...And gave it a try.

Killed 11 monsters, roamed in circles for a good 15 minutes in the air ducts (no hints whatsoever as to where to go), then got sucked into the void.

Bleh.

Kinda awesome in places, some extra ugly texture choices (door signs above all), boooring gameplay and a little blocky architecture. Diving back in to get tom the end... 

Some very good architecture/layout. Too much colored lighting. Subtlety is required. Gameplay non existent. With this kind of spaces, I'd expect a kill count around 300+. Lots and lots of potential. Some very clever tricks and devices, you just need to use them wisely.

3 demos, to give you an idea of the difficulties encountered... Only last one complete, played with no sound.

titan_beta_thesilent.zip 

Processing archive: titanbeta2.7z

Extracting pak3.pak Unsupported Method
Extracting Titanbeta.txt Unsupported Method
Extracting quoth2test.fgd Unsupported Method
Extracting titan.map Unsupported Method
Extracting titan.rmf Unsupported Method
Extracting titan.wad Unsupported Method

Sub items Errors: 6

WHY do people insist on choosing those weird formats ? Isn't ZIP/RAR good enough ? Does it worth selecting obscure formats just to save a few kb in archive ?

I will never understand this, now I have to search for somwthing that can unpack this and probably it will be a cmdline tool. Why, why, why ? When I could simply click on it and unpack it if it where ZIP (without any tool installed, it works in Windows, in Linux, anywhere) 

because rar is not free and 7z can be significantly smaller than zip. just use the official tool from www.7-zip.org/ 

and this is why i fucking hate the trend of omitting the protocol in the address bar.

http://www.7-zip.org 

well u should get 7zip. u don't need winrar, winzip, winace and all the millions of other compression programs if you have 7zip, it does them all. thank god for no more fucking shareware winrar and it's popup i put up with for years before 7zip came along. 

Nevermind, I just think that ZIP is much better, because it's a STANDARD for such a long time and now any operating system has integrated support for ZIP.

Anyway, back to map : it's awesome. I haven't finished it yet, but I gathered almost all CPUs, I need the last one, I'm at 111 kils from 208, that's half of monsters.

I assume that the teleporter from the CPU room will send me to another area, that would be awesome, the map is very large, but detalied at the same time.

And some scripting sequences are perfect, the way that the second tunnel exploded and those monsters floating in space - jaw dropping... 

"Every operating system" also has support for BMP which does not mean we should not be using PNG and the like nowadays. 

The Silent - set skill 0 in console and restart map. I have 208 monsters on easy. NO SOUND? Then you missed part of the map. I made it a point to have ambient throughout.
Please check for errors, texture align problems, get stuck spots, to hard on easy...

RaverX - 7zip is the best compression tool out there. Thanks for trying my map. The end teleport will link to the next map (one of the planets or comsat).

I'm getting tired of using free hosting. Anyone know a good hosting site. Don't need much maybe 1gb storage.

Now on to the Tormentarium 

WHY do people insist on choosing those weird formats ? Isn't ZIP/RAR good enough ?

winrar supports .7z

u don't need winrar, winzip, winace and all the millions of other compression programs if you have 7zip, it does them all.

so does winrar ;)

"Every operating system" also has support for BMP which does not mean we should not be using PNG and the like nowadays.

or to paraphrase bash... "Saying that .zip is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders" 

quake releases have always been in zip. it would feel weird if that ever changed 

Mechtech: quaketastic.com, pw ilovetheshubhub
Not sure what the size limit is though. Iirc http://www.datafilehost.com/ is nice.

I am being a hypocrite about ZIP. At Quaddicted I do not accept any non-zip into the main sp map archive because only zip is supported by the backend scripts and the Quake Injector. It's the lowest common demoninator. 

quaketastic=50meg limit
I see your point about .zip now. Will use it for compatibility.

.zip 93,323kb ultra
.7z 66,001kb LZMA2

Too bad 7Zip is the better compressor.
Thanks for the link to the hosting site. Testing it.
http://www.datafilehost.com/download-729d06ee.html 

Shots from Tormentarium by Madfox
I relit using -dist 0.5 -range 1.5
Vis taking awhile?
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/vistorment.jpg

Nice looking area
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/tormentarea.jpg 

The 7zip GUI program is free to download and supports zip and rar as well. If Winrar also supports 7zip, then I don't see what the problem is.

7z is much better for big releases (especially if they don't need to apply for Quaddicted in the first case) since it compresses a heck of a lot better than Zip. The difference is large. So the bigger your file gets, the more attractive something like 7z becomes.

Installing an unpacker for a commonly used format isn't really too much to ask for, in Linux you can simply use the package manager like for everything else, and for Windows it's a simple download of either Winrar or 7zip GUI. Either of those will serve you well. It takes 5 minutes to install but serves you for a long time.

"It's always been done like X" is a very bad argument when it comes to IT. You're not using DOS anymore, right.

Some of the Stalker mods I downloaded recently were packed with 7z, so there's a practical example. Any final RMQ release is likely to be very, very large, so using Zip would be suboptimal in that case, too. Of course if someone is diehard enough to repack something like that with Zip because he loves that combination of letters the most, more power to them.

If a person is flexible enough to download and install mods for a game in the first place, it's reasonable to assume they can do the same with an unpacker in the unlikely case that they need to.

Now if I had to *sell* a download, then I would probably use Zip because I might lose some customers otherwise. Luckily, that's not the scenario I'm in. 

@Bernsen - I had to watch the demo in dark places. And having this dark map it is double dark. I had some cfg settings to get it right although the screen kept shakery.

I don't know how you managed to get on the second tube from the first outview. I can't jump 64 units, and by doing so you missed the key.
It seems one can jump higher in DP.

The squad was there before you killed all enemies on the lift. Thanks for bringing up the hom in the round lift. I almost forgot.
The corridor in the chapel is too dark.

@Silent - Good demo, straight away. There are some textures that didn't align although I repeatly had changed them. Even lowering the whole poly, but the texture kept on the wrong place.

@digs - I admit the entrence to the last cave in the cathedral part is too dark to see. So it's rather hard to find it. I will make it better in vieuw.

@Mechtech - vis-13h40 Looks a bit lighter indeed.

Thanks for the demo's, it cleared up a lot! 

.7z, Winrar, ZIP, any one of them is fine, just for the love of Mary, do not use dzip! For anything! 

ever since i started using 7z, i'm actually surprised people still put up with the winzip/winrar nag screens. we need to spread the word more! 

necros : some people actually buy the program, not everyone use them in freeware/nagware mode. But I work in Total Commander, there I copy, delete, etc. Am I use it to pack file (to ZIP) and to unpack.

It's so easy to unpack ZIP in Total Commander. I don't care what programs are using other people, but it would be nice to see standard formats, everyone can unpack a ZIP file without any other tool, but 7z, dz, etc.

I will never understand the need for so many formats (the same problems are in images - bmp, jpg, tga, gif, png and much, much more). 

That's because you don't understand their purpose. 

7zip plug in
http://www.totalcmd.net/plugring/Total7zip.html
http://totalcmd.pl/download/wcx/arc/7zip

pack plug in for quake pack files:
http://ghisler.fileburst.com/plugins/pack_plugin.zip 

jt_

Oh yes, please do explain me. You think I don't understand that some support alpha channel (tga), some compress very well loseless (png), some compress very well but with information loss (jpg), etc ?

I understand that there's the need for "a few" formats. But when you have BMP, DIB, JPG, GIF, ICO, ICB, PCX, PCD, PSP, PBM, PGM, PSD, PPM, PSG, PNG, VST, VDA, EMF, WMF, TIF, TIFF, WBMP, RLE, SGI, and many, many other formats it doesn't make any sense.

Ankh : thanks, I'll try them, they should solve the problem on my system, but I work on many computers (and at work I have hundreds of virtual machine, I barely managed to install Total Commander on most of them, I don't have time to install plugins everywhere : ) 

Hey raverx, now you are ranting just for the sake of it. 

I mean, there's loads of reasons why all those formats exist, what's the problem?

Proprietary formats for editors are inevitable, obviously. BMP isn't useless, it's extremely easy to operate on (and actually compresses well with a .zip :P). Some formats are legacy, because, you know, things change as time passes. Some formats are patent-free, some aren't. Some as OS/device specific. ICO can contain a lot of sizes, GIFs animate....

I suppose maybe there are cases where someone developed a new format when there was something out there that fit their needs exactly, and there weren't any licensing issues, but it's probably not that common.