Quake is 10

cyclomedia writes "Late on 22nd June 1996 Quake was uploaded to cdrom.com's archives in the form of 7 1.44MB floppy disk images. Though it wasn't until the 23rd that everyone realised (or at least, that's my excuse for being a day late with the news submission). Cue much aggravation on the newsgroups as eager downloaders experienced glorious 2 FPS gameplay."

Comments

Old schoolin'

[Pope]

Hell, I remember going to a vending machine at a local mall to buy Doom! Had to supply my own 3.25" floppies and everything. What a crazy way of getting software, and IIRC it was $18 in 1 dollar coins.

Re:Old schoolin'

[Skraut]

Heh, that's how I supplied myself in college. Found a website where you could request an AOL disk. I put everyone in my dorm in, then sat a box by our mailboxes which said "Don't want your AOL disk, drop it here" As I recall I ended up with over 80, more than my CS needs, I ended up selling them.

I can still remember Quake 1 being released

[phaetonic]

1) Quake 1 was released for $9.99 as shareware with the full soundtrack. It was able to be unlocked with a code, and so of course, keygens came out and enabled you to play the full version for $9.99 with the awesome Trent Reznor soundtrack in all it's glory. 2) When QuakeWorld came out, you could play with others anywhere at 600 ping and still be o.k with it. There was a few seconds delay, but you would essentially predict what you wanted to do. I remember I would turn, grapple against a wall, let go, and shoot hoping I was able to hit something. I don't remember broadband back in the day. I wonder what the next innovation will be that redefines video game playing.

Quake still has a feature no other FPS has...

[drinkypoo]

...it's playable with 32 players on a single server when all the players (though not the server of course) are on modems. Quakeworld rocked my world then, and it still does. Let's also not forget how easy it was to mod; sure there were doom mods, but quake was the game that catapulted us into the wide world of modding.

Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Name one thing that is in an FPS game that isn't in current quakeworld engines. Note that quakeworld has been opensourced for a long time now and has had time to evolve purel based on peoples desire for a better engine, no desire to try to be able to sell polished crap. Whether you're a visual junkie(Specular lighting, 24bit textures, Luma textures, Bloom lighting, Weather effects, Per pixel shadows, particle explosions/trails, etc), a Tech junkie(MD1/2/3 model support (thats quake1 through quake3 and everything between), BSP1/2/3 (Again, q1-3 and every game based on it), PK3 support(the compressed archive q3 uses to store its files), even so far as to support Quake3 QVMs, which is pretty much a .dll that is the entirety of a mods game-code, Direct encoding from ingame to an avi (xvid+mp3), etc)

And then theres the stuff for gameplay. Fully customizable hud. Arbitrarily re-coloring text(makes for good teamplay scripts), Regular expression triggers for console text(so you can match "someone stole your flag!" and play a sound for example), TCL scripting(I don't like it, but to each their own), Advanced scripting (if/then blocks, variables, math), etc.

It's not that games havn't improved since 1996, its that while companies are busy trying to add a few new features to their engines so they can hype it up, we've all been sitting here playing with the best christmas present anyone ever got us--Quake's source.

Of course I only focused on the engine (whats important-- as a good mod has its balls cut off by being on a bad engine), but for gameplay just look at stuff like CustomTF, RocketArena, MidAir, ClanArena. For that matter, I've yet to have a better co-op experience than quake right out of the box.

Quake Done Quick

[Denny]

This seems like a good time to mention something I ran across again a few days ago - Quake Done Quick. These guys finish the whole of the original Quake, on Nightmare difficulty, in 12 minutes and some seconds. Incredible.

Check it out: http://clanservers.multiplay.co.uk/?p=/ftpfiles.ph p%3Fpid%3D%26fid%3D953 (BIG .avi)

Re:The Size was incredible

[shish]

cough. 1% of quake 1's filesize, and much better graphics too... It makes me wonder -- WTF are today's multi-gig games doing with all that space?

Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law

[Dirtside]

The slashdot crowd is absolutely bloody right to expect that 10 years later something with the visuals of Quake and the level of game AI complexity of Nethack should have been written released and shipped.

Nope. Top-notch visuals, in practice, do not come about without a paid development team of professional artists and designers; the complexity of Nethack was evolved over two decades by geeks in their spare time. Companies will not take two decades to create a game (DNF notwithstanding), and geeks in their spare time do not have the resources to create top-notch game artwork.

It is, in fact, entirely unsurprising that this hasn't happened.

There is no random or even pseudorandom level generation.

There's a very good reason why you rarely see random level generation: It's extremely limited. (As a game designer, I've had a good deal of experience with the problem of randomly generating game content.) "Preposterous!" you say. "Random level generation means exponentially increased variety for only slightly more effort!"

While this is technically true, the problem with randomly generated content is that it's very easy for humans to recognize the patterns and elements of the random set. Anyone who's played Diablo or Diablo II enough is familiar with this. At first, the random levels are pretty neat, each time you go into the cathedral it's a different layout... but after a few times, you begin to recognize certain elements (a room shaped a certain way, a certain set of prison cells arranged just so), and after a while, you see enough permutations that even if the level isn't one you've exactly seen before, it's similar enough to all the others you've seen that it's basically the same.

Even if you create 100 distinct rooms for your dungeon that can be arranged in 100 billion unique ways, there's still only 100 basic elements, and you'll begin to recognize them pretty quickly. Randomly generated content also violates the precept that games are a form of storytelling; and randomly generated stories are not interesting. Notice that even in a game like Diablo II, with randomly generated levels, the quests are always exactly the same and the dialogue is always exactly the same -- because you really can't randomly generate a good, original story.

but in 10 years I would have expected the industry to come up with something moderately more engaging.

I've played plenty of engaging games since Quake came out; if you haven't been "engaged" at all since then, that's your problem.