People had been bugging me about arcane dimensions, in comments, on messages. I wasn't that into it. I plugged it into the existing epsilon compilation in 2016 or thereabouts and it didn't run great, or very prettily, and at the time half of it seemed to straight up Not Work on the Darkplaces engine. So I put it away without a second thought. Then, sometime in march 2019 I was listening to an interview with Mick Gordon, who I respect hugely for his work on Doom 2016, and he talking about how he initially got into video game music through mods. Something clicked, and I immediately thought, wait what was that thing everybody was bugging me about? Oh, right. Now it's not that I have a huge desire to work in video games, I've done a bit of sound for video game companies in the past, and it's arduous stuff, albeit that was sound work, not music. It was more that I realised that That was exactly where all those floating bits of disembodied ambient/tune bits could go. That's when I got interested.
I went back to the arcane dimensions pack, which'd matured and gotten a lot more stable in darkplaces, and more refined in general. By that point there was also a lot more work that'd been done by the modding community (largely Talisa on the quakeone forums) on getting HD textures for the different levels. But there was still a problem. There were 22 - 22! - main levels in Arcane Dimensions instead of the usual 11, plus test maps, and, unlike most quake episodes (fan-made or otherwise) these things were HUGE. So whereas you can get away with having a soundtrack for a quake1 episode 1 level that's only ~7 minutes long, because the person is only going to be listening to it for maybe 15 minutes, that doesn't work when you've got a level which lasts 1/2 an hour to an hour. Suddenly you've got to have per-track music that's a lot longer, possibly a lot less memorable or catchy so the songs/pieces don't eventually irritate the listener/player. And that threw me into another quandry - even with all the stuff I had, would it be enough? The DOPA soundtrack was 2 hours long. With this, it'd need to be closer to 3-4 hours of music.
For previous epsilon episodes, I'd compiled together pre-existing music that I or other people had done with their permission, or within the scope of the licensing like the NiN stuff (in DOPA). This time there was no pre-existing retro-industrial music to use, only half-finished pieces - but this gave me a direction, and a focus as to how to develop the remaining pieces.
*Quake Epsilon - Arcane Dimensions is being worked on. It'll probably be ready some time around Christmas, But I'm not guarantee'ing jack.*
