are part of the "problem". Quake players expect "kill monsters, (press button||find key), find exit." It's based around monster killing acrobatics. Exercises.

TR's $KEY method allows for some depth, in addition to the monster killing. Picking up the items, collecting them and counting them in your backpack to see how many you got, carrying them to the machinery, applying them, seeing the machinery start turning... seeing the water has been rerouted... the whole level is based around that. Other cool TR levels are the cistern, where you have to flood the whole level to proceed, St. Francis' Folly, where you have to collect four keys which are all behind deadly traps (with mythological background, and rather breathtaking architecture/jumping puzzles), Midas' palace where you have to turn lead into gold, etc... sure, you could just substitute buttons in all those levels... but *ugh*... that's so loveless and mechanic. IMO those rather primitive $KEY substitutions, and the little stories around them, are the reason why lots more girls play TR than Quake. Just btw.

Pressing a button, "2 more to go", returning to the machinery, assuming it has turned... actually there would be no need for the machinery at all then, the buttons would just be tied to a door (and thus we have just another quake level)... return after pressing buttons, door has magically opened. Technically it's the same thing, but TR's method is so much richer and more satisfying.

It's not the same thing... plus it could be any item... buttons are rather limited. Plus there are some places or scenarios where buttons would look out of place.

Basically buttons hide the interesting part (there is assumedly some hidden machinery behind them) while collecting statuettes, cogs, gems, airstrike markers etc. and placing them in the corresponding receptacle (altar, machine, etc) create an immediate satisfaction. Plus there is the "collecting fetish" that humans seem to have - "Cool, I have five of them." Hence the typical adventurer theme. Find $MYSTIC_ITEM - well first, of course it's in pieces which you have to assemble, and gosh, it doesn't stop there, you can put it into $RECEPTACLE and the fucking pyramid explodes :-) Plus, the little statuettes etc. actually look nice. "Cool, I found an item I never saw before. I wonder what it's good for." As opposed to "ah, there's the silver key."

The problem with Nehahra is the required engines. Quoth, for example, runs in any Quake engine, even Dosquake. I would be much more willing to consider Nehahra if the protocol extension stuff was removed (Nehahra-lite?) 

Its hard to make anything good. it always takes more skill, effort and time.
Its only easy to make boxes with a dozen of ogres lined up to be circle-strafed to death (from boredom). We all know that making a good map is really hard.

Why make something not everyone will see?
to have any depth in your creation! Even in the movies you simply cant notice and grasp everything in the first run. And that makes it worth rewatching (or just watching with all attention and thinking about what you see) - cause such movies have depth.
Indeed, some designers might be so affraid that you could miss a cutscene or god forbid play the way he didnt intend that they ruin any immersion by clearly forcing you on a narrow pre-determined path in all your actions. (no you cant jump over this 1 meter high fence. no you cant use the rockets in other location, cause you cant take more than 3 from those botomless boxes. and now we`ll take all your weapons away. just because.)
but I digress

Lets see how it works in the case of our fave game, just a very simple example: you have a shotgun and shells. And thats it. fun eh? Add a nailgun with some nails - now there is a choice of weapons which adds variety.
See - there is an armor over lava - do you take a risk of going for it or proceed unprotected? You make decisions, just like in your life, and suddenly the game becomes a bit more than just a reflex test.

GB: hate to turn this into another mapping help thread but:
func_wall cog; trigger killtarget cog msg "you have picked up a cog, go install it"
then use that logic gate to spawn a cog model in a mechanism when you come close to it and have "picked" the cog prior to that.
nehahra lets you have anything as a 'key', custents have more trigger and targets types too. you can do alot more than it seems 

was when an airstrike marker was stolen. It was so simple. But it made the level cool: "Umm, the airstrike marker was stolen by a Gekk raiding party." And you go, "wtf, GEKK raiding party?!" I loved that. 

func_wall cog; trigger killtarget cog msg "you have picked up a cog, go install it"
then use that logic gate to spawn a cog model in a mechanism when you come close to it and have "picked" the cog prior to that.
nehahra lets you have anything as a 'key', custents have more trigger and targets types too. you can do alot more than it seems

obvious reply:

why does nobody do it then? 

Speeds

It's about reality of time constraints when it comes to retail games. You barely have time these days to get the content in for the main path of the game, never mind spending time polishing and testing routes that most players will never see. 

Half-Life 1.

Willem - Thats the very reason why I think Half-Life 1 was better than Half-Life 2 or its other sequels. Depth. 

How so? I played Half-Life to death and don't really have any memory of optional areas to explore. The game was extremely linear. 

but there were little areas which you could find throughout it which enriched the gameplay experience. Secret areas, little nooks and crannies... Stuff which was really well hidden in some cases, and you didn't need to find to progress through the game. It adds replayability.

Personally I'm looking forwrds to GTA4 :D I wander how thats gonna be.... 

But those are secrets. Quake has those. I think Speeds was talking entirely alternate paths. Those are the things devs don't have time for. 

what devs? rockstar? bethesda? ubisoft? lionhead? bioware? or maybe 3d realms, they are sure short of time. plz
its a deliberate design decision 

HL2 also had secrets hidden off the main path, it was just like HL1 in that respect. They even had a cool device to let you know that it was a secret that you'd just found - they were all marked with the 'lambda' spraypaint logo. The first one of these was actually for a cache directly on the path the player had to take, but that was fair enough to teach you what the symbol meant. It also tied into the lambda symbol being the symbol of the resistance, which again I thought was neat. 

"what devs? rockstar? bethesda? ubisoft? lionhead? bioware? or maybe 3d realms, they are sure short of time. plz
its a deliberate design decision"

*waves* Me. I speak from experience. There is no time to waste on areas the player isn't almost guaranteed to see.

Gears of War had very few "off the beaten path" areas because of what I'm saying. You simply don't have time to build something that 5% of your players will actually see. 

The larger the company involved the more likely they have to use financial instruments to fund a project while there is no profit to show for it. When you use debt, you have to prove to the backers of that debt that product is being created, hence the tight development cycle.

It is actually an advantage of independents who may have a small dedicated, at times even unpaid, staff where they can go about developing game play at a leisurely pace.

For instance, I don't know if anything will come up it, but I have been developing a companion to Mortisville, using its assets in a stand alone capacity with the Irrlicht engine. It is nothing more than a huge Venice like city with dozens of puzzles and non aggressive creatures that roam around it. No time constraints, no worries, I let it develop
by its own logic. 

submit at least somewhat to that John Carmack school of game design (although not completely). Ie here's the shotgun, kill the monsters, push the buttons. Never bothered with Tomb Raider that much. Most players with some intelligence and experience from a few games recognize the attempts to dress up the game mechanic into something realistic as well, amusing and slightly annoying at best.

It's really common of course. Every game tries to have "variety". A training section. Plot interspersed with the action. Some of it works a bit but a big part of it is just dull.

You can play card games where there is no attempt to dress up the mechanic. It's plain artificial right there. After a little playing people learn to "feel" the game. They get good feeling when they pick up aces in poker - even when the aces don't represent anything from the real world.

Most of you probably get my point even though I didn't explicitly bring it out here, in one line maybe somehow like this: It's not necessary to have an externally plausible motivation to have a motivating game.

And what speeds said, decisions are what games are all about. If there are no decisions, then it's just routine. Freecell is a game that is very much based on decisions and it rocks. Civilization III has some decisions in the early part but mostly just routine, hence it doesn't rock so much. Some games, you do interesting decisions on the first or maybe second play time but then it's obvious always what to do in which situation and it's just boring. 

Willem thats the point of the whole argument - its not a waste to work on different ways of playing, siderooms and alternative ways. If your designers dont consider it and just rush out linear levels there is nothing good about it. To me its like saying 'we dont have a time to do lightpass, lets settle for minlight and some bloom - 80% of players cant tell a turd from a diamond anyway'. I listed all those companies (exept the obvious one) for their games, which have very large ammount of 'optional' content like sidequests etc. And it only makes those games better and more popular.
And Im not even proposing such scale of nonlinearity as, say Oblivion. Total freedom in unneeded in games. Just dont impose too many superficial limits and offer choice (and it will be roughly 50% players who see your extra content). GoW gives you an explicit choice of route in the very first level btw.

bambuz dont underestimate the importance of atmosphere and immersion - its one of the reasons people play games - and Quake has a good share of it 

GoW gives you a few choices either for (a) training purposes or (b) co-op. Nowhere else in the game is there a route that you may or may not go into that doesn't consist of a simple room or hallway.

There simply isn't time to build entire sections of levels on the off chance that someone might go exploring. In my experience, anyway. 

Generally the designers never get to make that decision.

I like adding alternate routes, especially if you add three or four but have the same four buttons / key / misc_whatevers that must be found in the level to open the big door to the next level.

My last project was very linear, but I opened up alot of routes as play progressed. I had to cut back a fair bit and block off some areas so the player wouldn't get lost or disorientated.

Anyhow, that sort of alternate path is good - even if the player only takes half the routes or (unlikely) one, they'll still replay to see everything if what they saw was good.

But a separate branch with no intermixing is bad. 

I need to emphasize these:

Why make something not everyone will see?

to have any depth in your creation! Even in the movies you simply cant notice and grasp everything in the first run. And that makes it worth rewatching (or just watching with all attention and thinking about what you see) - cause such movies have depth.

and also:

dont underestimate the importance of atmosphere and immersion

Something that's bothering me is the apropriate 'level' to analyse gameplay mechanics. If you reduce it as much as you can, quake gameplay is just mouse & key movements (i ignore the thinking part here, which might be bad). DS games come to mind, where the game is something that has story etc. but the mechanics are as simple as 'click at the right spot'. I'm always unsure to what level i should reduce gameplay mechanics.

Maybe the correct way would be to abstract from the games' scenario as much as possible, and try to find the most common analogue example in the player's experience, e.g. reduce Q (or any other shooter, for that matter) to 'run around with guns/shoot enemies/evade/explore/etc.'. TombRaider would be 'jump/run/shoot enemies/solve simple puzzles'(?). 

If you reduce it as much as you can, quake gameplay is just mouse & key movements (i ignore the thinking part here, which might be bad)

And if you reduce a vagina down to its basics its just a flap of skin and some highly dense nerve endings and muscle groupings but that doesn't keep me from thinking about it nearly every hour of the day. 

is asking for is in this post is for us to come up with some fun variations on Quake game play, not academic dissertations that by their nature destroy the experience. 

Is a reality for most developers (except for maybe the very few filthy rich independents, 3drealms obviously have time to switch engines and start all over again at least a couple of times...) but it also has a lot to do with the masochistic choice of making games with focus on cutting edge graphics where a lot of time is spent on things with a very little impact on the overall game experience. 

You barely have time these days to get the content in for the main path of the game

If you barely have time, you're one of the lucky few. I don't even have time for that. 5 platforms, 6 months. Oh yeah. 

It's a bit like a gas isn't it... it will quickly expand to occupy all available space. Everyone's often overambitious in the planning phase (before they actually have to DO the work) and/or there's not enough time in the schedule allocated for re-work and delays.

At the same time, the publisher (who usually has you either by the balls or bent over the table) wants to squeeze as much out of you as they can to justify the expense (and to make a more impressive bullet list on the back of the box). 

Quake play would be more fun if there were some NPCs and missions in some of the mods.

Stages/goals/objectives would be nice.

Rescue someone from the monsters, etc. Some more takes than just Chthons where a setting requires something other than shooting it.

Quoth and Quoth2 really expanded upon monster variety and it sounds like it made a number of other chores much easier, but Quake still has mostly one dimensional mindless gameplay (unless a mapper does an exceptional job on requiring exploration).

Considering how easy it is making maps for Quake -- something that seems to be possibly universally unique to only Quake -- the best way to give it extra character or add an extra dimension to it would be to provide tools to add depth to the gameplay (i.e. find the evil wizard who lives in the castle, meet with the monk in the clock tower).

Hell in a Can and sgodrune are some examples of lightly heading into that direction. A little bit of Nehahra had some of that. Too bad the QuakeC work would be onerous. And Quake isn't well suited for dialog as-is. :(

A shame because making maps is rather easy, it is just that the end gameplay ends up being identical every time. 

I think Speeds is right to some extent though. It's not just time and budget considerations. I think it often is a deliberate design decision to steer away from non-linear designs. Ijed knows why:

I had to cut back a fair bit and block off some areas so the player wouldn't get lost or disorientated.

People think that they want non-linear maps and many options, but in reality what often happens when presented with those options is that they get lost or confused. Even if they don't get lost, I think many players feel the need to explore the entire level before they leave, to make sure they don't miss anything. Even in a well designed level, this may necessitate some backtracking or other 'dead' time.

Boredom and confusion are not things that a sensible designer wants to encourage or facilitate.

Naturally there are players that may prefer a more non-linear experience, but as we're all no doubt aware, in a retail game at least, you have to cater to the lowest common denominator. If non-linear map designs are going to potentially confuse a large chunk of your target audience, you're not going to put them in the game. Commercial reality!