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Not sure how many of you've seen this, but it's insane. Much recommended for anyone who has ever played the game.

http://www.planetquake.com/dde/

Those were the days - further I can recall back to is the Voodoo 2, anyone have any further fond memories of the mid 1990s GPU situation?

Oh yes indeedy. I had a Packard Hell Pentium 100MHz and after discovering QuakeWorld, bugged my mom ruthlessly to get me a Canopus Pure3D video accelerator. That card was the only thing I got for Christmas that year. (This is all going from memory, so nobody shoot me if I've gotten some facts wrong. Better yet, just correct me.)

Not long after Quake was released, id (or some trusted source close to the employees at id) produced a variant called GLQuake that utilized OpenGL acceleration on hardware that supported it. I do believe at that time such video hardware ran upwards of $2000 and was accompanied only by high end SGI workstations and the like. But Quake still looked damn cool on them things.

Then the 3Dfx Voodoo chip came out and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, extremely powerful and affordable 3D acceleration was available to the unwashed masses. The Voodoo chip and GLQuake single-handedly started the 3D-accelerated FPS revolution. The interesting thing about the Voodoo chip is that it did not do any 2D graphics modes. For those who weren't around 3D gaming at this point or may have forgotten, there was actually a pass-through cable that connected between your old 2D VGA output and into the accelerator card. When not playing a 3D game, the card simply piped the 2D graphics through the accelerator, bypassing the Voodoo chip. When you launched Quake or any other 3D game, the Voodoo chip cut off the 2D signal to send its own to the monitor. Crazy, but it worked and it's probably one of the main reasons that the cards were so cheap. Oh, and the Voodoo had exactly one output resolution and color depth: 640x480x16k.

Now back to the Canopus Pure3D. The Pure3D, in its day, was the cadillac of Voodoo cards. If I recall, every single Voodoo card on the market had 2MB of framebuffer and 2MB of texture memory. The Pure3D had 4MB of texture memory, but the only game that could take advantage of it was Quake. (Every other game developer hard-coded their games to use only 2MB of texture memory due to the sheer volume of 2MB Voodoo cards on the market. id has always let you tweak everything.) The Pure3D also had a video-out jack, something unheard of on such a cheap card. But obviously it only worked in "3D mode," so it wasn't really all that useful. Few people would buy a 3D card capable of displaying high-resolution graphics only to display them on a crappy low-resolution TV.

Ah, the wonderful days of yore where I'd spend entire weekends playing QuakeWorld with the Team Fortress mod over 33.6 dialup. When I wasn't gaming, I was browsing Blue's News or Planet Quake. The Pentium 100 and Pure3D combo couldn't quite handle Quake II all that well, but I was still quite happy enough with good old Quake for at least a couple years.

http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/generations/

Generations Arena is one of the finest mods for Quake 3!!

It's no different from saying that a monopoly on wheat held by one farmer doesn't take away my ability to compete with him, so long as I sell rye instead. You're ignoring that I can't compete with him in the wheat market, and that this lack of competition may harm the public and harms me by restricting my freedom.

Except we're talking about luxuries, not necessities and it is much harder to create a new kind of crop than it is to create a new work of art*. If Twain charged too much he wouldn't sell much.

Yes. If I have a Mickey Mouse story I want to tell, then I'm going to need the character. Not being able to use it harms me, since I'm not free to create the works I want. It harms the public, since they can't get those works, which could very well be better than those that Disney makes. It harms Disney to a degree, since the lack of competition lets it sit on its laurels.

You are free to create a character that is sufficiently similar to Mickey Mouse for the purpose of your story. If you need a character with the amount of backstory that Mickey Mouse has then you have to create that backstory yourself instead of resting on someone else's laurels. This forces you to compete by using your ability to contribute new ideas to the market instead of your ability to copy others. Or go to Japan (most of those games simply disregard copyright and use other people's characters).

Now I'm hardly a poster child of honouring copyright but I think that if you wish to compete in the market you should do it with your own ideas so the market can judge you on your own merits.

*= apply term loosely

I remember back in the early days of Planet Quake, when Bastard (Basty) was running the site. This was of course before Gamespy transformed from being a little ping tool, into a giant marketing juggernaught. Quake lovers like myself would collect in #planetquake and chat about the latest mod, hang out on servers and submit news to contribute to the (then) growing online Quake community.

I did a lot of mods myself. Some I would have liked to have finished, but the ones I did finish all collect dust now. (and some of them collected dust THEN)

At the same time Bluesnews was also a great place to find out awesome insights to the whole Quake scene.

Look at these two sites now, and all you can see is marketing.

They both, arguably, sold out. I don't know why... maybe they like affording new computers from Alienware, or maybe they just like the concept of selling their souls. Another person who sold out bigtime was Dakota, the CTF guy that some of you might remember as the founder of Captured.com (which is now closed). He joined Gamespy and is running a large part of that company now. He used to post amazing CTF news, mods, tourney info and stuff.

Vid journalists all get bought up by the industry.

But the games changed, too. It used to be a lot of fun to play Quake or Thunderwalker on servers, but then other games came along and stole the show, thus putting an end to the tight-knit community. Each new game fractured the core community until, for quite a while, there was no cohesion.

All good things come to an end, and I think that is how we really know they were good.

So I'd definetely wager that PvP was not the first... good ol' Dank and Scud were veterans by the time the other comics started swinging.

http://www.planetquake.com/quake4/info.shtml

English version of Windows 2000/XP
Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or Athlon XP 2000+ Processor
512MB RAM
8x speed CD-ROM drive and latest drivers
2.8GB uncompressed hard-drive space, plus 400MB for Windows swap file
100% DirectX 9.0c compatible 16-bit sound card and latest drivers
100% Windows 2000/XP compatible mouse, keyboard and latest drivers
DirectX 9.0c included
3D Hardware Accelerator Card required
100% DirectX 9.0c compatible 64MB
Hardware Accelerated video card and the latest drivers
[snip]
Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) Supported
Internet play requires broadband connection and latest drivers
LAN play requires network interfaces card and latest drivers

If Quake 4 doesn't use DirectX, why would it COME with DirectX? Why would it REQUIRE a DirectX compatible video card?

Quake 4 for Windows can run with OpenGL drivers, and it can run with DirectX drivers, but it's DirectX by default.

Coming next from XADS: the railgun!

I've noticed that the Warsong Gulch Capture the Flag Map is very similar to a map by Der Kommissar called Contested Territories (LMCTF22) from the Quake 2 LMCTF Mod. (basic ss only, couldnt find a tour of the map and don't have quake at work http://www.planetquake.com/lmctf/maps.html) This is especially noticeable from the inside the bases. Was this planned as a inspiration or does "the Der" work there?

It all started with Quake Done Quick: http://www.planetquake.com/qdq/

Wallhugging, bunny hopping, rocket jumping, strafe jumping, quad damage jumping, grenade-rocket jumping, trapping a zombie under a closing gate so it reopens again, you name it, its all to get faster records.

Even did some speed running in Quake myself with another friend a long time ago, shooting each other to gain more velocity, launching rockets at each other to get even more height to get a certain key, etc, its very fun!!
When I solo play a fast game of Classic Quake, I usually speed run episode 1 which I can run under 10 minutes ;)

Damn this brings back good memories, im going to install Quake again :p

Quake succeeded because it was a hodgepodge of wild ideas--part Keen, part Doom, part Lovecraft--all undiluted by the bland design-by-committee unanimity that has subsequently marked id (and most industry) product. They went for it, following their passions and a little unsure of the destination.

Legend has it id was in a panic shortly before release when they realized the disparate elements didn't really fit together; and so the slipgate was born, allowing them to Frankenstein the whole thing together.

That happy accident will never happen again. Not at id, or elsewhere. Not in today's mega-budget corporate gaming space where accountants rule. Most games today follow Hollywood's model: carefully warmed baby food, free of impurities.

But it's wrong to speak of Quake as the past. Quake is still very much alive and in fact enjoying a dazzling new second life, thanks not only to Carmack's generosity in GPLing the engine but also to the very talented devotees whose artisty keeps it going.

Trust me on this. If you haven't played The Marcher Fortress, running on a supercharged rebuilt Q1 engine with eerie new enemies, you're in for the best single player FPS treat in years. And it's free.

Forget Doom III. And unless it radically reinvents itself, forget id. Take yourself here, and enjoy the fruits of a classic that refuses to die: http://www.planetquake.com/underworld/quakereviews .html

Here are a couple more helpful sites:

http://www.planetquake.com/
http://www.quaker.org/

I believe that rocket jumping wasn't a planned feature in the original quake

I believe that rocket jumping wasn't a planned feature in the original quake

http://speeddemosarchive.com/

Bending the rules is pretty much the entire premise behind speed runs. They are very entertaining as well. The origional inspiration for the site was Quake done Quick, a full play-through of the origional Quake in 19:49, which culminated in a 12:23 run through Quake on Nightmare skill. (not that they aren't trying to improve on that time).

At the speed demos archive, you can watch Super Mario Brothers 3 completed in 11:11,Super Metroid in 36 minutes flat and The Legend of Zelda in 35:50. On the PC Game front there is Half-Life in 45:45, Fallout2 in 17:51 and Jedi Knight in 34:03. I find these very entertaining, and sometimes informative. Check out the Game List and see if any of your old favorites are there!

http://speeddemosarchive.com/

Bending the rules is pretty much the entire premise behind speed runs. They are very entertaining as well. The origional inspiration for the site was Quake done Quick, a full play-through of the origional Quake in 19:49, which culminated in a 12:23 run through Quake on Nightmare skill. (not that they aren't trying to improve on that time).

At the speed demos archive, you can watch Super Mario Brothers 3 completed in 11:11,Super Metroid in 36 minutes flat and The Legend of Zelda in 35:50. On the PC Game front there is Half-Life in 45:45, Fallout2 in 17:51 and Jedi Knight in 34:03. I find these very entertaining, and sometimes informative. Check out the Game List and see if any of your old favorites are there!

click here [planetquake.com] to see the ideal case mod for a *BSD system!

The Quake 2 engine is probably the most advanced open source engine youl'l find. But It sounds like it would be better to start from scratch if your advisor intends to be putting science expiraments into this...

http://www.planetquake.com/meanarena/blog.html

Glad to be of service.

click here [planetquake.com] to see the ideal case mod for a *BSD system!

*BSD Film Festival Tonite at the Bijou:

On the marquee:
# Flatliners
# A Kiss Before Dying
# Night of the Living Dead
# Dead Poet's Society
# Faces of Death
# Four Weddings and a *BSD Install

Q: What do you call a gathering of BSD enthusiasts?

A: A funeral.

Elegy For *BSD

I am a *BSD user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.

I tap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a happy tune
but keeping happy's so hard,
*BSD died so soon.

Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.

Heh, there's another reason they weren't designed to - it's a pain in the proverbial buttocks. See John Carmack's old entry here towards the bottom about experimenting with SMP for Quake 3. We may eventually see more programs/games taking advantage of it, but as long as its a pain, it will be a slow progression....

That only leaves room for the people passionate about the industry.

And why is that necessarily a good thing? Does someone have to be an absolutely committed gamer to work in the video game industry? Wouldn't a more well-rounded team, with other skills and interests, lead to better results?

I've been programming for over 20 years, and have been in the software industry for around 12 years. I've worked for a word-processing company, a tax-software company, an ISP, a defense firm doing electronic-warfare simulation, a defense firm doing 3-D battlefield visualization, and two video-game companies. It never once occurred to me that I should look to specialize my software in one particular field; the true strength of a programmer is to be able to pick up any field and program it. But your attitude is consistent with the sort of people that I've met in the gaming industry -- they genuinely don't seem to understand that. I remember when we lost our audio programmer, and the higher-ups were panicked about hiring a new one. I told them I had done plenty of audio programming, and they told me no, they needed a specialist. I gave them a little history of the sort of audio programming I had done on my own, and left them speechless. They simply weren't willing to believe it. When I was being interviewed for my second video-game job, the president of the company told me that what he liked about my resume was my console experience; what he didn't like was that I didn't have enough console experience. Talk about tunnel vision.

I was hired to my first video-game job as a sort of "opportunity" programmer; they knew I was good, though I only had informal video-game experience, like the Quake II mod Weapons Of Destruction. I've been doing assembly-language programming and other low-level hardware tweaking since I was 12, so they gave me the (HUGE!) PlayStation 2 Hardware Reference manuals, and told me to get on with it. Within 3 months, I knew the machine well and was rewriting large sections of our code to either use the vector unit or to squeeze better into the FUBAR memory model. I was finding stuff that seemed really basic to me, but all the best "game programmer" minds that had worked at that company for 10+ years somehow couldn't find them. I even achieved an order-of-magnitude increase in performance for our physics engine. Oh, I picked up physics simulation while I was there too. (I remember being told by my boss that I was now considered the PS2 and physics-performance expert in the company. The same boss that was speechless about my audio experience. LOL!) It's not "passion about the video-game industry" that drove me to these accomplishments. I just normally act this way at work. (I act this way at play, also.)

Besides, what sort of grown adults could be so passionate about video games? The same sort that suffer from arrested development, that's who. The social atmosphere at both video-game companies where I worked was positively middle-school. I remember being told, hush-hush, that so-and-so "just doesn't like you", as if that was supposed to be some life-altering event. It was, too: I got fired from both jobs for reasons that didn't rise very far above that. A rejection letter I received recently from a video-game company actually went so far as to admit that.

If the video-game industry wants to improve itself, then the people involved first have to grow the hell up. The rest of what you need to do will become more obvious once you do that.

These are actually quite good for mapping buildings. Quark is quite good. But yeah, I would recommend against using 3ds max. I just spent a day modelling a japanese house for the LessShift project. Such a pain in the arse. Even people who are good at 3ds max probably find it a dog to work with.

Check out this Quake 3 Archon mod. Pretty cool! http://www.planetquake.com/brazen/arq/images.shtml

Oops, I used forums-style linking ... Homer player model There it is. -- Paul

An URL that works is http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=john c&id=15753.. Hmm, that error message suggests a rather nasty lack of input validation.. I wonder .... :)

Nope, so long as you supply the source code as required by the GPL you don't have to pay any license fees.

Quake 2 post:
http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=john c&id=15753/

click here [planetquake.com] to see the ideal case mod for a *BSD system!

The one thing I found missing, however, was the game still felt too linear to me, for something labelled Metroid.

If you followed the prompts that you receive every now and then then yes it is pretty liner. However it is possible to go exploring and find new upgrades that let you go into areas earlier than normal.
Just take a look here to see how.

My favorite game back in the Quakeworld days was a mod for Quake called Painkeep. The tradition is still alive with Painkeep Arena for Q3. One of the health powerups is a can of pork-n-beans which gives you +100 health when you eat them but the side effect is that you tend to fart alot. Your enemies can hear you coming and you "hop" when you fart which sometimes sends you headfirst into the lava or void. If you are quadded and farting you become a deadly methane weapon to those around you and yourself. Nothing better then killing someone close by with a fart. Period. It doesn't happen often but its something to relish. Makes for some very pretty fart bubbles underwater too.

PKA also has various goodies like beatraps, which leave you stumbling around with a huge trail of blood behind you. The gravity well makes the whole level rumble with an earthquake rattling people out of their cubbyhole who had scrambled to hide when they heard the well being deployed. With the dragon tongue, PKA's own unique grappling hook, you can place the beartrap or gravity well on the end of it and deploy with the hook to wherever you feel it will do the most carnage.

Someone coming at you like a maniac with a lightning gun? No problem. Keep an autosentry stashed in your inventory and bring it up as the chosen weapon... it reflects the lightning back at the perpetrator and zaps him until he knows better.

The guy wises up and decides to pelt you with a few rockets? His mistake. Pull out your airfist and blow the rockets right back in his face. One sure way to make your friends hate you is to deploy a gravity well into an open area then stand out of harm's way and blow unsuspecting victims toward the well.

Hell, I don't even need to play the upgrade game anymore with my PC. I should be fine for years to come With Painkeep Arena. Check it out here: http://sh.stonks.com/ and the official site here: http://www.planetquake.com/teamevolve/

You mean something like Quake The Movie?

Quake 1 was software only, but there have been many OpenGL ports made for it since it was released

I don't know where you've been for the past 15 years, but nobody does low level programming for games anymore.

Everyone uses Renderware . Just look, over 500 titles released or in development use Renderware and it's not that old. That's 1 in 4 titles (I'm reading this from the site). Grand Theft Auto 3 Vice City uses Renderware. Peter Molyneux's The Movies uses Renderware. Broken Sword 3 Sleeping Dragon uses Renderware. Everyone friggin' uses Renderware. And you know what? They aren't all the same game. Hell, even SEGA, Sony, and Konami and featured clients of Renderware.

Oh, and lets not forget Epic Games or id Software . And don't forget, these are not just for first person shooters. It's a 3D engine with underlying network code. I don't even want to think about how many games used the Quake engines over the years.

To say these development-houses-that-rely-on-high-level-develop ment-tools are suffering would be laughable. I'm laughing right now even. They are the highest profit games companies on the planet you fool!

I'm allready building my own map based on the movie aliens.

which may be one of the reasons top Q3A players worked so hard to get 125 fps

"Even there I adjust the video settings so that I get the famed "125 FPS" consistently. Now I don't crank things down like some of the pros do, and even as far as some I've seen first hand, but I do have them down a bit for frame rates."
http://www.planetquake.com/features/rantsnraves/rn r-00-12-12_b.shtml

Monolith has it's own game engine (called LithTech) that they've been licensing (or trying to license) to other folks..

http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/resources/lit htech/tutorials/lithtech_primer.shtml/

It doesn't matter if it's Quake or Quake II. They're both good, as long as they can run Star Trek: The Quake Simulation! My wife and I used to spend a lot of time Deathmatching in that level. Batleths, phasers, warp core ejection, transporters, shuttle bay, sickbay, hyposprays, quad damage, personal cloak, etc. That level had EVERYTHING! :-)

and it'll be the first time i booted into windows in 3 years.

Some details on Q3A's use of SMP:
1st attempt
2nd attempt

Some details on Q3A's use of SMP:
1st attempt
2nd attempt

Take a gander at Defrag mod... it may change your opinion of what speed runs really are about. You'll find plenty of excellent examples of people stretching the Quake 3 engine to its limits not to mention beautiful control and timing.

another site for speed demos. The difference (big difference) is that they seed videos from games running on emulators (most, if not all, of the Speed Demos Archive videos are recorded directly from the TV).
Except from the site: These are movies of various console games being played extraordinarily using an emulator as a tool to get over humanly limits such as "skill" and "reaction".
But it's interesting anyway.

It's a point seconded by Sheri Graner Ray, a senior game designer for Sony Online Entertainment. The game industry, by virtue of its overwhelmingly male employee-base, is missing a big market, she said.

Surprisingly, slightly more women than men reported playing computer and online games (approximately 60% women compared to 40% men) while about the same number of men and women reported playing video games.

A big reason that Quake was such a hit was Id's release of the "QuakeC" code, and availability of all kinds of WAD/PAK expanders, model editors, level creators, etc. Quake lived solely through mods for years

What is Id doing to ensure Doom3 has longevity? I don't feel like plunking down $70 on a single player campaign that I can finish in 2 weeks. I don't want another Quake2.

Yawn, more confusion from a coward. First of all, who made TwinGalaxies god? Just because they publish a book doesn't make them more legit than me, I'm not in competition with them. Anyway about saves in games and TG... allow me to provide some links. Here is TG's press release from May 2003 about a new Metroid prime record in 1:46. Guess what, it was recorded WITH SAVES! Here is proof of that. And how about a run of the original Metroid. No saves in that game, so it's in a single seg.

Dunno if anyone remembers this, but when I was younger I used to watch Blahbalicious, which is one of the most hilarious things I've seen in a long time. It's a feature movie made in Quake, and it's incredibly funny.

(no, I didn't make it)

Recommended hardware for running *BSD

If you want to play an updated Quake 2, try Quake 2 Evolved. I haven't tried it myself (no OSX version yet), but the screenshots and video look sweet.

Many universities have deals with microsft that let you get their software either free or really cheap. That's how I got my copy of MSVC++ 6.0 which I used to write a freeware compression program and puzzle game.