Wirehead Studios

Hey, what do you know?  Zenimax IS doing something for the 20th anniversary of Quake afterall:

http://kotaku.com/wolfenstin-devs-celebrate-quakes-20th-birthday-with-new-1782567370

MachineGames released a new mission pack for Quake and it's free of charge.  :slippy_thumb:

Sweet!  Downloaded, and here's some direct linkage:

https://cdn.bethsoft.com/quake/dopa.rar

Awesome. Good to see an official addon for Quake. And a damn fine one at that.

So, we had NRFTL for Doom II, and now DOPA for Quake. I wonder if we'll see an equivalent for Quake II next year?

So... I finally got around to finishing this. Well, restarting it and playing all the way through on Hard this time. I dug out my old Dark Places setup so everything was "reel purdy" for the experience even!

Overall, it's a pretty pleasing episode. It doesn't exactly try anything new, but that's fine, as it almost feels like a collection of "lost levels" in a way. It's ripe with secrets, though none of them were particularly difficult to find. It has some fun triggered events that seem like a step up from what we saw way back in 1996. You could also see a difference in design philosophy with some of the larger, more open battle spaces that cropped up here and there. If I had one complaint, it's that the final level was pretty much a complete rehash of the original.

Maybe, just maybe this is Machine Game's way of telling Bethesda that they would like to give the Quake (ONE!) universe the same type of treatment they gave to Wolfenstein. :)

I just finished playing this finally, after taking another romp through Dissolution of Eternity.  I did all this using Winquake.  Yes... choppy, non-interpolated software rendered Winquake.  Talk about old school.  I still hate the old choppy Q1 model movement.  It's still hilarious watching rottweilers getting buzzed up by the saws in the floor though!

The DOPA episide itself was decent, with only one secret being difficult to find for me.  There's also a nifty easter egg that "lives" on the second to last level.  If I have any gripe it's that the level authors had some kind of fetish for Death Knights - especially the secret level.  It wasn't a very rewarding secret level, it was just a flat out slugfest.  It served to just strip the player of ammo and armor, and it was difficult to get good infighting going between the enemies.  I would have expected at least an armor reward for getting through all that.  I have to agree about the last level being like Shub's pit, minus Shub. 

Moving on from that, let's talk source ports.  For me, too many source ports try to dress things up too much.  I don't like the new effects in Dark Places, and the Q1-style particles are bugged.  Maybe they fixed it since the version I'm running, but they look bad and the grenade smoke doesn't fade properly, and the weapon sway is just wrong.  Straight up GLQuake doesn't cut it, EZQuake doesn't quite do it either... so after some digging around I've discovered what I think is my favorite Q1 sourceport now, and that's Quakespasm (http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/).  It fixes GLQuake's issues, adds anisotropic filtering and optional liquid transparency, fixes the nailgun muzzle flash glitch, but keeps the Q1-style particles, weapon sway, and movement.  It also lets me run vsync and set host_maxfps up above 100, resulting in silky smooth movement at 100Hz and interpolated models.  It's soooo much gentler to my eyes I love it.  It also supports larger entity counts so there's a few SP campaigns out there (Soul of Evil, Arcane Dimensions) that will work under it that wouldn't work under normal Q1.  So now I have some extra Q1 stuff to try out the source port on at a later time.

I still maintain that Id missed the boat with the Id Tech 4 engine in making a proper Quake 1 sequel.  Quake 4 should NOT have happened the way it did.  It should have been a proper Q1 sequel, keeping the look and feel of the original but updated to a new engine.  Who knows.  Maybe if Champions does well Id will give Q1 some well deserved love?  We can only hope.

Also of note... DOPA did not have a single Spawn in the episode, nor any Rotfish.

I Approve!

And there was much rejoicing.

Gotta say.. I've just been using WinQuake the last few times I actually loaded Q1. The blurriness of GLQuake just felt overly bad to me, plus the atmosphere and lighting felt better in WinQuake. ..but that interpolation, ugh.

With the research of the various GL modes and such as well, I think Quakespasm will serve quite well (especially now that I can adjust the gamma again!). It's like a flat upgraded GLQuake, which is all I've wanted for years.. and with the discovery that GL_NEAREST looks better to me, well that's just icing!

However! The one thing I did notice missing is how the gun moves when looking up and down. In Quakespasm, it's static and unmoving.. whereas in GL/Quake it would pitch up and down.