I have yet to find anything newer than Zand 2.1.2 for Mac (can a Mac even play Zand online with PC's?)
As an aside, I'll ask you this because you seem very acquainted with the multiplayer: one of the bugs I couldn't pin down in testing multiplayer with my family has to do with the obituary strings. Seemingly at random, rather than displaying the correct 'x was y-zorched by z' string, it would occasionally display the 'x died' string (which shows as 'x didn't watch x's step' because the forcefield/world death obituary was changed). For the life of me I couldn't find a consistent trigger for this issue, but I'm thinking it's got something to do with the way Zand is attempting to read the obituary strings, because I don't recall the Beam Zorcher's obituary showing correctly often if at all.
Replying to your earlier questions:There are certain circumstances where you can't assign a custom obituary to something causing death, one of these is TERRAIN, another one of these are projectiles that spawn other projectiles, under certain circumstances. Or to put it another way, if Zandronum can't figure out what was the cause of death, it will default to "%o died"; was this just caused by the forcefields and the beam zorcher or were there other actors that caused problems?
- I found this to be quite challenging on "Extreme Ooze", due to the extremely low amount of ammo, though as I pointed out in the second run, that might have happened because I went a different route than what you were expecting.- If you did intend for this to be a map with very, very low ammo, cool! I like gimmicks like this in maps and I like it when people experiment with the gameplay in Chex. You may want to do something to make it clearer that melee combat is required, e.g., you could do this by not giving any minizorch ammo at all for the first few areas.- Please make sure that both the left and right blue doors have the same amount of minizorch ammo- I didn't find the secret in this map, it might be a good idea to make it more obvious using glasses of water or something similar to draw the player's eyes to the secret- The duplicate blue keys were kind of pointless but it was pretty pleasant anyway, it reminded me of how E1M2 has a duplicate area- The map is rather plain as others have said, personally I'm okay with this but you might want to consider going back and adding more detailing to bring it up to TUCQ's level, if you can. ChexMaster2109 is more into detailing than I am, maybe he can give you better suggestions on this.- For the best multiplayer experience possible, you should consider adding exit signs to all exits in the maps, without exit signs people will hit the exit switch accidentally and pull everyone out of the map before they're ready. If you're interested I have an exit sign in Chex Pack that you can use.
E4M2:Demo: http://ifocserv.net/ftp/Random/chexgc_e4m2.lmpGeneral notes:- So far I like the difficulty presented by Extreme Ooze, it's not nonstop action but it keeps me on my toes, nice work!- This map really, really needs an exit sign, I pressed the switch without even realizing that was the end of the map, I guarantee that people playing online will do the same thing and frustrate other players in the server.- Note that you don't need to use thing bridges anymore, especially if you're only supporting the latest version of Zandronum and zDoom, consider using 3d floors instead, they're much easier to work with and they tend to look better, too.- There was a bug in this map when played online, in the red key room. The red key was rendered above the thing bridges but it was only collectable below the thing bridges, for some reason I couldn't reproduce this bug outside of this map, even if I copy/pasted the entire room. I recommend that you check this out on the server when you get a chance. If we can figure out what's causing this bug, it would be a good thing to report on the Zandronum bug tracker so it can be fixed.- I found the long maze in the middle of this map to be tedious and not very fun. I would strongly recommend that you not put giant mazes in the middle of your maps. From what I've seen, even the mazes in the IWAD maps are not well received, especially when played online on a server. Try to find other ways to challenge players.- You might want to consider making your secrets a little more obvious
I never figured out how to work with 3D floors; at the time I didn't want to use them to prevent the game from varying too much from the original CQ levels.
On the secret areas: the 'Secret' console command was a gift from heaven on this.
Thanks again for all of your feedback! I hope you've been enjoying the episode.
How do you get to E4B1? I cannot get rid of the pillar blocking what I assume is the teleporter leading to E4M3's secret exit.