Nov 14, 1996



HEY!!! ---> UNUSUAL INSTALLATION FOR THIS QUAKE LEVEL!  READ THIS FILE! <---



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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!

