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I've been waiting for those to appear in a custom map. I compiled them into a map once and I actually -- heheh -- kept lobbying for Cyberdemons in Phait's Quake System 4 when he visited the recently-deceased Singed.Net site . ;)
First, thanks for all the comments... I'm glad you globally enjoyed the map...
To give you more informations: I effectively took inspiration from Event Horizon moovie (you are right necros, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119081/ ;P ) and also Doom's UAC interdimensional/teleport travel.. So the title was obvious.. The little map story came as a mix between the movie and Doom game... Easy to find... Anyway.. To explain briefly, Event Horizon terminology is also used in Physics: it is the stable point that determinates the frontier where a light particle can either fall into a black hole, or escape from a black hole... This is also the last point of visible events for Physicians... They use it as an indirect method to detect black hole in the Universe... (I always loved Physic Sciences ;) ) Concerning mapping, I can understand that it can be sometimes frustrating to have so much ammos (the more at the end)... but if you don't find any secret, it is mandatory to be able to defeat CyberDemons.. and as CyberDemon is 2000 health (equivalent ot 50 rocket hits !!!), you need ammos for sure... Furthermore in hard skill, in order to not run out of ammos, you need to find at least one secret (preferably with an armor.. the quad is better) to be able to defeat the 5 beasts at the end... Well, CyberDemon model is not perfect, and I guess an other attack would be cool to add.. I'm thinking about a nailgun attack or something equivalent to give more diversity... I think I will try to add it later... Thanks again to aguirRe, Hrimfaxi, distrans, Scragbait and trinca for providing help/comments/advices during these last months. correction, each cyberdemon has 4500 health points, compared to e.g. a shambler's 600. And the rockets have the same damage as the player's. So he's a pretty powerful guy and devastating in packs
I do like the movie Event Horizon. It's been a while since I watched it, so I can really remember the ship's architecture, but the map had excellent architecture and textures. Good gameplay, but I'm glad I read all the comments before playing otherwise I would have been "Are these cyberdemon's EVER going to die?" Having read all tips, I was ready for them and knocked them out with the Quad.
Doom things in Quake... I started PC gaming on Doom, but unlike a lot of Quaker's I'm not a big fan. I dunno. Doesn't seem quite right seeing Doom monsters in Quake. Oh well - no big deal. Top marks on this map JPL. Great looks and good gameplay. Thanks for the release. \o/ awesome map, yeah.
felt pretty oldschool/doom-like for some reason - and i appreciated that. hooray for cyberdemons! lighting was nice, at least in places where minlight didn't dominate. the architecure looked great, especially small details like pipes beneath stairs and so on. ah.. i remember the hangar and the ships. :) very cool secrets (partly even interconnected)! and this time i even found all of them, which is usually far from happening. they were quite helpful, too. i discovered the rocket launcher too late - only after i had already killed 3/5 cyberdemons - maybe it should have been placed in a more obvious spot, like next to the control station/button, since these monsters eat A LOT of ammo. i popped one solely with grenades. something to spice up the end fight would have been good, indeed (that doesn't mean i found it boring or anything, though). i second the opinion that there could have been more monster teleports in backtracking areas. two walkmonster warnings appear when the door in the beginning opens - probably related to the spawn code. a very enjoyable map, good usage of the textures (that i haven't seen in another map, yet) and nice gameplay. what really pissed me off (again), though, was the stupid sun shining through the blends, which made some parts of the map almost impossible to see. :( the real sun. it decided to remind me of her sorry existence just when i was playing the map (i know. stupid me for not playing quake in the evening), so the room became unecessary bright and i couldn't see much (had to increase gamma, bleh).
.. as I map in (almost) the dark (just with the TV light when my wife is watching it..), it can explain why I think a map looks great, when they are a little bit dark for many of you... damned... I really have to check the map with enough light... ;P
:
in the first large room, the one with the gold key, I got severe greyflash. Also in the GIGANTIC hangar. I can understand some of you saying, "wow, let's make this thing really big". Only it doesn't really need to. A hangar half the size with only 2 ships (the ships are cool) and 2 cyberdemons in it would have been just as good and caused no greyflash on older machines and smoother rendering and playing. More fps is always a good thing. For example, some areas in could.bsp like the final arena are pretty large, but give me neither greyflash nor significant slowdown. even in software. Go figure. Same in antediluvian. At least the gold key room should be greyflash-free and fps-friendly on slower hardware, because comparable structures in other maps are. Did you test the map in software? The textures look pretty pixel-y compared to speedbase or the other base sets. Before you say "no one uses software" please consider that it is good style to do so (testing). like in programming, there is a "good style", for example commenting your code etc. very basic things. in levelmaking it should be the same (testing in software, testing on older hardware, testing in different clients). This critique goes for a lot of the recent "HUUGE" maps. Others even more than yours. the crate constructions were good. in general, i liked the map, there were a tad too many enforcers, but it was ok. The hangar was unnecessarily big. The cyberdemon's HP is ridiculous. I thought there was some mechanism I had to use like Chthon's. It's too much. Please adjust r_maxedges/r_maxsurfs values.. and replay the map..... I tested my maps with WinQuake, increasing r_maxedge/r_maxsurfs values, and there were no major issues. Even fps was acceptable !
When you say slower hardware, I hope you are not talking about 15 years-old PC... I suppose they disappeared for most of them, and have been replaced by nowadays PC.. Be serious, except geeks and nerds, who still have such machine ? You ? wow.... hum... anyway.. You should consider to buy a new PC, realy.... ;P Concerning CyberDemon, I use the model as I found it on the web (except for the skin... ). And as CyberDemon has never been easy too kill, even in Doom I/II/III, why would I made it weaker in my map ? Come on... Just a reminder: when you play quake, you are supposed to be the Hero, so winning without danger doesn't give you any glory/self-satisfaction... So I don't see any interest to make "easy" maps... :) "when you play quake, you are supposed to be the Hero"
Right on! So all you others who God, Fly, no_clip, etc; shame on you. Play, kill, win - be the Hero. Live the life. Get the girl... I give some critique, and I get this in return. It is not about slow hardware. It is about sensible level design. The cyberdemon isn't too hard to kill, he's too hard to kill in relation to standard quake monsters.
The map doesn't run too slow and isn't designed sloppily when run on modern hardware. It is running slow and designed sloppily in relation to standard quake maps. It just _shows_ when run on slower hardware, modern hardware _masks_ those problems. The hangar isn't too big, it's just out of proportion. I didn't ask you to make easy maps. Come on, it's not like I killed your babies or something. It wasn't that the cyberdemons were too hard to kill, it was more that killing them took 5 minutes and was not really exciting. (Strafing around while holding down the fire button.)
Sorry about your hardware sucking so hard though, nico gripe about this map was actually also the demons' high hp and firepower. Its original power was of course since it was the Doom end boss (and only one).
Like Zwiffle mentioned, I also felt the step-up in difficulty from the rest of the map was too big. Otherwise, this is a fresh map with new colour tones and good combat to match. And the map is definitely not sloppily designed; load up WinQuake, enable r_draworder 1 and take a walk around. You'll notice how well occluded the various areas are. The hangar isn't too big, it's just out of proportion
Please, try the map in hard skill, and defeat the 5 CyberDemons... you will see then the hangar is quite "stretchy" And about the fact you felt hurted by my reply: It's not against you, but you have to admit 90's PC are not usable at all nowaday... and here on func_, fitzQuake is taken as a reference engine for most of the players (I guess)... sorry fot this... I had mostly nice fps, this was much better for my computer than Ankh's map (it was different style anyway and I am only commenting system requirements here, not overall "map goodness"). I only think the big amount of flicker lights or something in the first big room caused my fps to go to 20-30. Otherwise the map was fine, I probably had solid 72.
Maps like czg's terra series or metlslime's ant never lagged for me for one millisecond, I even know at least terra is playable in plain software (many play qw with that). I've played QW with this computer succesfully and never had FPS problems there either. I have a P3 500, with 256 megs of ram, it's a somewhat old system, but not totally unreasonable. I understand if Marcher gives some lag, but it's a concept map and really couldn't be done in any other way. It's stretching quake's limits and all that jazz. Necros' marble quoth map lagged to me at points even though it didn't have big rooms but the vis blocking was done badly, or not much taken into account. All the major areas were connected by pretty small but short and straight corridors. This was not a problem in your map. Your map would have been perfect without that one hitch, that was noticeable since it was in the beginning. It doesn't make the map bad or anything, I'm just saying that, well, it's partly my problem and partly a design issue. It's a tradeoff and I understand that you can say that old comps don't need to run new maps greatly, but if it's easy to do some small modifications to make them run it without detracting measurably from the map's overall goodness, one should do it. I didn't have any fps problems in the end hall. In conclusion, an example: Necros' marble should have run with good fps on my comp. Marcher could never ever have run well anyway and I understand it. Not to dis Necros, it was a Quoth demo map anyway and he probably didn't spend months perfecting it. :) In my GL-engines and FitzQuake, you can enable cvar r_flatlightstyles 1 and improve fps significantly when there are many animated lights (torches, flickering lights etc).
In bigger maps like gmsp3, this can have a major impact on fps even on otherwise fast machines. At some point I want to write up a page explaining how to do performance/quality confuguration in fitzquake. They're documented in the readme, but there's no guide to using them that explains the tradeoffs.
Nice map with interesting base architecture and good gameplay most of the time. I liked the base textures and the lightning. Also the way the base (or is it a space ship?) is build is very good. I have replayed the level again on hard and it still was interesting to walk in the corridors and watch the details. There were many good ambushes (opening windows/walls with monsters behind them, fiends) and also getting the GL early was fun. I didn't even notice that the NG was introduced too late, for me it was ok. GL and SSG was enough for the first part of the map. I was lacking armor in the middle part (but a secret helped me). Maybe too many monsters were hidden inside secret areas. I didn't like the gameplay in the final area. The monsters spreaded all over the hangar were an easy kill and the cyber demons were terrible for me. I have found 3 secrets which were very helpful. The amount of ammo was just right (sometimes it was too much to pick it up and after a while I had to go back to take it). The same thing about health. There were too many weapons introduced in the level. You could easily leave out the RL and the LG if there weren't those stupid cyber demons.
Anyway the map was great and I enjoyed it very much. I liked this, well laid out and seemed well balenced. I had to quickload on one ambush where I was destroyed to go back and escape to the right place but otherwise they seemed to hit at the right time where they leave you weak afterwards and are scary/suprising when they hit. The blastertraps I didn�t like, but that�s just my preference. The cyberdemons were kind of spoiled - there should have been less in the final area, with less health, but one featured as a mid boss before you�re fully armed in maybe a mini-maze type locale. The final hanger was just too big. It doesn�t work well with Q1 monsters. The modeling was good (ships) but I get the feeling flying enemies (scrags, basicly) were left out unnecessarily. Using an area of this size needs respawning horde combat, serious sam style. Other than that, and the slight dissapointment at not seeing a new model (yeah, moon on a stick) the map was well built, paced and styled.
thanks.
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