The first round of beta testing has gone pretty much as I expected, making little changes to the amount of ammo and health in certain areas of the map. The other main point that my testers raised was the fact that the texture set is pretty small, which takes away a bit from the otherwise impressive architecture. The main reason I had for doing this was to save space in the bsp file, but with my most recent optimisations I've managed to make some more space and I've hopefully improved this situation a bit.

This brings up one of the things that have made this map very hard to make. Normally the only real tradeoff a mapper has to decide on is a perfomance/looks kind of thing. In this map I've had all sorts of other tradeoffs to make, since having everything I wanted would cause errors in the map.

Anyone else who is considering making a huge Quake1 map should think carefully before starting because there are undoubtably a million problems you will face that you didn't even think existed. I know that I'll be considering making several smaller maps instead, next time a vision so grand comes to my mind =).

With any luck (and I think I have some coming to me ;-), I'll have the map done and released within two weeks. So I'll (probably foolishly) give myself a deadline of August 15th.