Quake's Player Speed (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Quake's Player Speed (2017)

rome.ro

85 pointsklaussilveira31 comments

That's fun and somewhat ironic, considering how speeding Quake up became it's own art form. Shoutout to Rocket Jumps, Bunny Hopping and Quake done Quick.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeDxelsLhikFHC8QnrcgQcg

I wouldn't call advanced movement "speeding up Quake". Speed in Quake and other FPS is an important factor that influences what you based on the speed that you have. Bunny hopping, air control, rocket jumps are not as useful when the base speed goes up. Also, less maneuverability, like in Quake 2, and bigger maps, mean that you have to be more judicious about your next move, and plan ahead more, stock up on more items, etc. There is an important balance to these things.

FWIW in some if not all ioquake3 forks if you set your FPS to 125 FPS, you can jump further, if you set it to 300, you can jump higher, typically.

Could not the PVS step do the "check for max 350 polys" automatically? Or was it not fine grained enough?

I don't understand what PVS is in this context, but it seems any attempt to completely automate this would struggle with false positives.

There might be >350 polys visible from weird camera locations, but if the player is never there in normal gameplay you don't care about them. If they do end up in such a weird position in one game in a thousand (say a rocket jump lifts them up to somewhere normally inaccessible) it's not the end of the world anyway, the game will just render slower for a few frames.

PVS is the Potentially Visible Set, and yeah, it’s a conservative estimate of the polygons visible from the player’s current perspective.

PVS by my understanding will only ever over-count visible polys.

It is essentially a set of all polygons that are visible from any point inside a fixed volume, but the camera only exists at a single point inside that volume so there will probably be some polys that the camera has no LOS (though I suspect these would still be 'rendered') to and a bunch that are out of the view frustum which will not be rendered.

edit: To observe this you can also load any HL1 engine game, run `r_speeds 1` in the console, then it will show you how many world polys are currently being drawn in the corner of your screen, which is probably the count referenced by John Romero here.

Imagine as a creator slowing down your YouTube video before your upload to stretch out the content. That's what they did with Quake.

Since kiddos play them at 1.5, you would actually get a normal video :-P

The player speed in Doom is completely unrealistic, which is fun, but plays against immersion.

In Quake, the player speed is less insane, more in line with human abilities, and it makes Quake feel more real. BTW the same is true for System Shock, where the player is not a sprinter champion at all (but can obtain a skateboard, but this is another kettle of fish).

I actually find that Quake’s running speed is still quite fast by modern standards.

Yes, but at least humanly possible. Likely not with all the gear, but at least as a player you feel more like a running person than like a flying pilot.

Doom offered very nice gentle "bobbing" that added to the illusion of a real person's gait. Of course, only when you played single-player and switched off the "always run" mode. (Regarding this, I wish there were a popular FPS that would explore the notion of stamina, so that running mindlessly would be wasteful, but sprinting at critical moments would be an extra game mechanic. It worked reasonably well in Diablo, released in 1996.)

Diablo 1 had no running or speed mechanic, movement speed was always constant. Its expansion Hellfire allowed running in town but not in combat areas.

Diablo 2 (2000) added the sprinting mechanic with limited stamina, but it panned out as irrelevant for gameplay. The stamina supply easily ramps up to more than you ever deplete so you just always run. And players wanted it that way since no one wants to walk slower, and the monster speeds were later increased to be balanced against players always running.

Not all gameplay mechanics need to last for an entire game. Stamina as an obstacle that you overcome plays into the power fantasy aspect of the game very well. Arguably it goes a long way to offset the feeling you’re slowly falling behind the power curve which is how they get people to grind without complaining about poor balance.

It never posed a meaningful challenge in gameplay, though - just an annoyance. If you run too much, you have to stand still for a bit for your stamina to build back up, or chug a stamina potion if you have one. There's a reason it didn't make a return appearance in subsequent games.

Arguably the true successor of Diablo 2 is Path of Exile 2, but PoE 2 doesn't have a stamina mechanic for running as well. It's just an anti-fun mechanic nobody asked for

This tread claims that David Brevik, creator of Diablo, regretted the stamina mechanic too https://steamcommunity.com/app/2694490/discussions/0/6052961...

It’s a non issue when there’s effectively zero penalties for death. On hardcore it’s more meaningful especially on hardcore challenge runs.

But that’s the thing if you’re only there for mindless slaughter then it’s anti fun, but also very close to a non issue.

Fortnite, one of the world's most popular FPS games, has the notion of stamina. In my opinion it has been poorly implemented and it's incredibly frustrating at the best of times.

I feel like most modern fps games have a sprint with stamina.

Escape from Tarkov is popular and explores stamina heavily. You can't sprint for long, or you exhaust your stamina and wheeze audibly to other players which gives away your positioning at minimum.

Further, the more you carry, the slower you can sprint, the faster stamina drains, and the faster your energy and hydration meters deplete. Since this is a game at least partially about scavenging, if you're carrying too much, you can only take a few steps before your stamina is depleted and you are unable to even walk unless you toss your immensely heavy backpack or gear on the ground and wait to recover.

None of this is to suggest that complex stamina mechanics are common in gaming, however...EFT is an exception to the mainstream.

And EFT has gone through some hilarious patches where stamina was very unrealistic. Some things are still very silly.

If you load up too much stuff in your backpack, you go from normal to overweight to tankmode. Overweight penalties are reasonable and progressive from normal weight. Tank mode is not. Walking, at a snails pace, now costs stamina. You cannot recover stamina unless you are standing still. OR, unless you go prone and crawl forwards at roughly the same speed as walking.

Idk if you’ve ever put 25 lbs + in a backpack and prone crawled, but that’s very much the opposite experience In real life. Same with crouch walking not costing any more stamina in the game.

Heaps of games have this? S.T.A.L.K.E.R?

This is true of virtually all FPS games. Realistic movement speeds feel unbearably sluggish in game.

Doom was inspired by arcade games. Armor helped, but your speed was your real defense.

Every single YouTube video does this right now. They are all incredibly slow and take forever to get to the point (if there even is one).

I have heard this is because there's a magic duration number for monetization.

So if I listen at 2x, how many minutes do they count for monetization purposes?

Watch hours are literally how long someone watches. So if you watch a 2 hour video at 2x, it counts as 1 hour.

Imagine walking around your 3d map hundreds of times on a slow ass computer looking for frame views that exceed 350 polygons. Must have been a pain in the ass.

I often go to YouTube to find teardowns and repair instructions. One thing I have run across is this niche where some guy out gal repairs something very slowly, over the course of an hour or two, with the mic gain cranked way up even though they say absolutely nothing the whole time. When I look at the channel, all the videos are the exactly the same and they have very high subscriber counts. I genuinely can't imagine who is watching these and why. But they must make a ton of money on the ad revenue.

ASMR

If I don't understand it, I usually attribute it to a fetish that I luckily do not have, yet.

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