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hardcore_gamer

Doom vs Quake, how many frames of animation for monsters?

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How many frames of animation do Doom monsters have Vs the 3D models in Quake? Quake was the first 3D fps but it did not exactly have very smooth animations for monsters. How many frames of animation do Quake monsters have compared to Doom?

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I'm not going to help maybe. Anyway i dont know about Q1 but Q2 monsters have more than 100 frames, i think close to 250 but im not sure.

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In Quake everything animates at 10 frames per second (equivalent to 3.5 ticks.) Doom is a lot more variable with it's animation. If you open the IWAD in WhackEd4 (or view the ZDoom decorate code in SLADE,) you can see that different monsters can have quite different timings. The Pinky Demon for example uses a new frame every 4 ticks in it's walk cycle, but it's attack cycle animates at 8 ticks, while the Imp walk cycle updates every 6 ticks.

 

On the whole Quake uses more frames of animiation since monsters have more behaviours. They can run as well as walk, they have can multiple standing attacks, as well as moving attacks, and so on.

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Quake depends on how you run it.

On the old 2D GPU’s before full 3D took off, it would render them at 10ish frames per second (taking from the person above, sorry I don’t remember off the top of my head).

However, if you had a better GPU that was built for 3D rendering, it could possibly render faster. The main problem was that at the time they weren’t strong enough, so it would likely look pretty similar on the first Voodoo GPUs, if a slight bit faster. This took advantage of OpenGL, which is why it’s called GLQuake. This was pretty revolutionary at the time.

Also I’m no expert I could be wrong do not be afraid to correct me!

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Doom has way less frames just because Quake is 3D and your fps is a big deciding factor in that. Even at 15 fps you've already beat everything in doom, even the archvile with its extreme attack animation.

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Is the question how many total frames of animation are there or how many frames are animating a second?

 

If the question is how many frames are there total, there's a couple things to take into account. Doom's animations will need to have at least 5 different angles for every frame of animation (things like death only having front facing, but enemies like Cyberdemon having sprites of all 8 angles) So while the typical enemy has just 4 frames of walking, they have to be at at least 5 different angles, making the frame count for walking now 20 frames for one enemy.

 

While Quake doesn't have to have different 'angles' for every frame as its a 3D model, a single animation is going to have a lot of keyframes. I don't know exactly how many there are, but I would guess a single Quake 1 enemy has more frames of animation than all the Doom enemies combined. That is a guess, however.

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19 hours ago, wheresthebeef said:

While Quake doesn't have to have different 'angles' for every frame as its a 3D model, a single animation is going to have a lot of keyframes. I don't know exactly how many there are, but I would guess a single Quake 1 enemy has more frames of animation than all the Doom enemies combined. That is a guess, however.

I don't know, the animations are very choppy without interpolation.

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So, are Quake 2's animations the same as Quake 1's when it comes to frames per second? They look smoother just because of model interpolation, right?

 

On 9/8/2018 at 7:09 PM, Arlak said:

Quake depends on how you run it.

On the old 2D GPU’s before full 3D took off, it would render them at 10ish frames per second (taking from the person above, sorry I don’t remember off the top of my head).

However, if you had a better GPU that was built for 3D rendering, it could possibly render faster. The main problem was that at the time they weren’t strong enough, so it would likely look pretty similar on the first Voodoo GPUs, if a slight bit faster. This took advantage of OpenGL, which is why it’s called GLQuake. This was pretty revolutionary at the time.

Also I’m no expert I could be wrong do not be afraid to correct me!

 

I'm pretty sure GLQuake had the exact same amount of fps for animations, and it didn't have interpolation either. You can run GLQuake on modern hardware and animations are going to look just as choppy as they did back in the day.

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On 9/8/2018 at 4:44 PM, wheresthebeef said:

I don't know exactly how many there are, but I would guess a single Quake 1 enemy has more frames of animation than all the Doom enemies combined.

 

I haven't extracted the Quake models to have a look, but I think you're vastly over-estimating the fidelity of the animations.  The original Quake monsters were very blockely animated.  I recall the Ogre had about four frames of animation for his entire chainsaw swing.  It's likely a little more than a Doom enemy, but not by much.

 

Modern Quake source ports added interpolation which estimated smooth movement between the key frames, but that's all a much later addition.  In the original engine they moved like stop-motion characters.  

 

Have a look at this play-through in (at least something close enough to) the original game engine, and see how low FPS the monster movements are.

 

 

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You can use QuArk (or any program which can read Q1 mdl) to open mdl files to see how many, for example, demon (Fiend) has frames:

stand: 13

walk: 8

run: 6

leap: 12

pain: 6

death: 9

attack: 15

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4 hours ago, Bauul said:

Have a look at this play-through in (at least something close enough to) the original game engine, and see how low FPS the monster movements are.

I don't know if it's just me, but everytime I look at Quake 1, I think "Man, that is one ugly color scheme." *Any* color scheme would be better than brown, and green with yellow highlights.

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4 hours ago, kb1 said:

I don't know if it's just me, but everytime I look at Quake 1, I think "Man, that is one ugly color scheme." *Any* color scheme would be better than brown, and green with yellow highlights.

And yet I love the color scheme. People made fun of Unreal for using every color in the rainbow. Quake 2 was way too orange. 

 

I think the Quake 1 color scheme fits perfectly with what they were trying to accomplish: A desolate, decaying, surreal world of medieval horror. It looks like the whole world is rotting and falling in on itself, most of the architectural design makes no sense from a logical standpoint; it's ultimately oppressive and depressing, and I can't imagine Quake looking any other way. At the very least, the game has a very unique look.

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Quake 2 was only orange on the outdoor areas and rooms exposed to the outside with large windows or roof openings.

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18 minutes ago, Avoozl said:

Quake 2 was only orange on the outdoor areas.

Well, if you play through Quake 2 you'll notice that a large number of the lighting fixture textures are either orange or yellow. Some are blue, some are white. But if you're making a level, and you place a light entity near that texture, you'll probably want to make it the same hue as the texture. And they did the same when making Quake 2, generally if there's a light fixture with an orange hue, the light will be orange. If it's yellow, the light entity will be hued yellow. 

 

I may be completely wrong, I never made professional levels for Quake 2, but the ones that I did make, I matched the hue of the light to the texture. And after playing Quake 2 again, it seems like iD did the same thing. Rooms with orange fluorescent light fixtures had light entities that were tinted orange. And there were a lot of them.

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Quake 1's model format is MDL.  It uses 10 key frames per second for animation, and can have 256 frames total.  There's also a limit of 2048 triangles and 2000 verticies (1024 in GLQuake), and a skin size limit of 480x480 pixels.  The animation is totally vertex based - there's no skeleton.  Vanilla Quake looked jerky because there was no interpolation between key frames.  Modern source ports usually have interpolated models, but this can be disabled ("nolerp" CVars and I think also a command line option).

 

If you really want hard numbers on the number of frames used for a specific pose (remember, Quake didn't need poses for separate angles), just look at the QuakeC sources.  The frames are listed there, for example the Ogre.

 

There's another modern format called IQM that some Quake source ports implement.  It has a lot more features, including skeletal animation.  But AFAIK Quakespasm doesn't support it, so I've never messed with it or come across anything using it.

 

Quake 2's MD2 models are pretty much the same, but with some raised limits.  4096 triangles, 2048 verticies, 512 frames, etc.  The number of key frames is the same.  The skin is stored separately, however.  AFAIK, they were interpolated during rendering, but I've never messed with Quake 2 much so I can't say for sure.  Videos of Quake 2 running on a Voodoo 2 seem to show interpolated animations.  Some of the wobble you see, iirc, is due to the vertex coordinates being stored as a byte, so there just isn't a lot of precision there to begin with.

 

Quake 3 is where things got a bit more interesting with the MD3 format, which could have a variable number of key frames.  You could also chop up the model into different parts (like the head, torso, legs, whatever) and animate those separately.  That's why Quake 3's player models could be running, look up, and you see the torso bend at the waist.  These were vertex animated as well.

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