I'm using Quakespasm with the instructed parameters and the EricW & Tronyn level lags substantially. Any help?

Vis didn't finish in time for this release (we were lucky to include it at all), but we are going to release an vised/finalized version in the next while, so if your system is a bit older you may want to just wait for that.

Who is Vis? I don't see that as an author.

lol sorry, Vis is a program that optimizes map speeds. Maps that are not Vis-ed will be slower.

Huh, unvised? The huge map? That is ridiculous! There are some maps with low-fps in this pack. Do the mappers know of quake engine limits? Some mappers names i never heard of.

Scampies is my favorite map of these all, followed by Ionous. Both play and look great and they reminded me of quakemaps most. Necros map looked nicest to me, must have been a pain to build. Sadly it runs unsmooth, the terrain feels wonky and the walls start to flicker at the edges. So far so meh.

I agree it is "ridiculous" but you are talking about free content here guru. even from that view please note the above quote: "we are going to release an vised/finalized version in the next while, so if your system is a bit older you may want to just wait for that."

Really impressive looking jam pack, although I think I'll wait on a V1.1 release of that UnVis'd map. Don't think I've ever seen Quakespasm drop below 60fps on my machine until today, but it CRAWLED on that one when I tried.

More occlusion kplz!

Actually I solved it, make the heapsive really big. They say 65536 but maybe go 131072 or 262144.

The Tronyn/EricW map needs just over 64000 heap (less than 64100) to run AT ALL. Such little spare over the requirement will slow it to a crawl. (Sorry for split post)

Ha, yes, cranking up the Heapsize works. Framerate isn't quite 60fps, but it's vastly improved. Can't wait to see the results of the Vis'd version later.

Tronyn, I'm impressed that you remained so gracious in response to guru's astonishing whining. How anyone has the gall to complain about these awesome free maps just baffles me. If they don't like it, they can have their money back!

Meanwhile ... 76.2 Mb has to be new record download size!

Well, pathetically, I am stuck already. Playing Adib Murad's Signati (jam6_adib) on Hard, I have killed the first seven scrags and made my way down to the blue-armour plinth in the second lava-floored room. Now what? The big button on the floor of the other plinth does nothing. Am I being very dumb? What am I missing?

(I'm using QuakeSpasm 0.90.0)

Finished Breezeep's Of the Flames in the Stars on Hard with 66/78 kills, but none of the four secrets. I killed everything I saw, so I assume that the other 12 kills are hidden in the secrets.

As far as I can tell, this is Breezeep's first map: if so, it's an astonishing debut, making good use of Fodrian textures to present a beautiful environment with some interesting combats. It does feel a little derivative -- of one map in particular whose name I now can't remember, I think it might have been one of the Lost Chapters. And there is a slightly arbitrary feel to the progression, as though the player is being put through his paces rather than discovering a real place. But still, worthy of four stars in isolation, even by 2015 standards, which makes it I think the best debut I can remember seeing.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what Breezeep can do when he hits his stride!

Have not played all of these yet, but Itendswithtens's map is my current Favourite Thing Ever!

Its not a quake map, i can see why you like that crude wack.

Regarding my problem with Adib Murad's Signati: he kindly emailed me. The "button" on the ground is not a button, it's one of the seals referred to in the level's opening message, "break the seals to open this door". So you don't need to press it, you need to break it ... But how?

I finished Adib Murad's Signati (jam6_adib) on Hard with 22/23 kills and one of the two secrets. Although this is short, it has a distinct feel to it, and it's satisfying to complete. It seems that this is another debut map, and another outstanding one. (Whatever pretensions I might have once had towards learning to map myself have been blown out of the water by seeing the new standard of debut maps!) I'd score this about 3.5* in isolation.

Mike -- yes, there are quite a few debuts in this pack. Adib, Breezeep, Exhelzar, Matecha, ShoTro and ItEndsWithTens all released their first Quake maps here. I'm not sure about Rick: I know he's not a newcomer to Quake mapping and has been working on another project for quite some time, but I'm not sure if he's released anything (under a different alias) before this.

I finished ItEndsWithTens' Princess of China (jam6_tens) -- which, for those who don't bother to read the documentation, was heavily inspired by yangxueguo's artwork Tower Of Evil.

This seems to be yet another debut map -- so much new talent in this jam! -- and another beautiful first map. The scenery is absolutely beautiful, and the gameplay progression is pretty good. My main criticism would be that it all feels underpopulated -- it could use about three times as many monsters and three times as much ammo. (The balance is good, though: I finished the level, on Hard, out of shells and nails, having had to grenade a shambler and a vore at the end.) For the record, I missed one of the 34 kills -- a fiend that jumped into the opaque lava, and which I then couldn't find to kill. Got three of the five secrets, though, including the pent/quad double.

Well worth 4* in its own right. What an amazing jam this is shaping up to be.

Or I should say "first Quake single player maps". Adib has made at least one really pretty Quake DM map before (youtube).

Daz's Magmapolis is truly beautiful, a winding, naturalistic castle set in a gigantic lava cavern. A delight to look at, and great to play through. It's also significantly bigger than the other three levels I've played so far from this back. I finished with 102/103 kills on Hard -- where on earth is the missing one?! -- and 3/6 secrets, which is better that usual for me. This map taken alone would be very solidly into 5* territory. Love it, and will definitely replay.

Thanks for the comments, guys. About Cepheus, you can get its latest version here:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/bcup3wftsocj0op/dmcepheusqw.zip

It's a deathmatch level, so no monsters. If you want to play against the Reaperbot, here is a zip all set to it:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/7dscbi1pvo730in/dmcepheusmarkv.zip

I'm depleting my storage of unfinished / unreleased stuff. I'm working on a single player using these textures, but for jam 6 I committed myself to use the provided resources.

I'm sorry to have finished Ionous's Gehennae Perpetuae Cruciatus (jam6_ionous). Sorry because it was a beautiful place to be, with superb vaulted ceilings, and lovely glimpses of the lava world beneath the floors. I enjoyed this one greatly, as was disappointed only that it ended so abruptly, when I had only 80 of 99 kills. (I can only assume that once more, the monsters I missed were inside the secrets I didn't find -- I got only two of seven). The quality of Quake architecture just keeps improving, and this is a wonderful example of just how intricate and delightful modern Q1SP can be. (I sometimes wonder whether the creators of the original game are tracking what's being done with it, and how impressed they are.)

This is a another map that is well worth four, or even 4.5, stars in isolation.

About Breezep seeming a lot like a Contract Revoked style I agree from the little I've seen but it doesn't even remotely surprise me. Breezep has also made maps for Doom and they will often owe quite a bit of inspiration to classic Doom add ons. Case in point a lot of his recent output for Doom owes its flavor to Valiant, an extremely popular Doom mod from earlier this year. However I always feels he picks a good base and makes good maps from it. I'd consider him one to look out for in both communities!

Igneous Interment by matecha (jam6_matecha) seems to be yet another debut. On the positive side, it looks absolutely gorgeous. Matecha has hit the ground running so far as aesthetics are concerned. Gameplay is much less impressive, though: there are only sixteen monsters on Hard, and it's easy to accidentally finish the level before even seeing four of them. There is only one secret, and it's the kind that you find by accident (by hitting the wall when shooting at a monster) or not at all. So all in all, it's a really tiny level, about one third the size of a typical ID level, and doesn't offer much gameplay.

But I think it promises that there is much more to come from matecha, who clearly has the talent to go onto far bigger and better things. I can't award this map more than two stars, but I think its author is capable of four or even five-star maps. I hope we'll see them soon!

Rick's Detour (jam6_rick) is, as far as I can tell, yet another debut map -- it's amazing how this jam has brought so many new players into the field. Once more, it's just beautiful to look at. Not so long ago, it would have been outright the most lovely Q1SP level out there. That's not true now, as the level has been raised starting with Honey, but it's still in the top rank. The gameplay is also pretty good here, much better than in matecha's map -- although if I'm being critical, the map does feel a bit underpopulated. That, and the modest size of the whole thing, remove this map from among the very best.

Anyway, a magnificent debut, well worth 4 stars on its own, and the promise of great things to come.

As far as you can tell is apparently not very far. The author left his real name in the readme, you could have checked for past releases...

I don't see any name but Rick in the readme. Can you give me a hint on where to look? I'm curious now...

Oh nevermind you mean the individual level readme. I got it. Returning old author!

JUST AMAZING !!

Especially using Darkplaces (with r_useportalculling set to 0)

I run EricW & Tronyn's level at 70+ fps using DirectQ on my E8600 and Geforce 730. What kind of rigs are you guys using to get such bad fps's?

"Who is Vis?" Haha, funniest thing in quake ever. It did sound ambiguous in how tronyn spoke about vis.

Ah, Rick Lipsey -- returning fifteen years after his last level! https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/?filtered=Lipsey

In Magmapolis map i can easily clip through some walls, and some monsters clip through edges of some walls.

It's a great map, but it could use a bit of work to fix up the outstanding issues.

The level of talent put into these maps is simply amazing. Keep up the phenomenal work guys.

Finished Scampie's 10,000 Days in the Fire (jam6_scampie) with all 83 kills, and (unusually for me) with 4/6 secrets. I absolutely loved this Rubicon-flavoured base infiltration with its steadily escalating difficulty. Every single thing about it is outstanding: the architecture, the brushwork, the texturing, the lighting, the progression, the monster placement. My only regret is that there isn't more of it. Yet its relatively approachable size makes it more digestible than more epic levels in the same theme, such as Telefragged. As a result, if a new mapper were to come to me asking what single level should they look at and learn from, 10,000 Days would probably be the one. Absolutely superb, and an obvious five stars.

The debut maps just keep on coming! This time, it's the turn of ShoTro, who offers From Ashes (jam6_shotro). It's another amazingly strong debut, despite its faults (which we'll get onto in a minute). It seems that new Q1SP mappers are coming straight in at a much higher level than used to be the case. Is this because the tools are better now? Or just because the present Q1SP culture presents such a high bar?

Anyway, From Ashes is a very decent size -- 139 kills on Hard, of which I was able to find and terminate only 127. But with only 2 of 5 secrets, I probably missed hidden areas where the other 12 monsters lived. There are quite a few good ideas in here, and I especially enjoyed the way I kept finding my way back to the start area with different ambushes each time. Against that, while the design of some areas pretty good, others felt very blocky, with a bit of a 1997 aesthetic. It's a shame that they were allowed to drag down the overall quality, and I think it would have been better to omit the weaker areas in spend the time polishing the better stuff: a smaller but more consistent level would have been more satisfying. Still, a great start and I hope we'll be seeing plenty more from ShoTro.

One of the secrets I found -- it would be hard to miss -- was the slime-suit that makes it possible to safely enter the lake around the rocky outcrop. But I could find nothing in the slime as a reward for entering it -- only the teleport that takes you back up to the outcrop. Did I miss something?

(By the way, a minor packaging bug: ShoTro's map is not included in the list in the top-level documentation file func_mapjam6_readme.txt)

Necros's unititled map (jam6_necros) is truly beautiful -- in purely cosmetic terms, probably the best in the back, with its gorgeous sprawling enemy base set in and around a lava lake. Unfortunately, it's simply not finished. Not only is there no title and only about a fifth as many monsters as there should be, but much of the scenery simply can't be reached, and there are plenty of places where you see flashes from behind the brushes. I missed one of the 38 kills, but since there are no secrets my guess is that it was merely a scrag that somewhere on the other side of the final tower from where I was.

I truly hope Necros finds the time to finish this. I could easily be a 5* map, and from naive perspective as a non-mapper, it looks like most of the hard work has been done. But in its present form, despite the stunning visuals, I can't give it more than three stars.

(Oh, and I forgot to say in my previous comment: three stars also for ShoTro's From Ashes.)

And so to WarrenM's jam6_warrenm (it has no other name). Many of the same comments apply as for Necros's offering: this is another truly lovely setting, a wrecked castle broken down into islands floating in lava, while lavafalls cascade down from floating rocks. But it feels like the first 90% of an outstanding level, with only maybe a half or a third as many monsters as should be in place -- and no secrets at all. There are only 45 on Hard (I got them all), and room for plenty more. Fix that, and the progression will be a delight rather than (as now) a mere procession. For now, I waver between awarding 3 or 4 stars, but I think 4 is fair.

So it seems that these map jams are awesome at getting people to make something -- but perhaps they lead too often to maps being released before they're finished. I've now played every level in jam6 apart from Tronyn's which I've held off from in the hope of a fully vised version being released. Now I find myself also hoping for re-releases of Necros's and WarrenM's maps. Perhaps the time will soon be right for jam6.1?

I just realised I'd not written anything about Exhelzar's Fiery Abyss (jam6_exhelzar). It's yet another debut -- the last in the pack -- and another that holds promise for the future. In itself, though, this is not a great map, and feels like it's from maybe ten years ago. Many of the rooms are too blocky -- some of them big and blocky -- and progression feels arbitrary. Throw in the smallness of the level (just 22 monsters on Hard, and a single almost unmissable secret) and we have a map that won't hold the attention for very long. Still, although I'd rate it only two stars by modern standards, I'm keen to see what else Exhelzar comes up with now that he's in the game.

Hey, Tronyn -- is there a vised version of your map yet? Super keen to play it, but my laptop isn't really up to the job. Thanks!

There isn't yet, I guess we could release a version with some tweaks (vising, lighting and gameplay rebalancing); maybe we'll just do that, but even if we don't I'm planning to put out a significantly revised version of this and my other jam maps as an episode, hopefully by Christmas. Thanks for the interest.

MikeTaylor - you can also try setting the heapsize really high (256000 for instance). Just like was necessary in Rubicon Rumble (at least for Telefragged).

Tronyn - when is an update likely to be released with vising on some of the other maps? And from what you know are any other authors updating their maps (for either future individual releases or for a revised release of this pack)?

thank you all who participated in this great pack. just two quick notes:

i played all the levels except for daz's one with darkplaces and everything was ok. even the monster level by ericw/tronyn was playable though fps was quite low and uneven. however, it is understandable for only fastvised level. daz's level was the only exception with average fps around 5. that level really doesn't like darkplaces. with warpspasm runs ok but there is quite a lot of homs and several brush collision errors. nevertheless, the level itself is beautiful.

rick lipsey is back? wooow... man.. well of wishes is on of my all time favorite level ever. glad to see you back.

That Quaddicted screenshot aahhhh!!!

It turned out that my humble 2009 MacBook Pro is, after all, capable of running EricW & Tronyn's ludicrously epic Illusions Outnumber Changes in Fortune (jam6_ericwtronyn) when given enough heap memory. I just finished it, with 386 of 402 kills (on Hard) and 9 of the 15 secrets.

Wow.

Tronyn continues to produce astonishingly huge maps with an enormously immersive sense of place and time. This map is by far the most vertical I have ever played. Again and again, I found myself tottering vertiginously far above an area I had played earlier, only to find myself subsequently arriving yet higher. This is kind of visible progress is very satisfying.

It may seem silly to say it of a map with 402 monsters, but Illusions seems very underpopulated to me. Especially towards the end, large parts of the scenery were either devoid of anything to kill, or harboured only a few grunts or knights. As a result, the gameplay was very unbalanced, because there were far, for more supplies than I could have used, including maybe 15 megahealths in total. To me, it feels like the map is set up with provisions to handle maybe twice as many monsters. I really hope that when Tronyn releases the promised vis'ed version of this map, it's also had a lot more bad guys added -- especially for the combat at the end, which is terribly anticlimactic.

However, even with these gameplay flaws, this map is a very clear five out of five -- in fact, it would be a five-star map even with literally no monsters, that's how good the architecture and progression is. A fully populated version would be up there alongside Telefragged as my all-time favourite map.

Having now played all thirteen maps, I suppose I should finish by saying of the pack as a whole that, once again, it sets a new standard -- not only containing so many maps, and so many of them so good, but also be introducing so many new Q1SP mappers. It's a delight to me that the community continues to flourish; as a result, Quake remains my favourite computer game even now, nearly 20 years after its release.

Oh, and five stars for the pack, of course!

I strongly want to play this on my beloved PENTIUM 2 450mhz + Voodoo3 ! Will it work ?

@sarcofagy: qdos port now has 3dfx rendering support. But you may need like a P3 550 to get some fun out of it. I haven't tried it on my P3 800mhz, but I was barely (and I mean barely) able to play Telefragged with my qdosfx port. Talking like 10-20fps on average, but it was playable with its slow pacing.

http://dk.toastednet.org/QDOS

It's a safe bet that some maps will work OK on the low-end hardware and other will not. Just try it and see.

Tronyn - Will you revise your map some when you do your 'all Map Jam levels' release pack hopefully towards the end of the year? I agree with Mike Taylor that it needs some more gameplay, otherwise it is absolutely breathtaking. I also hope there's maybe a v1.1 of the pack at some point correcting any bugs and maybe allowing some authors (mainly the ones whose maps seem a bit unfinished in gameplay, probably due to time constraint) to revise their maps. Either that, or they do separate releases as well.

Yes, there will definitely be significant gameplay updates, based on what you guys have said on here and the other feedback on func_msgboard.

We got published

Tronyn, if you're reading this, I just want to say that I hope your zer-themed map retains the zer weapons. I just played that map and I can't imagine doing it without zer weapons. The riot shotgun is the best modded weapon in all of Quake as far as I'm concerned. And maybe put them in the other maps as well? :)

I'll probably wait until the Vis'd version of your jam5 map to come out to play it, though.

Map Jam 6 videos on youtube

This playlist will be updated as I finish videos for each level. It could take a while :P

I replayed Tronyn's gigantic map, and this time got 401 of the 402 kills. (Lots of the previously missing ones were scrags that warped in when I picked up a secret quad.)

But where is the last monster?! Grrr!

The secret theme for jam 6 was actually to create a level with a single hidden enemy ;)

Quite simply a breathtaking collection of maps...

My favourite func_map jam, a lot of maps, all of them are of very good quality, they're of different sizes and difficulty and there is not a single map out of place: all have their strenghts. I like especially the variety of the maps: from the Rubicon style map by Scampie to the Doom style map from Necros til the huge terracotta style map from Ericw and Tronyn but all with tons of lava and lots of fun. 5 stars, all deserved ;)

Good pack with a wide variety of styles within the theme, from the Rubicon style base to the more tenebrous runic dangeons.

My personal winners are From Ashes, a clever death park with astonishing playing and surprises, and Daz's Magmapolis, for adherence to the proposed theme and getting a nice lava dungeon. Visually is not perfect but it is the kind of game I expected from a Fire and Brimstone.

My second choice is Ionous' Cruciatus, a great design and a clever construction only a bit diminished by that sudden ending.

Illusions Outnumbered by Tronyn and Eric is an epic level that could deserve an standing ovation but you know.. maybe too big, slow, extremely difficult and unbalanced for my taste. In this league of huge levels I aready have my personal favourites.

Scampie's 10000 Days in Fire is an interesting one, subverting the main theme to go on a Rubicon mission with some underground stages. Great playing, effects and surprises.

Played seven levels from this mappack.

Very nice visuals. Very boring gameplay. I'm not going to provided detailed description, why it's boring, but for me it was boring, especially levels with 16-20 monsters and huge wide open areas.

Ionous' and WarrenM's maps were my favourites Very enjoyable pack aesthetically and gameplay whise

For some reason, the start map does not remember which maps I've completed. Is this the expected behaviour?

Yes.

Most of these maps are beautiful, but for some reason they did not keep me enthusiastic about playing. Many of them are short, with few enemies, and I guess these are their authors' first efforts so no need to bring them down, but I'd rather play their other maps.

As I expected, EricW & Tronyn's map is a must play, although I did find it confusing at times. Just like in Something Wicked This Way Comes, highlighted arrows seem to be there to help, but that was not enough. That said, I'm probably to blame for using shortcuts I was perhaps not supposed to find, so I'm not sure I did things in the right order. And oddly enough, I wasn't able to grab the silver key the first time I ran into it. I had to retrieve the second gold key first (which by the way does not seem so useful).

Magmapolis by Daz is a close second, although I found some problems here and there (falling through the ground in a few places). For the rest, a few other maps by well-known mappers had original ideas and were enjoyable, but I don't really feel like playing the pack again. Matter of taste I guess.

Adib's map is a neat idea but it does a pretty poor job of communicating its central mechanic. And once you know what that mechanic is, you've already solved any situation the map will put you in.

Daz's map is fantastic. 5/5

EricW/Tronyn's map is huge, so huge that Quakespasm won't run it without a special command line. But does being huge really help it out? Long sight lines do not do Quake's monsters any favors. They'll fail to activate from far away even if they have a clear sight of you, and even if they did it's not like Ogres or Death Knights are particularly threatening. A lot of factors make this a really, really easy map. But for some reason the authors seemed convinced that it was an incredibly tough map; there are mega health and armor pickups all over the place. Like, before AND after any remotely challenging section. I was rarely below 200hp in the second half of the map. You're flooded with rocket ammo (using rockets is a no brainer when you're 50+ feet away from the splash damage) and not many tough monsters show up. By the end I was throwing rockets away on rottweilers because "why not". It is a gorgeous map, and it's certainly fun in a cathartic "Painkiller on Easy Mode" kind of way (lots of groups of weak enemies, near limitless rocket ammo, etc). It's also great if you like exploration. But it'll run poorly for a lot of people and the end result is a less tight experience.

Some of the other maps are pretty good (scampie's is great), but a lot of them go for being pretty rather than being good levels to play. A lot of really really short ones where the gameplay flow isn't well considered. I have no doubt that making these detailed caverns is really time consuming, but I'd rather that time be spent making substantial, fun maps that are ugly than making sure the rocks in the background look nice.

Just finished Ericw&Tronyn's map, and it's outstanding. Yeah, the ammo and powerups are a bit liberal, even on Hard, but it's JUST. SO. GORGEOUS. I enjoyed every moment playing it.

BTW: After getting the gold key (the first one I think, at the top of the tower you have to ride a "cable car" up to), I actually found I could bypass that door by jumping off the tower onto the mountainside and running/climbing around the outside. I bypassed a bunch of monsters that way, but then I went back and killed them all anyway. I just like finding unintended bypasses...

Is there a vised version of EricW and Tronyn's map available yet?

I played and loved all the other maps. Great visuals throughout, polished gameplay and a cool theme I had not seen before.

I though EricW & Tronyn's map was vised, since it runs smoothly on my laptop which by no means a beast.

I don't think it is. It runs choppily on my laptop, unlike the other maps. I had to increase heapsize a lot, and even then it is not quite smooth.

Almost all Tronyn's maps required a modern pc hardware. On my old laptop with core i5 560m\ram 8Gigs\ integrated intel hd\win 7x64 they unplayable all. Just like Shib\Shib2.

im played with quakespasm and this game aweome. 200 enemy map awesome... ty for sharing..

Really cool. THANKS to all aurhors. I've played only 2 maps so far by dear gentlemen Erycw, Tronyn & Daz. And they were stunningly great. Well personally I prefer some new textures like in AD but that's not as imprortant (to me again) as map's complexity, and in that regard 'Chages in Fortune' is absolutely incredible. Once again I've played only 2 maps so far so maybe there're even better maps...

Epic Pack and with some awesome gems. Thank you so much.

One of my favorite Mapjams, with many fantastic levels. I like the various ways in which the theme is implemented. My favorite map is from EricW & Tronyn.

Still one of my favorites in 2023! What a classic.