ETTiNGRiNDER

I like Quake. People always seem to sneer about it being "haha all brown" but personally I love the grimy medieval-horror aesthetic it has going on. I play custom maps sometimes. But I'm not nearly as up-to-date on what's out there as I am for Doom maps (and I'm not exactly up-to-date on those either). Like, Zerstörer is still what comes first to mind if you ask me "name a good mod for Quake" level of behind the times. As with Doom (and various other games of those times) I like to collect all those cheap third-party add-on CDs as well. The Quake ones tend to be a little more interesting than the Doom ones since they seem more likely to have original content, shoddy as it may be. I used to play MP a lot but dropped out of that scene for a long time. Lately though, I've been having a major deathmatch craving (not just for Quake, but including that) so if you get on one of the few populated Quakeworld DM servers that are up you might see me around. Port-wise, I mostly do vanilla, but for online play recently I've been using ezQuake. From what I can gather, on the SP front, Quakespasm is the "good" port (think PrBoom) and Darkplaces is the "pretty" port (think Doomsday). Don't quote me on that though. I used to use TyrQuake in older times which is/was a fairly chocolatey implementation for Linux as I recall. I don't know if any of the many others are considered worth bothering with.

A while back I put up what stuff I know about HHE here: http://ettingrinder.youfailit.net/heretic-hhe.html I kind of gave up on documenting it further since it seems like it's kind of junk, but if someone wants to suggest anything more about it to me I might update again. Too bad it never got polished to the same level as DeHackEd. I think there was a source code to DeHackEd released that could maybe be adapted, but, I figure most people would look at that as a "no point" sort of project.

A screenshot of a crappy old Heretic map of mine that I had on hand with a view that looked kind of cool. Maybe I'll remake those towers in a better map, some time.

It sure does "take it to a new level", like a mandatory bunnyhopping timed door as the first thing it expects you to do.

I tend to have a soft spot for layouts that loop back on themselves in interesting ways. Heretic E1M2 (The Dungeons) is one of my favorite IWAD levels in that regard. Misri Halek in Alient Vendetta (MAP20) would make another good example. This was a principle I tried to build into both Valley of Saints and Mountain King's Domain (and arguably even in Coven to some degree, though I don't know that it was as much of a conscious aim at that point.)

I guess you could characterize it as what I'd call a "NES gamer" mentality. If I've decided I'm determined to beat a map, I'll generally grind at it with repeated attempts until I've memorized things to the point that I have the right response ready for whatever situation arises. Pistol restarts as needed, savescumming in Doom just kills the flow of it and turns things into gaming the dice rather than building skills. I'll save if I'm running through a megawad and need a break though (and given vanilla/chocolate, sometimes end up pistol restarting afterwards thanks to that one savegame bug...) I'm also not too proud to play a lower difficulty setting, especially given how far out UV settings tend to be nowadays. Outside of that, quick and aggressive when I'm feeling confident (i.e. I either know what happens in a particular part or I don't feel that there's any trap impending) or slow and paranoid when I'm low on health, unfamiliar with an area, hitscanners everywhere or something's just plain suspicious. Chaingunners and arch-viles top the "must die NOW" list, often getting the SSG and BFG respectively even if that's a bit overkill. I can be a little miserly too, taking the time to swap from the SSG to the pump-action for the last shot on a badly wounded enemy, or for small numbers of imps/zombies, or using berserk/chainsaw on pinkies sometimes. Depends some on how generous the map is on ammo though. Sometimes I'll straferun or wallrun to make traversing a big area less tedious, or try to do a bump-grab on an item I really want, but otherwise I don't really bother to try to speedrun levels per se, nor do I worry too much about doing max runs though finding secrets is always satisfying when I do find them. I also exploit the "infinitely tall rocket explosions" quirk, given the chance.

The concept sounds interesting, but a newly registered user asking people to do stuff for them without any work of their own to show doesn't inspire a lot of confidence...

I seem to remember there being a little Duke3D mod that did sort of that. Basically instead of Duke saying stuff automatically when certain things happened, you'd hit the button and he'd shoot his mouth off whenever you wanted.

Already have it, but might as well stash a gift code for some time. It's a pretty nice game but I rarely find the time for something so long-winded to play these days, unfortunately.

Out of all of them this sounds like the one I'd be most inclined to play.

A lot of this echoes ideas that I've stumbled upon in my own course of experimenting with mapping, but it's good to see them reinforced. I feel as if this video, although it's about drawing, expresses some ideas that are pretty applicable to level design as well. Basically the same idea of "redo a similar thing a bunch of times and take a look at what versions worked the best." I know I have one map in my WIP project that I basically entirely rebuilt from the first version that was one of the earliest maps in the set, keeping the same idea but with the goal of "do it better this time".

My recollection of Vavoom was that despite some interesting features (the most promising of which being that it supported QuakeC type definitions as I recall) it was intolerably crash-prone. Didn't GZDoom get (partial, at least?) support for Vavoom maps already, or am I mixing it up with the support for Doom Legacy maps?

So what happened to this? The github seems to be gone.