I really liked the level, but the final battle was very difficult for me. 5/5

This level is absolutely epic. It's an immersive playing experience with interesting brushwork and is nicely textured and has loads of replay value. It's going straight onto my top maps list.

To me it was very much like playing several different maps all rolled into one very large adventure.

As you progress through the level, the combats get harder and the economy of health and ammo become a priority. To me most of the level plays like a skill 2 against a seemingly never-ending hoard of enemies striving to take your life.

The secrets are interesting and fun to find, but on my first trip through I only succeeded in finding half of them!

Thanks to the author for sharing this with us!

5/5, of cause. A long journey with different rooms, and everything is consistent. Most of the time I'm in slight lack of ammo.

Secrets 8/16 so far, and that's really good with me.

It's really difficult for me, an unexperienced player, playing skill 0.

For now I'm stuck, because I only can find tow of four switches to open the big door. I'll continue my search, but would appreciate an hint.

Referring to https://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=62173 it doesn't work correct with quakespasm. I compared the beginning and further on.

( Using quakespasm-sdl2 with Debian GNU/Linux, PC i386. But I was able now to make quakespasm-spiked from source. (AFAIK there's no .deb for i386.) )

Btw zbdiou72, I just saw, that You created nullbear. I also liked that very much, and it also was very difficult even on skill 0.

Thanx!

ludicrous

The first two are located right under the door, submerged. The other two are near the top, and may be shot from the wooden bridge that crosses the cave. 8/16 is quite good, there are 9 total up to this point. Some players had trouble with directions in nullbear, I tried to make things more straightforward in this one.

Oooh, yesss, ... as always, now I think, I could have seen that by myself.

Concerning the secrets: I found the (I think) first two in my second attempt, with quakespasm.
It's really hard to escape the underwater creatures then.

Thank You, zbidou72.

A little question: For this pack there are 2 subfolders, one is theutis and the other is id1. In id1 is only a gfx subfolder, would it make sense to copy that gfx subfolder over to theutis and delete the id1? (I would like it contained in one folder...)

addenum: yup, it works. But the "waterwalls" are intended or depends this on the use engine?

From a packaging standpoint it would have been better to put the gfx subfolder(contains only the skybox) in the teuthis folder. Are you referring to the "waterwalls" at the top of the trench ? If so yes they are intended.

Sorry, my Quakespasm just crashes with "QUAKE ERROR: AllocBlock: full"

This seems - most often - to be caused by textures with a weird scaling.

Sorry, but my time neither allow me to compile a Spiked, nor to go bughunting in the map.

I'm just bellyrotting here, but i wish that people would test their maps om stable engines, and then use the more exotic ones for whatever afterwards. On the other hand, the counter-argument would be, then we would never improve the engines...

QuakeSpasm is on the way out. Ironwail is just a better QS.

All right, I am currently applying some slight modifications that should make the map ironwail/regular quakespasm friendly(using sv_protocol 999 will however be necessary). should be done in a couple of days.

It runs good in Ironwail. Ironwail is basically the new QS.

PLEASE give me a hint!! the secret for the red armor... just a hint

ok ok... closely check the two small waterfalls in the temple entrance room.

WOW thank you!! it's very difficult to find out this secret!!

i did run the v2 of your map... what is map/theutis.way and why it is missing?

This file isn't really missing, I've seen this message for other maps as well. Must be a quake engine thing, expecting a .wav having a name identical to the folder.

Really great. But crashes on pushing the button (close to pool "pool loves you". I mean area in general, 3rd floor iirc, not exactly near blood pool

Are u on Quake Mapping discord? I can show screen

v2 made it dissappear. No problem

I had so much fun with this. Thanks man!

sv_protocol 999 should have been added to quake.rc to avoid surprises. The map is very enjoyable if a bit on the hard side.

Managed to finish this on Nightmare, and it was genuinely hard many times through out. The number of monsters is high as are the number of surprise monster spawns. If you're not careful, you can get into situations where you're out of the ammo you'll need to survive, particularly nails. I nearly had to start over, but was able to salvage the run by finding a couple of secrets thankfully. Good map :).

Woowwww this was neat. An adventure, like you say! Love the very distinct (and massive) areas. The environment lighting is quite a bit darker than "Quake standard", but cranking my gamma fixed that.

I always like ambitious use of underwater environments in Quake. Although it took me a second to figure out the ladders were "extras_r5 style" in how they worked! And generally items/vehicles made out of brushes (submarines etc.) is a thumbs up. :-)

I did get stuck on finding the "air shaft" for a bit, but solved that through some spatial reasoning which felt good. The only puzzle-ish thing I really failed at, I think, was trying to get to the red armor just inside the main temple entrance. That one is a real mystery! (Although BTW it's kind of bogus that an invisible wall there blocks grenade-jumping.)

The final room is excellent, both the construction and also how you staged the waves. One bit of the fight was a little anti-climactic, where one of the last shamblers I had to kill was just way off on a staircase chilling by himself until I hunted him down... but that's the Quake AI for ya I guess.

This map won't be to everyone's taste but IMO you nailed what you were going for.

BTW a quick comment about the question above, about "teuthis.way". That's not a sound file, it's a waypoint file.

If this mod is using the code from https://github.com/khreathor/extras_r5 (or similar), it looks like that includes frikbot code. BotInit in frikbot/bot.qc always checks to see if there are bot waypoints to load for a map.

I came back here after reaching the gold key door. The door on the right became locked: https://i.imgur.com/PZYtYT1.png No clue what I was supposed to to here, so I gave up on my first walkthrough. I restarted the map with v2, the exact same thing happened again, and I grenade-jumped to the quad platform in order to continue the level. Am I missing something?

That door gets locked once you enter the hall, but gets unlocked once your enter(from the hall) the room where the quad is located. In order to progress further, you must activate 2 switches(one in the quad room, another at the top of the hall), which unlock an elevator/push in the shaft above the throne.

I know, the problem is in that screenshot the right door is already locked (after going through it before). So if you don't enter the quad room but fall from this place: https://i.imgur.com/5SfPVnT.png you become softlocked. I think maybe there's even more ways back, I don't remember. That door should auto-unlock if approached from the outside.

I see, if you don't check out the quad room but go straight up and go down there, you end up locked out. Actually a second unlocking trigger there would do the trick(both unlocking triggers would "klll" each other when activated to avoid another unwanted activation). Thx for reporting this.

Hello,

I can confirm that the map does not work properly with quake spasm spiked. Some events don't run.

Example: in the very beginning, the event where 2 robots should appear does not run and so the door will never open.

It's works fine with Ironwail.

Hi, I don't know which event you are referring to, as no robots were used(or harmed) during the making of this map :)

@zbidou72

Here it is:

https://anonymshare.com/rbba/ironwail-2022-05-07-17-14-39.png

That screen is from another map, "smells like rust" maybe ?

Ahhh crap! You are right. I was playing both almost at the same time and messed the names, somehow. Sorry about this zbidou72 :(

I'm generally not a fan of adventure maps, but... this map is going straight onto my top maps list (x2). What can I say? You have a new fan!

Hi Mars, feeling's mutual, the forgotten nightmare was a blast.

thanks, zbidou72! I also enjoyed Null Bearing, which feels like original Half-Life in places. one of the best maps I ever played, really

Aside from some invisible walls blocking my jumping and scale making moving around kinda tedious(falling off for some items, noclip back up because it would take a minute to run around) it was an amazing map.

Scale also made half of the combat encounters kinda pointless. But other half was nice on hard difficulty.

There were enough creative progression ideas that carried this map being interesting. So I kinda have to go against my gameplay first attitude because of really cool details and say that this is a 5/5 map anyways... Like 4.51 rounded up or so haha.

Yeah I tried to alleviate the "having to go back up" with some shortcuts but it only partially succeeds. But you still enjoyed the map and that is what matters. I just completed your smej2 map. Brilliant, as always.

this was really a great and long experience with good exploration atmposhere and all what I love...thnaks a lot :)

Finally - finally! - i got my hands on a game engine able to run V.2.

I am impressed. This is serious mapping.

One theme used throughout, with the change towards the end smooth and consequent. Some thinking out-of-the-box and very original ideas. Good monster placement. A bit of 'rush hour' at the end, but not overdone. All in all, what's not to like?

The sheer size of this map is intimidating. I guess most mappers would have split this one up in 3 or 4 seperate maps - there is certainly enough material for it, and there is natural transition points, where a map change would have been natural. I shudder at the thought of keeping track of everything in the editor.

zbidou72, i expect great things from you in the future, Terrible things, but great! ;) We may have another contender for the title of 'Master of the Dark Arts' here...

Thanks for all your work; thanks for sharing!

Too big. Quake combat suffers when enemies are far away and it also makes getting lost more punishing. I gave up the third time I got stuck. I would have preferred if this was broken into an episode.

Great map!

@zbidou72 This is outstanding stuff, thank you! I am stuck, though, in what I think may be the final room -- the huge tall cylindrical temple with the enormous squid facing downwards in the middle. I killed all the monsters that spawned but I can't figure out what to do next. Did I miss an obvious button or something?

Hi mike, shoot the red glowing blobs on the arms, the statue's eyes will open, shoot them as well.

Hmm, that was what I expected. But shooting the red blobs has no effect. This is teuthisv2.zip with Quakespasm 0.93.2.

Also tried it with quakespasm-spiked 2022-08-11, but the same lack of reaction when I shoot the red pustules.

It takes about 5/6 rockets to destroy each pustule/eye. I'll quickly recheck that it still works.

I just rechecked with QS 0.95.0 and QSS-M, it seems to work as intented.

Well, this on me. I shot three or four rockets into the pustules, nothing happened, and I thought "Oh, that's not it, then". When I persevered a little longer, all went as it ought.

The one thing that would have helped the signalling here -- which did slightly break the flow right at the critical moment near the end -- would have been to make the pustules bleed when shot. That's the standard way to communicate "Damage is being done".

Anyway, this is a clear 5/5 with a lovely Ancient Evil atmosphere and a ton of fascinating exploration that makes great use of stock monsters to populate the temple complex in a way that makes perfect sense. Thank you so much for making it!

Yeah, or an outer crust with less health so that the pustule breaks in steps. Thx for playing, I was looking forward to your feedback since you seem balanced and non biased in your reviews. If you say a map is ok, I'll believe it :)

Oh, thank you zbidou72, that means a lot to me! Of course, your map hit all my sweet spots, with its emphasis on exploration and discovery, its variation between wide open spaces and smaller areas, and its consistent atmosphere!