The base levels justify using modern weapons
in the game, so I don't see getting rid of those
unless you go premodern with the arms or use an other dimensional variant of the weapon types, and that would be pretty cool actually.



Well, that's the idea: remake Quake as it were supposed to be. I wouldn't complaing seeing some of Painkiller's weapons, like the painkiller (that spinning blade weapon with a hook in the alt fire ) or the stake launcher replacing the nailguns. Bows. Spears. Torchs! Some monsters, like the zombies, could fear the fire, for example. Medieval weapons, magic weapons (earned in later stages). Think, for example, combining the end-level runes with the Hammer of Thunder and enabling new attacks. There is just so much room for new ideas. I really would like to see something really different but yet having that Quake atmosphere.



A lot of mods use the themes you believe to be lacking. Tronyn's work is Lovecraftian, as is Kell's and MindCrimes.

What I observed is that nobody yet took the original Quake concept and tried to make a mod with it. I believe there are lots of good work with Lovecraft inspiration, but that's another thing. 

A more Lovecraftian Quake would be cool. I could see fighting on some moon village or travelling to more dream-world landscapes with neat visuals. The original Quake took place mostly in dungeons and sh*t, but a ton of Lovecraft's stories revolve around majestic cities witnessed in dreams or far off kingdoms etc. There's definitely a lot of room to expand the Quake feel while losing the brown/grey Quake look. So, if anyone were to do a Quake V, then I would say definitely expand the concept of the Quake universe instead of just making more base/castle/runic/metal maps. 

one could do Quake Roots. :)

But hey, on a side note, are those lovecraft books and stuff good reading? Which of them? 

In terms of level design I think one of the most important things to add to the tools would be props. It's the little touches that really enhance atmosphere [I think], such as old bones scattered around the edges of a room, spent ammo strewn about the place and maybe even the odd Fiend turd for Quake Guy to stand in.

It would also allow for more detailed light fittings, etc. Just imagine that light texture with the fire behind stretched faces, modelled in 3D and casting proper shadows on the opposite wall.

Ambient sound is also very important, of course [no footsteps though, they make movement feel sluggish]. Hearing distant monsters communicating with one another in some freaky language would be interesting [and could also be quite chilling, if done correctly].

Ragdolls shouldn't just be the same boring crap I've seen in all the new games. Each monster should have 'ragdoll behavior' ... for instance, a Hell Knight will still drop to it's knees before slumping on to its face, but will react correctly to the surface it lands on. A fiend, if killed mid-jump might go limp and slide heavilly along the ground, scattering a plume of dust/debris. Of course, gibbing should still occur and be as unrealistic as ever.

I think one of the hardest areas of a remake/sequal would be making the monsters more detailed without having them look cheesy. I've never really approved of any remakes I've seen of the Shambler, because they always look a bit cartoony. Some ideas I've had for monster details would be for Scrags to be semi-transparent [so you can vaguelly make out a ribcage and organs] and for zombies to be maggot infested, perhaps with flies buzzing around them [no ragged clothes please, that's far too corny].

As for episodes, I think there should be far more than five but they would be shorter affairs, comprised of maybe one huge level or [more realistically] a hub of interconnected levels that you may occasionally have to go back and forth between in order to complete goals. This would allow the mappers to revisit old themes AND explore new ones. I'd like to see a 'wood' theme, a little like how I imagine the proposed wooden 'world' that somebody designed for Alien 3.

As for gameplay devices, I still like keys and buttons, but perhaps they could be used a little more sparingly than in the past.

Weapons: No sniping weapon of any sort, please. Sniping has to be one of the most boring things in an FPS. Personally I also dislike chainsaws -- the noise always irritates me [and I'd hunt down anybody who tried to replace the axe with ANYTHING].

Weapons should lie on the floor or be propped up against walls ... none of that floaty spinny guff unless there's an obvious explanation for it in the environment [other than: "Oh it's magic"].

I have an idea for a storyline [actually, several intermixed], but I'll spare you all for now. 

Ermm, hmm, Lovecraft was the furthest thing from my mind in Nehahra...

(Many years ago, I was a bit of a Lovecraft junkie... but that was before Lovecraft became *trendy*, ahem) 

I like your style, especially this:

A fiend, if killed mid-jump might go limp and slide heavilly along the ground, scattering a plume of dust/debris. Of course, gibbing should still occur and be as unrealistic as ever.

And also this:

I think one of the hardest areas of a remake/sequal would be making the monsters more detailed without having them look cheesy. I've never really approved of any remakes I've seen of the Shambler, because they always look a bit cartoony. Some ideas I've had for monster details would be for Scrags to be semi-transparent [so you can vaguelly make out a ribcage and organs] and for zombies to be maggot infested, perhaps with flies buzzing around them

You too seem to be thinking along the "keep it Quakey but enhance all the Quakey aspects" lines, w3rd. 

of those shitty "better looking" textures which have become standard for alot of players (The drop-in .tga or .jpg ones). I know gibbie is working on true-to-the-original texture replacements, and they look good, but I am still jaded against replacing the textures since they almost always look like crap! 

Show us gibbie. And I am right up there with you inertia. 

would have been made from a master set that was then indexed for the game. If they could be persuaded into releasing those that would be the best of both worlds. Higher resolution for those who want it, and for those who don't, dithering software for indexed textures has improved quite a bit since 1996; running those through an action in Creative Suite 2 and putting them back into classic .bsp's as 16 bit palleted textures would still produce some wicked nice results. 

Hmmm, if the id textures were based off higher res originals, then I don't think anyone could object if they were used in engines that supported them. I'm not 100% convinced that they were though - I vaguely recall reading that id made the doom/quake texes in an in-house pixel-pushing program that effectively just streamlined the art of directly painting in an 8-bit palette at (I would imagine) the target resolution.

Sounds a bit crazy, and I might be (i.e. probably am) talking total bollocks. Someone should ask Romero on his forum what technique they used - he's usually pretty receptive to answering questions like this. 

I had a model kit as a kid called The Visible Man. It was a clear human with separately installed bones and organs. I painted his viscera all different colours. Your concept of the semi-transparent Scrag is awesome. With your imagination you should be an advisor to the design team if we are ever lucky enough to get an upgrade to Q1. 

I would first have to ask him about the nick, TheRomero. I could see George Romero getting away with it, but John? 

FFS let's settle this shit.

They are hand-made 256 color pixel art by Adrian Carmack. (Who's retired now btw.) Read up Kevin Cloud's interview somewhere in the web. He explains how they've done stuff for those games. I won't bother into browsing the net for that article since this computer doesn't have a mouse. (really!)

At least deluxe paint was used when making art for doom and quake 1. That is one damn good and intuitive program, and I still use it occasionally.


That's why they are so fucking amazing. They're hand-made by an extremely good artist.


If you look at q2 textures, they're generated from higher color and prolly higher res stuff too and have horrid banding and sloppy fuzziness everywhere. Just the grey base stuff is sooo ugly it makes q2 look 1000 times worse than quake.

Doom had some very nice and inspired textures too. Some were made from photos but still touched up by hand.

Pixel art is an archaic skill in this age of photoshop layer smudging... but there still are a few sites that show some old masterpieces from the amiga and vga pc era. 

I suspect there is a master set because you can see subdetails jump out quite clearly when you resample the textures at higher resolutions. The method you describe doesn't exclude that possibilaty.

But if A. C. really did create these at 64x64 pcx, I'd agree with you that that is impressive. 

Cheers, I thought so. 

I'll have to look into Deluxe Paint sometime if it is available now. I'm all about getting as much bang per pixel to minimize download sizes. 

Okay, maybe I leapt into conclusions some.
The interview is a fascinating read anyway

http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/january01/aog10/

GameSpy: Could you describe your creation process? How do you move from concept to the final skin or texture?

Kevin Cloud: My process has changed from project to project.

I used DeluxePaint for years. We didn't have an animation program. So we tested our animations by toggling between the page and spare page.

For DOOM we sculpted and scanned.
[snipped doom stuff...]

With Quake, I picked up Alias's PowerAnimator to create and animate the models. Adrian did an excellent job creating the skins and in the end they turned out pretty good. Compared to today's games the models and textures in Quake look pretty crude, but in the end I was proud of the work. In my opinion Quake's art was far superior to the work we had created for DOOM. 

This should settle the shit.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.08/id_pr.html

"Adrian is tall, with long brown hair, a goatee, and a soft Southern accent. Sitting next to his partner Kevin Cloud, he 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. This monotonous detail work is the foundation of Quake's environments, giving level architects an extensive index of patterns and textures to draw from as they construct interiors. Adrian's pencil drawings of Quake's monsters are beautifully detailed. The game's relatively low resolution barely conveys his sinister sketches. Of course, there's little time to appreciate the aesthetics of creatures whose only aim is to destroy you."

Word. Quake is eternal. 

and

Ponderous wooden doors swung open with an incongruous pneumatic hiss instantly recognizable from Doom

I know that sound! Though, I always thought it sounded similar to doors opening on the Starship Enterprise. 

made of wood always remind me of Myst/Riven. Having read the books of Myst only helps to reinforce that notion. 

Quake is fine as it is. leave it be! :D 

that id sponsored a team to make quake V for the original quake engine?

Hmm. How nice.

Maybe there could be a shadow "QV" project with 4 grand episodes in the making... wait, there are such already like Nehahra. But a more high-profile recent more kind of a quake-vee-ey thing? A bit like doom2 was for doom? What slight texture, model and client updates? Who could be the taste judge? 

I think the thing that made Quake unique WAS the sense of no explanation. Quake had a severely powerful sense of place, a sense of weirdness, that would never be conveyed if the game slowed down and zoomed in on some boss monster who made a cut-scene speech to the player character (Prince of Persia style, or some other new game, etc).

Quake worked because it was a combination of three influences: attempted fantasy RPG, attempted update on DOOM, attempted Lovecraftian mood piece. The sense of being an anonymous killer in an anonymous, unknown, unearthly world - that's what Quake's all about, and what has made all the custom maps for all these years all so playable and so good. The Quake Guy could be a space marine fighting robots. He could be a godlike savior destroying degenerate beasts, or a demonic destroyer dismantling the world of men. He could be involved in some kind of struggle between demons (Vondur's Koohoo), or a pawn of higher forces (as masterfully stated in Nehahra). The point is there is no real answer as to who he is, or as to why he is where he is. Imagine waking up in a fucked up world with only an axe, and walking around the corner and seeing an Ogre (in real life graphics of course). And you'd kill the Ogre first, survive that, but imagine if this world never ended. And your only existence, with possibly no ultimate goal or meaning at all, was just to kill those other lurking things out there, before they killed you. After all, after at least 1,000 Quake levels it's impossible to say when the anonymous player has ever reached the finish line.

As the Doom Marine said, "Where's my fat reward and ticket home????"

? 

After all, after at least 1,000 Quake levels it's impossible to say when the anonymous player has ever reached the finish line.

Some say he came close in the interval between Bastion and Marcher, reaching the outer northern steppes after breaching one of the larger of Quake's netherworld garrisons, but then the Gaurochs used long distance telepathy or some shit to mess with his head and drove him into the mountains so it was back to square one lmbo. 

Quake 5 (five) will be...

MMORPG
in a fantasy setting
with cartoonish style
and maybe an anime tilt
with emphasis on social interraction (ala 2nd life)
and on Wii

:)