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.

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

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.

Likely em units and missing closing tags.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I have introduced my son to online Quake III servers where people still play regularly. The Quad Damage voiceover is still cool as hell.

> lab -> LAN

Ah yes, those lab parties.

I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.

190ms? You lucky bastard!

(hopefully you're familiar with Monty Python...)

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

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"?

Did an LLM draft this garbage copy?

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 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.

>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.

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.

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).

YOU CAN JUMP ACROSS

And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.

Seconded!

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

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.

It's for people who own the original game on Steam or one of the other supported digital storefronts.

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.

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.

Don't forget Reflex Arena!

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.

AKA redbook audio

How many hours did you play when you found out you can dismiss the "computer updated" notification?

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?).

Strictly speeking the was a seperate track with the game, the music was just in the native Audio CD format.

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.

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

> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players

This means that they not necessarily were all that great.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

In this case the CD exists everywhere. Just buy a copy of Quake on CD.

It's a subscription service! When the vinyl wears out, buy another!

Look inward at our infantile and excessively positive industry. We are just trying to have fun! Do you hate fun?

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.)

Yes.

ChatGPT was the first place to really do it to this extent

Quake was a DOS game.

Around 2020, I think tools like Notion (notion.so) made it popular. Even the Huggingface itself is an emoji...

LLM-driven writing's been a big part of this trend, unfortunately.

They're called "pak"s for quake :)

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

Arcane Dimensions is worth the effort.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 got more play in my car than they ever did in my Playstation.

Popularity and quality are two very different things. There are many brilliant games that simply didn't get much attention simply because of luck or attention got dragged somewhere else.

Not just that but I believe that even those folk that have these huge hits don't really understand how they managed to do it. There just seems to be so much luck involved on top of a great product. You can have a brilliant game and still fail because it doesn't get picked up in just the right way.

Sort of like how Nintendo had the Wii, a huge hit but then almost immediately started to flounder for growth ideas as they didn't understand why it worked so well.

Only in the rather reductive sense of “the vast majority of gamers are into other genres now”.

It was just a standard way to play CD-quality audio tracks (by actually playing CD audio tracks!).

It can also mean the market has shifted which is more the case imo.

The people behind UT were reallocated to make Battle Royale mode for Fortnite which is the reason of the take off, not vice versa.

The term for that is "Mixed Mode CD": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Mode_CD

It was actually both in one executable. Pretty neat. But I will agree that OP might have played it in Microsoft Dos on a PC, so the original point still applies.

They were great examples of what an arena shooter should be. Smooth movement, balanced weapons, well designed maps. The people who had experience with arena shooters liked them. Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.

It was never officially released, but it was on the front page of epic launcher for years, even after fortnite took off. The online experience was fairly complete and enjoyable (for people with experience) for ctf, duel, tdm, and team arena master. But yeah, epic didn't support it as much as they could have.

There's a reason you used to have a separate four-pin cable going from the CD drive to the sound card ;)

I remember when someone registered (poopemoji).la

https://xn--ls8h.la/

It does show up as the poop emoji followed by .la in google search results, but not in a firefox address bar.

But that means it had to be a trend already to be overrepresented in the training corpus, right? Or was it just something the RLHF evaluators got a kick out of...

I figured as much. Some of the addons for the 'modern' Quake seem to really stretch it way beyond anything we saw out of the original engine.

Also love that there is a 50% chance that you can crash a Ps4/Switch just loading a level with the Slave Zero mod that they provide. They are pushing it fairly hard with that one.

It's been so long since I've put the CD in, I forgot.

HOLY SHIT THOSE SOUNDTRACKS WERE JUST CDS?!

THPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.

IIRC, Epic had (still has?) the source for UT4 available as they were trying to push community contributions, mostly on the playable content side but I'm fairly sure they had the core game there, based off what is now a very old branch of UE4. The telling thing to me is if there was a huge demand for it there was no significant effort to pick up the torch, or even do yet another 'spiritual successor'.

Due to the way computers cost a fortune back then, you could skip huge parts of hardware changes in the space of a few years. I must have skipped over that part and jumped from no CD audio (or CD-ROM at all) to, everything over IDE.

Never knew about the 4 pin link.

Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin.

The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd.

But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill you with a rail gun. It got frustrating playing the same bloody map each map change. "Oh yay, it's cs_office again" /s

The whole genre got stale and never has been successfully reignited. As Discord to TeamSpeak; same misfortune.

Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo and Minecraft was the new digital lego. None of them required such a skill to play or host the game. It was refreshing for it's time.

Not forgetting it was the upcoming of a new crowd of folk and as generations go, the old cards topple.

Who hosted an BBS when the internet came to be?

IRC today is pretty much stuck in dinosaur country and XMPP/Jabber never got a product which then was further nailed shut by Google & Co.

It was epic fun for the era but it had a death bed waiting.

> Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.

If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up. Making sure new players actually have fun is a critical part of the game's design. You can't just rely on "...and then new players will have to spend 50-60 hours getting demolished before they start having a good time."

Easing that transition could mean different things -- a campaign, skirmish mode vs bots, full-on PvE co-op mode, automatching that actually works, whatever -- but you do need something effective.

It was common before but the LLMs took it to the extreme. They seemed to have mostly fine tuned it though. Page copy definitely smells like ai

>but not in a firefox address bar.

That is by design (on Firefox's part) to avoid someone registering e.g. steаmpowered.com (notice а as U+0430 instead of a as U+61) and running a scam that looks valid on the address bar.

All of the things you mentioned still exist, they are just not mainstream. And maybe that's for the best. Small friendly communities keep them alive, not companies that need to keep messing with a working thing in order to justify a monthly subscription or ad revenue.

I've never understood the appeal of the opposite. Modern gaming where you just play with different randos every round.

When I was a kid playing Quake 3 I had different servers bookmarked, knew the players that ran the servers and the general crowd that hung around. Had friendships and rivalries.

Modern multiplayer you may as well be playing bots. There's no community.

That's largely what matchmaking aims to solve, assuming you have enough players you can get a reasonably balanced match to drop people into.

Bots can teach basics, but many of these games rely on abusing game mechanics in ways the developers didn't think of in development so it's impossible to teach. Or things are physically difficult to pull off.

Movement shooters especially have this problem because a core part of the game is abusing the movement system and abilities to out maneuver other players. You can explain the how, but executing it all automatically is a real skill that requires practice. I adore Titanfall 2. I sunk hundreds of hours into it. It's really something else when you get the movement down, it all happens so fast you can't think about it you just have to do it. There's no way to teach that with a tutorial, it's muscle memory and perseverance.

Titanfall 2 has all of these things, campaign, skirmish with bots and PvE, but the skill floor and ceiling is still brutal. Whether it failed or not is a question of how long you expected the game to last, but it still succumbed to the same fate. The more experienced players pulled the ladder up behind them and the matchmaker didn't have enough players to give everyone a fair match.

Yes absolutely to avoid phishing sites with idn homograph, homoglyph attacks. Personally I'd like to see the punycode first then the emoji

Wut? We're in a Renaissance of boomer shooters right now. There's like hundreds of new ones and it's a popular category. Just check out civvie11's channel if you disbelieve.

They're just all single player focused.

The source code repo is still on Epic's Github, not sure if everything else is that easy to get currently. The problem about picking it up by a 3rd party is the fun of getting approval on basically anything.

Splitgate matched new players with bots for the first few hours. It meant I had fun (then eventually I levelled up enough, matched with players, got stomped, and never picked it up again…)

I compiled the project on a whim during COVID. It played okay. There was even a very small pool of players who had presumably just done exactly the same thing.

Marvel Rivals quietly matched your team up with bots if you lost twice in a row. I think that was a good system.

Single player maybe, but that's nothing compared to the likes of UT or Quake.

Overwatch too, but it got boring after a while and their matchmaking was atrocious.

I don't know about that. I've pretty continuously been playing games like UT99, UT2k4, Quake (specifically Quake Fortress), TFC, AvP2 since release. Even things like Space Station 13 and King Arthur's Gold.

It's not the only thing going anymore, but also people have orders of magnitude more choices. That's the thing that's missing today. Nothing is "dead", there's just too much competition now.

Honestly the aforementioned games have had much more staying power than more recent multiplayer games. And they're mostly played by old men like me.