I take it that it was meant to be a bit dark because even after turning up the default brightness for quake I still struggled to see, is that the doom3 influence?

Anyway, it's good stuff. I didnt have a problem with bobs on normal, more those grenade enforcers and their damaging shotgun blasts.

Looks are decent, dont really like the textures in quake, but brushwork is good. and I have to say best use of coloured lighting yet in quake, very subtle and effective.

Nice map overall jpl, keep it up. 

I died once in slime and once with those shotgun guys.
Found one secret, killed all. Played with skill 1.

I liked some details too. You do nice lighting. I liked the silvery curvy place too.

Some textures were lighted upside down btw? 

... too bad there weren't 3 maps, heheh.

I think this used the Quoth base guys very well, I had never been worried about the green enforcers or the flying drones in any other map that had used them, but this map used them very effectively and I hated them ;)

I liked the unusual attention to detail with all areas of the map.

Quoth really needs a base boss that is the equivalent of the Gug, like the Cyberdemons used in Event Horizon or something.

Speaking of potentially useful base bad guys ... Source of Power has those battle robots or whatever they are. 

I am no lover of base maps (monsters especially).
Thus I did not expect to like the map anyways and I didn't... ;)

However, here my comments:

I liked the doom3-ish curvy part. Looked nice.

Now the ranting:

The map was way too dark-bland lit. This plus the high amount of "visual noise" from the textures made it pretty hard to get a good aim on the monsters. They just melted into the background. Might be just the textures and not so much the lighting though, no idea.

I REALLY hate when maps have little brushes everywhere that make the player's view (and step) go up and down and up and down. Blocking decent strafing in combat, generally making it a pain in the ass to move. Same goes for crampy door and corridors (the one near the Vore at the slime pit where the scrags spawn is a good example, I died 3 times there and always simply quit Quake because it made me so freaking angry that the map caused me to die).
And why on earth did you make all those small ammo/health "stashes" (the small holes in the walls) just so high that a player thinks "hey, I can walk right in there" but instead one has to jump?! I don't want to think about how often I died because I went for health inside there (eg in the last room) and still thought "hey, let's just walk in there - what? - oi!- now, in therARGH!".

I really hate Bobs and the green enforcers, but I blame Kell & Necros for these instead. :P Bob is a typical "modern" monster that strafes like a mad man, one of the reasons I dislike many modern shooters. The green enforcers are so very powerful and just unfair if you place them in the back of the player because they fire very fast and with such high damage (that ass behind the crate there...).

Another flaw: There was no visual mark for the sk/gk doors. The sk door even had a yellow/golden mark on it. :\
Doors generally were hard to see. 

Agree with Spirit. I must say that I have exactly the same feelings about this map like him. The textures were ok for me and the architecture looked pretty nice but there were those annoying "details".
The level felt very cramped for me. There was not much space to manouver which made the fights with bobs and green enforcers very hard. The final room looks very nice but I always hit the walls and supports during the fight. Those holes in the walls with ammo/health annoyed the hell out of me. I quit quake twice before I finished this map.
I don't think that bobs should be used in packs. Fighting so many of them at one place was pretty boring and annoying. I also think that there was not enough ammo (or health) on hard skill. For me it is always the case that when I try to save ammo I loose some more health (and vice versa) . I have played the map on hard skill (after reading the silent's post :) and didn't have any ammo in front of the SK door. I have lost too much of it trying to fight the bobs from far away. Well, maybe I just can't play the game good enough.
For me the map looks nice and interesting but the gameplay was not good. 

Same goes for crampy door and corridors

I thought it felt like really being in a base. A base isn't going to have wide corridors and someone might be around every turn.

In wide open areas, there isn't a monster (or even 10) in the world that stands a chance against a good player (unless it is a vore and the map is a void map or a lava area).

This was one of the most frustrating (combat wise) maps to play I've played in a long time, but it was frustrating in a good way in that I had to pay attention and be careful for once.

If there were 2 more maps and some sort of "base boss" somewhere at the end, it would have been perfect (to me). 

I can understand the map was frustrating in a way. My intention, as denoted Baker, was to create a certain unsecurity ambience. Remember Doom / Doom2 / Doom3, the idea was to create bad surprises on each corners, and stress the player as far as possible. It was my primary idea... as usual I should say...

Concerning layout, I took inspirations from some 1870 war bases I know (an old Germans vs Frenchs war... once again..), also refreshing the brushwork, in order to avoid flat concrete walls as in CMC...

Also, to increase the insecurity feeling, I think that there must be more darkness areas than brigthnes areas..... in the nigth it is more difficult to see what you are shooting, and alos more frightening (e.g Predator movie...).. I know some people don't like it, and I tried to tune the darkness/brightness ratio in this way... In anyway you are not navigating in the complete darkness... maybe it comes from my flat screen...

Well, maybe I will "respin" the map when Quoth2 will be released (next century maybe :P ), because gameplay was less boring with those cool new monsters (e.g pyro, sentinels...): as examples, half of the bobs have been replaced by sentinels... a shame... you know what I mean...

Anyway, thanks a lot for the feedback, good or bad, it is always interesting to read different point of view, and to learn from that, even if it is difficult to satisfy everybody...

BTW, soon will come an even more frightening map (about the ambience).. "Five rivers Land" is waiting for you... :D 

I have to agree with JohnXmas on the textures. I think they looked fine, but then I guess everybody has their own idea about what Quake should be. I like different maps, and generally feel modern Quake mods and maps suffer somewhat from people reining in their creativity for the sake of making something that fits in with predetermined ideas of... erm... Quakeness. 

Warpspasm really suffered from that. As did JPL's other map (the castle one).

o_O 

All the Warp textures were from classic-type sources, but if you're going to use more modern sets at least convert them properly to the Q1 palette, which was my beef with these ones.

Why I asked for an external .tga set . . . I deleted the game that the textures originally came from quite a while ago.

It was the blocky pixel resampling I didn't like - the textures are probably great undeneith that. 

I found the visuals very confusing. The color scheme made it hard for me to see where I was going/was supposed to go. Half the time I was mistaking wall panels for doors. The little niches added to the irritating feel.

The Quake/Quoth base monsters don't really mix with the textures' color scheme. The bobs I think are too tough to be used in groups. Their HP should be reduced to the level of Quake2's flyers (they should die from at most four SG blasts.) They're robots, they should please a) be stupid and b) fall over when shot.

The green enforcers are too tough, and Bob's strafing gets on my nerves. I'll take scrags over Bob any day.

Technically the map is obviously good, texturing is fine etc. Gameplay/flow is very Quakey but it strangely doesn't feel like Quake because of the textures.

I didn't find the map too dark, except in the slime.

It's not my cup of tea though :-) 

I corrected the 2 zombies bob generated by spawning / telefragging monsters. I updated the stuff in the download link.

I just would like to thank all the people who supported me during this project from Base Pack to "here": theys will recognize themselves (e.g beta testers, technical support, etc...).

Thanks to all the people that gave feedback, bad or good. I would like to emphase a single thing: it is really difficult to innovate without hurting the Quake purist.... I will be recognized after my death only... ;P 

I think the crampiness added to the baseyness of it. There were a few holes yeah but it was not that bad.

The problem with suits and slime is that you have no multiple tries to go through the swimming place. It was not obvious which door opened when you came from the other side. 

where can i play the game at already? 

http://www.idsoftware.com/store/

Get quake 1. 

Gameplay felt very unbalanced with not enough guns, ammo or health to deal with all those really tough Quoth monsters. I first tried briefly on Hard and couldn't advance after the first bob horde, no health and no ammo.

I switched to Normal and I must've died over 20 times and then I even knew every encounter beforehand. I couldn't finish the map with any reasonable effort, so I quit.

Taking down five or six bobs in a row with only shotguns? There should've been SNG or PG early on with a lot more ammo to handle this, I felt seriously under-equipped until I found the GL.

I find this apparent trend in making overly difficult maps disturbing. I can imagine that skilled DM players can handle this easily, but this isn't DM.

As for looks, I liked the textures and layout, except for the slime maze. Some textures suffered from the restricted palette. It might've helped with the Malice palette instead (more greyscales), but then the monster skins would probably look bad ...

Like others have mentioned, it was too easy to get stuck on things while fighting and this made the map feel a bit cramped. More clipbrushes might've helped here.

Sorry for sounding negative, but I hope for a better experience in your next map. 

Don't worry to be negative: everybody is free to have his own feeling about a map, even if it doesn't please the mapper.
Someone told me here one day: "it is not a popularity contest", and I've integrated very well the concept...

At least you enjoyed the architecture ;) so it's not totally negative :)

and concerning my next map: you are already experimenting... :P 

I didn't find the map too cramped - at least I didn't get stuck anywhere. Played on normal and it wasn't too hard for me, no problem with ammo and Bob hordes. Dunno how it is on hard skill though. I died two times; once in the slime area which was fairly confusing. 3 secrets.
Although it's nice that someone finally made use of the Doom3.wad, I must admit I don't like the textures. They are too gray and don't really seem to fit with Quake, even though they were used quite appropriately here. The lighting didn't help much either, maybe some more delay/wait tweaking would have been good. Nice curves (and aligning) though.

Preach: Please take a look at the spawn code. Every time monsters spawn in, there are "walkmonster in wall" warnings (this occurs in every Quoth map). 

Is a hard-baked bug (I understand).

Basicly Quake checks whenever a monster is created weather or not it can move - calling it walkmonster in wall if not.

The Quoth spawn code works in such a way that the monster isn't active when this check is made, so is automatically called as stuck.

It does nothing apart from confuse the issue if you have real stuck and delay spawning monsters; but they'll be called at mapstart anyway.

The best solution is to just turn off this warning in-map for delay spawned enemies. 

It's something I know about, my tutorial for spawning monsters on inside3d mentions it. Basically the test always fails because the monster is not "onground", since it's usually not preferable to have the monster droptoground() when you teleport it in. You could fix it by always calling droptoground() when you spawn a monster in, but then you can't have monsters appear in the air from teleports(unless you do it the old fashioned way). So the best thing to do in my opinion is just have the monster opt out of the test at the same time as it opts out of droptofloor(). This means you don't know when teleporting monsters are in walls, but there would be no easy way to check that anyway - you can't distinguish between "still falling" and "stuck in a wall" in a reliable way.

Anyway, it's just moving a } two lines down, so now fixed. 

Ok, was just my mangled explanation of what I'd heard some time ago; good to know Quoth2 has it fixed. 

a few weeks ago, really enjoyed it. In fact, it got me looking up some of your other maps, as well as some goodies on UWF's and Shambler's sites.

I don't complain about the D3 textures, they are a great deviation from the normal q1 base. Keep 'em coming JPL! 

Wow, I was not aware SRC has this side effect on you.. and I'm glad you took some time to play my old maps... I really honored..
Thanks a lot supporting me... 

I find this apparent trend in making overly difficult maps disturbing

- there are skill settings
- nowadays I guess most fps players have played online, so the skill level is higher in general
- playing the more difficult Quoth with keyboard only, you can�t expect to do very well ?! (i.e. there are some ownage Doom speedrunners who play kb only, but in Quake with 3d and all?)

Surely a map should be accesible to a wide range of players, but if a map is too easy on the other hand, I tend to not replay it so often, no matter the looks. 

I found the Bob hordes in this map too hard, too. With Quoth 1, please no more than 2 Bobs and player should have either quad or SNG then. Really. With Quoth 2 beta, it's entirely different, so everybody who finds this too hard should replay it when Quoth 2 is out.

:-)

The rest was manageable.

Overly difficult maps: Well mappers should stay _reasonable_ IMO. For example, three droles with just a shotgun is not reasonable. One drole with SSG + Quad is reasonable (even fun.) One drole with grenade launcher is also reasonable.
Necessary weapons should also be in plain sight, prior to meeting the monster(s) they're intended for, and NOT in a secret area.

But isn't this all pretty standard?

Big monsters -> bigger guns plz.

Multiple tough monsters -> Quad plz. Player should have fun, not stress.

:-)