Saturn Quake Findings And Musings
Turns out the Saturn version of Quake has completely different secret levels, which are actually pretty cool. E.g. one of them is a series of huts and walkways on top of huge trees and another one lets you pit monsters in a boxing ring. Those levels make some interesting and clever use of vanilla Quake assets.
Here are the videos of all four Saturn exclusive levels:
Purgatorium
Hell's Aerie
Coliseum
Watery Grave
(There's also a test map of sorts on the disk resembling a
modern day apartment chock full of pop culture references and inside jokes.)
How cool it would be to play those levels on the PC with proper controls and a framerate higher than 20 FPS?
Now, the Saturn version of Quake runs on a completely different engine (supposedly, the so called "Slave Driver" engine which Lobotomy Software used for PowerSlave/Exhumed) and all the levels are actually low precision 3D models in the custom LEV format. Rich Whitehouse has
reverse-engineered the format and his model viewer/converter, Noesis, can export the Saturn Quake level geometry + textures to other 3D model formats, such as OBJ.
I was thinking about trying to convert the levels into the standard BSP format, as all the tricks used in those levels should be possible to do in a standard Quake engine (apart from maybe the rain effects), but what would be the best way to import the OBJ etc 3D data into a Quake editor such as TrenchBroom or Radiant? Anybody interested in working together on such a project?