A letdown is the item layout imo. Weapons are a little scarce in areas and I think there should be more SG and less PG. The most significant issue: those rage-inducing short doorways - it cripples the flow of the map. Doorways should slightly higher than the player's maximum height at the peak of a jump. When you hit your head ont he doorway while strafe jumping, it's a huge letdown.

6.5/10 from me. 9 if the issues are fixed.

Although I'd love to complete another Q3A map, I am also trying to learn Maya so I can hopefully contribute something to the UT2003 community (sorry quake fans.) Maybe even the new Doom engine will prove interesting to build things in. Anyway, I salivate every time I consider what I could do with such a large polygon budget.

Ya ever gonna make anothe map Zarathrustra? (Hope so).

Another big 10 from me :-)

To all who heard about my post on qmap christmas day, they sent me the wrong computer. I sent it back and had a custom one built for me.

People like me really piss me off.

I cannot even begin to know where to start....How the hell did you get those angled curves in the hallways (the lower wall border trim part). Brilliant! The whole map is brilliant.

And How come no one has mentioned the Quad. GENIOUSE! Pure and simple. You get teleported to the quad then the sphere holding the quad opens dropping you below.

I spent 30 mins in the map and still came to new places. I gotta go back to see what else I have missed.

I give this map a 10.

Nice job Zar.

The area pictured in the sample pic was the best. I wish the walls throughout had a little more to look at.

Good show. I'll throw an 8.

No lack off mapping skills or fantasy at all, looks are very good and impressive. Its only the smartness of gameplay a little, which is most often hard to capture in a map of this size.

If i ever want ot download a level I always try here first beacuse I know it will download first time. Hope this helps anyone with problems. Keep up these amazing maps Zarathustra!

Hehe, I thought I'd personally thank you for being such a trooper about downloading this map. :)

i r'member Runtfest beta crashed

just the same.i have 117 too.

do the bots play really well

and the whole map or do they Clog up the middlest area like 95% o maps.there should be a RE-aas Program that paks the pk3 for you and makes the aas file rock! then all those Early maps will Kick Arse! C anyone?

it gets stuck everytime and i am trying for days now and i have cable

fucking stupid fileplanetserver

refixings. everybody hates when it doesnt work but give them Kredit when it kicks arse at 5.0k/sec thats great for my connection speed.[donate me a dsl please]

I've done this before, but I did it again just to check. The r_speeds in Andronicus are actually pretty comparable to q3dm12 "The Dredwerkz", with a few exceptions.

In both maps, just running around normally by yourself in regular first person player mode, you get mostly from 3,500 to 8,000 r_speeds, plus or minus a little.

q3dm12 peaks at about 11,700 in places like the plasma gun and the exit to the main room from the railgun area.

The main difference with Andronicus is that it peaks like this in a few more places, going above 10,000 r_speeds here and there. But it is far from the norm, IMO.

Now, I've seen very well made maps that regularly go as high as 18,000-20,000 (PowZer's Golgotha Core comes to mind.) And I just saw one not-so-well made map that was around 19,000 on QIC (www.planetquake.co...a/fragnflag.htm).

Now that is what I consider "too-large" r_speeds (no slight to PowZer, who makes wonderful maps, and I love Golgotha Core anyway.)

Looks like a nice map, but I need a new computer to run it properly. My fps are far too low.

Have you tried my suggestions below? Also, read Johnny Law's post. Sometimes weird stuff just happens.

it crashed just like your map.

without a doubt ,the best tech-theme map I have played.

I am working on a smaller map now. I intend it to be for FFA/Tourney play. Check out my website periodically (in the readme.txt) for news.

IT WORKS ON THIS SYSTEM. IT WORKS ON EVERYTHING I TRY IT ON.

By what happened to SiCdeth, I cannot possibly see how I could have tested for this. I mean, there must be some strange bug in Q3A itself, or a problem introduced by something else. If SiCdeth could get it to work by upgrading, perhaps there was something corrupted in his system or pak0.pk3 file... or something.

SiCdeth has gotten the map to work simply by installing the latest game patch from id software (version 117).

Also, as a suggetion, you might try cleaning your /baseq3 directory up. I have seen people have various problems because of bad .pk3's, or too many .pk3's etc. etc.

To be sure it isn't an issue with other .pk3's, you can move ALL of your custom .pk3's OUT OF /baseq3 temporarily, and then just put the q3zdm1.pk3 in there. This will eliminate that as a cause.

Personally, I only keep the .pk3's that I know I'm going to play in /baseq3. The rest stay zipped in another folder.

like every freakin map ever for Quake1,2,3[A]!

i have the 117 and a 16mb TNT [dont boo . . . ok stop already]

p3 450 128mbRam. if i deleted the aas then that would delete the point i dont play online cause of my 48k connection yes i have a 56k modem but a certain SH#TWAY computer co. cuts down their speed. i did Lug my comp around to a Lan. once

However, an 8 for me, because of lower frame rates. If you had built some more winding (thus vis blocking ) corridiors, fps would have included greatly. I assume you did use areaportals with the doors?

Love the glass sections BTW.

I think I'll be avoiding this forum now so that I can concentrate on my next map. :)

That's interesting. But why on earth would that crash on a few systems but not others? The bot file is not dependent on special drivers like video or sound. If someone can tell me how I could have avoided this, maybe I'll be able to take that knowledge forward to the next map.

On the issue of whether levels should run within the original system specs -- I agree, but only to a point. It is a factor, but not the whole ball of wax for freely distributed add-on levels. Besides, Geforce cards are continuing to appear on more desktops, and this will become less of an issue soon. I think the [i]really low[/i] votes for this reason seem vindictive and take the point a bit too far.

Thankfully, the map critics on the major review web sites seem to be thinking in this way.

As for the map, looks good and is a decent large map. But peformance has to be considered as well as everythng else. All you "it runs fine on my p3 whatever with GeForce" people, you have to realise that levels should run on system specs specified with the game. This is about a 6.

What does your system have in common with SiCdeth, I wonder? What do you suppose was the issue on those maps you had problems with?

p3 450 [im too stupid too overclock]

i have ezperienced this same crash with other lesser known maps ,[duh i told you i beta test].

I just ran it again on my "measly" Pentium Pro 200Mhz Win98 64MB system with a Voodoo2 and it booted up fine. Granted, it didn't run too fast, but it did run fine. Runs fine on my other computer too (also Win98).

Really, there is nothing especially strange about the construction of this map except that it is larger than average.

The difference between your machine and mine is the AMD processor and the amount of memory. Also, you didn't mention the operating system version (Win 95, 98 or NT?).

IMO, with a souped-up, over-clocked processor like that k6-450 (550) you really ought to invest in some more RAM (its not that expensive unless all you have is milk money.) Other than that, you have a good system to run this map. I just don't get it.

a measly 64mb ram

tnt2 32mb

i dont have 117 because i have 116 and i dont see the need of getting the new one unless u decide to play online, and i never do because i have a crappy 56k modem and i have pings of like 500+

But what kind of system do you have otherwise?

On the Machine Problems... I got a PII400 and a voodoo2 and this have an easy solution: put the detail level to a lower level.

anyway I have seen better maps... only a 6/10 for me

8/10

Re-think, Tig, Please!

To clarify some things:

Detail brushes were used where appropriate. Essentially only the hull and vis-blocking structures are "structural." Hint brushes were used in a number of places to create portals where desired to reduce visibility and hence r_speeds. Using detail brushes mainly affects compile time, not necessarily game performance, which is all you should care about.

Also, the readme says that the long compile was because of the light stage, not vis. Detail brushes have no effect on light compiles, and there is little that can be done to affect light compile times in any case. But ultimately this means nothing to you, the player, because you don't have to sit through the compile. The lightmap is the same size regardless and there is no special performance hit for this. It is a simple rendering pass that must be drawn any way you slice it.

Finally, using detail brushes can reduce the number of leaf-nodes in the Potentially Visible Set (PVS), but it won't necessarily speed up your map much. The engine still has to draw it all, which is the main performance hit. Having fewer leaf nodes means that the PVS is smaller, but that performance gain is negligible compared to the cost of rendering a scene.

Reducing the number of leaf nodes in the PVS too far can cause too much to be visible at once, since everything sits in a few large nodes. The real key is to create nodes where they make the most sense, not more or fewer per se. This is what I tried to do.

The attention to detail and the generally excellent design make this map a keeper.

I think it's a solid 9.

BTW,

It runs fluidly on a Celeron 533/GeForceDDR/192MB, which I now consider to be a minimum target spec for Quake3 custom maps; Voodoo3, Rage128 and TNT1 are horribly underpowered by current standards.

A compile time is not indicative of quality construction dude.

It would appear that he hasn't used many(if any) detail brushes, but nothing is gunna get that RAD time down with the size of some of the areas.

I agree that making maps that can be ran resonably well on all system specs is good, but I dont think knocking maps that require a little higher end hardware good at all. Just consider them ahead of thier time.

Your personal opinion on the look of this map being ordinary is fair enough, but have a look at some of the other post's and you'll see your a minority.

Quality? ha. The readme states how long a compile this map took on his awesome box. Maybe more attention to technical areas such as detail brushs and hints wouldn't have helped this map. I noticed a few Z-fighting problems on the map as well.

It runs very smooth (40+FPS avrg @ 8X6, 5 bots)

on my P3 550E, TNT2 32MB.

I've given it an 8.

Rio: define "to big" ?

Scampie: What does this mean?

"If mappers didn't care about how well their maps played, there would be many better looking maps then this with a hell alot more gameplay."

correct me if I'm wrong but that just doesn't make any sense?

I can't play map therefore it's worth 3/10 in my mind.

If mappers didn't care about how well their maps played, there would be many better looking maps then this with a hell alot more gameplay.

And isn't it strange how most good Q3 maps that look better(lun3dm1 and 2, bal3dm1) run perfectly on my machine...

loser

but it's only worth a 3/10. A map should be able to be played and enjoyed. I get lag playing by myself.

if the q3 engine could handle all the ploys and shader effects and open areas, I mite look at the map in a better light. I shouldn't have to get a 1ghz processor and a gig of RAM to play a map made for a game with minimum system specs of more then half of what this map requires.

Far too big.

Lloyd M

my computer takes up 4 walls is this big enough?

mm....it doesn't have a monitor tho :(