404 monsters, it was on Hard, 215 on Easy and 340 on Normal. 

on hard skill, could you not find something? 

Well, I finally found time to play this nice level...
So, the architecture layout is very interesting, and +400 monsters is also impressive!! After the first door, seeing the horde of scrags, knights, ogres, I asked myself one moment: "did you install correctly hipnotic pack ?" And yes I did...
IMHO, the most interesting thing is the texturing: particularly the evil ambiance you created with blood everywhere. It's a Doom "Hell On Earth" tribute or what ? ;) Try just adding a low density red-dark fog and you can have an real unreal bloody ambiance more frightening than the original... the more in last area near the end door with bloody meat everywhere.... brrr...
Gameplay was never boring, and ammos/health/armor/monsters balance was very good, maybe too much items, but anyway, it important to finish the level in a confortable way...
Overall verdict is like others said: the most good evilish level I saw from years ago..
Thanks alot for this pure moment in Hell.. ;) 

JPL and everyone else. This release worked out better than I was expecting. My next site update will contain aguirRe's hipnotic mini-pack so anyone can play the map as well as (probably) a fixed start map so the skill select works.

Thanks for the review UWF, I appreciate also your including some background about the story. I thought that in this map the player would be/play as the "specter" mentioned in Poe's story that travels through the castle sowing death - having the player a bad guy instead of a good guy. 

I only found out about it the other week, and then didn't have any of the right engines to run it, so give me a break :)

What awesome work! The map looked pretty great and played even better. I found the start a bit brutal, and there were a couple of trouble spots for me, but I saved often and once I had the rl it became fairly reasonable (skill 2).

I was constantly running out of ammo early on (although I always had grenades, so it was fine) but later on there was more than I could pick up.

It was a great moment when I got the rl, as the horde combat in open areas became even more satisfying. The quad run under the shambler cage was particularly good fun.

Actually, I haven't finished it yet because I was near the end and my gf looked a bit pissed off that I'd been playing quake for half an hour or so - then I fell off the top near the run and quit. I will finish it later.

Performance was ok on my laptop. Generally very smooth, with only some minor slowdown (maybe 20fps or so, so not a big deal) at the top of the level near the RA secret on the rocks. My system specs are modest (2ghz pentium-m, 512mb, gf ultra 6800 go) and I ran at 1600*1200, so I'm not complaining about performance.

I was a bit dissapointed to discover that it doesn't work in Fitzquake. No offense to other engine coders, but aside from the 256 unique models limit, Fitz is by FAR the best engine for SP Quake. I have it running 1920*1200 widescreen and set to look like winquake on steroids (GL_NEAREST with fullbrites etc.) 

Actually, I haven't finished it yet because I was near the end and my gf looked a bit pissed off that I'd been playing quake for half an hour or so

Did you sperm up her nose to show you pay her enough attention too? 

Spirit, negke and onetruepurple (later) fighting the disease in a packet overflowing adventure of joy and disappearing entities.

Demos

I was going to put my run on Youtube, but it's probably not worth it considering how bad the disappearing ents and muted sounds make it look. 

I am super happy to have people playing my first "new" map (I think of Soul of Evil as my last "old" map), but what engine? Still these days, entity no work?

With my merger project I do hope to do a really good coop feature, with respawning/seeking monsters, endgame stats as to which player killed how many monsters, and etc.

Anyway cool guys. I remember when I first release this map, Lord Havoc the Darkplaces guy, was pissed off, and while I think that's an awesome engine I can see why. 

Quakespasm server running protocol 666, but not a local one, so maybe something wasn't configured correctly.

We also played through Nightjourney v2, but that didn't go nearly as smoothly. We recorded continuous demos which I thought could be fixed with convdem, but no avail. Possibly faulty recording due to QS or the network situation. Suffice it to say, we died and cheated and spotted lazy mapping. Still kind of fun though. 

well with my merger I won't have most of the sources (ie anything before 2005) left over. But you are obviously appointed tester #1 if you accept the position, since you understand the mechanics of the game in a way that's almost creepy. But I do think coop would be something important to support with the me/PM merger project.

PS any lazy mapping in NJ is daz's fault

let's see if he's made anything post-NJ to back whatever he says up ;) 

Commandline was: ./quakespasm -dedicated +teamplay 1 +deathmatch 0 +coop 1 -hipnotic -game masque +map masquestart

It said "sv_protocol 666" in game. 

jay new map, and heavily hangovered. Lets see if hangover quake beats drunk quake :) 

hangover quake rarely works for me, as my nerves are usually too frayed to successfully handle ambushes! hah 

easy run in 2:01 might try some more later this week. It was actualy the route i menat for nightmare run but have appointment with gf and just wanted to get a finish :P 

1:38 , no wil check some demo posted above and see if secrets can help :) (found 6 so far but only 4 without rj's) 

i noticed that i wasnt using -hipnotic properly before (didnt realy mather much for the route) but the coop demo crashed my quakes cuz of it. then i figured out a different route, to find out it was slower (got the quad at the cage then took the same ya but on my way back down and quad-rjed to the rune) so poilshed the 1:37 a bit more

a sloped double gj route is probably the best route, but didnt feel like restarting over a single trick a zillion times :)

http://members.upc.nl/verorber/masq_133.rar 

When i was reading this thread i was like hmmz maybe already fixed since fitz not giving any trouble for me (in fact it runs pretty damn smooth for a map of this size and mobcount). Untill i just got bored and was like lets try it on skill 3, then i get an eddict warning. You can get that button to spawn quad without opening the bar, then quad route is a coupel sec faster, still double gj and going aroudn on the elft side of the cliffs most likely is faster. 

The edicts warning is displayed every time a map that exceeds the standard limit is loaded, but it won't affect you (otherwise the game would crash). You can also increase the count even more with the max_edicts cvar.