Is that area a homage to another sp map? 

...with business committments out of the way by tomorrow night I'll get to play this, thanks Trinca! Looks like a nice use of skybox from the screenie. 

for q1sp :) will test it tonight. 

I played about half of this and 3 things bothered me:

1. Monster density seemed really high
2. Texture clash
3. "Glass walls" aka invisible walls

It seemed like there were too many soldiers and enforcers in each area and there were too many non-brown colors in a lot of the textures (reds, yellows).

I like almost every one of Trincas maps (Forgotten Tomb, tcoa, etc) so I kind of feel bad saying this.

GLASS

I could be wrong about this, but doesn't aguirRe's engine support transparent walls (I assume this looks glass-like).

I find the "glass" textures where skipremove was used to be annoying in most cases.

Is there a standard method that would work to create semi-transparent brushes that work in both aguirRe's engine and DarkPlaces and maybe get the code in aguirRe's engine patched into FitzQuake/TyrQuake/JoeQuake/other engines.

Because it seems to me that maps like this one -- that break at least 1 GLQuake limit anyway (edicts in this case) -- might as well use widely accepted engine enhancements.

Skyboxes, fog, color lights are already almost universally supported in all engines. Why not add transparent looking glass too? 

I really disliked the changed monsters as they had no visual hint about being stronger and thus were a bad surprise. I also didn't like the "glass", you could have just left out those brushes.

Some very nice architecture. Most of it felt too room-corridor-crate-room-corridor-crate-room-corridorc-crate-... though. It was kinda confusing sometimes.

And of course it is a base map and I hate base maps, heh. Even with hating them this felt like a good map, so, well done!

I mostly enjoyed seeing all the trims, rounded egdes (well, some :P ), innovative stuff, you did some nice progress even back then. Start making medieval demonic maps please. ;) 

There's a fairly standard convention in all engines for how you make things transparent, you add a field to all entities called .alpha, and set it between 0 and 1. So that much is fairly simple.

The problem is what you do for engines that don't support alpha, like standard glquake and winquake. If the map isn't exceeding hard engine limits, then it's bad practice to release maps that don't work well in engines without a specific extension. For something like transparent windows, it'd make much more sense to have the window brush invisible in these engines than have them fully visible. So how do you code that?

Well, the best way to do it is to use the checkextension method, which is all well documented with the darkplaces engine(see dpextensions.qc for the full rundown). The basic idea is that you check the value of one cvar, which tells you if there's a builtin function called checkextension. Then you can use that function to decide if the engine has .alpha support. If both of those checks are passed then go ahead with setting the model and .alpha. If one of them fails, hide the model.

The problem is that adding both alpha rendering and the checkextension system makes this a non-trivial bit of coding to do. The reason why skyboxes, fog and coloured lights are implemented more widely is that they have fallbacks on older engines - render the normal sky in white light. If you just add a window expecting alpha, then in old engines it'll a) look ugly and b) be opaque, so you can't see through it. That might adversely affect gameplay.

Kell and I have considered adding an entity for quoth2 basically as described there, specifically for making these kind of windows. But we want a reasonably stable engine with checkextension first. 

Put note in readme ;)

/Semi-joking, I know you are saying that this should be done properly. 

Good map! Took me 16 minutes on medium (about 13 enemies remained alive when I exited - no idea where they were). I found two secrets (I never really look for them).

You really filled this one with enemies but I thought the balance was quite good. I didn't die even once but base maps tend to be quite easy anyways so... I'd have left those four ogres out since they felt a bit out of place and I agree with the criticism concerning those invisible walls and tougher versions of the same old enemies.

As for visuals, too many hallways looked the same (although good) and I'd have wanted to see a few more outdoor locations. The underwater section was pretty cool. 

The underwater bits were nice indeed, especially the floating crates (bit unrealistic though). Some other area looked nice too.
But in general most areas were pretty bland. There were properly aligned textures, trims, computers and random crates, however they don't help much as the overall structure of the map is a linear room-corridor-room construction with little interconnectivity and mostly large, more or less square 2d rooms. This is worsened by the lack of depth and detail of the ceilings in particular. Some slopes and pillars on the walls or buttresses would have helped as well.

The large amount of monsters was typical of a Trinca map. I only played on Normal this time, so no problems (only found 1 secret). Combat got repetitive though, due to the overuse of Grunts and Enforcers - you should have considered using Quoth1.

The map is OK, but luckily it doesn't reflect your current skill level, since it's already older than other releases. Keep it up. 

One of the best Base maps ever; I liked especially the underwater part near end, and how much work it must have taken to get the air supply *just* right, I cannot imagine.

Great, sneaky secrets :) and good combat; base enemies are cannon fodder so it�s very reasonable to use a lot of them, but they were nicely combined with the medieval monsters, i.e. the Spawns fit very well in the long corridors.

Btw I can�t understand the nitpicking about small forgivable things like the invisible walls (they are there to make a secret not too obvious), they are no show stoppers !?

My complaints would be: lighting is too flat, and some rooms seem bare, despite the good effort to hide that with texture work.

Fantastic map, Trinca, still it would be nice to see a deluxe edition in Quoth2 :)) 

my second base map is much much more detailed and not boxy.... that was main reason of this release.... becouse map was to big to fix, in that time my mapping skills were poor, and i think this map is not a map to sent to trash... atleast people can have a litle fun with it... and for Base pack... not to good becouse i saw others people maps... are this is crap comparing with the others... i could use the alpha trick to make the window... but i didn�t now that trick in that time and i didn�t change nothing!!! just monsters... so this map is from the time that was made!

thks for hate or love it :)

Mikko the 13 monsters that you miss were progs.dat problem... fish count! in the number of fishes :) i got in map

Baker i still love you anyway ;) 

When using the shootable trigger_multiple trick for glass-like surfaces, it should be given a very high wait value AND be fired itself upon startup by another entity in order to avoid the bleeding effect (using a trigger might be necessary in case the skip tool doesn't work, e.g. if it's a very large and intricate map - though with metl's new tool, I guess the trigger technique isn't needed anymore, except if the map is meant to be reused by less skilled people maybe).
In areas such as in this map, regular glass surfaces (without alpha or the transparent water trick) should optimally have some visual clue, like some logo, cracks, or makeshift reflections. It doesn't look too convincing but at least it's better than having an entirely invisible wall. 

Had fun with this, nice to see it released finally, although I'll still bug you for the Quoth II version when its ready ;)

The mixed enemies didn't bother me, but I wish you'd given them the Quadfactor hack as well, would have made them more challenging instead of just bulletproof.

As to alpha, I use it alot, especially since it works with all entities (eg. breakables). A note in the readme - if there's any spot where it directly changes gameplay for those with an unequipped engine then I remove it. 

this is quite good, despite the linear design and boxy nature. There's some nice detailing in parts and the gameflow is still pretty good. You can definitely see a good imagination at work though, both in terms of looks and gameplay.

I also didnt like the changed monsters because there was no way to tell apart the stronger ones from the normal ones.

Apart, from that, very enjoyable. 

...I'm actually all for the armour hack, but within limits! Random grunts and enforcers with the equivalent of a single SG blast of armour is fine, harder enemy with the equivalent of a DBS blast also, but grunts and enforcers with vore/shambler type protection is infuriating.

The level was basically room/corridor/room but I still found most of it interesting. The level of trim was impressive in places. A couple of the corridors were very impressive on their own - more sci-fi than standard Id base.

I too thought the use of spawn was well done, unnerving but easily beatable if one kept one's head. Fragging grunts in corridors got a bit boring but the set pieces made up for it. I'm still not a fan of base enemy teleporting in base levels with no obvious mechanism involved.

Don't beat yourself up too much about this one Trinca, it was a blast with some good ideas. And great practice :)

P.S. I found a small block sticking out of a beam up in the rafters of the main "key door hub" but it wouldn't react to push or shot. Mapping artefact? 

but the stronger enemies without any skinchange etc are a bit annoying. There's also a HUGE load of monsters in this map and for that amount, the SNG and the RL came a bit late into the game imho.
Liked the design though quite a lot.
Well playable. 

is it possible to point me where I can download the sky in the screenies and alsothe ones that gives an error on loaing? 

http://trinca.quaddicted.com/dark_env.rar

and what are the one that are giving error? 

as the skybox isnt included in the normal zip file, when you load the map without it you get an error message where quake tries to find the sky but cant. 

the one i got in worldspawn is this one dark :)

didn�t put in .zip becouse i think everybody had it! i got 200 mb of sky boxes :\ 

With the selected skybox it looked good, I especially liked the initial open areas. Inside there were quite a bit repetitive corridors, though. Gameplay on Hard was great, everything felt balanced.

The logic in some of the secrets were a bit puzzling, the slime hint was really off ...

It'd be nice to see a wild demo on this! 

Nightmare 100% if you didn�t play map dont see demo :p

http://trinca.quaddicted.com/wbase.dz 

Is the url correct? 

http://trinca.quaddicted.com/temp/wbase.dz

sorry aguirRe 

Played on Hard and had a good time!
Corridors was a bit repetive, as others has pointed out! And I the stronger enemies should have had a skinchange as well!
Else the map is one of your best!
Just keep them comming.