I watched all of your demos and found them very useful. Some responses for you.

I personally think that the entry area to e2m1rq needs a better hint to the player. Maybe a crack in the floor, some sparks, and a second pop-up message: "a couple of hits should do it". This only occurred to me as I was watching your demo.

Sometimes I wasn't certain if you'd got lost or were just exploring.

The engine doesn't have fancy particles yet. They're on the list of things to do (as well as CSQC, PK3 and a billion other things) and we just had to choose a cutoff point and get this thing released.

I personally think here that hard-coding fancy particle effects into an engine is very much the Wrong Thing; they should be more controllable by modders. That of course puts the onus on the modder to do the extra work, and if a modder doesn't want fancy particles then you won't get them at all. Maybe there is a happy middle ground that can please everybody, but my experience is that if you try that you normally end up pleasing nobody.

It's obvious that some decisions need to be toned down a little, yes. Remember that this is a demo and as such is a point-in-time snapshot of a work in progress, not the finished item. It's a later demo for sure, meaning that it gives a reasonable indication of what the finished item will be like, and nothing major can really be overturned at this stage, but everything can be tuned and adjusted.

Lightmaps. The range is essentially unlimited. Some of the areas where you commented on areas being "too yellow" would actually have looked green in engines that did 2x overbrighting, as the red channel would have been clamped off. Standard lighting can go up to 1020 without being clamped (each style goes up to 255, up to 4 styles on a face) whereas GLQuake and derivatives are limited to 255 here (and even if you add a 2x modulate you lose a bit of precision which this engine doesn't); dynamic lights are unbounded.

It would be quite straightforward to add some cvars for additional light scaling and ambience, but I'm going to make an alternative suggestion.

I think you're running your monitor very dark. I looked through all the areas where you had to shoot in order to see by the muzzleflash, and I could see everything quite clearly all of the time, even though my own monitor is also quite dark. 

Please play e2m1rq on nightmare, or skill 2. It's a lot more fun. I like to try and cater for a broad range of players, I don't always succeed, but I definitely prefer to play this on Nightmare. IT's not too much of a chore either. I can do it without dieing. 

To be able to load e2m1rq, I had to rename a bunch of files to match the case that the map expected. I think was all of them:

rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_tileGib1.bsp
rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_tileGib2.bsp
rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_demonCrateGib1.bsp
rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_demonCrateGib2.bsp
rmqwinter11/maps/e2m1rq_demonCrateGib3.bsp

I don't think this would have been an issue if they were in a .pak file fwiw.

More comments later, I hope... 

Doesn't support our filename length - this will be fixed for next time. 

Well... new drivers fix glitches with strobing surfaces, nice.

About game, good:
-level design
-bsp2 idea
-new models
-engine balance between classic atmosphere and bells&whistles

bad:
-new sounds
-annoying particles around player when firing blaster 

Cool. Still haven't gotten around to playing much...

(also sound works perfectly on linux this time around, makes a nice change) 

One of the features of RMQ is that you can play thorugh id1 maps with it, but increased fall damage and underwater jaming actually break some maps 

Also, is there an command to make the water non-transparent in RMQ? Thanks 

I am encountering rendering bugs with id1 maps in RMQ with transparent water. 

Yhe1, r_wateralpha 1 works fine. 

... somewhere. Guess that's not too helpful, sorry! 

there are r_lavaalpha r_slimealpha and r_telealpha.

Yes, we've noticed some water rendering bugs - we're on it.

In theory RMQ also supports Nehahra and Quoth maps - but the more complex ones using triggers we didn't make wrappers for probably won't work.

Enemies should swap out fine though - a Drole becoming a Shambler, an ogre2 becoming a rocket ogre (don't remember well). 

The water rendering issue we can't retro-fix in id1 since that'd mean just repacking those maps with the fix mwh mentions - I think that's on Quaddicted.

As to underwater combat, the idea wasn't to just break it, but make it more unique. For example making the melee weapons speed you up so that it doesn't matter that your ranged attacks are faulty.

Didn't work though, back to the drawing board. It was an experiment though, and some ideas came out of it - like making air_bubbles recharge your air supply.

My e3m4rq and e3m5rq have quite a bit of water in them, so underwater play will be getting more focus in the future, as we get to figure out what works best.

Please bear in mind - you're getting to see the insides of a development process here :) 

It's been said many times before but ultimately the 'Remake' element is what's caused so much trouble. If you were making a mod in it's own universe as it were, people wouldn't have expectations. But people expect Quake, and the more of Quake's own rules you break the more you'll annoy people. I wanted Doom 3 to be like Doom 2, but I didn't get that. If I'd not had those previous expectations perhaps I'd have liked Doom 3 more.

I started writing up something more detailed divided into three sections, Player enfeeblement, randomness and atmosphere, but really it's this fundamental question of are you making what you think Quake should have been, or something that builds and improves on the original.

If it is the former then there isn't much to argue about design wise because it's the vision of the team making it, and you can just stick up the sign saying well, I think Quake should have given you no working guns underwater etc. 

Here is a demo of e2m1rq

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/e2m1rq_ankh.7z

Some things I liked, some I didn't like but overall the impression is positive.
The map itself was very good.
I always liked the fact that original quake levels weren't that big. Playing them is always a blast. New maps with more than 200 enemies on normal skill overwhelm me and if the gameplay isn't super exciting it feels to be hard work. From the explanation by Ricky I should have played it on hard but I know form experience that rmq gameplay tends to be much more difficult than standard quake. I will give the other maps a try after some recovery ;) 

While I haven't been able to play the latest incarnation of Remake Quake yet (no OSX build, I have a feeling my old XP desktop may not be able to run the gfx ... has problems with DP) ...

I did watch the Youtube on PlanetQuake.

I personal enjoyed the miscellaneous game play challenges of the prior demos.

But the grunt sounds and possibly some of the player sounds to me are too ... loud or demanding of attention. Instead of letting the player get submersed into the environment I feel that the grunt sounds pull you out of that submersion.

Kind of like how I honestly despised the sounds in Q3. Especially Orb and the announcer voice. I once described it as a cacophony.

I don't know. Maybe the sounds could somehow be made more subtle and quiet with some sort of Audacity filter or manipulation or whatever people use for sound processing (I don't really know).

At least that's my perspective. The maps look beautiful and I look forward to playing them and I don't mind a few twists in game play to keep it fresh and I enjoyed playing the last one. 

This is how I love quake:
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/e3m2_e3m3.7z

Of course I know the maps by heart but I have also tried playing like this using rmq (previous demo) and I would usually die pretty quick.
Standard quake is forgiving, you are allowed too make some mistakes. 

It's been said many times before but ultimately the 'Remake' element is what's caused so much trouble. If you were making a mod in it's own universe as it were, people wouldn't have expectations. But people expect Quake, and the more of Quake's own rules you break the more you'll annoy people.

this.

it would be much better(imo) if the rmq continue the same direction as previous rmx maps ie modern/enhanced mapping style with an old fashion gameplay and some quoth qc here and there. e1m1rmx is good example. 

btw i have noticed some bug with e2m1 , the water in the starting area/cave just disappears to me. watching at different angles 

I agree with Spy's comment completely. New textures and monsters are okay as long as they open up new challenges and are in harmony with the original content (Quoth delivers perfectly in this regard) - however, all those extra sounds (which are mostly out of place) and completely modified game mechanics can ruin what would otherwise be a top-notch pack with high-quality maps and ingenius monster placement.

Being simple, raw and to-the-point has always been the key with Quake. Personally I wouldn't want it any other way. 

I know you guys have IQMs coming soon.

Any reason not to support Q3 mdl also which is a helluva lot easier on the engine that IQMs?

Or is there a good reason to not like Q3 mdl? 

Ijed, please give an cvar to turn gun jamming and fall damage off when Playing id1, nehahra, and quoth. 

It is a good point about the "remake" being the problem because people expect a sort of better-looking copy of Quake with some new mapping entities and a few new monsters.

I have said in the past that the name is unfortunate.

I know the development process, the people involved and the underlying tendencies of the project very well. The tendency of the project for a long time has been to become its own animal, in short, RMQ is different and wants to be its own.

There are other mods that don't "break the player's expectations", chiefly Quoth. This is actually a guiding principle of Quoth, as stated by Preach to me privately. We actually used Quoth as a base when we started, but abandoned it because ultimately we couldn't get what we wanted out of Quoth, because some of the ideas we had ultimately and unavoidably break "the player's expectations". This is by far not a new or recent development in the team.

I could ask "who is this rhetorical player with these postulated expectations", and a number of other questions like that. But that discussion is endless and not productive. In the end, there are different ideas about Quake, and that is OK. Freedom!

So let it be very clear, RMQ is its own animal and is not trying to be an extension of Quake in the same way as Quoth. It is accurately described as the team's vision of the Quake universe (isn't every mapper here taking the same liberty of having his vision realized?), but it stopped slavishly copying the original long ago.

A project such as this could not survive for as long if the design goal was so narrow and allowed so little room for modification (because then its creators would effectively be creative slaves to the expectations of others). Remember a large part of the RMQ team are NOT MAPPERS, and even the mappers on the team have their own mental image of Quake that isn't identical all the time. Our way of dealing with that was to allow some episode-specific developments. I believe this makes the game richer, even though it must be kept in check to retain an overall identity to the game. Since this overall identity is the sum of its parts, and not all parts think the same (we're not the Quake mapping Borg), it will differ from vanilla Quake for sure.

It is not "Quake RMX", I'm sorry. I encourage those who want that (and wanting that is entirely OK, don't get me wrong) to get in touch with Kell and contribute to the Quoth series of remakes. Let me say that our map and other sources will be released under some free license (this is a difference to Quoth that suddenly seems entirely logical because Quoth is protective where RMQ is permissive), and I have no objection to people using them for their own purposes. It would be decent to wait with butchering it until after we made our final release, but in principle there is no objection to it. I also don't object to the porting of my maps to Quoth, but I'm personally not interested in the job. ;-)

We try and go for a very similar core gameplay - like I said, kill monsters, push buttons. We don't necessarily stop there, which might be what irks some people. For example, some people bleedin' hate the idea of a laughing hellknight, while I think it adds to its sinister personality. He might even change more in the future.

Let it be its own game, and remember mod is short for modification. It would be fair to judge it on its own terms, not with an expectation of Quoth or "being the Doom2 to Quake's Doom" in mind.

I don't hate anyone for not liking RMQ, it is your good right, but it should be "allowed" to have its own identity please, that's all I ask for.

We gladly take all criticism on board that points out the technical faults of the project, because it makes RMQ better. However at least I am pretty unwilling to do this

continue the same direction as previous rmx maps ie modern/enhanced mapping style with an old fashion gameplay and some quoth qc here and there.

for the reasons I stated above. RMQ is more than a mapping project.

@Baker: No problem, the grunt sounds have been scheduled for replacement for a while, and I know what you're talking about. About IQM; I think IQM (and/or DPM?) would be a better choice for a possible Quake Standard Base than MD3 and MD3 also is no skeletal format (IQM can be animated from CSQC for animation blending and all that jazz, for example). 

Vanilla Quake *has* fall damage, so turning it off entirely would sort of go against the player's expectation. 

You know what I mean