MH is the man for engine bugs, he's good at fixin 'em too, thanks for the info :D 

I'm getting some very odd graphic glitches (what looks like long rectangular arms stretching out to a shotgun that's pointed toward the ceiling) but I forgot that shubbyhubby doesn't like .tga files so I'll convert a few pics tonight and post them tomorrow. Game is basically unplayable at the mo'.

gb - regarding sounds and voice acting, my home studio was topped off by a copy of SoundForge 10 Pro at Christmas time so I'm ready to make, change, and generally screw with any sounds or music you need. As for voice acting, my actor friends at the theatre company would be keen to get involved, me too of course. So, let's start a conversation...email is in the profile. 

Are for each unique object\texture (ie 900 grunts = 901 draw call)
To put that in perspective this _entire_ map with r_novis is ~5000 draws (yeah it's a heavy map).
There is no way to have 900 draws in that scene alone.
The polycount is insignificant, 100k with 10 draws would run faster. 

You may have found one of those rogue spots where vis doesn't do it's thing as effectively. It's also the case that the engine alpha sorts absolutely everything that needs it, including individual sprites if necessary. It will batch sprites but switching textures or to a different object type needs to break a batch, of course. Even aside from that, any kind of texture, lightmap or object type switch in the main renderer also needs to break a batch.

(Note the ~7000 epoly count in a scene where you can't see hardly any MDLs.)

Finally, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that you have found a genuine bug with my draw call batcher.

Worth noting that the main skill selction area in ID1 start.bsp comes in at 35 calls in the absolute best case - including using instancing where possible for torches and zombies.

@81.23.195.106 - can you explain these glitches a little better? I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing here. 

there's a guy over on quake3world forums called Odium who is the lead artist/modeler on a long in the making free q3 engine game called Overdose. Since that game will be free, some of the weapon models/skins etc that he has done for that may be able to be shared with you guys.

Worth an email I reckon. 

Tons of glitches coming to light, this is very cool and exactly what I hope to get from demo releases.

Distrans: Cool, I'd be delighted to get help with the audio and voice acting. I'll mail you.

Nitin: Thanks for the heads up, I'll definitely look at it. 

Most of what you said was spot on, actually. 

http://www.team-blur-games.com/odium/portfolio/modeling.htm 

Quoted from the internal forum;

I lowered fall damage again - with the arrival of special moves, and seeing we have the visual damage feedback/blur now, less fall damage is ok and fits better with the idea of a superhuman player.

I'll also tame the underwater weapon punishment somewhat and probably allow all weapons to function underwater, with an amount of harmless jamming varying from weapon to weapon. I'm thinking to reduce the backfiring (which damages the player) a lot. The destroying of backfiring weapons was already removed a while back.

Part of me sees this as "dumbing it down" since it makes the player suffer less consequences / allows them to switch off the brain while playing. It's difficult to strike a good balance. 

http://negke.slipgateconstruct.com/files/rmqwinter11_negke.7z demos

Many nice and cool things, and also quite a few not so nice ones. The maps look great, though some have issues with the lighting. Too dark or too colorful in some places, and E3M3RQ with terrible minlight.
E2M1RQ goes a bit overboard with reinterpretation and adding new areas, so that only 60% through Quake2 you finally enter the actual e2m1 part. The other ones were mostly recognizable with neat additions. Not sure about the ship part. It certainly looked cool though (with better light).

I experienced a couple of slowdowns in E2M1RQ - this shouldn't happen, but it was bearable. E3M1RQ, on the other hand, was barely playable. Something caused a major hit on performance, possibly the rain. Also I'm not sold on the Glados AI thing, felt tucked on and out of place. 'Regular' (non-humorous) AI broadcasts may be better for the level.

New stuff... the hires textures look surprisingly good. The new sounds, well, I don't like them because they are no improvement on the older ones, but seemingly only added because you felt everything has to be updated to higher resolution. Pew pew laser etc. And what's with the monster calling the player "noob" when he dies - I mean seriously.... Environmental sounds are good.
The new monsters are nice, though also pretty powerful. Seems harder to avoid taking damage. Those Madfox squids work surpringly well (if not overused). They seem even harder to dodge though. The drones look somewhat out of place with their non-brown skin, a bit Shrak/Malice-like. Their explosion should be toned down visually. Zombie knights stay dead a tad too long in my view, could get back up faster.

Gameplay was mostly okay on Normal, was low/out of ammo/health and died a few times. Hardly any secret found, but it's great there are so many in each map. Did you nerf the DBS? Somehow felt weaker than before. I don't like the laser rifle, the v_model looks cheap, and I don't see a good gameplay reason to replace the nailgun with it. I missed the SNG.
Still don't understand why you don't just use the chainsaw model from Zer, it looks very badass - unlike the RMQ one.

The 'drunk' effect in E3M3RQ was annoying and felt like a random idea forced into the map. At least tone it down a little and put a centerprint explaination in the area (poinsonous gas or something).

Please change the autosave system to name the files "autosave.sav" instead of overwriting the quicksave file!

I encountered a few glitches, even two gamebreaking ones. After dying in rising lava, the orange screen tint didn't go away on reloading. The ladders on the ship in E3M3RQ are parially nonsolid. At one point I reloaded and the fog was gone for the rest of the map. Best watch the demos so you can see it for yourself... and have more immediate (and possibly aggravating) comments. Sometimes I only look at something that's wrong but don't type a message. You'll probably get the idea.

Bottom line, enjoyable beta maps, many good features as well as controversial bullshit. 

The damage blur, interesting effect, but somewhat annoying. It blurs your vision too much if you take lots of damage from different sources. Makes fighting back unnessarily difficult. I sighed at the fall damage a couple of times as well, because there are areas where you are required to jump down (less than 256 units) but can't avoid taking damage from it.
I noticed that the nailgun sometimes jams underwater but still functions. This is good, better than completely disabling it.

What you regard as "dumbed down" actually is what makes Quake fun. The opposite of what all those realism shooters do, and what RMQ, to the dismay of many players, has started to incorporate, eg. damage blur, fall damage, autoregen health etc. Perhaps optional gameplay settings to cater to all kinds of players could make it easier to balance?

Btw. I'm not sold on the new powerup behavior either. Not to mention that you didn't explain how the new versions work now. In effect, I wasted to Quads going wtf at the shorter duration. And ZQF didn't benefit from his Pent, either - quite the contrary. I'd say maybe makes those new version extra items and use them in situations where they can be utilized properly, rather than using them as replacement for the old ones and forcing the players to make due (for in my view, the new ones, at least as much as I understand their behavior, are much less versatile now compared the others). 

Zer Chainsaw - ok. Ideally I want the player to swing with it. The current version is an Ogre's saw, which is why it looks so crap.

The DBS has a slower fire rate but much more damage, and spread. Up close it makes mincemeat of enemies, although more feedback of that is probably in order.

Increasing the stutter effect for some weapons underwater seems fair. We're still working on the gameplan for the underwater combat.

Same for the powerups - we know the direction, just not all of the specifics yet. I'm also thinking to add print messages for these to make it crystal clear what is going on. The Quad duration for example increases with each kill.

The Blaster model I finished the day before the delivery. A very important aspect of its behaviour is that it increases in power under sustained fire, but becomes more inaccurate. After firing for a short while it'll gib zombies, but at the cost of ammo wasted. So adding visual / audio feedback to show that better is a good idea. So the pew-pew could get more bassy the more powerful the shots are.

Poisonus gas - I'd hoped the fog raising to pea-souper levels would confer this :) I did have a message in there saying 'argh my head' but it seems to have gotten deleted in the shuffle.

Distrans, that'd be great - there's a lot to be done, especially with voice acting. We have a lot thats not included in the demos yet, but vital to the vision. 

Good points.

The old chainsaw model sucks, and will be replaced (not with the zer one though, but we can easily make a good looking model now). The blaster vmodel was added at the last minute, and it shows. The explanation for the player to have the blaster is that the Episode 3 player character is an Enforcer - the idea is that you get the enforcer's gun etc. Yes, it needs improvement, no question.

The new powerups: the pent does suck and shouldn't have been in the demo because of this. The quad takes some getting used to, but if used right can outlast the vanilla id quad (killing streak feature). Needs tweaking.

e3m1 slowdowns: Same here, this is due to the sounds. Too many GlaDOS sounds - the rain alone doesn't cause this.

Realism: Yes, as I said earlier I'm cutting back on this stuff.

Autosave overwriting quicksave: It was actually doing what you want, but was changed so you can use quickload to go back to the latest autosave after quitting and restarting the engine. This was done because most people were in favour of the change.

SSG was nerfed compared to Demo 2, yep. There might be a - permanent - weapon upgrade thing sometime later, where you collect an item and it just buffs a weapon. We plan no alt-fire or anything like that.

Will watch demos now, thanks a lot for those. 

What you regard as "dumbed down" actually is what makes Quake fun
This!
I feel a lot of what is being done in RMQ is against the fundamental spirit of the kind of experience old iD shooters embodied. A fast, tight action game with simple weapons and mechanics that gives variety and complexity through level design and monster variety.

Things are being made too complicated, a feel of 'this would be cool' rather than 'this would be appropriate'. The engine tech and sheer degree of work is very impressive, but the design is muddled. Ultimately Negke is spot on. 

a lot of what is being done in RMQ is against the fundamental spirit of the kind of experience old iD shooters embodied.

Please, concrete examples would be helpful.

The core gameplay is still "kill monsters, press buttons". RMQ weapons are very powerful, so the game actually favours a rush-in approach. Stuff like pushable crate puzzles can usually be bypassed in the typical ways (trickjumps etc).

There are a ton of buttons in e3m3rq for example, but I've got to say pressing buttons has been an established gameplay mechanic in Quake all the time.

Give examples, please, instead of roundhouse kicks. ;-) 

But it's a daunting task when you're faced with it. Watching Negke's demos (of my map, naturally) was actually quite cool. He doesn't miss much! A agreed with almost 100% of his comments.

I generally feel that e2m1rq needs to be tightened up. Trust me I've been tightening the sh*t out of it for the last two or three months. Releasing these demos is good when it's actually your own work which is on the line because it makes you look at it from other people's perspectives. I mean I've been testing my own map a lot, of course, and I can whizz round it and get four quad runs on skill 3 and it's great. But watching people wandering round it for the first time is almost unfathomable for me by now.

ZQF I know where you are coming from for sure. 'Against the fundamental spirit of the kind of experience old id shooters embodied' is a roundhouse kick, agreed, but, having watched a couple of player demos (three infact) from this release, I have been considering way which I can make the experience of playing my map more fluid, basically just putting more gameplay into the same distance travelled. I need to keep the player pumping rounds. I need to keep them more worried about what is round the corner. More worried about what is going to be in their face in two seconds time, rather than standing way back and picking monsters of from a distance. Or something like that. More manic.

It's all coming. The extra features and tech I don't think are the problem though, it's just using them in a balanced was so as not to interrupt the carnage too much. 

Yeah that was a bit over dramatic of me, just that laser thing really took me out of the feel in a bad way... I'll try and come back with something more helpful later ;) 

You should think "what it adds to the game and gameplay?"
Damage is a way of punishing the player for doing wrong or failing at the game. What's wrong about jumping from a ladder or 250 high platform? Add to that the way your maps are build, typical quake scale with no consideration for the altered falling damage. Its damage=punishment for nothing.
You should increase the threshold hight where only the bigger hight gives significant damage. Where it would be quite clear: don't fall here, you'd break your legs. Obvious danger is good.

Guns not working in the water - again why? And backfiring is just dumb - random punishment.
Its not realistic (if you want realism you should disable chainsaw in the water if anything). This adds nothing to the game, only taking away from it, because now you have to avoid in-water combat in your maps, knowing that the guns would malfunction.
This could work if you wanted to use water as a barrier, like HL does, forcing the player away from it. But then why not just use slime, which explicitly tells the player to 'stay away'. Clear game rules are good.
But if you have lots of accessible water volumes that offer exploration allowing combat there would only benefit the game. I missed my dopefish slaying. Or just lighting the dark corners with some shots.

Haven't played all the other maps yet, will comment later. 

SOUNDS
I'm making a patch changing the monster and most weapon sounds back to the original. Bad sounds ruin otherwise good mod. Simply removing grunt\enforcer wavs made the first map more enjoyable its not even funny. 

What happened to the pretty particles of MH quake? I'd like to enable them in RMQ. Having an option to have better particles than just old quake pixels would benefit the looks.

And how do you handle external textures overbrighting and flullbright bits? Most engines do nothing resulting in half the lighting range (compared to overbright lightmaps)and overall darker looks. I noticed same effect in rmq maps, which were probably lit for in-bsp pcx textures and look rather dimly lit in many areas. Most evident in e3 maps with darker textures. And the buttons miss the fullbrights in m1 and e3m4 notably), which would help them to be more standout. Not sure if its particular texture or engine thing... 

I have my own reasons for liking fall damage and stuff like underwater jamming in games. I even (predictably) like reloading and weapon decay. If you have to know, for me it adds to the challenge because it requires me to look for ways to deal with those limitations, which I enjoy, but this is a question of taste and if you don't like it, that's OK.

The fact you don't like it doesn't automatically make it a bad idea though. BTW vanilla Quake has backfiring underwater, with the lightning gun, so it isn't like that's some alien concept. It's in the game since it was released.

However, as I said it is being nerfed right now. No need to keep attacking it. We have taken the advice on board.

BTW, your plan to make a patch comes off a little like saying "Here, I'll fix your game for you." That's not what I would say in anyone else's release thread, even if I wanted to say it. Let people make their games as they see fit. 

I watched all of your demos and found them very useful. Some responses for you.

I personally think that the entry area to e2m1rq needs a better hint to the player. Maybe a crack in the floor, some sparks, and a second pop-up message: "a couple of hits should do it". This only occurred to me as I was watching your demo.

Sometimes I wasn't certain if you'd got lost or were just exploring.

The engine doesn't have fancy particles yet. They're on the list of things to do (as well as CSQC, PK3 and a billion other things) and we just had to choose a cutoff point and get this thing released.

I personally think here that hard-coding fancy particle effects into an engine is very much the Wrong Thing; they should be more controllable by modders. That of course puts the onus on the modder to do the extra work, and if a modder doesn't want fancy particles then you won't get them at all. Maybe there is a happy middle ground that can please everybody, but my experience is that if you try that you normally end up pleasing nobody.

It's obvious that some decisions need to be toned down a little, yes. Remember that this is a demo and as such is a point-in-time snapshot of a work in progress, not the finished item. It's a later demo for sure, meaning that it gives a reasonable indication of what the finished item will be like, and nothing major can really be overturned at this stage, but everything can be tuned and adjusted.

Lightmaps. The range is essentially unlimited. Some of the areas where you commented on areas being "too yellow" would actually have looked green in engines that did 2x overbrighting, as the red channel would have been clamped off. Standard lighting can go up to 1020 without being clamped (each style goes up to 255, up to 4 styles on a face) whereas GLQuake and derivatives are limited to 255 here (and even if you add a 2x modulate you lose a bit of precision which this engine doesn't); dynamic lights are unbounded.

It would be quite straightforward to add some cvars for additional light scaling and ambience, but I'm going to make an alternative suggestion.

I think you're running your monitor very dark. I looked through all the areas where you had to shoot in order to see by the muzzleflash, and I could see everything quite clearly all of the time, even though my own monitor is also quite dark. 

Please play e2m1rq on nightmare, or skill 2. It's a lot more fun. I like to try and cater for a broad range of players, I don't always succeed, but I definitely prefer to play this on Nightmare. IT's not too much of a chore either. I can do it without dieing. 

To be able to load e2m1rq, I had to rename a bunch of files to match the case that the map expected. I think was all of them:

rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_tileGib1.bsp
rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_tileGib2.bsp
rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_demonCrateGib1.bsp
rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_demonCrateGib2.bsp
rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_demonCrateGib3.bsp

I don't think this would have been an issue if they were in a .pak file fwiw.

More comments later, I hope... 

Doesn't support our filename length - this will be fixed for next time.