Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20171111143841/@comment-3547390-20180314184448

Pretty much. Aftershock is made to be a playable add-on for people to touch. The Toolbox is far more obscure, is mostly made for developers, and requires a lot more knowledge of the game. A good amount of the levels require compiling, which isn't hard but is not exactly as simple as dragging over a .BSP file. The hardest part is that none of it works as executables, so you need to call up the Windows CMD line to get it done. As said, not bad, but a bit more tedious than a functional .BSP file.

Pretty much. It is a lot of editors and other technical features that require knowing how to do things. Duke Nukem required a bit of thinking as I hadn't played with mods before and the Readme was wrong on what to do. It was a matter of experimentation, all documented in the video, to get it fully working. Now that I understand it, I love it far more than WAD files, it feels so expandable and so... mad scientist like (it helps that it is FAR better an experience than Doom, you basically had to make a copy of your installation and modify each one using a 32-bit OS, you would be insane to try to install two mods). Even Doom WAD files aren't as good as there is no permanence to them unless you dedicate a shortcut to it, while Quake feels entirely modifiable. It feels like it would be a lot easier to rip random files from each mod and combine them in new odd ways (now I just need more than just Duke Nukem, hopefully some sound files so it doesn't just sound like a reskinned Grunt, which is exactly what it is). Now I just need actual QuakeC stuff, basically real mods that change the game or new enemies and whatnot. They exist, it is just a matter of finding them. Duke alone is a massive jump, at this point I feel the standards for how all progress moving forward on the Wikia are fully set, it is just a matter of doing thousands of pages. I enjoy being Louis and Clark, exploring the wild unknown and seeing what I find, and so I like something like this which most people probably haven't bothered with.

We shall see what there is to see. I hold no expectations for what lies ahead. Would be nice to get some crazy things like Doom had. Doom really had two benefits to Quake, slaughter maps and joke wads. The former were great for quick action, while the latter just were quite entertaining with their random insanity. I could probably enjoy myself wandering through just those types, but Doom PWADs became too much when every level started becoming a spamfest. Quake is very rarely like that if it has ever been, the closest would be E2M1 of Aftershock with the grenade launcher area. Plus it was more limited in traps and other design, so instead we got evil puzzle levels everywhere. Quake hasn't really had any puzzle levels.

Doom is far better taken care of, meaning you get much cleaner archives, while Quake I am pretty much the first person documenting things as thoroughly as I am. If Doom dates were bad, Quake dates are far worse, and thus why I am stretching it out a full year when Doom would be done by month. Quake just has a bunch of sites that have been taken down and we are left without a really good archival resource like Doom has with Doomworld. Much like Doom, I am constructing the best archive I can, and while Doom had something to work with I am pretty much starting from scratch with Quake beyond the various resources I can pull from these shovelware CDs (of which I am the only one really covering in detail). Then again, that means I get to be Lewis and Clark even more than Doom, because there is zero information on a lot of this stuff on the internet.

The other main benefit I can think of for Doom would be that it was far more common for the average level to have Singleplayer in Doom, while Quake's levels were made in the middle of a multiplayer craze and thus seem to be where a lot of it is oriented. I hope eventually to run across a bot in my endeavors, that will make these 110+ deathmatch levels more playable and worthwhile. So for now they serve little purpose, but they will give me more variation and entertainment later when I start finding that stuff. But that is of course when I start finding stuff that modifies the code. For now, pointless test levels, we are now up to 25 on the Wikia and have passed 1500 pages with them :P

The real benefit Quake has over Doom is the fact that the former is far more simplistic while getting rid of the frustrations and inconveniences of the latter. I have more fun in something like hello than any of the 300 Doom levels I did. It feels better, the fact that I like it means it is practical as it means I will replay it in the future, and also the fact that I document it here means we get to pull apart subtle details. Look how the level editor pages evolved, I had similar shovelware for Doom but could never bring myself to care about the editors. It helps with Quake that some has the potential to be in Windows 95, there are even tools on the Aftershock Toolbox I find myself using to aid myself further. For example, QuakeMap is great for seeing geometry in .MAP files.

Yeah, I hope you can figure this out, because I feel like I have hit a wall. It would be nice, not only to document, but for the fact that it might just be the best editor for Quake based on the fact that it sounds like it has less headaches than the others...besides starting it. It even has custom mod support, meaning you could totally take the Armagon stuff and mix it with whatever random garbage I find to make an amazing level (step 1 of my goal to find a Quake randomizer, at least I could try to make really terrible levels with a lot of various things that probably will lag the editor). As for patience... you do know I love Thief right? Patience is pretty much who I am, it feels like the world around me is constantly impatient admittedly :P

So playing around with THRED some more, I have found the saving bug happens when you load up the file directly from the editor. If you load it from a new file, it is fine. If you load it by itself by affiliating the THRED documents with it, you will be unable to do anything with it and you will get an application error. Can confirm to exist in both 0.65b and 0.8b.