zommmg never saw a map start with so many warnings :\ and items fall out of map...

dispiste that i only played 30 seconds and look kind of impossible on hard... will try again later on... 

Can't open this map. Quake says there's a program error, when I attempt to load the map from the console.

What gives ? 

with qrack i cant see either the weapons, items or monsters - and THATS not even on skill 2 :-D
gonna give it a try later with some other engines. 

guys only AguirRe's engine runs it ok, forget about others... 

This map has to be played in engines with maxed limits such as aguirRe's or Darkplaces.

A nice map for sure, despite its unfortunate construction/size. Nice details and theme. Very hard on normal until the SK bars, from then on there was almost too much health/armor. Apart from that, gameplay was ok, with some exploration in the first half (although it is somewhat easy to get lost). There are several shortcuts (speedrunner to the fore), e.g. from roof to SNG room, and from Pent secret to middle balcony - i was mildly tempted to take one because I couldn't find the third tower at first. The explosion was cool, didn't know it could be used like this.

Some of the monster spawns seemed unncessary, especially since they were not silent - then again, it was probably better to avoid packet overflow or something. One fiend was stuck inside the wall at the bottom of the third tower and the invincible bob was a little annoying (though on second thought it wasn't so bad really, kind of like an environmental hazard)- any idea what causes its weird behavior? "delayspawn" is not a field. The sudden ending immediately after killing the Gug came as a surprise.

With such a large map, exceeding the marksurfaces limit is probably hard to avoid, I guess, but there are still some ways you could have lowered it at least a little more. Many of the func_wall'd structures didn't bring much of a benefit due to the way in which they were done and now only confuse/look odd when disappearing. The windows for example: func'ing them completely (with frames) won't do much. Rather only include certain parts of it in the func_wall. The fewer brushes touch, the better, even within funcs. The lights on the walls could have been turned into funcs as well (possibly illusionaries) or added to the wall textures - grouping textures is generally an apt way to lower the count. Finally, the crates and floor lights could have been moved up a little from the floors as well. Depends on the lighting of course and thus requires a lot of testing.

Anyway, good work still. 

AguirRe's engine rocks!!

Darkplaces works does it?

Are there any commands that can be used to stop func_walls dissappearing? There were two bad ones when I played it, as you go into the corridor for the SK bars, and the roof of the SNG room.

Anyone ard enough for nightmare?

I had to make a lot of func_walls to get it to compile. Vis groups are not much good for one big arena!

If you wanna have a laugh, try easy.

If you wanna have a good game, try normal.

'Ard and Nightmare are for psychos.

Anyone find the pentegram secret yet?

Anyone ard enough to post a demo on hard or nightmare - would be a god of Quake!! 

 

RickyT23 put developer 1 in console and then run map :)

i didn�t finish iet but map got a real nice places... i give a final feedback soon 

ok, finish the map...

1- good stuff brush work, lights and exploracion is very nice... enjoy it a lot!!!


2- gameplay in my opinion is crapy and most of times unfair and not fun at all...

hope you make more maps i enjoi this one...
sorry my negative in gameplay but i didn�t like much sorry :\ and i�m one of mappers that like to add many monsters... but not that much and not as unfair like in this map... 

and i'm one of mappers that like to add many monsters... but not that much and not as unfair like in this map...

Wow! If Trinca says you have too many monsters in your map, you might want to listen :P 

It's not so much the fact that how many monsters there are, its what they are. And the majority of them are grunts and enforcers. The Rocketeer and the Defender are what really ruin it, and make it not fun. They have have some pretty unfair weapons...

This is probably the hardest Quake map I have ever played, I still haven't been able to finish it on hard without cheating.

RickyT23, are YOU able to beat this map on hard skill? 

I can get up to the second tower, havent had much chance to play it this week cause its been compiling.

I figure if I can make it up to the second tower on Nightmare, someone must be able to get further. After you get the GL it evens the score a little.

Easy and Normal are quite playable tho!

Orl gave me a demo of him doing normal straight thru, 1st attempt!!

Clue: extra armour and health in first room after 1st lift. shootable tex above shells on floor (might be hard to spot, 32*32, at top of vertical post at side of room).

As for RickyT23 Nightmare Sickbase demo, watch this space (hahahahaha!!!) 

for me to get the zipped source map? 

- The huge layout and tons of monsters is very indicative of Doom2 level design and gameplay. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but when the map runs this poorly, you really need to reexamine your approach. There's a reason maps like this in Quake are usually a lot more enclosed - you have to imply the open space by capping more areas off with sky. Being able to walk over the top of every building isn't necessary, especially when it does to performance what it did to this map.

- Your brushwork seems to have improved. The parts of the map that weren't stuffed with far too much detail were constructed very well. The parts that were, like the ornate lamps and trellis windows and stair railings, while ... nice, are just wholly inappropriate to both the style and what the engine is meant to do. Quake doesn't just scale up in capability linearly if you put it on a faster computer. The fact that the map took you that long to compile should have been a major warning sign to you.

- I only finished this by taking the round-the-ramparts SNG shortcut and skipping the silver key door. Not because I didn't have the silver key, just to avoid having 9/10ths of my health shaved off by the giant explosion, and THEN having to face 2 droles. There are a number of combats in this map that are terribly unfair that way, such as the three vores that are teleported in right on you after hitting the two buttons by the SNG, which you can't escape without dying, reloading, and coming back with prior knowledge that it's going to happen. Or the rocket troopers on the ramparts way out of range of your weapons who can hit you with rockets with impunity. Or going up a lift into a tiny room and being faced with a bunch of enforcers, or going up a different lift into a different tiny room and being faced with two fiends and two flying sentries with your back to a wall. You are unfair to the player at nearly every turn.

- Basing the map on three towers was a good idea, and lent the map's progression some overall structure. They were too crowded, though, for what you jammed into them. After frantically trying to survive the fight in the tiny cubicle at the top of each one I had to look around to see what I had accidentally done while doing so - I did not immediately notice the buttons I'd hit or the keys I'd grabbed because I was too distracted.

- I actually liked how you put new monsters right after grabbing a new weapon - those combats weren't too tough, and they helped the reward of finding a bigger gun feel more immediately rewarding.

- Ending is ridiculously sudden. At least have the gug's death trigger a slipgate to rise out of the floor. 

is to populate the map to where you feel comfortably challenged beating it, and make that set of entities Hard skill. Reduce for medium and easy. 

populate the map to where you feel comfortably challenged beating it, and make that set of entities Hard skill. Reduce for medium and easy.

Listen to the Lunaran, and learn. 

*that* bad. Played on normal. Died quite often.

Gameplay: give slightly more cover at least. Also less trites in the beginning.

Architecture: make it much less open. Also make details that stand out of the walls, func_wall entities but keep the walls behind intact. Don't make it so that complex geometries can see each other or they split madly and also vis takes long. Doors don't block vis since they are entities.

It had some nice shapes here and there and some cool details too like some windows... you clearly need more experience, then it's all good. Ask about vis blocking and that stuff, if you don't know what it means... try your maps in fitzquake after a fullvis and use r_showtris 1 so you see what the engine actually has to draw. 

Hey, I liked it. It was pretty good on normal skill. There were no problems for me when using carefull approach. I had left plenty of health scattered all over the level. I thought there was too much armour also. Maybe I was just prepared for the hardcore gameplay after reading some comments. I wonder how skill 2 would look like. Let's just wait for a demo from someone. I liked many of the fights especially after getting the GL. There were no progression problems for me. The quoth monsters were ok in this map (those flying things still annoy me a lot though).
The explosion was cool. The looks from the upper parts were nice also. There were some problems already described by others but overall it was nice. Good work but I think your next map should stay within standard quake limits :)

Here is my demo (20MB):
http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/sick_ankh.dz 

Played in darkplaces since AguirRes engine wouldn't load the map on my system 8-(.
I played on hard skill and made it up to the gug and then health was down to 12 not enough to beat the it 8-).

The map had a lot of nice designs and ideas - looking forward to see more maps from you in the future, 

ok try it more tree time on hard...
and

die die die

quit...

please make next map easy... :\ 

Do you have any more info why my engine didn't work, version, error messages or crash details? 

Finally managed to beat this sucker on hard skill. I almost died a few times, but got lucky. This is a 20 minute demo.

http://orl.fvfonline.com/misc/orlsickbase.7z

Now I want to see someone else finish it on hard. 

I get the following message at the console:

call1 469(precache_model)precache_model()
world.qc : worldspawn
(no function)
pf_precache_model : overflow 

you're using a very old version (more than three years old!), try the latest one instead (1.33). You need an extended protocol to handle all the models in this map.

Please let me know if it works better. 

Got bored trying to make a NM demo. I don't think its too hard, there's just not enough resources to deal with this qauntity of monsters. An early GL and about 50% more health would have made it more fun.

As others have said I get the feeling you only tested the map yourself on normal skill, then added enemies for hard - never works because the person who should be able to play the map the best is you because you built it. When you add an extra level of difficulty over that (untested) you're not making hard you're making a Doom1 style nightmare, which pretty much obligates any casual player to use godmode.

Mind you, I was trying it on nightmare ;)

Cool setting, nice to see the grand scale, even if it did nack the engine in various ways with model and sound overflows, but I've used that as a mapping tactic so its not the end of the world, even though from noclipping around I can see that with some cleaning up and sky capping (as Lunaran says) you could have dropped the amount of slowdown and vistime considerably.

The func_walls popping in and out of visual existance are called flickering entities - AFAIK its when a func (of any type) it existing in too many vis leafs at once, so the player moving or looking at different ones means that the engine thinks the thing can no longer be seen by the player, because its origin is so far away, and stop drawing it.

When this happens just split the one large func into two, three or more smaller ones. Same thing, just split it up a bit - like the crenellations that could have been groups of two blocks each.

I noticed you used it on alot of archways as well - this is a bad idea, since what archways do (at least, the type you have) is create more vis leafs. Might sound bad but what it's actually doing is dividing the map into more managable pieces so the engine doesn't break down and cry every few minutes.

It also means that you lower vistime because instead of processing one gigantic portal you're doing ten (?) little ones. That is, at least if you cap the sky; make it so that each of the buildings touches the skybrush at the top, use some tricks like that (where the player will never get to anyway unless they're noclipping) and you can drop your vistime. Put a few verticle sky brushes linking the buildings that are lower to the sky and you can further cut vistime, but its a question of how much you can get away with vrs. things not looking bad.

Same kind of thing as for the flickering entities - try and be a bit more efficient and then you won't end up staring at a compile window for a week, or have irritating bugs crop up.

Anyhow, a cool setting and some really good ideas, I'll be trying for a NM 100% demo, at least until Sielwolf beats me to it :)

Looking forward to you future maps.