https://giza.mused.org/en/guided/266/inside-the-great-pyramid 

It's kind of like watching a slideshow but cool proof of concept nonetheless. 

I made a short explainer on lightmapped liquids. With a little bit of background I found here on func. https://youtu.be/AmPB6wWOXbQ 

thanks dumptruck, you rock 

I hate transparent water. It gives away all stealth enemies inside.
This new water lit looks fantastic, though. 

https://gitlab.com/HaydenKow/nuquake

quake for dreamcast with hardware acceleration

nice 

https://www.blockbench.net/ 

New Elderworld themed episode coming from Newhouse and zigi: https://youtu.be/253uATgjZwE 

https://www.businessinsider.com/john-carmack-meta-consulting-cto-virtual-reality-leaving-2022-12 

It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.” 

https://archive.ph/sfnzN 

how fucked up of an org it has to be so that John Fucking Carmack can't make an impact?

die already facebook 

Now Carmack is focusing on eliminating people's jobs with AI. Hopefully this will fail in the same way megatexture and his rocketships have in the past. 

Truth is, the last truly successful technical achievement by Carmack was the Doom 3 engine. Doom 3 game design didn't please classic Doom fans, but its technology was absolutely in the right path.

The Rage engine was perhaps Carmack's first failure in setting a technological trend. Other companies didn't follow up on it, and Id Software eventually abandoned it themselves.

VR is great, but it doesn't seem to have reached mainstream gaming appeal. It's still a niche market, and people such as myself are disgusted by many games not allowing players to freely walk around. They are simply too fucking afraid of taking risks, which gives the impression that VR gaming is made by spineless people whose main audience is casual players. Most examples of VR gaming with free locomotion that I usually see are homemade ports of 90s games such as Quake and Doom, instead of new games.

This is a misguided approach because casual players are never interested in spending lots of money in gaming equipment; they prefer to spend that on instantaneous zero-effort features such as virtual diamonds and character skins.

Carmack could certainly have done some great games in VR if Meta wasn't so focused in building soulless corporate-art landscapes. Seeing him reduced to promote Fruit Ninja styled VR games was sad.

My opinion is certainly biased because I only had the opportunity to play VR a couple short times (including one free-roaming indie zombie game, which was fun), but watching people playing it simply doesn't excite me like watching people playing motion-controlled Wii games used to. Resident Evil 7 is a notable exception.

And the rocketships... yeah, he lost interest in that. 

I thought the Rage technology was great, but I'd also have to concede that it was the wrong technology in the wrong place and at the wrong time. If it launched later and in a game genre that wasn't so affected by the lower texel resolution then it would have been groundbreaking stuff. As it stood, the decision to do it in a FPS, the decision to make everything a megatexture, the decision to use OpenGL on the PC version at a time when vendor driver support was particularly poor, and the misunderstanding and miscommunication about what it actually was and what it actually did ended up killing it. 

Does anyone know what engine introduced transparency to Quake? was is DP or Fitz?

Working on an Ironwail video and would love to mention this. 

I'm asking about .alpha on brushes not re-vis'd water BTW. 

Support for .alpha in Quake engines likely appeared around or before 2002. There was a Matrix movie inspired "slomo" mod that used it in the rings of the bullet time effect, which I reimplemented from scratch in my JoyMenu mod.

I remember something about TomazQuake supporting it back in the early 2000s. 

slowmo15.zip was released in July 10 of 2001, and the readme says to play it using TQ144.exe (TomazQuake 1.44). Also this:

NOTE: Using a GLQuake engine that supports .alpha will add to the experience greatly;
the rings will fade to invisibility as they grow, and will be transparent at all times.
I'd recommend the latest version of TomazQuake

And this:

*Credits*
---------
[...]

Great big thanks to Little_Horn for making the GL-only SlowMo 2, the inspiration for this mod.
Well, that's really strange, as SlowMo 2 was inspired by my original SlowMo, but I mean the
rings system...if you've played the original SlowMo you know the effects suck.

It's worth checking out where the TomazQuake engine got the .alpha idea from, or if it was their own idea.

The first versions of Darkplaces were released in 2000, it's a good idea to check their changelogs too. 

The first version of Darkplaces, 1.05, from November 04 of 2000, does indeed have .alpha effect support. 

Thanks for looking into this! 

That's interesting. I wanna see if it will run on my Voodoo cards now. I've an Alkaline map in the works that will run OK-ish on my Voodoo II cards with an AMD K6-2 333Mhz. You have to turn bullet holes and footsteps off though. 

I'd date alpha support to the Nehahra mod, with the caveat that there were a lot of non-robust implementations floating around before then, accomplished via checking model names or texture names for special characters. But for robust support implemented via the protocol and with the proper bits and entity fields, my memory is that it came in with Nehahra.

Not that there weren't issues with the Nehahra implementation, including overloading protocol 15 with alpha bits, and sending it as a full float rather than a compressed type. The modern robust implementation that solves all of this, and that we've all pretty much standardised on, dates to FitzQuake's original protocol 666.