|
|
|
Kajet
|
So is quake 3-2 going to be like gen? cause it kinda seems like that's what q3 was supposed to be... as for DooM 4... Is it going to be like plutonia, tnt, or eviloution where it's just more levels and nothing else new? cause I think there should be more new-ness to nessecitate an actual sequel.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Phoenix
|
Well, here's my hope. I'm hoping that "Tech 5" is the maturation of the engine tech Carmack pioneered with Doom 3. If so, then for Doom 4 they can concentrate strictly on content and design as opposed to technology development. That means there's a lot of room for what Doom 3 did not have that Doom 1 and Doom 2 did have. Of course, this depends a lot on the design goals as well. We know nothing about Doom 4 as of yet beyond "It's intended".
As for a Q3A sequel... your guess is as good as mine. If they want to make a Generations-ish game, well, they own the copyrights on all their previous stuff so it's not like we could tell them no or something. Why would we want to anyway? I have a feeling it will just be more of an "updated" Q3A using Tech 5 that picks up somewhere Q3 left off. I do know why Carmack wants to do a sequel to Q3A. He's stated in other interviews that he feels Q3 is the pinnacle of online gaming and wants to continue that style of FFA deathmatch. That's the same motive behind Quake Zero. It's to get people back into FFA deathmatch. Personally I think it's a good thing. How many former deathmatchers have been sucked into WoW or other MMO's? Doom 3 isn't great for deathmatch, and Quake 4 - let's face it, it's Q3 deathmatch with worse system requirements and ugly levels. Q2 players don't like it. Q3 players... depends on who you talk to. Don't even ask Quakeworld players about it, and us Doomers... well there's Zdaemon and Skulltag for us. I tried Q4 deathmatch once and it felt... strange, especially when playing it on the Q2DM1 and Q3DM17 remakes. Personally I think Raven does a better job at making their own stuff, like Heretic and Hexen, and Elite Force, than making a sequel for someone else's stuff.
I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what Doom 4 and Q3A2 hold.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
  I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
|
|
|
Lopson
Elite
Posts: 1133
Still Going In Circles
|
DooM 4? Man, id is getting boring... Get some new IPs for Christ sake! Or at least create new universes with the Quake brand, don't reuse the ones already created 300 times.
id's oil is getting old, time for an oil change. That's my oppinion, at least.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Kajet
|
DooM 4? Man, id is getting boring... Get some new IPs for Christ sake! Or at least create new universes with the Quake brand, don't reuse the ones already created 300 times.
id's oil is getting old, time for an oil change. That's my oppinion, at least.
Y'know that's not really a bad idea... give us new stuff, cause I kinda doubt anyone would like to see an updated Q1 game, or commander keen... everything else is starting to get slightly overused. |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
scalliano
Elite
Posts: 1095
Yup, that's me
|
As class as Gen is, I've often wondered how id would have gone about implementing the same concept. If Q0 turned out to be a Gen-style game, I wouldn't complain (not least of all because we all got a taste of it first  ). Frankly I'm tired of realism shooters. Don't get me wrong, the likes of R6: Vegas, Black and Resistance: FoM are great games but I'd rather RJ my way out of a situation than spend most of my game time hiding around a corner. More Doom is always welcome IMO, just as long as I don't have to sell my soul to Steam (sorry for bringing it up again, rant over .gif) ). And yes, Pho. Skulltag owns big style.  |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
PSN ID: scalliano
The Arena knows no gender, colour or creed, only skill.
|
|
|
|
Kajet
|
I agree with scalliano about realism shooters, I hate having to crouch-walk all over a level to keep my aim as good as possible, so what's wrong with realistic modern day settings but weapons and physics that make Q3 seem real?
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Thomas Mink
|
give us new stuff, cause I kinda doubt anyone would like to see an updated Q1 game
Oh ye of little faith. I would like nothing more than to see a return to the world of Q1.. with those monsters.. and the overall gothic theme of things. I still think Q2, 3, and 4 are undeserving of the name, but that's something else entirely. Then again, the more I think about it.. the more I doubt myself. Would I really like to see an updated Q1? Gen's spirit is with the Q1 of old that I know and love.. iD would strip that away and start over from scratch in order to 'recreate' it. I think Gen will do a better job at easing my purist soul. Guess this post was kinda pointless.. oh well. |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Kajet
|
I'm not sure, a new Q1 remake could be interesting given that they keep everything somewhat true to the original, more weapons would be nice, and more story than something thats little more than a doom rehash...
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Phoenix
|
Well what surprised me is why the Q1 storyline hasn't been revisited with the Doom 3 engine - barring that one project of course, I forget it's name and I've not really checked out more than a few screenies. Q1 maps were often dark, creepy, and gloomy, and the Doom 3 engine would be perfect for a Q1-style game. Consider how the hell level looked in Doom 3. Now imagine that kind of quality and "sporked-over reality" but with the Q1 universe. Reworking Q1 or making a sequel without plot-slowing stuff like a PDA or squads to @!#!@# gimmicks to get in the way would be something else if done right. The alternate dimensions could be made incredibly insane, dark, and evil, and the monsters could be made genuinely frightening. If it were done, I'd want the classic "you vs the world" mode of play - forget the damned NPC's. They all got turned into grunts anyway, right?
Now if someone made this and made it high quality and didn't screw with the formula I'd play it. Yes, I know I've said I don't like Q1, and I still don't but a lot of that stems from technical reasons with the engine and the lack of any color besides blue, brown, and olive drab.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
|
|
|
|
Kajet
|
Yeah, Q1 on Doom 3 engine would probably look a hell of a lot better, look at the difference between the colors in Q2 and Q4, a hell of a lot less BROWN i seem to remember almost everything in Q2 being tinted with some shade of brown (not a bad concept to make things feel gritty but...) and in Q1 I don't really remember maps being warped alternate dimensions, I just thought of them as relatively normal places with weird crap in them.
I was kinda thinking of some kind of squad based game but that be far more suited to a new Doom on earth during/after an invasion... and look at Q4, squad based games kinda suck when they aren't done right..
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Tabun
Pixel Procrastinator
Team Member
Elite (3k+)
  
Posts: 3330
|
What was so good about the "brown-ness" of Quake 2, is that its designers understood the power of subtlety. Stroggos was clearly a dusty brown planet, adding to the mood or the atmosphere of the place, but don't forget that the Q2 palette wasn't all brown. Lava orange, deep reds nicely contrasted with the softer brown and green tones of the game, but without becoming a spectacle of rainbow colour (like Quake 3 became). The palette limitation is a limitation, ofcourse, but at the same time -- if well the colours are well selected -- it can help to create a consistent atmosphere, enhance contrast and improve the quality of coloured lighting. That's what I think it did for Q2, anyway.
For an example of misuse of colour, look at the first Quake 4 level, and focus on the indoors areas. The odd combinations of lighting with colourless metal gray, tintless panes of glass and brightly red and yellow pipes is not good. If the colour scheme had been forced by a Q2-like palette limitation, these design flaws would not even have been possible. :]
The same can be noted in those Q3 maps made by people who just can't resist cramming everything in there. It's not good to get too much repetition, but it's equally bad to just start making the rooms as if they were decorated by a bunch of dissenting teenagers.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
| Tabun |
?Morituri Nolumus Mori? |
| |
|
|
|
|
Kajet
|
Sorry, was going on my relatively bad memory, and there is that Q3 bot chat line "Aww crap brown again?"
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Tabun
Pixel Procrastinator
Team Member
Elite (3k+)
Posts: 3330
|
Heheh -- why apologize? One look at the Quake 2 palette:  shows that there is there is definitely some 'leaning towards brownity'. I can sympathize quite well with those who can't appreciate that. :] However, it must be admitted that even crap comes in a great variety of browns.. |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
| Tabun |
?Morituri Nolumus Mori? |
| |
|
|
|
Lopson
Elite
Posts: 1133
Still Going In Circles
|
Quake II has an awesome colour scheme. It gives the game an unique look, a look impossible to imitate, no matter how hard anyone tries. The brown colour is an important colour in the first two Quakes. What made id change the palette from brownish to rainbow in Quake III and from there to greyish in the last Quake? Hmm...
Quake III's palette is varied so that 3rd party developers would easily adapt the engine. The wider the number of colors, the greater number of options. As for QIV... dunno.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Kajet
|
well... just how... "involved" was ID in Q4's development?
As for the Q2 palette... LOL
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Tabun
Pixel Procrastinator
Team Member
Elite (3k+)
Posts: 3330
|
The easy answer to the 'palette change', Kruz (ehr.. Lops), is that there isn't a palette. At least, not of the selective 256-colour kind that lower-bit graphic games like Doom, Quake and Quake 2 use. (One of the difficulties for Quake 2 skinners (*cough*, that includes me), was that you had to pixel-paint using the actual game palette, or face an often horrible alteration of your work as it was eventually translated to Quake 2 colours.) Bitmaps for Quake 3 are not palette-translated, but stored to allow for 16 million colours, as much as most windows desktops allow. One of the key reasons why id used all the colours of the rainbow in their game is, I think, because they could. ;] As far as I know, id was not involved in Q4's development. I think that one is all Raven -- its design sure leads me to believe that.  |
|
|
|
« Last Edit: 2007-08-23, 01:51 by Tabun »
|
Logged
|
| Tabun |
?Morituri Nolumus Mori? |
| |
|
|
|
|
Phoenix
|
Edit: If any of this seems redundant, Tab posted while I was typing.
I can answer on Quake 3. Doom, Quake, and Quake 2 all were limited to 256 color palettes. Quake 3 uses full 32-bit RGBA color. RGBA works like this:
Red = 0-255
Green = 0-255
Blue = 0-255
Alpha = 0-255
Every pixel drawn has four color values assigned to it. Alpha is used to determine transparency for certain types of color blending. In addition, Quake 3 uses a shader which is a scripting language that lets you perform mathematical computations with color as well as the texture coordinates. All the special effects in Generations rely on the shader. If you want to see what Quake 3 looks like without functioning shaders, switch to vertex lighting mode in the system menu. The advantage of 32-bit color is that you have over 16 million colors available to you, plus transparency, and with the shader language you can do damn near anything you want to the textures so long as the engine supports it.
That's not to say the Quake 2 engine couldn't do more than 256 colors. The textures were restricted to 256 colors, the game engine could offset those with lighting, and I believe the same held true for Doom and Quake 1. Running a 256 color palette, as Tab said, does have the advantage of unifying the appearance of a game. It's also very fast to calculate because instead of having to specify RGBA values all you need is a numeric pointer to the palette. The downside is that in order to do certain effects you had to resort to palette swapping. The color blends for pain in the view, or Quad, or even the Doom invulnerability are all done either with a palette shift or a palette substitution.
Now as to color schemes in textures, I think Id made Q3 more colorful because Quake has always had that "brown" thing. Doom was more colorful but the environments wildly varied so it had to be more colorful. With full 32-bit color plus alpha plus shaders opened up to the designers, I think they decided to try to develop more interesting and varied environments. How well they succeeded in this is up to the player of course. I really did not care for the Q3 look or environs myself when the game first came out and it wasn't until I started working with models for Q3 that I learned to appreciate just how powerful the Q3 shader language and the color math is. I'm doing some effects right now that would have been flat out impossible under any of the older games.
Doom 3 and Quake 4's engine just adds on to what Q3 started in that you could do specular maps for textures (shiny surfaces), bump maps, diffuse maps - all sorts of "effects layers" for textures that can make a 2d surface into a complex 3d form with light and dark areas and glossy and dull areas. It gives the design artist a lot of options for dressing up a map and making simple model geometry more complex. It also quadruples the workload to do so. I think where Q4 went wrong visually is it looks nothing at all like the Stroggos of Quake 2, the same as the Strogg don't resemble the Quake 2 Strogg. There are some impressive visuals in the game, but the Quake 2 feel is completely gone, and the color scheme and architectural design has a huge effect on that. You look at the various areas in Quake 2 and they all have a very hard lined, uber-industrial appearance - lots of straight edges and hard angles, a persistent yellow ambiance outside - you certainly feel like you're on an alien world just because of the color of the lighting - and their technology was very much pure function and very spartan in design, except when you get to the palace level and the imperialistic nature of the Strogg reveals that their very technology is a monument to itself. It's like "what if the Roman empire was made from Cyborgs?" The Quake 2 Strogg looked like walking industrial machines with human parts tacked on - again, their form was to the point and no BS. Jump to Quake 4 and you have lots of curves, useless mechanical clutter everywhere, and so much of it looks like shiny metal. The environs are often very claustrophobic whereas in Quake 2 the Strogg had a lot of very large and open rooms. The hallways in Quake 4 make no sense. It's more like Doom 3 was modded to have cyborgs and uglier rooms when you look at the level design. The outdoors look almost exactly like the Mars terrain from Doom 3! Another lacking feature in Quake 4 is water. Stroggos had a lot of sewers and toxic waste pools and lava. In Quake 4 you have no sewers, no slime pits, no lava. The Strogg themselves don't have that "Aliens powerloader" look anymore, being more fleshy and curvy. They're more annoying than interesting. The original Strogg had personality and a style to them that while they were evil as sin they were likable as bad guys. The Quake 4 Strogg lack this quality in both appearance and action.
I could go on and on about the visuals as I'm sure Tab could, but you get the idea. Having more options doesn't mean things will always look better. You have to work your tail off and keep a concept in your head about how you want something to look and stick to that design plan. I think that's one great thing about how Generations is working out. Sure, we're a very small team with a very large project and it takes us a long time to make progress as a result of that, but we have a very consistent visual style and a very consistent feel to the gameplay. Each class's weapons can be easily distinguished and have a consistent theme of color and feel. There's exceptions with some models, textures, or effects of course, but then we're also not done either. Where we are pretty "done" with some things, like the look of the Q2 weapons in the teaser vid, you can see how the final result all comes together. We're also not trying to reinvent the weapons and gameplay from the old games - notable exception for Wolfy of course. We're basically updating them to fit with the Q3 tech and letting them all play together in the same sandbox and tweaking where needed. I think it's a lot harder to do something like Quake 4 or Doom 3 because you're starting from scratch and trying to remake what you had before without it being the same, and for Raven it's even tougher than with Id because you have this whole Quake legacy to live up to, but you want to be creative at the same time. I still don't understand why they departed from the visual style of Quake 2 when they were able to make a damned convincing Star Trek universe with Elite Force. Maybe Id just let go of the reigns too much? I don't know.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
|
|
|
Lopson
Elite
Posts: 1133
Still Going In Circles
|
I meant in the design department, not on the engine department :/ . Quake III itself (its models, its maps) use lots of colors. Sure, the engine can sustain 32-bits of colors, but the maps and the models didn't have to use half of those colors (exaggeration), they could have continued to use the brownish look.
I like Q3's design, but I prefer Q2's design: it has a lot more personality than Q3's (or Q4's for that matter).
DooM3 is a weird case. It lost some of its original personality, but it gained new stuff. Its design is amazing: the claustrophobic rooms, the dark areas, the monsters, the sounds, the flashlight thing. Wide spaces and a good range of colours was swapped by a constant tone of grey and black (darkness) and tight spaces. It sticked to the concept of colour consistency, like Q1 and Q2 did, and BAM, a great game is spawned. One of the things that amaze me in those two Quakes and in this last DooM is that consistency never equals monotony. Which brings me back to the question: if they knew (and know) how to create a game with colour consistency, why didn't they apply that concept in Q3? Just because of the engine change? The engine change didn't do much for DooM3...
Q4's design is clearly id, despite the fact tha it wasn't made by id (it looks like it, I'm not trying to say that it was planned by id). The game screams out "DOOM3DESIGN" from the beggining 'till the ending.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
