Shambler fails at gamedesign 

You did get 100% monsters on normal, aguirRe has informed me that there are four missing monsters with entities with no targetnames. For some strange reason quake only reads six of the seven secrets, but a pop-up message occurrs with all of them (weird). Hmm, maybe I put one of them as a trigger_once instead of trigger_secret. I'll check... 

Unfair gameplay. The towers were a pain in the butt since you had no choice but to take damage. It got better after this but there were still some annoyances.

I played the map with Darkplaces and FPS was constantly pretty low on my new computer. There were also some strange bugs - you were able to walk through some brushes (mostly boxes) and enemies came through walls in a few spots.

Architecture was pretty good but I'd have stick with original surroundings (grass, mountains and blue sky with maybe water beneath the gameplay area instead of lava).

Didn't find any secrets, took me about 15 minutes. 

I happened to notice one strange secret room with a ROS, maybe that's the lost secret? 

...That's because of some Darkplaces' bug. Played it (sort of ) in aguirre's GL and it works like a charm.
But, totally unenjoyable without a very fast F6 finger... 

The Quoth creatures are pepper. Too much and they spoil the map, but used sparingly they make it more entertaining. 

I was thinking if I made it so that the guys in the rooms at the tops of the towers were facing away from the elevator instead of towards it it would have given the player a bit more of a chance.

ROS secret is a tuffy. Four of the secrets involve shooting textures, two of which are subtly 'incorrect' textures.

Has anybody figured out the Pentegram secret yet? Its on top of the third tower but getting there without cheating - you have to stand in a certain place and shoot a certain button. 

Yes, I found it. Hence my remark about the possible shortcut. 

the map is too difficult, try running it under Warp in coop 4. Or coop 3 for only std id monsters.

And if it's too easy, there's always coop 2 ... 

I worry it was a bit too obscure! 

Try running it in a engine other than yours. The spf (not fps) will make it worse. 

Your current Neh engine don't have the extra coop features?

I ask because its more favourable to use the most recent for warp (mainly for the PG effect) but that'll mean that the extra coop mode starts won't work? 

to help balancing the gameplay, I can't do much about the open layout and fps in other engines.

What I meant was putting the map+skybox under the warp (i.e. Warp Spasm) directory and run e.g. -heapsize 48000 -quoth -game warp +coop 4 +map sickbase. The important thing is to use the warp progs for the extra coop modes to be available.

It might help fps a little using coop 3, since the std id monsters are probably less demanding than Quoth, otherwise it shouldn't have any impact. Make sure to use the 48M heapsize.

ijed: The coop modes have nothing to do with the engine, it's all in the progs. I always recommend using the latest engine version. 

I read warp and thought warp exe. 

I was just joking and trying to subtle hint how much I miss your engine. Damn Linux! 

Spirit: OK, no problem :)

neg!ke: Invincible bob is a Quoth progs bug (a pretty common bug in many mods), same as what happened in SRC. If you run under Warp, it won't happen.

metl: Turning back all func_walls to solids will actually increase marksurfaces from 52k to 57k (pretty close to the hard limit 64k). Other values will still be over the normal limits along with vis leafs going up from 5k to 12k (this will crash most engines immediately). Clipnodes went down from 43k to 37k and # models went from 342 to 188, though. Lightmaps are also too much in both cases; about 80 > 64.

Not to mention having 46k portals to vis, just fastvis is about 25 mins and fullvis ... argh. Qbsp also went up from 5 to 14 mins. Having just a fastvis is basically pointless; it can't dismiss much due to the open layout and it's almost 16MB (more than twice the map size 6MB).

As soon as you get above groundlevel, it's constant packet overflows with std protocol 15. And if that's fixed with an extended protocol, the map feels *much* more sluggish than the current release.

Fullvis helps in some areas and would've helped even more if some holes and windows were plugged. So there's definitely room for fps improvements, but the current release is actually rather good, given the extreme map layout and level of detail, monsters etc.

Also, most of the flickering entities are solved in the current release without a full rebuild, if Ricky decides to release a third version. Raising the engine efrags limit is already done in my engines, that doesn't solve the "span too many leafs" issue. 

Need to learn to create more detail with textures instead of geometry. Its old Quake fterall.
Im still yet to see people use alpha grates/fences, since all the engine mods support alpha textures (and old engines are usless for such maps that brake all the limits anyway) 

A lot of good points were raised on this thread with regards to gameplay. I accidently played on Hard (batch file doh!) and made it up to the two end bosses which I couldn't kill without cheating. I found 4 secrets.

High Points:

- Great big DooMy vast space and mega structures reaching to the sky (great wow factor)
- Some nice brushwork and fixtures in places
- sprawling non-linearity
- cool shadows from nice light fixtures
- neat sculptures
- great sense that you're in a volcano
- generally good navigation after you open up new areas
- Another new mapper who can feed us more good stuff if he's inspired to continue

Lows:

- I saw a couple stuck robo-drones that can shoot but not be killed
- Chuggy framerates + Guants = many reloads
- Battles where you are pushed into the enemies and can't avoid significant damage (tower battles - those hateful vorelings at the start)
- speed bumps like the slow short lift near the SK bars and doors that needed buttons to open.
- if you run down after the bosses spawn (to get more ammo or avoid death), you're done since they'll Quake you to death before you get back up or they'll trap and kill you in the elevator.
- sometimes good and sometimes not good supply balance (agree that it gets better after SK bars)

I had my struggles playing through but I was motivated to continue since I wanted to see more of this grand scale setting. BTW, don't feel bad that it took days to vis - my Travail maps took weeks. 

coop 4, coop 3, coop 2 actually do? 

AguirRe has fixed this map up nicely:

-Flickering entities have been reduced to a negligible level
-Error messages on load have been removed
-Monster count has been fixed

Also this version contains all the adjustments that were present in the second release:

- yellow armour at the end of the first room
- megahealth instead of normal near second tower
- red armour instead of blue near main entrance
- SNG at foot of first tower
- more nails if you look for them
- one less gaunt on hard

Im gonna email moderator-type-folks and see if I cant just get the link at the top of the thread fixed too!

New version is availiable:

http://shub-hub.com/files/maps_singleplayer/sickbase2.zip

Thanks again AguirRe! 

see the Warp readme for details on its coop modes.

It has nothing to do with coop as such (i.e. being more than one player), I'm just using that cvar to enable different play modes, which can be used with one or more players.

Having more than one player in a map may still require explicit map support to prevent players from being locked out etc.

Just try it and see what you think! :) 

Ok, if we forget about the earlier versions and make this the only valid one? I would remove the older versions then and rename this one to sickbase.zip (and finally put it into the Quaddicted archive, I was not in the mood the past days). 

I tried emailing Shambler and asking him to change the link at the top of this post to 'sickbase2.zip', but so far nothing has come of it (it was only about 3 hours ago or so).

Any bet says you delete the older versions from the Hub, rename the new-un, and then Shambler updates the link to sickbase2.zip so it wont work. Ha!

BTW - The new one uses highest zip compression so it is about 4-500k smaller. 

Make sure to keep the original bsp if you want to check out the demos posted above by Ankh and ORL. 

cause im watching the old demo on the fixed map and so far it seems to be working fine...

Do you expect it to crash at some point?