>framerate independent
>time since last frame

Don't be naive. 

anim

A fairly seamless transition from worldmodel to viewmodel. How do you even do that? My guess is that when the animation is initiated and the player position/camera is locked in, the gun and arms are worldmodels as the gun is picked up (maybe??). After it gets picked up it's briefly lowered out of view. When it's raised up again, both the arms and gun are different models (now viewmodels). Pretty neat. I'd like to know how they actually do it. 

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? 

give this a try

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61207 

I think the 3d in Saturn-Quake reminds me alot of early NDS games, with the chopped up samples and the very crude way of doing 3d graphics. I like it. 

to the impulse behind this; a similar impulse was behind Quaddicted and I'm starting to think people might be looking at archives of Quaddicted decades from now. It would definitely be interesting from a "historical perspective" to see these levels which I didn't even know existed before. 

The OBJ-2-MAP utility doesn't seem to produce anything that can be loaded in TrenchBroom, so I might just reconstruct the levels manually brush by brush (unless somebody's got a better idea?). I'd need to fix various texture alignment/tiling issues anyway, so this might be a better way to do it. The textures are the same size as the PC version, so it's very easy to guess the size of each brush. Somehow I've got a feeling that these levels were originally compiled from standard MAP files, because the geometry structure is essentially the same as stock Quake levels. We might never know for sure, I guess.

Here's a screenshot of the first Saturn exclusive map (Purgatorium) using Rich Whitehouse's model viewer. It's a pretty cool vanilla-ish map, isn't it. 

Here's two ideas you might try, if you haven't already.

1 - Try converting the map in smaller pieces. Maybe the OBJ2MAP program doesn't handle many complicated shapes at the same time.

2 - Open the resulting .map file in a text editor. There may till be parts that you can copy and paste into Trenchbroom. Unless I remember wrong, you can copy and paste geometry into TB via the clipboard.

Either method might save you time compared to creating every brush from scratch. Worth trying at least. 

If you give me maps in obj and WAD with textures used in this maps, I can export it to editable MAP format. 

Feel free to add me on Steam, and I'll gladly share what I've got so far. Been working on one of the maps in Trenchboom and it's shaping up rather nicely.

But basically, you extract the maps using Noesis which you can get here. To get the original Saturn Quake files, do a Google search for "quake saturn iso", should be the first result. The textures are included inside the LEV files and Noesis can convert them to a number of formats including BMP and LMP. 

should be able to give you a Valve format map with texturing intact. I would then run it though my qbsp's "-convert quake" option to convert it to a map file with vanilla texturing for editing in TrenchBroom.

There are different algorithms in OBJ2MAP for converting faces to brushes, I think there was a "slabs" one that extrudes every face into a brush.. that might be a good choice? The other one is "spikes" which makes a pyramid out of each face which is probably not what you want for level geometry. 

http://www.shacknews.com/article/101156/rocket-jump-quake-and-the-golden-age-of-first-person-shooters

The full article is paywalled but here's a lot of words about Quake! 

That is a lot of words indeed. While it's never fun to read about the various conflicts that happened at id, it's great to see some words from people like American McGee and Sandy Petersen who- outside of dedicated Quakers, obviously- are too often forgotten in favor of the two Johns.

Side note: is that a possible DM3 or E2M1 on McGee's monitor? 

is the one I admire the most. 

 

 

I'm pretty sure I saw someone posting here from Asia not long ago. Tried to reach the guy, but couldn't find the Asian IP. Where are you, man? 

You should try translating your message to Asian if you're hoping for a response 

obv