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Post feature Report RSS How far - "a road map of Quake features"

How far have we come? A look into advancements related to the Quake one engine.

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Quake: Moddb.com

"A preview included with id's very first release, 1990's Commander Keen, advertised a game entitled The Fight for Justice as a follow-up to the Keen trilogy. It would feature a character named Quake, "the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent", armed with thunderbolts and a "Ring of Regeneration." Conceived as a VGA full-color side-scrolling RPG, The Fight for Justice was never released."


"Quake was programmed by John Carmack, Michael Abrash and John Cash. The level and scenarios were designed by American McGee, Sandy Petersen, John Romero and Tim Willits. The graphics were designed by Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud. Music and sound design was by Trent Reznor."

Released:

"June 22, 1996."

The story so far:

"The player takes the role of an un-named protagonist sent into a portal in order to stop an enemy code-named 'Quake'."

Features:

* Full 3-D environment
* Miptex rendered world
* Polygon models, _NO_ sprites
* BSP tree mapping
* Pre-calculated light levels
* Client / Server network gaming
- deathmatch or coop

Original system specs:

. Pentium 75Mhz Processor
. 16 Mb RAM
. 25 Mb of Hard disk Space
. A fast graphics card (VGA compatible display or better)
. CD-ROM Drive: Double-speed (300k/sec. sustained transfer rate)

Impact:

"It is also interesting to note that Quake was the game primarily responsible for the emergence of the machinima artform of films made in game engines, thanks to edited Quake demos such as Ranger Gone Bad and Blahbalicious, the in-game film The Devil's Covenant and the in-game-rendered, four-hour epic film The Seal of Nehahra."

"The source code of the Quake and QuakeWorld engines was licensed under the GPL in 1999."

"In 2008 Quake was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for advancing the art form of user modifiable games. John Carmack accepted the award."

"On October 11, 2006, John Romero released the original map files for all of the levels in Quake under the GPL."

Goldsource (Half Life engine): "It is fundamentally just a heavily modified Quake 1 engine. There are about 50 lines of code from the Quake 2 engine, mostly bugs fixes to hard problems that Carmack found and fixed before we ran into them."

"The Boss" visual upgrade: HD pack, Darkplaces, Software


The next visual paradigm - hardware acceleration:

GLQuake and VQuake: Bluesnews.com

"In late 1996, id Software released VQuake, a port of the Quake engine to support hardware accelerated rendering on Verite chipset"

"On January 22, 1997, id Software released GLQuake. This was designed to use the OpenGL 3D API to access hardware 3D graphics acceleration cards"

"GLQuake was written by Dave "Zoid" Kirsch for Id Software. Also the man responsible for ThreeWave's popular Capture the Flag mod. ... GLQuake was basically a test-bed for many of Quake2's 3D hardware features.

Features:

* Hardware accelerated display
* Filtered textures - NO blocky pixels!
* 32K Colors
* Real time lights / shadows
* Transparent water
* Mirror texture - real reflection

Monster shots: Hell Knight - Darkplaces, HD pack, software


Darkplaces: Moddb.com

Icculus.org

Darkplaces is a Quake engine update with unique and interesting features.
At its most default operation it is an enhanced GLQuake engine.

Features:

* Redesigned effects including smoke, blood, bubbles and explosions.
* Better looking dynamic lights.
* External texture support (see Replacement Content section below)
* Realtime bumpmapped lighting/shadowing support (r_shadow_realtime_world cvar) with many options.
* .rtlights file support (improves performance/appearance of realtime lighting)
* Alpha blended sprites (instead of glquake's masked sprites).
* Overbright and fullbright support on walls and models (like winquake).
* Colormapping support on any q1 model (like winquake).
* Fog (set with "fog density red green blue" command)
* Skybox (loadsky "mtnsun_" will load "env/mtnsun_ft.tga" and so on).
* Sky rendering improved (no more glquake distortion).
* Improved model lighting (directional shading).
* No messy .ms2 model mesh files (no glquake dir anymore either).
* Decals (cl_decals cvar to enable).
* Stainmaps (cl_stainmap cvar to enable).
* Improved multitexture support (r_textureunits (1-4 supported), needs gl_combine 1 because of overbright)
* Optional fullbrights (r_fullbrights 0/1 followed by r_restart)
* Dynamic Farclip (no distance limits in huge maps)
* Improved gl_flashblend (now renders a corona instead of an ugly blob)
* No 8bit texture uploads (fixes 'green' walls in the distance).
* Fixed view blends (glquake was quite broken).
* Video Options, Color Control, and Effects Options menus added, and more options.
* .dlit file support (produced by hmap2 -light) for fast per-pixel lighting without shadowing.
* configurable particle effects (effectinfo.txt, can be reloaded at any time by cl_particles_reloadeffects command for quick testing)

And many more...
Darkplaces lets you achieve some interesting visual feats.
All it needs is a compilation to show off its full capacity...

Monster shots: Scrag - Darkplaces, HD pack, software


Quake HD pack: Moddb.com

Quake HD pack is a compilation of visual and feature enhancements that pushes Darkplaces mod-ability to the max.

Features:

* Textures - Quake retexture project (complete!) - really awesome tex upgrade
* Monsters - new skins and many bonuses - extra skins, models and effects
* Particle effects - pretty much all the old quake effects are redone well
* Realism - shell casings, nails stuck in walls
* Physics - Gyro physics system
* Effects - water & lava splashes (check Cthons pool)
* Environment - rains, snows, ash, waterfalls, lava haze, new skies
* Audio - includes the orignal game cd tracks in ogg format
* HUD improvements (try the compass - slick)
* Quake-c - many new effects are quake-c driven

If you want to make a Quake mod or new take on the game, the HD pack would be a great starting point. A starting point for a single player reboot styled after a Lovecraft horror fest (hint, hint.)

Monster shots: Chthon, exploded - HD pack, software, Darkplaces (clockwise from left)


Comparison:

Quaddicted.com

I present for a visual comparison the torch.

Software:


Darkplaces / GLQuake:


HD Pack:


Wow.

Quake one has come a long way, and the engine, modifications and derivative games are nowhere near the end of the life cycle!

"Semper Fidelis"

Nehahra: Moddb.com - Quake one story explained
NPR Quake - an "alternate" dimension render: Moddb.com

Sources:

Quake FAQ v2.0
En.wikipedia.org
Quakewiki.net
Icculus.org
1up.com
Soldcentralfl.com
Soldcentralfl.com
Thefullwiki.org

Post comment Comments
WeeGee9000
WeeGee9000

software still rocks

Reply Good karma Bad karma+5 votes
numbersix Author
numbersix

Edit:

* Polygon models, _NO_ sprites

Just remembered the original software used sprites for 2 things - explosions and bubbles.

Reply Good karma+2 votes
Jam3s007
Jam3s007

I love stuff like this, just bought the whole quake series and experiencing dark places/quake for the first time.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
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