Quake is 10

cyclomedia writes "Late on 22nd June 1996 Quake was uploaded to cdrom.com's archives in the form of 7 1.44MB floppy disk images. Though it wasn't until the 23rd that everyone realised (or at least, that's my excuse for being a day late with the news submission). Cue much aggravation on the newsgroups as eager downloaders experienced glorious 2 FPS gameplay."

Old schoolin'

Hell, I remember going to a vending machine at a local mall to buy Doom! Had to supply my own 3.25" floppies and everything. What a crazy way of getting software, and IIRC it was $18 in 1 dollar coins.

Re:Old schoolin'

3.25" floppies? Crazy. Where'd you get those from?

3.25" floppies

Basically, you had to buy some 3.5" floppies and then trim .25" off of one edge with the scissors before they would fit in the vending machine.

Re:3.25" floppies

Don't trim the side with the write-protect tab.

Re:Old schoolin'

AOL used to send me 3.5" flopies in the mail all the time for me to reformat and use for whatever. Now all I get is read-only coasters. Sigh, can't get good swag anymore.

Re:Old schoolin'

Heh, that's how I supplied myself in college. Found a website where you could request an AOL disk. I put everyone in my dorm in, then sat a box by our mailboxes which said "Don't want your AOL disk, drop it here" As I recall I ended up with over 80, more than my CS needs, I ended up selling them.

Re:Old schoolin'

Oh, metric floppies, yeah. 1.44 litres instead of the standard 1.2 quarts or something.

The Size was incredible

quake091.zip is nearly 9MB in size

Oh how times have changed.

Re:The Size was incredible

Times haven't really changed - quake091.zip is still 9 MB in size.

Re:The Size was incredible

cough [abraxas-medien.de]. 1% of quake 1's filesize, and much better graphics too... It makes me wonder -- WTF are today's multi-gig games doing with all that space?

10 years!

Insert Ob "My God, now I feel old" comment.

Re:10 years!

Specially if you realize that today's multi-giga games don't offer much more, neither in fun, gameplay, and even content.

Next you'll be telling kids to get off your lawn

Seriously, what is it with the grouch crowd on Slashdot that lvoes to hate on any game newer than 1980s? Look man, I'm big on old games, really big. I play onld NES and SNES games all the time, I've worked hard to get my DOS emulator working well on XP-64 so I can play X-com, Castles, Darklands, Epic Pinball and such. I really enjoy classic gaming. However, I play new games too, and let me tell you, there's been major improvements.

There are plenty of great new games, if you haven't found them it is because you are being willfully blind. Some are nothing more than updates of old games, but wonderful ones at that. Civilization 4 is a good example. As the name implies it's the 4th in the series. Each game is just the old one made anew. The fundimental premise of the game doesn't change. However each one is a worthy successor. The gameplay and mechanics take a huge step up, as well as graphics and sound. Some are more orignal, such as Knights of the Old Republic. Jedi Knight meets NWN.

Also, I think you'll discover that if you take off the rose coloured glassess of memory you'll find that many of those great old games, well, aren't. I've found that games that I just loved as a kid are not nearly as good now. I remember how tought Final Fantasy used to see, how a group of us would get together on the weekends and play it as a team. Now it's trivial, formulaic even. If enemy if type X, do strategy Y, etc. Still cool, but no comparison to, say Baldur's Gate 2. Of course I doubt I'd have liked BG2 as a kid, too high level, too much reading.

So please, let's stop with this "new games don't bring anything to the table". Yes they do. They aren't all great, of course, but you would be positively amazed at the utter crap released for old systems. Ever play Captian Novilon? I thought not, it was an SNES game about diabeties. Yes really. A huge pile of shit and it's just one of a massive list.

There are plenty of new, good games. There are plenty of resources to help you find them, or you can ask on Slashdot. However if you can't find any good modern games, the problem is not the state of games, the problem is you.

Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law

There is nothing wrong with the slashdot crowd.

In fact everything is right with the slashdot crowd.

The slashdot crowd is absolutely bloody right to expect that 10 years later something with the visuals of Quake and the level of game AI complexity of Nethack should have been written released and shipped.

And that has not happened. The monsters in the newer quakes, dooms and the likes are as daft as in the original. There is no random or even pseudorandom level generation.

It is the same old grind. Granted it is with very fancy visuals, but in 10 years I would have expected the industry to come up with something moderately more engaging.

So the slashdot crowd is entitled to bitch and it surely does.

When it is not engaged playing Nethack. Where the f... did that storm giant go... I need to kill it and eat it as I am missing the intrinsic...

Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law

The slashdot crowd is absolutely bloody right to expect that 10 years later something with the visuals of Quake and the level of game AI complexity of Nethack should have been written released and shipped.

Nope. Top-notch visuals, in practice, do not come about without a paid development team of professional artists and designers; the complexity of Nethack was evolved over two decades by geeks in their spare time. Companies will not take two decades to create a game (DNF notwithstanding), and geeks in their spare time do not have the resources to create top-notch game artwork.

It is, in fact, entirely unsurprising that this hasn't happened.

There is no random or even pseudorandom level generation.

There's a very good reason why you rarely see random level generation: It's extremely limited. (As a game designer, I've had a good deal of experience with the problem of randomly generating game content.) "Preposterous!" you say. "Random level generation means exponentially increased variety for only slightly more effort!"

While this is technically true, the problem with randomly generated content is that it's very easy for humans to recognize the patterns and elements of the random set. Anyone who's played Diablo or Diablo II enough is familiar with this. At first, the random levels are pretty neat, each time you go into the cathedral it's a different layout... but after a few times, you begin to recognize certain elements (a room shaped a certain way, a certain set of prison cells arranged just so), and after a while, you see enough permutations that even if the level isn't one you've exactly seen before, it's similar enough to all the others you've seen that it's basically the same.

Even if you create 100 distinct rooms for your dungeon that can be arranged in 100 billion unique ways, there's still only 100 basic elements, and you'll begin to recognize them pretty quickly. Randomly generated content also violates the precept that games are a form of storytelling; and randomly generated stories are not interesting. Notice that even in a game like Diablo II, with randomly generated levels, the quests are always exactly the same and the dialogue is always exactly the same -- because you really can't randomly generate a good, original story.

but in 10 years I would have expected the industry to come up with something moderately more engaging.

I've played plenty of engaging games since Quake came out; if you haven't been "engaged" at all since then, that's your problem.

Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law

Name one thing that is in an FPS game that isn't in current quakeworld engines. Note that quakeworld has been opensourced for a long time now and has had time to evolve purel based on peoples desire for a better engine, no desire to try to be able to sell polished crap. Whether you're a visual junkie(Specular lighting, 24bit textures, Luma textures, Bloom lighting, Weather effects, Per pixel shadows, particle explosions/trails, etc), a Tech junkie(MD1/2/3 model support (thats quake1 through quake3 and everything between), BSP1/2/3 (Again, q1-3 and every game based on it), PK3 support(the compressed archive q3 uses to store its files), even so far as to support Quake3 QVMs, which is pretty much a .dll that is the entirety of a mods game-code, Direct encoding from ingame to an avi (xvid+mp3), etc)

And then theres the stuff for gameplay. Fully customizable hud. Arbitrarily re-coloring text(makes for good teamplay scripts), Regular expression triggers for console text(so you can match "someone stole your flag!" and play a sound for example), TCL scripting(I don't like it, but to each their own), Advanced scripting (if/then blocks, variables, math), etc.

It's not that games havn't improved since 1996, its that while companies are busy trying to add a few new features to their engines so they can hype it up, we've all been sitting here playing with the best christmas present anyone ever got us--Quake's source.

Of course I only focused on the engine (whats important-- as a good mod has its balls cut off by being on a bad engine), but for gameplay just look at stuff like CustomTF, RocketArena, MidAir, ClanArena. For that matter, I've yet to have a better co-op experience than quake right out of the box.

Re:10 years!

As long as he does not claim that Doom has turned 10. When THAT happens, I'll feel really old.

Re:Indeed

The single-player was fun, but the real accomplishment of Quake is bringing in the era of deathmatch.

To me the major accomplishment was that it had co-op play. Unfortunately, it totally failed to usher in an era of co-op. Playing Quake with two or three people (or Doom for that matter - it's not like Quake was the first FPS with that feature) was just riotous fun. I have played Q2 with the co-op mod, but it's buggy. Or it was then...

God, yes

I couldn't understand why nobody wanted to play co-op. To me, co-op is the only interesting kind of multiplayer game. Yet even now, the emphasis in online games is on deathmatches.

Me and a bunch of friends against a seemingly unstoppable horde of alien scum--that's what I want in a game.

ah the memories

I have a 486 Dx2/80 with a Diamond Stealth 64 2120
> video card and I get 6.2 fps in the start. While in Duke 3D, I get well
> over 30+ fps. Why is Quake so slow compared to Duke 3D?


Ahh... the last time anything besides Windows Vista got compared to Duke Nukem.

Re:ah the memories

I have a 486 Dx2/80 with a Diamond Stealth 64 2120 video card and I get 6.2 fps

Don't use a three year old S3 chipset video with a two year old Cyrix/AMD -- it is 1996 and Intel owns games.
That 80MHz machine is no better than an i486/33 which is barely a shade better than AMD's i386/40.
And Gateway2000 has had an under $2000 Pentium for 18 months now.
Go back to your two year old, 64 bit Atari Jaguar.

Still my Pentium favourite

I used to run Quake I on a 486DX 80MHz with 8MB of RAM. It was fantastic when I upgraded to 12MB then 20MB. It was THE reason to get a Pentium computer.

In recent years Unreal has replaced it as my favourite. I got my screenname [used on Slashdot now too] from playing Quake on dialup, and P2P with another local kid.

I can still remember Quake 1 being released

1) Quake 1 was released for $9.99 as shareware with the full soundtrack. It was able to be unlocked with a code, and so of course, keygens came out and enabled you to play the full version for $9.99 with the awesome Trent Reznor soundtrack in all it's glory. 2) When QuakeWorld came out, you could play with others anywhere at 600 ping and still be o.k with it. There was a few seconds delay, but you would essentially predict what you wanted to do. I remember I would turn, grapple against a wall, let go, and shoot hoping I was able to hit something. I don't remember broadband back in the day. I wonder what the next innovation will be that redefines video game playing.

Your excuse

(or at least, that's my excuse for being a day late with the news submission)

I thought it was because you were using that Procrastnatr calendar thingy...

Still have flashbacks ...

I like to think of the original Quake as my own personal Vietnam

Not Quake, but GL Quake!

For me, the game wasn't on until a little later a company called 3DFX released the Voodoo graphics card. Which you could install a front end called GL Quake to play Quake with arcade quality graphics. That, was a true game revolution for me. The full 3D engine, and liquid smooth graphics. I love it!

Now hurry and get people to help out at http://www.quakeremix.com/ [quakeremix.com] !!!!!

Quake still has a feature no other FPS has...

...it's playable with 32 players on a single server when all the players (though not the server of course) are on modems. Quakeworld rocked my world then, and it still does. Let's also not forget how easy it was to mod; sure there were doom mods, but quake was the game that catapulted us into the wide world of modding.

Classic quotes

Some quotes for our own amusement and wistful recollection :);

"Still have 486? Get a Pentium immediately!"

"I have a 486 Dx2/80 with a Diamond Stealth 64 2120 video card and I get 6.2 fps in the start."

"Am I the only person who just can't /stand/ things like heretic/duke's look up/down?"

"Well over 30+ fps at start of Duke3d ? Thats top DX4-100 speed....actually I haven't seen a DX4-100 that tops 28."

"There's an option, r_fullbright (1/0) which turns off all lighting effects and speeds up the FPS tremendously."

Those were the days - further I can recall back to is the Voodoo 2, anyone have any further fond memories of the mid 1990s GPU situation?

Re:Classic quotes

There were no GPUs in the mid 90s, the Voodoo/Voodoo 2 didn't have GPUs, they were mere rasterizers. The first GPU was nvidia with the GeForce 256, Aug 31 1999 [nvidia.com]. It took a long while for it to really catch on, since it's just as easy to do the 3d to 2d conversion in memory (CPU).

The 3D engine used by Quake and Quake 2 was pure software, the CPU did all the heavy lifting geometry wise (and still does, for the most part). AFAIK, the 3d geometry part of it is still mainly CPU based, you can't just send every polygon in the world up to the GPU and expect it to sort the shit out in a timely fashion. BSP trees and face culling and all kindsa nifty hacks abound for such things.

We had no fancy hardware T&L business or programmable pixel shaders, and that's how we liked it.

I remember walking uphill 40 miles in the snow just to frag newbies with my nailgun.

Revolutionary Game and GPL'ed Engine

Happy birthday Quake!

And thanks to Id for releasing its source code [idsoftware.com] under GPL, because of this, the game is still being played and mod'ed after 10 years of its initial release, check Tenebrae [sourceforge.net] for example, which adds modern rendering techniques like per-pixel lighting and stencil shadows to the original game.

Perfect time to re-install and re-play

I still play the original Quake. Nothing has every really come close to the "arcade-y" feel of Quake. The controls were tight, and the game was pure fun. I encourage you to honor Quake's 10 year aniversary by re-installing it and playing for an evening.

Put it on nightmare, type +mlook into the console and let er rip. Not many games can be enjoyed 10 years after their initial release, but Quake stands above the crowd.

88mph

I was about to post a reply in that thread, you know, to send a message back and boast about how good our computers are here in the future or something, but apparently [google.co.uk]...

Sorry...
You cannot reply to this topic because it is more than 30 days old or has been closed by a moderator.
Please return to the main page.

And I was gonna get so much cred with my 'amazing' Pentium III laptop... anyone know when Google will be implementing this feature?

Descent.

I grew up on Descent instead of Quake. Now I'm immune to motion sickness.

Quake beta

Ah, Quake was a classic. My brothers had gotten their hands on the beta version of it before it had been released. The Twist? It had no enemies in it. Imagine how fast it became boring.

Quake Done Quick

This seems like a good time to mention something I ran across again a few days ago - Quake Done Quick. These guys finish the whole of the original Quake, on Nightmare difficulty, in 12 minutes and some seconds. Incredible.

Check it out: http://clanservers.multiplay.co.uk/?p=/ftpfiles.ph p%3Fpid%3D%26fid%3D953 [multiplay.co.uk] (BIG .avi)

Quake Done Quick With a Vengeance

Or even better, view the entire thing in the actual Quake 1 engine using the recorded demos (.dem)

http://qdq.planetquake.gamespy.com/qdqwav.html [gamespy.com]

Full collection of Quake 1 demo files for the run.

Attention, Mac users

Quake and Quake II updates for Mac OS X --- Fruitz of Dojo. [fruitz-of-dojo.de]