[NightFright]

Some daredevil apparently ported Wolf3D to Quake:


Might actually try this. Original Wolf3D level design is bland and boring from today's POV, but movement speed and gunplay might still be fun here.

[Aristotle Gumball]

The gunplay and movement is extremely good. Makes me wish it was more than a straight port of Wolf 3D maps, which get old fast.

[NightFright]

Some impressions from "Alkaline".

[Aristotle Gumball]

No one's making better maps than the people at func at the moment. Absolute renaissance happening right now.

[NightFright]

Creative output in the Quake community is really at a good level right now. But things are also improving here again, which was overdue.

[Ninety-Six]

I wonder if that's coincidental or if the resurgence of arena shooters has brought more people back to the classics.

[Aleks]

Ninety-Six, on 01 July 2021 - 10:46 AM, said:

I wonder if that's coincidental or if the resurgence of arena shooters has brought more people back to the classics.

Might also be pandemics and related lockdown - resulting in both some people having more spare time and others realising that their work isn't everything, thus dedicating more of their time towards a more niche hobby.

[NightFright]

And the next project has been announced for 2021 still: Quake Mjölnir!

Func_Msgboard announcement (contains link for public beta):
https://www.celephai...ad.php?id=62067

Trailer:
https://youtu.be/GXgBg2sEmqA

Looks like this is the year of Quake. Most likely, this sudden burst of addons is indeed a late result of the pandemic. Whatever the reason may be, it's amazing.

[Aristotle Gumball]

I wanna say those newer maps in Quakespasm is the absolute peak of what retro 3D should look like. Permanent 1999 mode. Just enough graphical bells and whistles to adequately translate ideas, but not so much that it becomes a confused mess.

[Aristotle Gumball]

NightFright, on 04 July 2021 - 06:19 AM, said:

Quake Mjölnir!

werewolvesbyday
11 hours ago
how many maps is planned?

TomeOfKeep
10 hours ago
75 normal, 16 start maps for the 16 episodes and an end.

werewolvesbyday
10 hours ago
@TomeOfKeep can't tell if joking or not. 75 maps over 16 episodes? this is like a whole new quake game or what?

SinaelDOverom
9 hours ago
@werewolvesbyday 2 Quake games. If they are serious.

TomeOfKeep
8 hours ago
That's the accurate count. It was going to be around 81 or 82 but we cut a few and merged several smaller ones together. Some maps had older little known releases, but are getting major visual, story, and gameplay overhauls to take advantage of modern engines and the fact that Keep merges all the mods mentioned in the video (and more) together into one mod.

[NightFright]

How the hell are they going to dish out so many maps? It would be the most massive Quake project ever created, provided the maps are not all super short.

[Aristotle Gumball]

werewolvesbyday
6 hours ago
@TomeOfKeep that is really crazy. how long have you guys been working on this?


TomeOfKeep
53 minutes ago
It's been about 5yrs ago when we really started to organize the mapping and story, though the mod/code part has been in development for about 11yrs.

Not me btw. Pretty crazy. I guess some of these projects have been in the works for a while.

[NightFright]

Remarkable they have been able to keep this under wraps for so long. And I thought the projects released so far were already more than enough to celebrate the anniversary adequately. Looks like it was just the tip of the iceberg. Tremor and Mjölnir might keep you busy for quite a while once they are available.

Has Romero seen this already? Maybe he'll start mapping again for Quake as well... Looks like he is at least aware of Tremor according to his Twitter post from Jun 22.

In the meantime, more info about Mjölnir from the Func_Msgboard forums:
"The trailer was meant as a #Quake25 retrospective (despite being a bit late) and also to show how Mjölnir draws inspiration from Quake history. Mjölnir does indeed include both new maps (including previously unreleased maps that stagnated for years while I was too busy to map, negke is totally correct there), and overhauled versions of my [Tronyn] old maps. The new weapons shown (Sanguinators, Void Staff, Mjölnir, Flak Cannon - aesthetic note taken!) come from the mod Arms of Asgard, and the storyline is indeed inspired by the original concept for Quake where you start with earth weapons, but as you journey further into the medieval dimension you get to use not only Thor's hammer Mjölnir, but other weapons of the Norse gods as well, from the Arms of Asgard mod (that oldschool Quake blurb is great!). The entire thing will demonstrate the awesome powers of Keep 1.0, a vast mega-mod/devkit that combines Arcane Dimensions, Drake, and many, many more. This trailer is just a teaser/announcement, we'll release a demo at some point. And anyone interested in making medieval maps is welcome to join the team!"

So yeah... it's not only new maps. Quite a few of them are older releases which will be overhauled.

[Aristotle Gumball]

I suppose X is Tim Willits? Gives a lot of insight into the going on's at id at the time that ultimately caused several people to leave and made Quake what it ended up being.

One Doomed Spacemarine
5 days ago
Read various accounts from people who worked with him (like Romero, American, or Sandy, even though Sandy doesn't like to mention him by name), it paints a pretty vivid picture of him as a two-faced asshole who often likes to do anything underhanded to make his coworkers look worse, so that he can look better by comparison, and who went out of his way to be just be as petty as he could. One time he was in an elevator with American and bragged to him with a big grin to his face that he had slept with American's ex, presumably because he derived a sense of power from it somehow.

In later years, he also likes to lie about his claims to fame, like claiming he invented multiplayer only levels for first person shooters during Quake. The other guys were pretty quick to tell him that's a lie (American made one as a proof of concept in Doom 2, while both Rise Of The Triad and Marathon had them well before Quake).

[MrFlibble]

I really enjoyed watching this video, Sandy is very pleasant to listen to (the only one I had watched before was one of his Doom II ones which did not impress me much). He also told a few anecdotes about Carmack that I had not known before.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Same @ Carmack. I laughed at the way he phrased those, like "don't get me wrong, the man's a genius, but..."

[Ninety-Six]

It's a shame that it's been slowly coming to light that Willits is a POS. I like his levels a fair bit. His Quake levels were great. He certainly had two of the stronger entries in the Master Levels. I liked Fear. They Will Repent was...not amazing, but it was alright.

Raven sucked ass though. Not sure how that got him hired. It's not like Duke's own Bowels of Hell Space Station where you can clearly see how that got someone a job (even if it wasn't the most amazing thing in the universe).


Conspiracy theory: Willits was hired as a joke, he knew it, and that's why he fought his coworkers constantly.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Yeah, his Quake levels are great, haha. Well, you can always separate the art from the artist.

[Ninety-Six]

Jesus Christ, on 08 July 2021 - 03:14 PM, said:

Yeah, his Quake levels are great, haha. Well, you can always separate the art from the artist.

And I do, and encourage others to do the same.

It still sucks, though. Ain't no changing that. Especially in mind the idea that he may have accelerated classic id's dissipation.

[MrFlibble]

Ninety-Six, on 08 July 2021 - 03:30 PM, said:

And I do, and encourage others to do the same.

I think it's quite commonplace that any person may be nice to some people and not so nice to others. It's easy to put on labels when one is a bystander, and even easier for a person who has achieved some renown / reputation to say or do something that will backfire and produce outrage or whatever.

Back in the 90s and even in the early 2000s I knew next to nothing about any of Doom's or Duke3D's developers, save for something gleamed from interviews in gaming mags, and the Romero hype of course No way I'm gonna allow any bad rep, even if true, take away from enjoyment of the games. Is an artist morally accountable to their fans? That's a bit tricky I guess. What if a fan, or a group of fans, holds some radically idealistic view and desires that their icon shares those ideals, and then it turns out the artist doesn't? What an outrage! Or not.

Ninety-Six, on 08 July 2021 - 03:30 PM, said:

classic id's dissipation.

I guess it was inevitable, one way or another. When they started, they were like this and then just grew up (Sandy hints at that in his tale, in a way). Also the video game development scene changed radically in these relatively few years from 1992 to 1996.

[Ninety-Six]

I know. That's why I said "accelerated" over "caused." It was indeed inevitable but they might have held it together for another couple of years if wedges hadn't already been driven between them.

[MrFlibble]

Ninety-Six, on 09 July 2021 - 05:21 AM, said:

That's why I said "accelerated" over "caused." It was indeed inevitable but they might have held it together for another couple of years if wedges hadn't already been driven between them.

Yes, I took note of your choice of words. But who exactly drew those wedges in? Apparently Tom Hall left some time before "Person X" even joined the team (if we're going down the conspiracy theory route, which I'm not a fan of TBH). In fact, if the Wikipedia info is correct, he left even before the first release of Doom in December 1993, which I was not really aware of before.

What is known with relative certainty from accounts by id people themselves, like Sandy, the environment wasn't easy, and for all we know it all could've fallen apart even sooner, were it not the sense that they had to deliver Quake and complete this project.

[Aristotle Gumball]

I also want to point out that sometimes a hostile work environment produces great work. We all know that suffering motivates high creative achievement, so I don't see this as any different personally. Individually of course the guys at id might've hated it, but I'm glad for what it produced. I feel the same way about bands, which is where I notice this the most actually. Sometimes there's a member that just rubs everyone the wrong way and they get kicked out and replaced with someone who plays ball, but soon after, the music takes a nose dive. All the fans hear it, but the band is tired of always being stressed out because of that one member, so they're never taking him back. Positive vibes don't always pay off. I'd argue they rarely pay off in a competitive industry. It's an inherently threatening situation and to pretend otherwise can keep you from really reaching the level needed to deliver a truly groundbreaking product.

[ck3D]

I knew I had heard the Willits story before and just couldn't remember where - until my YouTube suggestions did just that for me:



Teaching someone wrong on purpose is such toxic behavior (let alone in the context of one supposedly united enterprise); in a proper work environment that should be an instant red card, to me that's just sabotage in plain sight and the demonstration that the employee doing it is really wiping their ass with the idea of teamwork when no one is looking (but they still insist on leaving the door open), and doesn't understand (whatever is left of) ethos in business. But in between that and the tearing the walls down story, what's mostly apparent through those videos is, past their medium of choice, the original id guys really didn't know how to communicate very well on a personal level; otherwise a lot of those situations sound like they could have been defused roughly three dozens of stages prior to their eventual escalation. My understanding though is that before being a professional entity, early id was more akin to what would happen if you left a bunch of middle schoolers with money-making talents unsupervised: sincerity in the product but also a shit ton of unnecessary noise and pettiness (please no one corrects me on the actual age of the guys at the time, I don't care, such pitiful communication skills is some middle school shit). I'm not even talking shit here because that's always an interesting model to study.

I can't help but feel like to this day, Petersen himself sounds like he could use a bit more perspective on the situation just on the basis of how quick he is to judge someone else for being 'out there' as if he himself didn't realize his own (adorable) dorkiness. He probably seemed special to most people at id at the time too, except that instead of everyone coming to terms with their quirks (and recognizing their strengths), thirty years later, we're still on Spiderman meme levels of resolution where everyone's response is just to point at the next other guy for being different from themselves and that's a bit sad. I know Petersen means no ill intent and just to emphasize on this or that character trait when recounting those stories (although I'm a bit skeptical on attempts at sensationalism in general), but that behavior makes it look like even he's still missing part of the picture. I think he's a very imaginative person who occasionally clashed with, or just couldn't grasp, the more pragmatic vision and approach of the more technically-minded people on the team and that's as basic of a gist I'm getting out of the sum of his stories.

Now, I really kind of wonder what exactly that misleading level design advice was. I'm sure a lot of it would sound ridiculous in retrospect, now that we've learned from the standards those guys set, but since they were in that very process of establishing the basics of good and bad FPS mapping and gameplay I'm certain that suggesting a ten-step switch hunt and a random succession of dark mazes wouldn't have sounded that out of left field in the moment, and so I would have love to hear that conversation just to better contextualize the amount of trolling.

Jesus Christ, on 10 July 2021 - 10:13 AM, said:

I also want to point out that sometimes a hostile work environment produces great work. We all know that suffering motivates high creative achievement, so I don't see this as any different personally. Individually of course the guys at id might've hated it, but I'm glad for what it produced. I feel the same way about bands, which is where I notice this the most actually. Sometimes there's a member that just rubs everyone the wrong way and they get kicked out and replaced with someone who plays ball, but soon after, the music takes a nose dive. All the fans hear it, but the band is tired of always being stressed out because of that one member, so they're never taking him back. Positive vibes don't always pay off. I'd argue they rarely pay off in a competitive industry. It's an inherently threatening situation and to pretend otherwise can keep you from really reaching the level needed to deliver a truly groundbreaking product.

I part agree and part disagree with this. Does suffering feed art yes of course, is stress suffering yes, can it be used to help progress in a given field or on a personal level in general yes, but I also think there are healthier sources for that stress than the actual work environment if that makes sense, or at least more practical ones that yield to similar results. The energy spent solving the same inner logistics again and again and preserving everyone's cute little ego is no longer one you can usefully feed off as soon as it starts overcoming and degenerating your fundamental model, and by definition it's stupid easy to get there.

Petersen's description of an environment where one day someone in particular's work is the greatest, and then the next day it's suddenly the worst and that person becomes the official scapegoat until next time actually sounded too close to home for me, as I've spent close to a decade before working in a context where things were exactly like that (as the tip of the iceberg, too; such situations often come with verbal and/or physical abuse and other practices that cross over into the legally reprehensible). The company policy was essentially to drain the shit out of the employees' energy by mentally torturing them as far as into their private lives so that the employees would either basically surrender everything they had to the company, snap, or quit - essentially it quite explicitly turned life into product. The results weren't that good. Before I eventually fell into their little rotation as one of the bad guys there for years, I had singlehandedly credibilized that business in its field of choice and decupled their sales, then I guess they were content enough with that and started no longer relying on me, trashing my work and then my life, friends, family the way I later realized they did to every employee, basically seeing if they could play their little circus tricks on me. As a result I dropped out, stopped trying and just kind of sat back and watched the shit show from further distance for a few years and all I witnessed was the slow self-destruction of the entire operation, from within, caused by all the personal drama that had really become the main focus as opposed to the fuel to anything of importance. In the meantime, I started working with people with much greater values and with proper communication skills (more sophisticated than kindergarteners throwing shit at each other at least), which in itself is much healthier as motivation towards both professional and personal fulfillment, and I've only gotten more efficient. Anguish in art is cool and all, but if production is concerned then I'm sure there may be wiser sources for it than directly one's toolshed.

[Ninety-Six]

One thing I do find a bit shaky is the "actively taught Petersen the wrong techniques." I'm not saying I can't see Tim doing that in light of everything else, but there are other possibilities to consider that I think might be a bit more likely.

For instance, it's quite possible Carmack was never going to be happy with anything Sandy did. Sounds by that point that he was already deep in Tim's hands. Just because Sandy made the level might have been enough for it to be rejected, because he'd be biased already. Or perhaps Carmack simply didn't know what he wanted, which also seems possible with the kind of person he's consistently described as.

There's also the simple possibility that Sandy simply didn't do a good job. Emulating a style that was outside of his comfort zone might have resulted in a bad result.

Or, of course, Willits could have indeed told Sandy the wrong techniques. Perhaps because he was bad at explaining, or active malice.


I think these are all also likely explanations, or perhaps a combination. Again, I'm not saying that I couldn't see Tim doing that, but it does seem a bit more blatant than the kind of crap he usually seemed to pull.

[MusicallyInspired]

I thought Sandy said that Willits taught American the wrong techniques and got him in trouble with Carmack. Or was it both?

[ck3D]

MusicallyInspired, on 14 July 2021 - 05:19 PM, said:

I thought Sandy said that Willits taught American the wrong techniques and got him in trouble with Carmack.

Yeah that's what I got from both videos as well, although not going to lie, Petersen's style was always so unique, the thought of somebody having taught him wrong too (except no one ever realized) is pretty funny.

[NightFright]

So we finally have an explanation for why the Petersen episode sucked? Willits sabotaged him to boost his own ego?

[NightFright]

Authentic Model Pack Rev. #25 has been released. It took a while, but results are pleasant. Also, something rare happened: I actively contributed to the new version. Plasma cells were completely done by myself, and also the BSP model overhaul was my doing.

Download on ModDB

Highlights:
- DoE Plasma cells done
- Visual overhaul for BSP models (ammo, health, exploding boxes)
- Muzzleflashes for Grenade/Rocket Launcher
- Better animations for Shub and Vore
- Super Shotgun viewmodel repositioned

Unfortunately, it has become harder to get new stuff done for this project, which is why I believe there won't be a new version for quite some time now. On the other hand, there isn't much left to do, anyway. ID1 is pretty much done. We are still hoping in secret for that legendary ogre model by capnbubs to surface out of nowhere, but doubtful it'll ever happen. Hope you can enjoy this, one way or the other!

(Side note: I wasn't quite sure how to proceed regarding my improvements for the top of the ID1 cell models, so I asked John Romero whether my assumption was correct that the cells had two embedded batteries on top and not handles like the shell/nail boxes do. To my surprise, I received a reply from him within 24 hours, confirming my theory.)