Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-3547390-20181002222539

I figured you would be quite familiar with him, I am surprised you didn't mention Thomas Moeller. But yes, Doom veterans often moved onto Quake, so no real surprise to see him continue along here. Ironically, I am also familiar with the name due to his connections to Unreal's mission pack. In fact, the levels he made for that were some of the most memorable and best parts of that pack. I have to agree with Worch here, Doom 1's design was better suited for that style of game than the rather horrible design that was Doom II. Of course, I found Plutonia boring as well, feeling that while it had challenge it just also lacked anything to hold my attention. He is also responsible somewhat for the Wheel of Time, meaning he has connections to a traumatizing experience...

Also note the level he made is of quite good quality. One thing you really notice that past levels lacked is a consistent level theme, for once it feels like Level Theme has a purpose beyond "collection of shovelware textures". A lot of these early levels just picked whatever they felt looked pretty, resulting in a mess of textures with no real focus on trying to adhere to a theme at all. With this particular level, it is blatantly Runic, there isn't a texture in there that goes against American's maps. While it is just textures, it shows a lot more attention to detail than past maps. The key was a Runekey, the door was actually a silver rune door, there were Lavaballs IN the Lava, there were runes on the walls detailing the world, there were bridges with Lava under them you couldn't access... this level just has a lot of care put into it that someone like me, who tears apart these levels and plays them multiple times back to back, can really appreciate. Just look at the massive differences between the game modes, he didn't just tackle difficulty, he tried to make the level truly worthy of being "supported" when most pretty much just add deathmatch spawn locations and call it quits.

There is one small detail that Worch overlooked. He used a Teleporter as a level exit when he should have used a Rune Gate. The layman probably wouldn't care, but it is something I obviously notice. The choice of demon faces everywhere is also possibly flawed, since those tend to be far more prevalent in Wizard levels than in Runic, meaning that once again most won't care but I note this one element that jarringly belongs in Episode 2 more than Episode 3. The curse of getting so detailed, I guess, I know a high level of detail to the point that I can tell that this is trying to imitate that style and is within the proper Level Theme, but isn't perfect. Note that this probably isn't surprising when I have had more time to study the level theme than he had to design the level after Quake came out. Also note even id Software wasn't the best for adhering to their own level themes, E3M4: Satan's Dark Delight is a perfect example as it includes a switch that belongs in the Wizard theme. Of course, even more confusing, I am not really sure where this texture is in the level or if it was just imported into the level file without being used, since every switch SEEMS to be standard Runic (there's a task for you, find the brush using this texture if it exits). Needless to say, Quake's development was a mess, and while the level themes are present (primarily due to the different designers and one handling each theme), they can also be quite the mess. It isn't as "cut and dry" as one would hope.

Usually, my problem isn't pride, it is more that nobody around me knows how to do anything and so I am on my own to find some solution.

Yes, I guess there is the benefit of nostalgia for that stuff for you. Even on the computers I had, it pretty much was a ritual to install one OS and not worry about reinstalling things due to it being too much of a hassle.

I hate rushing and it is one reason I can't really play in multiplayer environments as a general rule. It seems like, for most people, the appeal of multiplayer is flying through content as fast as you can so that you can... do it again usually, since you are making multiple builds which are pretty much the same things with just some different combos. Usually, even leveling slow means I end up horribly unbalanced due to being horrible at point distribution, plus I end up getting frustrated as the games love to speed up XP through various ways. I have had to avoid certain days or play during certain times just so I didn't hit some double XP weekend or something.

I can understand that devotion to the original, it would be depressing to lose a feature, no matter how minor it was. One great thing about single player gaming, specifically old school since new school is all cloud based and thus automatically updates. With old school games, you get the exact update you want, which means you get to replay the game with the features you want. One good thing about Minecraft, they have at least maintained a backlog, even if it has gotten harder due to killing cloud resources. I just hate a lot of the added complexity and bad features that were added later.

One day I may reach the UQE and try it out. Primarily, I keep to the things I keep to out of traditionalism. It is also great for maximum compatibility, I know a couple maps that wouldn't work at all in GLQuake, and I can imagine it gets worse no matter how "consistent" designers tried to make later versions.

It isn't just Doom 3. Any game with Havok physics is like that, you end up with audio bugs as something gets stuck in an alcove that it can't get out of. It is pretty much always the downside of physics, they always have this issue with clipping. Somehow, after all these years, I am not sure anyone has gotten a way to avoid those type of issues. They just added more physics, such as hair and body, so that things are even more unstable in some ways.

I am much the same, I am quite curious to explore test maps just for this purpose, because we may find odd quirks of the engine.

Yes, if they are a good designer they often include some greater details. I will say that Worch is actually relatively limited, but his name means that his stuff is more notable and thus more likely to have a few facts. Plus there might be an interview due to his big name. Hopefully with time I can find Armageddon 1. I do know Worch is responsible for a much greater Quake project later on, but that is for 1997 and thus not something I am going to tackle soon.

The good news is that being invisible means that even the enemy won't acknowledge you. Of course this will result in the lonely suicide mission, since even Admiral Ackbar refuses to let you sit in the briefings, constantly changing the locks when you try to break in.

Precisely, that is one of the brilliant things about this. And you are quite right, remember VQuake. That is an engine nobody can even use because of the lack of proper support. Now imagine DOS support somehow becoming impossible as hundreds of years are added. This provides some useful resource to try to recreate that ancient era, a history of an era. People will know that Quake was one of the biggest games in 1996, then people stopped playing games for three hundred years. Researchers believe it was due to the over-saturation of Quake, specifically with the infamous Q2 maps, which drowned out the professionals like Worch and Greg. In the end, we relied entirely on Horizontal Door Example for entertainment.

Even if nobody but us cares, we were crazy enough to find all these old mysteries. This Wikia is the ultimate resource for shovelware. You could play hundreds of maps, but then you would forget hundreds of maps. By doing things in this way, each map can be referenced to each other, leading to even greater wholes as revelations are made. That map wasn't just some generic map, it was a map ripped by Q2, and that fact makes it all the more intriguing.