Let's talk about Quake 1!

[scifista42]

@Breezeep I got stuck in your map: After getting out of the trap room with the silver key via the door forward and finding myself in an old area, I repeated the path I went previously to the silver key, and ended up in the room with the gold door before the silver key room, but both doors out of that room were locked and I couldn't get back either due to the steep cliff.

Edited August 1, 2017 by scifista42

[Breezeep]

Well shit, the doors that lead into the SK room were originally meant to close when you opened the GK door, but I ran into a couple of issues where the doors would not close. I didn't think that people would just go back to the gk door area again because of the looming deadline.

[Urthar]

4 hours ago, scifista42 said:

@Breezeep I got stuck in your map: After getting out of the trap room with the silver key via the door forward and finding myself in an old area, I repeated the path I went previously to the silver key, and ended up in the room with the gold door before the silver key room, but both doors out of that room were locked and I couldn't get back either due to the steep cliff.

Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. Great looking maps though.

 

Favorite secret so far:

[Cupboard]

Quake is a good game, 5/5 quality. It was an extension of the Doom idea: great gameplay, great settings, no story. If Romero would have had more creative control over it, Quake would have been entirely different. But the team dynamics began to change, there wasn't enough time to make a super-ambitious game, and the budget wasn't stable enough for them to stay in development hell for too much longer. Romero definitely left his mark on Quake but the rest of the team contributed just as many ideas that were integral to the design. I never bothered with the expansion packs but I read they were great. I need to watch the Let's Play vids

 

Quake 2 in my opinion is a much better game. There is actually a "story" and the locations all make sense. The levels all LOOK like something and the objective system was nice. Just basic and stripped down. And I liked the hub system. All the weapons from Quake 2 are generally better than their Quake counterparts, except for maybe the Nailgun, which would have fit in just fine if they chose to add it to Quake 2. The Reckoning is a magnificent expansion pack. Ground Zero was great. Juggernaut was poor but very memorable to me because I played it as a kid. There were another 2 expansion packs that were ambitious but poor and buggy, I only watched the Let's Play vids of those last 2.

 

Quake 3 is probably a triumph. Quake 4 was great but quite similar to Doom 3. Quake 4 did abandon the claustrophobia of Doom 3 but the game dynamics were quite similar. 

[VGA]

Which engine is that,Urthar?

 

EDIT: And whose portrait is that?

Edited August 1, 2017 by VGA

[[McD] James]

Lovecraft, no less.

[Urthar]

42 minutes ago, VGA said:

Which engine is that,Urthar?

 

EDIT: And whose portrait is that?

It's Mark V (WinQuake) software renderer. To be honest, it doesn't render the alpha textures correctly, and the skies can look a bit ropey.

[Remilia Scarlet]

54 minutes ago, VGA said:

And whose portrait is that?

That would be H.P. Lovecraft.  Quake is quite influenced by his work.  For example, Shub-Niggurath is actually one of the fictional deities he made, though in the game it looks a lot more like one of her Thousand Young.

 

On a side note, my own SoTNR maps are influenced by Lovecraft as well.  I'm slightly surprised no one has caught (or at least mentioned) the ending mentioning the "Howard Phillips Asylum for The Mentally Ill in Dunwich, Massachusetts".

[VGA]

46 minutes ago, Urthar said:

It's Mark V (WinQuake) software renderer. To be honest, it doesn't render the alpha textures correctly, and the skies can look a bit ropey.

Too bad. Did you report the problems to the official thread?

 

Also, have you tried Super 8?

[Urthar]

3 minutes ago, VGA said:

Too bad. Did you report the problems to the official thread?

 

Also, have you tried Super 8?

I'm fairly sure such features simply aren't supported yet. Super 8 looks interesting, I'll give it a go.

[Lila Feuer]

1 hour ago, Cupboard said:

Quake 2 in my opinion is a much better game. There is actually a "story" and the locations all make sense. The levels all LOOK like something and the objective system was nice. Just basic and stripped down. And I liked the hub system. All the weapons from Quake 2 are generally better than their Quake counterparts, except for maybe the Nailgun, which would have fit in just fine if they chose to add it to Quake 2. The Reckoning is a magnificent expansion pack. Ground Zero was great.

I'm going through Quake II again as we speak using the Yamagi source port and playing on hard and all I can say is they really seem dispassionate in the single player, just everything pretty much. You can see why they ditched SP altogether for the third game, and the MP scene for Q2 was huge. They later bundled the legendary CTF with Q2 via the 3.20 patch so that should say something. The SP is far too easy, a lot of design sins like repetition (why is there three nearly identical flying enemies and two ammo extension pickups?), uselessness (quad damage seems out of place and never really needed since your weapons are more powerful than the ones in the first game, adrenaline only gives 1 permanent hit point, why not 5 so it's more valuable, too many enemies have slow wind up attack time and long pain chance animations making them easy pickings), or plain balance breaking (power shield, soon as you get it the game is over, along with the backpack, you're just a wrecking machine from there on out). Oh yeah, and the environments are too safe and boring to look at and explore, if you've played the demo for Q2 you've seen the entire game!

The Reckoning was alright though, it had a little more variety in terms of scenarios, cooler weapons and enemies, and perhaps tighter overall design, while Ground Zero just ended up pissing me off with its turret spam and ironically the lack of a power shield (played on hard so don't know if medium changes this) so you're far easier to kill with the new and frustrating Strogg additions while being given weaker, less effective new weapons.

[Jon]

The Lovecraft influence was driven by Sandy Petersen, who has since spent a lot of time on Lovecraft inspired board games. He was fired (or left) early in Quake 2 development so there's very little of his work in that. I think there's a Shub texture somewhere in the Citadel at the end. I often wonder if there's some early quake 2 prototype work, or design work, that shows more Sandy influence, that we have never seen.

Engine improvements aside, I think the gothic/lovecraftian atmosphere of Quake 1 has dated better than Quake 2, the theme of which has been bettered since.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I like Quake.  People always seem to sneer about it being "haha all brown" but personally I love the grimy medieval-horror aesthetic it has going on.

 

I play custom maps sometimes.  But I'm not nearly as up-to-date on what's out there as I am for Doom maps (and I'm not exactly up-to-date on those either).  Like, Zerstörer is still what comes first to mind if you ask me "name a good mod for Quake" level of behind the times.  As with Doom (and various other games of those times) I like to collect all those cheap third-party add-on CDs as well.  The Quake ones tend to be a little more interesting than the Doom ones since they seem more likely to have original content, shoddy as it may be.

 

I used to play MP a lot but dropped out of that scene for a long time.  Lately though, I've been having a major deathmatch craving (not just for Quake, but including that) so if you get on one of the few populated Quakeworld DM servers that are up you might see me around.

 

Port-wise, I mostly do vanilla, but for online play recently I've been using ezQuake.  From what I can gather, on the SP front, Quakespasm is the "good" port (think PrBoom) and Darkplaces is the "pretty" port (think Doomsday).  Don't quote me on that though.  I used to use TyrQuake in older times which is/was a fairly chocolatey implementation for Linux as I recall.  I don't know if any of the many others are considered worth bothering with.

[Cupboard]

1 hour ago, cyan0s1s said:

I'm going through Quake II again as we speak using the Yamagi source port and playing on hard and all I can say is they really seem dispassionate in the single player, just everything pretty much. You can see why they ditched SP altogether for the third game, and the MP scene for Q2 was huge. They later bundled the legendary CTF with Q2 via the 3.20 patch so that should say something. The SP is far too easy, a lot of design sins like repetition (why is there three nearly identical flying enemies and two ammo extension pickups?), uselessness (quad damage seems out of place and never really needed since your weapons are more powerful than the ones in the first game, adrenaline only gives 1 permanent hit point, why not 5 so it's more valuable, too many enemies have slow wind up attack time and long pain chance animations making them easy pickings), or plain balance breaking (power shield, soon as you get it the game is over, along with the backpack, you're just a wrecking machine from there on out). Oh yeah, and the environments are too safe and boring to look at and explore, if you've played the demo for Q2 you've seen the entire game!
 

id Software became a lot more conscious of the audience they were bringing into the FPS genre. A lot of people had never played FPS before by the time they tried Quake and even more of them had never tried FPS by the time they picked up Quake 2. 

 

3 flying enemies with weak attacks is basically a restatement of a lot of people who lacked hand-eye coordination to play FPS in the first place. How are they going to shoot at a flying semi-boss for example, when they can barely take out a Gladiator with a railgun?

 

Also I don't think the Quad Damage is out of place. How do you make a Quake sequel without a Quad Damage? Quad Damage was just about the best thing that ever happened to Quake. And it was downright amazing in Quake 3. I admit the adrenaline addition is a bit underwhelming but Quake 2 is a long game, filled with hubs and splinter maps. They wanted you to hound the layout for secrets and powerups. The game was already easy enough, so why should adrenaline do anything more than give you +1 permanent health. If the game is easy, why is it anything to lust over, just skip the secrets and adrenaline pickups (which were almost always secretive)

[Albertoni]

2 hours ago, YukiRaven said:

On a side note, my own SoTNR maps are influenced by Lovecraft as well.  I'm slightly surprised no one has caught (or at least mentioned) the ending mentioning the "Howard Phillips Asylum for The Mentally Ill in Dunwich, Massachusetts".

I didn't mention it because I thought it was obvious, heh.

 

15 minutes ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

From what I can gather, on the SP front, Quakespasm is the "good" port (think PrBoom) and Darkplaces is the "pretty" port (think Doomsday).  Don't quote me on that though.

Yeah, no... QuakeSpasm is the ZDoom of sorts, which runs everything, has all sorts of fancy features and is (almost) the only port used outside of the hardcore oldcore community that sees OpenGL rendering as an atrocity on humanity.

I'd still recommend Darkplaces to play the original game, as the graphical enhancements are pretty good. For anything else, QuakeSpasm.

[Remilia Scarlet]

The only downside to Darkplaces for single player that I've found is when fiends get stuck mid-jump.

[Lila Feuer]

Make adrenaline more powerful but have far less available in the game I say. Yes the quad is a stable of the series but it just sorta seems there in Q2, it's weird and there's never really any area you absolutely need it to complete the game even though it is just as devastating as the original, which I felt had more strategy involved since you couldn't just store it away for later.

I suppose a Quake II 'challenge' starter pack is in order for the fans: Don't use the power shield, avoid adrenaline pickups, don't get the bandolier or the backpack...

...and still own the game as long as you super shotgun the shit out of everything. ^_^

[SOSU]

3 hours ago, Urthar said:

Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. Great looking maps though.

 

Favorite secret so far:

Thats the coolest thing i have seen in a while!!!
What is that mod called?I really want to try i out :D

[Da Werecat]

24 minutes ago, Albertoni said:

Yeah, no... QuakeSpasm is the ZDoom of sorts, which runs everything, has all sorts of fancy features and is (almost) the only port used outside of the hardcore oldcore community that sees OpenGL rendering as an atrocity on humanity.

I'd still recommend Darkplaces to play the original game, as the graphical enhancements are pretty good. For anything else, QuakeSpasm.

QS is the PrBoom of Quake. Or maybe GLBoom. Limits expanded or removed, some new features and improvements, but everything is pretty retro. The part of the community that favors it is not unlike Doomworld - maps, maps, maps, and no innovation at all!!! I mean, aside from Arcane Dimensions, but it's more of an exception.

 

Mods made with Darkplaces in mind won't necessarily break, but the possibility is strong. Alpha transparency, for example, was implemented differently and needed workarounds last time I checked.

 

Not sure about this Church Of The (Un)holy Software Renderer you're talking about. Technically, its presence should be felt in the same place where Quakespasm is popular, and yet Quakespasm is popular there. There's even a fork of it with fancy particle effects - a well-received one. Weird.

 

In truth, OpenGL doesn't rek Quake nearly as much as it reks Doom. Gone are the days of GLQuake, and all of its objective shortcomings have been fixed. No light diminishing in this game, so the only difference that's hard to deal with is palette banding (or lack thereof).

 

Darkplaces is the "populist" port that has what it takes to power new games and total conversions. Doomsday meets GZDoom.

[Remilia Scarlet]

1 hour ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Don't quote me on that though

I'm not totally sure that comparing the various Doom and Quake engines is always the right way to go.  Quake itself was already much more flexible than vanilla Doom from the start, so while we made ports that added all sorts of editing features, Quake didn't have to as much.

 

That said, GLQuake was vanilla Quake with OpenGL and some screwed up visual things.  Quakespasm is GLQuake with some increased limits and a few extra cvars/console commands, and a few new visual features (24-bit high-res textures, and I think transparent textures), and fixed visual things.  Darkplaces is GLQuake with increased limits, some new editing features, some new cvars and console commands, some fancy graphics, and fixed visual things.

 

If you want new modding features, you usually (from what I gather) go with a mod like Quoth, or write some QuakeC.  Some additional features are also implemented not via the engine, but through the map compilation tools, such as new ways of processing lights with the "light" program.

 

This page has a table of some of the limits of various Quake engines.  This one shows an attempt at standardizing some of the increased limits.

[Breezeep]

1 hour ago, SOSU said:

Thats the coolest thing i have seen in a while!!!
What is that mod called?I really want to try i out :D

Map jam 9. Scroll up.

[SOSU]

3 minutes ago, Breezeep said:

Map jam 9. Scroll up.

Thanks a lot! :D
Goes to play Map Jam 9

[Albertoni]

@Da Werecat Last I read, but I well admit this has been 5 or so years back, I remember seeing QuakeSpasm had support for some QuakeC things other ports didn't. Still, fair enough. I'm speaking out of my experience with the small Brazilian Quake community, the international one might as well be different.

[Da Werecat]

5 hours ago, YukiRaven said:

Quakespasm is GLQuake with some increased limits and a few extra cvars/console commands, and a few new visual features (24-bit high-res textures, and I think transparent textures), and fixed visual things.

Colored lighting, colored fog, skyboxes, entity translucency, it has a lot of things. But it's all implemented in a way that doesn't break anything, AFAIK. If there's something that would most definitely break vanilla (and not just because of the limits), it's BSP2 and the like. Then again, Boom had a lot of new features, and PrBoom+ supports all kinds of things, like compressed nodes.

 

3 hours ago, Albertoni said:

Last I read, but I well admit this has been 5 or so years back, I remember seeing QuakeSpasm had support for some QuakeC things other ports didn't.

Probably, but it's Darkplaces that's usually getting flak for breaking physics and the like.

 

Anyway, it's not an exact comparison, and I was comparing communities as well as engines.

 

[[McD] James]

I used to favour Darkplaces over Quakespasm, but eventually switched to Quakespasm. I like a small number of Darkplaces' graphical enhancements, but periodically found myself running into compatibility issues. Sticking to just one engine makes things a little less jarring. I know of precisely only two Quake mods that are compatible with Darkplaces' but not Quakespasm. As far as gameplay is concerned, I couldn't specify any differences. I just wish that Quakespasm had better crosshair options. I don't see why you have to be stuck only using the default Quake crosshair.

[Flesh420]

31 minutes ago, Ajora said:

I used to favour Darkplaces over Quakespasm, but eventually switched to Quakespasm. I like a small number of Darkplaces' graphical enhancements, but periodically found myself running into compatibility issues. Sticking to just one engine makes things a little less jarring. I know of precisely only two Quake mods that are compatible with Darkplaces' but not Quakespasm. As far as gameplay is concerned, I couldn't specify any differences. I just wish that Quakespasm had better crosshair options. I don't see why you have to be stuck only using the default Quake crosshair.

Something is off with gunplay in Darkplaces.  Other engines are coded around Quake whereas DP was coded as its own engine that could be used to play Quake.

[Albertoni]

35 minutes ago, Ajora said:

I know of precisely only two Quake mods that are compatible with Darkplaces' but not Quakespasm.

And one of them is Nehahra, which is a mod I'd only recommend to the most die-hard fan.

Imagine a Metal Gear Solid game, with those half-hour cutscenes, but they are completely unskippable and... Other than one of the voice actors, everyone is under 25, probably under 18.

 

The gameplay is fine though, you just gotta leave the computer for a bit when the cutscenes start. And I guess it WAS impressive at the time, hell, the amount of effort is impressive even today.

[[McD] James]

Yup, Nehahra is one of the two.

 

I like The Seal of Nehahra and Nehahra's combined story. It was a lot more compelling than I anticipated. Unfortunately, the voice acting is a bit iffy, the dialogue is amateurish, and The Seal of Nehahra is roughly two hours longer than it needed to be. There are some really good story ideas at work here, and there's no taking away from the amount of effort that went into the project. 

[Da Werecat]

A bit of technical trivia about Nehahra: while Darkplaces has support for it, the music won't work. Level ambience will, but not tracker music. Mark V supports it, although it might be necessary to download a dll file to make it work.

 

There's also an unofficial Nehahra exe with improvements, but it's pretty old.

[Asure]

deleted

Edited November 29, 2018 by Phoenix Wright