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.
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.
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]
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:
> 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!
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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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YOU CAN JUMP ACROSS
And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.
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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...
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:
> 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!
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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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
LAN parties were an odd but super fun part of being a teenager at the time!
> lab -> LAN
Ah yes, those lab parties.
I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Don't forget Reflex Arena!
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> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players
This means that they not necessarily were all that great.
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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
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
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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.
Twitch and arena shooters are just not popular.
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.
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!
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.
Nine Inch Nails also has some new merch and soundtrack album for the 30th anniversary:
https://shop.nin.com/
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
I hate the trend of selling vinyl but not selling Compact Disc.
In this case the CD exists everywhere. Just buy a copy of Quake on CD.
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It's a subscription service! When the vinyl wears out, buy another!
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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...
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).
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
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They're called "pak"s for quake :)
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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.
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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.
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!
Arcane Dimensions is worth the effort.
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Every emoji in this post seems bigger than the last.
Did an LLM draft this garbage copy?
Yes.
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...
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LLM-driven writing's been a big part of this trend, unfortunately.
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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.)
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
Is this an update for the original quake or do you need one of the newer ones?
It's for people who own the original game on Steam or one of the other supported digital storefronts.
New. Modern platform versions from their respective stores.
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.
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?
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?
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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
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?).
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!
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.
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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.
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.
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The term for that is "Mixed Mode CD": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Mode_CD
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.
It was just a standard way to play CD-quality audio tracks (by actually playing CD audio tracks!).
There's a reason you used to have a separate four-pin cable going from the CD drive to the sound card ;)
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Strictly speeking the was a seperate track with the game, the music was just in the native Audio CD format.
How many hours did you play when you found out you can dismiss the "computer updated" notification?
AKA redbook audio
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.
The Quake type of graphics but in HQ makes it look a WHOLE lot like Dusk the game.
Quake is still around. It's a nostalgic game from decades ago, but I'm surprised it still exists
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.
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.
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...
Can one download this to use for the original DOS version?
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.
k
meanwhile, where is the new Elder Scrolls?
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.
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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.
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.
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.