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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 =]"

22 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Doom Patch to follow? by coryboehne · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I can only hope that someone will take the lessons learned from this and possibly re-vamp the old doom, maybe doom II would be eaiser, but doom would be oh-so-cool if someone were to add in modern features and graphics, but allow the gameplay for the most part to remain the same... Or, maybe I'm just nuts....

    1. Re:Doom Patch to follow? by weird+mehgny · · Score: 4, Informative

      You could do that in Doom. It's called vertical autoaim =P Oh, and check out JDoom for OpenGL-powered Doom. It's not quite the same as Tenebrae but nice anyhow.

    2. Re:Doom Patch to follow? by Josh+Mast · · Score: 4, Informative

      What, you mean like Doom3D or DoomGL?

    3. Re:Doom Patch to follow? by Etcetera · · Score: 3, Interesting


      Don't forget ZDoom. I'm waiting for the next rev of that to come out so they can all start synchronizing their codebases. OpenGLJBoomZDoom. Yeah.

  2. Why? by neksys · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Stuff like per-pixel shading and transparent water effects won't change the gameplay one bit. Quake will still be Quake, only instead of being able to play on your old P100, you now need a much more powerful machine and graphics accelerator. Games don't improve because the graphics are updated - in fact, part of the appeal of games like Quake is that we can look back at the game and marvel at what they could do with what they had at the time. It's a sad state of affairs when a fantastic game that still looks great today has to have its graphics improved to sate the appetites of those with a sweet tooth for eye candy.

    1. Re:Why? by mike3411 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think that's the point, some people prefer (or at least enjoy) old-school gaming style. If people like to play Quake because of the gameplay, why not update the graphics to make it look better? I know if I were a fan of any old game purely for its gameplay, I'd appreciate newer, shinier graphics.

      --
      Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
    2. Re:Why? by BrookHarty · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Id like to see a remake of Duke Nuke 3D with newer gfx, and sound that works under WinXP. One of the first multiplayer games where you could fly (jetpack) and plant laser trip wire bombs. Nothing wrong with tweaking a already good game with new gfx.

    3. Re:Why? by xercist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I saw the screenshots and thought to myself "damn cool!". Sure it doesn't change gameplay, but *That's fine*, quake 1 had great gameplay in my opinion.

      Yes, gameplay is more important than graphics and animations and eye candy. Now then, since we already have it, why can't we add some eye candy? Huh? Does it absolutely *have* to look less great than it could to be a great game?

      --

      --
      grep "xercist" /dev/random ...you'll find me in there someday
    4. Re:Why? by Boglin · · Score: 3, Funny


      You've hit on a key problem in society today. People are constantly looking for the newest edition, instead of looking back to the classics. Like all those people I see sitting around in coffee shops reading translations of Beowulf. What's wrong with the original edition. It's still English, even if it is an mostly extinct incomprehensible dialect. But these people just demand the latest flashy MLA standards.
      Or when I got to peoples houses and they insist on playing Mozart on their piano. Mozart never even saw a modern piano! But instead of simply shelling out the thousands of dollars for a genuine harpsichord, these pea brained individuals insist on using the latest musical instruments.
      It just the same when people demand some new flashy version of Quake. What was wrong with the old system and its 255 shades of brown? It's just like when people start playing Quake on their new 2000+ XP systems. That wasn't what Id intended for this program. If you want to play Quake, you should darn well go out and buy an old pentium one system system to play it on. No Voodoo cards, either; it was a software engine first. And I don't want to hear any complaints about the 13fps; it just shows that you care more about eye candy than game play.

  3. What is it with slashdot and going back in time?? by Economist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What have i seen last couple of days on slashdot: A story about getting back to the old internet with BBS systems, Time travelling, and now this. Someone trying to make a point that the past is better than now???

  4. Mirror by MrHat · · Score: 4, Informative

    A mirror of the screen shots is at http://www.codewhore.org/tbq.

    I must really be starved for attention to do this.

  5. Mirror of the Binary... by 10+Speed · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...is here

  6. Back in the day... by The+Pi-Guy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes, back in the day...

    Back in the day, we had to walk 20 miles in the snow to get to the town's graphics processor... (it was an ATI Rage, and we hailed it as the greatest thing ever...), then we had to take the pixel that it gave us and walk all the way another 20 miles to get to the town shader... he'd shade each and every pixel by hand... once we finally got our pixel, we'd have to walk the 20 miles back home again to put out pixel right in the memory, with our DIP switches.... And don't you forget it Michael, it wasn't frames per minute, you'd be lucky if you could get 1 frame per hou-- whatzat sonny??

    ****LART**** </VOICE>

    Thanks. Needed that.

  7. Why *I* was originally interested in quake by |_uke · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Was the scare factor.

    I LOVED the single player aspect of quake.

    When the demo was first released, a friend and I got together and played through it co-op.

    Nothing like turning a corner just to find some big ass bad guy... with me screaming... dying.. and shouting "OMG! Dont go around that corner!" (I am talking about first running into a shambler btw... hehe)

    A big part of what gave this effect was the atmosphere combined with the fact that, at the time... neither of us where very good at playing this type of game.

    The new lighting and whatnot (from what I've seen in the screenies...) it looks like this type of atmosphere has been enhanced greatly.

    The only real problem is the fact that... after playing through the game so many times, and many years of FPS action, I am quite good at not dying. Yes this is a PROBLEM. LOL... I don't want to get through the entire game on nightmare and only die once...

    This is one of the reasons why I really look forward to Doom III. It looks like the atmosphere and hopefully decently hard badguys will provide a decent thrill factor.

    In this kind of game, I want to come around some corner and literally jump out of my seat.

    The only game I've played lately that has done that for me was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. And only then, it was a few key moments. Like one part where you come through a hallway with a door at the end... and a window to the left just before the door... you can't really SEE through the window yet... but as you walk up a body flys at the window... now that scared the crap out of me! LOL roommate says, "Why did you just scream like a girl?". hehehehe.

    --
    Luke
  8. Wow! by RQuinn · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now even Quake1 runs bad on my Voodoo3!

  9. Transparency isn't really new in quake. by eddy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The original quake had transparent water.. well, if you run a special VIS-pass over the maps and used glquake (or had the power to run a special executable which did it on the fly -- I think -- I never did that though). I played it that way all the time, and it was much fun.

    Sprites? Didn't Carmack say he only used three sprites in quake? Or was that quake 2.. no, I think it's the original quake that only had three or so sprites (waterbubbles and something and another).. ah.. I found it on google.

    We coded lots of ways for sprites to behave (allways perpendicular, pivot along Z to face origin, pivot on Z to be parallel to view plane, fixed orientation), but we wound up only having three sprites in the entire game: explosions, drowning bubble, and a gold ball light in the registered version....

    As for the doom-engine games, there's already DooM Legacy which features TCP/IP network play and split-screen two-player mode on one computer, and more.

    --
    Belief is the currency of delusion.
  10. Hardware Advances != Better Games by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have just spent 200 Euros to buy a video card that will run today's games. It has more memory than my mainboard and the processor is nearly as fast ( and it cost more than my mainboard is worth, I suspect ).

    So, how much better are these new games, now I have all this X hundred MHz rendering-Anti-pipeline-fx-rendering bollocks ?

    Nix, nul, niente, zero, no difference.

    There are more pixels on my screen and the mist is rendered better. Oo oo.

    Games manufacturers need to cut their ties to video and sound card manufacturers and produce better games, not games that REQUIRE the latest tech, while adding NOTHING in gameplay.

  11. sdlquake by hitchhacker · · Score: 3, Informative


    try sdlquake. A version of quake1 that uses SDL.

    -metric

  12. Re:Is Quake Still Played? by Jagasian · · Score: 3, Informative

    Those servers are gay! They have self damage disabled, so the rocket launcher is overpowering.

  13. TENEBRAE QUAKE EASTER EGG! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    VERY cool, goto the quit screen with the credits, and hit D. If you shoot the well of wishes sign in the nightmare hallway it tells you this.

  14. Re:Is Quake Still Played? by Schnapple · · Score: 4, Funny
    Well whether or not people still play Quake is not the point - rather, the point of this is
    1. The technical demo of retrofitting an existing OpenGL engine with the new stuff they're doing with DOOM III
    2. The fact that Quake is one of a few games with available GPL'd source
    3. The fact that many people still own the game or have ever owned it (I had to break out my old CD)
    4. The sheer novelty of it - he could have chosen the more up to date (relatively speaking) Quake II engine but this is even more impressive
    5. And finally, this now officially labels this guy as a badass graphics programmer.
    I can hear it now...

    MR. BURNS: "I need a programmer! Get John Carmack on the line!"
    SMITHERS: "He's unavailable sir."
    MR. BURNS: "Then get me his non-union Belgian equivalent!"