Nov 14, 1996 HEY!!! ---> UNUSUAL INSTALLATION FOR THIS QUAKE LEVEL! READ THIS FILE! <--- ================================================================ Title : Call a Plumber Filename : plumber.bsp Author : Gyro Gearloose Email Address : gyro@nwlink.com Description : Quake level to show off some way cool stuff done by others in the Quake community. Red Armor & Megahealths to: Ken Turner (Willy the Spider), Bubbah aka Tan Sian Yue (Uzi totin' Snakeman), Dave Weiden (flowing liquid textures), Steven "Reaper" Polge for the best DM testbed yet (besides humans), Blue's News, Hudak, QuakeLab, and all the other excellent non-frames pages out there, Scope, Albinatr, Matt, Sharvey, Aschw, Birdman, Ian, Thomsonr, Dario, Ruffian, Sourmosh, and everyone else who sent encouragement and comments on Torture and Crucible. People in Quakeland are, like, way righteous y'know? Check out further wackiness (and Quake stuff) at: http://www.nwlink.com/~gyro ================================================================ * Boilerplate info * Single Player : Yes Coop : Yes (4 starts) Deathmatch : Yes (6 starts) - not really designed for DM Difficulty Settings : Yes New monsters/water : Yes Base : New level from scratch Tools used : Quest, text editor, and qbsp_dos Build Time : My social life is a thing of the past Distribution and legal : Copyright (c) 1996 Aaron Logue. All rights reserved. Portions copyrighted by id Software, Inc. Other copyright holders may exist for portions of this package. Do not distribute commercially. This level may be electronically distributed only at no charge to the recipient, and may not be modified in any way. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS THIS LEVEL TO BE DISTRIBUTED ON CD-ROM WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN APPROVAL BY AARON LOGUE. * Installation Info * Installation of this level is a bit different because there's more than just a BSP file - there are new monster MDL files and a replacement PROGS.DAT to run them. Not to worry! All you need to do is: 1. Put plumber.zip into the directory where your QUAKE.EXE is 2. pkunzip -d plumber 3. quake -game plumber +map plumber That's it! Replacements for step 3 include: quake -game plumber +skill 0 +map plumber <--- easy single player quake -game plumber +skill 2 +map plumber <--- hard single player quake -game plumber +deathmatch 1 +map plumber <--- explore in deathmatch mode * What is this newfangled installation doing? * The pkunzip -d thing will create a directory called "plumber" under your Quake main directory, and will create "maps" and "progs" directories under that. The BSP file should wind up in something like C:\quake\plumber\maps\, the MDL files should wind up in C:\quake\plumber\progs\, and the PROGS.DAT file should wind up in C:\quake\plumber. The "-game plumber" switch tells Quake to look in the directory called "plumber" for the files it needs to make the plumber.bsp level work correctly. Note that if you try to play plumber.bsp without the required spider and snakeman models and progs.dat in the right places, Quake will give you a cryptic error about not being able to find a mdl and you will have no joy. If you previously did a "pkunzip plumber" in your id1\maps directory, expecting this to be a normal level, here are the files that were probably created in id1\maps (that you don't want in there). plumber.bsp plumber.txt progs.dat snakeman.mdl snakeman.txt spider.mdl spider.txt waterflo.txt * Blah blah blah blah blah * The PROGS.DAT has the John Cash fish-miscount fix in it, so you can get a full monster hit count even though there are fish. In monsters.qc, swimmonster_start_go, remove total_monsters = total_monsters + 1; There are tough secrets to crack in this level. Here's the answer in decimal: 85 83 69 65 71 82 69 78 65 68 69. None of the four secrets are cruel unsolvable jokes, and the level can be completed without them. I tried a new technique for level building to try to reduce production time (which is still about 20 days for me) which was to construct the level without any entities first, then go through afterward and add all the moving things, lighting, and monsters. The experiment failed. It wound up taking a lot more time that way. I have a ways to go before I figure out how to break the habit of making cramped levels. Thanks to Scope for turning me on to Reaper Bots (and for making some cool levels - check out the dark industrial setting in "locks"). The Reapers will help me figure out better deathmatch scale. I played around with Reaper Bots in this level. They kick my butt so soundly that it's obvious that if I wasn't a LPB on the net, I'd never see a positive frag count. The Reaper is very, very cool. Check it out if you haven't already done so. If you run with the Reaper's PROGS.DAT, you'll get lots of benign errors about functions not existing to drive the spiders and snakes. Not to worry. This level isn't very good for Reapers - they get confused about getting out of the rising lava and have a tough time fighting underwater. I'll try to keep the web page somewhat current with whatever I'm fiddling with. Hopefully I'll be able to get a clue about Quake C before too long. Happy fragging!