i couldn't complete the map because it kepts crashing fq just as i approached a wooden door after getting the sk and opening a fancy looking gate.

Hey the same thing happend to me at the same spot.
I first loaded the map in tomazq 146 and got the same crash. Then I tried Fq 70 and 75, then Tyrq with same result. Winq wouldn't load on my system so in the end I played the map in MHq, with no problems. Weird! 

for you also in my engine? Is it easily reproducable? I haven't had any crashes, but I'm using a modified FQ 0.75 engine. 

it just freezes for a second then pops up the generic "glquakebjp.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close...etc..." error box. 

I liked the gameplay, some fun combats
but shambler, fiend and vores that were not able to pass thru th GK door were bad.
Some designes also were nice.

But texturing in quite annoying for me. 

for adding the extra download link. Much appreciated.

I found the source of the error that is causing those crashes. In the 52 builds I made, I encountered only one crash testing with FitzQuake 75, and GLQuake. It occurred at a trigger_once that pointed to a trigger_relay that killtargets a message. This crash never happened again in the several builds since.

For whatever reason, the error gated door crash didn't show up in test. At the point of the crash there is a trigger_once pointing to the doors. I mistakenly put a different sound on each side for the pair, and that is the most likely culprit.

I'm going to be away tonight, but with that crash, I'm convinced I should go ahead and spend a good part of tommorow rebuilding the level.

After the bugs, I want to redux the skill settings. Normal I believe should = Current Easy + Lake Bottom Vore + Bridge Crawling Vore, Easy should be Current Easy - 3 HellKnights + 3 Ogres + 1 spawn + 1 Scag, and Hard should be the same + a twist at the end.

Next are the textures. I will obviously have to keep the door, demon face and trigger textures as they are scaled to fit the demands of the brush work, but I can rescale the bricks (will have to switch to 1.4 GTKRadiant to do it as it is properly set to Quake 1 scale) and quarry stones back to their original heights and perhaps dampen the eye hurtage it may have caused. 

For some strange reason both Fq 0.75 and Tomazq 146 don't crash now when I tried to reproduce it. Wonder what has changed since I played it the first time(s) 8-/ 

give me simple instructions how to reproduce the crash, I'd appreciate it. I haven't been able to do it myself so far with the info at hand. 

HeadThump, you're evil spawn lover=) 

When you walked up the ramp to the door that leads into the start room and the silverkey door. Just when you walked into the "ally" before the door the engine froze and then it gave the error message necros said!
But as said earlier I can't reproduce it. 

Skill 2
Second attempt - first attempt died on the first Fiend huh.
15:00
0/1
102/112

Demo available. Comments as for other people's no doubt. The interconnectivity was nice and the cavern with the boat was a good idea. There seemed to be several places that should have been proper outdoor rock sections. There are some good ideas lurking but consistent build quality etc etc are lacking. Gameplay was a bit odd in places and hampered by the scenery.

Do better next time eh. 

I've tried exactly that numerous times in FQ 0.75 or my own latest GLQuake 1.11 and no crash.

If either you or necros are running NT/2K/XP, maybe you have a "post mortem" dump from Dr. Watson regarding the crash?

Search for a drwtsn32.log text file, copy the last GLQuake part of it (the file may be very big), usually a couple of hundred lines, zip it up and send it to me, please. 

well, i'm in a hurry, so i just cnped the last few entries in the logfile.

http://www.planetquake.com/necros/temp/crashes.zip

it will obviously be the last few entries, because i tried twice with fq, then once with glq, then with your glquake. 

but the last entry was from Feb 29th when hl.exe crashed. Either you didn't cnp the last part or Dr.Watson has been disabled since then. 

You got mail! 

i didn't see the dates. sorry about the non-helpfulness :P 

I tried to play it first on hard skill and pretty much died within the first area or two a few times, before I gave up (didn't get past the first badly placed Vore).

The sub-par visuals were not enough to entice me to play again immediately. I will try again on easy or normal when I have a bit more time and patience.

If you want a few tips on how to not annoy the player (just based on the first room or 2 of your map... just my opinion though!)

- Don't place monsters where they can see you immediately after you spawn. It's fucked.

- Don't place Vores in areas where there is no cover, eg the first Vore in the map (skill 2). If you drop down the hole there's no way to avoid the Vore balls... and I couldn't pick him off from outside as I didn't have enough ammo.

- Don't force the player to rely on 'monster infighting' (as you have suggested above). That's a bullshit excuse for a lack of balancing and playtesting. 

- Don't place Vores in areas where there is no cover, eg the first Vore in the map (skill 2). If you drop down the hole there's no way to avoid the Vore balls... and I couldn't pick him off from outside as I didn't have enough ammo.

i think the main problem with that area is that it's difficult to move along the ledge because it's so cramped, and jumping back onto the bridge-like brush is difficult because it's got angled corners.

as it turns out, i did have enough ammo to get rid of the vore with the SG, but it was still difficult and long, because it involved a lot of running back across the bridge for cover. 

I've got a Watson dump from Hrimfaxi that seems appropriate and I'll check it out asap. Thanks anyway for both your help. 

crash spot in FQ 0.75, but I don't know why it crashes there. It's in function SV_TouchLinks that seems to deal with "linked edicts", I assume entities connected by common target/targetname/killtarget values. HeadThump is probably right in his assumption.

But I still haven't been able to reproduce the crash yet. Well, it's easy to put in a controlled abort instead of the ugly crash, so I might settle for that. 

brush entity has both a killtarget and a target value. I wonder if it may be a result of different versions of Progs.dat causing the crashes and not necessarily the Engine Builds. 

hm...
as i recall, you are not allowed to have a trigger target one ent and killtarget another... but that doesn't explain why i crashes on systems and not others... 

the trigger_once is only set to target and not killtarget. It targets the doors to open them and also a trigger_relay which killtargets a second trigger_once that contains a message.

Up 20 odd hours due to a long drive last night.

Mr Fribbles, you have some excellent advice for me to mull over, but this one I take exception to:

'- Don't force the player to rely on 'monster infighting' (as you have suggested above). That's a bullshit excuse for a lack of balancing and playtesting.'

Monster infighting is purposively built in to Id games for the mappers to exploit. Some excellent mappers have used it well; Mexx9 in the 'Praying Monster' room, and the entire Hell Revealed MegaWad for Doom 2 uses it.

That it is rarely used in modern maps is more customary than a reflection of its usefullness. As I have said, this map is an intentional rollback to early Quake mapping, but I'll keep your observations in mind as I try to refine the style in the next map.

'There seemed to be several places that should have been proper outdoor rock sections.'

Good eye for detail there, Shambler. You probably mean the HellSpawn Walkthrough area, and some parts of the open court near the start. Those were rock area designs at first, but I had so many brushes in there to make the rock surface look convincing it took a toll on the speed. Okay on my system, but a map this retro should be able to make at least a PII user happy. I stripped it out and went for the simpler approach. 

I haven't tried it, but I remember reading about a crash you can cause in e2m2 (only on easy skill for some reason) that's something to do with the two buttons at the drawbridge conflicting with the trigger_once just inside the castle. 

HeadThump, did you receive my demo ok? 

I meant to send you a note yesterday. The .dz format you used, I don't have an decompressor that handles it. I use 7-Zip which is pretty versital but that isn't one of its supported formats.