From what I've seen they range from suckage -eg. Lost Souls, that spidery thing, ("thing" being the key word here, lol - I wonder where that got that idea from?) Revenant looks a bit silly as well, but the concept is flawed from the start - a skeleton with twin shoulder-mounted rocket launchers? It's hard to not make that look laughable.

On the other end of the scale, you have awesomeness in the form of the Archvile, Hell Knight, and that other big demon we saw right at the start of D3 tech demonstrations - was that a Baron? Is it still in the game? 

"a skeleton with twin shoulder-mounted rocket launchers? It's hard to not make that look laughable."

I agree, but then theres various Doom/Quake monsters that are weak or laughable. Personally I think Cyberdemons are boring, ogres with chainsaws? Pff... 

ogres with chainsaws? Pff...

The Ogre makes me laugh. I'm sure this is common knowledge, but the ogre underwent quite a few revisions during Quake's development. He started off very medieval, had viking-like horns, and wielded an axe. Then he was re-imagined as a chainsaw-wielding, nail-shooting mish-mash of tech/medieval, until right at the last minute id changed the nails into grenades, but didn't change the ogre model, giving him the unique property of actually firing missiles that are bigger than the gun they come out of :P 

yeah, id's pretty funny that way.

still though, i think the cyberdemon is pretty cool looking. granted, it's not the most interesting to fight (it had like, what, 10000 health?) 

not to mention the original Shalrath model - ugh! (Although Zerstorer tried to salvage it).

It's really interesting looking through the QTest pak; I keep spotting new things - recently I noticed the Shambler skin being slightly higher-res in QTest than in the final game. 

at the QTest pak files. Some very interesting stuff in there, extra animations for the scrags and spawn for example. Most of the skins are slightly different: the ogre is more orange in particular, but also the scrag and shambler.

There are some more monsters, most are well known though, such as the dragon, and the stupid looking Shalrath that kinn mentioned.... also a 'serpent' and a 'vomitus' that i hadn't seen before. The serpent might be an attempt at a manta ray type thing? Looks a bit crap. The vomitus is unskinned but has great animations, potential to be quite cool. Maybe i've missed this one being used before.

Weapons are quite similar... the shotgun effect is more realistic than in the finished quake, but otherwise everything's worse. Walltorches are sprites...they suck. Oh, lots of monsters and the player have death anims where limbs/heads get blown off.

Interesting stuff indeed 

Yeah, the mesh on the Serpent is bolloxed for some reason. The Vomitus is used in Nehahra, but I think it looks arse - id were right to drop it.

I find the Fiend interesting - it looks as though he started life as a huge demon, but got shrunk somewhere along the way. In any case, he has been salvaged to some extent in Nehahra, and some of Kona's stuff. 

I'd love it if I could see some of the rejected stuff for Quake2/3. Did you know that the Q2 Mutant used to be blood red?

Also, what happened to all the wicked looking maps shown in the very first Q3 screenshots - I remember a grey church-like thing and an extremely curvy-looking tunnelly thing submerged in fog. And also, has anyone else heard of the rumour that a significant chunk of the Q3 content was lost about halfway through development? Is there any credibility to this? 

Hey, I personally like Vomitus, and I thought John McCann ;) used him quite well in Nehahra. I have reskinned Vomitus as a mud bottom dwelling guppy for an upcoming map. 

I like the Quake monsters! 

Shambler, that's kind of obvious ;P 

Actually, the Vomitus skin in Nehahra was probably the part that made it look a bit silly - if you're reskinning it, I might like it better. One question though - are you redoing the skinmap? I'd recommend converting the model to md2, redoing the skinmap in NST, then converting back to mdl in Quark5. 

see this post:

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=15190&start=50

for an example of improved Quake 1 skinmaps 

I mentioned Vomi-Gup because I was getting around to asking you about that thread and how you got those md2 skin styles working in regular Quake. Thanks! 

My post in that thread should explain it all. if you need any extra info, don't hesitate to ask :) 

i stole these posts from
http://forums.inside3d.com/showflat.pl?Board=Inside3D&Number=17980&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5
thought they might be interesting

Posted by Sajt
http://imdb.com/title/tt0152116/

Two people, J.S. Gilbert and David Locke are here mentioned as voice actors for Quake. I guess they did some grunting and screaming for the player and monsters? Has anyone else heard of them? Also, J.S. Gilbert is credited as the voice for 'Dank'. So who the heck is Dank :P

Edit: Also, the IMDB trivia thing says this:

Originally intended to be a medieval game with swords and a dragon, but only a few months before it was released guns were added and roleplaying aspects removed. The dragon was also removed, although several other monsters like the Knights and Fiends were kept. The dragon was later added in the second mission pack by Rogue Entertainment.

I didn't know that :P It's interesting. I know somewhere in Commander Keen or something id Software advertised a future game called 'Quake' which was supposed to be a 2D rpg where you play as a magician or something... but this is interesting too :)

Posted by ErroraboveSCI
Dank and Scud my guess... old school quake related comic.

For all that medieval mumbo-jumbo... read the book Masters of Doom... it explains all the oldness behind Quake... which was originally based on John Carmack's Dungeons and Dragons world. But, was changed later on to be "another doom". One of the many reasons that John Romero left id Software. It's a good read... I highly suggest it.

That old thing about Quake that they posted, was something Romero did just shortly after Doom I think... It was posted on a BBS. I can't remember the specifics.

Another cool bit about Quake: original weapon was called the Hammer of Thunderbolts. And they player had a transdimensional object floating above their head that was called the Hellgate Cube. I hope I got that right. 

of all the old interviews with the id crew (Romero mostly) that were done at the beginning of Quake's development. It's really amusing reading back through them - they were talking about having things like flat-shaded player models and ragdoll physics (!). I'm buggered if i can find a link to the article though :( 

Hipnotic's Mjolnir was a nod to Romero's original concept. 

post #4436 by the communist Vondur

is the best post ever. 

that would certainly explain to lack of base monsters and base maps and the presence of medieval stuff.

also, thanks for pointing out that the qtest pakfile had the monster models in it.

also, what's with the fish model? it seems to shrivel up in some frames..?
also, did anyone notice the last frames of the death animation for the fish are screwed up in the finished quake as well? the mouth gets all skewed and funky...
i wonder what the deal with that is.

i think the player death anims with the head and legs getting blown off look really cool! i wonder why they got rid of it... 

The gib1/2/3 models are the players arm (a piece of it), a bloody limbless player torso, and the player head. I guess they later figured it would be easier to make non-descript gibs than to make a set of gibs unique to each monster.

There was also a 'prequake' version of quake, which was a pre-release version, closer to what was originally released but still some differences (I can't seem to recall atm). 

 

 

 

not to mention the famous player swimming animation