I hope DM with crossplay takes off, I might finally be able to climb off the bottom of the scoreboard! 

Did Nightdive actually do this port or did they just license the Kex engine? Nightdive's Blood remake was only supported for a few months before they stopped working on it, leaving it with many unfixed bugs, especially in custom content.

I just hope they don't do the same thing here. I mean, I definitely don't expect them to patch it up to support AD or other mega-mods, but I hope it's not just left to wither on the vine after release.

Of course, there's no way we'll ever see the Kex engine code. That's Nightdive's cash cow and they're gonna keep milking Kaiser for all he's worth :D 

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2580258215

The Q shadow near the teleport in E1M4 looks very sharp and anti-aliased. Sharper than any of the existing light tools could manage. Not sure how they're doing this. New lightmap format? 

Definitely a dynamic shadow. The player model casts a shadow here too.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2580266801 

n/t 

But it might actually support AD. I've heard 'partially support', I also heard one person on Twitch saying AD did work, I ran quoth successfully, the console gave a couple of weird warnings but seemed to handle it perfectly anyway. 

In terms of AD support, it probably can't handle any limits breaking maps, unless they created a new protocol and new bsp format (e.g. protocol 666/999 and bsp2.) 

Hey, so, some of those highres models seem very familiar, the dog and the grunt look a lot like the community-made dog and grunt models that I have installed already in my (non-steam) quake folder. I'd have to do a side-by-side comparison but is there any chance they actually licensed some of the community's work for those? 

It looks like they are using capnbubs' models (Player, Rottweiler, Grunt) plus his Ogre which he had never published before. They might have locked that guy in a dungeon for the last years to do all the models for this remaster, maybe that's why he vanished for so long. 

So when you ripping and converting the Ogre for AQM? :P 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33T7NPxnEKI 

Interesting for the AQM would be the Ogre, Vore, Zombie and rocket launcher. However, with the models having md5 format, it isn't clear whether it's even technically possible to convert them properly. Right now, it rather looks like the port could use more of our assets, considering ammo and health boxes haven't been touched at all, for whatever reason. 

The MVG video mentions new prediction code, so multiplayer is clearly not vanilla NetQuake. 

I don't know what they used, but it's definately not QuakeWorld and the code feels a shitty as NetQuake has always been, if not worse.

Another problem is lack of capability to run dedicated servers. The dedicated servers are all on Azure Playfab and only in Matchmaking, game browser is all P2P, no dedicated server binaries, no -dedicated switch on client... 

KEX has its ups and downs and has still way to go I think, but it is clear that MachineGames went all out with the new episode: unlike the classic one they produced for the 20th bday, it looks like they aimed for community-level content this time around. It is top-tier stuff and may hopefully serve as an entry-point for people out there who had no idea that their olde Quake was capable of looking that good and make them start looking for more quality content to play. 

Yeah, Dimension of the Machine is way more detailed, but that's because as I understood from J.F. Gustafsson's QuakeCon'2021 interview, he made Dimension of the Past "the old way" - using WorldCraft editor and keeping maps within the original limitations, even the supplied .bat file to launch 2016 released DOPA uses winquake.exe.

He also added that Dimension of the Machine episode goes beyond that and I think he said that he used Trenchbroom this time, not sure about other mappers. And yes, they were clearly influenced by some of the modern community releases and also advances in the sourceports.

He called it "our MachineGames Quake modding group". Well I hope they will produce more content. 

Certain sections of the levels found within DotM has always a kind of RT shadows going on. Even though I disabled dynamic shadows (gets distracting pretty quick and I'm not used to see it in Quake), those sections stay the same. It's a pretty impressive and adds a nice atmospheric touch. Would love to see it implemented in the source ports we normally use, though I wonder if that is a possibility at all, considering the KEX version is now an official release. 

I still have my old Quake CD somewhere, so this was never an issue for me... but it's great that people who bought the Steam version can *finally* hear Trent Reznor's soundtrack, without hunting around for it. (Now, if only they didn't have to "hide" from YouTube's algorithms when doing Quake playthroughs...)

I've noticed something weird, though: every 5th level seems to play Track 10 (as heard in "Ziggurat Vertigo") instead of Track 11, even though the latter exists. Also, I'm pretty sure the .ogg files have mismatched titles (though it makes no difference in the game.) 

Nice catch. That's because for some reason ExM5 have "sounds" "10" in the worldspawn. So in this rerelease, Track 11 won't be played at all when playing original content.

I just checked the sources that Romero released in 2006, and ExM5 have "sounds" set to "10". Since they recompiled the maps (small cosmetic changes and fixes here and there), perhaps that is the reason. But it's weird because these source .MAP files are dated September 1996.

Interestingly, I found this peculiar entry in Quake's 1.06 (downloadable) shareware:

v1.02 -- Bugs fixed
------------------------------------------------------
* Had to remove one ambient track from CD for retail

But it appears he didn't? 

One thing is certain, this port did set a new standard and custom engines will have to work to match its features. The new userbase will expect that the custom ports fully supports it, minus the obvious platform-specific stuff like Steam integration. 

But this thing with the ExM5 tracks doesn't happen in other source ports, right? I think they didn't touch the maps after the v1.01 release, so if tracks were changed later, it didn't happen via new entity definitions. 

So for example let's take E1M5 "Gloom Keep".
Right now there's four variants of it:

* 1996 Beta 3 Pre-release - uses track 8
* 1996 Regular release - uses track 11
* 2006 .MAP source - uses track 10
* 2021 enhanced - uses track 10

I don't think they hex-edited their BSP files :) Too bad .pak files do not contain file's timestamp information. 

Good catch. This version can definitely benefit from some community feedback about all the negative changes (wrong tracks, wrong backspeed, view bobbing disabled by default, etc.) if the developers are willing to fix them. Hopefully they will still do some updates for a while.

On the long run, I imagine the community will provide patches to fix most issues. 

I have reported your ExM5 music issue over at Doomworld where the Nightdive guys are watching.

In the meantime, I found a new glitch on my own: Flying gibs have low gravity. Looks like there's a dedicated variable for this and it's set to lower than normal. 

Some maps like ad_swampy seem to work. Some others like ad_tears definitively not. I´ve also tried some maps of Alkaline. They seem to work although the original menu is gone.

I´ve finally run the new episode mg1 with QSS, which despite some error messages, it runs until it crashes randomly during the game play.

So, for the time being I will stick to QSS or QS. I´m not playing Quake for just playing quake. I´m playing Quake for playing quakes´s mods.