Yeah I think it adds a lot of depth, and helps reduce the repetitiveness. 

Let's get this much clear from the outset.

I have an (unreleased) engine that can do lit water too. It's not lughtmapped, it's real-time lighting of water surfaces using the same lighting equation as was used by the original light.exe, but just run in real-time rather than precalculated.

I say this to emphasise one thing: I have seen it and I know what it looks like.

You won't convince me by showing static screen shots, nor a .gif that animates between with/without.

You need to see it move, you need to move around in a map that has lughtmapped water, see how water areas actually look while you're actually playing the game.

Here's why it sucks.

First of all you can't see the turbulent surface animation in dark areas. It just looks like solid black. Yes, I know the obvious counterargument here, but losing the turbulent animation is a worse tradeoff than losing the lightmap.

Second, it doesn't interact properly with translucent water. Nobody's going to pretend that Quake's lighting is physically correct, but there are degrees of what can or can't be accepted, and light should just go through translucent water.

Lughtmapped water overall reminds me of those gratuitous eye-candy features that people used to do back in 2001 or so. Everybody had their own variant of a sexy 32-bit particle system, for example, and it's only with the benefit of hindsight that we can finally say they were all horrible.

People get excited about these things because they're seeing something new for the first time. But the fact that it's new doesn't automatically make it good.

So no, I'm not hung up on it and I'm certainly not hating on something I don't know about. I've been there, done that with other features, I've seen lightmapped water in action, I know where it doesn't work well, and I know enough to classify it among other features that the community was similarly initially excited about but ultimately rejected.

It would be just nice if we didn't drag everyone through the bit in the middle this time. 

"You need to see it move, you need to move around in a map that has lughtmapped water, see how water areas actually look while you're actually playing the game."

hey dude in case you didnt know mappers have seen it in game and still enjoy it. were not just fellating to static screenshots, weve seen it in game and prefer lit water. 

You can't see anything when it's too dark to see. That's not a reason to make it fullbright. And surely your concern about transparency can be solved in the implementation? Ericw's compilers seem to handle it just fine. 

I know your history with it, which is why I said "STILL hung up on it".

I still disagree with all your points, and yes you're not the only one to have played with lit water, we have as well, and you're the only person I know so far that hasn't preferred it.
Unlit water makes absolutely no sense at all, even if it's transparent, and it's a bane to all mappers.

"Can't see the turbulent surface in dark areas" so what? That's on the mapper. You know if I make a pitch black area in a map, the player won't be able to see anything in it either, and will complain, that's on me, the solution isn't making the game fullbright.

"It doesn't interact properly with translucent water" I don't understand this at all, yes it does, modern light.exe even lets us have light going through transparent water be reduced by the alpha value of the water, it looks great!

"gratuitous eye-candy", again to me this is on par with stuff like basic fog, colored lighting, and skyboxes, all of which have been pretty much fully adopted by the mapping community.

This is an opt-in feature anyways, if mappers don't want to compile with lit water that's up to them, not sure why you'd have a say in how we decide our maps should look. 

Funny how a bunch of technical posturing and false equivalences didn't correct everybody's personal preference.

For my part, I thought DarkPlaces, JoeQuake, etc. looked like technovomit from day one, but I still like lit water. I think it's a development that works with Quake's visual style rather than against it. 

The Quake re-release received its second update yesterday on Steam.

Highlights seem to be a new coop mode for up to 4 players (also bots), "Honey" as the first official user-made addon to be included and then some smaller fixes (e.g.) autoaim and other mostly multiplayer-related issues.

But hey, at least they fixed the incorrect naming for the Death Knight. 

Nice to see user made content started to go in! 

Let's hope for Rubicon 2 sometime soon... 

Yeah that could happen ... it's almost entirely original work (or modified quake assets) with the exception of the sounds, of which many were borrowed or sampled from outside sources. I would mainly have to substitute or remove the problematic sounds to make it clean, from a copyright standpoint.

I also might do so minor fixes for usability problems, for example the nailgun in rub2m1 that people often miss. 

Does the curated version of honey include the Swedish gameshow music in the credits level? 

Nevermind, I misremembered completely. 

I got some friends together last night to try out the coop "Horde" mode from the latest update, and we all found it quite disappointing. It's best described as a very watered down version of the Qonquer mod, where waves of Quake monsters come at you in an arena setting.

Sadly this version is pathetically easy, even for my friends who really only play Quake because I like it. We were playing on Nightmare skill.

There's an interesting mechanic by which surviving a "boss wave" will drop a silver key in to the centre of the map which can then be used to open doors with high level weapons or pickups behind them, but thanks to Machine Games' overly symmetrical arena design it's pretty difficult to communicate to other players which door you've just unlocked. The same frustration comes in to play any time you want to alert your colleagues about a high level monster, or try to regroup when you've been split up.

Eventually a gold key will drop that allows you to open an exit which unceremoniously dumps you back in to the lobby without any real sense of reward, especially as the key seemingly drops before any serious amount of high level waves have spawned to provide any kind of real challenge. You then just have to decide whether to keep on playing until you're all dead (which again dumps you back in the lobby without any fanfare), or jump through the exit portal and play a better game. We were charitable enough to give all four of the arenas a try, but unless they fix this up in a future update it's unlikely we'll be playing again.

On the offchance any devs are reading this with interest, here's what we thought would improve Horde mode:

-Up the ante by increasing the amount of monsters that spawn from the very beginning
-Include the mission pack monsters for variety and to increase the number of high level monsters available
-Bring in high level monsters earlier
-Once it's only high level waves spawning, start gradually reducing ammo and health spawns
-Provide more visual queues in the arena to help with communicating locations
-Put a timer on the HUD to show players how long they've survived so far
-Dead players should be able to spectate living players
-If you must keep the gold key/exit mechanic, at least let it trigger one last really difficult horde
-When a game win or loss happens, show the players a scoreboard instead of dumping them back in the lobby
-Add some secrets that require players to work together 

mh - you just spent a post ripping a graphical feature in your engine to shreds that you had total control over and could have implemented any way you liked.

Like bal said, there's _a_ good solution, somewhere, if people give enough of a toss. 

I actually came here to ask: can someone give me chapter and verse on running quake re-release in Quakespasm? Because I am so done with that engine it comes with. 

was opening the wrong version of 'spasm.

carry on cheps. 

Late to the party.

Real mixed bag. For every cool thing like the palace at the start of mge4m1, you then get an equal amount of filler jank like the sequence of crap rooms that comprise the latter part of mge4m1.

That critique extrapolates to the entirety of the new content imo. All the bland filler undermines the few bits that are good.

czg's 2 maps hit the spot though, ofc, big willie style - will keep coming back to those. 

I see that vkQuake has just pushed a commit with lightmapped water support, so I guess everyone will be able to see it and make up their own minds soon enough. 

aka Ironwail also supports lightmapped water now. 

Will maps with this still be compatible with other engines that don't feature lightmapped water? 

and it works with regular Quakespasm or even Mark V (according to the readme), so I assume the answer is yes. Lightmapped water can be toggled to see the difference, and IMO it's quite considerable.

I dunno if all VR maps support the feature, but the one I tried (which had lots of water since it's a huge ship inside a harbor) worked. So far I know vkQuake and Ironwail have the feature (in the latter it's turned on by default). 

https://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/hipdm1.jpg
https://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/hip2m4_1.jpg
https://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/hip2m4_2.jpg
QSS 14.10.21
https://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/hip1m2.jpg

Issue on the last screen with QSS on this map only. 

OT: would rather have Quake 1 sequel with Doom Eternal graphics/gameplay obviously 

Quake 1 sequel with Doom Eternal graphics/gameplay

I just threw up a little.

It's okay, I swallowed it back down. 

OT: would rather have Quake 1 sequel with Doom Eternal graphics/gameplay obviously
Doom Eternal, in other words?

How about Q1 sequel with Q1 gameplay? It can be a logical evolution of Q1 gameplay, but it must be noticeably Q1 gameplay nonetheless. Doom Eternal gameplay is not Q1.