The fact that you have to exploit a gimmick makes it very unintuitive - the gimmick of pushing the button exactly when the other posts are moving. A real machine would never work like that, but instead have some safety function (i.e. stop all posts, do not accept input or something similar) if you use buttons when it is in operation. 

You had to make your light fixtures into worldspawn? Wuzzat and how? 

I might be stupid, but I'm certainly not patient enough to fuck about trying to figure out how to lower three electrodes just to see a crap slime monster die. I've seen Cthon die, and it was crap, I'm sure the slime monster is just as crap.

I had my fun playing the rest of the level, and the boss just left me with a bad taste in my mouth at the end. I suppose you might liken it to eating a good Christmas dinner and then following it up with flavourless cheese on crackers that were stale last Christmas. 

Thats the most fun I've had since the last time I had the most fun I had. Very nice looking and some excellent gameplay. More please. 

Try this after waking Chthon up:

1. Press the left button and hide until completed.
2. Press lightning button and quickly run to the right button and press it too.
3. Go back to the left button, press it and hide until completed.
4. Press lightning button and fry Chthon.

Rinse and repeat sequence two times more. 

Awesome map; excellent architecture and even better gameplay. It's really quite a feat you managed to make it so interconnected and seemingly nonlinear and yet easy to find the next place to go. I even grenade jumped onto the platform above the grenade launcher and facing out to the yellow armour surrounded by slime (hard skill placement) and it still didn't manage to break up the flow of the map somehow.

Health placement was perfect, although I had an excess of ammo. However, I did find 7 of the 8 secrets and I suspect that without the red armour, pentagram and quad, I'd have faired differently. It's always a tough balance with secrets I think - keeping the map challenging for players that find them and viable for players who don't. On that note, the secrets were pretty inspired and the classification of difficulty added something.. I'll probably mimic this in my own map.

As for the boss, I found him maddeningly frustrating for about 20 minutes - even when I'd figured out what the hell to do I was having problems - and then felt a wave of sickening smugness come over me when I finally killed him.

In all, the most fun I've had with a Quake map/mod in a long while. 

else I noticed was the very smooth player movements in the entire map; no snagging or unnecessary jumping. Monsters also like to move around easily and cause more unpredictable results.

I guess Lun's DM skills here pays off very well. 

Not much more to say really - I loved it. Some of the secrets were very tough, but I eventually got them all. I hope to see more maps begun in 2001 completed. 

like nehahra episode 4 :( hope glassman finish soon! 

Excellent design, very nice, lots of different bits and a good layout with some good exploration. Best bit was above the YA trap. Still didn't like the rock texture though. Everything else worked really well.

Only thing it was missing was enough fun. The start was a bit too hard but okay, and later on about the 120 monster mark was good, in between was quite tedious. You did all the right things with monsters and stuff, a bit too sparse on the health and early ammo, but I just didn't enjoy the middle bit that much.
New monsters were fine, just a bit wearing.

Some of the tempting shelves above the slime were highly counterintuitive, given the secrets were hard and required jumping puzzles.

The Chthon bit was the first equal worst Chthon battle ever, along with the end of Contract Revoked. I played around for a bit, and then thought I could either waste loads of time getting utterly frustrated, or go do something remotely enjoyable instead.

But as I say the design was great... 

this map seems very much like a mix of APSP1 and CZG07b. 

that was very good: design, gameplay, atmosphere
reminded me of czg07

I spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out how to kill the boss. Killed it successfully afterall. 

You had to make your light fixtures into worldspawn? Wuzzat and how? 

His light fixtures were made out of brushes. They can either be func_whatevers, or they can be part of the worldspawn. He had to switch them from the former to the latter. 

1. Why would you make a light brush a func_anything
2. What is the benefit of putting things in worldspawn and just what is it?

Stimpy, sometimes your ignorance astounds me. 

You'd make something a func_whatever to reduce vis times mainly, and sometimes it also reduces the polycounts.

You'd put it back in the worldspawn if you ran out of models. There's an engine limit to the number of unique models that can be cached. If you have ogres in the map, the ogre model is one model. If you have four func_doors, each func_door is a model, for a total of four. 

So Move-To-World command, essentially. So for detail brushes you'd make it a func_wall? if that area is causing VIS problems? 

Good stuff. The combination of rock and base was excellent. The concentric and frequently curved structures had a solid industrial atmosphere, especially by being very vertical in most areas. Good combination of textures; the rock wasn't awesome, but that's probably because it's gray and therefore a bit limited by the palette and going for anything other than gray would have spoiled the color scheme.
My favorite bit was the walkway-into-stairs activated by the blue keycard. That was sweet.
I got lost a couple of times, while looking for the keys, but that's not unusual for me and it wasn't enough to make me noclip.

Axemen rawk. Nifty combination of existing id content; familiar but new.

Blue/NuMeg Enforcers were much saner than the last time I met them, which is good. Their use of two ranged attacks was a little outside the standard for Quake monsters ( usually just one ranged/one melee ) but it wasn't anything to overpower them.

Red Enforcers were good. Not sure exactly what happens with their invulnerability/partial invulnerability. I think that the first attacks against them do less dmg so they are certain to get off a few shots. Then they lose that protection and die faster.

Good thing about the custom monsters was also that they were used sparingly and in appropriate places, resisting the temptation to overuse them for sheer novelty. Except the fourth red dude - he couldn't get his dick over a rock step, so I just cacked on him with grenades from a few feet away. Oh well.

SnotChthon/Tripletrodes. Um, no. No way. It was a novel idea for sure - three threes instead of three pairs to achieve victory. But really, it was like trying to solve the Towers Of Hanoi while a prison inmate beat me over the head with a claw hammer. Counterintuitive setup, given that as well as requiring thourough investigation and observation of the mechanism, it also then requires timed observation and timed pauses. You didn't give the player any indication of the 'trick' SPOILER that one of the switches has to be pressed while the trodes are still in motion SPOILER. And all the while dodging fast travel splash projectiles and essentially inescapable environmental hazard. That's a shopping list for 'Frustrated Player Flambe'. Sorry.
The Half-Lifey chamber in which it took place was well designed - capped off the 'concentric' motif perfectly.

Overall, 'twas a long and winding attack into an adequately defended base. Management should look into draining that toxic sludge though, it's environmentally unsound. 

I posted a review for the map over at retroquake http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~retroquake/blog/?p=243 .I gave it an eight. I really like the map alot, although i have an unnatural love for techbases so I'm not totally impartial. And ill switch the download link to a fileplanet mirror pretty soon so we don't hurt your bandwidth. 

yeah, the rock suffers from banding... are you guys still so opposed to 24-bit textures? Even if just that rock was replaced with an external .png file... The position is kinda weird, since most new quake textures are made from 24bit stuff anyway.
High res, now that's a different matter.

and I second the weird color of the enforcers too, it didn't fit that well, the bright blue and red.

I liked the architechture a lot and gameplay was pretty nice too. Any chance you'll make a BIG dm map (there's a lack of them) out of this by erasing the start rocky area and adding a few ents, maybe one additional route to the choke point? We discussed this a bit with Trinca already. 

I�d love to see this ;) 

This map rocked. Architecture and gameplay (for the most part ^_~) was top-notch, and connectivity was excellent, if a little disorientating. The Q2 base theme was executed consistently and attractively; the curviness of the base structures, intertwined within the rocky cave network worked perfectly.

One thing I would have liked though were those little arrows scattered around that direct you to the key doors. I spent much longer than could be deemed enjoyable running around in circles looking for the GK door.

Great take on the axemen btw; they work well in a base theme. The modified enforcers were cool, even if their various shielding properties didn't get appreciated that much (I just kept shooting at them whatever).

Sadly, like some of the others here, the Chthton fight prevented me from finishing the level. Although I knew I'd seen everything up to that point, and it kicked arse, so I had an enjoyable time nonetheless. 

I also thought that they'd have been helpful directing the player to the doors. 

I actually thought about making this a DM map. Dunno if I can get away with that now with my current employers but the thought occured to me as something that could be fun. :)

Oh, I was going to put arrows in and Von told me not to, so blame him for that. The boss fight is entirely my fault though. :(

Oh, and as for enforcer shields, here's the breakdown.
When they spawn they have no shield, and when they're awakened the shield activates at 0. It recharges a few points per frame based on difficulty (it's 1 + skill). HP's are subtracted from shield strength first, then health. Therefore, the best tactic is to never relent on the attack so that you don't waste too much ammo chipping away at the shield because you're a lazy bum and let it recharge. Nailguns are therefore best (SNG is damned effective), shotguns not so good (single shotty is basically impossible on skills higher than easy). Grenades do enough damage that it's inconsequential.

While this was almost never really taken advantage of in the gameplay, the shields are particle shields only. The lightning gun will fire right through it, shorting it out and reducing it to zero with no penalty. When the attack stops the shield recharges as normal.

It'd be fun to see a Q1SP that makes something of that ... ;) 

I tried to play the map yesterday night, and it was very slow when new monsters appeared, i.e. at the very beginning, when the first blue enforcer appears, suddenly the game goes slow... I have a Athlon 2600+, ATI radeon 9200 and 768 Mo. I launched the game with FitzQuake 0.8, so do you have any idea how to solve this problem ?