Lunaren is that awesome that the Quoth skin is already included! Plus two other skins for a low low price of free!

And did I bother in the widescreen version? Oh yes... 

I only know a Lunarian 

The quoth knight is the second skin in knight.mdl. If you want to put it in the quoth folder and keep the operation desert storm shoulder pads, just switch the first and second skins (or just delete the first one even) in QME version anything. 

Have anyone ever attempted to improve it? I think it's the ugliest monster in Quake. 

what's wrong with it? it's got some fantastic animations! 

I like the zombie. The model itself isn't special, but the animations of pulling the gibs off work great.

Spiney did an updated version in RMQ but it was stylistically different from the rest of the id monsters. 

The proportions are weird. I never really liked the animations either.

The pain animation is pretty cool though, although you don't see it very often during normal play. 

The zombie could be improved quite a bit I think, without being at all unfaithful. Trouble with it is that it's got a lot of both fast and slow motions, lurches and drags, which gives you a really cool feeling of hanging weight and a struggle to remain standing - when you only get one frame every 10th of a second that motion suffers, and frame smoothing doesn't fix it.

Maybe I shouldn't point it out but I never tested the knight with model interpolation on, so, hope it looks okay! 

So don't worry. 

someone agrees with me! 

There is surely some scope to manually interpolate the extra frames in the model to push it up to 20fps. There would be a tiny bit of QC required to go with it, but it would make any new modpacks look nicer.

But then I'm a heretic that likes Darkplaces and all of the graphical improvements it has brought, so what do I know? 

But then that would looking jarring compared to the rest of the monsters. 

not if you turn on interpolation! :) 

I'm about as likely to do that as install a hi-res texture pack, or enable .lit lighting or whatever the christ. 

I'd also animate this model differently at a different framerate.

Compromises were made in the timing of heel strikes, because they have to land on a frame to look appropriately snappy. I was also limited in how fast the sword swipes are. If he swings the sword from behind his head to in front of it in one frame, for example, vertex interpolation won't swing the sword around to one side, it'll just morph straight through his head. And, without vert interp, it moves too far in one jump to maintain persistence of vision, and it looks like a teleport rather than a swing. That's why all the sword swipes in Quake, including the axe vmodel, look so sluggish, and also why some of the runs (especially the Enforcer) look oddly weightless and hovery with vert interp.

Games with skeletal animation don't have these problems, because the interpolation between keyframes is rotational by joint.

kinn: I play without vert interp because the assets weren't made to look good with it (for the above reasons) but colored lighting is ok with me because the only maps you're going to play that have it were made for it. You should reconsider :) 

You should reconsider :)

I guess where I was coming from is that until recently, my experience with coloured lighting was with things like that horrific .lit pack for the standard id maps, that bathed every surface in saturated primary colours.

Truth be told, I do tend to play contemporary maps as the mapper intended, with .lit, fog enabled and whatnot. People making maps these days mostly seem to have got over the novelty of .lit and things have mellowed out. 

Only complete and thoughtful rebuilds can improve the content, usually, but I've harped about texture replacement packs and such already.


After looking at the new knight in game for a long time in a lot of contexts, I now begin to feel he's a little too short. :( 

I now begin to feel he's a little too short

I wasn't gonna say anything but I agree he's a little on the vertically challenged side. :}

Still awesome tho. 

Mmm, Quake 64. 

There is surely some scope to manually interpolate the extra frames in the model to push it up to 20fps. There would be a tiny bit of QC required to go with it, but it would make any new modpacks look nicer.

Besides the good points raised already about 20fps, one final thing to consider is the low precision of the mdl format. You get quickly diminishing returns, as bits that were only moving a single unit at 10fps start stuttering. It probably only adds to sequences that are already about large movements: I remember when making my ogre model the overhead chainsaw smash worked a bit better with extra tweening frames.

However...if you were going to do it, you could make the model backwards compatible by putting all the tweening frames AFTER the standard frames, so the 20 fps animation of the knight stand animation goes

0, 97, 1, 98, 2, 99,...., 8, 105

That way you get a model that works as a drop-in replacement with some junk frames at the back, which picks up to 20fps with the right code. Interesting to note that you can only pull this off with models whose framecount is no more than 128, else you exceed the basic protocol limit of 256 frames. The 20fps zombie would either need extended engine limits or only selective application of high frame rates...

One last nostalgic note for this plan: in winquake I believe the mod would actually be backwards compatible with the old model! That's because in winquake, when you set a frame above the model's framecount, the frame is reduced into range modulo the framecount. Hence you'd get frame 96 mapped back to frame 0 and 10fps re-emerges! Sadly glquake sets all out of range frames to frame 0 instead, so these tricks are dead.

Unless you combined it with the protocol limits! Pad the model to 255 frames! Then add the tween frames from frame 256! In old protocols the model is 10fps and in extended engines it's 20fps! ed: at this point Preach was sedated and returned to his cell, we'll let him back tomorrow 

another (remotely) possible issue with 20 fps animations, if implemented in quakec, is that the enemy logic will slow down if game fps drops below 20 fps -- this is because the enemy can only think once per frame. 

it would also mess with the probabilities for attacks. if a monster has a 10% chance to attack every frame, and you bump from 10 to 20 fps, you now have twice the chance to attack.

otoh, they would be able to maneuver better because they would call movetogoal more often but with smaller increments reducing the chance to hit a wall and cancel movement (so they'd fit through doorways easier, for example). 

His legs are definitely short, but he would be a bit taller with the original's style of sharp/pointed helm and pauldrons. But I'm partially bringing that up as I like that look. Like the metal was hammered out quickly by an ogre who'd rather do other things, and the knight's meat was crammed into it. 

Mini-bump for side question:

Any chance to get a version of this model for MP2 (Dissolution of Eternity) as well? Basically all it requires is an edit of the statue skin. 

Because I'm a horrible friend, I forgot to set the 'blood trail' flag on the head gib. Only took me three years to notice.

The files at the original links have been updated.