the Castle addon - Dark Places engine team

Release info:

Designed for maximum performance under Archon mod and Darkplaces engine.
Circumstances will vary with other mods and engines.

Can be played with Painkeep 2.2.1 ( Moddb.com ), and (in theory) vanilla quake or any derivative mod.

Multiplayer deathmatch "open" platform map - (i.e. if you fall, you die.)

Hints:

Jump in the towers to ascend. Second jump takes you to the tower tops where a teleport pad will return you to the tower bottom.

Shoot the purple sphere (in silver hub room) to lower / raise castle corridors (toggle on Archon mod only.) On other mods, shoot at the bottom of the silver hub room from the exact map center to lower the castle - this is the only way to access castle corridors from the towers.

Castle corridors: on the Archon mod the first jump from the tower bottom always takes you to the corridor level, whether the castle is up or down. On other mods you will have to lower the castle (see hint above) to enter corridors.

Escapes: lower hex platforms have teleport spheres on Archon mod, teleport phones on Painkeep, and some teleport portals. Look around, none of them are a total trap.

Main path: when running across the hex blocks, try to stay on the path from tower entry to tower entry. Running around towers and along side paths takes some practice - many areas can pitch you into the fall of "Doom."

This map was designed to be challenging to play on - it was intended for Clan practice.

Background:

In the hey day of Quake, circa 1996, I joined clan Arioch.

Archived clan site: Rothrin.net

The clans symbol was an 8 rayed star of Chaos, and that was my personal symbol, so we got along great. Heh heh.

Amongst the plans were 2 maps I promised the clan, the Castle and Heaven.
Both existed back then. Nothing like they are now, however.
They are now released in their originally visioned creative glory.

Problem was in 96, the tools and engines could not handle maps like these.
The original maps took weeks to compile and could not display 24 bit textures or sky boxes.
(Nor did I have the quake-c programming experience to put in the features I desired.)

I dont think we ever even played a clan match on these maps. The originals just were not that playable.

If you download either clan map, please enjoy.

If you find them fun, entertaining, or novel, why not leave a comment?

Why the fall into the "pit of death" on both maps?

(I just know someone wants to know...)

In the original design both maps existed in one level and when you fell from Heaven, you ended up in the Castle. In deathmatch play that doesnt work very well for game flow.

The original Castle sat on top of a massive lava lake with an island that sank into the lake. There is a problem with large lava lakes in the Quake engine - its hard to make them look very convincing. (The s6_ skybox is wicked and a great stand in for a lava lake.)

When I redid the maps, I decided both falls led to death. Except on the Heaven map, where you have a slight chance for redemption - well, only if you load Heaven under Archon or Painkeep 2.2.