A solid map. The architecture is ok. A bit repetitive but still looking good. Very good use and choice of texture I thought.
I liked the atmosphere with the fog and heavy, thick, simple brushwork. The curves were looking very good. The scale was also perfect.
Too many teleporting monsters for my taste. It made the fights random in a way. The GL was a welcome weapon as it could be put into good use in this map.
Here is my skill 2 demo: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/eels01_ankh.zip 

I wish people would not place powerful weapons in secrets. Or if you do, at least make it not too far ahead of normal progression. Wandering around with no nails or shells picking up large rocket packs is just insulting...

Find a lot of secrets irritating in general really, especially when you replay something you remember being really hard but suddenly find an LG or RL or something right at the beginning and suddenly feel like your struggle was being mocked. It's how I always feel about it anyway. Contract Revoked gave me just such a feeling on replaying it recently. random secrets with three large ammo packs or megas and quads :( 

Cool atmosphere created by the old school textures with wide arched architecture. Compared to the screenshots the level seemed darked when I played through it, but not in a problematic way, and it worked well with the subtle fog. I really liked the change in textures once you got passed the silver key door, although I was expected the fire element section the transition made it feel like you were exploring - penetrating the heart of the place.

As usual, I'm far to forgetful to set a skill before I load the map so I played normal. Found the grenade launcher secret but not the other two.

Ammo-wise I found it pretty well balanced - there were passages where it seemed natural to be heavily using the shotgun, and other sections where the nailgun was clear weapon of choice. These sections did drain down their respective ammo types to zero, but I never found myself using a less-preferable weapon in those situations before I found more ammo and moved to a new section. Perhaps if I didn't have the GL things might have been tougher, even though I didn't make the best use of it.

I liked the escalating combats that were set up in several rooms. The teleporting waves in the water section were the most frantic. I bit off more than I could chew in the air element section, triggering hordes and one of the shamblers at the same time. I then failed to create any infighting and so spent a while diving down the elevator between shots on the shambler.

I ended up dealing with the ambushes in the fire element mostly by fleeing - which did turn the lava into a fair hazard. However, it slowed the pace of the combat down compared to the previous sections. I also sniped the shamblers in the final room to engage them one at a time, and was a bit disappointed by myself that I'd tackled what turned out to be the final battle in a 'cheap' way.

Anyway, thanks for the map, had a cracking run through it. 

Hi I'm a new(but not n00b) european QuAKe mapper.. I' working on some sp maps..
hope to finish them soon :) 

interesting you considered it 'cheap', preach.
i felt smart pulling the shamblers individually. i would have felt it cheap if they were artificially linked together and vondur was laughing saying 'i don't think so, haw haw' in the background. :P 

Mostly because it meant I didn't fight at all in the final room, just crossed the floor and left the level. It made that ending part seem empty, but I had nobody but myself to blame for it... 

Sorry for my n00bness but .. what about If I don't VIS(or fast vis) a map ?
I mean is it possible to publish them anyway for the community?
Could Fast-Vis be enough ?

Thanks 

If you don't vis, you let everyone know you can't map properly. Fast vis also isn't enough. 

i love you vonder!! 

Damn, I think I remember having a "calm down Vondur" image lying around somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. 

lol

still though, vis is the mark of a proper map. especially these days with machines as fast as they are (and now with willem's multicore vis).

most maps will vis in under a day, and if it takes longer, then you'd have to vis it otherwise it'll run terribly. 

A day - what if you have a 12 thread machine running at like 4.5Ghz or something stupid like that. Or two of them. Does WVis support 24 threads? My map takes 24hrs on either 2 or 4 threads @ about 3.5Ghz (i forget) but on the aforementioned uber-machine. So it wwould prob take a few hours. like 4 or 5 hours maybe? And on a single core athlon it would take 4 or 5 days!!! 

Even if the poly count issues are less important nowadays, you can still run into packet overflows quite easily if you don't vis the map. Without vis data, the server will have to send all entities to every client, rather than just the entities in the PVS for that client. 

I haven't had that problem for quite a while!

Im using an engine which doesn't seem to give thee dreaded efrags bug either. My map is huge. I've got like 60000 marksurfaces and about 61500 vertexes. The are more gameplay entities than I've probably ever had before in there already......

And I was just running it with no vis and there was no packet overflow. No light data either. Would that have an effect? 

Some engines with raised limits won't have the packet overflow and similar problems. For example, if you're making a map for RMQ, which is using the RMQ engine, which is based on quakespasm, which is based on fitzquake 0.85, packet size limits are much higher. 

pretty much all warnings are removed in rmq engine, and the limits are something like 16 times that of fitz 0.85 in some cases anyway :) 

Vondur I can't believe you had to say that in 2010. I say this as a person who has slacked off more and more in terms of making the effort to design areas that look awesome but vis properly. My maps usually take a 3-6 days to vis. But I remember back in 1997 reading that Ben dude's worldcraft mapping guide in which he was like "if you do not vis, you are an asshole and there is something wrong with you." VIS IT BITCH. If the map doesn't suck someone will volunteer to help you out with it. Tyrann vised a bunch of the original SOE maps for me for example. If your map plays well without vising it's too simple, and if it isn't too simple then you need to vis it. Btw still on old shitty pc (which cant even run quake) but review coming! when I get my good Pc back. 

fog worked great in first part.

But too hard, I missed the GL until the lava bit when I realised there had to be one somewhere since it was the only ammo I had :) 

Brilliant and beautiful, as everything Vondur. 

ahhh, so many maps to play but i've been so busy with work. looks great though 

I thought the impossible was possible. 

I know this is a years old quote but ...

"My maps usually take a 3-6 days to vis."

Wow ... memories! 

I remember when we had to get other people with fat rigs to vis our maps, and even then it took days :} 

Yeah, sorry for necroing the thread, but it's a very nice little map. 

Just played this for the first time. Nice.