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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

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

> 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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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

>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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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.

Did an LLM draft this garbage copy?

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"?

Likely em units and missing closing tags.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?).

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

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.

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.

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

Seconded!

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

The Switch port has gyro aiming though.

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.

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.

machine games made all three of new episodes

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

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.