One of those jobs I’ve really not been looking forward to has been sorting out the map downloads. The initial pass of the 500 maps (I was wrong in a previous post on the number of maps, I was using old review tables) came back with about 400 that I had. With a bit of tweaking to my map finder and searching the interweb I’ve brought it down to just 22 files missing out of 520 in total. There are also some that are apparently “ok” but I need to go back and check them.
The majority of those 22 that I can’t find are… how shall I put it… not that brilliant anyway, but for completeness sake I will try to get hold of them. Although finding www.file.com/ziedm.bsp and K:\Games\Quake\id1\maps\ might be difficult! I’m going to knock up a list at some point and post it here and on func_msgboard, see it that gets any takers.
In the mean time I’m going to mark those maps as download wanted, so when someone goes to download them, they’ll be asked if they have it (yeah daft logic I know since they’re trying to download it) but you never know, it might spring up some results.
Amazingly for some maps the original download urls still worked, and the same was true of some author websites such as StarGazer’s Map Observatory. Ok, so it’s not been updated in four years but at least it’s still there *cough* PlanetQuake *cough*.
In terms of where to search I used Google and Yahoo but they’re not very helpful. PlanetQuake and Telefragged are littered with broken links, and PQ in particular is full of broken sites due to the their constant need to change the site urls. Why? Who the hell now wants an url at planetquake.gamespy.com!? Yuck.
In the end I was looking in three places for maps, FileSearching.com mirror of PlanetQuake, Gamers.org mirror of idgames2 (off cdrom.com) and most ironic of all the Rocketland mod upload section (yes, run by Rocketman).
Through staring at the various reviews, odd things have cropped up. 3 maps were reviewed twice (all by Joe Hunter). I reviewed them first time around and then 21 months later they were submitted again and Fat Controller reviewed them. Thankfully, we gave them the same marks (except for one, differing by just 0.5). Shows I wasn’t complete off base! Also browsing through the comment content showed that Pingu had a stalker, Ashley Lauren, who commented on most of his maps usually with “mapping god” or “master”. Very strange.
You know about my collection at http://www.quaddicted.com/dm ?
Unfortunately there are mostly plain .bsp files though :(
So you are gonna resurrect MPQ? I was about to ask you for backups so I could get it back to the internet as an archive.
:)
I’m not resurrecting the site as such, I’m creating an archive of the old site (hence the err… name MPQ Archive :P). If you look at the Quake post category on here you’ll see what I’m doing / where progress is at.
I didn’t know about the maps on quaddicted. I’ll have a look through, see if any of what I’m missing is in there. Thanks for mentioning it.
Also I notice you have the speedmap stuff hosted there too… fancy putting a link to my archive here of the original site? ;) It’s http://pauked.com/speedmaps/
Of course!
The site is in a “low-fi” mode at the moment though, so perhaps I will just add it when the new design is done. ;)