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Map Jam 5 : The Qonquer Map Jam RELEASED The Conquer Map Jam contains 8 new levels where your skirmishing skills will be pushed to the limits.



Fight to the death in multiple arenas, many of which contain traps and tricks more deadly than the enemies themselves!



Thank you very much to the authors who submitted their work for this jam :



Arrrcee

FifthElephant

Hypnos

Ijed

MFX

Scampie

Skacky

WarrenM



Additional thanks to Onetruepurple and Primal for additional testing!



Download Map Jam 5 : http://www.quaketastic.com/files/mapjam5.zip



Screenshot : http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/MapJam5.jpg



H Y P E ! ! ! /me Downloading /me Downloading Screenshots looks great... :) NICE! NICE! I would love to see another Qonquer jam again! Nice! Good Looking Screenshot Good Looking Screenshot Good work, DaZ Awesome Work Awesome Work All excellent in their own way. This theme has brought out some fantastic unique settings and atmospheres. Here's the ones I've given at least a few rounds of play so far.



Scampie's feels like you're playing a slick Unreal map, and some very cool gameplay ideas. I like the prison arena, it's fun as shit.



Skacky's looks mindblowing. The high res textures are beautiful, and there's lovely vertical architecture. I Liked the feeling of progression, as areas unlock, and how clear it was which spawn pads were active.



WarrenM even with some plain areas, it has some of the best architecture i've seen in quake. If I actually made maps I'd probably quit.



Hypnos and FifthElephant both nailed the atmosphere. Both really cool settings that it was enjoyable to wander round Bravo Bravo super excited to play all of these :)

Just did 10 rounds on skacky's - couldn't resist the looks - and had a lot of fun with it. mirrored to https://www.quaddicted.com/filebase/func_mapjam5.zip because it should be named that way, you OCD-hater. Warren Should Vis His Map Next Time Warren Should Vis His Map Next Time real bugger on slow rigs.

Such nice maps, skackys is best. Fuuuck Fuuuck just realized, upon loading my map in the jam5 directory, than my config in Qonquer had a low gamma setting for some goddamn reason and I lit my map that way... so... uh... sorry that it's kind of dark...



Guess I should've had someone else test for me :D



gamma 0.65 is what I had it on, if you'd like to see it at the brightness I lit it at. It's not too terrible on the inside areas, but the exterior is no where near bright and cheery enough. (just be sure to set it back before loading skacky's map, becuase that gets super blown out with low gamma) Holy Crap Skacky Holy Crap Skacky coly hrap.

Had a glimpse at yours while derping the dazzers, and yes, what a beautyful floating sky castle, i love the textures you choosed, i adore the light you gave em, the brushwork surrounding this is lovely executed, all blends in lovely with the lighting.

Totally.

I dont know what to praise more in the looks,

im totally in vain on this one!



Who cares about gameplay after this?

Okok, i admit, Ijeds is my fav, play that map! Arenas Look Great Arenas Look Great plus I have never tried Qonquer I dont think, so this should be a nice diversion when I have a bit more time in the upcoming days.



Thanks guys. Before This Gets Old Before This Gets Old Great map Hypnos, that lovely detail and execution for a 1st map is in my mind unrivaled by now!

(Unless you are Sock).

I mean as a first released map this one stands out.

Yep.

Map more! Thanks Everyone Thanks Everyone Thanks to all the mappers, Daz for organizing the jam and of course WarrenM for the Qonquer mod. Good work, great maps and fun gameplay. "Warren Should Vis His Map Next Time "



I tried! VIS wouldn't do a fastvis because the map was too complex and anything above that would never finish. Umm. Umm. You did use func_detail, right? Everywhere. Damn, I feel bad playing some of these levels. .. you guys killed it! Really, really nice stuff... Cant Get Hypnos's Map To Run Cant Get Hypnos's Map To Run getting a hunc alloc failed on 160 bytes. Whoever Finds Where The Title Of Mine Comes From Wins Shambler Dung Whoever Finds Where The Title Of Mine Comes From Wins Shambler Dung



Fifth: Man I'm glad you decided to release it because it's a lot of fun. Good use of Lunaran's IKWhite textures and very interesting arena overall. It gets nasty pretty fast especially with all these Vores up high (and that one a bit below too). Clipping is a bit agressive in the alcoves but that is a nitpick. I'd have made the lower platform with the shell box an elevator, but that's about it. Had a lot of fun with that one.



Hypnos: Excellent first release. Welcome to the world of Quake! I love that foggy aesthetic and that castle looks pretty ominous in the white mist. Good use of the rusty water slime thing too. It's probably the most interesting arena with ijed's, and it is incredibly brutal and hard. I made it to wave 9 on my first run but didn't record a demo sadly. There are a couple of tiny issues with it, the most annoying being some sort of borked collision when descending to the small nail box from the golden backpack pad, which almost always results in you falling the slime. It's the only issue I have with it though!



ijed: Super interesting arena with various playstyles. It feels like an oldschool DM map and it's just a lot of fun. Reminded me of E3 on acid. I like the fact that the only healing source was a mega (at least in the style I played).



mfx: Insanely good, mate. Not a single nitpick except maybe the fact that the lava textures are misaligned BUT I don't think you can do anything about this. In any case I loved every second of it, especially the quad area in the sky arena. Bloody brilliant map.



Scampie: That one feels so cozy. It's like Unreal meets Spyro. Love the different arenas. Rocky Rapids is really fun and you are a vicious bastard throwing in Shamblers there. :p

The crusher/bars arena is pretty cool too but it would've worked better with A LOT more monsters imo.



WarrenM: LOVE the aesthetic of that one. It feels incredibly evil and fits the theme perfectly. I had throwbacks to both Doom and Warpspasm with that one. I've had monsters that didn't aggro properly and stayed where they were, which made me go treasure hunting. You still have some skip surfaces too. Other than that it's great. I like the armor mechanic too.



Skill 3 demos: Arrrcee: I really liked the aesthetic of that one. It's a tad blocky but the textures work well and convey a very malevolent feel, something you'd see in Doom pretty often for instance. Fits the theme the most with WarrenM's. It's quite challenging because of low amount of health kits.Fifth: Man I'm glad you decided to release it because it's a lot of fun. Good use of Lunaran's IKWhite textures and very interesting arena overall. It gets nasty pretty fast especially with all these Vores up high (and that one a bit below too). Clipping is a bit agressive in the alcoves but that is a nitpick. I'd have made the lower platform with the shell box an elevator, but that's about it. Had a lot of fun with that one.Hypnos: Excellent first release. Welcome to the world of Quake! I love that foggy aesthetic and that castle looks pretty ominous in the white mist. Good use of the rusty water slime thing too. It's probably the most interesting arena with ijed's, and it is incredibly brutal and hard. I made it to wave 9 on my first run but didn't record a demo sadly. There are a couple of tiny issues with it, the most annoying being some sort of borked collision when descending to the small nail box from the golden backpack pad, which almost always results in you falling the slime. It's the only issue I have with it though!ijed: Super interesting arena with various playstyles. It feels like an oldschool DM map and it's just a lot of fun. Reminded me of E3 on acid. I like the fact that the only healing source was a mega (at least in the style I played).mfx: Insanely good, mate. Not a single nitpick except maybe the fact that the lava textures are misaligned BUT I don't think you can do anything about this. In any case I loved every second of it, especially the quad area in the sky arena. Bloody brilliant map.Scampie: That one feels so cozy. It's like Unreal meets Spyro. Love the different arenas. Rocky Rapids is really fun and you are a vicious bastard throwing in Shamblers there. :pThe crusher/bars arena is pretty cool too but it would've worked better with A LOT more monsters imo.WarrenM: LOVE the aesthetic of that one. It feels incredibly evil and fits the theme perfectly. I had throwbacks to both Doom and Warpspasm with that one. I've had monsters that didn't aggro properly and stayed where they were, which made me go treasure hunting. You still have some skip surfaces too. Other than that it's great. I like the armor mechanic too.Skill 3 demos: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tszl003myssdi32/jam5_demos.zip?dl=0 skacky: Probably you saw some pareidolic labia in your favorite woman-filmed erotica? :P



hypnos' easily is my favourite, such great and unique atmosphere, only missing some rain effects and volumetric fog.



I tried playing the maps a bit but the gameplay bores me, it's like nazi zombies but slower. oh and mfx needs to install the soundtrack, you lunaran Cool Demos Skacky Cool Demos Skacky You did well. I was surprised that no shamblers spawned, very weird. I usually get 2-3 shamblers per round! Then I did some testing on nightmare to discover shamblers rarely, if ever, spawned but on easy and normal they flow like candy from a pedos van at the last school bell.



Maybe something broke on the mod? I didn't do anything with the difficulty settings (I probably should have). FWIW, Qonquer doesn't care about difficulty settings ... From what I can remember anyway. Demos Demos

hypnos,WarrenM and mfx recorded in this order:



http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/jam5demos.zip First runs on five maps by ArrrCee,FifthElephant,hypnos,WarrenM and mfx recorded in this order: Trying To Download The Pack On Quake Injector Trying To Download The Pack On Quake Injector "Couldn't open file! Unexpected end of ZLIB input stream"

Anybody know what's wrong here? I wasn't able to get it to install via Injector either. Had to do it manually... Darkplaces Demo Thing Darkplaces Demo Thing Apparently the demo format is a problem for Darkplaces, and causes it to stop with an somewhat uninformative error message. You can add an option to the command line to jump to a particular map, for example +map start to go to the start map. This skips playing the demo and it should work.



I only dusted off the DP engine I still have around to compare some rendering things versus Quakespasm. If I had done this while testing it would have been useful for Daz to know before the release, but I'm sorry to say, I didn't think of it then. FifthElephant FifthElephant I have the same problem as you with Hypnos' map :( I have no idea what causes it and none of the other testers had that problem so I assumed it was something silly with my set up.



Very strange! Can you post your config and startup parameters so I can compare and get to the bottom of this! Daz, Here's How I Roll - Daz, Here's How I Roll -



fitz.exe -heapsize 128000 -game func_mapjam5 +map qstart



And a pastebin of my .cfg files -



http://pastebin.com/7btLPaBz My game.bat file -fitz.exe -heapsize 128000 -game func_mapjam5 +map qstartAnd a pastebin of my Addendum Addendum I have deleted all my cfg files and it now works.



Something kooky with my configs then. That's what I told DaZ to do and he didn't do it. :p "Qonquer doesn't care about difficulty settings ... From what I can remember anyway."



There's at least some difference between normal and hard. In the first wave, hard will spawn 2 enemies at once whereas normal will only spawn 1. Not sure about the rest of the waves, but I bet it's much the same. Also, you do not regenerate health on hard. Thanks Thanks I'll try and find out which config setting is causing this crash. FOR SCIENCE! The Injector error might be due to the malformed filename of the zerst�rer.wad. At least I get garbage when I look at it with 7z or anything else here. There is also a .DS_Store dir in the qcc/ dir.



I guess it is not UTF-8 or something? Found The Crash Found The Crash gl_subdivide_size "16" causes Hypnos' map to crash out with the error FifthElephant gives.



If you change the variable back to its default of 128, the map loads just fine.



So, mystery solved :) Hypnos' Map Hypnos' Map Seems to need -heapsize 256, at least with fitz family engines.The high memory use is coming from the huge water surface being subdivided into little triangles for r_oldwater 1.

Performance is pretty rough with r_oldwater 1 as well (check out r_showtris 1 to see why!), best to use r_oldwater 0. Er Er Daz has the better answer, I also had gl_subdivide_size set to 16 for some reason. "There's at least some difference between normal and hard. In the first wave, hard will spawn 2 enemies at once whereas normal will only spawn 1. Not sure about the rest of the waves, but I bet it's much the same. Also, you do not regenerate health on hard. "



You're right! I noticed those things watching some of the demos so .. yes, it cares about skill level!



You'd think I would know that but ... well, it's been awhile. Qonquer is pretty cool but I wish it spawned monsters faster, at least on higher difficulty levels (or let the map designer choose the frequency). Agreed Agreed it's the maximum monsters allowed to be spawned at once that is the issue I think.



I might tweak around with the source a bit, because I really did get worn out of those early waves testing my map, and I see the same problem in the couple maps I tried so far Maybe juice it up based on skill level ... make nightmare all out chaos or something. Absolutely stunning work guys! Great Jam Great Jam Well organised, well supported, well done everyone.



TBH I get bored quickly with Qonquer so have only dabbled in these maps. I do acknowledge that the relatively simplicity of designing arenas rather than full maps make it suitable for a jam though.



Skacky - absolutely beautiful. Attractive enough design to keep me playing for 19 rounds, and only died because i'd got bored playing normally and decided to do 1 weapon only per round, had done sg, ssg, sng, and gl, and then did a quad rocket in my face.



Hypnos - also stunning design and atmosphere. Really exciting and fresh feel to it and would love a full map in this style, exploring and battling all the way up the cliffs / towers. Got to 9 or 10 rounds and it got quite hard.



MFX - had a quick look and will probably play a bit on this as it looked great.



Warren - very nice style, I love the designs. Something was running very choppy for me so I didn't play it.



Scampie - fun idea having a few different arenas. I play the normal one a bit and although it is very simple I really liked the style and vibe of it, nicely done.



Fifth - quite cool for an arena, I played a few rounds, it seemed to work well, although the lava kinda niggled at me. Nice style.



Arcee and Ijed - sorry I didn't like the style nor the lighting. QuickerQonquer QuickerQonquer



- Rebalanced the mod to be faster and exciting in early waves

-- Removed randomness from amount of enemies active and in each wave.

-- Each skill level gives +1 active enemy.

-- Scaling of enemies active per wave slightly increased.

-- Base amount of enemies per wave lowered by 3.

-- Each skill level adds +1 enemy to a wave.

-- Scaling of total enemies added per wave slightly increased.

-- Base enemy spawn delay lowered by 1/4 second.

-- Each skill level gives 1/4 second lowered enemy spawn delay.

-- Scaling of enemy spawn delay reduction per wave reduced to compensate.

-- Base time between waves at all skill levels lowered by 2 seconds.

-- Each skill level gives 1 second less time between waves.



- Maximum minions allowed to a player in later waves rebalanced.

-- Easy used to have a maximum of 2 minions, while Nightmare could have 5!

-- This maximum is now 3 on all difficulties.

-- The player's current maximum is still capped by which wave you are on. (Waves 1-9 1 minion, 10-19 2 minions, etc)

-- Friendly minions spawn at a slower rate on all difficulties. Keep them alive!



- Health now regenerates even on Hard and Nightmare skills, but very slowly.

-- Easy: Unchanged, 1 health per second.

-- Normal: 1 health every 3 seconds.

-- Hard: 1 health every 6 seconds.

-- Nightmare: 1 health every 9 seconds.



Bugfix: Switching weapons after respawning post-intermission no longer crashes the mod.



http://scampie.net/files/QuickerQonquer.zip Some tweaks to the mod to make it more exciting in the opening waves. Also, a bugfix! Scampie Is The Savior Scampie Is The Savior Nice, Scampie! Thanks... Cycling Bug Cycling Bug I still get the weapon cycling bug on Quakespasm 0.90 on my Linux computer when using Scampie's version. As a refresher, this is what happens:



I die in any way and get the post-game summary screen. I press space to start a new game. I appear without a visible weapon. I try to cycle to the next or previous weapon. I get a host error with the following info.



IFNOT 3783(?) branch 8

weapons.qc : CycleWeaponCommand

weapons.qc : ImpulseCommands

weapons.qc : W_WeaponFrame

client.qc : PlayerPostThink

<NO FUNCTION>

runaway loop error

Host_Error: Program error



Again, that is easy to avoid by not cyclign weapons the first thing and only can happen at the beginning of a new game, so it's not a big deal.



I like the feel of these modification after playing a few rounds. It's still a bit annoying to replay the same arena and start with the easy early waves again, but since we have so many arenas to choose from now, you don't have to replay the same one.



There perhaps should be some time limit which ends a wave if you spend too much time without fighting. It would prevent cheesing with regen when there are only monsters left that can't hurt you in a certain area, such as knights that can't reach you, and fix a situation where you end up with an unreachable monster or have the monster count go off. (They should never happen, but... you know.)



Really, there should be a Qonquer mod specific thread to discuss its development and Scampie's suggested changes. I would tentatively say I'm in favor of all the changes Scampie implemented, and thus prefer his version. Nice Maps Nice Maps but not realy big fan of conquer kind of lacks a goal, and as others said starts out much to slow. Some of these maps deserve a standard single player set up hint hint :)



I am an idiot, I forgot to update the progs.dat in the zipfile with the version where I actually fixed the bug :D



Redownload the zip, it will actually have the fix now.

http://scampie.net/files/QuickerQonquer.zip



...this is why you use testers...



---



I don't think a timelimit or anything like that is the right solution to unreachable enemies. I'll think more on the issue, but I'm not sure I'm willing to fix it. There's a bug there (wave doesn't end because monster is stuck somewhere you can't get to it, or possibly didn't even spawn), and the rest is a gameplay issue that is half the problem of the maps themselves being designed such that Quake's limited AI can't get to you. Might just try and fix the bug, and leave the cheese-able gameplay. roflI am an idiot, I forgot to update the progs.dat in the zipfile with the version where I actually fixed the bug :DRedownload the zip, it will actually have the fix now. Agree With Orbs Agree With Orbs I really don't like that gameplay style. Too slow and boring for my taste. No map exploration and obstacles.



Feel just like some FFA/deathmatch, ... without real players.



While some maps are beautifull, they wont last long on my HD.

I much prefer the old gameplay style (search, explore, ... contemplate)



Sorry. Just my opinion. You don't need to apologize - liking Qonquer isn't mandatory. Scampie - perhaps teleport monsters to a random active spawn spot if they go too long without player interaction? I'd say, a two minute grace period after spawn, and then every thirty seconds check if they've taken damage since the last check, or performed a melee or missile attack. If either fails for two checks in a row, random active spawn spot.



Warren - ever try DarkPlacesMod deathmatch mode 7? Haven't had the time to play through everything yet, recording demos when I have the time.



Played WarrenM and Scampie's maps so far.



@WarrenM Really stunning visuals, easily outshines some commercial games I've played. Loved the slow gate mechanic for the armor, wish I thought of that when I was thinking of a way to slow down access to a quad.



@Scampie Love the aesthetic, nice and mellow. I thought the rapid river mini arena was hilarious.



I do agree the mod feels a bit slow, but it has a ton of potential. It's partly up to the mapper to make it interesting. The first iterations of what I made I got impatient testing it so I kept shrinking the arena to make it a bit faster. The lack of goals and progression can be dealt with too. Warren hints at it in the training arena that comes with the mod with the gated weapon. I'll definitely be exploring this format in the future.



Thanks to Daz for organizing this and putting up with my jackassery ;) and for the testers for figuring out what was going on with my map. Anyway to prevent it in the future? The large water surface I had was to prevent the player from seeing the edge of the world. repackaged at quaddicted so the injector likes it After 10+ Rounds Played On All Maps, Some Feedback After 10+ Rounds Played On All Maps, Some Feedback Arrcee - not bad for a newcomer to mapping, and I think gameplay would have actually been very good had the map been just a slightly enlarged version of the upper section. The addition of the basement, however, disrupted the flow of the map quite badly by making the map too large and dividing spawns too thinly, meaning that the general pattern of play was to fight off any monsters on the upper level fairly comfortably, then descend below to mop up the ones that hadn't been able to navigate upstairs. Visually it was certainly uneven, with rather jarring texture clashes, but I did like some features such as the lights in the stairwells (or 'rampwells' perhaps).



FifthElephant - overall very good. Lovely texture work and architecture, while gameplay was excellent too, with the map being just the right size to keep up the pace, and with sufficient connectivity to ensure good flow (Qonquer is quite like DM in terms of how a map needs to flow, though perhaps leaning towards a Rocket Arena 1v1 map - as Fifth's resembles - is the best method rather than a traditional DM arena). Might have been good to ensure another cover spot from which to hide from vore balls, since the green armour alcove was generally the only viable spot to do this).



Hypnos - quite an original visual style well executed, though perhaps could have done with greater texture variation (though I read you're still working on the set). In terms of gameplay, I found it a little cramped and travel through the map was rather awkward, though I did like the series of jumps one had to routinely make to keep ammo reserves sustained. Difficulty seemed to suffer from a bizarre spike btw, with it being fairly easy up until the point, about 10 rounds in, that I suddenly found myself fighting 4 shamblers at once o_O.



Ijed - this one was certainly architecturally nice, and executed the metal/runic theme quite well (I liked the faces vomiting lava), though the lighting came up looking a little lurid. In terms of gameplay, it was rather too big and it generally felt a bit laborious tracking down remaining enemies. Also the 2 quads meant one could be powered-up almost all the time, and the lack of shotgun ammo was also a bit strange.



MFX - amazing to look at, only second to Skacky's in this regard, though in terms of actually functioning as a well-rounded Qonquer arena, it wasn't great as the monsters just couldn't really find their way between floors. Would love to see a standard single player map done in this style though.



Scampie - your map was by a distance the best in the release, with the 3 arenas being of high quality aesthetically, and with gameplay that either showed Qonquer at its best, or provided a gimmick that was genuinely imaginative and interesting to play.



Arena 1 was the first map I played and I still think it's the best in Jam 5. Just the right size to keep the pace up, and just enough geometric complexity to be interesting without being so detailed as to result in the player getting snagged on the scenery. The use of triggers to push the monsters around was an excellent idea too, since the Quake AI's lack of proper pathfinding tends to show up quite badly in a mod like Qonquer and some of the other maps suffered from this.



Arena 2 was good also, with the gimmick actually working as a functional game play idea, though I did keep feeling like I was going to crush myself with one of the traps if I clipped one of the buttons right on the edge while moving at high speed. Might have worked better to move the crushers slightly further away from their activators.



When I first entered Arena 3 I thought there must be a bug preventing me from reaching the correct area of the map, but then I realised the idea behind it, and thought it'd maybe be just a mildly amusing silly gimmick that I'd play for 5 rounds or so. It was actually surprisingly fun and well balanced and I ended up playing 20 rounds.



Skacky - one of the most gorgeous Quake maps I've ever seen, it really was spectacular to behold. It was decent enough as a Qonquer arena, though in common with many of the other maps here, it was a little oversized. Also, the long, thin walkways placed some distance apart tended to result in monsters getting stranded a long way from the player, and use of somewhat slow lifts to connect floors tended to slow the pace quite significantly (it would be really interesting to play this map with the A* pathfinding from ne_dynamic, however. I'll get back to that in a minute). As with MFX's map, I'd love to see this art style reappear in a more traditional release.



WarrenM - yet another one with a cool new aesthetic, though it might have been good to dial back the fog slightly so players could see more of that stunning architecture. It was quite fun to play, despite being another entry that was pretty vast in size, and it was good to see the sadly underused minions making an appearance. ...and Some Feedback On Qonquer ...and Some Feedback On Qonquer As for the mod itself, it was one I'd played a fair bit of and always felt it had got less attention than it deserved, so it's nice to see that being redressed now. I like the changes Scampie has made to it, though it would be welcome to have more of a sense of finality accommodated by the mod's design; ie to enable the player to win by completing a certain number of rounds, or let the monster spawn rate reach such an absurd level that the player has no chance of surviving. As it is, it seems possible to pretty much go on forever, certainly on maps that contain health and armour respawns.



As I mentioned above, Qonquer would really benefit from proper AI pathfinding such as that found in ne_dynamic or In the Shadows, as it would increase the pace and challenge by letting monsters find their way to the player, while also decreasing the likelihood of the player having to scour the map for remaining monsters that have become stuck somewhere. Also, I always felt that ne_dynamic was another sadly overlooked mod, and as such would make an excellent candidate for long overdue recognition via a map jam. For those who don't know, it was a mod that basically enabled Left 4 Dead style gameplay in Quake, with the use of an AI director who would respawn monsters based on various factors similar to those used in Valve's game. Perhaps necros could comment on whether it's in a suitably polished state to be used in a map jam? That sounds like a fun map jam! I love L4D style games. I was a fan of Scampie's arena 1 too, and fifthelephant's... actually I was going to come here and post a bit about that & how they reminded me of good Rocket Arena maps in some ways, but someone has saved me a lot of typing! Mine Has Mine Has 4 arena styles in one, weapon and monster palette varying with each.



I agree that the mod is not aggressive enough, testing was very laborious.



Dynamic pathing would be cool. Something like the Nehara or Awakening system. Jam5_hypnos2 Jam5_hypnos2



http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/jam5_hypnos2.zip



I added the source and a readme explaining what tweaks I have made and compiler settings etc. Just pop it into the Jam5 maps directory. Enjoy my tweaked version folks.I added the source and a readme explaining what tweaks I have made and compiler settings etc. Just pop it into the Jam5 maps directory. Ijed Ijed Enjoyable secret. Nice One 5th! Nice One 5th! Even better now. Skacky's Secret Mapping Tricks? Skacky's Secret Mapping Tricks? i haven't tested all the conquer jam maps yet so it's to early for any final verdict. still, i have a question skacky, how you do it? there are plenty of talented mappers, but your map are the best from the technical point of view. i use darkplaces primarily and your maps always run flawlessly.



from what i see yours and warrenm's maps are comparable in the aspects of size or complexicity. however, your map runs smoothly at 50 fps while warrenm's is totally unplayable with average fps around 5 frames/sec. with the same engine settings...even though your map seems to me much bigger. i don't get it. it's not the first case, i tested yours previous maps it's the same story everytime.



ok.. dp is not the recommended engine, but still.. your maps work like charm in darkplaces while a lot of the other maps run significantly slower. Mine wouldn't VIS. :) So there's that... Dont Use Dp Dont Use Dp never! #64

Lots of func_detail I guess, and I run level4 VIS. darkplaces is a great engine. i don't understand the hate against it. i love quake game mechanics but it doesn't mean i have to play quake in oldschool graphics. i'm not a purist. i've been playing quake since 96

for its gameplay mechanics but the oldfashion fitz/qspasm graphics is not appealing to me anymore.



to warrenm: your map is fastvised only? well.. that expains a lot. it's a pity, architecture is impressive. i thought that today's compilers with extended limits capabilities are able to crunch anything.



to skacky: level4 vis is not everything. your levels run usually faster than other level4 vised maps. even the smaller ones. admit it, you are simply good. :-) I dunno. The source was included, I think, so take a shot. I was never able to get a VIS to complete. It gets to the end and just ... sits there. No, DarkPlaces is a pretty engine (depending on your tastes). It's also, from my understand, the least compatible. :) Dp Compatibility Dp Compatibility been using darkplaces for more than a decade now and have come across only a handful of incompatible maps/mods... and by handful i mean like six. Others can go into more detail. I know it's been an issue in the past. you're right.. there were problems indeed. nehahra was playable only partially with dp, but back then nehahra had its issues with any engine except for nehahra.exe. travail was pretty fucked up in final levels. there were others too. i know about only one persisting game breaker - zersterer.

-

there are still some issues with strange shadows here and there... yes.. that's anoying. Dp Dp Sock has convinced me to use dp and im liking it now after tweaking it.



I had a look at warrens map and I did notice on some of the angular stairs that it wasn't flush with the wall. Stuff like that can cause leaks leading to failed or long vis times. It doesn't leak. It just won't VIS. Revising Warrens Map Revising Warrens Map i'm trying to recompile warrens map... currently at cca 19% of fullvis, but something is wrong. whole process got stuck 4 hours ago. however, vis is still running.. i'll give it some time and we'll see. temporary vis file is about 90megs right now. It Might Not Leak It Might Not Leak but it's not going to help VIS if your map has areas where it's not sealed 100% in areas because it will have all these other areas that it has to work out visibility for.



I'm not saying it's 100% that but it might help. For The Record For The Record I haven't noticed any real performance issues with Warrens map and I'm still running on my surface pro (not exactly a powerhouse of a computer). I've not run it on dark places, I'm using Fitzquake. Infact Skacky's map runs slower for me than Warren's map. i thought darkplaces used its own vis system calculated at map load time, which would mean vis data is ignored. Anyone know if this is true? If it is it would account for wide variance of performance on the same map in different engines. to meltslime: it sounds unlikely to me. there is a huge performance gap between fast-vised and full-vised version of the same map. on-the-fly fullvis during just a few seconds of loading? it's too good to be truth :-) #71 #71 That you haven't noticed them doesn't mean that they aren't there. If you don't know what is the intended behavior of a map you can't know if it isn't working well or not.



An example: i made a map where it doesn't work as i intended only in DP due to exploboxes behaving differently in that engine. The possibilities of the player noticing that something is wrong is zero as exploboxes are still working, but it still affects the map. Darkplaces uses it's own real time portal culling technique, controlled by "r_useportalculling" setting. Try setting it to 0 and seeing if your performance improves. The version of DP I have on my machine defaults to 2 and causes flickering all over the place on Warren's map. With it set at 2, I get 90 FPS in some of the worst spots. With the setting off or at 1, I get 160 FPS in those same areas. (using darkplaces 'showfps' command) FitzQuake lacks this command, but from what I can tell from external sources is that the engine is capped at 72 FPS, and I was maxed at all points of the map anyway, so it's difficult to compare.



Load jam5_warren in Darkplaces, note that it takes several seconds to load, and then note the million "Mod_Q1BSP_RecursiveNodePortals: WARNING: new portal was clipped away" warnings in the console after it loads. Those are because Darkplaces is trying to do basically what the compile tools do and generating it's own portals for the map when loading the map for the first time, but the same error that exists within the .bsp that prevents it from being properly vis'd is also preventing Darkplaces from generating it's own portals to do it's real time visibility culling tricks.



I'm guessing the broken portals are being hellish on DP's portal culling system and the slowdown is the result of the engine spending more time trying to decide what to render, and thus spending more time than if it just rendered everything.



So really... half the map's fault, half the engine's fault. Tip Tip for checking fps in fitzquake or quakespasm, do:

host_maxfps 1000

scr_showfps 1



note that this will mess up physics, so only use it for benchmarking, and in quakespasm at least, make sure to reset host_maxfps back to 72 because it's archived. to scampie: thanks for the clarification. i'll try r_useportalculling command and see what happens. i tried to recompile warrens map with h2map.exe but the whole proces failed immediately after basevis due to the error described above.



vis.exe continues fullvising the even after the warnings but the process is extremely slow or maybe it has reached some infinite loop... I think I pushed the architecture too far. Too many weird angles, too much stuff off the grid, etc. @Skacky's @Skacky's Since I come here a lot asking for stuff and this forum is always helpful, I felt like coming to just congratulate Skacky for his beautiful environment art. I wished the higher levels was playable too, but it's wonderful the way it is.



There are other specially beautiful levels in this pack (the floating castle, the chained city, ...) and I should congratulate everybody, but this blue arabic dream just got me. I'm dazzled. That's some awesome looking maps guys, wow! People still making these kinds of levels for quake 1 when the 20-year anniversary is just around the corner, who would have thought? Some Extremely Nice Maps Some Extremely Nice Maps but I dont care for the mod personally.



Would love to see skacky's map made into a real map. And mfx's too. Others a bit too arenas-ish to be proper maps. Been Wandering Around Skacky's Been Wandering Around Skacky's without having qonquer on and my god is it beautiful!



mfx's has great brushwork.



scampie's has great lighting imho, those hallways were lit perfectly! Skacky's Map Skacky's Map is where mappers go when they die, if they were good. You must be logged in to post in this thread. Website copyright © 2002-2020 John Fitzgibbons . All posts are copyright their respective authors.