I did not think the wand belonged in Roman. Style aside, Roman does not have any dark spots, and the action is too fast-paced for me to tolerate its low damage rate. The few times I had ammo trouble, the chainsaw was sufficient to kill things. I guess Tronyn wanted the wand in there as a fallback in case the player runs out of ammo. If roman3 is played from scratch in skill 2, there is not quite enough ammo in the beginning. Also, someone noted ammo problems at the end of the level. There used to be an Equalizer item on the map, but that was removed.

Since there are some glaring problems, a re-release seems to be a good idea. Things to fix include the following: remove the offending demo, fix some annoying bugs in the mod, and maybe alter some of the entities in roman3. For instance, have an equalizer or riot controller available at the end of the level, and have some of the ammo respawn. Will need to see what Tronyn thinks about this.

As for the crossbow, I originally planned that as the secret weapon in the treasure room (in the start map), but Tronyn enjoyed using it enough that I moved it out in the open and put Mjolnir in the treasure room. 

This is same weapon as found in the Arcanum demo, except it fires a bit faster and gibs zombies at maximum power. While held as the current weapon, power builds up until fired. As power builds, the wand glows, and when it glows brightly, it is at maximum power.

I built the wand because I wanted a light source and weapon combo, and a wand was easier for me to build than some weird space gun. Also, I may add a mage class to Drake, which may extend to Tronyn's future projects. I will need to add the appropriate fantasy weapons to make this idea work. Before you think "Hey, awesome!", this is a low priority task, and it has a good chance of not seeing the light of day. 

The grapple was added because there was a time during testing when I got sent over some wall and (thought I) got stuck. Rather than have Tronyn suffer a full level recompile fixing problem architecture, the grapple was added as a band-aid fix to unstick the player. In addition, on my first run through roman3, once I made it past the gold key door, I fell down so many times that I got sick of wasting thirty-something seconds on each trip back up and noclipped to save time.

Thus, the grapple is a time saver and perhaps a life saver if the player gets wedged into something that without the grapple, only noclip would save the player. 

I'm almost at the end of the first map and then the thought occurred to me ... I have scarcely had an explosive weapon the entire map.

Quake and single player have always had the "explosive weapon" problem.

Either you have ineffective weapons (axe, sg, ssg, sng) or murder 80 monsters weapons (gl, rl), with the regular nail gun being sort of in the middle.

And explosive weapons just aren't fair to the monsters --- or interesting to use --- and can turn a room with 100 monsters into "hide behind wall and strafe out."

In this mod, due to the presence of the red spawns, the "explosive advantage" lies in the monster's favor and a being surrounded by 15 monsters was a real problem.

I wish there was a better laser.mdl and maybe a better sound for the laser --- it really doesn't fit in, although the strategic value and occasional self-damage from the weapon is great it really does stick out like a sore thumb and the view weapon model (PrimeviL's debug fix model?) doesn't really look like it should shoot lasers.

Maybe if the model were different for the view weapon or for the laser model or for the sound. The role the weapon plays is good and functions as a more effective weapon without being overwhelmingly advantageous.

I think every Quake map in a long, long time has suffered from the "too much" rocket launcher use problem. The Rocket Launcher really is more suited for deathmatch as a "close is good enough" weapon and it just isn't fair on the monsters.

Congrats on having monsters with non-explosive attacks that are still dangerous.

These are really the first new/altered monsters in years going back to 2005 [except for the dragons in NSOE] since The Lost Chapters when faced for the first time of the unexpectedness of the Droles, Polyps and mini-Vores. 

Ah, thank you! For pointing me in the direction of the problem. I have had -sndspeed 44100 in my commandline, never caused a problem 'till now, but I removed it and it worked. -nosound not needed thankfully. 

Does -sndspeed 44100 actually give you 44 kHz sound? What engine? 

hehe umm... I thought it just upsampled the original 11khz sounds. Maybe it was just placebo but I thought it made them sound a little better, less scratchy. You cannot turn shit into shinola, of course. 

Does -sndspeed 44100 actually give you 44 kHz sound? What engine?

only if the game provides 44.1kHz sound samples, like Nexuiz, Mindgrid's pak and RMQ do. On its own, -sndspeed 44100 makes the samples be played back at 44100 Hz. It broadens the pipe so to speak. How much water you put through it is another question.

If you install the manually upsampled 44100 Hz sound pack that floats around somewhere (original sounds, resampled to 44100 Hz but otherwise unchanged) you might hear a difference. When the soundcard upsamples 11kHz sounds during playback, you get an unpleasant digitized effect (if your ears can detect it) which should not happen with that "Quake resampled" pack and -sndspeed 44100. Basically, the holes that were left after downsampling are "plugged" (with a flat line) by the re-upsampling. That pack doesn't magically give the Quake sounds their original quality back though, just removes that side effect (from the missing data, ie holes) when playing them back at higher sample rate settings.

Frequencies that were lost during the downsampling process (to 11kHz) cannot be restored by doing that, they remain lost. I could draw a picture for you, but I think you might get it as it is :)

Using -sndspeed 44100 and 44.1kHz sounds only has an effect if the other parts in the chain can deal with them. So if you either have crappy speakers, or crappy ears, or both, 44.1kHz sound will not do anything for you. 

re: Metl
Roman1 is the most inconsistent map in terms of theme and layout, because it was two maps for a while - the gatehouse section, then the sprawling city/dungeon section. The second map (Venice of Blood) and the third map (Towers of Torment) I thought ended up being much more consistent. All maps are fully vised but as usual with these types of maps you will only get so much optimization out of it.

Re: Text Fish
Glad you liked it, the grapple was indeed a lucky accident. PM had that "unique key" idea and after he put it in the mod I thought well, given that the final area is now accessible either way and the map's really vertical (not to mention the sky ambush), why not let the player have some fun?

Re: Spirit
I have copies of my web site on my computer, so maybe when I get the time I'll see (if your offer still stands) about moving my site to Quaddicted.

Re: Baker
I know what you mean - Roman used to have a lot more explosives until I removed a bunch to make the player rely on other weapons, especially melee when possible. This of course meant that there might be insufficient ammo, so as PM said I pushed for the wand just in case every player didn't like the idea of resorting to the Chainsaw all the time. The laser is I think a really good halfway-between-shotguns/nailguns and explosives type of weapon. At the end I gave the player RL, but no sooner, because I generally think that only a boss-type fight can justify giving the player the RL.

Again thanks for the feedback all glad it's mostly positive. 

will there be an update in the near future? 

yeah I'm sure PM and I can have something together in the nearish future. 

I replayed the 3rd level (last one) and I am a little bit deceived by the end: wtf a cyberDemon has to do here ? I would have seen another big boss to defeat here: either a giant vermis, or a giant dragoon, or a retexture CyberDemon a least (not so yellow-shine-ish)...
Anyway, this is a great pack overall: keep it up !! 

...the point of spoiling the boss is...? 

...the point of spoiling the boss is...?

... it is just my personal feeling I am expressing here: I think the end boss (CyberDemon) is out of place in this map, or at least I would heve seen it retextured as the dogs...
It does not mean the pack is pure crap, far away from myself to think such thing. The pack is great, it deserves to be said, I just think the end would have been different with a different monster as a CyberDemon.

That's all :P 

He meant spoiling the surprise, not your critique of the monster. 

...that was my intention... Just got back from the first chunk o' holidays and did not have the chance to play the thing. Doing it tonight, though... 

sorry.... 

Fucking Awesome pack!
beat it on skill 1, only died like twice, until I reached the boss fight, where I died like 200 times. Too hard but I never got frustrated for some reason.
I thought the second level was the best overall, but the whole pack was pretty fucking good, if not up to SOE 2 quality. Love that pack, more than any other!
Didn't really like those spiders, either... I prefer the guys from Kinn2 and Travail. Minor, minor complaint.

Great job guys, looking forward to whatever you cook up next! 

Roman1 coulda used a little more Scrag.

Dynamite maps. 

...is a great map. A little crazy, but lots of action in an interesting space. Spent ages running around in god mode debugging.

When you get on the raft, throwing the axe (double-click) at the scrags cleans them up magic. The rumble and vibration of this and the Mirv... love it. And different enemies always coming at you from all sides.

Roman1 coulda used a little more Scrag
I _think_ he's being sarcastic ... ;> 

The maps are pretty much superb. At first I thought that the theme was a bit weird (not a fan of crazy texture combinations), but it is used consistently and it mostly works well.

Roman1 definitely felt like two maps fused together in the middle. You have this impressive, very 3 D front piece that's a little like a remake of e1m4, and then the very DOOMy part after that. Like the first part somehow ran out of juice.

Roman2 is excellent, although the gameplay basically consisted of "press five buttons" and "kill X amount of monsters". The layout was neat. The feeling was neat. The music was, for the most part, neat.

I did not find "the platform to the roof" on the first playthrough, even after some looking around, so I went "WTF?" and quit. That broke the experience. A "hello folks" to the playtesters here.

I found it now, but you can only expect Quake veterans to notice the bubble sprites in the "water". Anything that you want the player to find (and you want the player to find this, because otherwise they can't proceed and will become pissed), should be pretty big and visible. The messages in general were not descriptive enough ("opens elsewhere" doesn't cut it).

Roman3 was again very impressive architecture and layout, but the gameplay was a bit over the top, especially the boss fight.

The summoner teleports too quickly and is unpredictable, and I think the c********* model isn't Quake-y at all. If you aimed at being ridiculous, you did it. :)

I gloriously simply switched on god mode for the entire pack, because I thought I knew what to expect, and that's what I got, too. It's just not my cup of tea. I think that on Easy skill, players should be allowed to just take a walk in the park and take in the architecture while shooting the occasional monster.

Please allow players to turn off the music, like in This Onion. It was much better and got on my nerves less than in the Halloween map, but after a while, in each map, I wished I could turn it off, although I like the Doors. The music sounded weird in Fitzquake(SDL) - like lots of little underruns. One of the reasons I played in Darkplaces.

The mod part of the pack was certainly very impressive. I liked the blaster, especially since it had a matching skin, but you should make a new model for that, too. I liked the wand this time, because it was immediately clear that it was useful against zombies (still, weapons (and monsters) taken straight from other games feel a little like a compilation patch to me). It was a bit confusing that there were so many different weapons - why have both the SSG and the crowd controller in a map?

I like the design of the powerups. I noticed the Tome of Power (and I think a ToP weapon powerup system can work very well in Quake), but since I was totally in Godmode at this point, which has to do with the general gameplay, I wasn't really motivated to play around with it and really figure out what it does. Compare Hexen2, which gives you the first ToP very early when there aren't many monsters around, so you can experiment and see what it does. I think that's smarter than giving it in the middle of a crazy horde combat map. In general, you should consider giving the player some sort of test area, or shooting range, to get to know all the new stuff.

The book thing was underused this time. :)

I'd prefer armour shards instead of the coins.

Played in Darkplaces, since in Fitz the lighting seemed to look all stripey, at least in the startmap.

Comparing the pack to RMQ, it seems almost like the opposite, since fighting monsters in RMQ is gererally a quicker thing (with the more powerful shotguns etc) and hence horde combat doesn't feel quite so abusive. ARWOP combat feels a lot more like Quoth.

-> Nice. Please think of the kids next time. Having some people who are not from the Quake community playtest it would probably be beneficial. 

Hmm, nevermind, the FQ lighting issue was that I use mh's lit files and Fitz loaded id1/maps/start.lit and used it for your start.bsp, producing this:

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/arwop_litbug.jpg

... 

Just finished the final battle in godmode because there is no way I could have managed otherwise. The final boss took ages anyways, I already thought there was a bug and it was unkillable... Needless to say that I found it annoying and frustrating. :(

THe architecture and flow is great, I love the style. The monsters not so much. Especially the hell hounds were bugging me.

The hook model felt a bit out of place to me. But hey, Quake's weapons/items are weird anyways. I liked using the hook in the final map to stroll around and find secrets.

The music was super super super annoying in the second (and I think also the last) map. Since it has almost no dynamics there is a constant wall of noise hitting your brain. 

Yeah, I have to agree about the music.
Annoying indeed.
Also I'm not sure if the game is beatable on Hell mode. I've got no more ammo and shitloads of big monsters do deal with. I doubt I can take down a Shambler with the hook, not to speak about that boss. And I always get frustrated when I don't know how it works. I mean, does the spawning ever stop ? If it doesn't, the game can become un finish able. 

...once said something along the lines of : "We could easily write monsters that hunt you down and kill you without mercy, but I don't think tht much people would find such a behaviour that much fun. The whole point of FPS is that you have to be able to win..."