They have a different style, and I like to see something new in Quake. I think jungle, swamps & woods are very very difficult to get right in engines like Quake & Build (Duke3d, Shadow Warrior etc). There are some woods levels in Shadow Warrior, and perhaps some swamp level in Redneck Rampage that get it about right.

The maps were fun enough to play. I couldn't find a single secret (dunno why heh). They seemed to get better in design and details as you progressed. The fighting on the oms24beta map is a good blast. Thanks for sharing them. 

Do you have the originals (i.e. before conversion to 8-bit Q1 palette) in 24-bit TGA or similar for d/l? For engines that support external textures, this could be interesting. 

I sure do. I always keep my textures in a .fla (flash file) before converting them. 

Only played the first two maps so far, some good ideas. But I agree on the textures, some are pretty bland with blocks of flat colour.

I hate texturing so don't take it the wrong way; but maybe put a quick dirtmap over the top of each - 10-20% visible then delete the parts you don't want dirty with the eraser.

You can go nuts with different colours of dirt and texture types, depending how much patience you have.

Some really good ideas and setups - the scale works well, but some enemies were facing the wrong way and there's a few brushwork errors.

But I like it so far. 

color it in Macromedia Flash

agh!

sometimes emboss it, to make it look better

AGH! 

Oh come on, its not that bad...

But if it is that bad, what do you recommend? 

Lunaran recommends editing the rgba matrices individually in notepad.

Personally, I recommend standing on your tiptoes and watching your neighbor through the window as she gets it on with some random bloke. 

Lunaran recommends editing the rgba matrices individually in notepad.

Any other method is not only a short cut but an empty lie as well. 

paint shop pro at the least. You know, an actual bitmap editing program? with tools? as opposed to one designed for vector animation? 

in DreamWeaver 

So, this is interesting. These maps feel strongly like levels from 1996/1997, when lots of people were mapping, technical standards were low, but creativity was high. People were pretty much making all sorts of weird stuff. Nowadays, everyone knows what types of styles and environments quake can't do well, so we're much more conservative.

Not only is this pack very bold in its choice of theme, it's also very stylistic, almost cartoony. A boarded up door has oversized nails driven into the wood. Large tiki totems are scattered about. The gold key sign is sort of off kilter and held up by a sagging piece of wood. Big fat vines hang over the swamp.

From a gameplay standpoint, my main criticism is that the first map shifted abruptly from fairly slow and steady to fairly tense and violent. The ramp-up of difficulty and excitement should be more gradual, I think.

The maps after that kept a fairly even pace, though at that point I was running through, doing less killing and more dodging, trying to get infighting to take care of things. 

just want to point out that i like all the creative ideas you put into this. Simple things like insulting the player with funny text message, and cool situations (especially some of the explosive stuff in oms24) involving gameplay. 

You all seem pretty uptight about the textures.
The way I see it, the textures aren't annoying, your just letting them annoy you. Yeah they look different and possibly intimidating, but your letting them get to you. Same with the brushwork. It's not annoying, your just letting it annoy you is all. Just go with the flow, it makes things go a whole lot smoother.


Funny. 

...I hopped out of the early boat ride after killing the beasties so I could have a look around. I looked around and while doing so fell out of the level. I closed Quake.

I'll might venture in again tonight, and will post some thoughts later. 

uglyness is in the eye of whomever 

This nasty bug was found maybe a few hours after I released the pack. Its found in oms21 in the section of water the boat floats on. A small segment of ground is somehow corrupt, and you'll fall continuously.

I don't understand how I could have missed that, I play tested it hundreds of times...

Once I release the entire episode I will make sure this is fixed. 

Hehee, stayed in the boat this time.

I loved some of the architectural set pieces, even though they were sometimes marred by poor texture choice (floor textures as support textures - bleh?)

Mixing the "new" textures with standard ones didn't always work. I'd like to see a remake dressed in totally fresh textures (I don't mind the sometimes surreal "cartoony" look in these levels). Didn't Dilvish produce a texture set that might work with these new textures?

These are some of the first levels where I've been able to make infighting really work for me. I found myself racing into a room, counting the number of monster types I woke up then if the count was three or more I spent the rest of the time working the space so I could get 'em at each other. WHAT FUN!

I wouldn't play quake if all levels looked like this but as a one off experience it was enjoyable. I think you and madfox should collaborate on a project. 

ill write up a review of this in the next few weeks hopefully. 

Especially the textures made it memorable and gameplay was OK on Normal, a bit too easy perhaps. Ammo was overall a bit abundant; way too many rockets, but too few shells.

Armor was either too many in the earlier maps or too few in the later. Fighting sometimes got dangerous as architecture was very busy in some areas, but too many monsters were facing the wrong way.

Progression was straightforward, but too many monsters were hidden in secrets, some of which were really weird. How is the player supposed to know that he just passed a silent trigger_once that opens a door far away ... once? And having a GK door as a secret (and no other SK/GK doors along the main route) is confusing.

But as a whole, a nice pak with unusual visual elements. 

Very nice
.
My favourite was oms22, the temple and moshpit at the end was awesome.
The central area on oms23 was very slow for me, 8fps which makes fighting quite tough. ;)
Was fun to fight with the single shotgun on the first map.

Release part two! 

I'm sure me and everybody else would like to know what your specs are.

Part two is in development, and its coming along really good. Your in for a treat once its done. 

The double barrel shotgun is in the first map. It's in the tent where you start out. I didn't think many people would have a hard time finding it...

I'll have to move it out of there once I release the full episode. 

Running a probably ill-configured Darkplaces on a Geforce 2 AMD64 3200 box, realtime lights and shadows turned off.

and there's no need to accommodate my incompetence ;) 

does seem to be the most sensitive to differences in specs than any of the other Quake clients. Also, every time I update DP with the latest build and try to run it, my firewall will freeze everything up and it takes a lot of manual configuration to make it happy. Doesn't happen with updates of any other program. 

Creativity and general scenes and architecture were good. Some interesting and dramatic stuff. Brushwork was a bit sloppy and variable, needed more polish. The gameplay was good fun throughout, plenty of good action but nothing too nasty. Generally well balanced.

The textures were annoying.