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. 

 

Here's a dark ambient track, free for use in your projects. Creative Commons 0 License (public domain). Please let me know if you use it in a project.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WAryIhQuYXyNPL0ImOagc9QmRLZW0Zlm/view?usp=sharing

CC0 info https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ 

New style of mapping video. The map is promsing but the video is kind of a mess. I still think it contains good info for new mappers. https://youtu.be/SQai5AHwghA 

Would it be possible to have a single engine that "toggled" between Quakeworld and NetQuake depending on the server it was connecting to? Local Host vs. Online?

So if you are playing a map in SP it would default to NQ and if you were in COOP or DM it would default to QW? 

Would it be possible to have a single engine that "toggled" between Quakeworld and NetQuake depending on the server it was connecting to? Local Host vs. Online?

So if you are playing a map in SP it would default to NQ and if you were in COOP or DM it would default to QW? 

I bet both Darkplaces and FTEQW does this.

All engines that supports custom protocols already switches to vanilla protocol 15 when playing ID1 demos or connecting to vanilla servers. Engines that supports both QW and NQ protocols will most likely switch between them automatically too. 

DarkPlaces ... doesn't "suck".

It's brilliant.

It has held itself back with a few handfuls of frustrating choices that caused the user grief.

I am expunging those.

https://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=62234

I could produce a list of "mistakes" -- but why bother and I'm no scorekeeper -- instead I will just fix them.

I have great gratitude to LadyHavoc (and others .. DP is the work of a number of contributors) for efforts in DarkPlaces.

Ironically, it was LadyHavoc who got me into engine coding.

In 2007, LadyHavoc was one of the players who joined the "Dredd Server" debut (a server Phenom and I started) ... and late into the night .. R00k (Qrack) and LadyHavoc talked engine coder stuff for an hour. I listened intently as they had a very interesting conversation. I started to wonder if I could maybe update ProQuake like adding FitzQuake's video mode switch to it.

I also went to great efforts around that time to integrate DarkPlaces into multiplayer NetQuake community and LadyHavoc made many changes to the engine, I was always astonished by how quickly.

I think 2007 was also the year mh coded a Direct3D wrapper overnight and we ported it into 6 engines.

DarkPlaces can open some doors that will always remain closed doors without it as things stand now. 

DP still has the best netcode out there. just works. 

big shoutout to LadyHavoc 

I remember in 2012 or so using DarkPlaces and I lost my mind in anger.

I was already frustrated with some stuff that I couldn't turn off because I dont know the words.

Then I save a game.

I cannot find the save anywhere. I do a file search of my Quake folder, it is not there.

Far too many times, DarkPlaces did that kind of thing. 

hm, what happened to LordHavoc 

For the first time since so many years playing Quake1, I found a big map that asked for -protocol 999 during game launch (map addy_cl_m4, which is a true jewel, by the way!). What is this protocol? Should I use it as default to play all my other maps, instead of the regular one with QuakeSpasm?