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Author Topic: it's... the Off-Topic Topic (it just won't die!)  (Read 398652 times)
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Phoenix
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« Reply #1000 on: 2016-01-05, 18:04 »

Why would you try to ruin a perfectly good computer like that?
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Phoenix
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« Reply #1001 on: 2016-01-06, 02:42 »

This is your Quake.



This is your Quake on drugs.



Any questions?
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Kajet
 

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« Reply #1002 on: 2016-01-06, 07:52 »

Reinstalled UT04 and I gotta say... I wish things didn't disappear from the net, like when Polycount was awesome for Q3 models.
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Phoenix
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« Reply #1003 on: 2016-01-06, 20:38 »

Yeah, and I even emailed Polycount asking about the old Q3 model archive.  I was met with silence.  No replies, no answers, just... nothing.  If they lost them due to a server crash or something I'd understand but they never once said what happened to them, and a lot of those models weren't available anywhere else.  I will never forgive them for that.  Sipgate - Evil
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leilei
 

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« Reply #1004 on: 2016-01-12, 19:32 »

That's no biggie to me

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: 2016-01-12, 19:41 by leilei » Logged

Phoenix
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« Reply #1005 on: 2016-01-13, 01:55 »

Ahh, I just found it!  Thank you very much!   Slipgate - Love Slipgate - Love Slipgate - Love

You wouldn't happen to know if the old Quake 2 player models survived, would you?
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leilei
 

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« Reply #1006 on: 2016-03-09, 04:40 »

somewhat.  I think I have about 330 of them.

There's an overwhelming amount of custom skins though and getting those individually through the fileplanet line would've been more troublesome on short notice then.


What seems totally wiped out though is ......The Wadfather Slipgate - Sad  It's been hosted at many different places and the only survivng part seems to be skyboxes from one of its earliest incarnations!


It's still "up" in useless, broken php form.  Don't know if mr. gibs could be contacted about it or if he saved anything however.
« Last Edit: 2016-03-09, 04:49 by leilei » Logged

leilei
 

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« Reply #1007 on: 2016-04-17, 22:24 »

this place has a repack of a bunch but not everything.
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Phoenix
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« Reply #1008 on: 2016-04-18, 20:42 »

Good enough!  Nice find!  Slipgate - Love
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leilei
 

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« Reply #1009 on: 2016-05-31, 22:25 »

there's something satisfying about getting something to work in Windows 95 
 
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Phoenix
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« Reply #1010 on: 2016-06-01, 18:22 »

I used to think it was satisfying just to get Windows 95 to work.  Slipgate - Tongue
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leilei
 

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« Reply #1011 on: 2016-06-12, 04:21 »

LOL zing. I should mention installing Winsock 2 successfully is so much of a pain I just gave up and dropped the two required dlls from it in the system folder to test this.  Win98+ shouldn't experience this pain


in speaking of experiencing pain I tried to elaborate on the proto-rtcw particle system left in cgame, couldn't make bouncing sparks, so i ripped that out and stuck some Quake code in its place. and made bouncing stretchy sparks
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Phoenix
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« Reply #1012 on: 2016-06-12, 15:41 »

Oh yeah, that code is VERY ugly.  For certain effects I rewrote it as a stripped down "simple" particle system.  I found out that cgame is VERY inefficient on complex math, so even simplified cgame particles was dropping an Opteron 2.2GHz system down to 2 FPS with a full-length Q2 railgun spiral on screen.  Once I got access to the engine source I hacked in a Q2-style particle system for Gen.  I was able to move almost everything engine-side and there's no FPS hit even with 32000 particles on screen.  I still use the cgame particles for the new Q3 BFG particles and some of Earth's effects since they require more complex shaders instead of just being point-style particles.

Only thing I haven't been able to do is use actual GL particles - I had to use a hacked-in entity and sprite shader.  For some reason the GL particles won't render, and OpenGL programming is very confusing to me.  It works and is efficient, which is all I care about.  If you ever want a copy of the engine stuff I've done it's all under GPL so I have no problem sharing.

And we need to get back off-topic!  This is turning into a regular thread!  Oh noes!
  Slipgate - WTF
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leilei
 

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« Reply #1013 on: 2016-06-13, 00:03 »

I thought about having particles in the client/ part using Q3MME engine's scripted particle system code (which is super elaborate and familiar to the fragmovie scene), but never ever got that to compile properly, so I fell back to sporadically hacking up cgame stuff  Slipgate - Sad

Would be handy too because my code for managing different schemes of particle effects are a mess.  I have a single cvar controlling what would be used, with values by year of they're riffing off (set to 1996 you'd get the blocky quake particle effects, 1999 would get psx/dc/HL-ish effects, 2000 for earlygen ps2 fx etc)
« Last Edit: 2016-06-13, 00:10 by leilei » Logged

Phoenix
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« Reply #1014 on: 2017-06-17, 07:02 »



Is it wrong for me to find this unintentionally hysterical?  Doom - Huh?
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J3E125
 

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In cunning 480p!

« Reply #1015 on: 2017-07-28, 08:50 »

Don't want to dedicate a thread to this so I'll post here.

I was a wee little boy when I signed up on these forums 6 years ago. I had just discovered Generations Arena, and I thought it was the greatest idea ever for a mod. I had a lot to learn on here and other retro gaming forums. I learned how to download mods, maps, program, and most importantly create a fondness for old school FPS, a bygone genre supplanted by an unworthy successor (modern mainstream FPS).

Six years later exactly I drove out of town to sign up for classes in the college I will be going to in a few weeks. The end of childhood is a bittersweet experience, as you're old enough to understand what's happening. I'll join most of you in the adult world soon. I'm honestly excited for what lies ahead.

Generations Arena helped shape part of my childhood, and Phoenix is still the best admin I've ever seen in a forum. I might not be the happiest person or the most fortunate, but I cherish the experiences I've had with gaming. I grunt in my head like bitterman when I jump, I try to bunnyhop in every game out of habit, and I'll wait for the release of Generations 1.0.

Our memories and lives are temporary, but when we're pitted against each other to the death, the Arena becomes eternal. Collective experience brought me to where I am. Thanks for Generations, and much more. A little goes a long way in a kid's life.

-Jules (otherwise known as J3E125)
« Last Edit: 2017-07-28, 08:52 by J3E125 » Logged

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« Reply #1016 on: 2017-07-28, 14:02 »

I really don't know what to say.  I never expected this to have such a large impact on anyone.  If it's brought you someone some joy then it's been worth the effort, at least for me.  I thank you for the kind words, and don't worry, the journey is far from over.  The best is yet to come.   Doom - Thumbs Up!
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Phoenix
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« Reply #1017 on: 2018-01-26, 05:42 »

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5425124/do...uction-than-any-time-since-the-cold-war/

I've been waiting for this to happen, just so I can do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qbRHY1l0vc

But remember, if you're gonna die...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMyxhPHHwnk

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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J3E125
 

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« Reply #1018 on: 2024-01-18, 08:20 »

I don't know how I managed to push this off for so long, but I finally beat Quake 1 yesterday! In retrospect, I think it's super impressive that as a kid I tried to play through Quake via Quake 64 via emulator... one that ran in a browser window with 320p max resolution. That was like 10+ years ago and I got as far as Q64's version of episode 4. Within that time, I'd try to beat Quake but always quit around episode 2.

Personally, I was always more into Quake 2 with its power fantasy gameplay as opposed to the lite-survival horror vibe of Quake mixed in with difficulty spikes of id's older shooters. I saw news of the Nightdive remaster and took a week or two to wreak havoc once more on Stroggos. Finishing Quake 2 recently really pushed towards the realization that I should force myself to beat the original!

What really got me back into Q1 though was a Noah Caldwell Gervais' video essay tackling the franchise from a narrative/story perspective. Playing through Quake I kept in mind Noah's observation that each episode is sort of accomplished through auteur style design of the levels. Despite being the most difficult, I really enjoyed Sandy Peterson's levels. E4 feels abstract, but not in the way that Doom was. They all unfold in a way that reflects the game's cosmic horror vibe.

It's wild to see the direction the level designers went in after Quake, since time constraints forced them to settle on Doom 3 but in 3D but it's not doom, but there are traces of that original vision littered throughout the game. I'm sure folks here have played 1000x more Q1 than I have, so it'd be cool to hear any opinions on the meta and design of Q1.
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« Reply #1019 on: 2024-01-18, 11:11 »

Oh boy, down the Quake rabbit hole I go.

So Quake for me, initially, was... disappointing.  I had seen preview articles and teaser pictures with the dragon, knights with arms missing from locational damage, and the general idea was that Quake was going to be some kind of medieval fantasy game in full 3D.  I had just finished playing Hexen and was looking forward to this 3D castle romp... so that expectation was completely shattered when I got a copy of the Shareware and got to play the actual game.

But let's stop right there.  I heard Quake before actually playing it.  I put the CD in a player and listened to the... soundtrack?  The Quake theme was awesome.  Great stuff.  Then... what was this other stuff?  It's just ambient sound.  What's going on here?  That was a source of confusion.  It only got worse....

I read the manual.  Shotguns?  Military installation?  What happened to the dragons and knights?  Oh well, let's see where this goes.

I installed the game.  My first thoughts were in dealing with the performance.  My computer was not up to the task, so it was very choppy.  I got into the first level, and yikes.  The animation on the enemies was nauseating.  I was watching a slideshow playing another slideshow.  And... I walk into buttons?  I no longer have a "use" function?  What if I don't want to push that button?  And everything looks bad.  Those shotguns... so weak.  What happened to the punch from the shotguns in Doom?  The Rocket Launcher blew stuff up, sure, but it all just felt so bland.  Where were the gun animations?  Why does switching weapons just instantly put up a new gun instead of letting me see the old one lower, and raise up the new one?  Why no BFG?

I slogged through the first episode.  I got to the end, and I didn't want to play again.  Quake was thoroughly unenjoyable.  I went back to playing Doom.

Time passed...

I wanted to revisit Spear of Destiny.  I hadn't played it in a long while, and I noticed that my floppies had gone missing.  I purchased a CD replacement.  On this CD was a demo for Quake 2.  Hmm... well, let's look at it and see how it is.  I installed the demo, and I never looked back.

The performance was absolutely horrible.  I was playing 320x200 software mode, it was choppy, but the gameplay was absolutely fantastic.  I loved the cyborg enemies, the soundtrack was epic, and the weapons just punched where the Quake 1 weapons felt lacking.  There was variety to the weapons and enemies.  The gun models moved, raised and lowered, the enemies had personality in their actions.... I got a retail copy.  Eventually I got a Voodoo 2 card and I was hooked on Quake 2 since.  It was also my first foray into online multiplayer, as I was very, very slow in deciding to connect to the internet.  I wasn't sure I wanted to.  It was a tremendous personal risk that I wasn't certain I wanted to take.  But... the access to all that information was too much to pass up, so internet access, then multiplayer gaming for Quake 2 followed after.

At some point I stumbled across a source port for Quake 1 that described itself as bringing in model interpolation, among other features, to improve the performance of the GLQuake engine.  It was Q2K4, which was an evolution of a project called Phoenix Quake (I was not involved with that, despite the name).  I gave it a try, and that changed Quake for me forever.

It was far from perfect, but the smooth rendering performance and addition of model interpolation fixed the problems I initially encountered with Quake the first time around.  I found myself playing Quake and actually enjoying the game.  I began to appreciate the atmosphere, monsters, and level design for the first time.  Later sourceports such as Quakespasm further improved on the experience, and I finally learned to love a game I initially hated and largely skipped.  I realized most of my dislike was due to the technical performance problems that plagued my hardware at the time, along with the aforementioned model chop.  I'm visually very sensitive to certain kinds of movement patterns, so that was a huge fix for me.  I was late to the party, but Quake finally hit all the right notes.

So enter Generations.  Without going too far into the history of how I got involved, my joining the Generations Arena project pushed me to delve a lot deeper into all the Quakes than I had been before.  I was dissecting model files, looking at weapons code, and seeing just how everything worked.  During this time I also read the collective works of H.P. Lovecraft, so I also got to experience the lore that lead to Quake's environments and bestiary.  That provided some understanding of some of Quake's odder design decisions.  Learning more about the design changes that happened late in Quake's development brought the rest into focus.

My thoughts about the gameplay, design, and soundtrack have evolved quite a bit since my first experience with Quake.  Quake is, had to be, and will remain a product of its time.  The unusual combination of medieval knights, cosmic horror-inspired nightmare creatures, military weapons, and odd level structure was a result of the constraints of its development process.  It's not a game made from careful deliberate choices.  It was brutally Frankensteined together to make a mismatched whole that somehow managed to work despite all its problems.  That same brutal crudeness is reflected throughout every aspect of the game as well, from the weapons to the enemies to the models and environments.  True 3D games were a new thing, and Quake was pushing the hardware of the day beyond its limits.  Everything had to be as simple as possible while still being truly 3D, so you got angular models that wobbled due to vertex precision limitations placed into chunky, crudely shaped environments with simplistic weapons that went from weak to insanely powerful with no real refinement.  The soundtrack was even a huge gamble, favoring an ambient feel over the pulse-pounding metal music from Doom.  Yet... somehow all this managed to work.

My experience with multiplayer Quake 1 was quite a bit lacking.  I did not play Quakeworld until becoming involved in Generations development, and that was mostly to understand the mechanics of the gameplay rather than just playing it for the sake of playing it.  I learned two valuable things from my experience.  The first is that Quakeworld players are entirely fanatical.  They play Quakeworld.  Period.  Many of them never moved on to Quake 2, and the ones that stuck around long after were absurdly skilled.  The second point was that Quakeworld's super-shotgun lies.  During development for Generations there was a constant nagging from some people to make the Slipgaters' super-shotgun pattern super tight like in Quakeworld.  Yet... when playing Quakeworld I discovered that the SSG did very little damage even if the entire pattern was focused on another player.  So I did some testing and discovered that it was all a lie to save on network bandwidth.  The SSG ran the exact same pattern for doing damage that the SSG did in normal Quake, but it was transmitting a single network event, then drawing that multiple times on the client - but in the same spot.  The result was visually the gun seemed to pattern all its shots in one spot when that's not what was happening on the server.  A long-standing gameplay misconception was finally put to rest.

Looking back on Quake 1 from my present position I can fully appreciate it for what it is, what it tried to be, and I find it sad that it was never properly followed up on afterward.  Overall I do like Quake 2 better.  It is certainly a more polished game, with thought-out design, deliberate flow in the level structure, a very balanced progression of weapons, and the weapon variety just seems more flavorful.  It's just more to my personal taste, but I certainly like what Quake 1 has become for me in the time since it's initial release and my very unpleasant initial experiences.  It's hard to imagine a world of 3D games without Quake squarely at the beginning, like a brooding Great Old One awaiting for the stars to be right once again to awaken from its slumber and terrorize the unwary world.
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