Thanks for playing; there will be a point release with a few niggles fixed and hopefully easier installation.

The RMQ engine is required to correctly run this demo; Fitzquake/QS is missing a few key features and runs a lot slower, and even DP doesn't support it 100% (yet).

The RMQ engine is based on Quakespasm 0.85.3 (ie Fitzquake SDL) but its renderer has been extensively rewritten and it uses protocol 999.

RMQengine is the suggested way to play it; DP largely supports it but will run a lot slower. You could try FTE as well.

We should hopefully have a Mac version of the RMQengine for the point release.

As for not Quake, well, RMQ is a 40 map megaconversion. You're bound to find some maps that seem more puzzly / grapply, as well as some more classic hordefests. This map has only around 50 monsters. A large part of this demo is the introduction of the grapple, the pushables and things like cameras and custom keys. Hence it was bound to be less of a horde fight and more of a feature show.

You can bypass the puzzle, btw, and you can beat Chthon easily by blowing up the boilers first. And once you get more used to the hook, you can in turn focus more on the combat again.

What Lardarse said - press Fire and get pulled towards the grapple point, then press Jump to disengage the hook in mid flight. The momentum will carry you across gaps. The other method is to use the directional keys while dangling. A lot of the grapple points in this map lead to secrets.

Some lava gaps can be hopped without using the grapple btw, or using rocket/grenade jumps.

Finally, I want to advertise the randomizer a bit - a lot of the monster positions and subtypes are randomized, so they'll differ between playthroughs.

Thanks for the feedback, we will use it to create an improved, bugfixed and easier to install point release in a little while.

gb 

Once it has written its config it will fail with Z_Realloc: failed on allocation of XXXXX bytes if I try to load the map. 32 bit linux, nvidia, oss.

Grapple hook is absolutely not intuitive. I tried swinging and shrinking/growing. The player just wobbles around seemingly random. I did not manage to pass that first lava pit after about 15 tries. 

Main problem I had with the grapple was that the engine wouldn't recognise mouse4 as a button, and I use mouse3 and mouse2 for weapon selection, so I couldn't bind it to my mouse.

You could make the grapple a weapon and get the player to switch to it, the way you're using it means being off-hand isn't essential.

Also I hope you'll make some levels where more than just tiny points can be grappled too. Swinging around entire rooms off stuff is great fun, as Tribes Vengeance showed :) 

I liked the colored lights fuckery around the power crystal puzzle.

It took me like 5 tried to block the crushers with the pushable boxes and when I did it I felt absolutely no reward.

Didn't care much for the extra areas added. Oh wow, take the pent and cross the lava, what a new and inventive gameplay mechanism.

The moving lava pots would have been cool if they weren't completely ripped from e3m4rq.

I miss the huge slow crusher.

All the Shambler encounters felt tacked on and unimpressed. And I absolutely dislike how the DBS kills them in like 3 shots (lol dbs > rl)

The Vomitus in the starting hall is the #1 Misused Monster of 2010. What the hell was the point if he can't even do what he was intended to do?

The Elder Ogre - wasn't he supposed to be as tall as a Shambler? Seems to miss the point for me, otherwise.

The boilers = instakill bullshit. I destroyed them all before fighting Chthon and kept spamming rockets at him from the arena entrance until he died.

Whatever. Red Slammer had me more entertained. 

It's an offhand hook and works similar to those in many DM modes. Making it an additional weapon would take away much of its speed possibilities.

As I understand it, there's going to be a tutorial area early on in the full game, where players will be able to familiarize themselves with the item. It just didn't fit into this map.

Swinging does work in some places, but, indeed, the best method seems to be the one Lardarse descibed above. 

i'm sure the engine can be modified to incorporate mouse4 too :) (mh?) 

I didn't have any problem actually using the grapple, just pointing out the lack of mouse buttons. It was nice to actually have a proper grapple with the ability to winch it in.

But it may well feel very limiting if you get this fun grapple with nice physics but only get to use it to do very specific jumps over the odd gap. Also not a fan of using so many cutscenes to point stuff out. For tutorials it's nice, but when it's just pointing to a grapple point...I'd rather the points are just made *really* obvious :P 

Another little thought btw, it's always fun to cause destruction, so for the crusher blocking puzzle, it could be fun to make them seize up once blocked, perhaps with some nice metal snapping sounds, so you get a bit more umph from getting through it

Also the block pushing/pulling was too slow

Weapon balance wise, I'm inclined to agree with Ricky that it doesn't feel right. I'd agree on toning down the SSG. Also the super nailgun spread works as a way to make the original nailgun still useful, but the spread is OTT. My suggestion for what it's worth, tighten it up slightly and give it spin up/down time like a chaingun. 

 

Shows how much attention I'm paying. I'm associating colours with the poster I've seen use it most :p 

onetruepurple I agree with most of your comments/ideas, it's interesting how different playing styles can work. I'm much more oriented towards the idea of dropping the player into a scenario where they have as much freedom as possible, and with the randomisation features of the current progs (semi-randomised monster spawning) I'm having a lot of fun mapping for this. e2m1rq is almost in an alpha state now, and there are >200 monsters on skill 2/3, but I think you will find maps in the finished product to suit all tastes.

Giant Ogres or Ogre-Giants as Elder-Ogres is a cool idea though, I must admit too. 

...What did I do wrong? 

I had to use an earlier version of the engine: http://mhquake.blogspot.com/2010/11/rmq-engine-test-release-17th-november.html 

Now it works. 

Tried the included engine and had white textures with the .lit colors added. Frames per second was as slow as I normaly get in Darkplaces (about 15-35fps). Then tried Darkplaces and saw nice textures, but a framerate of 2 to 4 per second. Then tried regular Fitz 0.85(Windows) with:
+max_edicts 2000
...in the shortcut's cmd line, and success! Played fast and looked really good. Playing at hard skill didn't seem too challenging, but being a demo it's understood. There is alot to absorb here at first. The end boss was excellent in that cool chamber. All of the other monsters A-Ok. Most new sounds are great, some just need getting used to. Zombie's pain sounds like a womans though (a gag?).

Overall, different is good. Hope many mappers can find this mod easy to work with, regardless of their computer system. 

Can I just check something here? Everyone who's getting white textures has a GeForce FX card, right? 

Me, ATI radeon 9000 8 years oldie. ATI was just being bought out by AMD at that time and included crappy graphic driver sets (9500 were the worst). AMD sort of fixed some drivers, but never complete. I still have woking a TNT2 (Pine)from way back, and every program worked great with it. 

> Me, ATI radeon 9000 8 years oldie.

Not too far out; the age is about right and I have another person with the same problem on a GeForce FX. I'm now 100% certain that this is caused by usage of an OpenGL extension that these cards are supposed to support but don't really. 

Celeron 2,4 ghz approx 5/6yrs old+Sapphire Radeon 9200SE atlantis.

Is it the same? 

Radeon 9000/9200 or GeForce FX 5xxx fit with the theory - cards that were marketed as "DirectX 9" but were really only of a DirectX 8 (or GL 1.4/1.5) feature level.

Thanks all, that's been very helpful info in determining the cause of this bug. The beers are in the post! ;) 

I can believe it. I feel these graphics companies do this on purpose. That way people always upgrade. Thats why I stopped upgrading for a long while. Till my 3, 8-9 year old computers break, I'm not doin nuthin.

old tight_wad :) 

I'm thinking that I'll probably do an "engine only" mini-patch to resolve this and a few other small (and not so small) niggles that people are having; it's important that people can get to run this with the RMQ engine as there are a lot of things (like QC extensions) that improve on the overall experience. 

I'm playing it on vista btw and I have a feeling I had some mouse lag. I'll try playing it a little tomorrow to confirm it :E 

first, mappery is quite good with cool detailed areas and well done lighting (except in a few places where the coloured light is washed out).
i liked all the broken bits and stuff... like a in-progress renovation of e1m6 or something. quite cool. recognized old areas and enjoyed the re-worked progression through the map. i liked that there were puzzles, btw. nice change of pace.

stuff that bothered me:

1. push/pull blocks move way too slowly. it's lucky you can pull them with the grapple, because if i had to push those 4 blocks with the symbols i would have just not bothered. at least with the grapple you can sort of afk and wait for the block to get into position.
should move AT LEAST 2x as fast, but i could even go for 3x. or make the speed variable at the very very least. that crusher puzzle with the moveable blocks to wedge... there's a big box and a small box that both move at the same speed. the little box should be really easy to push around i think.
so yeah, just simply speeding up the pushing speed would go a long way toward making this less painful.
concept is fine and i like it. :)

2. grapple. like a few others here, i had a terribly difficult time using this thing. about the only thing i could do with it was reel myself up. (incidentally, i really liked that one spot where there's the hole in the ceiling and you can grapple up through it to a higher room... for some reason, it felt really cool doing that).
i tried using forward and back movement keys to sort of swing like in other games of the sort like dark messiah or fakk2, but it just didn't seem to move me very much... i had to resort to running grapple/jumping and that was hard to time, and i actually had to noclip over the first lava pit. o.o
so yeah, needs some reworking to make this easier to use.
btw, the physics on it is top notch. really liked this, and probably appreciated it more after working on that dynamic rope thing i posted about a while ago. n1

3. when you jam the crushers with the blocks, it should break the crusher or find some way to stop it from playing the movement sounds... they are fucking annoying!!! :D dun dunnnn dun dunnnn dun dunnn...

4. why are the blood particles so tiny? they are smaller than even quakeworld clients which are quite small. it makes shotguns feel very weak and silly. if you're going to make the particles tiny like that, consider spawning some blood sprite particles or something... i like the visceral feel of the large software/gl/fitzquake particles.

5. this map felt very quicksave-y... like, you turn a corner and suddenly this monster you didn't see takes half your health away. gotta do something about that... give some time when the monster first sees you or something.

6. didn't really enjoy that one puzzle where you get the rocket launcher and it tells you the boiler is explosive...
you should add a little note at the end that tells you the boiler is sort of explosive after you pump a dozen rockets into it. :P i sort of milled about that area not knowing what to do after shooting it once. :P
as an aside: liked the implementation of ladders in here. well done and work nicely. not sure i like how it makes you fall off when you turn away from it.... i liked the HL1/2 mechanic more where you stick on a ladder until you jump instead of the D3 way of falling off when you turn, but only a minor thing. it's just that, if you do it the hl1 way, you can shoot backwards off ladders which i always found cool. like in movies where the guy hooks his arm in the rungs and turns around shooting.

7. not a chthon fan here, sorry. :P he looks more like a worm (and indeed, on my first play through, i thought it was a new monster and not a redone chthon!). what's with the boiler explosion radius being so huge compared to the explosion graphic? it's like impossible to judge the size... you gotta be like 5 miles away to avoid the blast. :P

also, rmq engine worked fine, no problems on win7 64bit dual core system here. no ram problems either, but my always load up with like 256mb anyway. 

The mod is a stone-throw from terrific.

Here is how it isn't.

1) The mod is all too eager to give your 11 points of falling damage from falls that in standard Quake wouldn't damage you at all. Recommendation: determine whatever is the max safe falling distance in Quake and ONLY access damage after such a fall.

2) Boiler destruction blast radius is too big. Others have said this. Enough said.

3) The grapple is extremely effective once you get the --- um --- hang of it ;)

4) The mousewheel should scroll the console in every version of Quake. FitzQuake and its derivatives are the only Quake engines where that is busted. Likewise, 5 button mouse support should be a standard. My Mac supports 5 buttons, for instance, but not in FitzQuakey type of engines.

5) I didn't look, but the RMQEngine should support "record a demo at any time" just like DirectQ does. Just for general infos for the single player types that are FitzQuake/DarkPlaces oriented ... ProQuake has supported "record a demo at any time" since at least 2002 and JoeQuake has supported this since at least 2003. Oh yeah, guess what other engine supported this ... DOSQuake 1.01. Not supporting this capability in modern times isn't old school; it's mold skool. I'm not saying RMQEngine has this or not, I'm just saying MH knows how to implement it if it isn't a current feature since it is in DirectQ.

Now for the positives ...

A) 1I like the philosophy of less monsters, more meaningful danger. I shouldn't have to play a Tronyn map with 32 scrags, 8 fiends and 12 vores ambushing me to feel threatened.

B) OMG it isn't Quake enough. Ok, goto Quaddicted and download the 978 Quake maps --- a lifetime supply --- and realize that if there wasn't a single new stock Q1 map ever made that more than enough of that linear school of thought have already been made that if you are worried about something different you suck at Googling or you have the fail of not knowing about Quaddicted. Even then, several uber-outstanding Quoth maps by distrans and Ijed don't have the Quakey feel and totally own. In order to even have the right qualifications to gripe about a non-Quake feel you must at a minimum not be ignorant to the point knowing that Quaddict has a lifetime supply of stock Quake goodness. Nehahra isn't actually Quakey. Do we need more Quakey? Only neg!ke Quakey do we need more of. Anyone with solid fundamentals of Q1 single player knows this.

C) Oh yeah ... the camera work and help buttons are uber.