That was Darkplaces. 

I just realized I confused that demo with another engine which was entirely focused on optimization, I think that demo might have been a response to this other engine, the way Darkplaces had real time lighting as a response to Tenebrae. 

There's RemakeQuake's engine:

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.wordpress.com/page/3/

And AguirRe's engine also had a massive box with a load of knights in it as a test. 

mh made a map with 500 knights in it. The engines listed in the title to this post play it, I haven't tried any else. The download for the map is in the comments of one of mh's blog post. There's a screenshot of the map in the post, it shouldn't be hard to find. 

was it actually 250000 knights? cause if so, that's a bit more than 500.

fq has max edicts of 32000, so it could theoretically handle ~31985 knights if it was a completely empty box map.

anyway, at that high level of monsters, the bottleneck becomes the qc. i know this from experience. ^_^; 

maybe my memory has been making the tale taller

thanks for the responses I'll check all of this stuff out. 

It was darkplaces with 10000 hell knights. 

 

I want to see a gazillion knights... 

Cant find a link. The map is called helm18. Does run but apparently not very well... 

http://ghdigital.com/~havoc/helm10000.zip

Make sure you don't have unsaved work open, engines suck at error handling. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PjYn-Cvkwo

Looks fun :) 

Recently played with Direct Quake myself, was impressed by how much it handled bigger stuff over Fitzquake. a fast-vis version of my current project ran much better. Will be using it myself in future :)

My laptop was playable with about 200 knights when I tried this kind of thing myself, but that's in a box, no geometry, and no projectile enemies. Once you factor in monsters like Death Guards or Ogres and geometry things get a bit more messy :( I'd still like to make a Quake level approaching Doom BFG zerg stuff sometime though :) 

http://www.gdconf.com/news/the_gdc_25_chronicles/the_gdc_25_chronicles_a_quake_.html

Haven't watched it yet, looks interesting. 

Only excerpts are online at this point. The whole recording is worth waiting for. 

Awesome, a flashback into the 90s.

Love the green T-shirt. Brilliant guy, too. 

Does anyone know how/if one can kill those "chests"? 

the entire audio is already there, but yeah, only 2 video excerpts are up so far. 

http://www.gdcvault.com//play/mediaProxy.php?sid=1014236

without a shitty flash player 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q-xqI8Cm5A&feature=player_embedded= 

That looks cool! 

played this one today at XS4ALL - QuakeWorld FOD Free For All awesome map layout and gameplay for ffa!

miss this one from tiddles don't knoe even why :\

quake.xs4all.nl:27500

http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4291 

Excellent !! A 3D doom-like arcade game ! 

Updated the content on
"Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake1:
High Resolution Texture, Model, Music Packs and User-Made Episodes"
at:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jimw/ClassicFPS/

January 14, 2011 - Content

Quake1 add on files for darkplaces engine
Collection from the Web. I did not create the data in these files.
/Darkplaces/ID1 Complete Hi-Res Everything, 6 files
/Darkplaces/Missions_Packs 9 add on games
/Stand_Alone 1 game, nothing else required

High-Res Addon: DarkHour-DarkPack - StarWars TC for DoomII using gzDoom Engine
High-Res Addon: The Original Missions - Wolf3D TC for DoomII using gzDoom Engine 

It always makes me sad how those "high-res" packs make pixel art classics look like low-budget shovelware from the late-nineties.