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Comment by rndmio | Hacker News Reader

I know there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but in my mind this was a pivotal moment in gaming. The step up from Doom (and alikes) to Quake was huge. Not to mention how well designed and balanced the game was. I wasted so many hours playing it originally and even now it still thrills, in a way I just haven't had for a long time.

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That was a beautiful moment in time when the technology was starting to reach high levels of realism but the aesthetic of realism still hadn't become the oppressive norm of mainstream gaming.

And then we got WoW and now things are tilting back towards cartoons...

Yeah, but that's still progress in a way, progress away from the false goal of unconditional realism. Cartoons are generally cheaper, which means we can have more things, and also has more useful design space. Something like TF2-style "all characters must have distinctive silhouettes" is much harder if you're also trying to do total realism, because you end up so much more constrained with where the distinctiveness can be. (Color? No, nobody's running around on the battlefield in bright red. Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. A lot of guns look a lot like other guns. etc.)

Here's a presentation by Valve about the visual design of Team Fortress 2: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_Illust...

And here's the paper for it: http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_Illu...

It is not even just about the cost to produce. Realist games sacrifice gameplay itself, because if you are on the bleeding edge of fidelity you cannot have a lot of useful gamey aspects (speed, object density, environment complexity, etc). You can put more non-interactive polygons on the screen but only in exchange for gameplay quality.

Amen. I recently tried playing a MMORPG that seems to throw a insane polygon count at the player models (boob physics galore). End result is that my computer screams for mercy any time i set foot in a spawn zone.

I think there's room for both, and it's not that limiting. An Uncharted 4 looks amazing and has all the elements you describe, but is obviously a lot harder to implement than an Overwatch (which is great looking in a cartoon fashion, with vibrant colours etc.)

> Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair.

Clearly you've never played TF2.

Read harder.

Whoops. Too bad it's too late to delete now.

Things run faster when not realistic and are cheaper to produce (Normally)

I personally prefer the art style approach over trying to make it realistic/technical approach by making realistic representation as if it was real life. TF 2 > Crisis

This is a BIG why the Indie Game movemnet

I don't know if this was intentional, but eevee just made a blog post about this yesterday:

https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining...

Probably to coincide with the anniversary.

That's a great article that really articulates some of the feelings I'd had towards modern games, especially FPSs.

It was/is being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444

Oddly one of the more interesting quake 2 mods i played around with was Brazen. It made the Quake 2 weapons have realistic ammo management and carrying capacity.

The most intriguing part was perhaps that you could transfer ammo between magazines, and empty ones was thrown into the game world.

The developer would go on to make a variant of this that was compatible with Action Quake, with a bit of Matrix influence thrown in (you could climb buildings by "wall jumping").

I've been really enjoying Minecraft lately because it bucks that trend for all of the right reasons.

All of its graphical simplicity both helps make the game world more modifiable, and encourages users to use their imagination to interpret the world, just like simple LEGO blocks do.

It's not just the graphics, it was gameplay too. Take a COD game and contrast that to a quake 3 1v1. No comparison.

Of course, IMAO.

I know what you mean, but as someone who works on rendering tech (for CG not for games, but games are more and more using the same tech), I would like to clarify something. You do want realism in your graphics. You want realism in the way light is calculated, you want realism in the way materials interact, in short you want fully physically modelled materials. Watch Disney animated movies (or really any high-budget animated movie), notice that no matter how stylised it gets, the lighting is always as realistic as possible, or if the visuals are really trippy, still grounded in the usual physics, it's just the materials and geometry that get twisted in fun ways. Humans have a really good feel for lighting, so you want that to be top-notch. Now that we've practically achieved real-time physically-based lighting calculations, I'm seeing lots of games opt for a less realistic style of materials. I think the oppressive drive towards realism was a necessary step to build the tech that will allow for real artistry. You can cheat and take shortcuts as much as you want, but there is no substitute for having a real solid base for lighting and I'm pretty excited to see what will come out in the coming years.

It really was a distinct shift, wasn't it? And you could feel it then too, it's not like you have to look back 20 years later and go "yeah you know what, that probably was a pivotal moment" – it was palpable right then and there. Quake, as it turns out, was a really great name in more was than one.

Me and some friends who played a lot together back in the day, some of us belonging to the same clans, are doing a re-union LAN later this summer as a kind of celebration. Can't wait! :o)

The atmosphere still exists when you look at shots today - I think it's mainly the lighting: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19...

I suffer from poor vision, but surely I can't be the only one... there is no lighting in those pictures. It's black. I'm tempted to say it's so black you ask yourself how much more black could it be... Well, a little more black, but not much. I never played quake because I literally couldn't see it. I always wondered what it looked like to people who liked it.

Apparently you can set the screen brightness in Quake's console by assigning a value to the variable "gamma": Less than 1 is brighter, more than 1 is darker: http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.htm...

I closed the curtains, so the only light was coming from the monitor. I think id should have told people do do that too.

It wasn't just a feeling. The reason Quake felt like a distinct shift was that it was the first proper 3D engine in an FPS, allowing for much more interesting level design and player freedom. Doom was still built on the hacky 2.5D engine from Wolfenstein.

>Doom was still built on the hacky 2.5D engine from Wolfenstein.

That's not true at all. Wolfenstein 3D was a raycasting engine based on cubes. Doom used BSP trees and allowed for much more varied level geometry without right angles everywhere (although there still were no sloped floors).

Let me rephrase that. Doom extended the technique used in Wolfenstein, which is 2D maps and sprites, and movement in the 3rd dimension was limited. Quake used a proper polygon rendering engine. In any case, it doesn't change my point that there is a discrete change in the rendering tech between Doom and Quake that accounts for the difference in feel.

Again, you're kinda missing the big change from wolf3d to doom.

Doom added semi-dynamic lighting, arbitrary line angles (wolf3d was only grid-based), and moving segments.

Maybe not as large a leap as from Doom to Quake, but at the time it was significant.

You guys are arguing from opposite directions.

Doom-to-Quake was a bigger technological leap, going from a hacky 2.5D raycasting engine to a fully polygonal 3D environment and renderer.

But Wolf3D-to-Doom was a bigger gameplay leap. Doom could do enormously more with level design and the visual experience than Wolf3D could. Quake being fully 3D didn't really do all that much for the player experience over and above Doom.

Out of the box, Quake was a lesser experience indeed.

But the engine was highly mod friendly. I think i have at least a couple of CDRs somewhere (if they are still readable) Stuffed with zips downloaded from Fileplanet.

Everything from grand projects like Team Fortress, to small one man mods that was not much more than a collage of weapons.

This in large part because the game logic was implemented using quake-c, and the compiler was freely distributed.

how do you define semi-dynamic, the lighting had to be pre-rendered as part of the level building.

Lighting could change and cycle, thus changing the illumination of sprites for a sector.

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