Five Years of Quake 221
Jacek Fedorynski writes "On this day five years ago the shareware version of Quake has hit the Net and changed the world forever. There's a pretty good article about the history of Quake on Methos Quake. It's got an interview with John Romero and Tim Willits."
q1 didn't change much (Score:1)
Re:5 years since the release of Quake means... (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm a QuakeForge developer.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Re:All the wonderful things Quake gave us: (Score:2)
A QuakeForge developer.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Re:American McGee is the key (Score:2)
- DM1: never particularly liked it.
- DM2: not too bad, but totally sucks for 2 players.
- DM3: I HATE it.
- DM4: pretty good, even for two players.
- DM5: another "lots of players" map, but it's fun (especially with rune or paroxysm:)
- DM6: just perfect
:)
Back in 96 I was able to play quake for a while (`stole' the computer from work over the weekends:) and I had my friend come over with his computer twice: first time to play coop, second for dm. During the DM session, we went through all 6 DM maps sequentially. DM 1 3 and 5 didn't last long due to their unsuitability to 2 players (3 actually lasted a little bit but IMO should have been a SP map (it's very big and the TF version just makes it worse)), 2 was okish, 4 was fun (I wiped the floor with him, but I had more practice playing quake) and 6, well, wel lasted for hoursDon't get me wrong, I'm not bagging any map out of hand, but as I generally prefer small games*, most of the id dm maps are just not to my liking.
* Mind you, a nice big, *TF game is fun, especially on a suitably sized map (until my fps drops below 15:/)
Bill - aka taniwha
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Re:5 years since the release of Quake means... (Score:2)
Speaking of Romero interviews... (Score:1)
Anyway, I'm going nuts trying to figure out what he's saying where ever OMM substituted the word "crack".
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Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:3)
And if you read the interview, the interviewees seem to be acknowledging that. To paraphrase every single question in the interview:
Interviewer: It was great how Quake invented foo.
Interviewee: We made some improvements over Doom/Wolfstein that regard.
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Still alive and fragging (Score:1)
I and about 20 other people still regularly play quake (qw creeper ctf). The most popular server is currently madhouse.
I have tried q3a but it has too much of a spacey feel to it. I like the dungeon-y feel of quake. I also tried tribes2 but it was way too complicated to satisfy my fps needs.
Re:spispopd not spispod (Score:2)
A Dumb Question for Carmack (Score:1)
Computer games, in terms of raw dollars, are a bigger industry that motion pictures. There's little question that, though Wolfenstein-3D, Doom, and Quake, John Carmack is personally responsible for much of this success, and is a celebrity in his own right.
So my dumb question to John is: Have you ever been invited on the Dave Letterman Show? Come to that, has any major figure in computers ever been on Letterman (or Leno)? (Bill Gates doesn't count.)
Schwab
Re:Wolfenstein is the real hero here (Score:1)
Quake? (Score:1)
Quake ruined gaming!! (Score:5)
Re:Ah yes.. (Score:2)
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Re:Quake was a late-comer (Score:2)
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Re:Wolfenstein 3D (Score:2)
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Re:It was not the first with real music (Score:2)
IIRC the C64 version of Afterburner came with a tape soundtrack to be played while playing the game.
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Re:two cents (Score:1)
Myst? I saw a a picture once (in fact wasn't it just that - a series of nice pre-rendered piccies) but I can't claim to know a single person who has actually played it..
Re:5 years since the release of Quake means... (Score:1)
Re:All the wonderful things Quake gave us: (Score:1)
- Revolution on graphics, 3dfx
- Improved stability for Windows, DirectX Improvements
- A major gaming developer saying Linux is important
- Improvements for some Linux drivers, John's envolvement
- Release of complete gaming engine source code to GPL
- Racing stats of the cars id employees drive
LandoRe:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:5)
Actually, the first multiplayer 3d shooter was probably a tank fighting game that was a GL demo for SGI systems. Kind of a neat game actually. It got better as GL got better. Preceeded even Wolfenstein 3D, but it required awesomely expensive hardware. :-)
Also, the multiplayer innovations in Quake were actually, to my knowledge, pioneered in nettrek for Unix boxes as well.
For a couple of other borrowed ideas...
I like the PC games mentioned, and have a lot of respect for those who wrote them. But, sometimes it irritates me that people forget the genesis of the big ideas that went into them.
Re:Quake ruined gaming!! (Score:2)
On the Atari 2600, for example, I'd estimate that 75% of the games are Space Invaders/Galaga-style shooters, varying in playability from excellent to awful. One of my favorites is Megamaina, where in a sorta surreal parody of the situation, you defend your planet by shooting invading hamburgers and toasters.
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Re:Where were you? (Score:2)
The next thing I remember, it was two days later...
Re:I agree, but... (Score:2)
What about Marathon? (Score:3)
Does anyone know what the timeline was for Quake versus Marathon? I may be wrong here, but Marathon seems to come first in my mind for the first person 3D shooter. It may be that Bungie was developing for the Macintosh and fewer folks were exposed to it at the time, but the story of Bungie goes something like this: A few great programmers and artists get together and make a few killer products on the MacOS (Pathways into Darkness, Marathon etc...). Company decides to move development to Windows in addition to MacOS to make more money. Linux comes along and company starts developing for Linux. An awesome looking program begins development (HALO). Another company, M$ decides they want to own the game console market. M$ buys Bungie and HALO is forever lost to Linux, and possibly the MacOS.
At any rate, I would appreciate any info from those who remembers Marathon and know of the development timeline between Marathon and Quake.
I remember when DOOM came out (Score:2)
Oh yeah, I remember when Quake came out too. It did like 0.5 frames per second on my 486-120, so I never *ever* played it again. That machine would play Descent just fine.
Re:Descent (Score:4)
My favorite part was when you blew up your opponents their "goodies" would float there for the taking.
I agree, but... (Score:2)
QIII was a nice progression but honestly, and I speak for myself, what I enjoyed most were the multiplayer Q2 co-operative games, where up to four people could do the same mission at the same time.
Re:All the wonderful things Quake gave us: (Score:2)
* establishing OpenGL as the de facto 3d platform for the next couple years, ensuring that directx didn't totally swamp the market right away.
yes everyone uses directx now, but everyone still has FULL opengl support with their cards. it's a given.
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
Quake lacks some of these degrees of freedom in rendering in that the character can't tip their head to the side. For movement, you can't tip forward/back or right/left.
It may not often be appropriate to do so, but there is a difference as compared to a game like Descent where you can point the ship in any direction.
As to the issue of the character moving, or the map moving... It's a common rendering trick to move the map around a zero point. It simplifies a lot of the calculations. Many modern engines do this. In fact, this is just a minor detail that these days is wrapped up in OpenGL or DirectX, it's about as unimportant as the specific graphics format used to store the textures.
You are correct that Doom wouldn't do floor-over-floor. In fact, in wouldn't let the player and a monster intersect. You couldn't jump off a cliff if there was a monster right underneath.
This however doesn't mean anything about the 2d or 3d-ness of the rendering. Technically, any engine for which you have to specify a 3rd dimension in the rendering is a 3d engine. If Wolf3D it had a 3d appearance, yet all the ceilings were the same height, etc.
In Doom, there was definately a height stored for each sector, the floor and ceiling could and did change, small passages, huge rooms, etc.
It was a 3d engine, but it was a 3d engine with a lot of limitations.
The name "2.5D" was used to describe these engines (Doom, Duke3d, etc) but it's not a technical term. It basically means that the engine has some sort of limitation, such as 2D maps, or no floor-over-floor, or walls at 90-degree angles, etc. It's not a technical term though, there are no 2.5D engines, 3D engines which are described that way to illustrate the limitations.
Re:All the wonderful things Quake gave us (Score:2)
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
Definitely full 3D and precedes Quake by quite some margin as I recall. Pretty successful, too.
Problem is it's been forgotten because it wasn't in the same mould.
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
If you're requiring that you simulate a view from a person nominally running around an arena then it clearly misses. I would suggest it only truly requires a shoot-em-up game where it sits as a first-person view in a 3D world of some form, on which grounds Descent qualifies admirably. But yes, it's largely a different gaming paradigm so I can understand why it's sometimes forgotten.
Oh, BTW, I found it almost unplayable until I got a Cyborg 3D. With a decent stick it's actually pretty simple, it's just that it doesn't work well with a keybaord and mouse.
small inaccuracy in article (Score:2)
Quake was the first network / on-line code that let you join in the middle of a game, players could come and go and the games would never end.
This is not the case -- back in my school days I remember playing Xpilot over the net at all hours of the day. You could join in anytime you wanted, send messages to teammates, customize the look of your ship, etc. There was even a worldwide ranking system. Xpilot has been around 10 years old now, and introduced (or at least expanded on) some pretty cool innovations.
Check out the story of Xpilot [acm.org] at http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds3-2/xpilot.html.
American McGee is the key (Score:4)
IMO, Willits is a 'YES' man of the worst kind. He made DM1 (wtf?!) and the passable DM6 but is lauded like some sort of major contributor.
If you look at the following games that each of them made, Quake II for Carmack, Daikatana (stop laughing at the back!) for Romero and Alice for McGee, I think it is apparent who had the flair and imagination to push boundaries. Even though it was made within a corporate enviroment Alice was still refreshing and innovative (although not without flaws).
He's just started a new company and I await its creations with baited breath.
Re:American McGee is the key (Score:2)
Mod this up (Score:2)
Re:Wolfenstein is the real hero here (Score:3)
Who the hell modded this 'insightful?'
Just Imagine (Score:2)
Quake The Movie. Politicians, and politically (in)correct parents would have a field day with it. "Quake made my child bite the head off a bat!"
two cents (Score:2)
I would say Myst has done more for 3d graphics than Quake has, and Nintendo did some really cool stuff with games like Legend of Zelda, Metroid, etc., Quake just hit it on the nose by being a really great interactive game.
Re:Quake ruined gaming!! (Score:2)
The author's post is NOT flamebait. The BIGGEST problem with *3D* games is trying to make them look distince and unique, as "almost anybody can write a 3d engine." (There was a Game Developer article on this.) Why do you think NPR (Non Photo Realistic) rendering is catching on? "Jet Grind Radio" for the Dreamcast used "real-time toon-rendering" for a nice effect.
> Atleast back then gameplay was more important than fancy graphics and 3d accelerators.
Gameplay doesn't sell, fancy graphics and repetative gameplay does. i.e. Diablo 2 has sold over 2 million copies, Lineage has over 2 million subscribers, EQ has over 300K subscribers, etc.
I'll try to dig up some links on the rendering issue.
Descent had a nasty bug (Score:2)
Well Descent had that bug in 3 dimenions! You point turn righ 45 degrees, and point your nose down 45 degreees, then move left+forward+up and you moved at 3x the speed !
The other problem with Descent was that it was peer-to-peer. (You would see people disappear then re-appear on a bad con.) You could hack your client to make yourself invulnerable and there was nothing no-one else could do.
Re:5 years since the release of Quake means... (Score:2)
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Re:Where were you? (Score:2)
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Re:Just Imagine (Score:2)
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
- lets assume "world" means "US pc gaming industry" [remembering that outside the US significantly less games are FPS.]
- lets assume that anyone agreeing with this line of thought got into pc gaming only after the pentium processor was widely in use.
- lets assume that no one recalls that duke nukem 3D had excellent multi-player capabilities, ran well on 486s, offered both on the ground and arial combat, and generally blew people's minds.
- lets assume that descent somehow doesn't qualify as an FPS or as a revolution even though it distictly offered 1st person perspective and much shooting, and it had a full 3D world with 3D models as targets, a [confusingly] 3D map for real, and of course a full 6 degrees of freedom/confusion.... not to mention network play, all on a lowly 486 long before Quake was really real.
- Then lets assume that Quake was not a belated catch-up effort to incorporate the better descent style engine, and fuse it with the rather non-fun [the second time] Doom style game play. And toss in some internet functionality that was only just becomming consumer feasable.
Only then can we agree that Quake changed the world forever. Now Q3... that's a fun multiplayer game... though Tribes has some more developed playing.-Daniel
you guys out there? (Score:2)
things like this make me miss hardfloor.
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
Hmm, well I think you're on the right track, but a few details are missing. First, DooM & co had 3D engines, alright (even if the entities were sprites), but most map makers tend to describe DooM and Duke3D engines as 2.5D. You have two whole complete dimensions. The vertical axis was highly simulated. (Somewhat analogous to using animated sprites in a 3D shooter to make them look 3D.) What I mean by simulated is that it was some sort of programming trick. Remember in Hexen where if you looked way up or way down in a corner, the angle of the wall corner (usually 90deg) changes to something like 30deg?
The map-editing program for Doom engines provides more evidence... the map you created was *always* 2D and the engine merely rendered it to approximate the 3rd dimension. The closest you could get to 3D was stairs and platforms, by "raising the floor" those areas in the editor.
but Quake was the first COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFULL 3d shooter,
Most of us go ahead and refer to Doom as a 3D shooter, since it faked it pretty well. But it didn't have a true 3D engine, (like Quake does) as I've been yammering about above. Second, Quake was not the first commercially sucessfull 3D shooter, Doom was, by leagues. Quake just seemed to have a much more dedicated audience among the hardcore gamers.
Re:Where were you? (Score:2)
The Monster card would have been either 4 or 6MB's of RAM, I think. 4 sounds right. I only remember that my friend had a Monster but I got a brand-spanky-new Canopus Pure3D which had 2MB more RAM than the Monster.
Of course, I bought it specifically for Quake.
Re:Where were you? (Score:2)
Hmm. Well I remember cruising about the internet on my Pentium 100 with 24 megs of RAM (barely following having my first non-Compuserve type of internet access) and hearing about all this raving of Quake. I downloaded the 9MB demo (on a 14.4 modem, this was an acheivement!) and fired it up. It wasn't too impressive at 320x240@256 on a Pentium 100, so I stashed it away and got hooked on Duke Nukem 3D for a good many months. When I decided to drag Quake back out of the C:\DOWNLOAD directory, I fired it up a second time and began wasting most of my teenage life.
See post below about my getting a Canopus Pure3D merely for Quake alone.
The single best multiplayer gaming experience I've ever had to this day were the countless hours spent late at night dodging snipers in Quake TeamFortress.
Re:5 years? (Score:2)
ts also almost 5 years to the date that my grades started slipping, and I started failing all of my classes. But those all-night frag-fests were worth it, eh?
Ah, so that's what they mean by "changed the world forever." The braindrain of millions of college-grade would-be engineers in North America and Europe. This is a good thing?
Re:History, etc (Score:2)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Re:What about Marathon? (Score:2)
If you're curious, go to the marathon story page [bungie.org] and check out the stuff for yourself. It's epic in scale and it's full of mystery the way any great story is. They've created this incredible science fiction world that I've never seen another game pull off as effectively, especially in the FPS genre. People lauded Half Life for its in depth plot, but when you play it, it's a two bit hack job compared to Marathon's story. For instance, there's no character development at all in Half Life (and even less in Doom, Wolf, or Q123) but Marathon's AI's were all individuals.
I just don't see why everyone who posts about Marathon feels the need to lambast that it wasn't full 3D. That's not where it triumphed. It triumphed in plot, and I'm still waiting for another FPS to match the richness of Marthon's storyline.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Where were you? (Score:3)
I remember this: "What are they thinking? Why would they give something like this away for free?"
Where were you when Quake was released?
Re:What about Marathon? (Score:4)
Pathways into Darkness was Bungie's take on Wolfenstein.
The original Marathon was Bungie's take on DOOM.
John Carmack
History, etc (Score:5)
Everything is built on past work.
A lot of people like to think of creativity and innovation as something that springs from the void, but the truth is that everything is traceable to its origins.
I consider myself fortunate that I am consciously aware of the process. I can dissect all of my good ideas into their original parts, and even when there is an interesting synthesis, the transformation can usually be posed as an analogy to some previous work.
Given that fact, you will rarely find me touting anything as a "first", because I could always say it is "sort of like this thing over here, but with the principle demonstrated by this over there added to allow it to give the feature we wanted back then" and so on.
There are the occasional "eureka!" moments, but they tend to be in twitchy little technical things, not the larger ideas like "3D environment" or "multiplayer gaming".
I'm not all that concerned with our place in history. The process has been interesting enough in its own right, and lots of people have enjoyed the work as we produced it.
John Carmack
Re:Fond memory (Score:2)
Tragically, the death of Danielle Bunten probably means MULE will never rise again.
Actually.... (Score:2)
Descent (Score:2)
The reason I think Descent didn't catch on as vivid as Quake and the like did was cuz the average gammer couldn't handle descent. Most of my friends couldn't figure out controls in a manner that proved usefull. (I loved my old Gravis phoenix! the throttle needed a spring tho). So most of the ppl I knew just gave up and went for the easy point and shot and hope to kill games like Doom and Quake.
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
Yessir, this is the only factual statement in your whole post. However, you seem to imply that since Doom has apparent depth, it must be 3D.
No. Ask yourself this: In Doom, do you have X,Y, and Z all at once? Sorry, no. In Doom, your character does not move at all. It is the rest of the environment that changes based on your input. Carmack himself said that Doom is not 3D. But its not exactly 2D either. The rendering techniques simulate something I think he called 2.5D. That is, yes, you can move up a flight of stairs, but anything directly under those stairs is solid. There is no closet behind the stairwell.
Sorry bub, you're wrong. If you'd ever bothered to develop maps for games like Doom (or Duke Nukem 3D heh), you'd know full well that Doom was absolutely positively _NOT_ 3D! Ever notice in Doom that there are NO spiral staircases, or true multi-tier structures. Whether you are shooting on an angle or not is entirely pointless. Imagine an apartment building with balconies outside every floor. In Doom, it is impossible to build this structure, as it is a true 3-dimensional model. You cannot start in one room (1A), then go up a flight of stairs and wind up in 2A. You _CAN_ in Quake. Doom uses some cheap hacks to make you think you can do so, but you cannot map one floorspace directly above another, with a hollow space inbetween. Looks like Carmack did a pretty good job of his quote "2.5D" in Doom. If you knew a damn thing about actually creating an environment in Doom and Quake, you'd know immediately what I was talking about. Thats why in Doom you can't have the aformentioned apartment building, but you can shoot at an angle.
And sorry sir, but a real 3D game does not have 6 degrees of freedom instead of 3. Unless you are a time traveller, degrees (directions, pivot points, angles) are a function of 3 dimensions. A true 3D game has 3 major degrees, the X, Y, and Z axis. A true 3D game has infinite degrees of freedom, just like real life. How do you get infinite degrees of freedom? Thats your function of X, Y, and Z, man. Also, a computer generated 3D environment has NOTHING to do with the pretty graphics, whether sprites, skins or texture maps. Its not necessary to fully render vines on a wall in 3D since its just for decoration anyway. And you said it yourself. Skins are wrapped around hollow cores. For a thing to be hollow, it must have 3 dimensions. Quake uses skins wrapped around a "hollow" frane, Doom uses 2D sprites. Would it make you feel better if those hollow frames were solid instead? Why abuse the graphics engine with polys you'll never see?
As for that swimming comment, I assume that you mean that you can't swim naturally in Quake (as in face first, feet last). I think you are confusing whether or not Quake is 3D with its game physics. Is there any compelling reason to position a model this way to swim? Not particularly. This would force the model to have a higher poly count so it can contort itself into this position. Polys are a big factor as to how hard the graphics card has to work (less unnecessary polys=good). Its not practical to render this in 3D when its such a unimportant factor of gameplay. But the fact is there is no reason that the Quake engine can't support this. If you've seen some of the cooler taunt actions that some user-made models have, you'd know that.
Funny, I learned all that shit doing Doom and Duke maps as a 14 year old, and I could grasp the concept perfectly even then.. Why can't you?
See if you can find an archive of Carmack's old
5 years since the release of Quake means... (Score:5)
-gerbik
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
Doom and Wolf3D are great milestones, but I was playing First-Person-Shooter type games as far back as the TRS-80 (Dungeons of Daggorath -- First person POV, wireframe graphics, and you move a cell at a time like Ultima or something). Granted, there wasn't any real shooting, but...
An even better example might be Stellar 7 or its ilk; the game where you're driving a tank around shooting up enemy tanks and cubes and things. :)
-Erf C.
How quake ruined my life (...or not) (Score:2)
A few years later Quake came out (idcracked it off the shareware cdrom). Lucky for me my dad worked for the gov't and for some reason they had money to buy new computers and he got a p60 with 16 megs of ram. What a beautiful machine. I got the supa-l33t dos tcp/ip hack and could now play quake online by hitting a website with a semi-current list of servers and writing them down, exiting to dos and starting quake (-maxheap 16000 baby!) The coolest part about the illegal tcp/ip hack for dos was that you could ping fine to the server but all the death messages would queue up for like 5 minutes then dump 100 lines to the console. Those were the days of playing until 5am and going to school at 7am. Soon I was able to convince my parents to buy a p166 with 32 megs of ram and win95 so I could actually play the game like normal people (err learn to program...yah). I even cracked quakespy/gamespy so I could get the full feature set (my cracked version still works).
This new computer along with quake and my hate for community college finally forced me to quit school after repeatedly getting absolutely terrible grades semester after semester. I had been working as an IT tech at a few companies (mostly to play quake on better hardware and use their net connection) so I decided to go full time into IT. Now I am a 21 year old (started at age 20) IT Manager for a pre-ipo biotech company (with umm, lots of probably worthless stock options) making a really nice salary and I owe it all to Quake.
In the end doom/quake:
1. helped me make friends with people like myself including my best friend.
2. taught me to pirate games
3. helped me to learn to program
4. got me intrested in IT (for the unaudited high speed connections)
5. got me to pay attention to hardware
6. landed me a management job that pays well and potentially could make me a millionaire (but I am not holding my breathe!)
Personally, being able to point all my success at a couple games makes me sad...but oh well =)
FYI, quake2 sucks. Is it just me or did anyone who liked q2 never actually play q1 or doom multiplayer? I paided for q3 (must...stop...pirating...games...I...enjoy...)no
Re:Quake ruined gaming!! (Score:2)
Sure it is. It makes a highly debatable point in an inflamatory tone without providing any depth, thus becoming the epitome of flamebait.
-n( Not that I disagree with it
Re:5 years since the release of Quake means... (Score:2)
Quake was a late-comer (Score:2)
2 - Doom, 1993
3 - Quake, 1996
Wolf 3D was a revolution, and Doom was a huge step from Wold 3D. Quake was a minor improvement, but a huge commercial success.
Re:I remember when DOOM came out (Score:2)
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Changed The World Forever? (Score:4)
--Quake isn't a huge step from Doom. Yes, it is better than Doom in some technical ways but as a game it (and Doom for that matter) are not terribly different from Space Invaders or Asteroids. [It's you against a never ending supply of baddies coming at you.]
--FPS hadn't changed much from Wolfenstein. In terms of importance I'd rate Zork, Pirates!, Sim City and Civilization MAGNATUDUES higher than Quake.
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Evolution of Gaming (Score:2)
I think it would be sufficient to say that the popularity of Quake, the original, really added a lot to the stagnating gaming industry 5 years ago
Re:But that name! (Score:2)
Personally I think the 'games are stagnating b/c Quake was successful' reasoning is crap. If games are stagnating, and that's a big if, it's not because of their popularity. Small niche groups do a fine job stagnating all by themselves. Look closely at the history of technical innovation.
Ah, nostalgia... (Score:2)
wishus
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DOOM and Quake were okay... (Score:3)
J
Glory to the Day!!! (Score:2)
Hats off to you! Thanks for making a difference. And I am gonna sue your ass for making me waste those countless hours (till daylight broke) pummeling through hordes and hordes of demons and grunts.
Along for the ride (Score:2)
first 3D games and cool sountracks (Score:2)
I believe Battlezone (circa early-80's) was the first 3D game, followed by Stellar 7 on the Apple ][+. Let's hear it for pale blue vector rasterization and green-monochrome-phosphor wireframes!
I liked Quake because it had that badass Trent Reznor soundtrack, which I still listen to every few months. I think the only game with a soundtrack by a major musician prior to Quake was something David Bowie did... can't remember the game, but it was pre-7th Guest days... sometime in 1990, right when 66MHz 486DX2s and CDROMs were becoming ubiquitous...
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Best Quote (Score:2)
Anybody got any other game quotes?
Microshaft still OWNZ JOO! [msnbc.com]
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
Actually, the first multiplayer 3d shooter was probably a tank fighting game that was a GL demo for SGI systems. Kind of a neat game actually. It got better as GL got better. Preceeded even Wolfenstein 3D, but it required awesomely expensive hardware.
Thank you for proving my point! Did you do that on purpose? Like I said, I'm sure there were a million truely 3d (not 2d as in wolfenstien and doom) games that came out before Quake; however, not one of them had the success that quake did...
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
The funny part is that I rejected about a dozen much worse names in my head before I finally decided on the much less offensive sounding space slugs title.. In other news, I've begun developing UCotNSSoH in another window here on my desktop, because it's just too good of a title not to have a booth at E3 next year.. I'm envisioning Space Slug Booth Babes!! WOOT!
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
Semantics.. Whichever you want to label up down deminision, Doom had none.. i.e. you could move side to side or front to back (2d) but not up or down.. now there was a cheesy hack that Carmack added that simulated an up/down-dimension, and if you read paper's he's written he specifically states that doom is 2d.. Granted to the average 3d developer X is up Y is right left and Z is depth into the screen, for the average slashdot reader this is confusing and there is no need to go into such silly details other than to argue semantics (i.e. YOU are wrong because you called it "blah" when it's really "foo".. big deal.. names are labels and nothing more)..
They get flattened to a 2-d array of pixels by your Geforce card, anyway.
Now you are again using semantics.. 'True 3d' as is defined by the gaming industry means the game contains a 3d model of the objects in the game and can render the objects based on the positional data. Granted the only interface we have to those objects is a 2d monitor, so in the long run it is displayed 2d, to be truely 3d it must as some point be represented by a true 3d model.
Bottom line: Doom was a true 3-d game with a few shortcuts and a missing control axis. It was much better distributed than Wolfenstein, and created the richness of atmosphere that pervades first-person shooters to this day. Wolfie was a testbed by comparison. Doom was the real deal. Quake was Doom in makeup.
Again that's just a stupid argument, Doom was in no way a 3d game if you look at what the industry defines as a True 3d game.. Doom was 2d.. everything was sprites.. there was no 3d rendering engine (in software or in hardware)..
Another you have missed that proves that Doom was 2d is that Doom lacked the ability to shoot at angles.. you could only shoot in front of you (not like Quake where you can shoot anywhere from directly in front of you to a 90 degree angle upwards)... if you look at a map of doom from above, you'll see a bunch of objects that exist on a x y grid, if I shoot in a straight line that intersects another x y point that contains a different object I hit it.. there is no z (in the standard use of Z in a geometrical system, for game developers this will actually be referred to as X).. i.e. if I shoot foward I don't have to worry if the object is jumping or ducking, it will still intersect.. The cheesy hack that Carmack added was that if you 'fall' to a different up/down dimension you actually enter a NEW 2d playing field.. if I stand on a playing field above yours (I'm on a box) you can't hit me.. we are on different fields..
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:3)
If my memory isn't core-dumping, I remember that Doom had an improved 3d engine and better camera move as you walk. Oh, and had also 3d scenarios (although it has only 2d maps).
Can anybody help us to find where all this started?
Uhmm.. If you mean Doom had an improved 3d engine over quake then your memory has definately core dumped.. Doom was still 2d (only it was produced to look 3d.. but it had no Z dimension (i.e. you couldn't jump)).. quake was the first commercially successfull 3d first person shooter.. now I'm sure that 50 people are going to reply and explain how the Ultimate Clash of the neferious Space slugs of hate or some other such game was the first 3d shooter and that I'm a non-1337 14m3r and I should kill myself.. but Quake was the first COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFULL 3d shooter, there may have been other games that entered the field first, but non of them had the success of quake...
Both Wolfenstein and Doom were 2d shooters that attempted to make you think you were playing something in 3d.. look at the bad guys in those 2 games, they weren't 3 dimentional bad guys (i.e. there wasn't a model with 3 dimensions) but 2d drawings that were moved like sprites in a simulated 3d world.. if you looked at the sprite from the side or the back you just saw the front, or a 2d image of the side or a 2d image of the back of the critter.. i.e. there were no angles, not true 3d..
Re:What about Marathon? (Score:2)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Re:American McGee is the key (Score:2)
No, actually the credit is given to Carmack, rightfully so, because he wrote the engine from scratch and basically pioneered realistic 3D games on "mere mortal" PC hardware.
Romero tried to take as much credit as possible for Quake, but I always got the impression from various interviews that he was floating on his success with Doom.
American McGee's DM levels WERE awesome; the best. However, he'd be staring at them in 3DMax if it weren't for Carmack's engines.
And, BTW, American McGee's Alice used the Quake3 engine
Re:If you wanted a revolutionary 3d fps... (Score:2)
By "3d" did you mean "2d"? I thought so.
Re:Evolution of Gaming (Score:2)
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
All the wonderful things Quake gave us: (Score:3)
- Aiming proxies
- Campers
- Lusers who complain about packet latency
- Hundreds, if not thousands of lame imitations
- Massive hardware requirements for *every* game, regardless of genre
- Game developers who are more concerned with game-engine mechanics than gameplay
- dozens of lame gaming comics
- CTF jokes
- Daikatana
Need I go on?why i feel quake was important (Score:3)
Quake 2 (Score:3)
Quite simply, Quake 2 is the best First Person Shooter created, ever.
Its too bad the people at id listened to the extremely vocal minority of 'hardcore' gamers that couldn't adjust to Quake 2's more cerebral style of gameplay and they made Quake 3 far too Quake 1 like.
Ah well.
And just look what it's done to our society! (Score:4)
Re:Ah yes.. (Score:2)
Ummm... Unless I am mistaken-- and I don't think I am-- Quake didn't use CD keys. As a matter of fact, I don't think it even looked for the CD. It did have some Redbook audio tracks on the disc that it would play, but it just knew which tracks to play and played those numbers. It would actually play any audio CD that happened to be in the drive. I don't even think Quake2 had a CD key you had to type in. Half-life, OTOH, always did, and was a real pain about it too.
Perhaps you mean the demo CDs that id distributed that had the shareware version, along with the full version you could unlock by calling id.
Re:Changed The World Forever? (Score:2)
My P.S. mentioned partial dimensionality, and the followups ignored it. The longer one simply misinterpreted most of what I said.
Doom wasn't the first 3D game. Quake certainly wasn't. Wolfenstein wasn't by a decade. The first 3D games were probably Battlezone and Red Baron. Red Baron especially, being a wireframe simulation of a biplane shooting down enemy planes. The enemy moved in three dimensions relative to you, and you had control in three (pitch, roll, and throttle) that gave you the same trajectorized-6-degree control that any airplane gives you (you can have any position and attitude in space, but it depends on your previous position and attitude).
Descent was different enough that it made me buy the $100 3D controller that it came with (the Logitech Cyberman II puck, which was perfect for that game, but integrated into very few others).
As for what Carmack says, that's just his view that having three coordinates for the map wasn't enough. I'd agree, but I'd never go so far as to say Doom wasn't 3D at all. When you turned, the environment moved in perspective.
Again, the first thing I said was that there are many kinds of 3D going on in a virtual reality. The environment (position/orientation/perspective), the objects (sprites vs. wireframed/wrapped-wireframed vs. solid), and the control (paddle, arrow-keys/ joysticks, pucks/joyballs). Carmack's world had 3 DOF, 3 visual dimensions, and 2+ map dimensions.
The most important point one should take from my posts (both of which someone was so kind as to mod down, proving that metamoderation is a boon to mankind), is that true 3D will arrive when we can view from all angles.
(Think about the chesslike game R2D2 and Chewbacca play on the Millennium Falcon. With movable-camera environments and multiplayer, we're close, but still not there; we need the real volumetric display. And there was that holographic gunslinger game from ca. 1980, but it had only the one visual sequence, repeated over and over again in the same place. I wouldn't be surprised if the arcade at Disneyland still has one of those in operation...)
The argument about the player always being (0,0,0) proving the simulation is less 3D-ish makes me think that people should learn their math in school and not from computer games.
--Blair
"Let the Wookiee win."
Fond memory (Score:2)
Quake got me into this industry, really... I might never have learned networking if I hadn't had to troubleshoot that damned BNC network.We had old AnselNet NICs that should have been identical but weren't... had to start the server from a PC in the middle of the BNC chain because of the lag at the ends.
those were the days!
5 years? (Score:2)
Imfamy (Score:2)
Not intended as a flame to Quake fans, but they've knocked out some of the elements that made the genre initially great.
If you wanted a revolutionary 3d fps... (Score:3)
Shocking, I know. But that's why li'l ol' Marathon still beats out Quake [II[I]] in my book. Now that it's open sourced [bungie.org], it even has OpenGL support. All it's missing now is some good ol' TCP/IP networking...
Recent developments (Score:4)
Re:small inaccuracy in article (Score:2)
Or Empire (the Online Unix game [empire.cx], not the PC or Spectrum version)
Or any of 10,000 MUD's.
Quake / Doom / &c. were the first time you had 3-D (or 3-D'ish) versions of the old "shoot anything that moves" games (asteroids, space invaders, &c.) They had better graphics than most of their progeniters. But the ideas were all done before.
Quake and the like are perfect for the "I've spent 25% of my life watching TV and am proud of it" generation. As for me, I got bored after the first hour.
Personally, I'd rather fire up the old Atari 800 and play M.U.L.E. any day. Crappy graphics with awesome gameplay will always win out over simple gameplay with incredible graphics...
Re:Yeah what did they blame mass shootings on befo (Score:2)