If you don't mind asking, why not? Unless you're breaking the original engines limits that is. If so I get it and I completely approve (not that my opinion matters a bit of course).

One of the things that I forgot to mention in my previous post was that I almost positive that your project would break the limits set by the hardware of 1995, and why not? That was one of the issues that ID was facing and why there was a much more blocky layout.

I think that any Quake level should still have that blocky feeling (at least in the background) because that's part of what classically defines it (and the original models wouldn't look right if that blockiness wasn't there anyway) but with todays tools, engines and hardware there's no reason to not get a bit more detailed or add more surfaces to draw at once even when you know for a fact that it's going to break the original limits

I was under the impression that you were going to basically keep the general tone of each level, add some new areas to explore, move some secrets and maybe add new ones but in the end keep enough of the original levels general idea to make it recognizable as such while switching up the gameplay to make it fresh again (that's what the similarly named Doom mod did so that's what I assumed here). Was I wrong in that impression or have you changed your vision as to what you want the end product to look like?

I'm not trying to sound whiny here (especially when the whole thing is going to be free anyway so there is no reason for anyone to complain) but there is only what I've read here written by you to go on and the screenshots are few and far between. 

With all due respect and not meant as discouragement but QTWID not running in the original engines would be a major disappointment. 

Would be a major breach of public trust. 

I wanted to address this separately because I wanted to make some very specific points on it.

Alternate universes in fiction (and lets face it, Quake is set in a fictional world) have things that are the same yet different (sometimes very different, but still recognizable). For example, even though they share a lot of similarities in settings in a general sense, Star Trek is not set in the alternate universe of Star Wars. They are two very different universes.

I hate to sound like a Trekkie but if you look at how they did it the bones (not the doctor) were the same. The ships were similar in layout and overall feel, the enemies were similar (although they may be the opposite where who was once an enemy were now your friends and vice versa) and so on. In other words you knew what was going on was in an alternate universe, there were enough similarities to know in a general sense where you were but you may have to do things differently to complete your goals.

As a simple thought example, in the original Start.bsp the easy and hard level teleporters might be swapped in an alternate universe where reading was from Right to Left. In that universe it would make perfect sense and not cause anyone to bat an eye but would certainly draw comments in the original Quake universe. I'm not saying that a simple transposition is the answer but that the basic idea's could be the same while still being very different in implementation.

In another example e1m2 has a lot of things going on as far as choices for the player to get around. In an alternate universe some of the original ways to do things would have to be kept while others wouldn't be there but replaced by something different. Secrets, weapons and ammo may or may not be in the same places but the same amount and types would be there, that sort of thing. Continuity is the keyword here. The player has to be able to say to themselves "Hey I've been here before but it's different now".

Let the levels that you are re-imagining keep the bones of the originals. Then you are doing a "Quake as ID did it" because those bones are what helped to make Quake in the first place. Otherwise you are just doing another original mod or map pack and that may or may not stand out above the others. Gimmicky gravity might not be the way to go unless you do some careful thought on it first.


Again, just my two cents and that's not worth a whole lot these days. 

I respectfully disagree Shambler.

There are at least a few (free I might add) engines out there that are at least as good as the software 1.0.8 and GLQuake ones that do allow you to break the limits. Unless you want to play on a x386 with 8mb of ram and maybe, if you are lucky, a 260mb hard drive there is no reason for not being able to break the limits, not anymore.

If FifthElephant wants to keep it inside the original limits I have no problem with that (what I said was pure conjecture, but I did expand upon it) but it might limit what he has said in the past about what he wanted to do (he was after all recently considering switching over to Quoth which is so far outside of the limits that it's not even close to being original Quake, so consider that). But ultimately it's his project and it's his call. I'll respect his decision either way and let the work stand for itself in the end. 

Quake The Way ID Did It?

There's a clue in the name... 

If it's no longer what the name implies, better call it something else. People take issue with those things. 

 

IMHO do what you think is best. Whether or not that conforms to some nostalgic pre-existing name based bias is another question. 

look at the original qsrc world.qc

=================
void() worldspawn =
{
lastspawn = world;
InitBodyQue ();

// custom map attributes
if ((self.model == "maps/e1m8.bsp")|| (self.model == "maps/insertyourmapnamehere.bsp"))
cvar_set ("sv_gravity", "100");
else
cvar_set ("sv_gravity", "800");
============
that should do the trick
something like that 

I agree 100%. But it's a take off of "Doom the way ID did it". And that is not something that would ever run on the classic Doom engine. It exceeds the Doom limits in almost all respects and requires engines that exceed those limits, which is why I said that I expected that this would exceed the Quake limits.

Did I say "Exceed" enough? That is kind of the point of these types of things. Quake made as if almost no limits were there to keep the original level designers constrained to very limited .bsp and hardware constraints of the day. What would they do given the broad palette that they left behind if they would do it now?

The concept was never to run inside the limits of the original Quake engine (and apologies to FifthElephant if I ever misrepresent this, that's all on me) but to take the original levels and tweak, twist, modify or otherwise change them to be the same, yet different. All while not worrying about original limits.

He's (apologies to FifthElephant if you are a she but he works better in text) is trying to re-image the original Quake levels in some other way. From past comments made by him I was just trying to remind him and the readers of this thread of what he said his idea was months ago. Mission creep sucks and all I wanted to do was to nudge him away from it. 

The sentence is "Quake The Way Id Did It" not "Quake The Way Id Might Have Done It If This And That". 

Doom The Way id Did doesn't exceed any vanilla limits. It was designed to be as close to the stock levels as possible. 

Doom The Way ID Did does run on the classic engine. The whole point of the project, and similarly FE's Quake The Way ID Did, was to make (new) levels that look and play like they could have been part of the original games, as if made by ID themselves. It does NOT mean touching up on the stock maps or making overly detailed maps that break vanilla engine limits.

I'm also of the opinion that the QTWID levels should run in vanilla engines, otherwise it would defy the goals or the idea of the project. How can they exceed the limits anyway - one should think that smaller, less detailed maps wouldn't even come close to having any of such issues. If they do, there's clearly something wrong with the design.

At the end of the day, it's FE's decision how to proceed. However, I would be very disappointed if it turned afterwards that tweaking the levels for vanilla limits was possible after all. 

This is a lot of text.

I will probably be disappointing many people with this project. The first couple levels will very likely run on the original engine but the last two maps I made I went a bit mad with the details.
The maps are supposed to be like an extension to the game not a revisit of the originals.

I think if I went back and took out all the details just to make it run in the original exe people would be mad. I might just give it a name like the expansion packs and let it be its own thing.

People will still see the inspiration from the original game 

I am a mere lurker, but I think a proper QTWID should be a community project where detailed id style analyses are used to vet and refine maps, just like DTWID. Studying the DTWID site and Doomworld discussion threads would be a good first step. And of course all maps should be vanilla-compatible. Anything else does not follow the TWID ethos and should really use another name, IMO. I very much hope someday a proper QTWID is done, and it would be unfortunate if the name was already taken by a set of maps that follow a significantly different design philosophy. 

I agree with you on all points. 

using winquake and all the maps except map 3 run fine.

The only problem is map 3 took me quite a long time to make and is fairly elaborate. I dont think I could go back and rework the entire map. I think I would have to redo a lot of it from scratch. Honestly it may be unsuitable for redoing as it's just too detailed and too much of the map is visible from any one point.

As for making QTWID a community project? I did make an attempt to do this and the guys here ended up doing a speed map session that ended up only 1 map really feeling like it was made by id. 

Which limits does the third map exceed specifically and by how much?

Community projects don't work here anymore, unfortunatly. There's simply too little of an active mapping community left. 

The geometry is disappearing, probably too much shit visible on screen. So you can see into the void in a number of areas.

This is the only map which has this problem. I'm probably going to have a look at making some cuts to get it to run in vanilla. 

Oh. I thought you were talking about the hard limits that crash old engines. Technically, according to the rules disappearing stuff or grey flashes shouldn't occur in TWID maps, indeed, mut this is not that much of a critical problem in comparison. It can be alleviated by adjusting maxsurfs and maxedges in software engines. Of course, if you could optimize the areas a little more, it would go a long way. Still, no end-of-the-world problem as it sounded at first. 

Aren't there already tonnes of maps that are qtwid (ps shouldn't it be qtwidi, what happened to the 'it'?), just play anything from 96/97/98 and they're all within original limits and mostly id textures.

What exactly is Quake the way Id did it anyway... small, blocky, underdetailed levels? Is that really what people want to play now?

I'm all for creating some levels inspired by the style and design that id did, but "extremely under-detailed" shouldn't be a prerequisite. You can make an id themed map with detail.

I wouldn't worry about a custom progs and it not running on the original engine. Is there anyone at all that would actually attempt to run this in the original engine at 640x480? I'd still be playing it in dp. 

in standard quake. Probably still needs a tiny bit of tweaking but it's pretty much resolved. (Just chopped down on detail a bit)
The detail I have reduced isn't going to be missed, the map has still retained the same feeling. I think once I am done with this pak I will make a much more detail intensive map like I did with q-deck. This should restore balance to the universe. 

According to the DTWID site:
"The idea behind this project was to imagine that the original Doom had more maps before the release, but they were lost. The mappers tried to simulate the work of John Romero, Sandy Petersen, Tom Hall and achieve that authentic id-feeling in their maps."

Achieving that id feel entailed analyzing Romero, Petersen, and Hall's individual mapping styles/habits and refining submissions based on community feedback to better emulate those styles. You can see how the project developed and find some great design analysis in this gargantuan thread:
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/52046-dtwid-public-beta-5-released/ 

if the name causes so much offence (spiney was rigth re RMQ reference) call it soemthing else and still do what you think is right fifth.