please don't be an ayatollah about it.

Lol, with "all due respect" I just gave a simple answer to your question. Not sure why you think I'm being all preachy about this. Then again we all love a bit of salty beef on these forums - keeps it interesting doesn't it?

I don't personally have anything to do with QS's development, but it is my preferred engine, and indeed the FitzQuake/QS/MarkV line of engines are overwhelmingly the engines of choice for the mappers and players on these forums. Not bad for such a "backward thinking" approach I guess. 

HD content will always look terrible in Quake unless all the art assets - including the detail of the level geometry - are upgraded to a consistent fidelity.

2048 pixel texture on a 300-poly monster? Looks like shite. Hi-res bump-mapped textures on ultra-low poly quake level brushwork? Looks like shite. etc. etc.

There has been no attempt to remake Quake in entirely HD content, but what you do get are quarter-arsed efforts that are essentially the quake equivalent of this:

http://i.imgur.com/q3GvKMr.png 

Quake being a highly immersive experience, it undoubtedly benefits from looking better.

Anything would benefit from looking better. But whether HD content and new effects make classic games look better is arguable.

In short, it's about the balance of elements. When you improve textures, they make the geometry look simpler. When you improve skins, you should also improve models (which is something I'm yet to see). And when the character models will be up to modern standarts, if will suddenly be discovered that the whole animation system needs to be reworked just to make them look natural.

Some people don't notice all of this, but some people do. I would really like seeing a modern-yet-faithful Quake reimagining, but I think it should be a standalone project on a new engine, or a very deep reworking of the whole game, which will most likely mean dropping mod support.

Special effects like real-time lighting are less harmful though. In this case I'm only concerned with the fact that the quality of static lighting improved considerably in the last few years, and I'm not sure that real-time rendering can do it justice. 

And let's not forget about the actual quality of the HD art assets that the fans produce. I think it got better with time, but it's still not exactly at the professional level. 

Well, talking about Quake (or any 20-year-old game for that matter) as, ahem, "pixel art" and saying stuff like "an acceptably Quakey aesthetic" sounds pretty preachy and rigid-minded to me. You know, "this must be that way and any divergence is intolerable". Words you can hear in the mouths of zealots and dictators. Just sayin'.

As for the discrepancy between the simplicity of the geometry and the level of detail of hi-res textures, that's a matter of taste. A nice texture will always look better to me on a simple surface than a mess of blocky pixels. I thought they looked like crap 20 years ago and I still do now, luckily now I can get rid of those. And normal maps help a lot in fooling the eye into thinking that what it sees is more than a flat wall. Sure, normals can look a little weird sometimes depending on the viewing angle, but most of the time they do their job very well. As for low-poly models, you're aware that they can be replaced with hi-poly versions, right? If you haven't seen Fredrikh's awesome shambler or those shader animated ammo boxes (the nailgun boxes for example have each individual nail modeled) you're in for a real treat! 

Yeah, a modern reinterpretation of the game would rock all kinds of awesome! Sadly, each and every TC nowadays seems to stall after a while. If we're lucky we can get one entire episode, like Classic Doom, but these projects never see completion anymore. Have you tried Shambler's Castle for Doom 3? It's quite short but it's most definitely a must-play. 

I have, and yes, while it has its problems, it's the direction I was talking about.

A nice texture will always look better to me on a simple surface than a mess of blocky pixels.
Again with the "good vs. low-res" attitude. Low-res can be good too, even if you don't understand it. 

 

 

I do understand low-res when it's real pixel art and not due to hardware limitations like Quake. Wadjet Eye productions, games like Minecraft or Eldritch are prime examples. Eldritch even emulates by geometry the broken lines of the textures in early 3D games! Quake's pixels and muddy palette were only the best approximations id could offer at the time and it makes sense to update them when technology has caught up.

Anyway, as I said it's a matter of taste and neither option is wrong, contrary to Kinn's absurd claim. We're not gonna dwell on it forever, this is not the place for this discussion. I originally asked a simple question and never intended it to escalate into a full-blown argument. But what do you know, vanilla vs. enhanced seems to be a touchy subject for a certain kind of people...

I'm gonna finish with something I wasn't able to add earlier because of connection troubles: you may not be aware of it but the monsters from Shambler's Castle (vore, scrag, fiend) have indeed been ported to Quake. Check also Fredrikh's shambler as mentioned above, it's really a sight to behold - first time I saw it I went "holy shit!" You can find both types of knights, grunts, dogs, Ranger, there's a great model for Tabun's enforcer and more. There's even a hi-poly tarbaby! Plenty of detailed models to complement the fancy textures and lighting effects. Not to mention a fix for the shambler's lightning that makes it finally come out of his hands as it should instead of his belly. 

Pixel art exists due to hardware limitations of the past as well. So?

Then again, I'm one of those misguided individuals who still produce art that's neither pixel art nor "good" art. My motives in this conversation are pretty obvious. 

I did not grow up playing Quake DOS and the first time I did play Quake was the N64 version. I started messing with Quake PC last November and used the Epsilon mod. I originally enjoyed the flashy visuals and weather effects but eventually I transitioned to Quakespasm and never looked back. I am just putting this here as someone who isn't specifically biased to old school quake...ness.

Anyway, I would love to see weather effects in quakespasm/maps. I'd make every flipping one of my maps rain because I love rain in games. 

Sitting next to his partner Kevin Cloud, [Adrian Carmack] clicks his lightpen all day long, making minuscule adjustments, one pixel at a time, to countless texture tiles: lichened stone, pitted wood, corroded metal, viny corpuscular stuff. - Wired

vs

Quake was no pixel art, it was downgraded art to circumvent hardware limitations of the time - some fucking rando

Who do I trust?? 

Technically, Quake has little to no pixel art. Pixel art (in the modern sense at least) requires you to work with the palette colors directly, and 256 colors is a bit too much to handle efficiently.

Still, this kind of art (when it's done well) shares some traits with pixel art, such as a high level of precision when small details are concerned. It's kind of a necessity when you only have so many pixels to convey an idea. 

Mugwump, if you want rtlighting in quake, you need one of FTE, DP, or Tenebrae. They each have different featuresets and their own compatibility quirks too, hurrah.

I personally tend to use vanilla content more often than not. Its at least more consistent with itself, and imho replacement models tend to have goofy animations that I can't stand. Maybe I just don't like change. 

No one has to like amateur HD content. More often than not it's just weak.

Today I looked inside QRP_map_textures_v.1.00.pk3 that I happen to have. One of the first textures I clicked on was this little gem:

http://i.imgur.com/X0UA87y.png

This is a texture of the "bodies" series. Guess what's missing:

http://i.imgur.com/PSVK70R.png (this is the original)

I know drawing is hard, but come on. It's supposed to be an improvement. Although, FWIW, if they'd actually draw the contents of the texture properly, it would still look awkward on a flat 2D surface. You can barely get away with such "macro" detailing on a pixelated texture, let alone a high-res one. 

I like the low res art style. It's kind of funny, back in the old days I used to have a 3dfx card coupled with a Matrox 2d card and often I would prefer to play in software mode. The only time I jumped to the 3dfx card was if I was play Q2 and beyond. 

Because of the lack of space for information, pixel artists have a somewhat impressionistic approach. The result, to me, kinda causes you to "fill in the gaps" with your imagination, giving the world a real sense of depth and interest. This works well with quake's otherworldly setting.

I love high fidelity art as well. But that's a different beast all together and puts a whole different set of demands on the artist.

In my experience, HD content for quake may be "good" in isolation, but in the context of other assets and game geometry it often comes off as inconsistent, out of place and amateurish.

A true HD quake would have to be a total remake with a focused and coherent vision from the ground up. 

Words you can hear in the mouths of zealots and dictators

Cool, so I'm essentially Quake Hitler for simply pointing out why QuakeSpasm does not support the features you describe. Again, I'll repeat that I personally have no say over what features QS does or does not have. I'm just an end user. I happen to agree with the QS design philosophy though, as do I think most people on this forum.

We're not gonna dwell on it forever, this is not the place for this discussion

Hey, you dropped this turd on the carpet, don't think you're getting away without having a good sniff of it.

Quake was no pixel art, it was downgraded art to circumvent hardware limitations of the time

It's pixel art. There was no "downgrading" of existing higher colour or higher resolution artwork. The artists literally sat in front of Deluxe Paint with the Quake palette loaded and painted stuff precisely at the pixel level. Maybe you're using a different definition of "pixel art", in which case this is just a retarded argument over semantics and I haven't really got the time for that.

I'm not quite sure how someone could fire up id.wad in TexMex and look at arch textures like "church7" or things like "window030", "adoor01_2", "enter01", any of the stained glass windows, hell, pick almost any texture in the wad that's not just a plain stone surface...and then claim the artist wasn't precisely and purposely laying down palette colours at the pixel level... 

 

Making all those references to the not shooting Hitler bit from The Office has finally taken its toll. 

Actually, it's precisely the stone surface textures that make me really doubt that each pixel was done in a controlled way. You just don't do that. It's slow. Have you seen the amount of colors used?

While there wasn't any conversion from true color to indexed, it's pretty clear that some "dirty" tricks were still involved. But it really is a pointless argument, because being/not being pixel art doesn't make the assets good or bad automatically. 

Since the engine supports colored static lighting, are there any plans to add some colored dynamic lighting functionality? Right now all dynamic lights are white. 

Have you seen the amount of colors used

It's a very manageable amount actually because the contrast of the textures is very low compared to the range of the colour ramps used - so the number of colours used from each ramp is low, and taken from the darker end of the ramp.

The light colours in the palette only get seen in the game once the lighting engine does its thing.

Trust me, I am currently creating my own quake texture wad by working directly with the palette colours and ramps, using a bespoke pixelling program I wrote for a company I worked at (which was inspired by pixel apps like DPaint and Pro Motion).

Here is a just one example of one of my textures. I don't pretend to be an amazing artist but the aim is to at least be consistent with the style and quality of quake's original textures. The number of colours used is really really low, simply a handful of colours from the lower end of about 3 of the ramps was used in this one, and this texture look literally minutes to bash out:

http://i.imgur.com/YN5DBmG.png 

Do you know how DarkPlaces does colored dynamic lights?

(Hint: it's not pretty)