Any Hell Revealed Style Quake 1 Maps?

[David_Dweedle]

Just curious if Quake 1 has any maps like that.. I know its a long shot.

[andrewj]

David_Dweedle said:

Just curious if Quake 1 has any maps like that.. I know its a long shot.

Quake 1 has more severe limits than DOOM on level size and especially number of monsters and items ("entities" in quake-speak).

So I'm also guessing there isn't anything comparable.

[leileilol]

No. Level size limit and entity limit (do you like packet overflows?) prevent such thing.

Though for more capable engines there's marcher fortress.

[Maes]

Heh that had been the subject of a rant letter I had sent to a PC magazine when I was 16 and they gave Final Doom a low score.

Among other things, I wrote (translated from Greek):

Furthermore, [Quake's] "real 3D sprites" may offer greater realism than DOOM's 2D sprites, but their existence is also part of the reason of why the game [Quake] is so slow, that is, the "good" they do can't make up for the "evil".

Really, wouldn't a location in QUAKE with over 30 enemies be too slow, even with a Pentium Pro @ 200 MHz? I've seen locations in DOOM with tenths of enemies packed together, hordes, mobs, and at the maximum window size, at High Detail (a very useful functionality BTW, which was unfortunately removed from Quake) and on my 486DX/40 with just 4 MB they were lightning fast, according to Doom's FPS meter (20 to 24 fps).

Yeah, this sounds so atavistic now, but with the eyes of then, I had to choose between a game that run lightning fast with frantic action, and a depressing, slow, brown blob of shit that ran at 4 fps and you fought maybe 2-3 enemies at a time :-p

I concluded the letter with::

Really, if someone was to see for the first time Quake and then Doom on a machine that's able to run both of them perfectly, I am pretty confident that he would find Doom more lively, faster, better looking, more SATANIC (yeah, I actually wrote that!) and more ATMOSPHERIC than Quake. For Quake, he would perhaps mention as "advantages" the slightly more varied environment, and the prettier water effects. But NOTHING else. He would also find the enemies [in Quake] would be in general slower and unchallenging, the weapons would be more stupid, and the gameplay in general more tedious.

And to complete the above statement:

I believe that an experienced DOOMER on a good machine (to help achieve fast gameplay) can quickly dispose of those turtles pretending to be Quake's "enemies". If however he saw both on a machine that's only able to run Doom well, he would also add that DOOM is technically light-years ahead of Quake, and that Quake is simply....unplayable

Well...I probably was too emotional and not entirely objective back then (after all, I was just a 16 yo teen whose favourite game had been dissed in an unfair review :-p ) but I still like to think there was a grain of truth in my statements.

[printz]

leileilol said:

No. Level size limit and entity limit (do you like packet overflows?) prevent such thing.

What an utter and definite fail. Wolfenstein 3d also has a 143 or 145 or something actor limit. Limits in the hundreds suck.

Technically Doom had that savegame buffer limit as the thing excess, but no more with virtually any port!

[negke]

I suppose Warpspasm comes closest to Hell Revealed style. Huge maps with insane monster count (in some maps up too 600 or so) - requires an engine with increased limits.

[gggmork]

Plus its awesome how corpses stay in doom without lamely fading away (I don't remember if that happens in quake specifically, but it tends to happen in most modern shooters I've played).

[kristus]

Maes said:

mobs, and at the maximum window size, at High Detail (a very useful functionality BTW, which was unfortunately removed from Quake)

Quake always had hi resolution support.

[Maes]

kristus said:

Quake always had hi resolution support.

Ehm...I meant the ability to downscale the detail level/resolution like Doom could. At the time, my concern was getting any game to run on my 486, and Quake just didn't cut it :-p

Even Duke Nukem 3D had a half-detail and even a quarter-detail mode, Quake has no such mode as far as I recall, or else I would not have complained about it ;-) The very last thing I would do would be firing Quake in SVGA resolution on a 486DX/40 with 8 MB :-p

[kristus]

You could say it is equivalent.

[Maes]

Well doh, it couldn't run well at Doom's native resolution (320 * 200) at spec parity (low specs, indeed),so why would I want to increase it further?

Also, Doom's "low detail" mode only affects the play area, not the whole screen. I doubt Quake had a 160*200 native mode though, or even a "double pixel" or "quad pixel" mode for the play area (and if it had, it wasn't accessible through a single key like F5).

Therefore, for all effects and purposes, Quake just didn't have an equivalent of Doom's "low detail" mode. The opposite, maybe ;-)

[David_Dweedle]

Dang.. was really hopeing for Massive Hell revealedish style quake..

Anyway Ive been playing this Custom mapset for Quake called Beyond belief.. man that is one rock'n mapset.

[leileilol]

Low detail wouldn't do 486s any good since they'll choke on the processing of the BSP in real time alone, with dynamic lights, vis, etc.

The entity limit has nothing to do with being more 3D than Doom, but more to do with the client/server packet system Quake uses.

[Maes]

leileilol said:

Low detail wouldn't do 486s any good since they'll choke on the processing of the BSP in real time alone, with dynamic lights, vis, etc.

Probably true. Even Duke Nukem 3D didn't benefit much from its low detail modes (it looked like crap and only gained maybe 2-3 fps), but still I very much resented the lack of a similar option in Quake. In Doom, low detail was pretty much a must on large maps on a two-digit 486, especially with low RAM.

[kristus]

Quake still had the option to shrink the screen.

[Maes]

kristus said:

Quake still had the option to shrink the screen.

That didn't help either :-p

In general, Quake's fps performance was an order of magnitude below that of Doom (yeah, I know that the calculations it performed had nothing to do with Doom's in complexity), and shrinking the window size made no practical difference when you were far below recommended specs. It didn't magically transform Quake from a single-digit fps mess into a 2x fps immersive experience.

[printz]

Maes said:

In general, Quake's fps performance was an order of magnitude below that of Doom

I think it's the reverse. Under a performant Windows 98 computer, Quake runs twice as fast as it's supposed to do. It happens real easily when you look into the void.

[Maes]

printz said:

I think it's the reverse. Under a performant Windows 98 computer, Quake runs twice as fast as it's supposed to do. It happens real easily when you look into the void.

You're probably referring to a bug that uncapped the framerate in vanilla Quake (and I'm not even sure that GLQuake had the same rendering limits, if any, as vanilla Quake) and can only be witnessed with a powerful configuration that well outspecs Quake.

We're really overanalyzing this, but it that doesn't mean that Quake performs better than Doom at spec parity (if you only measure average FPS at the same screen resolution, size and at high detail for Doom). If this statement was true, then I should be effortlessly getting on higher average FPS in Quake than in Doom on my 486 with 8 MB, which is just impossible.

[leileilol]

Quake uses floating point everywhere.
Doom does not.

486s, Cyrix and K5s suck at floating point.

[Maes]

To be fair, very few non-Doom FPS or FPV games back in the day had comparable performance anyway. Either due to sloppy coding or using more complex engines, almost everything released after Doom needed more CPU horsepower than Doom itself, even if the engine wasn't always superior in visuals.

Duke Nukem 3D was nowhere near as fast as Doom on spec parity, for example, and "enjoying" it with anything from a 486DX/66 and below was fooling yourself (let alone that you needed 8 MB of RAM just to fire it up).

Descent was also unplayable with less than 8 MB of RAM due to its use of a disk cache, and the engine was way more complex than Doom's anyway.

Games like ROTT and Corridor 7, despite having simpler Wolf-3D derived engines were somehow not as smooth as Doom. On the converse, Heretic was baby-smooth.

The only game that impressed me positively back then was Dark Forces, which somehow managed to combine a superior graphics engine with the same if not greater smoothness than Doom (although IMO the requirement for 8 MB of RAM hurt it. Keep in mind that the "MPC 2" standard called for just 4 MB in 1994-1995, and that memory modules were awfully expensive).