Quake – 30th Anniversary Update | Hacker News Reader

Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

slayersclub.bethesda.net

419 pointsdsubburam210 comments

Quake is 30 years old. I can't believe I'm still alive. I love this game so dearly. The mods were just incredible, KQP and Girobot in particular.

Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back. As in I had friends bringing over their big ass CRT monitors and PCs for a single occasion and also had ludicrously long network cables. My parents didn't mind, they somehow understood, even with LAN wires running across the kitchen floor. Priceless.

Edit: typo: lab -> LAN

hell yeah, my first real LAN game experience on Windows was the Quake test/alpha that preceded the release of the game (IIRC?), when I was at a local tech school for a class. We weren't technically allowed to load the game on the uni PC's but like.. yeah... it happened. And we did zero work for that day (or days). (Prior LAN experience was Marathon and Bolo in the Mac lab which was insanely awesome too, and a year earlier lol)

Honestly the best of times. I wouldn't be able to pay rent were it not for videogames which inspired me to work in the software industry.

I wish we could get those days back. Cars loaded with CRT monitors and big machines and bags of all sorts of stuff.

There was a way that you could trim the files just right that you could fit the Quake executable and a single multiplayer map onto a floppy disk. Those things were treasured as you could easily just hide them wherever.

Definitely made high school much more fun.

You can go download it again here:

https://archive.org/details/q3DemoTEST

There were multiple test releases. You can find the older ones out on the web.

I think this was the one we were playing: https://archive.org/details/qtest Good times :D

I remember the days where our data center PC had CDROM drive so someone installed Quake (can't remember II or III) and we would play while the overnight multi-hour batch jobs were running.

Quake came out just before I started high school and I played it a lot in those three years. I remember playing quake 1 in the LAN in university around 2002 because it was easy to share the 50MB of portable files. Things moved so fast back then that it already seemed like a retro game. I didn't realise at the time that it was a timeless classic and I would still be playing it 25 years later.

3 weeks ago, John Romero did a play through while discussing the entire design and build process of the game.

It was actually pretty cool how they designed the first room to demonstrate almost every new feature of the engine and how the first level is made to walk you though most of the new gameplay features.

https://youtu.be/PU7HkttPfAo?si=LnD4vJeCiUojhojt&t=728

YOU CAN JUMP ACROSS

And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.

At shop.nin.com you can buy a quake ammo box keychain. It makes the jump sound effect.

Dang it, sold out :(

Yeah ... "new features", especially the torches, to show me that FPU of 486 OCed to 150MHz is not enough :)

Good old days of 7-15 FPS being better than nothing.

Oh yes. I remember first playing Quake on a 486 and not liking it, because it felt like I was moving in a heavy sluggish tank, and later playing it on a Pentium, and loving it for the agile movement. The difference was huge!

Quake was notorious for being the first major game to require a powerful FPU. Michael Abrash manually tuned the rasterization code to fit the Pentium pipeline, any other CPU didn't cut it.

I recall we got it running pretty decently on an upper end 486 (DX4 100). That, and Winamp. Good times.

Memory has tencency to bend reality for better.

Every room with torches was max 9FPS on 320x200 on DX2 OCed to 3x50MHz, literally 50% performance over your PC. Turnig off all objects through console made torches vanished and FPS doubled.

My OCed DX4 got around 15fps, but I agree my memory of what was deemed “playable” back then probably wouldn’t stand today.

IIRC it came down to something crazy simple, like, using the FPU registers to bit-blit was the fastest way, but only on the genuine Intel Pentium.

Exactly. I remember schoolmates with AMD K6 (which had exceptionally weak FPU) having to purchase atleast the cheapest OpenGL GPU like Rendition Verite V1000 to play with decent FPS, while guys with 166MMX could play it software rendered.

So many modern games have such a clunky movement in comparison.

Till this day, there's literally no game with such smooth movement as had Quakeworld or Q3A CPMA/Defrag.

They've literally reinvented "platformer speedrunning" to a whole different level.

with a resolution of 640x480 or below !

Fun fact: The pattern of the torches' flickering is encoded via special strings in the source code:

https://jasemagee.com/post/2022-03-27-26-year-old-quake-ligh...

That is also the approach that Nintendo took with Super Mario Bros, as in the first level you almost cannot avoid to learn that, for example mushrooms=good and goomba=bad [1]

[1] https://mainstream404.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/how-super-mar...

> lab -> LAN

Ah yes, those lab parties.

I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.

> Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back

I still remember hours-long marathons of Doom2 deathmatch at my cousin's Novell cubicle farm after office hours, ca. 1994. Then Duke Nukem 3D (using Build to make custom maps [anybody here play NukeCity 1 and/or 2? That was me!]), then eventually Quake. Oh nostalgia, you rickety tower of mixed emotions.

crazy played both of those. nany many years later when i looked into the build engine finally :'D

my game was HL and CS (later days) which got me into modding so years after i looked at build engine.

i made for worldcraft a human launcher one day (ripped entities from some HLDM map by valve) and that got chucked into awp_1337_sk337 (by other guy, superjer).

miss those times :') still occasionally crack open the worldcraft to make a room with zombies and nades!

The original Shadow Warrior used the same engine as Duke3D, and when 3DRealms hired a company to build an add-on campaign for Shadow Warrior, that company reached out to me to design a level based on the popularity of my NukeCity levels. I designed the level and everything, and the add-on was completed, but it was shelved when Shadow Warrior sales underperformed. Sad.

I never got paid for that work, but the campaign is out there: Twin Dragon[1]. I built Level 11: the Fortress.

[1] https://www.moddb.com/games/shadow-warrior/downloads/twin-dr...

Story time! I was a kid when the original Quake came out in ’96. I don’t remember if I saw it in someone’s .diz file, a FAQ, or somewhere else, but I learned you could change the actual game physics through the console and most importantly you could do it mid-game.

I used to host LAN parties where all my friends from school would lug their PCs over, and we’d hook everything up over 10Base-T. One match, somebody was chasing me down and I’d completely run out of ammo. I fled down a corridor and jumped over a pit of lava - immediately spun around dropped the console and typed as fast as I could:

  sv_gravity 1600

LAN parties were an odd but super fun part of being a teenager at the time!

I got so much networking experience from hosting lan parties with quake and q3. Crimping cables. Installing 10 mbps pci card in people's computers, running dedicated servers with mods and map cycles. Good times...

It is nice to see Quake getting some love from the publisher, but I feel like it is not enough.

A bit controversial opinion maybe but I really like Quake Champions and I spent a good amount of time playing it. I even bought some battle passes and merch to support the development. I was really sad that they basically put the game to life support just 1.5 years after its release. The game improved so fast during those 1.5 years, we were getting significant improvements with every patch. I always wondered how much more it would improve if they put just 1 more year into its development.

With the failure of Quake champs, unreal tournament 4, and diabotical in the past decade, I don't think we can blame the developers for not trying hard enough. All three were great games (regardless of how nit-picky the players might be), and all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players.

> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players

This means that they not necessarily were all that great.

Only in the rather reductive sense of “the vast majority of gamers are into other genres now”.

It can also mean the market has shifted which is more the case imo.

They were great examples of what an arena shooter should be. Smooth movement, balanced weapons, well designed maps. The people who had experience with arena shooters liked them. Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.

> Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.

If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up. Making sure new players actually have fun is a critical part of the game's design. You can't just rely on "...and then new players will have to spend 50-60 hours getting demolished before they start having a good time."

Easing that transition could mean different things -- a campaign, skirmish mode vs bots, full-on PvE co-op mode, automatching that actually works, whatever -- but you do need something effective.

Splitgate matched new players with bots for the first few hours. It meant I had fun (then eventually I levelled up enough, matched with players, got stomped, and never picked it up again…)

Marvel Rivals quietly matched your team up with bots if you lost twice in a row. I think that was a good system.

Overwatch too, but it got boring after a while and their matchmaking was atrocious.

Exhaustive list of team-based PvP games where people don't complain about matchmaking:

That's largely what matchmaking aims to solve, assuming you have enough players you can get a reasonably balanced match to drop people into.

Bots can teach basics, but many of these games rely on abusing game mechanics in ways the developers didn't think of in development so it's impossible to teach. Or things are physically difficult to pull off.

Movement shooters especially have this problem because a core part of the game is abusing the movement system and abilities to out maneuver other players. You can explain the how, but executing it all automatically is a real skill that requires practice. I adore Titanfall 2. I sunk hundreds of hours into it. It's really something else when you get the movement down, it all happens so fast you can't think about it you just have to do it. There's no way to teach that with a tutorial, it's muscle memory and perseverance.

Titanfall 2 has all of these things, campaign, skirmish with bots and PvE, but the skill floor and ceiling is still brutal. Whether it failed or not is a question of how long you expected the game to last, but it still succumbed to the same fate. The more experienced players pulled the ladder up behind them and the matchmaker didn't have enough players to give everyone a fair match.

I've given up on PvP. What I never understood was; if I "git gud" then all that really does is shift the "I can't win" problem to someone else. It doesn't resolve it.

Now if you have fun playing the game while losing to others, don't have rewards (whatever they are) based on winning against others, well that's not a problem.

So now I play PvE and it is much more fun in a long term sense. There can still be stats about who the best player is, but everyone gets the rewards and has fun.

What about an Elo system where players get matched with players of similar skill?

I mean good PvP systems have skill based matchmaking so almost everyone is winning and losing 50/50. Though, that's harder to do if you have a small playerbase.

Even if you have a larger player base.

A person lower down the skill ranking has to put up with the flowing of higher skill people beating them as the higher skill person travels up the ladder to their skill point.

These aren't static systems.

> If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up.

Have you really though?

I'd argue that what made arena shooters great was the steep learning curve and the grind to improve as a player.

The feeling of having practiced duels for months and finally being able to beat players that used to 50-0 you every game was better than any achievement in any modern FPS game I've ever experienced.

Gamers these days just doesn't really care about becoming better themselves. They want the instant gratification and that's why you have FPS games with super low TTK, perks, abilities, heroes etc. All to narrow down the skill gap between actual good players and completely new players.

Maybe it's just me but I find those games boring.

In the 90s, almost everyone was still bad at these games (because they were relatively new as a genre), so the skill discrepancies were smaller. I was there, I remember.

When the skill gaps are smaller it's not as big of a deal to play "stronger" players. But when the skill gaps are huge, it becomes a real problem.

Skill gaps back then were HUGE. At least in the games I used to play and compete in. Mainly Quake, CS and StarCraft. If you were an average/decent player, you'd get absolutely destroyed by a good player every single time and it was never even close.

Modern FPS games with SBMM creates this huge "blob" of low-to-average players that will rarely if ever even have the chance of playing against an actual good player and they have no clue of how huge the difference in skill gap it is.

Popularity and quality are two very different things. There are many brilliant games that simply didn't get much attention simply because of luck or attention got dragged somewhere else.

I think games that are heavily reliant on online pvp are just always going to struggle with being more niche appeal. Matchmaking is hard to do well and consistently, and managing the skill/progression curve is hard— there's gotta be things in there to master, but also new players will never join if they're just getting stomped every game because they can never catch up.

This tension has arguably been a contributing factor in the collapse of the ARC Raiders playerbase, with a huge population who joined primarily to shoot and loot the robots eventually confronting the realities of a pvpve game, and peacing out for good after getting shot in the back or ambushed too many times.

Not just that but I believe that even those folk that have these huge hits don't really understand how they managed to do it. There just seems to be so much luck involved on top of a great product. You can have a brilliant game and still fail because it doesn't get picked up in just the right way.

Sort of like how Nintendo had the Wii, a huge hit but then almost immediately started to flounder for growth ideas as they didn't understand why it worked so well.

Unreal Tournament 4 didn't get a chance to fail because it was never a real release. UT4 was a free tech demo for Unreal Engine 4 that never got completed because Fortnite started taking off at that time and developers were deallocated from it.

And UT3 was definitely not a great game by anyone's measure.

It was never officially released, but it was on the front page of epic launcher for years, even after fortnite took off. The online experience was fairly complete and enjoyable (for people with experience) for ctf, duel, tdm, and team arena master. But yeah, epic didn't support it as much as they could have.

Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin.

The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd.

But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill you with a rail gun. It got frustrating playing the same bloody map each map change. "Oh yay, it's cs_office again" /s

The whole genre got stale and never has been successfully reignited. As Discord to TeamSpeak; same misfortune.

Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo and Minecraft was the new digital lego. None of them required such a skill to play or host the game. It was refreshing for it's time.

Not forgetting it was the upcoming of a new crowd of folk and as generations go, the old cards topple.

Who hosted an BBS when the internet came to be?

IRC today is pretty much stuck in dinosaur country and XMPP/Jabber never got a product which then was further nailed shut by Google & Co.

It was epic fun for the era but it had a death bed waiting.

Wut? We're in a Renaissance of boomer shooters right now. There's like hundreds of new ones and it's a popular category. Just check out civvie11's channel if you disbelieve.

They're just all single player focused.

Single player maybe, but that's nothing compared to the likes of UT or Quake.

I don't know about that. I've pretty continuously been playing games like UT99, UT2k4, Quake (specifically Quake Fortress), TFC, AvP2 since release. Even things like Space Station 13 and King Arthur's Gold.

It's not the only thing going anymore, but also people have orders of magnitude more choices. That's the thing that's missing today. Nothing is "dead", there's just too much competition now.

Honestly the aforementioned games have had much more staying power than more recent multiplayer games. And they're mostly played by old men like me.

I haven't fired up UT99, UT2K4 or any of the Quakes for decades. Are there active servers where you could get a good DM session?

afps is pretty dead. there are a handful of people on qw, q2,q3 but if you don’t wanna dig around start with the microtransaction feature quake champions or the quake re release while people are playing it again.

also shout out to banana shooter or straftat if you want a quick fix in a f2p game. it’s not really afpsy but pretty fast movement and wacky guns in both

For oldschool shooter experience you can just install Quake Live from Steam. You won't have trouble finding active servers in it.

I've never understood the appeal of the opposite. Modern gaming where you just play with different randos every round.

When I was a kid playing Quake 3 I had different servers bookmarked, knew the players that ran the servers and the general crowd that hung around. Had friendships and rivalries.

Modern multiplayer you may as well be playing bots. There's no community.

Xonotic has that old school feeling. It's an unfortunately tiny player base, and only a handful of servers with regular players. But if you are within ping of a busy server (like Jeff & Julius resurrection) you do run into the same people all the time, including the ones that run the servers.

Is there any community anywhere in life any more?

There really isn't, and I hate it.

All of the things you mentioned still exist, they are just not mainstream. And maybe that's for the best. Small friendly communities keep them alive, not companies that need to keep messing with a working thing in order to justify a monthly subscription or ad revenue.

>Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo

I'm sorry, what?

IIRC, Epic had (still has?) the source for UT4 available as they were trying to push community contributions, mostly on the playable content side but I'm fairly sure they had the core game there, based off what is now a very old branch of UE4. The telling thing to me is if there was a huge demand for it there was no significant effort to pick up the torch, or even do yet another 'spiritual successor'.

The source code repo is still on Epic's Github, not sure if everything else is that easy to get currently. The problem about picking it up by a 3rd party is the fun of getting approval on basically anything.

I compiled the project on a whim during COVID. It played okay. There was even a very small pool of players who had presumably just done exactly the same thing.

The people behind UT were reallocated to make Battle Royale mode for Fortnite which is the reason of the take off, not vice versa.

Twitch shooters are niche in the first place, and it has an even more niche player base that isn't majority American. I think it's a hard sell when 90% of the diehard community built their skill on Quake Live, which comparatively takes far less resources than Champions or UE4. Bethesda then switched the F2P status of Champs and Live, which was not a popular move.

Don't forget Reflex Arena!

while it’s the cpma 3.0 i always wanted its also bolstering 0 players and worth forgetting

I was gung ho to play Quake Champions, then the monetized the shit out of it and I fucked off.

UT4 was a tech demo.

Well, this update doesn't mean much overall in the Quake scene, if you actually play it for the PvP. Quake Live has held it down since 2012-ish, and was always a free-to-play game.

Champions came out, most of the community from Quake Live stayed on live. Bethesda in all their wisdom made it cost $10, I assume to sway new gamers into downloading Champions (which they also made F2P shortly after release). So effectively, they swapped the F2P of both games, and the free one is the less preferred option in the scene.

> Quake Live has held it down since 2012-ish, and was always a free-to-play game.

They had subscriptions for a while.

Quake Champions was the Mortal Kombat to Overwatch's Street Fighter. I've only ever seen gameplay vids of it, but it looked a trip.

Was fun, the never ending pursuit of balancing game balance with adding new stuff just watered it all down with the glaring obvious detail: stop all the hero bullshit and just make us all equal. At least a mode for that. Instead, speed, armour, health was all varied and unique "balanced" in their minds against active and passive perks per character.

A lot of potential, killed by committee

The problem is there exists a version of Quake Champions where everybody plays equally. It's called Quake 3: Arena.

The thing is, Q3A was originally supposed to be a sort of primitive hero shooter, with the various characters falling into different classes: fast, lightly armored "light" characters, more robustly armored but slow "heavy" characters, and a class in the middle. This was scrapped before release.

Well, a lot of it found a home in Team Arena, but that wasn't particularly well received.

TA and its huge maps looked like id's take on Tribes without understanding what made Tribes good

That's a problem of every commercial competitive game. Endless tweaking and new content kills most games, they never reach their potential skill ceiling. Sometimes it comes out good, but that's more of an exception.

Quake 3 was kind of like Latin of the PvP world (together with SC:BW, CS 1.6 and maybe Tribes 2), its great quality was that it was abandoned and frozen while also being extensible. This let the community decide what they like best (for example CPMA didn't take off despite being great on paper, because it was breaking a lot of VQ3 depth by being too fast for the maps it was played on), and let the players truly master the game over more than two decades. I recently played some VQ3 with agent and had zero hope of keeping up despite being in the top few dozen of players a bit over a decade ago. He's still playing and still keeps his chess-grandmaster sense of the game (and trash talk).

I like to think that doom: the dark age is the quake 1 sequel we never got, I mean it has the doom name, probably for marketability reasons, but thematically it fits quake the first better, and it really fits if you include what quake was supposed to be before it was released as just another shooter, the only remnants of this planned quake are the excessive castles and eldritch horrors. Nether of which were present in supposed sequel. I think of it as three separate franchises bearing the name quake Q1, Q3/champions, Q2/4/wars

Twitch and arena shooters are just not popular.

You can't fight with the times. Kids want colorful mods, dance moves, and other stuff like that. Girls also play, they won't play things like the original Doom or Quake, and boys don't get to meet girls much if they are not playing the same games.

Quake was special for me, the first time I felt truly immersed in a world. I'd played doom/wolf, obviously, but being able to look down, and move in a 3d space just felt real in a way nothing had until then.

Then the multiplayer - lived in the sticks had a 33.6k modem - ping times on a good day of 300ms. Even with all the limitations (and lack of any sort of predictive netcode) that was it, a very expensive (we paid by the minute for phone bills!), game!

Later teamfortress came out from the guys at RMIT in Melbourne who later went on to Valve (Robin Walker/John Cook from memory) and TF set the bar for so much to come.

I know a lot of folks recommend masters of doom for the atmosphere at ID during quake's difficult development, but actually Michael Abrash's graphics black book (free on github - https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book) is an even better companion, still a wonderfully readable book today, but captures the mindset of the development that we can take much from still. Indeed Abrash's anecdote about sliderule jockey's in the day of pocket calculators rings very true today as we grapple with the impact of AI on our work.

How many of us can thank our careers to id for hooking us on computers and things like quakec and even quake2's game dll source and later full engine sources.

Wow, didn't know TF was developed in Melbourne RMIT! That's awesome.

Robin used to go by 'bro' and he was insanely good deathmatcher, also an LPB (low ping bastard) as the Uni of NSW/RMIT folks had decent net links unlike the rest of us plebs.

PROTIP: Install the Kex-engine remaster, but then actually play IronWail: https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail

It's a real IdTech source port that will load the Remaster's PAKs and pretend to be the Remaster to Steam for achievement unlocks.

Dimension of the Machine was fantastic so I'm hyped to play Dawn of the Machine tonight :D

>PROTIP: Install the Kex-engine remaster, but then

You should rephrase this as just "Install Quake on Steam, but then" for newcomers who need this advice to be able to understand it.

Yeah I guess I should have added “(the Steam version)”, but that was an intentional context clue because I bet most people here who haven't been paying lots of attention to Quake would assume that the currently-sold version was based on the actual Quake engine, because why wouldn't it be when it's like the game engine that's most-famous for being portable?

Ironwail issue for Dawn of the Machine support: https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail/issues/550

And the new update to the KEX Remaster would't even launch for me; just crashes immediately with a “see CRASHLOG.TXT” message. I had to add `+r_rhirenderfamily "d3d11" +d3d11_compileShaders 1` to my Steam launch options, and it plays but with lots of texture glitching. This is on Intel 11th-gen integrated (Framework Laptop 12).

Wow I'm out of the loop!

I remember Quake, WinQuake, then QuakeWorld for online play, then GLQuake and GLQuakeWorld. Squake on linux showed up in there at some point (non-X11 linux version). Sometime later IIRC there was dquake... which google tells me was a PSP version but I swear there was a sorta "improved GLQuake" engine called dquake at some point, with various other ‘enhanced’ engines trickling out in the early 00s…

And of course not forgetting novelty versions like 'ttyquake'.

But all these are ancient history now! I'm surprised and amazed at the continued evolution.

q95.bat! Oh, the memories!

Nine Inch Nails also has some new merch and soundtrack album for the 30th anniversary:

https://shop.nin.com/

I hate the trend of selling vinyl but not selling Compact Disc.

It's a subscription service! When the vinyl wears out, buy another!

In this case the CD exists everywhere. Just buy a copy of Quake on CD.

Sure but…

- normies (not derogatory) wouldn't know that.

- original Quake CDs are of limited supply since new ones aren't being pressed.

- your CD player has to be smart enough to recognize Track 1 as data and skip it or else it will blast your ears with two minutes of loud static before the music starts.

- the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis and your player has to support applying de-emphasis equalization or else it won't sound right. I did check my copy when writing this comment and the TOC does at least flag `PRE`, so supporting players should do it automatically, but still there are loads of ways this can go wrong because it's a relatively niche CD feature and because most modern software players won't handle it at all:

https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/index.php?title=Pre-emphasi...

https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Pre-emphasis#...

Fine, get Quake on vinyl then :-)

Making the photos look like the old photos of the ID office is inspired.

https://www.nin.com/quake-nine-inch-nails-limited-merch-coll...

Nicely done; Really appreciate the extra effort, little touch that means so much

If you read this and you haven’t played arcane dimensions yet, drop everything and go and do that. It makes the quake the best single player FPS ever. The mechanics are even better than vanilla quake, the maps are gorgeous, the enemies diverse and fun. Absolute perfection

I adore Quake custom levels, but any time I want to play one, the half thousand source ports, the accessory tools to manage wads that work only on Windows (I'm on Linux), figuring out how to get a shady copy of the original .wad from shady sites, all send my brain into analysis paralysis and I just lose any interest. I must have tried half a dozen times over the years, and every time there's even more options and recommendations than last time.

Arcane Dimensions is worth the effort.

OK you guys convinced me. Just tested it now, plays really good

I love it and with the original music it's even better, especially the levels in the second chapters hub

it's fantastic! the gameplay is paced just perfectly, the puzzles are fun, and the levels are genuinely beautiful to look at. as far as i'm concerned - (with the caveat that the team had better tech and hindsight at hand of course) they built something that's more "Quake" than what id originally managed to.

I think it's a lot easier to run mods with the Linux source ports and so far I've had no issues running arcane dimensions (AD).

To run that mod from a CLI with most source ports, you just need to make sure that you specify a path to your original Quake .PAK files and set the -gamedir to the path of your AD mod folder.

I downloaded the arcane dimensions mod from here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/arcane-dimensions/downloads/arcan...

I hope that helps!

Quake Injector is your friend, it will download and configure all the maps and mods for you.

https://www.quaddicted.com/tools/quake_injector

I have no idea what any of these are LOL

Dawn of the Machine is available as a free update for Quake owners on XBOX Series X/S, XBOX One, Microsoft PC Store, Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2 (via backwards compatibility), and Nintendo Switch versions of Quake.

I do still have my Quake CDs...

Quake launched 2 full years after Playstation 1, so I find it somewhat unlikely you've never heard of a Playstation. And if you have it on CDs you must have played it on PC with Microsoft Windows, so I'd assume a Microsoft PC Store should at least let you guess what it is.

Quake was a DOS game.

It was actually both in one executable. Pretty neat. But I will agree that OP might have played it in Microsoft Dos on a PC, so the original point still applies.

Same.

Weird to see a DLC for a game that's older than Steam. Would have been more interesting if they released the WADs or whatever that you could play on the open source version of the game. (All of this is interesting in light of MS's recent hallowing of their game studios.)

When Quake was popular, CDs were far and away the most popular install method. They're locking a lot of OG owners out (unless they're hoping to drive a trickle of $4 Steam sales).

They're called "pak"s for quake :)

It's been so long since I've put the CD in, I forgot.

These are out for the enhanced release all owners of Quake on Steam/GoG got for free when Nightdive remastered Quake I/II.

Unfortunately they break the limits of the original game engine and usually require something like Darkplaces[0] to run. Although I highly recommend darkplaces for even players of the original Quake because the QoL improvements are nice.

[0]https://github.com/darkplacesengine/darkplaces

I figured as much. Some of the addons for the 'modern' Quake seem to really stretch it way beyond anything we saw out of the original engine.

Also love that there is a 50% chance that you can crash a Ps4/Switch just loading a level with the Slave Zero mod that they provide. They are pushing it fairly hard with that one.

For anyone checking out and liking the anniversary updates, I would like to point out there have been some very high quality mods and map packs released the last couple of years.

It's worth to check them out if you want to enjoy a little quake renascence. For example the Quake Brutalist Jam packs and more. They can be found on your favorite quake distribution site like slipseer or quaddicted.

Every emoji in this post seems bigger than the last.

Where did that trend start? Who writes like that, with emoji bullet points? I'm seeing it around, but surely nobody looks at that and says "yeah that's good"?

Around 2020, I think tools like Notion (notion.so) made it popular. Even the Huggingface itself is an emoji...

I remember when someone registered (poopemoji).la

https://xn--ls8h.la/

It does show up as the poop emoji followed by .la in google search results, but not in a firefox address bar.

>but not in a firefox address bar.

That is by design (on Firefox's part) to avoid someone registering e.g. steаmpowered.com (notice а as U+0430 instead of a as U+61) and running a scam that looks valid on the address bar.

Yes absolutely to avoid phishing sites with idn homograph, homoglyph attacks. Personally I'd like to see the punycode first then the emoji

ChatGPT was the first place to really do it to this extent

Look inward at our infantile and excessively positive industry. We are just trying to have fun! Do you hate fun?

LLM-driven writing's been a big part of this trend, unfortunately.

But that means it had to be a trend already to be overrepresented in the training corpus, right? Or was it just something the RLHF evaluators got a kick out of...

It was common before but the LLMs took it to the extreme. They seemed to have mostly fine tuned it though. Page copy definitely smells like ai

I've really seen it a lot in Discord channels that have [emoji]channelname Occasionally in some channels lists may be bullets with emojis particularly the welcome/rules, usually to match reaction emojis, or to automate channel(s) selection (click on the youtube icon to get notified when a youtube vid is posted, etc.)

Did an LLM draft this garbage copy?

Yes.

Likely em units and missing closing tags.

Memories, many memories. I remember the endless nights playing Quake on dial-up, 190 ms ping, listening to Nirvana.

There are still people playing on some servers, and the challenge is higher than ever. Although I still have the reflexes, the tics, and I know the maps and respawn times, I had a very hard time fitting into the games. I imagine that for someone starting today, it must be impossible to face 30 years of muscle memory.

190ms? You lucky bastard!

(hopefully you're familiar with Monty Python...)

I have introduced my son to online Quake III servers where people still play regularly. The Quad Damage voiceover is still cool as hell.

M-M-M-M-Monsterkill-kill-kill! Different game, but I still can hear that sound playing in my head.

Whilst they owe me nothing with the amount I played my CD, feels a bit harsh to trade on the 30th aniversary but only support much newer sales.

They have modified the engine heavily since and thus it doesnt really roll back to the older releases. Also, I think it is on discount currently and only costs a few dollars.

The quality of life improvements are done very well and I would recommend. Heck even if just for the new lighting engine.

They did update Steam and GOG sales to the Enhanced Edition for free when that launched, so "much newer sales" might still be almost 20 years old at this point.

Does the new episode work well in opensource ports? (don't feel like installing steam rn and don't care about nightdive port)

The modding changes mentioned at the bottom of TFA seem to imply that text strings won't render properly until the source ports are updated. You're going to have to install the NightDive port anyway to download the new episode. I don't think they have a separate download for it. I'd imagine everything else might work okay already or will be fixed alongside the string issues.

They need changes to support it, but I don't expect it to take long. Both vkQuake and IronWail work well with the previous new official episode (Dimension of the Machine) and the remastered models after they were updated for that.

Is this an update for the original quake or do you need one of the newer ones?

New. Modern platform versions from their respective stores.

It's for people who own the original game on Steam or one of the other supported digital storefronts.

I had the Mac version of Quake II.

They encoded the game as an audio CD, so you could toss the disc in a boombox and listen to the soundtrack when you weren't playing. Very cool!

Strictly speeking the was a seperate track with the game, the music was just in the native Audio CD format.

This was actually just how CDDA music tracks worked in almost all CD games in the late 90s. :)

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 got more play in my car than they ever did in my Playstation.

HOLY SHIT THOSE SOUNDTRACKS WERE JUST CDS?!

THPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.

The ConsoleMods wiki[0] has a list of games that contain standard CD-DA tracks, which doesn't include any Tony Hawk Pro Skater releases (nor Crazy Taxi).

[0]: https://consolemods.org/wiki/PS1:List_of_Multi-Track_PS1_Gam...

Same with my Wipeout 3 disc

That might be a false memory, check the comment linking to consolemods.org below

This was very common at the time. I suspect there was a technical reason, maybe freeing up the CPU and memory from dealing with music and offloading that to the CDROM drive.

There's a reason you used to have a separate four-pin cable going from the CD drive to the sound card ;)

Due to the way computers cost a fortune back then, you could skip huge parts of hardware changes in the space of a few years. I must have skipped over that part and jumped from no CD audio (or CD-ROM at all) to, everything over IDE.

Never knew about the 4 pin link.

It was just a standard way to play CD-quality audio tracks (by actually playing CD audio tracks!).

How many hours did you play when you found out you can dismiss the "computer updated" notification?

That was standard practice in the 90s. Track 1 on the CD is the data track, and subsequent tracks are standard CD audio tracks that happen to be played in the game.

If the game didn't require accessing data on the CD after installation, you could even swap the CD with a different album and listen to what you want.

The term for that is "Mixed Mode CD": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Mode_CD

Back then most common CPUs were 386 and 486DX - in real life they can't decode 44khz stereo mp3 file in realtime[1].

Only later Pentium 233mmx could handle mp3 decode in background + game (UT or Q3 Arena lets say).

[1]. Yes it is possible to play mp3 at 386SX 33mhz using magic with mplayer or mpg123(?) or (forgot the name) but it needs to be downgraded to 11khz, mono and other tricks.

CD audio track != mp3.

Either CD player would play audio itself (passed over analog audio connector), with the game occasionally changing track #. Zero CPU time.

Or a DMA controller would read digital audio from the CD, and CPU pass that on as-is to audio hardware. Lots of audio data streaming, but easy on the CPU.

AKA redbook audio

I have zero real excuse for never having built the game from source.

I have played with the modding surface available in the quakeC files tho!

I was experimenting with a game design element where firing a weapon didnt decrement the ammo, but auto fired.

In other words, you always fired whatever you had out, removing the ammo hoarder behavior, but also makes you very cognizant about explosive barrels and where you point that rocket.

Surprised they didn't port these to Mac yet. Between M series and Game Porting Toolkit (4 now?) it seems like small effort can unlock huge wave of new players nostalgic for childhood game.

Nope. Unless Game Porting Toolkit is free and open like Proton, there is little to no prospect of the macOS gaming landscape to improve.

it is free though, no? am i missing something?

GPTK cannot be freely redistributed, Steam cannot integrate the tech like they do with Proton.

You can't actually ship a game on the porting toolkit without breaching the license. It's intended by Apple to aid porting to use Mac's native APIs one component at a time, but the license forbids redistribution or commercial use. The community can hack away with it however they want because Apple isn't going to chase every individual person, but a business can't ship it unless they want a nice call with Apple's legal team.

If i understand correctly Bethesda has the original IP and would just need a regular apple dev account if they wanted to publish, no?

Is there a technical reason why this update won’t land on GOG?

The FAQ reads as "not yet", not "won't". This is second-hand but my impression is that publishing patches through GOG is not as easy as through other platforms (possibly because of their need to build new installers?).

Reminder that the NIN Quake soundtrack rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Jvr2Fp48&list=PLs7s7YCW40...

Seconded!

Emoji are clear indicators an LLM wrote this post. Ugh.

so awesome; as a side note I still host quake net pl (plz do not visit it, it's hosted on my home NAS and currently supports up to 10rpm xD) which was dedicated to Quake 3 and have origins starting 1998; I need to figure out how to keep it alive once I'm dead, lol

insert: how do you do, fellow kinds meme jpg

Don't forget the magic of the fast inverse square root: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8u_k2LIZyo

The Quake type of graphics but in HQ makes it look a WHOLE lot like Dusk the game.

Quake looks a fair bit nicer than Dusk :)

It's interesting that the new Quake episode was developed by an external studio (MachineGames) rather than inhouse by id Software.

machine games made all three of new episodes

It raises the question whether they have become better at making Quake games than id Software themselves.

There is no ”id Software” any longer.

At least the post on the Bethesda website is attributed to id Software.

Branding still exists, but the studio is a skeleton.

Quake is still around. It's a nostalgic game from decades ago, but I'm surprised it still exists

Does it work with the MS-DOS version?

Not likely. The modern version of the quake engine is heavily modified to handle much larger work loads and flexibility.

Haven't looked at it yet but I suspect these maps probably blow over many memory limits that most DOS machines would have had.

No Switch 2 mouse mode support?

There's no Switch 2 version, it's supported through Switch 1 compatibility.

The Switch port has gyro aiming though.

I have Quake on Steam. Just updated, but I do not see Dawn of the Machine.

I see it at the bottom once you select "NEW GAME".

I found it after my comment. The first level was nice. Level designs are actually very high quality.

Who wants to start a clan?

I bet this is an attempt by Microsoft at trying to win back fans.

I also noticed IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat promoting a Minecraft playthrough, which I would assume is paid for by Microsoft given what they’ve been saying lately: https://youtu.be/IgJru9870_A

We will be inundated with low-effort fan service until morale improves.

While that does seem intuitive, they have been doing this kind of stuff with Quake/Quake 2 for many years now. The nightdive refresh was offered for free to anyone who purchased the originals on steam for instance.

Doesn't seem like it would be very effective. I assume the overlap of Quake fans and people who have sworn off Microsoft forever is large.

Can one download this to use for the original DOS version?

It was always crazy to me the Quake team never jumped on the boomer-shooter bandwagon by releasing a new retro Quake... Excited to play this.

Absolutely played the arse off Quake 2 multiplayer when I was a young'un too, weirdly made so many IRL friends from local Quake 2 servers, you don't really get that from modern multiplayer games...

celebrate with another round of layoffs, hooray

I was coming here to make the same angry joke. It's offensive to me that Bethesda wants to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of the first & finest multiplayer deathmatch games ever made, after hollowing out the organization that built it.

FFS, I mindlessly bought it off Steam to play the new episode and probably have played it longer than the refund threshold now.

meanwhile, where is the new Elder Scrolls?

I had to stop playing online FPS's because the cheating got so bad. I really miss the days of COD/MW2, that was kind of peak for me. I had been playing since Doom on modems... but never saw the cheating so bad. Instant spawn, headshot, nuke.

I don't have a PC anymore so most of the top tier FPS games I can't play anyway since they require kernel level anti-cheat.

The dichotomy of man: you complain about the cheating but you also complain about the solution (like it or not, kernel anti cheat works).

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