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...who would recently go around saying "has-been mapper", "king of curvy maps from 10 years ago", "retired zombie clawing from the grave" can fuck right off.
Played first map, it's awesome. I can't sa it's the nest map I've played, but it's TOP. The end was the best of all, that rusty old industrial walls and machines, it felt like it's a real place.
I rarely play maps again with different skill levels but the quality of the first map Honey is just breathtaking. I was surprised to find that the difference in monsters between skill levels was subtle and very cool. Extra mobs here and there, a few types switched around and only a couple extra overall. I am not sure what thought process you went through for creating this map but I would love to know.
I wished I saw the creation process on the first map or even if you wrote something about how you created it would be good. I don't know of any quake mappers who sit down and talk about the construction of what they do. The maps are released and very little is discussed, just strange readme files. So after several plays of the first map and I eventually tried the second map and was sourly disappointed. I know it is your trademark thing to have maps where have to do mario style jumping and can easily fall to your death but it just feels so 1990s. I understand that dangerous environments are the things (Ive spent long enough playing DarkSouls) but there is nothing wrong with safetly nets once in a while. The other thing about the second map is the labeling of stuff (rocket/grenade tubes), just made it feel even more like an arcade game instead of the rich dripping atmosphere of the Honey map. The final maps were awesome, I loved the sense of humour you had with the village. (not saying anymore) Overall a good map pack but the second map felt more like an experiment than the awesome first map. I can't agree this is the best ever, but it is certainly amazing what you did with just the standard monsters. The gameplay in map 1 is just perfect, loads of moments where the pacing is slow, ambushes, surprises mobs and placement was so much fun. Off to play the first map again and I wish you did more maps like it again! best ending credits ever!
some interesting gameplay choices. especially liked the super ogres. 'z aware' didn't bother me at all here thanks to the super ogres being very distinctive (although, the floating orb looked a little goofy, but still better than just a reskin). few great ambushes... fiend and ogre attacking out of the shadows was cool. would have been annoying but it only happens once for each of those monsters so it was good. :) lighting in general was way too dark though. had to pump up brightness a lot which i hate doing because it makes everything look washed out. :( by far, my favourite map is the poison (saint) map. ridiculously cool, and reminds me of enclave. (maybe cause of ogier?? dunno) using rockets and grenades to unlock the areas was nice. and made a more interesting way of replaying the same areas. liked the attention to detail with the busted up fences and the great tex alignment on the collapsed stuff. incidentally, it's interesting what you are saying, sock because it's the exact opposite for me. i liked the new gameplay stuff and i always love rickety hanging stuff. didn't have any real trouble with slipping off either. also, i found the honey map a bit of a let down because visually it was less interesting for me. i kind of wish i had played them in the same order as you. :P the arrow textures help a lot in both maps and i never got lost. otoh, kinda too bad you had to resort to so many 'sign posts'. :( also, i wish you had taken the start map seriously as (at least the initial start map) it would have been pretty creepy. thanks for the pack! I loved the rocket/grenade switches because it was pure metroid prime. TBH more quake mappers need to play metroid prime.
OK, played the second map, it was nice, but it didn't had the same "feeling". It was also much easier, I encountered 2 times a yellow armor that I couldn't grab because I didn't used a single bit from the one that I already had.
But the finish was great, the ghosts and the messages made me smile. And the end movie... oh man, I felt like I have 16 years again. Great job, I really hope you'll release something similar after 3-4 years. Err, I was trying to launch with an old FitzQuake version. It DOES work with QuakeSpasm after all, sorry for the confusion!
Really nice from what I've seen. The huge architecture has JUST enough detail to sell the level to my brain and it all works really nicely. A fiend jumped on my damned head though, so I'll have to try and play through again tomorrow. Oh, and I really like your sense of Quake gameplay. I've killed these creatures a thousand times but the way you present and position them makes it almost fresh again.
I'm really enjoying the combat and that rarely happens anymore! dont_bother, its a czg mapping, no crappin�
Don�t he doing it makery for fame, still in the one quakery game. Like for fifteen years, i swears.. teh best, me guess.. thx a lo�t , dis issa hot one love http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty_UVj3qc00
I enjoyed saint.bsp the most. Mostly for the incredible atmosphere and visuals. There really isn't much to fault here at all, my only gripe is that the pacing of both maps (but more honey.bsp) was slower than I typically like. I loved the use of spawns! Great idea to change the fog to that green/blue combination whenever spawns were close, nice touch and it put me on edge whenever the fog changed :) How did you do the fog transitions? It seemed to lerp very smoothly from one setting to another, is that part of the custom progs.dat or a fitzquake thing? Rocket and grenade puzzles in saint.bsp were awesome. I wish there were some hidden targets though as part of secrets (maybe there were, I didn't find all secrets). My main issue with saint.bsp was all the backtracking through previous areas once you had the grenades, and then again somewhat with the rockets. While you were unlocking new areas it still felt a bit tiresome near the end (imo) and could have used a new area or two to keep things fresh. Comic sans 4 evar! fitz has interpolating fog built in, but looking at the qc real quick, looks like the lerping is done manually.
forgot to mention, but i didn't notice the fog changing with tarbaby proximity. too bad, cause that would have been cool to know. :)
awesome maps!
I loved the cavernous brick interiors, the use of fog.. one standout memory for me was the shambler fight in the dark in the chapel area of saint.bsp. for me honey.bsp captured the best parts of id1; the combat felt great, the feeling of being lost in a crazy catacomb but in fact having a clear route (I didn't get lost once :-), lots of ambushes, etc. Both maps were great though. cheers. Not much I can add to previous comments, these are as good as people say (although not the ultimate end of quake you knobs).
Good set-up, good intro, amusingly silly ending. Saint - amazing, one of the most radical atmospheres in Quake for a long while. As well as the obvious designs, I found the religious statue murals to be particularly evocative. With all the void, this felt like what Warpspasm would have been if it had fully capitalised on the atmosphere. I felt on edge most of the time, and the more sporadic gameplay enhanced that rather than overwhelming it with stress. This really felt like somewhere....somewhere different and eerie. Honey - very good, I liked how it was both similar to Saint but different - more straightforward atmosphere, less environmental tension, and rougher and tougher gameplay. Had some good fights in this and good Quad runs. The complexity of the design was also very impressive and I spent a while working out how things fitted together around the floating Quad. A great map in it's own right but slightly overshadowed by the spectacular Saint. Excellent work. Best Sunday for Quake in a long time! Yeah the fog is controlled manually.
It is stuffed to the console each frame, and that's why trying to disable fog doesn't work. Should have thought of that and added a way to disable it, but I didn't. Sigh. The fog system is way overwrought for what I ended up using it for, but it is somewhat robust and flexible. There is a global fog set in the worldspawn, a local fog that is set by groups of triggers, and an override fog that is controlled manually by certain entities. (Most obviously the deathpit) When I started working on the fog system I almost gave up because the results I got in the engine were so crap compared to what I expected them to be. Then I discovered that ftos() only gives one decimal point. So of course I implemented my own ftos that is a complete and utter coding horror. There are lots of other "systems" spread throughout the code too, where just simple hacks would have been better: Spawnable monsters and items are obvious. Items flaggable directly as secrets save a bit of work. Everything that can take damage in the game can also be filtered to only accept damage from certain weapons. This is used on maybe one button in the whole mod. All monsters can have their sight range individually scaled. This was only used for the vore before the gk door in honey. I implemented an interpolated sine lookup function for the ghosts. I implemented a system for spline movement. This was intended to be used on the boss that there are fragments of in sknight.qc. It's kinda neat but not perfect, and in the end it got only used for the ogre marksman "guiding spirit" orbs. The gist is I don't really like doing hacks, (although there are quite a few of those as well) and generally prefer doing things systematically. Can you tell I actually went to school to be a java engineer? Anyway, this pack was mostly pretty fun to make, and it feels good to have done something. It was inspired by a trip I made in 2008 I think to the city Sienna in Italy. It fucking owned and both maps are pretty much directly influenced by the narrow streets and tall brick buildings there. Saint.bsp was also heavily inspired by the very first leaked gameplay video of Diablo 3. The one with the barbarian traipsing across stone catwalks over bottomless pits while huge arches and stuff loom in the distance. ...awesomeness of these maps has just increased exponentially: Siena is some 60 miles from my town, so I guess it's just like playing Quake in my courtyard.
Outstanding work, sir. And, next time anyone comes here close looking for inspiration, feel free to drop me a mail. You may find a bunch of goodies and wine... also, i wish you had taken the start map seriously as (at least the initial start map) it would have been pretty creepy.
Yeah that was a real shame imo :( That the architecture reminded me heavily of Diablo 1, albeit with verticality. Now we know why. :D Haven't played far yet but the first level is amazing. I love the verticality, and I wish Diablo 3's cathedral looked more dark and "grungy" like this
Still playing the levels...
I played Saint first. This looks great, I love especially the player route that winds through the same areas 3 times, with new openings each time. The grenade/rocket locks are cool and well-implemented, I only wish the glowing cross-hair texture turned off when they had been used. (so i wouldn't try to use them again.) It also caused me to be more conservative with my rocket ammo, since usually I try to use that type first (so that my nails are ready for a crisis.) Brushwork is top-notch, lots of great details and everything looks cleanly built. Playing Honey now. So far it feels different, but not that different. Brushwork is less showy than the other map, but still solid with lots of details, and great large spaces with many layers of structure making interesting views. Some specific details were neat: 1. pressing the button to lower the bars on the staircase above you, and you could actually see the bars lower into the alcove you're standing in. 2. The double-lift with the rocket launcher on it. 3. The encounter right before the gold key (three ogres on pillars, etc.) was very cool and suprising in how it developed. 4. the sort of "mirror's edge"-style red brick texture you use on ledges that you can jump from or jump to. Start map -- state changes after completing each level were cool. Credits -- funny. One thing that i noticed, there were no styled lights in these levels! Was this for performance or laziness? :P Oh, and: saint, 39 minutes, 2/7 secrets honey, 26 minutes, 0 secrets I'm not that excited about animated lights in non-base levels, because there aren't that many places it looks natural. I'm not a big fan of flickering torchlight for instance.
Only places there are animated lights is in front of some teleporters. Did you notice I implemented smooth light ramping on trigger? I hope you did! Really the torches are the only place I felt flickering should have been used. That's the only reason I noticed, I was looking at a room near the end of Honey and realized the most prominent light source was a torch, and then I noticed it was not flickering :)
Actually when the lights ramped, I guess I just thought that was the fog changing color. I didn't realize the lighting was changing too.
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