k I'm curious now what radical or breaking things Quoth did?

Play the Quoth start map. Jump in one of the torch thingies in the spawn area. Do the same in ID1. Odd, isn't it?

Those knight things that continually shout "heuuu-arrrgghh!" at you. Is shouting "heuuu-arrrgghh!" Quakey? Next they'll be telling you that your mother was a hamster, etc. Or saying "Ni!"

Where are the animating lightstyles? ID1 is stuffed full of animating lightstyles. Why do community maps avoid these?

Monsters. Quake monsters don't look like Quoth monsters (honourable exception: Voreling). Quake monsters are animal, bestial, unintelligent, savage. Eyeless, primitive, primal, etc. Killing machines with next to no setience in there. Quoth monsters are not like that. 40 billion variations on the Grunt and a few knights that shout "heuuu-arrrgghh!". Don't think so.

Will I go on? 

Jump in one of the torch thingies in the spawn area. Do the same in ID1. Odd, isn't it?

This is caused by a trigger_hurt, not the flame entity.

Those knight things that continually shout "heuuu-arrrgghh!" at you. Is shouting "heuuu-arrrgghh!" Quakey?

More Quakey than the Enforcer telling me to suck it down? Also, one of these is a hoarse, throaty sound befitting the rest of the Quake sounds, and the other is a guy screaming into a tin bucket (guess which).

Quake monsters are animal, bestial, unintelligent, savage. Eyeless, primitive, primal, etc. Killing machines with next to no setience in there.

Pretty sure you had a ticket called "Monster AI"... 

It would be helpful if you or anyone else could give an example of good sounding lazer blasters in FPS games, so I have an idea what people perceive as a good laser/blaster sound. Unfortunately these things are hugely subjective, and no one has ever heard an actual laser blaster in action... 

Pretty damn sure I didn't. 

"Suck it down" is a Romero homage, something he allegedly liked to taunt his deathmatch opponents with. As for why the enforcer would say it, it's a friggin' game - why not? Romero himself still puts lots of homages into his games even today. Because they're games, not the Qu'ran.

Same goes for calling the player "n00b" in a monster taunt wav. It refers to deathmatch, which Quake brought to the masses.

But you know all this, right. 

Q2 hyperblaster is too shrill but it sounds like it has power behind it. Feeling is enhanced by the mechanical sound of the gun turning over.

I reckon your best source for inspiration would be UT. The plasma gun sounds are awesome (especially the secondary fire, that thing sounds like a piece of industrial machinery) and the shockrifle is okay. You could also take a peek at UT3/ut2k4 though I forget there sounds as they aren't imprinted on my brain like UT :E

I dunno perhaps a guiding principle could be "Would this sound fit into a Megaman game or cartoon. If yes, it's not suitable" :p 

As for why the enforcer would say it, it's a friggin' game

Because a monster using a cheesy deathmatch taunt rips the dark, brooding Lovecraftian atmosphere to pieces. You might as well have your grunts shouting "This is my BOOMSTICK".

It might be amusing as a 'ooh lets chuck this in' but think what effect it's having on the tone of the game.

"Hey what's it like fighting a shambler?"
"Shocking." 

So what?

Facts are: the Quoth team made a variation on the Start map. They changed many elements of it. It looks and plays different to the original. Where's the vitriol against them?

If what one wants is classic Quake, there is an option available. It's called: pop the CD in your drive, run Setup, double-click on "quake.exe", select "Singleplayer - New Game" and go for it. Nobody will hold it against you.

There are people who are genuinely interested in providing constructive feedback and comments on this, and there are people who hate because hating is what they do.

Let's get this clear. I wasn't invited to join this project; I muscled my way into it (and that, by the way, is an option that's available to anybody who genuinely wants to contribute). Yes, I'm an unashamed fanboy, but also: that doesn't mean I agree 100% with everything. I have my own tastes in Quake (I couldn't give two hoots about gameplay, etc, I just like looking at pretty architecture) and I'm strictly a backroom techie person. But I'm prepared to swallow my pride, subdue my ego, and accept things I might not like for the opportunity to contribute to something like this.

Whether you agree or disagree with the style and gameplay, you do have to admit that this is taking things to another level. If that level is something you don't like then you have options available. You can spill hate over the forums, you can join in and try influence things, you can do something you think is better yourself, or you can do nothing. Which of these options is/are the constructive one(s)? Which ones result in you spending negative energy on something you don't care much for to begin with?

Rant over. 

I have to say I'm not against new things overall. But when you replace something old you better think twice and then make sure its better AND similar. The whole quake 'replacement scene' is quite ugly, full of low quality hacks that think increasing the resolution, number of colors and polys alone would make it better not caring about quality, consistency, style and atmosphere of the original.
If your mod was about more new\original stuff it would feel better, but when you replace something already established and accepted you will receive a lot of criticism, unless its absolutely an improvement and fits in.
For example, those new sounds wouldn't be bad if they were used for the new monsters, but put over the old ones they make things seem worse. Were there people complaining about the new animei-sh looking flying robots with ears? I bet far less than about the questionable changes to the old stuff.
No one really opposed the new monsters in Neh, but everyone hated new 'AI' of the old ones.

As for Pew-pew
Sound is not the worst part of the gun... but it's a cheap fx that associates with old synths or toys rather than a cool gun and gets unpleasant with repeats. Does Scourge' laser use the same sound? cause it didnt annoy me much there or in Tronyn`s mod.
There is a certain range of frequencies around 1-3k Hz I believe that could sound unpleasant to human ear, where its most sensetive.
Not a big fan of q2 HPB sound btw. Fallout had some good sounding lasers\plasma (but those where single shot). 

Because a monster using a cheesy deathmatch taunt rips the dark, brooding Lovecraftian atmosphere to pieces.

After you just died violently anyway and probably went "Fuck" or something similar, yeah.

I don't want to discuss this to death (much like "what is Quake"), but obituaries like "Player discharges into the water" and "Player sucks it down" already do the same. See, it is already in the original game. In single player, too. Ours is just the audio version of that.

Not to mention giant cubic boxes with the Nine Inch Nails band logo on them, absolutely huge flashing red buttons, phallic looking weapons (their intention being reinforced by the deathmatch obituaries), and rocket jumping (surviving it, no less) are not very Lovecraftian either.

Not one bit.

(And I think Quake's zombies are probably more inspired by 80's zombie flicks than Lovecraft, considering when the game was made. Let's not mention Rottweilers, who are straight from Castle Wolfenstein and not the pages of Lovecraft. I could go on.)

Besides id games have a tradition of cheesiness, see Romero's face being the end boss in Doom2 (ho-hum, now you have to defeat me, John Romero), nazi-themed bonus levels, dopefishes and all that. In single player. There is a lot of "don't take this too serious, guys" in id games which is conveniently overlooked. Anything remaking Quake would do good to incorporate some cheesy humour.

I mean you go massacring hordes of monsters with a chain saw (no one complained about the presence of a chain saw in our Lovecraft simulator - of course not, because chain saws were already in vanilla Quake, wielded by one of those Lovecraftian freak-show members), their chunky gibs theatrically splashing around the room, and you call that brooding?

Are we playing the same Quake? ;-)

Thanks for laser gun references, will check. 

Its too easy once you know what's where. Was running max HP max armor, most of the time (even w/o the secret hunting) so even the shards wouldnt pick... but then I found "The pentagram of trololo". Very funny.
I have to say SG is really OP it kills even fiends in 5 shots. And then you have a GL to boot, which is a bit overkill for base map I think.
Couldn't find shredder to my disappointment - is it random or not present on skill2 at all? Btw not so fond of rnd items, cause something like MH is almost usless compared to RA.
Found another showstopper: you can fall into the pit from which an ogre(or a spawn on hard)rises with no way out.

And fianlly: corpse removal code please. Would really help with performance. 

"j00 s4wk n00b, unistall quake!11 L0L" *corpse humping* 

Special voodoo beans were added to the engine to ensure that it would be able to do this, with some Intel-specific workarounds in place
Do you guys have a public svn ? Or could you mail me the Intel tweaks. Cheers. 

The kids love them, the flashy stuff, the older ,audience dislikes them for the and disparities and nostalgic incongruence.

As for the "Lovecraftian" in Quake, to be quite honest, there isn't much apart from a few names. But I think we all agree on what the Lovecraft synonym stands for in this game, otherworldliness, acrane magic, and strange eyeless monsters. (Fiends do have eyes, however. HI SHAMBLER!)

mh: GTX 460, latest (beta) drivers, Win7 

 

Wow ... this just keeps getting better and better. So far this sticks out as better than Warpspasm, Travail or Q2. The Warpspasm/Travail thing feels weird to say because I never really expected anything to pass Warpspasm or Travail.

The presentation is top notch, the fact it uses high resolution textures, ... sheesh. Probably 16 other things. The lighting.

Here is what bothers me ... and this isn't about RMQ:

1. RMQ has the word coop written all over it. However, being NetQuake that would realistically require a net code overhaul. I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how to pull that off or doing a DPP7 lite protocol. I feel that these kinds of things might happen this year (50/50 chance?).

2. The king-size maps almost require coop to correctly play. So many monsters and so much map size --- I mean seriously large maps -- would almost require a couple of players to find everything.

3. Might actually require coop for best experience. Watch other players do things from time to time instead of having to figure out everything yourself.

Plus this feels very replayable.

Please tell me this has been tested in coop and won't crash due to the camera action or what not ...

I have to admit when I heard about huge level sizes I wasn't so sure that was a good idea because generally I never thought map size was everything. But these maps have tons of detail and the colored lighting and high resolution textures make them look great.

Still, I think without people being able to coop the maps over the internet, the maximum potential of demo 3 won't be hit. 

Er - I tested the map on skill 3, and no-one has been man enough to feed me a nightmare demo. I think I would like to see your nightmare demo.

Known bugs:

1 - it is possible to break the end sequence by doing an Ankh near the start

2 - it is possible to re-fill the cavern once you have emptied it

3 - the killcount is wrong by one monster (I have figured out what causes this, it will be fixed)

4 - it is possible to to get stuck in the room with the ogres in two different ways

5 - if you fall off the platform at the end sequence, you have to travel quite a long distance to get back up again

6 - there is some zfighting at the tunnel entrance near the bridge in the large outside area

Luckily this stuff is W.I.P.

I had optimised the map to conform to the 657## verts limit, but since that was doubled a few months back thanks to the work of MH, I have since added a whole bunch of new 'stuff' to the map, and I am currently at the 74000ish mark, but I wont hit another limit until I reach about 130000 verts. So basically this map will be improved a shed-load before release. Stuff will be added, improved, bugs will be ironed out.

I appreciate your feedback genuinely, I was expecting a lot of comments about some of the known issues, and just generally because that is what happens when you release maps - but I have learned for a long time now that feedback is all good, if you take it the right way. It's all vaguely useful, even if it just re-iterates the point that "Item X, or SFX B seemed to go down like a lead balloon, maybe we should reconsider our options.

Believe you me, aside from the general musing, advocation and opinions being thrown around on this thread, our private forums have been BUZZING with creative activity on the back of this release, our intention is to get this project whipped right into some kind of real shape, we are listening to everyone.

Ultimately, we are going to do what WE want to do, but what that is changes, posts are moved, peoples opinions about ideas shift and change, and the evolution of the project has been quite profound up to this point alone, and I don't see it lessening any time soon. 

Do you guys have a public svn ? Or could you mail me the Intel tweaks. Cheers.

Public SVN here: svn://svn.icculus.org/remakequake/engine/Experimental

Be warned that the engine source code won't translate to any other Quake codebase without serious surgery.

OK, that out of the way.

Traditional Quake codebases do a LOT of work in software on the CPU. For the renderer much of this was transferred to the GPU instead - light animations, light updates in general, MDL animation and frame interpolation are all bottlenecks that were addressed. This allowed the data to be kept relatively static and in VBOs, which allowed for the renderer to avoid pipeline stalls associated with updating this type of data at runtime.

Much of this requires bumping the hardware requirements to a level that may be uncomfortable for some. That was a tradeoff that we discussed at length and are happy to accept. The current hardware requirements have settled around OpenGL 1.5 with the ARB program extensions and 5 or more texture units.

Even before this bump there were things done to improve on Intel but which are no longer in the code. These may be of more use to people, so I'll discuss them fairly generally.

A move from OpenGL immediate mode to vertex arrays was a very early change that saw useful gains in MDL rendering performance. Each MDL can be drawn with a single glDrawElements call. The vertex arrays needed for this can be built manually and at runtime if desirec, and it needs nothing beyond what's available in OpenGL 1.1. Moving that up to the next level involved putting everything for MDLs into static VBOs - no dynamic data is sent from CPU to GPU, the vertex pointers are set to offsets into the VBO for each frame (or pair of frames that must be lerped between) and blendweight and shadelight are sent as shader params. A switch from FFP arrays to vertex attrib arrays was an aesthethic choice moreso than a necessity, and was heavily influenced by a loathing of glClientActiveTexture (glMultiTexCoordPointer would have been a better API design choice).

In all cases, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT indexes were preferred to GL_UNSIGNED_INT as the latter is not actually supported in hardware by many older parts, causing your vertex pipeline to drop to software emulation.

I believe that MDL handling can be gotten to somewhere around 75% of the full increased performance (drawing 400 knights went from 50fps to 300fps) just by making the vertex arrays and glDrawElements switch.

Something similar to this can be done for brush surfaces, but the gains are slightly more marginal owing to the need to dynamically build (and rebuild) a lot of data due to PVS and frustum switching.

This is getting long so I'll save the lighting changes for part 2. 

OK, this one no longer has a direct descendant in the current codebase, so I'm largely working from memory here.

I'd been aware for at least 10 years that dynamic light updates were a huge bottleneck in the Quake engine, and maybe 2 years ago I sat down and did a lot of work, testing and experimenting around what could be done about that.

Two main things came out of that.

First was a change of the glTexSubImage2D params from GL_RGB/GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE to GL_BGRA/GL_UNSIGNED_INT_8_8_8_8_REV. I have a test program (which I should probably put on the RMQ SVN) that tests various combinations of params for dynamic texture updates, and these two invariably came out fastest. The improvement on Intel was by a very wide margin - time to update 16 256x256 textures went from ~40ms to ~3ms. NVIDIA was 6x faster (18ms to 3ms), and - oddly enough - it seemed to make little or no difference to ATI/AMD, which locked at about 16/17/18ms irrespective of params. I haven't restested this on more modern AMD parts yet, but I have done some informal benching of D3D9 LockRect/UnlockRect performance which indicates that things are largely unchanged.

This fixed update times in glTexSubImage2D itself, but the pipeline was still stalling as GPU resources which were currently in use needed to be updated from the CPU, so a second change made was to bulk update all lightmaps that were changed during a frame at the start of the next frame. No glTexSubImage2D calls were used on-demand, but all light updates were deferred until after everything had been drawn, and this applied equally to the world and to brush models.

A tradeoff here was that light updates were out of step by 1 frame, but in practice it was not even noticeable.

The requirement here was for OpenGL 1.2 or the packed pixels and BGRA extensions.

Further experiments were around using GL_RGB10A2 formats to get more bits of precision and more dynamic range, as well as using the alpha channel of a GL_BGRA texture to store some HDR info, but they didn't go very far with RMQ because another problem had arose in the meantime.

However, these on their own will resolve 99% of the "dynamic light updates are slow and sometimes the engine runs faster if you switch off multitexture" problems that exist with current maps (and that I believe are a large part of the reason why community maps don't make much use of animating lightstyles).

The other problem that arose was in relation to a large (and as yet unreleased) map which made very heavy use of animating lightstyles - almost every surface had some kind of light animation on it. Some simple r_speeds tests revealed that most of the time we were getting 2-4 ms in the renderer, but 10 times per second that shot to 12-20 ms, and the criminal was light updates. Gameplay was very jerky and uneven; not enjoyable at all.

The eventual solution involved blending multiple textures (up to 3) on the GPU and completely ditching glTexSubImage2D light updates. Dynamic lights were done using additive vertex lighting (which was lower quality but we felt it to be acceptable as these lights are so short-lived; you can still see the lower quality in certin cases and if you switch r_lightmap 1 on though).

This moved frametimes from 2-4 ms to 3-5 ms in general cases, but it also meant that the engine was totally immune to the imapact of lightmap updates. Even though overall perf was lower, it was smooth and consistent and with no hitching or frametime spikes.

It also enabled the standard lightmap texture size to go to 512x512 which increased my ability to batch up brush surfaces - double win.

I've since written a more evolved version of this code (using D3D11/SM4) that handles dynamic lighting per-pixel, but it needs more shader instructions, dynamic branching, bitwise operators in shaders, increased constants register space and other higher hardware requirements that are not suitable for use with RMQ. It might be fun to make an "ultra" version of RMQ using a GLSL port of it sometime though, but other priorites must take precedence. 

I thought the "low" monster density in parts was good. It makes more sense, more atmospheric, in such a level. It would have been less so (plus probably frustrating) if every bit of space was jam-packed with enemies.

Some calmer moments improve or reinforce the setting. For example, I remember one situation, I think in the E2M1 part or shortly before, where I dropped down into some sort of basement area with no monsters or items but columns and beams. The area isn't particularly interesting, but it feels like it adds to the sense of place. Perhaps add a few low blueish lights (16x16) there. 

e2m1rq skill 3 when I shoot those 3 expl crates shortly after the start

same thing 2 times in a row 

 

The kids love them, the flashy stuff, the older ,audience dislikes them for the and disparities and nostalgic incongruence.

No. The average age in the RMQ team is surprisingly high, none of the people designing the game are noobs, and there are veterans of the community in the team as well, plus some of us have made landmark Quake maps or mods. This argument holds zero water, I'm sorry.

But I think we all agree on what the Lovecraft synonym stands for in this game,

Hah, an appeal to the audience. First time I hear it described as just a synonym, though. This, as well as the 3kHz audio frequency thing, is splitting hairs and grasping at straws. If Lovecraft isn't what you actually mean, then say what you mean instead. ;-)

otherworldliness, acrane magic, and strange eyeless monsters.

This could as well be a wishy-washy description of AD&D. None of it refutes my point that Quake is mainly a splatter-action game with quite some cheesy humour in it, even if some of the surroundings look like some sort of castle and there's an "evil altar" every once in a while. Much less does it refute the point that it's OK for the enforcer to say "suck it down" after the player died. It makes perfect sense.

As for the "Lovecraftian" in Quake, to be quite honest, there isn't much apart from a few names.

So we agree that there isn't actually that much Lovecraft in Quake, yes? Awesome, then we can let that rest. 

I think I got 4 random armors and sng this time http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/m1-nm.7z 

You completely misinterpreted my post. It wasn't meant as criticism.