But with a custom engine you could use high-res skins like this http://www.securitronlinux.com/files/dp000012.jpg 

But with a custom engine you could use high-res skins like this

But why would I want to see a knight in that much detail? Would H.P. Lovecraft's stories have been improved if he presented his horrors in such mundane and precise detail? 

First, you think colored light is fine, then you'd want truecolor textures...
this way you'll end up with q2 monsters allover your maps!
And the last thing you know you are not allowed on quaddicted anymore. 

doesn't do coloured lighting. 

Rock on, Kinn. You're a man after my own heart. :) Blocky pixels and low res texture FOREVER.

That high res knight, to me, looks ridiculous. 

but it can now stab you with its nose!

didn't everyone get the memo on "higher resolution being always better"? 

but it can now stab you with its exaggerated junk! 

Rock on, Kinn. You're a man after my own heart. :) Blocky pixels and low res texture FOREVER.

/hugs Willem.

And I bet he looks real menacing when the 8-bit vertex precision is causing his face to swim around on his cube head like a swirl of cr�me fra�che on a bowl of carrot soup.

I truly believe, in the most honest and genuine way, that Quake in its untainted, software rendered form has a timeless quality to its visuals that is only degraded by the addition of polygons or additional colours or texture effects or whatever. All of the visual elements perfectly balance and complement each other in terms of style, level of detail, palette etc. etc. Any changes to one or more throws the balance out of whack and the overall effect is only one of dissonance. Unless you literally redo every aspect of Quake's visuals so that you achieve a new overall unification, you're always going to end up with something that looks like one of those cheap shovelware games from ten years ago or something. 

causing his face to swim around on his cube head like a swirl of cr�me fra�che on a bowl of carrot soup.

seriously, are these just coming to you? hehehe :D 

but it can now stab you with its exaggerated junk!

Heh, reminds me of this "alternative" hellknight skin I once did but wisely decided not to inflict upon the world. Check out those buns. Feel free to use it if you're so inclined:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61424391/Temp/campness.bmp 

 

What's your painting method?

Despite his arse hanging out and him looking like an extra from the sexually ambiguous 300 it's well done :) 

draw a bit, smudge a bit, draw a bit, smudge a bit...

The idea behind this particular hellknight is that I wanted to create a monster that looked like he might have a fate worse than death in store for you. I mean you look at a regular hellknight and you think "yeah he looks like he wants to kill me", but then you look at this new hellknight and you probably think "he looks like he might kill me, but then again he looks like he might do something else to me". And that is one hell of a terrifying concept.

Btw - you lot might find these curves i made useful:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61424391/Temp/photoshop%20curves/photoshop%20curves.rar

take any layer in photoshop that has been desaturated to grey, and apply one of these curves to it. Voila! You now have a deliciously Quakey colour!

When you flatten your final image to the quake palette notice that you will get the closest possible colour preservation on these quakerised bits.

I must emphasise - only apply these to grey things, or the colouring will not work. 

Are there any mods that can do this?

What i'm thinking I want to do is have the player leave the current map and go to another small level for a little bit then come back to the main map and have it be in the same state as when they left.

is it possible to do in Quoth for example? That would be perfect :))) 

 

no, it's not possible in anything that doesn't have engine support.

i've been trying to haxor that in with only qc for a while, and it's just not possible without massive haxoring (ie: storing player information in console variables like cl_forward or other weirdo crap and then abusing save/loadgame console commands).

the problem is that you only have 16 floats that you can carry across to other maps, 10 of which are already in use. if you wanted to do anything more complex than fire a few triggers off, you're out of luck.
the best you could hope to achieve is to use bit fields on the 6 (7 if you get rid of one parm that's not really needed) to get 6 * 24 = 144 on/off states. and that's incredibly limited.

using an engine that supports FRIK_FILE (which lets you write external files from QC) allows you to save entity states yourself via qc. this is what's used in prydon gate, iirc. 

interesting... if you change line 1350 in ltface.c from:
SkyLightFace (&entities[0], &l, SunLight[i != 0], SunLightColor[i != 0], SunMangle[i], i > 0);
to
SkyLightFace (&entities[0], &l, SunLight[i != 0], SunLightColor[i != 0], SunMangle[i], false);
this disables minlights on _sunlight2.
then, change the constant NOOFVSUNS in light.h from 4 to 32
coupled with very low _sunlight2 numbers 2~4 will yield a pretty decent fake GI effect like lunaran's recent map... 

that's for MH's version of aguirre's light.exe 

yeah i actually did something like that myself a couple years ago... never got it polished up enough to really be usable though. For example i wanted to generate a full sphere (or half-sphere) of really dim suns for true global illumination / ambient occlusion.

I also had a related idea where seeing the sky wasn't necessary, it would simply shoot rays out in all directions from a surface and the farther the ray could go, the more light i would add (as if teh air itself glowed a bit) -- might look good in skyless interior spaces. 

... but i think this is worth pursuing because the current state of outdoor lighting in quake maps is people just throw in a sunlight and sunlight2 and think they're done, and it looks really flat and bland to me. Global illumination would look much better without any extra work on the mapper's part. 

yeah, aguirre was on the right track when he implemented the minlight skydome idea for exterior minlight, but the results of using additive lights instead of min lights is really quite remarkable.

also, a little more testing found the previous 32 v suns to be way excessive.

12 HSuns and 12VSuns is enough to get a really good and smooth fake GI look.
also, you need to disable the VSun changes for -extra modes. specifically, the if block concerning oversampling around line 1300. just comment it out completely and set NoOfHSuns to 12. you don't want the number of suns to vary now because they are additive and will become brighter in -extra4 mode.
i'm not smart enough to figure it out atm, but i'm sure someone could just take a look at #of suns and divide the light level to keep things consistent, but i found it probably wouldn't matter since at 12x12 suns, it's fast enough to not really matter much when using -fast but won't be insanely slow in -extra4 more (in my original post, it was probably 32x32=1024(!) suns in -extra4 mode which is... ridiculous. 

this is all just testing on a small ~1000 brush map with only 8000 faces.

i imagine, because of the way light works, with a full size map with tens of thousands of faces, it'll have a much bigger impact on light times. 

i guess a couple of screenshots are in order...

here is the original light, sunlight:220, sunlight2: 60
http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/fakeGITest_0.jpg

and with the haxored version, sunlight: 100, sunlight2: 2
http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/temp/fakeGITest_1.jpg 

forgot to comment on this:

I also had a related idea where seeing the sky wasn't necessary, it would simply shoot rays out in all directions from a surface and the farther the ray could go, the more light i would add (as if teh air itself glowed a bit) -- might look good in skyless interior spaces.

this sounds quite awesome, honestly... would make a good base light pass. 

that is awesome! the second screenshot looks way better than the minlighted-sunlight. going to have to try that next time I do some mapping.

re: light fantasies, one I was thinking would be cool is if light.exe projected light from fullbright pixels of textures. you could even have the light color be the color of the fullbright, or plain white, or somewhere in between for a subtle effect.