So we were just shooting the shit in Discord, talking about how Quake was actually straight-up genuinely scary to some of us when playing it back in 1996.

Obviously it's not scary now - but is it possible for Quake to be scary again in 2018, to those same players, without any custom progs?

So let me suggest Scary Jam:

Create a genuinely scary quake experience, i.e. actually try to scare the player, using id1 progs only.

Worth doing?

Caveat - this was just an idea I had - I can't personally enter or even manage the Jam because I'm too busy with other shit right now, but I thought this was a compelling enough idea to just float. 

Quite a good idea and yeah it was pretty creepy back in the day. 

I didn't want to say Halloween Jam because that could place an undesirable time restraint on it (unless everyone literally started it now I guess lol)

But it's kinda around that time I guess :} 

Great idea! I am almost ready to release a "quality of life" progs that would be a good candidate for this king of Jam. I know more than one mapper who is trying to up the fear factor and do more horry-themed maps. 

Just wanted to say good theme. I also found that the game was sometimes scary when first playing, first because some of the enemies were dangerous enough that i feared facing them (I remember hiding from Shamblers in Azure Agony), and second because the strobe lighting and dark corners and twisty layouts meant that sometimes you would get surprised by an enemy's sudden appearance (a fiend that you didn't expect and didn't hear because the alert sound was lost in the chaos).

The last custom level I played that captured any of that was Hell in a Can, or maybe some of the levels from Zerstorer. Though, they were different than the original levels that were scary kind of by random chance, because these custom levels were actively trying to set up scary scenarios. 

Once again, it's all about episode 4, which features all the aspects of Quake that people fondly remember the game by when they reminisce but hated when they first played it.

Also: keyboard only! 

it'll be a real challenge to make Quake scary again. I think it gets so difficult once you've seen behind the curtain, to the point where you know how the enemies and environments work.

Even worse, for many of us, we know how the levels themselves are put together, or even the exact code the determines the AI behaviour.

So yeah, doing something unexpected that cuts through that wall of predictability will be a really interesting challenge. Might have to give it a go. ID1 progs is definitely the right way to go too, it's nice to have constraints. 

Also maybe limit it to "only id textures" as well? Could be really interesting to stick to the same art that id had to use. 

means no-one would be tempted to make spoooooky textures, which i think would be missing the point. 

Once again, it's all about episode 4, which features all the aspects of Quake that people fondly remember the game by when they reminisce but hated when they first played it.

A tough truth to accept, but a truth nonetheless. Bravo, negke. 

Tricky to pull off, agreed, but could make for some very special maps.
Hope it happens! 

Create a genuinely scary quake experience, i.e. actually try to scare the player, using id1 progs only.

Hopefully this week, I'll be releasing a devkit that strives to maintain the id1 aesthetic but adds quality of life features for mappers including the ability to add models and sounds. I was making this for myself in order to do a "scarier" map project anyway - so I thought I'd chime in here. I think you can make something creepy with id1 progs only - it's just very hard to do without custom sounds at the very least. Add to this that many mappers are using hacks to get around id1 anyway. 

Plus 1 for quality-of-mapperlife-progs or qomp or whatever you want to call it.

Some of my favorite maps were in e4. E4m4 is probably the scariest with all its dark corners and fiends. 

The dark dungeon pathway with fiends in the shadows and the guillotine at the end still terrifies me. 

Hell in a Can and Ruined Nation are two damn really scary Quake maps. 

re: mods and version numbers. I will be releasing a devkit mod called progs_dump later this week. This is not a mod like Quoth or AD that mappers will release maps for. Instead, it's designed for mappers to create their own mods. I would like to include the version number in the folder name as there will undoubtedly be multiple fixes and additions to the devkit. There's a chance this mod will be re-written as I learn more QuakeC. So each release should be a stand alone release, not something you'd want to overwrite.

Keeping this in mind, what's better for version 1.0.0

progs_dump_100

progs_dump100

or

progs_dump

I am not a fan of the latter because I want version numbers to be very clear for the reason above.

I welcome your opinions! I just can't decide. 

Second one makes it look like dump and 100 are "syllables" within a name, not name + version. 

learn git.

people can then either fork your git repo (and easily pull your changes and send patches upstream), or they can use your progs.dat file with their map packs using their own gamedir. There isn't really any practical scope for your own directory name that doesn't also defeat your stated goal.

fteqcc-specific
#pragma copyright "Some Boring Message"
#pragma flag enable embedsrc
Then anyone that opens your .dat with fteqccgui will see that message and be presented with your original source (or they can open it with 7zip or whatever for the source, but no message).
You can also pass the output of external commands in as preprocessor macros, which is a very good idea for eg 'git describe', and can make much of the version tracking automatic.

Additionally you're not limited to just underscores. hypens and dots are commonly used in directory names too.
quake -game progs_dump-1.0.0
Just be sure to avoid leading hyphens or dots. :) 

Thanks, all good info. Yeah git is high on the to-learn list. I decided early on to hold off but a future version will be available.

Embed sources is pretty cool! 

D.o.t.s. like progs_dump_1.0.0
Or undersquires like progs_dump_v1_00

Just please don't make version 1.0.9 go to version 1.0.10. That doesn't make mathematical sense to go back down a bunch of versions. Should be 1.1.0 at that point.

Also you could start with 001 as a version. 

Version strings aren't floating-point number though. They are a series of numbers separated by dots... x.y.z, where x is major version, y is minor, z is "patch" (or something similar). It's fine and good for example for 1.9 to be followed by 1.10, if that's a minor version increase and not a major release.

/end software developer pedantry 

I did research it here based on how Tb2 is released: https://semver.org/ Although I doubt this will get that many patches but who knows?

Since I am a total newb feel free to share other organizational tips. I am all ears! Thanks guys. 

Nope, 0.1 is not larger than 0.1

Significant digits trump your pedantry.

I do like the versioning method as a solid method. I prefer 1.0.00 myself since minor patches tend to be more common on stable longterm projects. And for that matter, 1.00 for anything rather "trivial". 

version numbers don't have to make mathematical sense, but if they don't then they won't sort correctly. sorting correctly is a handy property that's worth willing to pay a couple of extra chars for.
that said, if you don't want to switch to double-digits then you could switch to letters instead of numbers in order to retain sort orders - version numbers don't even have to be numbers!