The sense of place is amazing.

Here's some demos where I die a lot and wander about gawping at the architecture.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v075wb80mk0nu2g/ijed_zendar.zip

1/10 secrets and missed a load of kills. Also only went through a single SK door, so plenty left to do!

Challenge felt fine, I was just off my game a bit.

Reminded me of the plague village level from Painkiller. What is that eye symbol on the doors to the houses? It reminds me of something. 

Don't have much to say about this as it was pretty much perfect in all aspects.

Except for one thing: The secret high on the left as you enter the main courtyard is a demon door which are normally openable by switches. I spent a long time looking for a switch for that...

Demo: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/zendarsham.zip

(47 minutes - 30 minutes playing, 17 minutes trying to get into that secret or back to that secret once I got lost). 

@Orbs, there is no official demo of all the secrets but I believe Shambler got them all, I think! :P

@ijed, wow you are crazy! skill 3 first time, its nuts! :) The eye symbol on the wooden door is nothing, just detail. I like your route, you found stuff in cool ways, but you still missed a ton of stuff! :D 

you'd realise I'm a bit of a fanboy for your maps ;) 

14:16 is still much to long
if somoene spoils me that last secret il try improve.atleast have to find a solution for those last zombis i kill


http://members.upc.nl/verorber/demos/zendar_1416.rar 

good thing it wasnt the secret at the end of that demo, geez you fell down alot :)

whats in a a name it was the secret behind the shambler on the roof 

@shambler, very cool demo, you were obsessed with that demon door but it was different, my fault. I also should have not locked the roof towers, the items are not critical.

It is awesome to see all the different routes people are taking and how they are getting to the roof. Very cool demo's so far. :) I will release a pack of the one's I got working next week. 

I think it is interesting.that the horde parts are not criticised. They would be the only common bad thing that came to my mind when thinking about it. I did not mind them when playing, I actually liked them! So you can make good horde fights! 

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/zendar_drew1.zip 

Short review: this is incredible!

My first play: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/zendar_mandel.zip

I must have found some accidental shortcut because I think I missed large portions of the map. At least judging by the monster count - I only found 60 (easy). Unfortunately the demo lacks total monster count since I restarted the recording after the map reload.

Here's a little utility which replaces reconnect messages with nothingness, making most multilevel demos possible to play back in most engines. Should support any protocol since it works on the raw level. Source and mingw (win32) build included: http://mandelmassa.net/quake/raw-unmarathon.zip 

It was a typical orbs screw up that gave me the multidemo playback issue, when i loaded up my command line yesterday to watch a demo to find the last secret it reoccured and i had a closer look at my commandline and saw it wasnt the latest fitzquake, after changing that could watch back all np. + i did a 12! sec improvement over the above posted demo with the last secret, gosh so slow was hoping for more:) 

@spirit, what would the horde of zendar be without a good horde fight!

@Drew, as always you play like a master with perfect jumps and magnificent infighting sequences! :D

@Mandel, it looked like you were toying with the AI, lovely movement, you should really try skill 1 it could be a better challenge. :) 

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/zendarnightmareisforpussies.zip

2nd playthrough, skill 3, no deaths. Don't usually play skill 3 so I forgot how much more effective ogres and shamblers are so I did get below 50 health a few times.

Sock if you like church infighting you'll like the massive clusterfuck I get in this :D 

@Shambler, yeah awesome skill 3 demo with cool route variety. The more demo's I see the more things I want to change about the map!

I think the rooftop encounter could have been triggered better and there certainly should have been a jump route back up to the ogre's balcony. Also the locked towers should have been unlocked, this is an old design which was setup because of the old silver/gold locked door system. 

As posted in #tf:

<@Honkbler> got thru zendar on hard with 84 kills....that is going only to the minimum of areas, but killing all monsters in an area
<@Honkbler> i.e. not leaving any visible / encountered monsters alive
<@Honkbler> i did kill one deathknight on a walkway because he was visible, and 4 zombies visible thru a grate

Get SK in top left of main area, go thru SK door on right, around to lower GK area and up to GK, retrace steps, do GK door bit and endgame, exit. 

unless i get bored and no new releases :)

Improved the Er by grabbing the SNG and a bit less mistakes.
Did the NH with the route i had in mind yesterday,still lot of mistakes but that comes with lenghty demos;)
and i tought i was going crazy. am i getting that old that im actualy forgetting secrets after finding them? Not yet, my friends(demo-proof included) my best geuss is that its a packetoverflow kinda thing, but im not the tech guy here.It happened that often that amade a slight tweak to the route, but herecomes the weakness of my geuss even then it sometimes happened and by then there isnt to much action yet. I tried getting it from when on the roof aswell, same bug so i get it asap to not have to restart cuz of it while 10mins playing already

http://members.upc.nl/verorber/demos/zendar.rar 

Am I the only one that found progression a bit confusing? I spent most of the map walking around wondering where I was. Early on I guess a secret opened up a whole new area, at some point I got a gk and forgot to return to the gk lift for ages, mainly because I'd progressed so much further that the gk door was a distant memory by then, and the level was still pushing me further in the wrong direction. Then the hole opening at the end had me a bit lost - totally forgot there was a hole even there. The blocked door opening at the end was the problem, that should have remained blocked. I thought with that opening something must have changed beyond that door so went searching through the level again.

So yeah I did find it a bit TOO non-linear.

Having sk's open doors between two areas you've already been to doesn't help. I guess there were 3 different sk doors all of which actually lead nowhere and don't progress your game, which is not what a sk door is supposed to do.

On a second playthrough it would be fantastic, since I'd know where I went wrong first time through. The design is just awesome sock. Definitely a breath of fresh air as your ability to create architecture and detail is some of the best ever seen in Quake. 

to find the similarities to the Thief game, especially the roofwalking 

Zendar and some of sock's other maps have really pushed the envelope in the swiss-cheese-topology, wandering-and-backtracking zone of the Quake design space. I'm selfishly glad about that though; it happens to match nicely with some of my personal FPS gameplay hot-buttons.

I was thinking a bit about how playing this reminded me of "filling out the map" in Doom, and (not for the first time) I thought that It's too bad that Quake didn't get even a rudimentary automap function. Obviously 3D automap is harder than 2D, but some sort of automappery could make strongly nonlinear Quake maps even more widely accessible & enjoyable. 

@Kona, this map is certainly not for the traditionalist because the keys are setup different. I am not really a fan of the "one key one door" idea and thought giving players a choice could be fun.

There are 4 Silver keys and 4 doors, three of them can be accessed from both sides to confuse the matter more. The gold is your primary objective, Silver is secondary and in most cases, optional.

The map is designed to always take you back to the Hub, you cannot be lost for too long because it always leads back to one central location.

The GK side has brown arrows all over the place and the hub had large key symbols. The map exit, well its in the center of the map! I tried for ages to make the flow go towards the gold lift/exit so it would minimize the feeling of being totally lost. 

On a second playthrough it would be fantastic, since I'd know where I went wrong first time through.

This is indeed what the map is designed for, yes it may seem weird that the first play through is not the best, but this is a map that grows and gets better the more times you play it. Something to make xmas last a little bit longer! :P 

Please remember everyone to VOTE for the map over at Quaddicted. 

/me bans sock for vote-begging! 

@spy, I am a huge fan of the Thief franchise, so it is indeed possible that there is a lot of "Thief" influences in the design. One of my favourite Quake maps is E1M4 and there is also similarities there, with the huge city below the water and the GK and route across the top like the platform in the giant lake of the Grisly Grotto! 

And this is a good thing, as myself i'm a huge fan of the Thief series too, and seeing something that has connecting on and off is a great

I'd like to see more maps in the same vain (ie the City maps), its kind of unique for the quake scene

I wish me a Merry Christmas you never stop mapping