A super-metroid style quake mod would be awesome. In a way that is what metroid prime is, but putting it on the PC so you can use WASD+mouse would be even cooler -- it would allow tougher combats, and more complicated secrets.

You could even split it into multiple levels with backtracking, since one of the cornerstones of the "metroidvania" genre is the respawning enemies. So no need to worry about saving level state (means your interactive objects like doors and bridges can't save state either, but remember: the point is to use weapons/items as gating factors, not doors and lifts.)

I guess you'd want SOME permanent changes across level loads, and you could use the serverflags variable to store them -- maybe 1 bit for each boss you want to stay dead, and then 1 bit for any other special one-time events or changes in the environment. 

I always thought it would be nice to have something in the level which would give an indication of the health of the boss. Like if you had an array of statues overlooking the arena you fight in, and as you do damage to the boss, they shatter one by one. Or some kind of plinth that decends into lava as you do damage. Perhaps if the whole floor was to descend, it would add an additional challenge to the fight - sections become seperated by the lava as it falls.

The other advantage of that is that it's easy to accomplish in quake, where additions to the HUD are more difficult. I suppose the most important thing would be to make the connection explicit between the damage taken by the boss and the changing environment. Perhaps by making sure that the changes occur in delineated "steps", and that the boss goes into pain each time it happens. 

You know the final idea/plan for shub

Yeah. Lots of damage, and avoid everything that it shoots at you, while at the same time also trying to not die to everything else that's in her pit. Or fall into the lava. At least you respawn after you die... 

don't confuse quake with a puzzle game. It's not.

I, for example, have zero fun playing puzzle games. Everytime some random puzzle flash game comes along, it bores the fuck out of me. I don't want to figure out stuff the designer made up. Even games like Commando (1) feel the same: I just need to find out the exact sequence the designer made up to beat the game.

I never quite got the console boss fights, because in their stereotypical form they're just puzzles.

An example: had to refer to a walkthrough to find out how to kill the robots in bionic commando that are only vulnerable on their backs. I just couldn't figure it out. I tried any combination of weird fighting moves, tricking them into positions where I could use special moves, etc., but looking at their backs (or shooting at those) just didn't occur to me as plausible in the game world. Nothing else I had ever had to look behind before.

So be careful with them. Charon (?) had those quake buttons that you had already pressed dozens of during the game, and I'm not sure i ever completed shub before I know the secret. 

Saying Charon (who's a very good Q3 mapper) in place of Chthon tells me you're not as anal retentive to worry over these details. But at the same time you say you hate flash puzzle games is a bald faced lie. If you hated them, you wouldn't knew they existed.

Reamek Quake will never be a puzzle game. As much as I liked liked the metroid series, it'd never get to that state of bar battles either.

You fire enough rockets at the thing, it dies. I always like having weak points for the savvy (remember the shambler has, inverted) but health bars and so on aren't for me.

I try not to be an arsehole with RMQ's design, but there's still stuff that's been negotiated that I want to scrap over.

Fuck. Ignore this post. Fell off the wagon. 

A super-metroid style quake mod would be awesome. In a way that is what metroid prime is, but putting it on the PC so you can use WASD+mouse would be even cooler -- it would allow tougher combats, and more complicated secrets.

You could even split it into multiple levels with backtracking, since one of the cornerstones of the "metroidvania" genre is the respawning enemies. So no need to worry about saving level state (means your interactive objects like doors and bridges can't save state either, but remember: the point is to use weapons/items as gating factors, not doors and lifts.)

I guess you'd want SOME permanent changes across level loads, and you could use the serverflags variable to store them -- maybe 1 bit for each boss you want to stay dead, and then 1 bit for any other special one-time events or changes in the environment.


This sounds fucking awesome. You're making this, right? If it helps, I can bring you cups of tea and danish pastries while you work. Team player. 

Continued from

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60400&start=100

The map that is scheduled for the next RMQ demo has a pretty brutal multi-element trap at its core, as well as other gameplay novelties that are part of the environment. I didn't make any sketches, I just roughly knew where that trap would be and when I got there, I built that section around the trap. Same for the other, weirder element, which I can't disclose now :-P

I had this rough idea that an environmental hazard is in area X, while a certain form of movement is required through area Y, and some other obstacle might be in area Z. And I just built that while I did the blocking out. These things aren't actually hard to do if you're blocking out anyway. But I think a map should have 2 - 3 non-monster related / environmental challenges, some parts that require alternative forms of movement, plus a couple corners that are worth exploring. That should allow you to halve the monster count while keeping it interesting.

I hate to repeat it, but even without turning it into QuakeRaider, TR games are pretty good sources of inspiration when it comes to traps and non-monster challenges. Watch/hear this guy flip as he plays through the famous trap gauntlet in "The Great Wall":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_dP53CPuk0

It's just trap after trap after trap. You think you're through it, and then you turn around just to see another spiked wall come at you. You stop to calculate distance, but the floor starts crumbling. The secret pickup in the crushers is also a nice detail. This whole thing must have caused countless fatalities, without a single monster in there.

A collection of crusher based traps, and some moving blades/combination traps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2tgFOIAo2Y&feature=related

Most of the basic elements of these exist in Quake; they have to be built while laying out the level though. Of course Quakeguy is a lot less nimble than Lara; you can't duck, climb, balance, and whatever. hence the traps must be slightly dumbed down for Quake, but not much.

- Doors aka crushers

- small landing spots or thin columns

- nail shooters

- lava or other threat when falling

- rotating entities

- trigger_hurt

These can be combined to create more interesting traps. The basis of these TR style traps are usually crushers, danger of falling, having to land on small spots, and shooters. There are also the good old pendulum traps and rolling blades/boulders/whatever. I find these a bit boring, unless combined with shooters. That's because the player can just stand and wait for the right moment. However, by adding shooters, you can force them to think on their feet. If they stand and calculate for too long, their health gets spiked away. It helps if you can set the shooter's damage (easy to do if you use a custom progs).

Finally, you have breakaway floor with spikes underneath, or just lava. This can be done in Quake, too; there is a testmap in RMQ that does this. Naturally, you could just retract the floor like in e4m3. Best to combine this again with jumping through something that you have to time, because an added timing element makes the trap even more precarious than just taking away the floor. Most traps in Tomb Raider are combinations of something that requires timing (crushers, pendulum, blades) or skill (grappling, wallrunning), and something that reduces the time you have available (shooters, breaking floor, retracting ledge, application of physics). Make the way dangerous, and at the same time pull the floor away underneath them.

You can do these things in Quake, you just have to remember building them in the blocking out stage already. Although to a certain extent, you can use existing corridors as the base for a trap, like they say here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL71UuPB8Gg

Flak ogres / nail ogres, and other monsters, can be used in place of stationary nail shooters to make the whole thing less predictable and give the option to kill part of the trap to make it easier. It should be obvious that you can use monsters as part of traps or puzzles (like having to kill certain monsters to give you a chance at fighting others / pass a trap).

And so forth. These crusher based traps tend to work well (DOOM did that a lot, too), the crushers just need to be wide enough to counteract the Quakeguy's moving speed. Moving through a wide crusher takes longer than moving through a thin one, thus the crusher has a larger chance to hit. They can be staggered, of course, like in that first vid I posted above.

An element that can be nicely used against the player is that you can't stop immediately in Quake. There is still some movement after letting go of the keys. This makes it that much harder to land on a tiny spot without falling or sliding into the crusher...

It's pretty fun to design traps in Quake. 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=49776&end=25

Good point about traps in id1. Seems modern user-made maps are more difficult in general and have less traps.

My favourite trap of all time was the sequential nail shooter from Koohoo that fired in a circular spread until a few buttons were pressed.

All traps and puzzles in all games have a single goal - to make the player feel clever. That shooter from Koohoo made me feel clever because it was itself clever. Deactivating it wasn't, it just gave the time to figure out how it worked.

Simple but the quintessential Quake trap.

The most important thing about it was, I doubt anyone who played the map died from it, although every single one will have perceived it as being just as dangerous as the room with multiple Shambler spawns. 

Heh, I don't know func_ by heart exactly - old threads can be very hard to find. Shambler linked me here.

The idea is to make the trap at least as memorable as any monsters in the map, yeah.

And traps are just one option to break a map up a little, to give a different kind of challenge from the monster onslaught. 

creating a 'dazed' effect on the player by reducing 'sv_maxspeed', 'cl_yawspeed' and 'sensitivity' cvars...

or would that just be annoying? 

for a very short amount of time. 10-15 seconds?

Or do you mean a permanent effect? 

If it corresponds to the map/gameplay, then it might work. If it's during a horde arena battle, then maybe not...

Same goes for a mangle'd teleporter. 

Can you make it feel like the player has lost his sense of balance and is leaning one way or the next, and the put that right before an area with giant machinery-type things that can squish the player? Might be really annoying, or really tense. 

In runequake there is a rune that gives you the ability to drug people and one of them makes the player's view shift all over, can't remember the command though and also sometimes the players view would be off centerd when the effects wear off.
Perhaps you can use the command for this? 

default 0, increased a little during intermissions. can go up to 100 (or more?) for some seriously nauseating effects! 

Is an incredibly long time, really.

Screwing with the players view is fun but tricky - if you get it wrong then people who suffer from motion sickness won't be able to play and lazy people won't want to. 

hahah wow, v_idlescale is insane at high levels.

anyway, i was only thinking maybe 3-4 seconds at the very most. v_idlescale might be fun to mess around with but i don't think i'd go over 20ish.

mostly the dazed effect is really just daze-- making the player feel sluggish. like when you get blasted by explosives in war fps games. 

 

I was not aware of this feature... in FitzQuake it's more like walking on a boat in the open sea... I tried setting it at different value and indeed when it is higher than 20, it is almost impossible to play. I tried to play e1m1 with v_idlescale = 100... and I had to finish the game with the axe as it was impossible to shoot precisely...

It gives me an idea for my next project: black operation onto a boat in a open sea... (like Navy Seals intervention, or something equivalent).... hhhmmmmmm I have to investigate what could be done... 

I plan to use something like that to create a very short lived "drunk effect" in one of my maps.

:-) 

Did any Quake map to date make creative use of the following:

- Pushables (they're available since Scourge of Armagon)

- Physics (Gyro, ODE) (available for years)

- Rotating entities (not as simple doors or decoration, but as parts of the gameplay, be it as traps or as means to proceed through the map)

- Moving water (includes raising/lowering the water level, or using a current as a means of transport or a trap) (qc is available for years)

?

Why is this stuff available, but unused? It seems making the environment itself part of the gameplay has gone out of fashion? The three maps I played lately (Trinca's, Madfox', and neggers' unreleased) all rely on combat for over 90% of the gameplay.

Environmental stuff exists, why is it not being used?

Why is the environment not used to tell stories, either? All it does in most Quake maps is look cool.

As if there was a self imposed limit on creativity - "Quake needs no stories, and Quake is only about shooting." 

A lot of that is ... "extra stuff."

Pushables - I don't know how to make something pushable. I don't remember there being a func_pushable or somesuch.

Physics - had no idea, dunno what Gyro/ODE means.

Rotating entities - think one or two of necros' maps used these a lot. Negke's 768 map did as well (I think.) Probably others.

Moving water - had no idea water could move up and down. If it involves using qc, I don't want to futz with it. 

It does involve using qc. However, quite a few maps used their own progs.dat, like Marcher for example, and madfox' latest. Rotating entities are in Hipnotic and Quoth, pushables are in Hipnotic and Nehahra, moving water is in extras. All of those supply a progs.dat that's ready to be used I believe.

gyro is a set of qc files for Quake, allowing you to add physics to an object. It is very much plug and play. ODE is an open source physics engine, which for example darkplaces, and I believe FTE, have support for and is apparently very easy to use.

Rotation - I was looking for rotation directly as part of the gameplay, for example as a means of progression (like hopping from one moving gear to the next in a sort of clockwork etc). 

To mappers who don't use all the wonderful stuff that's lying around, but the reason is that monsters are easier.

Traps tend to get underused as well, even 'tricky' terrain, just because you have to test it a lot before it works right.

I remember that zigzag walkway in ProdigyXL that was over a slime pit - very simple, but effective. 

@gb ...

Has a story line to some degree. One of my favorite maps ...

In particular, it has an opening demo to tell it ...

http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/sop123.html

Obviously the following Quake maps have a story line of some semblance:

1. Hell In A Can

http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/casspq1.html

2. Starship 1/2

http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/starship.html
http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/starshp2.html

3. ... I forgot the 3rd one.