Improvements to the FvF client pak? Well...
- Include DM6 Purifier map.
- Repaint homing scrubs -- they are too light, make them a bit darker.
- Do something with help screen? -- FvF has an old help screen... I could update that with current info? But what? The website... and?
- Damage skins
I agree with these 4, and added one. The help screen can probably be totally removed... if you have fvf, you already know about the website! So there's no sense in the fvf client pak telling you about the website you downloaded it from. (I was going to suggest adding the custom maps to the fvf pak, but that idea kinda sucks, so I'll just mention I thought about it and backed off on that idea)
Damage skins would be good, but a lot of work. It might be easier to give Clerics and Monks an easier way of seeing how much health and armor a person has. Trying to point at someone and press [ is actually kinda difficult. It restricts your movement, making it difficult to actually hit a moving player with that. The cleric would probably be the easiest to work with. I don't imagine it being too difficult to code something for the Cleric where, if he hits a player with the Drain spell, it shows you their current health/armor status. Maybe the same thing for the Monk if he punches somebody... but the hit would have to actually connect, otherwise you'd be spamming (impulse 33?) all the time. Or, maybe if you just look at a player (keep your crosshair painted on them) long enough, it'll just tell you without you having to do anything.
Since I'm on the forums and not in Quake and have plenty of time to consider how this could work with all of it laid out in front of me... I'll make my suggestions for repacking the fancy stuff.
*REMOVE .lit files from the custom maps download. Put them with the ID1 .lit pack. Add the .vis files to this pack. ADD Skyboxes to this pak as well.
Now you have 3 fancy paks, one with skyboxes, lits and vis files (still rather small), the monster skins pak, and the big textures pak. Since I think it's unlikely for the texture pak or the monster pak to get updated (after the suggestion below), pak those together.
Add textures for the custom maps we already run to the big texture pak.
Before you do anything, consider adding Travail to FvF (because you would have to update the map pak and the pak with the lits, vis and skyboxes again). It'll take a huge trial run, but Travail is a pretty good series, and deserves a spot on our server if it can be added without too much work.
Protip: you can save on some filesize if you compress with the Ultra setting in 7zip. It's pretty resource intensive to use this level of compression, but worth it if you care enough about the resulting filesize enough (which you seem to). This also cuts down on bandwidth used moving these files around, and upload time (and download time... the server isn't that fast, heh). To illustrate this, I redownloaded the big "Medium-HQTextures.7z" file, decompressed it, and recompressed it with 7zip set to Ultra. The original filesize was 91.4MB, and my result was 61.1MB. That's about 33% smaller.
Oh yeah... dance loops
Internet is Tubes!! Specifically, thinking of 0:27~0:55
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs
And, uhh... no idea where to clip these
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-WHW-QNswE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btPJPFnesV4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D-QD_HIfjA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72YszOdxdnM
I have a feeling you guys might like those, but not this one. Maybe you would? 1:22~1:33 would make a good loop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOI8T06PNq4
