[Zaxx]

You can play against bots in QC in custom games (they can even strafe jump now, it's pretty boss) and that segment of the game is a f2p feature now... but of course you don't know that because the game launched in a barebones early access state and received very lackluster marketing afterwards. Bethesda basically gave up on it at the first sign of trouble.

[Putrid Pete]

It really was poorly marketed. I've been a life long Quake fan, so you'd think I'd be the prime target demographic for Quake Champions, but for a long time I thought it was some sort of mobile game. There was so little information about the game I was surprised when a video of gameplay popped up in my youtube recommendations and I realized it wasn't a game for phones.

[Danukem]

 Zaxx, on 09 September 2019 - 01:12 PM, said:

You can play against bots in QC in custom games (they can even strafe jump now, it's pretty boss) and that segment of the game is a f2p feature now... but of course you don't know that because the game launched in a barebones early access state and received very lackluster marketing afterwards. Bethesda basically gave up on it at the first sign of trouble.

Maybe I'll check it out. I looked at the website a few months ago and didn't see anything about that feature.

[Putrid Pete]

So I finally got around to trying out Dimensions of the Past... I haven't made it far, but I gotta say that I'm impressed with the quality so far. This new episode is quite challenging and in a much welcomed manner. It kind of reminded me of SIGIL when it does things right: it requires you to think more carefully how to deal with certain rooms and it really pays off to use your ammo intelligently. I found myself restarting maps because I was overwhelmed by my own mistakes more than say, cheap death traps, etc.

Looking forward to playing more of it. Hope it only keeps getting better now.

[DisgustedGrunt]

[HulkNukem]

How could it be called Pro Quake when there's no Quad Axe

[NightFright]

Never played on Nightmare, but after watching this, I know I didn't miss much. Wouldn't be able to handle it at all. Those hordes of spawns in the final episode, OMFG. Survival turns into pure coincidence like that.

[Putrid Pete]

Well, took me a while to beat Dimensions of the Past because I got distracted and started playing other games, but since it's spooky month I decided to restart (and properly finish) the episode. I really enjoyed all maps, except maybe the last one. They were very well designed and the increase in difficulty was just right.

This new episode fits right in with the rest. But maybe a little too much. That last map was paying homage to the last level of Quake where you fight Shub-Niggurath, except... without Shub-Niggurath. I already kinda hate that final map because the boss battle was very anticlimactic... even back in the day. So as you can imagine, experiencing a version that doesn't really change much except removing the boss fight altogether was a complete let down. At the very least I expected some creative twist and maybe even an awesome surprise boss fight to compensate for the one in the original game, but nope. Just fight an endless array of Shamblers and Vores until you win. Lame.

But that issue aside, I was quite impressed with the quality of the level design and the attention to detail that required to make a set of maps so in tune with the original game. You can tell there was some real love put in here by MachineGames, and it really shines through this episode. Other than the issues I mentioned with the last map and maybe that the episode uses too many Death knights in a few levels for my taste, I really can't think of anything negative to say about it. Just keep in mind that this episode is tough. Sort of like what Thy Flesh Consumed is to Doom: an episode intended for hardened Quake veterans.

Also this episode really rewards you for conserving ammo and hunting for secrets. Ammo is scarcer here but never to the degree that its totally unfair, so being more tactical makes your life easier. For instance, I finished the last level with almost all my guns depleted, because I forgot to search for ammo and secrets at the end of the penultimate map of the episode.

But anyway, it was a solid 9/10 for me. Good challenge, complex but not confusing level design, good difficulty balance while still testing your skills beyond what the other 4 episodes ever did, and quite fun overall. Knocking half a point for the last level and another half for abusing Death Knights in the later maps. God, do I hate bullet spongy enemies.

[Zaxx]

It's THE TIM talking about Quake:

[DisgustedGrunt]

Quake 2 Rtx off: 1000 fps
Quake 2 Rtx on: 78 fps

I feel sick, all those poor frames murdered for pretty lights.

[Hank]

 Lazy Dog, on 31 January 2020 - 11:16 AM, said:

I feel sick, all those poor frames murdered for pretty lights.

Nah, dude played on low skill level.
NVidia made it so that you can adjust the settings to be as original looking as QuakeII was, as possible. Works for me.

Ray Tracing is awesome technology. Just make NEW games for it, and don't do cheap/lazy/asinine reruns of excellent classics.

[NightFright]

Is it true you can also play this without an RTX card, e.g. a 1070?

[Player Lin]

 NightFright, on 01 February 2020 - 12:40 AM, said:

Is it true you can also play this without an RTX card, e.g. a 1070?

It is.

https://www.pcworld....racing-dxr.html

But since it's software level(on driver support) so it won't like those RTX card, only basic features, cast much less rays, so if you have something more complicated or if you want see the real power of ray casting then you still need RTX cards and its RT cores.

[NightFright]

Well, if it ran fine without RTX, there wouldn't be a point in selling those cards, I guess. At least it's good enough to try. TBH raytracing makes the game really very bright. Personally I prefer vanilla, with a decent port like YamagiQ2.

[Player Lin]

 NightFright, on 01 February 2020 - 01:55 AM, said:

TBH raytracing makes the game really very bright.

Yeah, that's why I don't like HDR or something similar in past. Too bright for no reasons just hurts my eyes...

[DisgustedGrunt]

 Player Lin, on 01 February 2020 - 02:32 AM, said:

Yeah, that's why I don't like HDR or something similar in past. Too bright for no reasons just hurts my eyes...

I remember having to turn off Bloom in Oblivion, shit was way overused, it was painful to look at.

[Fauch]

78 fps is probably how well the original runs on my toaster.
I played it last year, and I think it was darker, I suppose it's light bouncing or something that makes it bright. or maybe the dude is playing with very bright settings, well that looks off anyway

[Sanek]

My friend knows that I'm a "retro gamer", so he gifted it to me as a birthday present.

Spoiler

[PikaCommando]

Here's a preview of Quake 1 I found while digging around in CGW, thought I'd share it here. It's from the July 1996 issue of CGW.

[Ninety-Six]

Okay so I know this is like, really really


really really


really



REALLY late, but I honestly kind of forgot about it until I set Quake up for my friend, so better late than never I suppose:

 NightFright, on 04 May 2018 - 08:13 AM, said:

In ports like Mark V, your best bet is to use Pakscape. Create a new pak with it, add maps/e2m6.map (with this folder structure) and save. If you have pak0.pak and pak1.pak, name the new file pak2.pak and place it into the id1 subdir. This way it should override the original map whenever you load it.

If you can't get it done, I have a finished version I use by myself, with .lit and .vis files included for colored lighting and transparent water (.vis files only work in Mark V, though). Can provide you with it if needed.

You can download Pakscape here:
https://cdn.valvedev...fP/pakscape.zip

Once extracted, it's just an exe that does not require installation.

Thank you very much. This worked.

So what is the deal with these colored lights, anyway? Are they imported from one of the console versions, or hand-made by fans to make it a little less brown?

[NightFright]

The lit files are made by the Quake community, I don't remember any more by whom exactly. Colored lights give the maps a slight Q2 touch but also improve atmosphere if done properly. Transparent water is a matter of taste, I guess. Makes taking out rotfish from above the surface quite easy actually, so it's almost a cheat sometimes.

[Ninety-Six]

 NightFright, on 26 July 2020 - 09:40 PM, said:

The lit files are made by the Quake community, I don't remember any more by whom exactly. Colored lights give the maps a slight Q2 touch but also improve atmosphere if done properly. Transparent water is a matter of taste, I guess. Makes taking out rotfish from above the surface quite easy actually, so it's almost a cheat sometimes.

danke

[NightFright]

I did my bimonthly check of the QuakeOne forums and found out that a guy had released a fixed version of a classic Quake TC from 1997 called "After the Fall". I had never heard about it before and got curious. After playing the first couple of maps, I can say that level design is half-decent, maybe on par with (or slightly above) Shrak. Setting is kinda futuristic city/abstract sci-fi, think Malice. Often you finish a map between 5 and 10 minutes, so it's nothing epic. Still very interesting to see how far they managed to deviate from vanilla Quake just one year after its release.

If you want to check it out, the QuakeOne forum link is here:
http://quakeone.com/...all-2020-update

It's also recommended to read about the changes and fixes the comm guy applied. Apparently this wasn't really fully playable before. In fact I found some issue with three of the maps still and made a small patch, together with colored lights.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Great find. I love this kind of shit.

[Marphy Black]

That guy who edited the mod said:

I re-wrote the plot

Comparing it to the original plot, it seems a bit different, but I guess the plot in a Quake mod doesn't make all that much difference as long as it doesn't affect the ga-

That guy who edited the mod said:

The only element that I cut from the game is some human NPC's that appeared in a couple of spots as they contradicted my rewrite of the story.

Some of the points in this changelist seem needlessly intrusive and arbitrary as they go beyond technical fixes. That's all good and well, but there are changes that wipe out the character and quirks the original team intentionally infused into their work. Even recording new demos means you no longer get to see the developers playing through their mod in 5 player co-op, a brief glimpse of the team enjoying the fruits of their labor forever memorialized in demo form that we may witness 20+ years later. I guess some of this was done for the sake of Dreamcast optimization, but I'd rather see the subjective alterations and irrelevant-on-PC DC stuff kept separated from the genuine improvements.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Wow, you're completely right.

"The enemy, originally called "Bitch", was changed as I felt that its original design was immature and out of place. Whilst the other enemies in the game were either aliens or robots, Bitch was simply a tall woman in a bikini.

Now known as "Lass", she appears as a female counterpart to the basic lizardman trooper."

This is taking it way too far, and I'm the type of guy who scoffs at modern games having this kind of content.

Don't mess with history. If it's there, it's there. A record of the time and the developers creative choices.

Edit: Started playing the original version with Night's light maps and I'm gonna see how far I get in it. I wonder if that one also has that ENT empty line problem...

[NightFright]

There were actually quite a few questionable edits in After the Fall, especially
- Changing visuals of at least one enemy (quite obvious why you shouldn't change this)
- Removing NPCs (to "fit the new background story" --> as if anybody cares about that)
- Removing locked doors instead of adding a key somewhere
- Altering/erasing music tracks of levels (if the TC ever had custom music and it ever surfaces, it won't work like this)

Anything that fixes the game is OK. I can also live with changing ingame texts or relocating items if they are in suboptimal locations, at least to some degree. These edits however go quite far and tend towards a "fan edition" where someone alters a game to their personal liking. It's something I tried to avoid in the Addon Compilation, hopefully with success.

[MrFlibble]

 NightFright, on 29 July 2020 - 08:52 PM, said:

Anything that fixes the game is OK. I can also live with changing ingame texts or relocating items if they are in suboptimal locations, at least to some degree. These edits however go quite far and tend towards a "fan edition" where someone alters a game to their personal liking.

So basically the guy made a mod of a mod, right? I'm not sure if this is actually that questionable once you look at it like that, unless of course the original was deliberately destroyed or made unavailable, which I think did not happen.

AFAIK there are no simple guidelines for this kind of modding endeavour if the original authors left no clear statement whether they allow their work to be used as a basis for something else, and considering that the original mod was never completed. The first thing to do would probably be to try and contact the authors if they still can be reached, but if this failed and the update went ahead anyway I don't think it is much of a problem, unless it somehow irreversibly destroyed the original (which should really not be possible except if the author of the update was in possession of the only copy of the original work I guess).

[NightFright]

In the meantime I have played through the original mod and can say the "modded mod" deviates too much for my taste. Especially the NPC removal or change of some objectives in maps (e.g. replacing a cure with a teleporter core) is too much. There also are no episode ending texts. Basically a completely different story is told in the original.

It's a personalized edition of one guy that had nothing to do with the authors and people playing the mod for the first time might get the wrong impression when using this edition. I experienced a similar issue with my custom DukeDC soundtrack. People complained about my hand-picked music missing when the addon was re-released since it had the standard ep.3 soundtrack (as it should).

I found just a few severe bugs which I will probably fix myself just to make it playable:
- Easy skill setting is broken on start map
- Sewer exit in E2M3 is broken (showstopper)
- You can get stuck in E4M1 and E4M2 wind tunnels (showstopper)
- Some enemies are stuck in ceilings

More than this shouldn't be needed for preserving the original experience. Unfortunately my skills with Quake editors are very limited. So far I was able to fix the start map with a simple ENT edit at least. That one was easy since the ingame error message already indicates what is wrong. Instead of using the skill id 0, they entered the text "(Select Easy)" in the definitions for some reason. This way you are stuck with normal even if you take the center bridge.

[Aristotle Gumball]

I quite like it so far (the original). More than Shrak, but less than Malice. I think if more work had gone into it, they would've had a solid TC on their hands. For some reason I really enjoy old, obscure mods/games like this - warts and all. It was much harder to create content like this back in the day as the tools were more primitive and hardware much less powerful.