Is the mega bug = elder secret? or there is something else? Noctis had said syncerror will show it on quakecon unless someone found it prior to that. (Apparently noctis knows what the secret is)
If its indeed the mega bug then I am disappoint.
Edited by butcher_kgp at 22:03 CDT, 27 July 2015 - 62040 Hits
I never said SyncError would show it at quakecon, no idea where you got that from. From what i know he won't reveal it and just wants to see how long it'll take people. And if nobody ever finds it he is happy as well. ;)
There are some pictures on a wall, in the textures either side of the tele by 50hp bubble, picmip 0 and look carefully, can see some interesting faces and creatures.... didn't see any genitalia though jamalz :p
yo that gives me a weird idea. What if there was a switch you could press and then a picture of syncerrors hairy nutsack descended and hovered right above the red armor? Like if you were playing elder out of control you'd press the button so the guy in control has to stare at some balls.
That would be such a mind fuck, imagine trying to get red armor from now on. You'd always have to look at his nutsack by accident. That would totally fuck up your focus, you wouldnt be able to strafe across the pillars at all unless you were gay as fuck.
If it was something to do with the map geometry someone would have found it a long time ago. I started decoding those symbols on the pillars, and was getting somewhere, but I got distracted and haven't picked it up again since.
If the bug is that subtle we'll never find it, I don't see a point in anyone looking/caring. It's not like people are still gonna play this map now quakecon is over anyway.
well its not a bug, its an easter egg. the difference is significant because of the intentional nature of easter eggs. if you dont care to look for it then dont, i didnt mean to discourage people from finding it.
Didn't Sync say that secret is decompileproof?
Means no shooting or pressing buttons are involved. Or any other triggers for that matter.
Also it won't be some image because texture would show up in elder's pak.
I see 2 possibilities
- something carved in map geometry, maybe very tiny and you need to zoom in to see it
- level geometry creates a pattern/image when you look at it from specific angle. For example those tentacles could look like a q3/ql logo or something like that.
Means no shooting or pressing buttons are involved. Or any other triggers for that matter.
How conclusive is this really? Like couldn't there be button logic on top of the button logic that's there? Where is the code for what the button does stored? Can you see that in a decompile?
Yes its possible for a single button to trigger multiple things.
I recently went hunting through a decompiled version of the map and found nothing suspicious with regards to the entities. The only thing that I couldn't explain was an info_null with a targetname of "info_null30" that is not targeted by anything else. I assume it was left in the map by accident.
The entity lump is stored as plain text inside the BSP file. You can usually search for 'worldspawn' to jump to the start of it.
Are the things triggered by "Time" like the railgun section possible to track that way? I wonder if the easter egg could be something like something appearing/disappearing/moving at some specific time.
Railgun doors work as follows:
There is an entity type 'trigger_always', which is a trigger that is permanently on (eg: it triggers when game starts). It targets a 'target_delay' entity which has a 120 second wait before it triggers its target(s), which are a sound effect, and another 'target_delay' entity which has a wait of 2 seconds before it finally triggers the rg doors to open.
There are no other instances of target_delay entities in the map. I am quite convinced that whoever said the secret isn't entity based is correct.
I was thinking that it's especially decompile proof because we have a situation where he's in control of the way the game handles bsp files.
It would probably be trivial to add some small thing that checks for a new attribute in the bsp that decompiling would ignore, and even if we found this extra information it would probably be gibberish, but understood by the game of course.
you basically just have to shoot at one of the lights (not telling you which one) and then that will open up a little secret compartment that shows.... a cat
Remember when fox picked up the mega (or was it RA?) through the floor on a similar ledge on A Man Called Sun against DKT at a CPL Q4 event in.. I guess 2006 or something. Match was stopped and a rule was put in place that forbade players to do it.
when pow3r hid from neok in the ceiling of ztn at cpl cologne he was awarded a win - and the map got changed after the tournament. i don't think any of this has relevance today .)
Wow. So he misses his first few attempts. Then he makes it. After that the guy tries to run too him...to no avail!!! Should of went to grenades in last 40 secs and thrown more up there :p
The elder easter egg does not exist, otherwise someone would have found it decompiling the map. It's just a shenanigan to keep people interested in an otherwise forgettable map.
Whether intended or not, that was a decent clue, pressing buttons and such things doesn't require 'imagination' in the same way that something visual does... right? :p
Someone mentioned the runes earlier so I figured I would take a look.
The four buttons on the map and their respective targets are decorated with the four runes from Quake 1.
* Obelisk has episode 1's rune (except mirrored horizontally for some reason, possible to avoid it looking like a character from the Lovecraft Diary rune font)
* Left ramp from SG to upper YA has episode 2's rune
* Mechanical stairs have episode 3's rune
* Right ramp from SG to upper YA has episode 4's rune
The rest of the runes are from a font called Lovecraft's Diary. The obelisk is decorated with almost a complete alphabet. Each column below represents a side.
A B C D
G H I J
M N O P
S T U V
A B C D
The two floating rocks outside the window near MH are labelled as 'A' and 'B', and the three floating rocks outside the window near top YA are labelled 'O', 'N' and 'E'.
Sound effects are very similar to those in Quake 1 (listed files are in Quake's pak0.pak)
* Key used on door - sound/doors/medtry.wav
* Key door stops moving - sound/doors/drclos4.wav
* Key door starts moving when closing - sound/doors/doormv1.wav
The 3 tentacles in the lava pit are probably a reference to the Quake final boss, Shub Niggurath.
The brown/green mossy stone texture is clearly from Quake 1, famously seen in E1M2
That's about all I have noticed so far. Any of those easter eggy or just pure autism?
So when I asked someone who knew what the secret was (100% confirmed) to show me what it was, at QuakeCon they replied with "I can't show you" with a big grin on their face. Meaning the secret is not something that someone could just "show you". Take that for what its worth. I interpreted it as it's either an audio file OR its something too small to be seen with the human eye/using zoom or whatever.
Just to be clear, the person responded this way as to give me a hint, they didn't literally mean they weren't allowed to show me.
but the real trick is to find a way in, I have shown this to people many times and nobody found a way in yet... So good luck in finding secret teleport / portal...
pretty much this. I have swivel sweeped the whole space around the map and followed up the obelisk light to where it ends. someone said that sync have said the map is decompile proof, and that is not decompile proof mate! If it is there anyway and I have totally missed it I will stab a kitten..
I bet the key on the map has something to do with it all, it just would make sens. And if it's just an 'elder sign' somewhere like cl0ck was on about, from a magic fiction book, it would be a really boring easteregg.
I hate secrets when I know they are there and I can't find them.
It is in game and accessible with noclip. Try turning on r_showtris to find it easier. I assure you this area of the map is used to create the special sky effect. See https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Q3Map2#skybox for more details.
Well it turns out the flying runes above the obelisk were the right place to look. I found the texture used for this effect, transcribed it from Lovecraft's Diary to plain old ASCII then decoded it (caesar cipher). Here's some working notes if you want to reproduce it.
elder.pk3
textures/se_gothic/runes.jpg
(used for the rune light-shaft effect above the obelisk)
transcribed runes.jpg using Lovecraft's Diary font as reference
-------------------------------------
F R Q J U D W X O D
W L R Q V D Q G Z H
O O G R Q H B R X K
D Y H E H D W H Q W
K H K L G H R X V V
K X E Q L J J X U D
W K D Q G K H U K X
Q G U H G V R I X J
O B F K D Q J H O L
Q J V D Q G P R Q V
W H U V B R X K D Y
H S U R Y H Q W K D
W B R X U V N L O O
D Q G B R X U F X Q
Q L Q J D U H J U H
D W H U W K D Q D O
O W K H S R Z H U V
R I T X D N H B R X
D U H W K H P D V W
H U Q R Z L G V R I
W Z D U H V D O X W
H V B R X V B Q F
deciphered with rot23
---------------------
C O N G R A T U L A
T I O N S A N D W E
L L D O N E Y O U H
A V E B E A T E N T
H E H I D E O U S S
H U B N I G G U R A
T H A N D H E R H U
N D R E D S O F U G
L Y C H A N G E L I
N G S A N D M O N S
T E R S Y O U H A V
E P R O V E N T H A
T Y O U R S K I L L
A N D Y O U R C U N
N I N G A R E G R E
A T E R T H A N A L
L T H E P O W E R S
O F Q U A K E Y O U
A R E T H E M A S T
E R N O W I D S O F
T W A R E S A L U T
E S Y O U S Y N C
Formatted to be readable
-------------------------
Congratulations and well done! You have beaten the hideous Shub-Niggurath and her hundreds of ugly changelings and monsters. You have proven that your skill and your cunning are greater than all the powers of Quake. You are the master now. id Software salutes you.
- Sync
Quake 1 End text (looks familiar)
-----------------
Congratulations and well done! You have beaten the hideous Shub-Niggurath, and her hundreds of ugly changelings and monsters. You have proven that your skill and your cunning are greater than all the powers of Quake. You are the master now. id Software salutes you.
Congratulations and well done! You have beaten the hideous Syncerror-Gibberish and her hundreds of ugly textures and brushes. You have proven that your skill and your cunning are greater than all the powers of ESReality. You are the master now. Nobody salutes you.
I knew it was something like this though. Started decoding the letters from the Lovecraft runes a while ago but I got bored.
You beat me to it, out of all the things I'd looked at that was my next job, I had seen the image in the elder.pk3 and thought I could see a pattern of recurring symbols, this is very common in simple ciphers, and I have experience with ciphers from a previous job :O
(Symbol i noticed was for H, which deciphers to E, common vowel)
I was going to solve it 2 days ago but didn't rush as I thought no-one would be looking for such things, but you proved me wrong!!!
Well done ))
If anyone wants to try it http://theblob.org/rot.cgi
paste the text to there and you see ROT23 is correct rotation.
What about the room hidden under the map ? maybe Shub is hidden there or smth, that text, maybe it is supposed to appear somewhere ? cause this is just too lame :/
I had a feeling that perhaps the easter egg had something to do with the first two minutes. The rail is locked away for this time and then the stones blocking the entrance and exit are lifted. I thought maybe it's possible to access the rail before two minutes OR the easter egg can only be found within the first two minutes. This is the only time the map does something on its own. When the stones finish lifting you hear a loud sound, a sound that is a little similar to the locked door closing. I wanted to find out if anything else changed on the map at this moment but as you can imagine it is time consuming to investigate. I was very interested in the only button you can press repeatedly. The button for the stairs can be continually pressed from a distance with grenades. If you pay attention you will notice that when pressing the button over and over again the first step gets stuck in down position until the button usage stops. I messed around with that for awhile finding nothing. Also if you look at the entrance of the GL hall and opposite wall you will notice they are horizontally flipped. It looks like something should be there. Anyway unless Syncerror says there's another easter egg I'm stopping.
it's really really boring when they place the secrets inside the textures like this. 2/10.
Repent secret will remain my favourite, but I had hope this one would beat it.
This is the description of Elder when it was first released.
"Deep from within the bowels of the Nameless City lies Elder, a nostalgic Quake 1 inspired arena. This small and simple dreary place is home to more than just it's combatants, for Elder beings lie dormant in waiting, feeding off the pain and torment of it's captives. Locked away within lies 1xRA, 2xYA, 1xMH, and a 1x50hp for players to control, and after two minutes of gameplay two heavy stone doors reveal access to a railgun previously inaccessible. However beware, on Elder more than the usual is up for grabs as one shiny gold key lingers in it's halls for one and only one player to control; control the key and control the map. Designed by Adam 'SyncError' Pyle for Duel, Elder is also available for small FFA and 2v2 TDM matches."
That was indeed better reading than the easter egg itself. The theme is cool and all and the map is as allready stated based on quake 1. IMO it would been much better to make a classic quake 1 secret instead of this, even though it would been rather obvious.
secret was ass, I was hoping it was one of those monsters from quake 1 hidden somewhere on the map with the ability to be released.
Like if you are in a 1v1 with some faggot who is owning you, you'd use the secret and then suddenly a shambler would spawn and chase the fuck out of everyone. That would be awesome. That's fucking quake.