countless times I've tested in WinQuake and DarkPlaces.

It sounds like the engine is getting the self.modelindex or self.model wrong, but either way it seems to be one of those annoying bugs that only surfaces in certain engines.

Do the monsters that this happens to spawn mid-game? Can you described any specific locations/occurences of this?

aguirRe, any thoughts? 

properly yet, I've just briefly checked it out technically in FitzQuake and my own simple GLQuake engine.

The only thing I've noticed is the large heapsize requirements (>32MB) when having full pak loaded (not just the bsp) at startup.

But I do remember players having similar model problems with the Soul Of Evil pak. I myself was sometimes chased by ammo boxes which felt a bit weird ...

At the time I recall vaguely one could get around it by using savegames or something about the engine startup sequence. I don't believe I have that particular QMap thread available; it was lost when QMap died. 

I didn't have any probs with using winquake and a heapsize of 64000.

I don't think this is the same as the soul of evil thing as that (if I remember) involved starting single player maps with DM (or DMSP) settings and the entities taking the wrong entitiy numbers. So in that case ALL scrags would look like nailboxes (or whatever) not just one.

If anyone manages to record this happening I'd be interested to see it (and try and solve it :-)). 

i rocketjumped to the quad/666 secret w/o probs. but maybe there were no probs for me cuz the height wasn't that big... 

with the SoE issue. You need to select New Game, Single Player before reloading saved games after starting Quake. There are probably some necessary progs.dat code that runs when you do that.

Since I haven't played it yet, I don't know if it helps in the Bastion pak. 

http://starship.python.net/crew/mwh/bastion_mwh2.dz

Three strange things happening: at about 6:40 there's a deathknight shaped like a gib, at about 11:20 there's a fiend with an explosion sprite and just before I die stupidly around 15:00 there's a ogre looking like a nail.

It looks like recently used entity numbers are retaining their shape or something like that? 

MisYu - fantastic! I just love hearing these reviews :) I'm so glad this map is being so well received.

An update on the skybox issue - i'm trying to upload a fixed .zip with skybox included (jpeg version), but my connection keeps buggering me about. I hope to have something up in the next hour or two.

aguirRe, Morfans - good sleuthing :), let's hope we can get to the bottom of this.

Vondur, yep - I made sure that places that require rocket jumps (just that one secret actually), are still accessible. 

Hmmm... I've tried playing the demo in both winquake and darkplaces, but in both cases, it crashes just at the start as soon as you start hacking the knights.

Very puzzling. What engine did you record this in? Also in Winquake, it dumped an abnormally large number of "total channels == max channels" error messsages to the console, much more than i get if i just load the map. 

Just tried the demo in GLQuake; same thing happened - tons of max_channels messages and the thing crashed a few seconds in, just after the knights with the error message:

Host_Error: CL_ParseServerMessage: Illegible Server Message 

do you plan to include a custom engine executable with the full episode? Probably advisable, given the number of QC changes made. 

That sounds like a very good idea. I'll include the latest stable version of DarkPlaces with the episode, although again I will strive to ensure WinQuake compatibility.

If there's one thing I learned from all this, it's that I grossly underestimated the popularity of custom engines. Also, not all engines load skyboxes in the same way :| 

gltomaz.exe -game bastion -con_alpha 0.5 -nomtex -primarysound -width 1280 -height 1024 -heapsize 32000 -noipx -nolan -dinput -zone 1024 +map bastion %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
IT KICKS ASS! FANTASTIC JOB!