Released last night, finally, and with great relief on my part. Right up until the end I was finding new problems, and new solutions, and more usefully learning a bit more about making mods.
The number of times however, that fixing one thing, just plain broke another, was very fustrating, especially as often it was just a missing word: return; for instance
But I know why; I'm still a noob at heart and I'm completely disorganised. Couple that with code and a mod that spiralled in both scope and size from that which I'd envisaged, and you can understand why I had problems. God forbid anyone else should try to read it
But it's done and regardless it's my best mod, and even though I hate it now, I'm sure I'll appreciate it as such once I've had a break from it.
There are number of things that didn't make the finished version:
Not all quake sounds have been replaced, mostly because the QUake ones suited it just fine, but also because of time pressures. In addition there there's a lot of centerprint - ed 'chat' that was going to have accompanying audio (either spoken/acted words or "vocalisations") but again time, and some skill-decifit, meant it was binned.
A fair amount of planned stpryline is gone or simplified, and this was just unavoidable. There was no way I would have ever finished it, if the planned storyline, needing another 15 or so levels, had been followed. So a few corners have been gut.
Some thing were cut because of model related issues. I'm never going to be a modeller; not even in terms of tweaking existing ones. So some features (there's a full list I may 'release' one day, but I don't want to give the mod any more bad press than I already appear to be doing
) just didn't happen because the model couldn't do it and I couldn't make it!
There are a numebr of cuts made due to coding issues, predominately because
I couldn't get things to work, but some (one major thing) that a bit of me thinks you just can't do in Quake, and I'm sticking to that opinion, regardless of what the actual truth may be.
SO what's left then? A pretty big mod. 16 levels, a 3rd person perspective, background music (different for each world type) 5 species of non-playable characters, with different individuals within those, 5 attacks/powers, 5 world-types, a storyline of some description, and a whole range of (spot 'em there's loads!) "borrowed movie and game influences, most none too subtle.
Pert of me loves it, part of me hates it. I'm still quite fustrated that I didn't have time or the skill to include stuff that was pretty great in theory, and also that both in terms of mapping and especially coding, I didn't have the time or enthusiasm to make it as polished as it should be.
But I think it's different, fun and big (during last minute testing I played thorugh it in god mode, taking all the short cuts and avoiding all the pit falls, and it still took me 37 minutes!) and worthy of people playing and giving some time to.
I'll just finish by saying thank you to everyone who has helped me over the it's development, it would have been impossible without you all *sniff*. More detilas of which can be found in the Game Manual
http//www.ajaysquakesite.co.uk/lj_dloads/lj_manual.zip plus installation tips, chracter guides and why you should use TomazQuake, so you really should download it.
Hope you enjoy it
ajay
