Tenebrae Quake

viperstyx writes "Ah, the days of running around in bland 3d environments and fragging your best friends surrounded by a plethora of sprites and simple textures. What if we could go back to those days, except with per-pixel shading and transparent water? Well now, thanks to Tenabrae Quake you can. This small [just over 3mb] mod to the original quake engine allows users to play Quake while taking advantage of new technology like per-pixel shading. Its beautiful and definitely worth any old skool gamer's time =]"

Comments

Missed half of the "innovation"

[Osty]

Way to go submitter! You picked up on the per-pixel lighting enhancement (one of two things new in this mod), but got blinded by the vis-patched water that has been around since 1997 or so. The other important enhancement here is the stencil-buffered shadows (yeah, yeah, glquake had shadows, if you enabled them, but they were pathetic things. these shadows are nice). The point is that these two things (stencil-buffered shadows and per-pixel lighting) are two of the major enhancements coming in the Doom3 engine, and yet somebody was able to hack the old Quake1 engine to do them just as well. Sure, the visual quality isn't the same, thanks to limitations of the engine (old technology, simply can't push as many triangles as the newer engines, even if you do throw hardware at it), but that's mostly from a lack of triangles in models and scenes.

As for those who say this is a waste of time because it doesn't enhance gameplay, all I can say is "play it". The changed lighting adds new depth to the game. Okay, so it's not a huge change. So what? This is mostly a technology demo than anything else. I don't understand how some people can get off on stupid things like putting a switch into a teddy bear (how useless is that?), yet they can't understand why someone would modify an old engine to do per-pixel lighting and stencil-buffered shadows.