Quake MOD - In The Shadows

[Dr. Shadowborg]

Somehow missed this, downloaded and tried it. (haven't finished it yet)

Bugs:
None noticed.

General Feedback:

Pluses:
1. I like how the stealth gameplay is entirely optional. It's like getting two games in one. (that said, vanilla quake weapons...again? *sighs* Then again, some people seem to prefer things that way...)

2. Visuals are amazing, love the walls that turn transparent in stealth mode.

3. AI pathfinding seems to be working well, I liked how the start map fiend knows how to use the button to get out and kill you. >=D

4. Map alterations depending on route chosen?! Awesome.

Minuses:
1. Start map can be a little confusing because you need to shoot some buttons to get into the vault. I didn't see them right away and ended up wandering around the map not knowing what to do. Also, some secrets / areas seemed...not immediately accessable. Maybe they become accessable later?

I'll update some more once I finish with it.

EDIT:

Finished it, no bugs to report. AI navigation appeared flawless. Also, I now belatedly noticed the highly id1 inspired map design.

All that said, stealth really isn't my thing...suffered through the first map in stealth mode, stuck with it through start map redux, ditched it for "Castle of Shadows", had a lot more fun playing oldskool-style. (guess I'm just the "kick ass and chew bubblegum" kinda guy...)

Excellent atmosphere, the floating book thingies were cool too.

All in all, I give it 9/10 score.

[sock]

Well here is it, 'The Cosmetic Upgrade' because it has so many visual additions. New particles, new models, new skins, new textures, new tutorial, more main story, new stealth books, new menu/help system and a few changes to the layout of some maps!

- V1.1 Download Link (16.5Mb File Size)
- V1.1 Readme File

@Dr. Shadowborg, thanks for the feedback. The vault button was something that is now fixed in the new version. I would love to know why you did not like the stealth? Too hard? Did you try a different skill level? Was things not explained very well? The latest version does have a ton more hints and tips and the tutorial is longer with more information. If you have time I would love if you could try the new version and tell me if stealth is easier to understand? To quickly get to the tutorial section, load the start map, bring down the console and type 'training' and let me know what you think. It might be so good you might try the bonus maps again!

Something is completely screwed with this forum, the PHP is going crazy with the cookies, I have to block cookies for this forum. Constantly clearing cache does not work. Something has changed and I am still using the same browser/OS. Firefox really does not like this website anymore.

[Dr. Shadowborg]

Downloaded, playing it now.

Inital impression is that this is MUCH more polished than the original.

I'll let you know more once I've played some more.

[taniwha]

[taniwha]

[Spike]

[taniwha]

Spike: so it seems. The problem is, I haven't had enough mods lying around to do the required testing. This is one of the areas that gets in the way of merging the servers. I guess I might need to add that loop control flag

Heh, fte has a decompiler? Can tell by the crazy symbols for the constants Thanks.

Yeah, it looks like just adding a small number to time will fix it (so long as time never gets to be more than a few hours). 0.01 is ok for about a day ().

I need to get around to making Sys_DoubleTime 2G offset.

[Spike]

the three engine portability issues I've seen are these:
1: ent counts can be quite high with particles etc all moving at once at once, thus it requires an engine with increased packet sizes/ent limits. Fair enough, not much you can do about that one without sacrificing stuff. You could make some temp1 flag to disable particles I suppose, which might help with coop/internet games even with fitzquake etc.
2: "gl_texturemode 3\n" stuffcmds - that should be "gl_texturemode gl_nearest_mipmap_nearest\n" (I assume) if you want greater engine compat. This should be an easy change that won't break fitzquake, while the more verbose form is understood even by vanilla glquake.
3: scr_menusize - this is specific to fitzquake. Other engines tend to use vid_conwidth/vid_conheight, but setting those correctly is often too much of a hassle. Presumably the sensible thing to do here is to move that setting into your default.cfg file instead, though their regular config might still override that... Not really sure if this can be fixed in a portable way, other than to directly detect the client engine and then pick the appropriate stuffcmd.

There may be more issues with other engines/maps.

[taniwha]

1) ok, qf should have that covered
2) yeah, that's a problem. qf doesn't accept numeric arguments for gl_texturemode
3) They're con_width and con_height in QF. Not only that, they're read-only. The only runtime mode changing QF supports at this time is fullscreen toggle. Regardless of that, IMHO a mod has no place modifying such vars anyway, especially console width/height as they affect text scaling in GL and the user might have things set up "just so". Probably the best thing to do is just document the required space for the menus and let the user decide what to do about it.

[taniwha]

sock: to the readme with my suggestions for better wording of some of the sentences (just ones with "only" in them, nothing else made me twitch). For completeness, it includes the one I've already mentioned.

[taniwha]

The dragon room (?) was nifty. Neat trick and it crashed QF (found a bug because this is the first time the same texture has been used for both wall and water).

Fun. Though I got the shammy first try the first time I played, it took a couple of goes after that. That is certainly an interesting mod.

I've yet to get past the start map :/.

[sock]

[Spirit]

I have no idea about anything but could you circumvent that 'PF_VarString: Overflow' problem by splitting the strings into smaller chunks and display one on top, the other lower, etc? This might lead to more problems depending how engines handle their 2D scale. Just a random thought.

[sock]

@spirit, there are plenty of ways of dealing with this engine error and here is a quick list. (I am sure there are more options available)

1. Truncate the string and only display what the engine thinks is valid. Don't constantly spam the console with the same error message and make it a 'dev' only error (need developer 1 to see message). Players don't need to see this error, only developers of the map/engine can really fix this.
2. Allow the engine to have a command line parameter to let the string overflow (can even make this a SP only mode if necessary)
3. Added an extra centerprint function so the QC can display the string properly and add a way for the QC to know what engine it is running on.

As I have stated on many occasions, I will gladly work with people to fix problems but people have to be willing to try different solutions.

[Baker]

Trying to make a complicated mod work on "all engines" is a waste of your time and kind of like "fool's gold".

The burden of engine compatibility is not on modders, it is on various engine authors. Trying to do this in reverse is checking into the heart-break hotel, it isn't going to go well no matter what you do. And you'll spend a lot of time chasing an unattainable goal.

Do yourself a favor. Don't open pandora's box. Stick with a target engine, work within what it does.

You've made reasonable design decisions to limit "evil". That's all you can do. Trying to appease everybody ultimately appeases nobody, and costs you a ton of time and there isn't a qualification to be an armchair quarterback, nor do they really know the true costs of their "ideas" or complaints (oh dear, a few years I had an asshat tell me how "easy" it would be to make Quake just be a jpeg stream and this guy would start talking about it every time I connected to a server to play. One time I said "Look, I'm here to play. I don't want to talk." and I guess that made him upset and caused him to not like me.)