Comment by ColdStream
1 day ago
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.
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.
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So many modern games have such a clunky movement in comparison.
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...
with a resolution of 640x480 or below !
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 :(
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...