and the low pollygoons.

Once you start trying to make the quake all realistic and militaristic, you lose the quakiness of the quake. 

But DAT health.... 

take literally any action game with a semi-realistic aesthetic released in the last 10 years, and you'll see all sorts of forgettable ammo boxes and crates and whatever that look just like that. it's just really generic and unremarkable prop stuff. 

I've never quite understood how "higher def" assets always seem to become so colour desaturated - dull even. Quake might be mocked for being so brown, but it's not that brown.

I don't have any complaints about the model though, looks how I'd expect a higher poly version of it could look. 

The original is charming, to me anyway. The way-oversized rivets, exaggerated thickness of the trim, the warm colours, the huge bright red cross symbols. I like the vague materials - not really sure if it's made of cardboard or metal.

With the high-res one I see more details from everyday objects. A band equipment case or a shipping crate. The keypad from a payphone. The corner bits are rubber? It's a cool model, just less quakey. 

It's a fucking cube

Nice geometry knowledge. 

The future is in cans! 

tyrintro.wav, from OUM i suppose. i'd love to hear the full version. where is it from? 

"The Charm Is The Pixel Art"

Right. The charm is in the details that your mind fills in. The high res version is basically telling you everything about the box ... and if that doesn't work for you, then it looks stupid.

If you're going to do a new health pack for Quake and you're going to go high res ... literally, think outside the box. There's a lot of cool designs out there if you're going to throw polys to the wind. 

Older games such as Quake or Doom are extremely stylized due to the days tech limitations. This styling is very much become the identity of these games even if it was not so intended.
They are not like Battlefield, HL and others of the realistic concrete texture and photo-realistic wooden crate variety.

So why oh why go and try and remake these in those ill-fitting styles.

New tech, OK, but the vibe should stay the same.

And its difficult without emulating the pixellated look, other means have to be found to give the space for your mind to fill in the blanks, I'm sure there is something to be pulled off well in that direction one day.

Simpler though is to stick to the same pixelated/low poly style in a new engine.

Ok so if we stick to that whats new then ?
-Its a mission pack for an old game in a new engine emulating graphics of an ancient engine. Hmph, not great. What else though makes newer games more next gen other than "more is better" eyecandy ?

What "little" or not so little things can we bring that would give a definite sense of "this is exactly what is loved but somehow...much more?"

Lighting is one I think can be brought in without ruining the soup there.

What about scale offerent by this computing and rendering power ?

What about 100% continuity between levels, not a millisecond of loading time , not a single thing blocking view into the coming part ?
Skyrim like, one world, one level. You can have this and be made to progress linearly through it. Indoors stays indoors. Teleport to other worlds/dimensions OK, those are also continuous.


Scale again -> 1000 fiends in the distance ripping through a base you have to eventually reach ? You hear the distant sounds of the actually in game occurring battle from a distance...
Once you reach this base, the remains of 900 fiends and 2000 Marines are strewn about the place ?
->That's a kind of Hell level.
Rivulets of blood flowing and pooling around the level, carrion scattering away from the corpses to hide in dark corners as you approach. Kill them or not, you are there.
->The "boss" of the level could be a massive beast raised live before your eyes from all this dead putrid flesh you have walked past. Actually see all these gibs gather up in a central point and come alive. Think Akira.

That would not feel outdated, ever, fucking pixels or not!


Sound design ?
Maybe a vastly richer variety of impact sounds for different surfaces, liquids, bodyparts ?

Think of a these AAA budget sized art teams working on producing 10'000's of simple props and textures instead of 100/1000's of complex props and textures.

A true richness in variety to the world. Play through it 10 times and the world still does not feel like old stuff to you. Always a little new something to notice.

On can give a world a real sense of "being" through richness instead of through reality copying textures and objects.

There are many more ways I am sure newer tech and computing power can be harnessed to create "next gen" games whilst keeping this charm provided by the blanks in the details. 

killes that is the best thing you have ever written 

Splooge! 

I think high def assets and models lose a lot of their effect when you notice they are always the same. If you kept seeing that same health pack over and over again, it would make its details feel less authentic. It'd take something like random procedurally generated scuff marks, blood or dirt applied to the model to prevent this. It would in fact take all kinds of things to make it feel consistently realistic, and not just a pretty box based on a simple mechanic of getting some HP back by walking over it. Which of course is a great mechanic and fits just right into classic Quake.

That's how I feel about modern games approaching photorealism. The closer they get in detail and effects, the more striking it is when they fail to feel real in other ways. I find it perfectly OK when game designers decide not to go for realism and high def graphics, but for consistent look and feel. And you know, the good thing about stylized looks and symbolic representations is that they let you use your imagination to fill in details. I like it when I can do that.

I think the effort to make things look realistic only works when it is backed up by making things interact in more realistic ways. ANd it just sucks when modern games feel smaller and more constrained because it takes so much effort to create content that they just put in less than before.

OC, I use the word realistic pretty loosely. There should be some handy term for graphics looking like they'd be realistic if what they represented actually were real things. Consistently extrapolated from reality perhaps?

Also, I am in full agreement with what killes wrote. Some people in game biz might think that making a game that can be replayed and enjoyed 10 times is not worth it because people will only buy it once, but man oh man I hope other people will continue to prove them wrong. 

Like I said...

"Just needs NIN scratched into the paint somewhere, and some blood splatters from the marines who died inches away from the health pack."

You can do 'the player can fill in the blanks' with any level of polygons and textures. Don't pretend that cubes with pixels are the only way to the spur the player's imagination. They fit well in Quake as it is, with it's blocky 1996 architecture and tech, but that doesn't mean that some future 2015+ 'Quake' in a new engine needs to be low polygon as the only way of letting the player wonder. You can quite easily construct photo realistic beauty and have the player imagine what it's story is, the real world / art world / film world have plenty of examples of that.

All of Killes' ideas can be done no matter what level of detail the world is made of. He mentions a few good narrative ways of creating a world of wonder for the player that still fits the atmosphere of what Quake is. The key would be to make sure not to do them as cutscenes, which is the exact opposite of 'letting the player fill in the blanks'.

Back on topic though: That medkit some guy made as a high poly model for the fun of it and which isn't even being used as a replacement model or anything: It looks ok. It looks like Quake's medkit. It would fit in a modern day Quake with equivalent graphic fidelity. Maybe it would look better done not as a box like Willem said, make it a new and different cooler medkit. But then it'd likely be called "Not Real Quake", which would just be another stupid bullshit comment from the Nostalgia Police. 

Btw: streaming Travail. First episode done, now starting second episode. 

 

That was actually pretty cool, though luckily I only played on Normal skill.

I can see how many people are put off by the first episode. It's hard and grindy with many downright unfair situations, coupled with awkward construction - cramped areas or lots of brushwork to get stuck on. All probably due to several factors, 2005 mentality, technical/hardware issues and just wanting to get it out of the door, and the beta testing was generally poor. A shame, because the first episode expemplifies the Quake Journey part really well - however, these levels and their semi-realistic theme would have been more effective in this regard if they had had a more low-key approach to gameplay/combat.

The second episode is better combat-wise, though still quite a bit on the tough side. My secret levels certainly are a good example for this. Enemies stuffed in every corner. Also, the way to access them is ridiculous. 

Who the hell decided to have all the sunlight worldspawn keys be "_sunlight_xxx" but the sun angle be "_sun_mangle"? Wasted like 20 minutes figuring out why my sun wasn't angled. 

I think mangle is used for something else like info_intermission or something so it's been loaned to other features. 

mangle makes sense, anything that takes a 3 dimension vector uses mangle.

it's that one of the sunlight properties is "_sun_" and not "_sunlight_" 

So you only have yourself to blame. 

To make things more uniform I can add "_sunlight_mangle" as a synonym for "_sun_mangle" in my tyrutils branch. 

that sounds easy to do, hopefully doesn't break if some idiot uses both! I'm just perplexed that it was like that in the first place, all sunlight keys had to have been added at the same time.

Kinn: no shit? it's in the manual? thank you for your incredibly useful commentary. 

 

does anyone have the dkt2.wad file without fullbrights everywhere? the one on quaddicted is... bad. :(