Quake is 10 405
cyclomedia writes "Late on 22nd June 1996 Quake was uploaded to cdrom.com's archives in the form of 7 1.44MB floppy disk images. Though it wasn't until the 23rd that everyone realised (or at least, that's my excuse for being a day late with the news submission). Cue much aggravation on the newsgroups as eager downloaders experienced glorious 2 FPS gameplay."
Old schoolin' (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Old schoolin' (Score:5, Funny)
3.25" floppies (Score:5, Funny)
Re:3.25" floppies (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Old schoolin' (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Old schoolin' (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty useless as coasters or "clay pigeons" (Score:3, Informative)
They are pretty useless as coaster, zero water absorbancy. The water just beads and rolls off as you pick up the coaster.
They are pretty useless as clay pigeons as well. They launch just fine from the skeet launcher but they move way to fast since they are so much lighter. Worse, they present too low a profile and are a b*tch to hit while in flight.
They are so so as sihlouette targets for plinking with a
Re:Old schoolin' (Score:4, Funny)
The Size was incredible (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh how times have changed.
Re:The Size was incredible (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Size was incredible (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Size was incredible (Score:3, Funny)
Umm... status bars?
life: 050
ammo: 096
weak ass hud: priceless
10 years! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:10 years! (Score:5, Insightful)
Next you'll be telling kids to get off your lawn (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of great new games, if you haven't found them it is because you are being willfully blind. Some are nothing more than updates of old games, but wonderful ones at that. Civilization 4 is a good example. As the name implies it's the 4th in the series. Each game is just the old one made anew. The fundimental premise of the game doesn't change. However each one is a worthy successor. The gameplay and mechanics take a huge step up, as well as graphics and sound. Some are more orignal, such as Knights of the Old Republic. Jedi Knight meets NWN.
Also, I think you'll discover that if you take off the rose coloured glassess of memory you'll find that many of those great old games, well, aren't. I've found that games that I just loved as a kid are not nearly as good now. I remember how tought Final Fantasy used to see, how a group of us would get together on the weekends and play it as a team. Now it's trivial, formulaic even. If enemy if type X, do strategy Y, etc. Still cool, but no comparison to, say Baldur's Gate 2. Of course I doubt I'd have liked BG2 as a kid, too high level, too much reading.
So please, let's stop with this "new games don't bring anything to the table". Yes they do. They aren't all great, of course, but you would be positively amazed at the utter crap released for old systems. Ever play Captian Novilon? I thought not, it was an SNES game about diabeties. Yes really. A huge pile of shit and it's just one of a massive list.
There are plenty of new, good games. There are plenty of resources to help you find them, or you can ask on Slashdot. However if you can't find any good modern games, the problem is not the state of games, the problem is you.
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact everything is right with the slashdot crowd.
The slashdot crowd is absolutely bloody right to expect that 10 years later something with the visuals of Quake and the level of game AI complexity of Nethack should have been written released and shipped.
And that has not happened. The monsters in the newer quakes, dooms and the likes are as daft as in the original. There is no random or even pseudorandom level generation.
It is the same old grind. Granted it is with very fancy visuals, but in 10 years I would have expected the industry to come up with something moderately more engaging.
So the slashdot crowd is entitled to bitch and it surely does.
When it is not engaged playing Nethack. Where the f... did that storm giant go... I need to kill it and eat it as I am missing the intrinsic...
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:3, Informative)
SLIGE [doomworld.com], SCUDD [newdoom.com], SLUMP [samiam.org].
Okay, so they don't make breathtakingly amazing levels. But they're still better than 90% of the user-made Doom levels out there...
In fact, Quake sucked (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd naturally assumed that Quake would improve the gameplay, monster AI, and co-operative play. Instead, they dumbed those down and just improved the graphics and deathmatches. And thus began the tendency of FPS games to develop in exactly the opposite direction to the direction I'm inter
Re:In fact, Quake sucked (Score:3, Interesting)
One of my favorite aspects of Quake is that they removed the retarded "puzzles" that were all over Doom. Having to run around trying to find a switch that you can barely see because the whole game looks like dogshit is not my idea of a puzzle.
The criticism about the monsters is ent
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean, something with the visuals like This? [mooh.org]
In the 10 years since Quake, you've had engaging story elements added by the likes of Half Life, high player interaction with plot in Deus Ex, an MMPOFPS Planetside, the FPSRTS Savage, The whole counterstrike phenomenon, Goldeneye, an FPS platformer in Metroid
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:5, Interesting)
It is, in fact, entirely unsurprising that this hasn't happened.
There's a very good reason why you rarely see random level generation: It's extremely limited. (As a game designer, I've had a good deal of experience with the problem of randomly generating game content.) "Preposterous!" you say. "Random level generation means exponentially increased variety for only slightly more effort!"
While this is technically true, the problem with randomly generated content is that it's very easy for humans to recognize the patterns and elements of the random set. Anyone who's played Diablo or Diablo II enough is familiar with this. At first, the random levels are pretty neat, each time you go into the cathedral it's a different layout... but after a few times, you begin to recognize certain elements (a room shaped a certain way, a certain set of prison cells arranged just so), and after a while, you see enough permutations that even if the level isn't one you've exactly seen before, it's similar enough to all the others you've seen that it's basically the same.
Even if you create 100 distinct rooms for your dungeon that can be arranged in 100 billion unique ways, there's still only 100 basic elements, and you'll begin to recognize them pretty quickly. Randomly generated content also violates the precept that games are a form of storytelling; and randomly generated stories are not interesting. Notice that even in a game like Diablo II, with randomly generated levels, the quests are always exactly the same and the dialogue is always exactly the same -- because you really can't randomly generate a good, original story.
I've played plenty of engaging games since Quake came out; if you haven't been "engaged" at all since then, that's your problem.
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:5, Interesting)
And then theres the stuff for gameplay. Fully customizable hud. Arbitrarily re-coloring text(makes for good teamplay scripts), Regular expression triggers for console text(so you can match "someone stole your flag!" and play a sound for example), TCL scripting(I don't like it, but to each their own), Advanced scripting (if/then blocks, variables, math), etc.
It's not that games havn't improved since 1996, its that while companies are busy trying to add a few new features to their engines so they can hype it up, we've all been sitting here playing with the best christmas present anyone ever got us--Quake's source.
Of course I only focused on the engine (whats important-- as a good mod has its balls cut off by being on a bad engine), but for gameplay just look at stuff like CustomTF, RocketArena, MidAir, ClanArena. For that matter, I've yet to have a better co-op experience than quake right out of the box.
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:3, Informative)
Wide open spaces.
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:2)
Civ4 may not be the best example: the last two games haven't approached the production values of Alpha Centauri, which was crammed full of jaw-dropping cutscenes, eerie music, intelligent quotes (some fictional, so
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:3, Insightful)
Typical gamers that grew up with the current generation are really looking for flash and instant gratification. A large percentage of modern games focus primarily on graphics, and tend to throw gameplay out the window.
Older games had to focus on gameplay simply because no matter how good the graphics were they still were just a series of low FPS, low-res, 2d, pixelated images.
It's not that I'm against awesome gr
Re:10 years! (Score:2, Insightful)
Quake 4, Half Life 2, etc.. All the fun and more, with a healthy dose of jaw-dropping graphics.
Quit trying to get cred by waxing nostalgic for graphics that sucked.
I remember Quake fondly, one of my first University projects was to write a report analysing the usage of a particular language, and while most of the class jumped on the shiney new Java, or latest iteration of Visual Basic, and I did QuakeC. Got like a 97% on the project too, dragged down by a couple stupid typos.
It was fun pissing
Re:10 years! (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember Sturgeon's Law. 90% of everything is crap. You only remember the good stuff.
Re:10 years! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:10 years! (Score:2)
Indeed (Score:3, Informative)
The single-player was fun, but the real accomplishment of Quake is bringing in the era of deathmatch.
And it's still alive and.. well.. ok, so it's just twitching. I got this game the week it came out (wow, I was 10yo then) and havn't stopped playing since. Connect to oc9.org with your QuakeWorld client [fteqw.com] for some fun :)
It's the arcade-ish physics meant to run on 10 year old cpus that differenciates the game from modern ones, and actually makes the game more fun to play. Your skill in multiplayer depend
Re:Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
To me the major accomplishment was that it had co-op play. Unfortunately, it totally failed to usher in an era of co-op. Playing Quake with two or three people (or Doom for that matter - it's not like Quake was the first FPS with that feature) was just riotous fun. I have played Q2 with the co-op mod, but it's buggy. Or it was then...
Re:Indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish ID would go back to their roots and stop making these single player tech demos
Re:Indeed (Score:3, Informative)
56k modems don't support sending at 56k (or, actually, 53k as per the FCC.) They can only receive at that speed. I'm not sure if they can send at 33.6k, or if it's only 28.8k, but that's the peak, so they're not going to send THAT fast, either.
Even when you do connect to a proper host device, like a PRI-connected Ascend Max box or something, you don't get to send at 56k. You send at 33.6kbps IIRC, and receive at 53k. Again,
God, yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Me and a bunch of friends against a seemingly unstoppable horde of alien scum--that's what I want in a game.
Re:Indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:10 years! (Score:2, Informative)
Indeed... (Score:2)
ah the memories (Score:5, Funny)
> video card and I get 6.2 fps in the start. While in Duke 3D, I get well
> over 30+ fps. Why is Quake so slow compared to Duke 3D?
Ahh... the last time anything besides Windows Vista got compared to Duke Nukem.
Re:ah the memories (Score:4, Funny)
Don't use a three year old S3 chipset video with a two year old Cyrix/AMD -- it is 1996 and Intel owns games.
That 80MHz machine is no better than an i486/33 which is barely a shade better than AMD's i386/40.
And Gateway2000 has had an under $2000 Pentium for 18 months now.
Go back to your two year old, 64 bit Atari Jaguar.
Still my Pentium favourite (Score:3, Interesting)
In recent years Unreal has replaced it as my favourite. I got my screenname [used on Slashdot now too] from playing Quake on dialup, and P2P with another local kid.
Happy Birthday! (Score:2, Insightful)
Fun times!
I can still remember Quake 1 being released (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I can still remember Quake 1 being released (Score:2)
Re:I can still remember Quake 1 being released (Score:2)
Re:I can still remember Quake 1 being released (Score:2, Insightful)
Coincidently, I still have the soundtrack on my mp3 player. Which, interestingly enough, has more horsepower than the machine I bought to play Quake (with a student loan, I might add).
I was playing qtest1 for weeks before the official release. My first real-world program was a utility that queried servers for the people playing on them. God, I miss that game.
Re:I can still remember Quake 1 being released (Score:2)
I remember that well, I started deathmatching with DOOM - indeed, I setup my first LAN with college buddies just to play DOOM over the network (yet we could only ever have a max
Your excuse (Score:5, Funny)
I thought it was because you were using that Procrastnatr calendar thingy...
Still have flashbacks ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Still have flashbacks ... (Score:2)
Not Quake, but GL Quake! (Score:3, Interesting)
Now hurry and get people to help out at http://www.quakeremix.com/ [quakeremix.com] !!!!!
Re:Not Quake, but GL Quake! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not Quake, but GL Quake! (Score:2)
goodtimes.
2fort5 MegaTF ftw!!
This seems appropriate: (Score:2)
Quake still has a feature no other FPS has... (Score:5, Interesting)
Classic quotes (Score:4, Interesting)
"Still have 486? Get a Pentium immediately!"
"I have a 486 Dx2/80 with a Diamond Stealth 64 2120 video card and I get 6.2 fps in the start."
"Am I the only person who just can't
"Well over 30+ fps at start of Duke3d ? Thats top DX4-100 speed....actually I haven't seen a DX4-100 that tops 28."
"There's an option, r_fullbright (1/0) which turns off all lighting effects and speeds up the FPS tremendously."
Those were the days - further I can recall back to is the Voodoo 2, anyone have any further fond memories of the mid 1990s GPU situation?
Re:Classic quotes (Score:5, Informative)
The 3D engine used by Quake and Quake 2 was pure software, the CPU did all the heavy lifting geometry wise (and still does, for the most part). AFAIK, the 3d geometry part of it is still mainly CPU based, you can't just send every polygon in the world up to the GPU and expect it to sort the shit out in a timely fashion. BSP trees and face culling and all kindsa nifty hacks abound for such things.
We had no fancy hardware T&L business or programmable pixel shaders, and that's how we liked it.
I remember walking uphill 40 miles in the snow just to frag newbies with my nailgun.
Re:Classic quotes (Score:2)
Re:Classic quotes (Score:2)
I had an S3 virge and it was a 2d video card back in 1996 with some 3d effects that could speed gameplay.
The vodoo1 is what brought true fast 3d performance. I think nvidia was coming out with the tnt at the time but I am not too sure as 3dfx was all the craze then. A few months after quake was released a new version with opengl called glquake came out. Its the only way to run quake on NT these days besides winquake and the graphics looked
Re:Classic quotes (Score:2)
These instiled a macabre fascination - especially when the
Re:Classic quotes (Score:2)
What is this "Gee Pee You" of which you speak? My DX4/100 has a video card with a rasterizer on it, and there is a CPU on the motherboard...and I can run a display in 16-bit color!
Re:Classic quotes (Score:2)
Re:Classic quotes (Score:2)
My graphics card in this machine has about 6 times as much memory as my PC did back then
Re:Classic quotes (Score:2)
Re:Classic quotes (Score:2)
When quake came out, 3D cards were pretty much non existant. (I don't recall if the S3's Virge 3D decelerator was out, yet, but it wasn't supported and pretty useless either way). I think the first 3D card to support Quake was the Verite 1000 through "VQuake". Then 3DFX came out with their Voodoo card which could run GLQuake and 3D gaming was never the same.
Re:Classic quotes (Score:2)
True - it is strange really; from the 1998-2000 era it is hard to recall individual fascinations post-initial 3D situation. It is mainly the small details that capture the mind; things such as flame effects; water in pixelated droplets from Lara Croft post-swim; the sky backgrounds of Counter-Strike and Quake III; the intuitive low polygon rendering of varying terrain fixtures - TR II's take on Venice (as in V
Re:Classic quotes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Need for Speed (Score:2)
The Voodoo series is oft-underrated in its adeptness at bringing 3D graphics to
Revolutionary Game and GPL'ed Engine (Score:3, Interesting)
And thanks to Id for releasing its source code [idsoftware.com] under GPL, because of this, the game is still being played and mod'ed after 10 years of its initial release, check Tenebrae [sourceforge.net] for example, which adds modern rendering techniques like per-pixel lighting and stencil shadows to the original game.
Re:Revolutionary Game and GPL'ed Engine (Score:2, Insightful)
Tenebrae was what I was thinking of when I posted a link to DarkPlaces, but it's another good version of Quake with fancy new graphics.
Perfect time to re-install and re-play (Score:5, Insightful)
Put it on nightmare, type +mlook into the console and let er rip. Not many games can be enjoyed 10 years after their initial release, but Quake stands above the crowd.
Re:Perfect time to re-install and re-play (Score:2)
Re:Perfect time to re-install and re-play (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Perfect time to re-install and re-play (Score:2)
Re:Perfect time to re-install and re-play (Score:3, Interesting)
88mph (Score:5, Funny)
Descent. (Score:5, Funny)
Really? (Score:2)
I remember downloading Quake on my brand new Pentium 133 with 32mb of ram laptop on an ultra fast 56K modem!
I remember getting fragged all the time by ISDN guys though because my crappy connection, but then I went to college and got a T1, but by then Quake 2 came out and the fun happened all over again.
Scary... (Score:2)
Oh those were the days!
Quake beta (Score:3, Funny)
Quake Done Quick (Score:5, Interesting)
Check it out: http://clanservers.multiplay.co.uk/?p=/ftpfiles.p
Quake Done Quick With a Vengeance (Score:4, Informative)
http://qdq.planetquake.gamespy.com/qdqwav.html [gamespy.com]
Full collection of Quake 1 demo files for the run.
Ah, the good old days (Score:2)
Sure it was dialup but today 1/2 of our bandwidth is sucked up by garbage anyway.
Attention, Mac users (Score:3, Informative)
You /still/ have 486? (Score:4, Funny)
Wow I love reading old technical newsgroups...
Vivid memories of the music (Score:3, Funny)
If I remember correctly, it was either Quake or Quake II that played its music from the CD while you were playing. Of course, if you happened to have a different CD in there, it would play that music instead.
I vividly remember playing when my kid had left one of his CDs in there. I'd move into a some section of the map and it would suddenly trigger "Do You Want to Buy a Bunny" or something equally horrifying. It really added flavor to the game.
Even better was that it would repeat the song over and over until you left the section. I'm not really sure why I never took the CD out...I guess it gave me incentive to keep moving.
Re:2 FPS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:2 FPS? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:2 FPS? (Score:2)
Re:2 FPS? (Score:3, Informative)
Since the video card wasn't doing any of its own processing, moving the CPU-->Video data as fast as possible was the best thing you could do for that game. And you didn't need gobs of RAM either, if your hard drive was also sitting behind a fast VLB con
Re:2 FPS? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:2 FPS? (Score:4, Informative)
486SX - no FPU. (you could buy an add-on called a 487)
This is not to be confused with the 386 series, which all needed a 387 to do hardware FP.
386DX - no FPU. 32-bit wide external bus.
386SX - no FPU. 16-bit wide external bus.
Re:2 FPS? (Score:2)
POS systems rock!
OT: mod comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Anyone Remember... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Anyone Remember... (Score:2)
Re:Still have it... (Score:2, Funny)
I warezeded it, so kudos to the real heroes: CLASS.
Re:blah blah (Score:2)
Re:blah blah (Score:2, Insightful)
blah blah stupid mods blah blah RTFA blah blah (Score:3, Informative)
Re:quake on a dual ISDN (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh man I hated you guys soooo much!!!! I couldn't afford an ISDN or 2 56k connections back then (you could use this special modem from Diamond MM that would aggregate 2 modem connections).
So I would kick everyone's butt except for those creeps with the sub 100 pings, zipping around with your rocket launchers, grabbing the pentagram of protection before I could.. arrgh!!
I remember thinking that once I had sub 250 pings i would kick anyone's butt,