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RemakeQuake Winter Demo 2011
Here's the d/l link: download
The RemakeQuake blog with screenshots: blog
And our public forum for feedback: forum

The pack consists of four large levels by myself and Ricky along with a load of new Qc, sound and engine features. Shortly we'll be releasing the tools version as well, which features the BSP2 tools. A small detail was omitted from the readme, that being the correct command line of:

-game rmqwinter11 -sndspeed 44100

Let us know what you think, this has been a long time in the making, but we're pretty pleased with the results.
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Huh 
Why did that stay italic, will this? 
SHIT.... 
you found another bug :) 
 
To Boldly find bugs... 
 
L00l 
Test 


test 
Ok, Enough Spam 
But it also put my name and IP in italic. 
 
I think perhaps it should take longer to warm up because no fiends got anywhere near me! 
Fixed And Playing E2M1RQ 
For some reason my pak1.pak was corrupt, so replaced it and all fine.

My feedback from playing e2m1rq:-

* Initial cinematic totally confusing, I thought the game was broken at first and was teleporting me around the place randomly
* The Broken floor was not obvious (the very quickly displayed message about the floor was bad), if you need a message to tell players to do something with the floor then gameplay is broken. Should be visual in some way. Plus why am I in a prison cell with a gun!?!
* Dropped into a black hole and was lost for a while, black confined spaced early on in the game, not a good idea.
* Not sure why you give a quad so early in the game, I picked it up and it ran out in what seemed like 5 seconds.
* Grapplehook secret is pitch black (on my screen) found it by complete chance.
* Performance is terrible on my machine, I kept lowing the resolution but nothing seemed to fix it. Probably some weird setting I have missed on the command line!
* I want to shoot the security camera's off the walls!
* Too many crate styles, I kept finding new styles and was shooting them for secrets! :P I know it odd thing to say but a pile of crates the same style looks more believable than an every crate texture next to each other.
* Played on default skill setting and everything felt too easy. It felt like enemies health was scaled with skill level. Not a fan of this TBH.
* First button mashing puzzle was strange, drain water from pool below. Was looking for a cool pipe handle to turn somewhere and then I remembered it is Q1 ... and I had to bash a button in the water! I hit the button, went back to the control panel and was told I had to use a lift back in the water!?! It just seems so odd and retro level design.
* Died a couple of times to some hunter thing, first one I did not even see hitting me. Next couple just appeared out of nowhere and it was instant death. IMHO a bad mechanic.
* I still can't believe the menu's are not scaled up correctly, it makes the game feel so dated.
* I don't remember E2M1 feeling like this base layout, it felt completely different. A good thing! :)
* Maybe I have been spoilt by modern games with locations feeling like real layout. Offices, lifts, railings, even the puzzles felt old. The place lacked a scale and I know it can be done right, I have played Q1 maps with it right. (Rubicon1+2)
* The high res textures felt all wrong to me, they looked like a mashed up mix of colours, draw styles and their use in the environment felt random. The map desperately need an artist to make everything work together better. Control panels look pixelated next to high res signs, walls with too many details in the texture. There is a beauty to some surfaces being plain concrete and just having dirt on the edges.

I know I am picking at the level, but I assume you want feedback not back slapping. It is certainly a good MOD, but at the moment it feels odd, especially the visuals. 
Menus 
These are untouched right now, we're just throwing some things back and forth now, before we commit to anything else with them.

Health scales, but its very slight, and has a large randomisation factor - you can still find tough enemies on low skills.

Performance could be related to the aforementioned memory settings - oldschool Quake settings are stupidly low for RMQ. Mh's engine defaults it to 128000, but you could try bumping that.

A lot of the others have been noted already, but there's some useful ones in there, thanks. 
RMQ 
Hmmm - the project name kind-of implies that the original Q1 shouldn't be needed to run the thing. 
Laser Blaster Cont'd 
I didn't even notice the heatup / cooldown in the game (kept wondering about the particles though). Probably because everything just died right away, fiends also. I tend to run away from fiends backwards and that must have given the blaster enough time to heat up.

I'm not so sure about this mechanic tbh. - Quake II had it, and the Hyperblaster bece the least uses weapon for me. It was like the Chaingun just worse because at least that's a hitscan weapon and easier to aim when moving.

So I think if you want to keep this mechanic you must balance it better because Shambler health bump or not, it's too powerful. And some better feedback about the heatup phase would be nice. 
Whoa... 'twas The RAM Setting, Of Course... 
Nothing different from everyone up here to say, except maybe that I found some badly aligned textures here and there...

Got to the green fog place, made me wanna puke. Had to quit.
You sure this is a good idea?

Sleepwalkr: I'll try out the port over the weekend. I'll keep you posted. 
It's All A Bit Dark For Me 
It might be to do with mostly playing in quite a bright room, but I've occasionally just given up and played with r_fullbright 1 and generally had a better time doing so. I'm sure this makes me a terrible human being, but maybe a few fewer shadows would help? 
@Sock 
First of all - thanks for playing my map! :)

And the list of things you mention is a good list, I will be looking at some of the things you mentioned - some of the textures have been improved already (by Inkub0), and there are some other issues you mentioned which I plan to rectify (like the scale for example - I also think I could improve this). Unifying the crates a little more isn't a bad idea ither.

So overall, thanks for your feedsback!

@Spirit

Thanks also for your feedback, MOAR BASS!!!! 
 
mwh - which levels?

poison fog - there seems to be a split on this, some like it, some don't.

Blaster - will revise it. Q2 didn't have this though, it just had a warm up for the HB and a warm down for the CG. The idea here is that the weapon overheats, firing more powerfully, but needs to cool down afterwards as well. So not spamming with it is less effective, but spamming too much can leave you without ammo and/or unable to fire. 
 
I didn't realize the lasergun was heating up and inceasing damage (+cooldown time), either. It could be made clearer by two or three skin changes (glowing exhaust slots: not, orange, red), and a distinct wshhhh steam sound.

But like I said earlier, I think the weapon is kind of unnecessary and only makes the game even harder to balance. If you need to bump the monsters' health to make the weapons work, you're doing something wrong (wasn't it the same with the SSG before?).
In my view, it would be better if you allowed all standard weapons, and additionally, since the player is supposed to be an Enforcer, gave him a sort of laser DBS, or laser Riot Controller. Something that works similar to the standard enforcer attack; two rays + wait time. They would have to be more powerful (and costly) than regular laser shots of course, DBS/RC style. This way it could serve as a special weapon for certain situations, like the Cauterizer, and bound to this episode, but would not imbalance the regular gameplay and not require too much additional doctoring around.

As for setting a bigger heapsize - it was my understanding that the memory heap is only important for loading stuff, the map, precaches etc, but has no impact on the actual game performance. The bigger a bsp size gets, the bigger the heap requirements are (map data, visdata, lightmaps, textures etc). A heapsize of 64000 is usually enough even for the largest maps (within the 'old new' limits). Only now that maps can grow to 22MB more startup memory is required.

sock: HF in E3M1RQ (performance-wise). ;) 
Shotguns 
+1 for a proper DBS animation. Ideally Something akin to Doom2, or at least some visible cocking. Or maybe an animation where the gun is lowered and a sound is played that suggests two new shells are being put in the barrels which is not visible to the player.

The animation of the new shotgun looks a bit odd to me, because the cocking is so fast. It seems the model was adjusted to the sound and not the other way around. It should be a tad slower (surely the firing delay allows for that?). And the hand could use some tan.

I don't want to make it more complicated for you, but I think the DBS too nerfed now. At least I didn't use it as often as I would have in this demo (when I had the choice between regular SG and DBS), though maybe it's only because the E3 maps focus so much on the laser rifle... 
And Yeah, Forgot To Mention... 
...it's dark as fuck.

Have to play with all lights turned off, secondary monitor off and brightness settings tops.

Atmospheric? 
Poison Fog. 
Poison Fog made me feel a bit sick too. I realise this was the intention, but I'm not sure why you'd want your playerbase to experience actual nausea. Anyway, I think you could fix it thus:

Reduce the swaying very slightly. Most of all though, change the way the section has to be played. Give the player an enviro suit at the top of the elevator which will run out when he's in the poison area, then have one or two more suits dotted around down there that the player needs to find if he wants to see & shoot correctly. 
On Balance And The Blaster 
So if I understand it correctly, if I keep firing the blaster, it gets more powerful, but eventually stops working? Because that never happened to me or I haven't noticed it. If the blaster has some kind of operating temperature, e.g. 0 to 120� C, it would only need to cool down if it went past 120� C during usage, and logically, it should have stopped working when it reached that peak. So in cases where I only use short bursts, it always works without any delay and needs less time to heat up again?

The Q2 HP didn't have that behavior, no.

The balance is very problematic because if you increase monster health, you'll have to change all the other weapons too. Otherwise, maps without the blaster will be much harder to play. 
Darkness 
That was problematic for me, too. I had to crank up the monitor brightness and in game brightness to be able to see something, but that made the entities washed out. Maybe it's related to the gamma curve, which is different on Mac systems. What do Windows users say? 
Memory 
Maps require a small amount of -heapsize to run but a large amount to load, yes.

But if it loads OK then -heapsize shouldn't affect runtime performance (e3m1rq only needs 16mb of heap to actually run, for example).

Things that can affect runtime performance are many and varied. You own PC's performance, size of the BSP and how much impact all the BSP tracing done by the engine has, sounds, QC, drawing stuff, etc.

The one thing that can make performance suck badly and you do have immediate control over is textures.

If you're using large replacement textures on hardware with only 256 or even 512 mb of video RAM these can kill your performance as the total amount of textures may not fit into video RAM and your driver will be continually having to swap them in and out.

We set the hardware requirements as "in or around similar to Doom 3" so far as the rendering tech is concerned, but that doesn't tell the whole story.

Doom 3 used 256x256 textures (which were compressed on lower spec machines). The Quake community likes to use 512x512 or even 1024x1024 textures.

A full mipmap chain for a single 1024x1024 texture needs just over 5mb of video RAM. Use 40 of those and that's over 200mb. Gone.

If you run at something like 1280x1024 resolution you're using 15mb for your front buffer, your back buffer and your depth buffer.

A 1024x1024 skybox needs 25mb.

You're looking at about 40mb for lightmaps.

There are additional textures created for post-processing effects (like the underwater warp) - these will take about 16mb at that resolution.

All MDLs and brush surfaces go into vertex buffers which take more (the alternative - streaming them from system memory on demand - is worse for this kind of content).

You see where this is going?

So first thing to do is drop back to native textures and if that resolves any performance issues then you've located the cause of your problem.

Second thing to do is ramp back the video mode a little. Drop a notch in resolution. That might help a little. Also drop back AA and AF in your video card's control panel. You may be used to running regular Quake content maxed out, but this is not regular Quake content. This is extremely heavy content. You may be used to running modern games maxed out, but Quake formats (in particular Q1 BSP) are SHIT for hardware accelerated rendering. That's a tradeoff you need to understand and accept that you're working under when you use Quake formats. 
 
Why would you set the Hardware requirements to "in or around similar to Doom 3" when you're not aiming to make a game that looks as "good" as Doom 3? And if you do want to look like Doom3, why not just use DarkPlaces?

Honestly, looking at RMQ I see very little reason it shouldn't require similar specs to something like FitzQuake. Maybe there's something technical that I just can't comprehend going on, but if it isn't obvious in the visuals then perhaps it's unnecessary or should be scaled down by the development team rather than the players? 
Read What Mh Wrote 
The problem is that the BSP format is not suited for hardware acceleration, and this problem gets overproportionally worse as the maps get larger. 
Blaster 
Yeah, this was previously discussed in the thread, it's missing heat up vfx and similar.

The DBS has had some internal discussion as well.

Removing the blaster and adding a laser DBS sounds kind of 'would sir like an apple, or a pear?'. What's broken there is that the cooldown isn't enough to force you try to fighting like an Enforcer.

So if you play cautiously you'll fire, say, a couple of shots at a time and never waste ammo - but if you go berserk and fire off a lot of shots then you'll do more damage but also become more vulnerable + waste ammo.

The pro player will try and keep it somewhere between the two - doing slightly extra damage and wasting almost no ammo.

A case of getting the balance right. 
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