Taken me three years, but finally finished Peril, a mod based upon Arcane Dimensions.
- Submitted by Balgorg
- Creation date
Latest updates
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Peril3. 0b Fixed
Stacks of fixes. Especially the door and key in Tavistock that broke the game. Most edict... -
Peril screenshots
Some more screenshots -
Peril screenshots
A selection of screenshots
Latest reviews
I have finally beaten Peril after all this time. That was quite an adventure! Really, that's what would come to my mind if you asked me to describe the mod in one word.
It leaves me with the same feeling Unreal does. I think it is the huge environments, the impressive vistas and the medieval setting being invaded by "future-tech" thematic being treated in a morerealistic? believable(?) way than in base-quake.
You go from setpiece to setpiece and those are always creative and often very impressive, and that's a big part of the draw of the mod for me. I was often thinking to myself, "okay, what are they going to throw at us next?".
On a technical sidenote, those setpieces often rely on quake lifts and trains and are often broken by the physics in engines other than QSS and FTE. Luckily the black magic trick of turning v-sync on in Ironwail fixes those issues (I couldn't play in QSS as I was having way too low FPS). I don't know what is going on in Ironwail with the physics and v-sync because I have a 120Hz monitor so with v-sync turned on I was at 120fps, still way above the quake physics limit of 72Hz (which is supposed to be decorrelated anyway in Ironwail) but it worked fine.
I started the mod in vkQuake to keep the FTE particle system for those AD weather effects as I feel they add to the atmosphere and to have performance on par with Ironwail, but alas the v-sync trick does not work in vkQuake. It became a problem in the maps Mountain and Blimp where you NEED the physics to not sh*t the bed to progress, so I switched to FTE. I eventually came to SkyCastle but FTE crashes when trying to load the map so I went back to vkQuake for the rest of the mod.
As a criticism I'd say that encounters are a bit too often on flat ground with no line of sight breaks resulting in me just stomping them with a boring circle-strafe strategy. And I must say I am totaly suffering from small-group-of-grunts-and-enforcers-in-a-wide-corridor fatigue. Maybe that is why Peril does not get more recognition in this community? People are more interested in neatly tightly designed combat and level pacing?
That being said that is not the draw of the mod for me, no, the draw is the feeling of adventure, the wonder of what is going to happen next, as it is for me in Unreal, with some half life-esque vistas. Those setpieces fights, those are the ones I'm looking forward to, that and what the next environment is going to look like.
All the maps look incredible and the natural environment ones especially impressed me. I hear it is quite hard to achieve in Quake but Peril's are great and look natural. I don't know the UK side IRL but they reminded me a lot of Britanny on the other side of the channel.
All of blocked-out organic cosmic horrors look great and really add to the lovecraftian themes of the game, to a level base-quake could only dream of (I have the "Fire" level in mid as I write this).
For one being in the later levels, I was a bit let down by QuakeStation as the excitement builds up at the end of the level prior with the "oh shit we are going IN THERE" moment, but then it's mostly empty cargobays. The Shub fight atop the Quake-Q-nail and the end-generator fights are still epic and strong hightlights of the entire mod, but I feel the rest of the level could have been a bit more fleshed out.
On the same note, I feel the end fight in SkyCastle could stand to be a little more phases long, it is over a bit too quickly.
I really enjoyed the change of pace in the Plymouth map where you have to sneak around ala Thief. It sounds clunky to do that in quake, but I have to say it worked great for me, even if I was just there wishing I could meld in the shadows then remembering it was just Quake.
I loved Rubble and the way it makes us revisit a map we've learned an adventure ago, but ruined, instantly making it more interesting to visit -and fight in- with all the added nook and cranies, providing great encounter setups.
And there I was thinking I'd write a quick review. Long story short, that is an incredible achievement you've done there Balgorg, you can be proud of your work! I hope it can inspire some mappers to test out some of your ideas and I very much look forward to more adventures with Robyn (come on, there must be more shub nigguraths out there
)
PS: another technical side-note, on the Tavistock level, I had to turn on "no_surfacecheck" in worldspawn to prevent huge momentary tanking of the framerate when shotgun and SSG pellets hit walls in engines with CSQC extensions like vkQuake (I think it would have been the same in QSS). I had this problem in ad_swampy in AD 1.7 back then and Sock told me that solution to fix the issue. I don't know what we are losing exactly but I never noticed anything and Sock told me it should better be turned on in huge levels. For people wanting a fix for this here is what I do: I generate the level's ent file (I use FTE's sv_saveentfile console command) then add "no_surfacecheck" "1" in the first worldspawn block of the generated .ent file.
Maybe you can add this in Trenchbroom to save people some hassle?
It leaves me with the same feeling Unreal does. I think it is the huge environments, the impressive vistas and the medieval setting being invaded by "future-tech" thematic being treated in a more
You go from setpiece to setpiece and those are always creative and often very impressive, and that's a big part of the draw of the mod for me. I was often thinking to myself, "okay, what are they going to throw at us next?".
On a technical sidenote, those setpieces often rely on quake lifts and trains and are often broken by the physics in engines other than QSS and FTE. Luckily the black magic trick of turning v-sync on in Ironwail fixes those issues (I couldn't play in QSS as I was having way too low FPS). I don't know what is going on in Ironwail with the physics and v-sync because I have a 120Hz monitor so with v-sync turned on I was at 120fps, still way above the quake physics limit of 72Hz (which is supposed to be decorrelated anyway in Ironwail) but it worked fine.
I started the mod in vkQuake to keep the FTE particle system for those AD weather effects as I feel they add to the atmosphere and to have performance on par with Ironwail, but alas the v-sync trick does not work in vkQuake. It became a problem in the maps Mountain and Blimp where you NEED the physics to not sh*t the bed to progress, so I switched to FTE. I eventually came to SkyCastle but FTE crashes when trying to load the map so I went back to vkQuake for the rest of the mod.
As a criticism I'd say that encounters are a bit too often on flat ground with no line of sight breaks resulting in me just stomping them with a boring circle-strafe strategy. And I must say I am totaly suffering from small-group-of-grunts-and-enforcers-in-a-wide-corridor fatigue. Maybe that is why Peril does not get more recognition in this community? People are more interested in neatly tightly designed combat and level pacing?
That being said that is not the draw of the mod for me, no, the draw is the feeling of adventure, the wonder of what is going to happen next, as it is for me in Unreal, with some half life-esque vistas. Those setpieces fights, those are the ones I'm looking forward to, that and what the next environment is going to look like.
All the maps look incredible and the natural environment ones especially impressed me. I hear it is quite hard to achieve in Quake but Peril's are great and look natural. I don't know the UK side IRL but they reminded me a lot of Britanny on the other side of the channel.
All of blocked-out organic cosmic horrors look great and really add to the lovecraftian themes of the game, to a level base-quake could only dream of (I have the "Fire" level in mid as I write this).
For one being in the later levels, I was a bit let down by QuakeStation as the excitement builds up at the end of the level prior with the "oh shit we are going IN THERE" moment, but then it's mostly empty cargobays. The Shub fight atop the Quake-Q-nail and the end-generator fights are still epic and strong hightlights of the entire mod, but I feel the rest of the level could have been a bit more fleshed out.
On the same note, I feel the end fight in SkyCastle could stand to be a little more phases long, it is over a bit too quickly.
I really enjoyed the change of pace in the Plymouth map where you have to sneak around ala Thief. It sounds clunky to do that in quake, but I have to say it worked great for me, even if I was just there wishing I could meld in the shadows then remembering it was just Quake.
I loved Rubble and the way it makes us revisit a map we've learned an adventure ago, but ruined, instantly making it more interesting to visit -and fight in- with all the added nook and cranies, providing great encounter setups.
And there I was thinking I'd write a quick review. Long story short, that is an incredible achievement you've done there Balgorg, you can be proud of your work! I hope it can inspire some mappers to test out some of your ideas and I very much look forward to more adventures with Robyn (come on, there must be more shub nigguraths out there
)PS: another technical side-note, on the Tavistock level, I had to turn on "no_surfacecheck" in worldspawn to prevent huge momentary tanking of the framerate when shotgun and SSG pellets hit walls in engines with CSQC extensions like vkQuake (I think it would have been the same in QSS). I had this problem in ad_swampy in AD 1.7 back then and Sock told me that solution to fix the issue. I don't know what we are losing exactly but I never noticed anything and Sock told me it should better be turned on in huge levels. For people wanting a fix for this here is what I do: I generate the level's ent file (I use FTE's sv_saveentfile console command) then add "no_surfacecheck" "1" in the first worldspawn block of the generated .ent file.
Maybe you can add this in Trenchbroom to save people some hassle?
I have learned lots by watching how you progressed, and how I need to make some stuff more clear.
Its been a tough learning curve
Each map is an experiment at doing something different, not the usual stuff you get in many maps. But the main theme was to experiment with the open world concept, and how yo get that to work in Quake.
I think I finally gave ip with that in the last two maps, and went with the flow of linearity, which seems to work better, but without loosing the sense of scale.
You are right that reflected in the game is my learning curve.
Thanx for playing it, for the livestream, and the feedback.
I haven't finished with it yet, and I have some ideas about how to sort out some map issues.