You'll get better compression ratio with 7zip when compressing non-standard demos like this one. DZip cannot parse it and will therefore fall back on standard zip. Using 7z instead, this demo shrinks to 3.5MB. 

...from PuLSaR was fun, I watched it from start to end.

Funniest moment was when you asked "where are the secrets" and you were standing riiiight next to one (I believe, the wall sure looked a bit strange there).

Thanks for keeping me up a good while in the middle of the night =) 

Funniest moment was when you asked "where are the secrets" and you were standing riiiight next to one (I believe, the wall sure looked a bit strange there).

Yeah, I noticed it when I watched my demo. That wall with strange texture. And button in the ceiling near to door. I found it later.

I feel secrets when I'm drunk =) 

Well, I didn't like the visuals I saw so much at first, but this ended up being a great map indeed, layout and gameplay were awesome, great work. 

this has likely all been said already, but i'm too lazy to read 70+ posts now:
i really enjoyed this map. hard skill was great, challenging (died two or three times in some areas on the first try) but not overly difficult. the scale was impressive - and so were the r_speeds in the atrium. :) it was good to have some proper horde combat again.
the mountain tour with the rune chapel was cool, too, though i got to the rune before i pushed the button in the clocktower.

lighting felt a bit rushed in places, but it was still ok. unfortunately there were some obvious misaligned textures that could have been fixed easily (hello beta-testers?).
i also wonder what hipnotic was needed for - if it was just for minor stuff like the spawn code or something, an included progs.dat would have been better in my view.

i had some other things to mention in mind, too, but i can't remember now...
anyway, nice work! 

I finished this map, found 4 secrets and went back and found 3 more.

This is a great map and does what I have tried to do in maps that I've made. That is to make the player fight their way upwards in a meandering and varied manner. This is an excellent map for vertical progression and the player is able to see many layers above. It makes you want to push on just to see what's above. It's cool to look out from up high from windows that were far up from the ground. It's very 3 dimensional.

I've always liked id textured maps and the Gloom Keep style textures are nice to see in a new map. This map has massive scale to match the massive mob combat. I played on Hard and died enough times but in general felt that the generous supplies, mega-healths and powerups made it very manageable without finding a lot of secrets (I found 3 during play). I had lots of spare ammo and mega-healths after 100 enemies or so had been killed.

This nitpics would be some misaligned textures, some obvious clip brushes (with 8 secrets to find, I'm going to search every ledge so clippys just seem unfair), there were some buttons that should have been set to no return and there were some cases where opened doors stuck through adjacent walls. Nothing really bad - just picky things. Being able to touch the sky is also bad form but with a map like this, I can accept it.

Overall, a great vertical map that felt huge, had lots of secrets to find (and they're fair) and one with a style of layout that I try to build myself (although my vertical segments are much shorter and less layered - this map is very inspiring.) 

I used the start map to set skill and just read that you need the console.

So I didn't finish on Hard. 

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.