Minor setpiece spoilers ahead.

Visuals are neat and I'm a massive sucker for brush-built toilets and toilet accessories so you automatically get cool points there. Unfortunately, some of the textures from Kingpin didn't convert to the Quake palette perfectly, with lots of grey and grey and grey and a little bit of tan mixed in (this is noticeable in the kitchen area). Enemy variety is alright, would have liked to see some non-humanoid/dog enemies earlier in the map but I suppose that would've broken the theme. The attacks themselves are good and varied at any rate courtesy of Quoth/AD's various grunt types, even if some of them look a bit similar before they shoot and I was surprised a couple times by how durable they were, expecting a normal Grunt. Set pieces are excellent, especially the bit of outside ledge-climbing staring into the void, and the various shenanigans in the parking garage- I almost got hit by a truck and it was fucking awesome! Ammo and weapon balance was pretty good, assuming all secrets are found- getting the LG relatively early on while already having a supply of cells is nice, and hoarding them and the nails to the end still cuts it close ammo-wise but never feels like there isn't enough. Didn't get the last secret as I never made it to the top floor area (I'm assuming), I did get the Widowmaker by barely leaping across the gap but it didn't count as a secret so I'm not sure if the necessary circle jump is intentional. A couple of the other secrets are almost too obvious, like the nail ammo next to the lift that you practically walk right into. Played on skill 2 and took around a half hour- demo with some other train-of-thought comments ingame here. 

I'll have to check this out later. I'm a sucker for these Orl-type maps based on real world locations. 

Man, what a blast! I love it! XD

Awesome map, challenging and fun, the secrets were amazing (i found 08/10) and those walls in the first room are a work of art :)

i made a playthrough (killed 111/111 in skill 2) \o/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iQUViPXfTc 

@Spud: Thanks for the feedback! I tried to re-balance some of the enemies health-wise to add both variety and difficulty balance. I'd actually like to introduce a melee-soldier, similar to the knight but military themed (ie: stun rod instead of sword). I think it would help to make the soldiers more enjoyable to fight as a whole. I never realized how much more interesting knights made things until doing this.

Sadly, I am unable to watch your demo. For whatever reason, I can't get it to play at all. The game just crashes whenever I try to run it. :/

@Qmaster: I hope you enjoy it! I'd love to get your feedback. :)

@Tribal: Thanks for the playthrough! I left a comment and like on your video. Glad you liked it! 

"I'd actually like to introduce a melee-soldier, similar to the knight but military themed (ie: stun rod instead of sword)"

Malice has a guy like this:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2XR9wyEHv0U/maxresdefault.jpg

Malice has a lot of cool "base" enemy models. Somebody should put those guys in Arcane Dimensions. 

That's weird, the demo plays back fine for me. I recorded it in QSS-Spiked just like the readme said/map required (specifically 0.92.2-qss-r7-admod), protocol 666+FTE2. The demo takes a second to load that looks like it's freezing, but then plays fine; are you just getting a direct crash to desktop or at least an error message of some sort? Also, you did actually extract the .dem from the zip, right? 

Yep, made sure it was extracted. Every time I try to run it I get "quakespasm-spike-admod.exe has stopped working".

The last thing the console reports is "downloading progs/proj_lighting2.mdl...", then it pauses, then it crashes.

I'm still relatively new to a lot of these things (Quake Engines and mapping), so it could very well be something that I'm doing/failing to do. However, I was able to run several other demos, along with recording my own and getting it to run.

Regardless, I'll keep trying and see if I can figure it out. 

Minor issue. It was a missing file. ad_v1_70 had a file that I didn't.

Just finished watching the playthrough. I should have kept in the destructables. Originally, EVERY item had a broken version for when it was hit, but that got kind of tedious and a bit excessive, so I took it out. In retrospect, you would have been destroying things left and right with that axe. lol

*sry for the double post 

Added to the list ;) 

How many kills are you supposed to get to unlock the next area out of the start? I killed 11 and the GK door and the path to the left are gated. There appear to be no more buttons or monsters and the last monster I killed was part of a trigger_count that had "more to go", so at least 4. Am I missing something? 

Did you try on a different difficulty, e.g. hard. 

Map Spoilers:


Wave 1 - 6 Monsters
Wave 2 - 8
Wave 3 - 9
Wave 4 - 3
Wave 5 - 5

There is an occasional issue with 1 monster getting stuck coming down from the skylight. If that happens, just look up and walk in his direction and he comes down...usually.

Other than that I haven't run into any problems with that area, and I don't really mess with difficulty flags.

Please let me know what happens. I'll continue to look into it. :) 

I'm pretty sure I end up finishing two waves and start the third, but that would mean I have killed at least 14 and I haven't. Is there some order you have to do it in? I kill the vores/shambler first before anyone else. I'm playing on hard. 

the vores/shambler are the 4° wave

in this video, at 20:00 you can see the waves of enemies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iQUViPXfTc&t=20m

but, if you are stuck, i think the only solution is start the map again. it takes less than 25 minutes to finish it ;) 

The only time I ever had shamblers and vores showing up before their appointed time (at the end of the map) was in every engine, but the one specified in the readme.

map spoilers:


The map circles back on itself, so it begins and ends at the gold key door, but the waves don't activate till the end. There shouldn't be ANY enemies at the start. Again, I suspect the engine. 

 

dude 

As said before, realistic settings are tricky to do in Quake and often look odd, so it's a rarely-done theme. So I thought this was quite refreshing. The areas are well-made, suitably varied, and I even got a slight Deus Ex vibe. I liked the use of Kingpin textures regardless of the known conversion effects. Bit goofy in places: lol at the cars.

Gameplay is fine given the setting, and I guess I can live with the health-buffed grunts in this case, though not sure it really adds to the map. The end fight feels a bit over the top despite the quad; just too many waves overall.

The kitchen fire is a nice touch, but it doesn't work that well with the standard particle limit set in vanilla AD (heh). The fire particles show up and disappear in sequence which means one can easily run into the hurt triggers by accident. Probably meant to be played using that Spike port? As for the sounds, be sure to keep them short and small and in Quake-compatible format. The 11 MB (!) sprinkler sound is over a minute long for the same repeating sound scape, and it doesn't even play in game, because the it's a stereo sound or something according to QS. A sound like this can be short and made to loop, because, after all, there's only so much variation in water noise.

By and large a big improvement over your first release. GG, keep it up.

Demo (died at the end) 

@negke

lol jk

Yeah, it HAS to be played in spike (with command line inputs) to work right.

Buffing the enemies was just an attempt on my part of re-balancing. With their default healths, I was blowing through enemies left and right, and the map was over in no time. So I tried to tweak basic things like damage output and health.

I'll look into the audio thing. It was my first time messing with custom audio (not an excuse), so I think I got a bit lazy with the implementation.

Thanks for the review and playthrough! And I appreciate your help getting me started. :)

PS: Any chance of my map getting a page on Quaddicted? It's in the database, but it never went any further than that. 

Demo here:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/redfield_office.zip

Like the unique setting and somewhat realistic vibes. The opening hallway was fantastic and some of the traps were pretty clever.

I do think that some of the textures just didn't look very sharp because they lack any sort of detail that the id/Hexen/Daik textures are known for. The purpleish wall texture is very bland for instance.

Yeah the sound should have been a looped mono channel wav. Use GoldWave to add cue points and convert to mono. You only need like a 5-10s sound. As a result it didn't play the sound. I ran it in QS v0.93 with no issue. There are plenty of ways to set up a custom pixely particle to simulate the fire without forcing Darkplaces style effect use.

The only other minor gripe is that when going onto the ledge of the building, the sky is the ugly scrolling sky, with infinite plane at the horizon. A cityscape skybox would really have sealed the whole "real place" thing here. There are a few Q3A city .tga skyboxes in the huge skybox pack on lvlworld.

Overall I loved the unique theme and funny posters and stuff. Good times! 

I haven't played through Arcane Dimensions, only got a brief taste of it, so some of this stuff was mind-blowing to me. I agree with some of the other comments here that I read - almost getting hit by the car in the parking garage was awesome. The enemy variety was nice. Since I haven't really experienced much of Quoth or Arcane, some of the new enemy types were a really nice surprise.

I'm with Tribal in that those walls in the first room were truly a work of art. I spent a while just admiring the room and thinking about the time that must have gone into making those walls. You also did a really great job at capturing the workplace vibes - Reznor's moody music really shone through on this map, as well as that ominous classic skybox.

The secrets were nice and I liked that there were many of them. I found 8/10. It's hard to choose a favorite part of the map but I really liked the Ogre that was fishing on the ledge. Curiosity got the best of me so I attacked him but I immediately regretted it. I detest attacking the dogs in Quake but this is the first time that I've ever felt sorry for an Ogre.

I really liked the textures. Someone mentioned too much gray but some of the concrete textures had moldy discolorations, which I liked. I also felt that it matched the drab concrete hell of the places where I've worked. The back in 10 minutes sign cracked me up. I also appreciated the little things like the mice at the computers.

I had a little trouble at the very end with the ammo situation. Just one additional crate of shells or nails would have been a huge help with the final fight. I had to take down one enemy with an axe and it was a little slow and painful but fortunately, it was the last one. Fun map, looked great, played really well, can't ask for more than that. Excellent job. 

@Redfield

Thanks for the demo and audio tips. I'll check it out!

As for the particles, the standard fire particles just don't work, imo. Specifically in the kitchen section where they need to be readable or you just end up taking unnecessary damage (as you found in your demo).

My knowledge of Quake mapping is still rather limited, but if you have recommendations for easier ways to get similar results, I'd appreciate any suggestions you may have. :)

Also, thanks for the skybox resources. I've been meaning to start working with those.

@Poorchop

Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed it. That truck moment seems to be getting a positive response, but the amusing part is that I just added it on-the-fly, 10 minutes before the upload. Also, that opening area went through a bunch of iterations until I started messing with the wall panels. Then it just came together.

Be sure to check out Arcane Dimensions and get your mind blown. It's the reason I decided to start Quake mapping. 

And I freaking loved it. As someone else who attempted a more realistic theme in Quake I can really appreciate the effort you put into it. The offices, the kitchen, the parking garage, I thought it all looked great. Seeing unusual themes in Quake definitely gets my interest, and this was no exception.

I specifically enjoyed the kitchen fire scenario and putting it out, as well as the truck slamming into the wall. Its gameplay moments like this that can really make a map stand out.

As for the gameplay, it was tough, but I never found it unfair. In fact I might have been a bit careless as I died at the very end.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm a sucker for maps that go outside Quake's usual environments, and you can bet I look forward to your next release!

First run demo, hard skill: http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/orl_ad_dwoffice.zip 

Thanks for the kind words, I'm glad you liked it!

TBH, I just kind of default to realism. It's my way of thinking through an area.

For instance, in the restaurant, I wasn't sure where I wanted to go with it next, so I just added a bathroom because it would have one in real life. By the time I was finished, a new idea for the area was ready and I got back to work.

And I'm with you regarding unusual environments. I've seen Quake done to a masterful level (both by id and the mapping community) within it's established themes. Now I want to see what else it can be!