omg I wet my jean!!!

so awesomeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee 

 

is awesome.

//=========Commenting is phenomenal===========

//Here we congratulate Kinn for providing the
//best commented quake code ever;

//---------End comment------------------------
I'll be digging through this for ages, it's a gold mine!
*/ 

 

Kinn,

All your sprites have black instead of index color 255. There isn't any transparency to them. What's going on? How'd you get them to work?? The imps are shooting squares at me! 

Don't blame the mapper, blame Darkplaces. 

Unless of course you mean that only Darkplaces recognizes the pink 255 as transparent, which I know isn't true. But if they only work on Darkplaces, then, why aren't they working?

I have the .tga files in the directory and in the .pak file. I checked the tga files though and I don't see alpha channels in photoshop.

*shrugs* 

meant was the other way around:

The tranparency in Marcher is not supported well by darkplaces for reasons unknown to me. I have tried to run Marcher using darkplaces not long after its release, but seeing all those black edges around explosions etc, I reverted to using the exe files bundled together with the release. 

The tga sprites use additive blending. This is how it worked in Darkplaces at the time of Marcher's release.

I cannot guarantee the map will render or work properly on any engine released since then.

It works in FitzQuake 0.85 - I'd recommend just using that. 

First and second run on hard:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/marcher1.zip
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/marcher2.zip

'100%' demo: skill2, 384/386, 4/4:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/marcher_3320.zip 

It might be worthy of note that I've literally stumbled into
all the secrets during the several replays: fighting an imp,
falling down during a battle, in midst of another using an
explosive weapon, and searching for alternative routes to
get back to a higher level...it felt like this might indeed be
the way it all was intended. 

...it felt like this might indeed be the way it all was intended.

sure, I'll go with that, thanks! 

My how you've blossomed. 

It's at the age where I keep having these awful "you're not going out wearing that" arguments with it. 

The mother of all hoarde maps, epic, paced, fantastic. I play it once every few years, about due for another.

Heres to hoping for The Marcher 2. 

Is the source for this and bastion still around? I think it would be awesome if there were an AD version of this. 

 

The AD projectile shotgun is very enticing but personally I'd like to see a Quoth version. 

Please be patient. A surprising version of this map features in the quakey-but-not-quake game that I am working on, and I think it would be cooler if that represents the modern iteration of it.

No need for a George Lucas re-release just yet... 

This is a companion interview for the Must-Play Quake video posted here.


1. What made you want to do a sequel to Bastion?

Bastion was originally supposed to be spread over two .bsp files - the 1st is the Bastion that you got, and the 2nd was intended to be a surprise "boss arena" that you warped to after Bastion's "final fight". This boss arena was scrapped, but it was actually the exterior of the Marcher Fortress - no interior, just the Marcher castle facade. I built this castle exterior, looked at it and thought "you know what, this is so much better-looking than anything in Bastion, and it would be a complete waste to just tack it on to the end of that map as an afterthought", so I held on to it, and carried on turning it into a full-blown sequel to Bastion, with proper interior and all the trimmings. The idea of a final battle outside the castle was kind of retained actually, but now in the Marcher map..... After Marcher's apparent "final fight", you think you're stepping into the end portal, but it just warps you down to outside the castle, where you face the true final horde. That's a little homage to Bastion's original intended design that no-one would ever know about (until now I suppose!)

2. Why Quake 3 textures in your maps? (I love them BTW!)

By far my biggest quake map influence at the time was czg's Insomnia, especially the 3rd map in that pack. I loved how epic he made the Q3 textures look, and I wanted to do something a bit similar - there were purples and turquoises in there that you just did not see in quake, so yeah I wanted to bring those colours into quake, and I loved the interesting brick patterns in all the "gothic block" stuff. I did things a bit differently though - Q3 textures are a bit too bright for a simple palette conversion to Quake, so I darkened them a bit, and made them a bit browner in places to suit quake's palette better. czg kept his Insomnia textures at the original Q3 resolution, so they ended up double-sized in quake (which I think suited Insomnia fine). I however resized them, as I felt that suited my architecture better

3. I recognize some of your new monsters from other mods. Was this their first appearance? Tell me what they allowed you to do with gameplay in the mod.

The new monsters were Spiders, Imps and Gaurochs. These all rather cheekily derived from Hexen 2 models, with some tweaks to scale and textures. Spiders and Imps were totally new, but the Gaurochs first appeared in Bastion (where they were called Shufflers, bizarrely). The spiders were intended as just low-health melee cannon fodder, but I could trigger them to jump at a certain trajectory on use, or player sight, making for amusing entrances (I had them jumping down from holes in the ceiling etc.). Imps were intended to be flying versions of Doom's imps. Low-medium health, fireball shooters. Quake had a huge dearth of flying monsters, so this was a great chance to stick something there that wasn't just a scrag. In terms of gameplay though it's not radically different from a scrag, so maybe I could've got a bit more imaginative there. The Gauroch was the biggie though - it did new stuff. It could charge the player down, faster than player running speed. I made use of the model's natural 20fps animation for the charge anim, because at that movement speed, 10fps didn't look great. All the other anims were chopped down to 10fps though, quake-style. It could spawn new Imps - giving it a bit of an Archvile-ish role, and it also had a funny little behaviour which I called the "Goon Slap", where it would just backhand pimp-slap other, lesser, monsters that go near it, and they won't retaliate. Bastion's "Shufflers" were a bit less refined than Marcher's Gauroch's, representing an earlier iteration of my QC code. All three of these beasties later featured in Arcane Dimensions, with sock's tweaks and new behaviours, but I remain slightly disappointed that the Gauroch "Goon Slap" didn't appear to make the AD cut

4. Skybox - is that from Quake 2 or... ?

Skybox is by Kell I believe (https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/kell.quaddicted.com/) - I remember a funny thing back then, when I was trying to support Marcher in different engines. Back then, not all engines agreed on how skyboxes should be oriented, so when I lit the map based on the skybox sun direction in engine A, it looked totally wrong in engine B. I think by the time the map was released, things had been sorted out after a little back-and-forth with engine coders. 

This is part 2 of the companion interview for the Must-Play Quake video posted here.

5. How long did this take you to create and any fun testing anecdotes?

I think its development spanned 6 months, but I was in full-time employment at the time, so was only able to tinker in my spare time. I think I was one of the laziest in terms of playtesting back then - by that I mean: the preceding map (Bastion) had absolutely zero playtesting apart from my own playthroughs, and Marcher had something like just 2 other playtesters giving it a go about 2 days before I just decided to release it. I can't recall even changing anything as a result of their feedback! (it was a long time ago, I may have made minor changes and forgotten about it), but really I think I mostly just thanked them for playing and then hit the "submit" button. I was a pretty awful, stubborn person. With more testing, I could have picked up on the outrageous coop-breaking bug that the map shipped with (and still has to this day), but of course I never tested in coop. I later made an excuse that co-op was "not supported", as it was "incompatible" with my system for spawning groups of monsters, err, "procedurally" as a way of working around the WinQuake entity limit in map with over 350 monsters.

There was some truth in that of course: monsters were placed in the map file as individual entities...but if WinQuake was just to load the map up like this, spawning all the monsters, then it would hit the edict limit on map load, and crash. The workaround was a bit of sneaky QuakeC..... as the map loaded, and a monster entity was spawned, the basic info for that monster (classname, origin, angle), was added to special fields in a "monster group" entity, and the individual monster entity was deleted before the next monster entity was loaded. This way, I "compressed" multiple monsters into single entities, and spawned that group of monsters back into the game, mid-way through the map according to some trigger. I also used the same trick for pick-up items. This way I managed to make a map with the highest monster count to date, all working in vanilla WinQuake. This highly scripted order of monster / item spawning according to player progression would have been really problematic in co-op and would have taken a lot more polish to get working smoothly.

I then proceeded to completely undermine the whole point of doing that, by bundling the map with a high-capacity engine anyway, that had a huge entity limit. I think that was mostly to avoid packet overflow glitches in the final battles, and also to let players see the skybox.
Oh well, it does work in WinQuake

6. Any specific inspirations for this map?

czg's Insomnia (the 3rd map) - The Tower of Babel, and Minas Tirith from the 3rd Lord of the Rings film, with a little bit of Helm's Deep thrown in (from the 2nd film). I was an enormous LotR nerd at the time, pretty much living and breathing that stuff. It even has "The Brown Tree" which is a (hopefully) pretty obvious Quake-paletted tribute to the White Tree of Gondor. If I had the resources back then, the whole thing would have been a full-on LotR-themed map with orcses and goblinses and everyfink.

7. Is it me or is there some kind of sound code that muffles the monsters when occluded????

I can't remember ever doing anything like that! Weirdly, it's the sort of over-the-top detail I'd probably have thought about, but I'm pretty sure I never mackled up any kind of sound occlusion code. I may have messed with volumes and attenuations on certain monster sounds here and there, but nothing that would have been changing dynamically like that.

[NOTE:] The demos were played back in Quakespasm-Spiked when recorded, which is a new workflow for me. So that could be the reason the sound felt different. Maybe Spike will weigh in.

Thanks for your time Kinn. And.... great map!!! 

I kind of wish it were a bit longer but I guess that's not the point of the project. 

Yeah I just want to highlight and not really review or playthru and the goal is to have some info that even the hardcore folks didn't know or forgot.

Also this video took me a while to produce so I have to keep it manageable.