The "censored" health .lmp's are located in \steamapps\common\Quake\rerelease\id1\pak0.pak in the "progs" folder. They even have animation for the non-rotten packs. It's strange they weren't used. Maybe it's as you say, the lack of white background turned out to be "good enough."

Yeah, I remember when almost all games had the Red Cross on their health packs. Funny how things change. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see the Swiss flag being used instead. Ridiculous. 

The maps store wateralpha/slimealpha/lavaalpha/telealpha in the worldspawn key, and the engine reads them and uses them as overrides for the cvars.

The maps also have their fog settings in worldspawn, including sky fog. 

The new sound files are 44khz files but the sound data in them is lowpassed at 22khz, so the files are actually twice as large as they need to be. That's probably not worth patching. 

The remastered sounds sound a lot better in Quakespasm with sndspeed 44100. Nice find! 

Yeah seems they found all the 22kHz sounds they could (some of them they didn't) and just batch-converted them to 44100. I tried the new ones in Quakespasm, it sounds better than in the KEX Engine Enhanced version, less clipping, but it's still there. I think it's mostly due to most of the sounds being super loud and compressed (meaning dynamic range) themselves.

They also have couple of unused Fiend sounds in the rerelease sounds. After playing Quake for all this time since '96 the new higher quality sounds just feel "off" for me, so I'm gonna stick to original muffled noisy 11kHz ones.

It's awesome to get the higher quality sounds anyway, I use HEALTH1.WAV as my message tone and PROTECT.WAV as ringtone, time to upgrade :) 

One of the involved people who's is present on Quake Mapping Discord confirmed it's because there's no white background:

> its not a problem in quake because it's not on a white background, it's a plus on a bunch of green techy stuff 

https://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/MD5_1.jpg

https://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/MD5_2.jpg

Note that this is in a regular source port, NOT the Quake 2021 Kex engine.

Note also that these are the actual source MD5s copied over, NOT conversions. 

If you want to see some MDL conversions in action, we have already added those we wanted to the AMQ. Check latest dev build on Github. 

Had a look at an Ogre in e1m3; the first one you encounter in Normal skill (around the corner to the right, not the one behind bars), looking at it with notarget on and viewing it's idle animation.

This I guess is a case of different things annoying different people in different ways, but I see some very extreme vertex wobble in it.

This was with frame interpolation on. Maybe it's less pronounced if you switch off frame interpolation? 

I have interpolation on in QSS and tbh it looks just fine to me. 

I agree with mh. Vertex wobble is very noticeable. Took a short video of it in QSS.

https://youtu.be/VoxHGqptqFM 

Heh, reminds me of Kingpin! 

In an ideal world QuakeSpasm and derivatives would just load and use the MD5s directly. Now that they're official, and now that MD5 is an official MDL replacement format, this makes sense to do.

I know that QS hasn't released in a while, but cruising by it's Github page I see that it's still being actively worked on, and is starting to take up changes for the Quake 2021 reissue. Same with VkQuake. 

The new Quake Kex assets are NOT in any of the official AMQ releases yet. Your video footage does not show our latest models, I am afraid.

You must download the dev build from the Github page. To do so, click on "Code" (green button), then "Download Zip". THAT'S the way to get the new stuff right now since we aren't fully ready for a release yet, so it's NOT to be found under "Releases".

I admit that Github navigation can be confusing to people who aren't used to it, but that's the way it works. 

I admit that Github navigation can be confusing to people who aren't used to it, but that's the way it works.

It's confusing even if you are used to it (18 repositories and I still get lost).

Anyway, that is significantly improved, although I'm still seeing wobble compared to the source MD5s.

That's not a criticism of anyone's work, by the way. Vertex wobble is a "feature" of the MDL format caused by compressing positions to 8 bits, and that's just what it is. 

Has anyone done a detailed comparison of how the remastered version is implemented versus vanilla/derived? For instance, does the remastered still use QuakeC with progs.dat, or does it use something else? If it uses progs.dat, is there a formal source dump? Are the assets the same format or different?

I'd love to see a tabular breakdown/comparison. 

@mtp I agree. I'd love to eventually see some community documentation of the technical changes that are relevant for mappers, modders, and engine coders. Things like changes to the protocol (e.g. svc_achievement), new file formats (e.g. md5), new console commands or cvars (e.g. menu_credits), changes to how autoexec.cfg is handled, etc.

@mh, the work you are doing for md5 would be great as a sample implementation, unless it depends too much on each engine's model renderer. 

I could release my MD5 code publicly but I fear it would be of little use to people. It's all D3D11, buffers and shaders, that kind of stuff.

The code at http://tfc.duke.free.fr/coding/md5-specs-en.html is probably more useful to the Quake community. That's a working implementation that uses GL 1.1 code and that my own is based on.

The main thing missing from that code is generating normals. There is code in modelgen.c for this and that can lift over clean enough.

It also does it's skeletal animation on the CPU at draw time, whereas I've used the bones and frames to build keyframes instead. My way takes more memory but it's highly compatible with my MDL renderer.

An option is I could port an implementation to QuakeSpasm. Last time I publicly fiddled with QuakeSpasm I did have needy, demanding people descend on me practically ordering me to do Linux builds just for them, so I made the project private and I'm really reluctant to go there again.

I don't know, do people want the MD5 stuff? 

@mtp I think it uses QC progs.dat (but only 328KB instead of vanilla 411KB), for example it ran Team Fortress 2.8 alright, the centerprint menus are messed up (but they work) and the intro crashes the game after a few seconds, so I deleted demo1.dem from the fortress pak. I also experimented with FrikBots adapted for Clan Arena, but the game crashes when I try to load any map. :(
So, sadly there may be quite a few classic Quake mods that won't work properly. 

Not sure if your code would be generally applicable to other engines. Probably the loader and the code that bakes out the poses could be generally useful, even if the rendering part isn't.

Although I feel engines would be better off doing the skeletal animation in realtime, for fidelity reasons. Fast-rotating shapes tend to collapse if each vertex is lerped directly, whereas if the bone is rotating, then the verts could follow an arcing path, so the overall shape doesn't deform or collapse.

That link you posted also looks very useful, though. 

@mh, I am sure making it available in Quakespasm would be nice for folks. I have no problem with UNIX-like build systems; and for demanding/needy users who aren't, it's a good chance to learn how. ;)

@rickzeppelin, that somewhat matches my expectations. I wonder to what extent there are signature mismatches between the QuakeC interfaces or the in-engine hooks/stubs/thunks that the QuakeC code calls. Then comes the wire format used for demos and the network. Here be dragons.

I built a progs.dat decompiler in Go (almost finished) as a part of a self-study project. I was interested in trying my hand at decompiling qtest1's progs.dat, but that uses a different signature. Sadly I don't have a lot of time right now to inspect the header signatures of qtest1's progs.dat. I was mainly interested in trying to learn how the in-game logic differed from the public release à la The Cutting Room Floor.

I know it's naive, but I was really hoping that the remastered project materially was derived from the vanilla engine to preserve maximum compatibility. 

I'm working towards a standalone release of the MD5 stuff, derived from my engine, that people can use as a base rather than as a drop-n-go replacement.

That means that the renderer and some of the loader will be Direct3D 11, but it should be quite clear what's going on.

A very subtle bug in the new content.

The Grunt's gun has a red light that uses fullbright texels on the original MDL skin, but the Nightdive guys missed it on their MD5 replacement. 

Presumably NightDive could have replaced the vanilla cube hitboxes with much more accurate ones if they'd wanted to. It'd be interesting to know if they even considered it, or just instinctively knew that the community would reject it. Personally I think it would be quite a good way to raise the skill ceiling of the game and prevent players from picking off Shamblers and Vores from around corners, but would it detract from the Quakiness of the reboot? 

....would it detract from the Quakiness of the reboot?

I think it's the kind of change that would have gotten colossal pushback from the community.

As it stands they're already getting a rough time from some, and I think a large part of that is down to the fact that ID had neglected Quake 1 for so long that the community feels a stronger sense of ownership towards it, and any changes are maybe viewed as a challenge to that sense of ownership.

I think a new "Ultra-Nightmare" mode incorporating this kind of change would be good though, and maybe would have been the right thing to do for the changes they made to the existing Nightmare mode as well. 

Check out those red fullbright pixels on the Red Armor!