The mod is all too eager to give your 11 points of falling damage from falls that in standard Quake wouldn't damage you at all. Recommendation: determine whatever is the max safe falling distance in Quake and ONLY access damage after such a fall.

thanks for bringing this up, i forgot about that. felt the falling damage was overly harsh, and i'd rather just flat 5 damage as per normal quake. it's especially apparent in this map as it's a very vertical one with plenty of falling.

The grapple is extremely effective once you get the --- um --- hang of it ;)

maybe i'll go back and try to figure the damn thing out later.... heh, but you need to jump into that first lava pit for that pun. :P

Likewise, 5 button mouse support should be a standard. My Mac supports 5 buttons, for instance, but not in FitzQuakey type of engines.

yes please, although i'd say this should be in all fitzquake engines! (and really, all engines in general).

I didn't look, but the RMQEngine should support "record a demo at any time" just like DirectQ does.

strictly speaking, you could always do this in any engine: quicksave, disconnect, 'record demoname' (no map specified), quickload. i know what you mean, but keep the above method in mind if you're ever in a bind.

OMG it isn't Quake enough.

i didn't bother saying that this time because i've already gone over this at least twice re: RMQ, and as development continues on, it is fairly obvious that being 'quakey' is not at all the goal of this mod, so i just take it as it is. if you go into this expecting something totally new, you will have a good time with it.

Oh yeah ... the camera work and help buttons are uber.

actually, i found the incessant cutscene cameras annoying. but i think that's more because this map had to both be an 'actual' map, as well as a learning map, since it incorporated so many new things. hopefully, the actual version bundled with the complete mod (when's that coming, btw.. ;) won't have to teach so many things since that can be done in it's own tutorial map. 

Yes, this map (any RMQ demo map) will have to go out of its way to also spoonfeed new mechanics to the players; without the need to do that, there would be a lot less cutscenes here.

Indeed, the final episode integrated version of this map will play in a more straightforward manner. Speeding up the puzzles etc. makes sense.

Thanks for the continued feedback, those are all good points. And that's why we make demos.

A stone's throw from terrific, heh. Hopefully next time we'll hit the mark then.

Cheers,

gb 

I found myself balanced on a pipe above the first boiler in the dark and I thought "what is this, Mirror's Edge?" then I saw the pale blue glowy thing in the next area, and the ventilation shafts and the endless ladders, and the block puzzle, and I realized that I was actually playing Half-Life in 256 palette colours. And I fucking hate Half-Life.

However, the aesthetic level design is excellent apart from the ziggedy lava pools in the train well - I would suggest throwing about fifty more polys at them to give them nice rounded edges.

As necros said, it was not at all obvious that the boiler needed shooting repeatedly. It should show damage somehow as you attack it.

The engine, to be polite, sucks rusty goat bollocks. Seriously, you can't even overlay the HUD? And the particles are awful. Go play Darkplaces and come back when you can alphablend things.

(I gave up at the block puzzle after I trapped myself between the large block and the wall) 

> The engine, to be polite, sucks rusty goat bollocks. Seriously, you can't even overlay the HUD? And the particles are awful. Go play Darkplaces and come back when you can alphablend things.

Would you despise a Ferrari for not having caterpillar tracks? Is a butterfly useless because it doesn't have tusks? Does the lack of outboard matching his-n-hers pontoons make the F16 a bad fighter jet?

Otherwise keep up the constructive critisism; it's much appreciated! 

With chase_active 1, the camera goes into walls, creatings homs. That's with he rmqengine, in case it wasn't obvious. 

Chasecam isn't fixed, no.

Just to be 100% clear so that nobody has any misconceptions here. Most of the work I've done on the engine has been in the area of enabling stuff specifically required for this demo. Otherwise it's heritage is FitzQuake > QuakeSpasm, and you shouldn't expect anything beyond what they do.

The engine isn't meant to be a general purpose engine. It's meant to be a "reference implementation" that other engine coders pick up RMQ features from, put them into their engines, and then you use the other engines instead. Until such a time as that happens it serves as a stopgap so that you can play RMQ, but it's eventual goal is to become obsolete, not to replace $YOUR_FAVOURITE_ENGINE. 

Necros: strictly speaking, you could always do this in any engine: quicksave, disconnect, 'record demoname' (no map specified), quickload. i know what you mean, but keep the above method in mind if you're ever in a bind.

Had no idea that could be done. 

Is it possible to use one single map as the only tutorial map, showcasing all the new gameplay mechanisms, instead of inserting here and there cutscenes in every RMQ map? I personally would like this approach much better. The uninvited cutscene in a gameplay map really slows down the pace, and feels rather obtrusive, especially when you are playing the map for the second or third time. In other words, it helps to reduce the replayability of the map. 

on the start map; that makes the most sense (imo...) 

You don't have to shoot the buttons which activate the tutorial cutscenes.

Apart from that, yup, e1m1rq will have grapple, trap and puzzle training in a special section. Or maybe the start map. This is just for the demo. I had to explain it somehow.

Half Life in Quake, well, some maps are going to be different from others, which is a good thing IMO. It's impossible to please everybody.

It is Quake, of course. Quake allows you to do these things; grapple mods, cameras, and func_doors have been out there for years. It is simply the choice of the level designer if he/she doesn't use them. 

Quake has always been oriented towards point-and-shoot horde combat (Tronyn, JPL, Trinca) even when using, say, Quoth or Zerstorer or Hipnotic. I'll say Necros in particular doesn't do it that way (and CZG back when he was mapping).

But it isn't because Quake SP mods had to be that way, it was because evolving to more sophisticated gameplay would tell hella effort. And substantial risk.

Case in point, Nehahra is a work of art and everyone who likes Quake should play it once. But I didn't really enjoy the gameplay. The maps were beautiful, the use of new features was great. More than likely, in practice it might have been being forced to watch the demo again after every death or maybe getting tired of the advanced AI killing me. Whether it should have or shouldn't have, Nehahra didn't "take off".

Quoth was a nice incremental upgrade. Many of the Lost Chapters monsters worked very well and the incremental improvements and the rocketeers and such. Much thought and tuning was put into Quoth.

And Quoth offered more of the same providing a few extra mapping conveniences and a few extra baddies that were crafted to represent specific types of threats.

But it is still point-and-shoot.

E1M6RQ

The play was deeper, I felt like the encounters were more focused and that individual enemies represented a greater threat and challenge. It felt more personal. (The opposite is needing to spawn 40 monsters to truly threaten an experienced Quake player type ...)

The environment was clearly richer. Looking around for grapple spots, for instance. Trying to get the hang of the grapple swing. This is the best grapple I've ever experienced in Quake.

The experience with E1M6RQ, especially with the cut-scenes which were probably overused a tad ... but again everyone knows this map was fleshing out new features -- it felt like a more personal environment telling a story and giving the player a hint here and there.

I did have a little trouble learning the ropes of the game play, but honestly after cheating off Monster's homework and watching his demo for 20-30 seconds I quickly knew how to approach the map and use the tools.

Maybe in some slightly different world, this game would have been Quake 2. I can --- no kidding --- see a cohesive set of these maps plus developer docs + map editor defs --- effectively being the Quake 2 we never had. 

Quake has always been oriented towards point-and-shoot horde combat (Tronyn, JPL, Trinca) even when using, say, Quoth or Zerstorer or Hipnotic.

That is not true at all. 

was introduced when computers / engines became fast enough to actually handle hordes of enemies. Up until then, Quake was oriented towards fighting small groups of enemies. 

Something that definitely came across when I was testing this map a few days before the release. When I finally managed to complete the map on normal, the one thing that struck me was "were there really only 40 monsters in that?"

There has been a definite move away from filling maps with monsters. Not even Trinca can out-horde Tronyn.

The truth is, you really don't need that many monsters. This map, the recent map by negke, and many of the 1997-era maps are good examples of this, even though they are all completely different in concept and execution... 

personally I think some of the move to horde combat has come about due to increase in size and scale of maps. Maps as big and epic as some of the ones in recent times probably feel the need to have tons of monsters to match up the epic feel in gameplay.

Back in 1997-2000, maps were not as big and therefore small groups of monsters was the norm. 

larger areas provide more room to maneuver further decreasing threat from monsters.

plus, it just looks funny fighting a single monster in a huge room. 

Gb's mapping style (in this map at least) was fewer monsters and a more involved gameplay flow.

The mod must be flexible enough to support, say, Marcher or Masque style gameplay and at the same time Distrans or Negke styles, otherwise its a failed mod.

I think I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but this is Gb's take on this particular map - others in the mod as a whole are completely different (and some are his as well).

In theory we could have released, say, four or five unfinished maps or alongside e1m6rq. Instead we went for a snapshot of key things we're working on, like the grapple and pushables, to get feedback from everyone.

And in general the feedback is very good; thanks.

Also, a note about the grapple - the DM players seemed to have much less problem with it... 

When will bw available thr progs.dat and (hopefully) also an .fgd for Worldcraft ? 

Both the QuakeC source code (those .qc files) are available in the download and the engine source code are in the download.

You use a QuakeC compiler like FTEQCC to compile .qc source which builds a progs.dat (although technically you could use Pakscape and open pak0.pak in the supplied download and just extract the progs.dat).

fteqcc compiler, gui version:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fteqw/files/QCC%20GUI/3343/ 

The fgd / other editor files should be in there as well - if it's not then I'll upload them somewhere. ((Yes, I haven't even tested the download myself :P)) 

and I must say that the grapple was somewhat easier to use in the dm maps than e1m6rq. I'm not sure if it was that I had not used it in a while, but to me it may have been more of the mentality change from a multiplayer to a singleplayer situation. In miltiplayer I was more inclined to hook right up to a grapple spot the second I saw it to gain speed, but in singleplayer I was like 'wone liufe, sooper seruous bidness' and tired to excrescence more caution trying to avoid being killed; which ended up getting me killed in lava. Also I feel that in the dm maps the use of the grapple was more of a choice, and was usually ued to explot the maps or swing around next to each other with the chainsaw.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hQC3nkftrk) 

http://youtu.be/3hQC3nkftrk 

True. In multiplayer, the grapple is practically always a choice.

It should mainly be used as such in SP mapping, as should pushables; note how the lava gap near the SK can be jumped without using the grapple, and the box puzzle can be bypassed via rocket jump. However, one or two grapple or pushable challenges in a map might be OK, although not everyone's cup of beer. Both grapple points and pushables work really well in conjunction with secrets.

RMQ is a collection of tools. It is up to the level designer what they want to do with them. You can have a horde combat type map in RMQ, rest assured.

e1m3rq will end up at about 300-400 monsters on Hard, including hordespawns and huge open areas, so there are really examples for both ends of the spectrum inside the same episode, even. e1m2rq, as another example, is more about collecting keys and fighting smaller groups or single monsters largely... you can vary it, RMQ doesn't strongly encourage one direction of level design. This is partly due to the fact that we have several pretty different mappers on the team and the mod needs to serve everybody's needs. If someone has a request for a specific feature, it is usually provided eventually.

Other RMQ maps follow different formulas - it's going to be a varied conversion.

I found it a fun little challenge to keep the number of monsters down, deliberately. Although more crept in towards the end of development. I enjoy laying the horde smack down in other maps, though. Both have their place.

No doubt we have a lot of growing and polishing to do yet. Many things might change. 

Didn't use the RMQ Engine ... have been playing using Fitz 0.85 SDL on my Mac (performs very well) and have not had the chance to try this with DarkPlaces or FTEQW or fully playing with the RMQ Engine.

It looks like there is the need for brush model interpolation in the Quake engine like when the cubes puzzle blocks drop off the ledge and the very fast "squishers" -- for lack of a better word.

Also the camera cut-scenes are great but the occasional very subtle lack of smoothness that I occasionally notice makes me wanna try this in DarkPlaces which I know has camera smoothing.

I've played Remake Quake several times, a few times the whole way through and mostly not.

Last time I'll mention this, but in the very beginning where you normally start the map on E1M6, I feel it is unfair that virtually every way of getting down to ground level gives 11 points of damage. It's not a huge problem.

One thing I definitely like about the mod is the ability to reel out the grappling hook to lower yourself. If there is a "tutorial start level" in whatever distant future, I think it would be beneficial to emphasize that feature and force the player to use it once.

I really like that this mod gives off such a insecure vibe when playing it and it feels unQuakey while being Quakey.

It really does feel like Remake Quake is an alternate Quake 2 ... whether or not that has anything to do with the project goals or not ... I'm just saying it feels like how a "true" Quake sequel with a bit different game play and several small enhancements could have turned out.

p.s. I like it when if an Ogre falls into lava, he bursts into flames! 

very fast "squishers"
this is nothing to do with interpolation, rather it stems from the qc governing brush movers, specifically SUB_CalcMove.

essentially, as the function is calculating how long the bmodel will take to move to it's destination, if it finds that time to be less than 0.1 seconds, it simply sets the origin to the new position.

this is kind of stupid because that's what causes things like getting stuck inside super fast movers. otoh, i'm assuming that's in place to prevent collision errors from the engine itself but there's already the sv_maxvelocity cvar to prevent that anyway, so it might even be some left over code that was obsoleted by sv_maxvelocity later on.

anyway, to fix the problem would just be a matter of setting a lower speed in the entity keys.