I have no idea what went on in their heads when making that guy.

Every poly saved was a win back then. Also I imagine the 'bler was one of the early models, like the knight. Later on they had optimised the engine enough to allow for 400-600 poly characters like hellknights and dogs, but I guess no-one deemed it worth remaking the shambler. 

I will let that one pass because I do this for a living. Quake got me hooked on modding and game development after all when it came out.

I do agree with Kinn that it was most likely one of the first things and never got updated. Any game with a consistent art standard would not give a tiny dog enemy over 500 triangles and then 200 triangles for what is effectively an end game boss monster.

We love the shambler for its size, soundscape and evilness. It could have done with better construction and for dang sure better rigging back then though :P 

Quake originally ran in 8-bit and 320x200. At that resolution it truly makes no difference whether there are 200 or 2000 triangles on a model. 

But now we try to enjoy it with a little more detail... just a little bit. 

is the implication in your reply that the shambler is a bad model? not sure how you can come to that conclusion. with 200 triangles, it would be difficult to make a convincing model like the shambler. i am judging the model based on 1997 as that is when it was made. i guess you are judging it on 2015 standards, which is not really fair. 

There's also the disparity in triangle counts. The dog gets 600 while the shambler gets 200? I think it definitely smells like a case of the shambler got done first and the dog was done later ... and there was no time to re-visit the shambler. 

So, if I make an md3 I would still bother learning mdl stuff? MD3 is not an industry standard outside Quake world, right? So I would have to learn the tricks of two proprietary vintage model formats? Correct me if I'm wrong, please.

If my model's mdl version is just boilerplate, it would be... more boilerplate to care about. If I have to craft an mdl it would double my work, I would have to model for two formats, my monster would still have to look and work decent in mdl. 

.mdl is about as hard as downloading preach's md3->mdl converter I think.

I may be missing something, so others please jump in. 

it's really that simple. 3d app -> mdl involves md3 so you just keep doing the same thing. 

The issue of md3 backwards-compatibility would present a unique - and possibly quite annoying - quandary, because the more you make use of the capabilities of md3, the worse the fallback mdl is going to look.

Do you not care that a certain percentage of players will witness your awesome tentacle boss monster in the form of a horribly mangled soup of quivering triangles?

Do you purposely constrain your design so that the mdl will still look "ok"?

I think I'd take the latter approach because the thought of it looking terrible in certain engines would grind my goat a bit. But this approach does undermine the whole idea, I will admit. 

How will darkplaces deal with this md3 + mdl model you're planning? 

Do you purposely constrain your design so that the mdl will still look "ok"?

I wrote this article a while back and I think some of it would relate to MD3 upgrading MDL

https://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/progressive-enhancement/

The most successfully adopted features across all engines, like fog, skyboxes, external textures and alpha, all exhibit some echo of progressive enhancement, so I think it's a pattern to bear in mind. 

That is very sensible and sound. I agree. 

If I recall, DarkPlaces uses .mdl as the file name.

And then it checks the first few bytes of the file with the name "solider.mdl" for the word "IDP3" to see if it is MD3 (or some other model format). 

In standard quake engines, whether something is loaded as a mdl, bsp or spr is always determined by the header, never by the file extension. In theory you can use any extension you like for anything!

But the scheme that plans to rename an md3 file with a .mdl extension does fail to have any level of backwards compatibility. Something a bit more along the line of...

progs/cultist.mdl
progs/cultist.mdl.md3

...where precaching "progs/cultist.mdl" will first try to find "progs/cultist.mdl.md3" and load that as a substitute if it's available, would work a lot better. A bit like how .lit is a separate file with a name-matching convention, so it doesn't affect old engines but takes effect automatically in new ones. 

I want a cultist model now! 

I really should go back and revisit this chap someday...

https://tomeofpreach.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/cultist.jpg

He needs a quality pass on the skin and a completed set of animations though so may take a while. 

As I said before and Warren pointed out again... Shambler 200 triangles... Dog 600 triangles... smells suspect to say the least. I think we can all agree that the shambler was a little light back in the day. Now on a pure quality standpoint I found the rigging to be a sad sight with how it deformed back then even. But that is a discussion for another day. :) 

Give him a pump-action shotgun and some blade legs instead! 

They didn't have rigging at first. Kevin Cloud had to do at least some of that animation pose by pose by moving verts.

I don't know what software they used, but the original tools all only parsed Alias .TRI files, so whatever Alias's 3D package was at the time. Advanced Visualizer, maybe?

anyway, off topic 

Well not much excuse for bad rigging even in 1996. Soft skinning was already supported in various art packages like Maya, Softimage and hell even 3ds DOS with an early version of bones pro. Yea off topic. crazy how just improvement in the art tool pipeline can upgrade old games without changing the underlying systems. 

I'm having some fun writing some GLSL shaders effects lately and i wanted to know how to apply them into QuakeSpasm. Small and fun things like Nightvision, B&W, etc. Where i can find docs on the subject? 

Dunno, but make sure you write a shader that makes it look like software quake. 

is right... the software mode would be neat. Also make sure you get the terrible z-plane texture wobbliness. 

Making the large models (like shambler) just disappear if they get too close to the edges of the screen would be sweeeeet.