And looking at the poll at Quaddicted the two most used engines are a pity for Singleplayer

I could write a whole book on how that's the wrong attitude. I agree that the poll results were a little surprising, but it isn't that unexpected either.

Better preach people to read the manuals and learn to use their OS accordingly.

People don't want to read readmes, they wanna play.

If I decided to release the following, it would be downloaded countless times:

http://www.quakeone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2856

But I'd actually prefer to see if I can add this type of capability on the engine side. 

The player is going to tell the engine which map to load, then the engine reads it and sees what entities it's using. So it holds a cross-mod entity database and points at the correct folder if it exists? Message: "You need to install mod X" or "Loaded mod X".

It's not a bad idea but there's only so many good Q1 mods out there, and lots of guff. Also, I can imagine lots of stuff being shared between mods that could make it a headache - theres large differences between OUM and Zer, but lots of shared resources as well.

Typically problems happen when the mapper forgets to put 'use this' in the readme. I did the same with the documentation in my last pack, describing what to do but without those two simple words; underlined, in bold 82pt.

Anyhow, its sounds interesting; like an internal frontend. 

I suspect that having engines that automatically load the right mod is going to cause problems - would there be a way to override this if you really did want to play it in a different mod? As a softer option, how would a message that's printed to the player in-game if you aren't using the correct mod sound? The idea I have in mind works like this: You add a string key called "mod" to a trigger, and you fill it in with a keyword. The keyword doesn't have to correspond directly to the mod directory name(since you can't control what the user calls it), but let's call it "quoth" for sake of example.

Then the mod is programmed to ignore/remove any triggers which have a keyword corresponding to a mod they handle correctly. In our example, a trigger with "mod" "quoth" would be removed when we load the map in quoth. Then you just make sure the trigger has a "message" key saying "You need the QUOTH mod to play this map", and put the trigger over the spawnpoint. Of course, since the id progs(and all mods to date, but never mind that) doesn't check for "mod", it'll load the trigger and so display the message.

Since the trigger functions in the usual way, you could use it to trap the player somehow or make the map totally unplayable, although I wouldn't recommend that. If it's a soft option like a text warning then it doesn't even matter if mods give false positives. For instance a map that just uses entities from the current version of quoth but also adds a keyword trigger to warn people. If run in the second release of quoth(with this hypothetical system added) there would be no warning message at all, in the older release there would be a warning but it could be safely ignored.

A mod wouldn't be limited to a single keyword that it responded to, like for instance subsequent versions of quoth might support "quoth3" and "quoth", the former indicating you need features from the 3rd version. You could even add a key called "id1" that warns when you load the map in a mod that's not backwards compatible - although the problem is that would also set off the warning in the id1 mod, so probably not a good idea. Since this is mostly an issue for mappers, as long as future mapper-targeted mods practised this it could work. It'd even be ok as a standalone quoth feature not adopted in any other mod, but standards are always good things. 

People don't want to read readmes, they wanna play.

True, but if it doesn't work when they're installing/running it wrong, they have no one to blame but themselves. I don't see how adding a few words to a command line makes running the map a pain in any way. 

..those who did read the readme will have seen the note at the top saying about using an engine which supports coloured lighting, and joequake users typing "loadsky tramonto" - I was very worried about the player seeing the level with white light and normal sky and then thinking it looked shitty. I should have just added another line saying "RUNS IN QUOTH", maybe even with the address of the Quoth homepage...

duh!

BTW - I like joequake plenty, but why did they have to be different with the F@*&%ng "sky" key!!?!? 

Newlines in centerprints; probably, I don't know, try it.

Longer centerprints; scr_centertime I think, but in Fitz and my engines they can be logged to console, so you never have to worry about this again. See readmes for details.

Btw, I noticed the unusual and neat trick with the lava pool in the arena being slime in Normal/Easy, I don't think I've seen that before :) 

Doesnt hurt!!!

Fucking func_walled lava/slime doesnt hurt! If I had realised I would have put a trigger hurt in!

Its in spirits demo - quite funny but a SHAME :(

Oh well... 

perfect as it is; it's for decoration. This arena doesn't need any more damage than there already is. Also, with a trigger_hurt on the floor, the monsters would probably kill themselves soon enough ...

And if you haven't noticed already, JoeQ doesn't support the fog command. It uses the Nehahra syntax and only when the -nehahra option is enabled.

Some other engines (e.g. Tomaz) don't even have the same fog concept, which would render the parameters meaningless. 

Speed-demos!

This map has l00ts of scope for speed-demos. With the early GL + bridges holding back progression to GK + possibility of Grenade Jumping to a pentegram => shave off l00ts of time!

Also has anyone beat my skill 2 time of 33 mins or even post a skill 3 demo?

(I love watching peoples demo's :P) 

I forgot to mention:

Damn you are progressing nice and fast!

I just hope you will do non-base maps too. ;P 

Yes, this was more enjoyable than the last one, though I shouldn't have played on hard. Some of the ambushes were just wtf with vores and fiends silently spawning in my back. Fairly frequent Vore + Voreling gang and similar nasty encounters were a bit questionable too. A few times I almost ran out of ammo and health but it always somehow worked out in the last moment. The secrets (found all of them right away, nice) really came in handy, except for the Pentagram, which I wasted because I got lost in search of one of the key doors. Some signs/arrows would have been good. DBS against Gugs is tricky..

Nice architeture and texture work. I'm surprised you got all the details in without exceeding the limits. The Wolf3D-grade lava texture sucked though. The shattered muh_bad was nice, fog and polyps = awesome. The dogs were cool too. Some of the door triggers made beep sounds. Boring intermission persective - next time add several showing some cool parts of the map. 

I don't see how adding a few words to a command line makes running the map a pain in any way.

I understand your perspective. It is not difficult. 

I beta tested!!! but didn�t play the final release becouse i got my eyes fuckedup :\ hope to play as soon as i�m perfectly ok! but from what i�ve saw during beta... this one is real fucking good real nice brushwork and gameplay fun and balance enjoy it a lot on hard :)

As other people said u�ve realy improved a lot... real LOT!!! i�m already a noob at your maps :) maby i should give more time in mapping :\ but life eat me!!!

hope to see more from you my friend!!! and i will post a proper hard demo when my eyes are better to play :\ becouse now i�m realy fuckedup... 

This was great! Also, I had fun playing it. Although I apparently missed 3 secrets and 30 monsters.

Nice base texturing, I appreciate a nice clean base. 

...this one is worth commenting on.

1. Loved the solid architecture, nice angles on supports of all kind, grand in places but tight in others...as one would expect in a base. Excellent sense of place (the skybox and fairly consistent texture use really helped with this too).
2. Progression was well thought out until I had to return to the previously contained button in the SK room. Luckily I had triggered the message earlier so it eventually came back to me. otherwise I would've quit out at that stage.
3. The underground section with the rock work and then Kell's texture set was magnificent.
4. Quake started to judder when approaching the GK area. With my machine, the only time this has happened in the past was in certain places on Hrimfaxi's woefully vis-blocked first release. You may have taken qbsp/vis out for dinner and a drink since your last effort, but you have yet to consumate the union. Keep at it though!
5. I played on "normal" and enjoyed most of the gameplay, you really do understand the Quoth baddies on this skill level...far better than I do. Regardless, gameplay became increasingly unbalanced in the final stages.
6. Yeah, this is a base level worth playing/exploring. Grand, fresh, unbalanced but mostly just solid fun.

Thanx 

Took me 10 minutes to find the gold key door. 

I also experienced inflated monster counts - 358 on my first run through, and 328 on my second. After some investigating, it seems that whenever I save a game, then load it, the count goes up. Until that point, the total monster count displayed is correct.

However, opening the .sav in Wordpad reveals that the total_monsters global was already at the increased value when I saved, even though the count in the status bar was still 306.

I was able to easily reproduce this in aguirRe's engine (neh v3.08) - just killed ~25 monsters, saved, then loaded: total_monsters jumped to 311. Probably a bug in the spawning code of Quoth? 

I did all testing in my own bug-fixed Quoth progs, I'll test using the original also. It might be the horde-spawning that causes the killcount errors, I think I've fixed several of those. 

I get the impression (from a brief look) that this is rather different in Quoth. 

plenty of killcount errors here, already in the 2nd room where some dogs are horde_spawned.

This explains Spirit's demo issues. If you feel it's a problem, use the Warp progs instead. 

Its really nice to hear some good comments for a change - also some very usefull constructive criticism, tips and pointers! Thanks for the feedback!

Still waiting for a NH uber-quick demo! >;-)

Trinca - What happened to your eyes? 

why doesnt "bind 9 impulse 250" work in fitz?
To select the Plasmagun I mean, by pressing "9" on keyboard. The console just quotes me usage instructions when I type this... 

Would you say that the sign00n buffer thingy is killing the correct killcount?
Predicted - Level wouldnt load if too close to limit
Actual - Killcount f@cked when using savegames :-/

Signon buffer - predicted SOLUTION ?

Darkplaces engine - a wonder if using DP will fix killcount/savegames bug? 

You need to type it as

bind 9 "impulse 250"

including the quotes. Otherwise you end up binding the key to impulse without the number. Probably worth added to the config.cfg file. Do people feel that a more natural, single word console command for selecting the plasma gun, something like weapon_plasma, would be worth adding to quoth2? 

How about

"plasma"

I like it - like:

"god"

or

"fly"

Or: How about

"w_plasma"?