You were correct. The version I had was from 2005. Whoops. Smoothed out animations look neat.

Didn't turn my music off before playing. Nsoe3 intro music and Hefeystos make for an interesting mix. 

wow Orl, skill 2
my criteria was simply "I must be able to pass these maps on normal." I told PM, that on hard, people know what they're getting themselves into. The bane fight is balanced on skill 1 for me, but I get my ass handed to me every time on skill 2.

maybe in a future version the coins/gems could provide the player with a bigger bonus. 

It's always recommended to increase the heapsize at least a little. In some maps, particularly the excessive ones, sound dropping may occur if it's too small (newer versions of BJP will show console warnings). 

...said you don't actually need ammo to fight enemies - sack them. 

Yeah, I left the MH aswell in that start battle aswell! If I knew I actually picked up a GL it probably would have been easier!

For me those 3 Vores in the void map were very difficult, but it was my own fault. I decided to leave them until I found a RL, rather than wasting nails. I spent the whole level running away from their bloody Vore Balls. Eventually when the dragons came, and I still had no RL, I finally just sat in the SK/GK room and nailgunned them, and took the dragons out with the DSG. Pity you lose your ammo at the start of each ammo - because I always left with heaps!

Yeah that sword is awesome. At one point I got Bane just below me on a ledge. He was trying to get me with his sword, and couldn't, so I just attacked him with my sword for ages. Then the fucker teleported behind me, and I was all wtf? so he hurt me good, so I had to reload. Never managed to get him back to the same ledge again.

Yeah, my levels were always rather small because of my computer limitations. I'd love to make some huge maps now. Although, a month of vis'ing doesn't sound good. Maybe I won't :P

Good luck with your future maps Tronyn! That Unforgiven one I'm looking forward to - remember originally it was us two that were going to make that episode in 2001? It was going to be the sequel to Rapture :) More medieval ruins and underground wizard = good. More base = bad. It would be good if you'd use more custom textures though. There's so many games from the last several years with textures that haven't been used in Quake. I should upload my textures sometime... I converted a lot. 

only played the first map, kept dying on the second one right at the start on the first few knights; skill 1 i think.

One thing that i found a bit frustrating: i haven't played the original pack, so i don't know the monsters and pretty much died on each new monster the first time i saw it (that was on hard iirc); they do a lot of dmg if you don't know how they'll attack you. It would'be been nice to have some sort of introduction for each new type of enemy. 

It only took 50 years, but that crummy map I made was finally released. Oh hey, there's other stuff in there as well.

Haven't gotten past Trinca's map yet (the dragon keeps killing me) but I'm looking forward to getting past the first two crummy maps so I can play the last 3 good maps. 

great that pack came out i�m just sad becouse they dont fucking run with joequake :| fuck i�m sick of old stile clients!!!

aguirre fix put your client more modern please!!! 

If you can't run it with Joequake, maybe you can give Qrack a try. It's a spin-off of Joequake, and is now in many ways better. I don't know if it can play all the way through without problem though, because I am now just in the second map. 

The decapitation effect of the sword was very cool. The animation was very good too. 

To Zwiffle and Trinca: As you have noticed, extra stuff was inserted into the maps, nsoe2 in particular. Once the devkit becomes available, the coders can look into the source and see for themselves the mess I wrote up. Also, there were originally too many Hell Lords in nsoe1 and nsoe2, so some of them were downgraded.

About nsoe2: Before the additions, nsoe2 seemed hard at the beginning, then gets progressively easier. By the time I get the rocket launcher, the five shal-rath at the end were a joke. During the rebalancing tests, damaged armor along with a dead guy were added at first, but then I thought why do that when I can add NPCs to fight monsters and mitigate the armorless player's limited ammo. So came the idea of rebels fighting the Bane's army, whose job in Quake life is to cause some damage then die like the redshirts they are. Also, as you all noticed, a ton of extra monsters were added to the end.

About the sword: It can decapitate anything except blobs (no head), the nsoe2 dragon boss, the trogboss, and the Bane himself. Zombies are gibbed instead of beheaded. I considered decapitation, then have the headless zombies continue after the player, but that was too much work for little gain. In addition to decapitation, the sword can deflect missiles by swinging the sword at them. Most missiles are too fast to deflect reliably. However, the lavaballs the Hell Lords fling are ideal for deflecting.

SoE: Indian Summer has some unused stuff. There is one unused weapon, a super-powered MIRV launcher that can be accessed via impulse 9 cheat. Impulse 14 gives the player dragonscale armor which is red armor with a morphing power.

With the various issues discovered since the release, I will work on a patch once I finish the devkit documentation. Bug reports or minor balance change suggestions, such as boosting treasure values, are welcome. I will also compile a version of the progs that will work with standard Quake by disabling some features and bypassing the map nsoe3. 

um, please fix the difficulty. upto map2 which is pretty much ridiculous on skill 1. 

despite the extremely frustrating gameplay, some of the situations are an absolute joke.

But maps 3 and 4 look stunning, and have a mind boggling scale too (especially 3). And I liked the non-linearity. Too bad you die no matter which route you take :) 

i'm not going to really comment on the gameplay, just that in general, the fights are extremely difficult.

that said:

i liked, nsoe3 the most. i like the sprawling city/castle type feeling, and the clocktower looks great looming over the rest of the map. i also liked how the map starts, sort of in like a forest from inside of a quaint cottage. made a good contrast for when you hit the city/castle.

the final boss "bane" was crazy and had some cool attacks. i liked the lightning storm where the whole map gets dark for a bit before the strikes rain down. :)

i don't know what it is about picking up shiny things, but i loved the coins and gems, lol... it's like hellgate london ^_^

ty for quite a few hours of gaming! :D 

There will be an update coming out pretty soon - this will make the gameplay a lot easier in general. Also, it'll be playable in FitzQuake - the fitz progs will just skip Nsoe3. I'll post more info soon.

Anyway, a learning experience for future projects that will also use PM's stuff. 

In other fantasy themed mods or games, monsters drop treasure. If Soul of Evil had shops where you can buy stuff, treasure would be used as the generic "GP". If Soul of Evil had an experience point system in which the player can gain levels, treasure would also be a source of experience, much like in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Since neither shops nor leveling exist, treasure serves as armor or health boosts like the helmets and potions in classic Doom. The lack of shops, or rather the inability to spend money, and the lack of leveling are not (good enough) reasons why monsters cannot drop treasure in Soul of Evil.

On another note, treasure will give more in the update to come. 

Having died several times in the first big fight I decided to just leg it past most of the monsters and get a big infight going, which served its purpose quite nicely, but in the process I must have skipped quite a few pickups because I'm now hiding behind a rock near the water with very little health and ammo. I don't want to start the level again, but DarkPlaces is shit so it won't let me cheat without restarting the level, and AGL just won't run it.

Does anybody know of a way to disable DarkPlace's silly cheat system? 

I'd rather leave it at requiring specific engines than skipping the best map of the entire episode...

Text_Fish: sv_cheats 1, restart. (quicksave/quickload instead of restart might work as well) 

you just have to set sv_cheats to 1 anytime after you start the game (you could do it in any map, and it will hold until you quit or set it back to 0)

annoying "feature" in my view, at least having it as default is 

while i'd love it if it ran in fitzquake, skipping nsoe3 is a real shame...

i just wish i could run in aglquake instead of darkplaces but there's some wierd bug in aglquake where these blocks of grey void appear on top of my screen.


also: i wanted to say, i liked the look of nsoe4 a lot, but i forgot to mention that last time because there was so much to take in. ^_^
the way you start off in that totally enclosed round structure and then make your way down and all of a sudden, the wall gives way to girders and you see this huge wide open area... good use of contrasting volumes there. the vores though... yeah those guys pissed me off. chain lightning gun got a lot of use in this map. it was nice to have a lot of cells and actually be able to use it once in a while. :) 

and also I second/third the non-removal of nsoe3, the best map by far. 

Couldn't nsoe3 be just slightly trimmed instead of removed altogether? It had some sections that felt just tacked on (i.e. the pyramid area) 

As a test during development, I removed all of the monsters so sound precaching and edict count would not exceed standard limits, and I still could not load nsoe3 in standard or FitzQuake. That map breaks limits that I cannot fix via QuakeC.

The upcoming progs that would work in standard/FitzQuake by skipping nsoe3 (among other cutbacks) would not replace the default nsoe progs. It would simply be an alternate progs.dat, like progs_dp.dat is for DarkPlaces. At first, people were lamenting that SoE: Indian Summer would not run in FitzQuake. Now people seem to be opposed to the idea of a scaled back version of the progs. The point of the so-called Fitz progs to come is so that anyone who cannot load any of the enhanced Quake engines can still play SoE: Indian Summer. Unless Tronyn says otherwise, there will be three progs.dat files in the update to come, with the AguirRe Quake progs as the default. Only the Fitz progs would have any cutbacks.

One note: The only difference between the default progs for AguirRe Quake and the progs for DarkPlaces is the DarkPlaces progs has modified flymode code, which would be necessary had one of the levels included dragonscale armor, a variant red armor which lets the player morph into a dragon. As I wrote earlier, the cheat 'impulse 14' is available to test the morph. 

so PM and I are going to tone down the difficulty (btw, necros, glad you appreciated nsoe4. If you can believe it, nsoe3 and 4 were originally one map - lol, then nsoe4 and nsoe5 were originally one map.)

Here's what I'm thinking:

-Remove some of the Vores that are in the most frustrating positions in snoe3 and 4
-Gems and Coins give bigger bonuses
-Demote many of the Hell Lords to Hell Knights
-Up the player's health and armour limits

Does this seem fair enough to everyone? 

Those seem like good fixes, and would help out a lot. What might also help is toning down the dragons a little, either make them slower, or have their attacks do less damage. Right now, they pretty much mop the floor with the player.