Giving up the RL for that punk arse secret is a bit rough. Yes - i missed it. %<

My favourite bits: the blood trail in the floor cracks, awesome insanity scroll and the nice use of fog. Looking forward to a replay. 

made me feel 100% better about myself 

 

really? That's crazy talk. 

I think all that can be said about this one has already been said in the above posts by the other regulars. No single fault, no dull moment -- simply an atmospheric masterpiece. Maps like these are the very reason that Quake has been (and will always be) the favourite shooter of mine.

(Demo w/ latest QS.exe) - 60:58, 10/20 secrets, 222/222 kills
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/apsp3_erc.7z 

quaddicted front should mention this soon, but in the meantime, my review is up here:

http://www.quaddicted.com/tronyn-reviews/subterranean_library_by_than

For me the one drawback was that I was sometimes confused by the layout (and as I say in the review it might be just me), but the main strength of the map was the detail put into the broken style and how much the map rewarded exploration with secrets. The detail put into things being broken, gave a real sense of an ancient, long-decayed, forgotten-by-the-gods place. Or aka, great atmosphere. 

Yes - It was quite very confusing... just enough to make one feel stupid, but not overly annoying.

The way the doors with (say) one glowing rune on them became detroyables without any markings at all (once the rune was attained) had me scratching my head for ages. 

But imho, it's worth more than 16.5/20!
Visuals 10/10, gameplay 8.5/10, and bonus points for the dynamic envirs, tomes, and all the ace secrets. 

I didnt find it confusing at all, either layout wise or what to do next wise. Thought there was enough placemarkers, hints etc. 

I was doing just fine on my first playthrough, but on the second I got hardcore lost after the third rune. 

I thought it was confusing that when you got the rune, the rune door magically turned to rubble and I did not see it! It was confusing because the place was in ruin, so one more pile of rubble does not look out of place. The rune doors should of exploded or turned to rubble infront of the player.

@Tronyn, nice review but IMHO 16.5 out of 20 is rough considering how good this map is compared to others. I can understand getting lost can be a problem but the map is very much exploration (huge number of secrets) and not a linear corridor experience. 

...Is still the gold standard for interconnected-yet-obvious. 

my ratings are pretty inconsistent and subjective as a whole, all I can do is rate it on how much I enjoyed it. If I were trying to do an "objective quality" rating, this should be like 18 or 19 and OMS25 should be like 5. heh. I definitely recognize how much work went into this and was impressed by the detail and secrets, but still, 16.5 reflects how much I enjoyed it.

I've thought of just having a general system but quaddicted already has that with the crap/excellent scale. 

thanks for the nice review. Glad you enjoyed the map.

Personally I tend not to have big navigation troubles in complex maps, but I did get some feedback from the testers regarding getting lost at times. I tried to improve things, but ignored some of Negke's feedback about the broken rune doors, which I probably should have taken on board (instead of his suggestion, I just added a message the first time you break one.)

I also understand the problems some of you guys had with cramped-ness. I have a tendency to do that in my maps. If/when I get on with dm5rmx, I'll try and make sure that doesn't happen - the original is very cramped, and I'd like to avoid that as much as possible.

Will check out demos when I can. My main comp is hosed now for some reason (one of those times where it was working fine when you shut down, then the next day it inexplicably doesn't work properly.) 

Never bothered me - I'm kind of starting to think of it as your thing, but it's not inherently bad by any stretch.
I'd like to think that navigation wasn't a particularly big issue for me, but then again my demo was almost an hour long. I never felt exasperated anyway, and I think a lot of that was dedicated to secret searching. 

WTF, were you speedrunning it?? ;) 

For Tronyn - I respect your review and the work you do for Quake, but this map deserves at least 18/20, it's a awesome map, huge, but also with a lot of details.

For than: man, you simply rock. This is a very, very cool Quake map, I hope you'll release many more in the future. 

Maps don't "deserve" a certain score. 

"Maps don't "deserve" a certain score."

Well, if that's true, then nothing "deserve" a certain score, everything is subjective. I was only trying to say that the map is much better (in my opinion) than a rather average 16.5.

And when I say average I'm not saying that 16.5 is an average score, it's actually a good score, but I'm saying that almost any recent Quake map would get that score. And S. Library is clearly much better than most recent releases, so it should get a higher score. 

Exactly, it's your opinion, a map score is subjective; that doesn't make everything subjective. Not sure why you would think that. 

you are both wrong.

It is simply inarguable: Than's map deserves no less and no more than 4 bananas out of an ostrich. 

somebody put up a 100% demo, I'm losing my sanity looking for secret # 20. 

More people will see the star rating than Tronyn's score and even those who do stumble across the review will probably have seen the rating first. 

HTH go map. 

Whilst testing the map, I did a couple of runs to get all secrets and couldn't find the last secret on two occasions. That was even after enabling noclip :/

Maybe I'll put up a demo tomorrow if I get the chance (my pc was screwed up last time I checked though.)