I wouldn't want to try running AD maps on a Pentium 90 with 8-16 MB of RAM, which was actually one of the better systems you could have had when the original Quake was released. The game had to run on that hardware (usually worse), so there couldn't be many details in the levels.

As great as it is to see what became possible in Quake mapping after all these years, the classic levels remain timeless and really shouldn't be compared to what the community comes up with these days. 

Leptis Magna is one of my favorite AD maps. However, it has way too many encounters where we can just nail the enemies from very far away, which makes the enemies not react, because the enemies will only target the player if the player is close enough, even when the player is attacking them.

If the player is too far away for the monsters to target, the monsters should at least dodge the player's projectiles when they're hit. Get the angle of the projectile's trajectory, and make the monsters run in an orthogonal direction. 

or just run around randomly when hit 

With the Benny Hill Chase music playing. 

Giftmarchar's ad_e1m3 is fully playable, and is different enough from AD schupuler, so should be added. 

 

I discovered recently that AD was featured in the March 2018 issue of Pelit, (probably) the largest game magazine in the Nordic countries! :D

Brace yourselves as I reminisce: Back in the day, before the days of the Internet, I used to read the magazine a lot in the elementary school (1995-2001) library when I was a wee lad. But as Internet became more widespread, and I grew up, there was a long time I hadn't read the magazine at all.

But once I graduated in 2014 and got a stable job, I picked up reading the magazine once again. And I noticed some of the journalists in the magazine were still around as in the nineties, so there's a lot of oldschool flair in the magazine, with a lot of love for old or retro games.

Some highlights from the article:

"Arcane Dimensions is Quake as it's painted in our memories. The building blocks are largely the same but the action has been beefed up and the architecture is from another world."

"The culmination of the mod is Forgotten Sepulcher. Despite the size everything is thought out and detailed."

"20 years of practice in map design has produced fruit, the seed of which id Software probably didn't realize it had sown."

"I was enchanted by AD from the first bite."

After a brief description of his run of Foggy Bogbottom the author states: "Not every map of the mod is an epic like that of Foggy Bogbottom, but it sums up what AD is at its best: feeling the map, horror, action, exploration, pacing, replayability, a little bit of everything."

(The author seems to like large open maps with exploration with side paths and backtracking.)

"The Triforce of speed, avoidable projectiles, and ever surrounding punishment shines bright"

"The game keeps you on your toes."

"The maps in AD are spiky Rubik's cubes that occasionally lock in places to show something, but are often just skillfully intertwined geometry, art for the sake of art. They evoke a lot of images, but often slip to the realm of the incomprehensible, which since the days of Lovecraft has been a good setting for a nightmarish feeling."

"Quake Champions has shiny graphics and polish, but in attitude AD dominates. Rough is beatiful."

The author states how many of the maps draw inspiration from FPS games throughout the ages and states: "AD is Quake with two decades worth of experience. A map pack, which makes the id maps look like preschooler tinkering. Not that the folks at id were bad at the time but knowhow has simply just increased since then."

"Subjectively I have an unhealthy fixation with the Quake framework. Objectively AD is one of the best things that people have done with the framework."

Screenshot of the article with the text hidden to respect the text copyright:

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/AD_Pelit_jpg.jpg

The text at the beginning says:

"AN ANCIENT GOD AWAKENS

In capable hands certain games just keep getting better over the decades. One of them is Quake." 

Seeing this is very humbling and exciting at the same time, I feel honoured to have contributed to this mod. :) 

Very nice to read this. 

Only skimmed what u wrote and that's great :) 

Sock also just retweeted a blog article by the same author, more about "pixel graphics" in general rather than only talking about AD: https://twitter.com/SimsOCallaghan/status/977864228118941697 

Hi,
Im running the later Quakespasm on a mac and looking at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8JWgsz8-lQ

I think Im missing the rain and some "smoke trail" with the torches and grenades maybe.

Am I missing some configuration? Im running a very clean config with just a texture 2 change and some joystick (due to handicap).
Thanks 

Regular Quakespasm does not have those effects. You need to run AD with "quakespasm-spike-admod.exe" to get those special effects. 

Here it is, app is inside: http://www.simonoc.com/files/ad/quakespasm-admod-macOS.zip 

may the gibs be in your favour! 

So, sock himself is using QSS to play AD. This should be enough reason to switch to QSS over regular QS for playing this mod. 

How can I contact you with a question about one of your maps? 

maikfranzxaver -at- gmail -dot- com 

 

FYI... QSS != quakespasm-spike-admod 

has anyone managed to find all of the new 10 secret triggers in ad_e2m2? there used to be only 3 before it was updated in 1.70. After hours of not finding any new secrets i didn't recognize from 1.60 I noclipped around the entire map still and couldn't find the last 2 anywhere, which is kind of weird since there should be rooms of some kind for them, but there don't seem to be. is this a bug or am i just too stupid to see them? 

nevermind, i'm stupid. 

Or was that for swampy. If you are having too much trouble, switch to an engine that supports drawing EVERYTHING when outside the level bounds...oh wait you can't because QS/QSS and QuakeDroid are the onlyones that support AD lol. 

is there any way to configure coop to work properly? it keeps dropping packets and a lot of things like bullets and particles aren't showing up on the client. 

The packet size limit of Quakespasm is fixed at compile time (DATAGRAM_MTU 1400), I've tried raising it to 32000 for testing coop and it worked OK, but routers/internet are not required to deliver large packets from what I understand.

try Quakespasm-Spike; it has a new network protocol which is supposed to be better for coop: http://triptohell.info/moodles/qss/