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!