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Comment by snide | Hacker News Reader

There was a brief period of time where having one of these 3D cards in quake led to a pretty heavy advantage for gamers.

I can very clearly remember installing the card and then loading up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being able to see THROUGH THE WATER.

Sniper's paradise!

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If I remember correctly to get transparent water the level also had to be re processed through the "vis" program with a transparent water flag set.

vis did a precalculation for where a level segment(the partition in binary space partition) could be seen from any other level segment. the end effect was that while glquake did have a option for transparent water, the geometry would not draw on the far side. making the effect useless without a bit of extra work. But I have to admit I have no idea if entities(other players) would draw or not.

update: found this https://quakeone.com/forum/quake-help/general-help/4754-visp...

Apparently there is a no_vis option to run without the visible set optimizations.

Adding: the server and client had to both be running vis patched maps to be able to see other players in the water due to the way entity visibility was calculated server-side.

The downside to running vis patched maps on a server is it used slightly more CPU than unpatched maps IIRC. Perhaps someone that ran more servers than I did (I ran two nodes on an Intergraph InterServe with dual P6-200s) could weigh in on what the impact was at scale.

There was also a perverse effect on some games. With a graphics card, your gameplay could be altered and you had to unlearn all the reflexes you built on CPU rendering alone. Moto Racer (1997) was like that. The gameplay with a graphics card was completely different, even trajectories (I assume lag made the cpu accept a little bit more rounding errors).

Moto Racer was one of the few games that supported the PowerVR card. I had one and it looked so good. Such a fun game.

> I can very clearly remember installing the card and then loading up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being able to see THROUGH THE WATER.

Searching for "2Fort4" in YouTube yielded some interesting videos for people curious what the original Quake Mod version of the map looked like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJh36LuKwVQ&pp=ygUGMkZvcnQ0

As someone who still spends at least 3 hours a week playing 2Fort on the current Team Fortress 2, it's fascinating to see how the core of the map is still basically the same after 20 years.

EDIT: Another video which goes into more detail about the history of each 2fort version, going back to its original inspiration from a Doom 2 level:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid9QwAOlng&t=375s

Interesting, didn't realize this design was that old. Feels a little like teapot :).

The video also misses that there was a pretty popular 2fort for half life 1.

I spent so much of my early 20's in that map/mod on Q1. I don't think I've had that level of just fun in any game/map/mod since then.

This and the overwhelming advantage conveyed from fast internet connections was hard to really appreciate when you were there.

Even having a solid dial-up connection with a ~180-185ms ping was a ridiculous advantage when most HPBs were ~350ms, particularly in clan invitationals for Q1CTF. We were playing as LPBs in the dorm at ~45-60ms and 180ms wasn't that much of a concern, aside from sliding around corners more than expected, but at 350ms you were basically shooting predictively at where you assumed they'd be next, not where they 'were'.

Subspace/Continuum also used lag in its gameplay, with players warping to recently exploded spaceships so they could continue to invade. It was an established technique and had to be defended against.

Edit: typo

Shout out to any EG players!

On a very different scale, but I recall playing bzflag decades ago and discovering that I simply could not jump my tank to the second level. My graphics card was so slow that something wasn't working correctly, and no matter how many times I tried from different distances I would almost make it, but not quite.

More recent example: In GTA SA in a mission I wasn't able to reach an airplane before it took off unless I lowered the resolution of the game.

You also needed a fast connection to minimize latency. 400 ms on dial-up was common.

I used to play games like Starsiege (the mech game) on dialup. With our 250ms pings, your brain just learned to compensate for the delay and click that much earlier to shoot.

But yeah, those lucky people with their DSL modems and 60ms pings would wipe the floor with us.

Nowadays, everyone has a < 10ms ping.

I loved playing starsiege back in 2000. I had a wired college campus connection, but shared with so many students, my pings would go anywhere from 50 to 500 depending on time of day. Near-timeouts showed the client side prediction code in action, with mechs sliding around and then freezing in place.

Yeah funny to watch the mechs slide, all the kinds of things the young whippersnappers nowadays will never witness.

Plus all the weird behavior with packet loss. You could see each player's ping and PL numbers in the server player list. Those were the days.

The torque engine (at least tribes 2) was wild what it was capable of on dial up. 32 or 64 players was okay compared to 8 on quake 2 depending on your latency and connection speed.

I played in Tribes 1 tournaments ... I never had a computer powerful enough for Tribes 2 – it had a very bumpy launch, remember? A lot of C++ exceptions, etc.

But Tribes 1 was incredible in how smoothly it handled "larger" servers. It would be so chaotic.

When qtest was released, I was there in the IRC channel and one of the first to play.

I remember connecting to someone's machine and just destroying everyone. Afterward I got a message from someone congratulating me, but being incredulous about my ping time being 26ms.

I happened to be on the first floor in the first dorm on campus to get wired internet access, and they had an OC3 dedicated to it. Two months earlier there were 16 of us splitting that line, with public IP addresses. (Going back to dial-up after leaving the dorm was.. difficult).

So I told him, yeah I kinda have a ridiculous internet connection here at school. He was like, "no, you don't understand - it is my machine. I am playing on the server and your ping time is lower than mine!"

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