Inside3D Asks #4: Quake 1 and the community.

[Sajt]

Hey, don't be dissing our caveman ancestors. They led deeper lives than any of us do today. Besides, if it weren't for the remnants of their blood, nobody would play these violent games anyway.

[Baker]

Hey, don't be dissing our caveman ancestors. They led deeper lives than any of us do today. Besides, if it weren't for the remnants of their blood, nobody would play these violent games anyway.

You know, I always love re-reading what I posted when I was dead tired and drinking a few beers.

I'd stop doing it, except you wouldn't believe the number of times some rant of mine has launched 1,000 ships.

It is my gift

Let's see .... things a Baker rant has done in the past ... well, let's see ...

1) alpha support ubiquitous in all modern engines
2) Getting Jozsef Slalontai hyped up about his JoeQuake (yes, I'm not kidding). When I saw his awesome work, I personally asked several different people to contact Jozsef to tell him how awesome his work was.
3) Igniting Solecord to start the idea of QuakeOne.com
4) Several RuneQuake features
5) NQuake. I know that sounds bad. But hey, before my rants about the evilness of eQuake the Quakeworld guys were distributing registered Quake so it is an improvement I feel.
6) Getting RocketGuy to go crazy and make RQuake Team Coop mod.
7) Countless other things I forget, probably many of which are interesting.

Where angels fear to tread, they send in Baker. I'm like a random dice roll or Forrest Gump's box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get, and neither do I

[Spike]

I got hooked on quake thanks to its QC modding stuff. Plugging some tat together and ending up with stuff in friggin 3d is awesome.
The satisfaction of getting tat working properly is what drives me, for the most part. I'm more likely to implement stuff that I feel to be a challenge than to polish stuff, much to my detriment.

Most memorable moment:
Support for Hexen2 BSPs without breaking Q1 BSPs.
Its small stuff like that that gives me a sense of achievement.

(Hexen2 bsps have 8 hulls, Q1 bsps have only 4. The format is otherwise 100% identical. Only other difference is the palette, but I'm not sure that counts as its not defined in the file itself. This means that the file ident is identical and it looks identical to Q1. FTE contains a hack that detects which format of bsp it is, and loads+sizes hulls accordingly).

Oi, Baker, start ranting about my npfte thing! Make me fix it!

[Baker]

Oi, Baker, start ranting about my npfte thing! Make me fix it!

np? Hmmm ... stumped.

np = ??? Hrm. I can't even come up with a bad guess

/Yeah, I followed up a tired with beer post with ANOTHER tired with beer post. Lovely No, not this one. The previous one.

[hondobondo]

being a C/OpenGL genius, and also the most artistic person in the civilized world, i mod for quake because it's EZ. i suck at C (never had a class), and am only remotely adequate at QuakeC

the tools are easy to learn (QME,BSP), the code is easy to learn, but powerful, and the rewards are immediate. plenty of help from the community (if you can speak opengl and C, even better!), plenty of source code to draw from, plenty of assets to ape, ITS A WIN WIN! i mean LOSE-WIN if you're not the sharing type

[MasterSplinter]

What kept you with this game?

Why haven't you "moved on"?

I have always been a multi-player fan. I guess the concept of friendly dueling or combating with another human is exciting. It is not as rewarding to sneak up on an AI player as it is on a real player. Real players learn from you, mimic, predict, and can exploit your strategies. My fondest experiences of this have been through Quake 1.

I've played many FPS games: Wolf3D, DOOM, Duke3D, Hexen, Blood, Quake(s), Unreal(s), Half-Life... etc. I've done mapping in Duke3D with the tool they provided. But, thanks to college, and the turn of the broadband era: Quake just happen to be there at the right time... It was all too easy to jump on a Quake 1 server on a LAN or some other broadband hosted server. I frequented the CMU servers and EROLDS. An added bonus....being a HPB @ home on dial-up was tolerable... and being a HPB who could beat a LPB was rewarding.

Being in a multi-player environment meant being in a social network. Quake to me, at the time, was like being in a virtual reality chat room... where you exercised wit, humor, and sport. Of course this built relationships... and it was how I interacted with people of mutual interests.

In the here-and-now... things have changed... but I still carry the nostalgia... the flavor of the game is just strong enough to keep me interested. The Quake 1 multi-player games I take less for granted, and I believe others do too.

I have played Halo 2 (when Halo 2 was new) for a bit, as I was on a Quake-Break for a period... The overall experience was not as fun... and the age group of my peer-players was way off. Quake 1 generally has a late 20's - early 30's population.

Besides all that... I love the physics in Quake 1, the combat experience isn't all snipe, and it has a more earthy/physical element that appeals to me.

[Electro]

It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel, saturated by it.

[ajay]

In my late teens (28+ years ago) I started programming on BBC Micro's (link for non-Uk ppl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro ) and, although it never went much past "Hello World" in Basic (although years later, in about '94, I'd get a 2nd hand one and programme more complex things like Lottery Simulators and the beginning of graphics...) I loved it.
From my teens on I was somewhat a frustrated programmer; on dropping out of my 'A' levels I took up a computer course at college; it split it's focus 50:50 on programming and what was then called 'Operating', which was basically changing the big tape reels, putting paper in the huge printers and typing the odd word of conversation on green-black screens with Intel in the US.
It didn't motivate me much, and was as far as my toe got in stepping into the waters of computer related careers.
1995 eventually arrived and I got a job in the LD service I still work in today, 2 months afterwards it got it's first PC and 2 marvellous things happened: we stopped having to handwrite all our many, many documents, and I got back into computers.
Later in 1995 we got a PC at home, hooked up to the internet and about the 131st thing I downloaded was qtest. Wow. But the harddrive was tiny (can't remember exactly) and I ended up deleting it. Then the game proper was released, I bought it, played and finished it. What struck me, apart from the scariness of shamblers (I totally ran away on sighting the first one), was smoothness of this completely 3d world. Never seen anything like it. But I'll be honest, a year or so after its release and I lost that much love for Quake the game, as far as MP goes I've never been big on it; I played Doom LAN matches, I played a little Quake and Quake 3 MP online and even some Halo with my son, but its never been a big draw for me, for any game.
Then I was in PC World of all places, and found this toolkit for Quake, which allowed you to change the game. Make maps, change code and graphics "
anyone could do it!". I bought it and found, well actually anyone could do it, as I obviously could. The pack wasn't great, and I found myself needing help from the net. You can guess what site I found...

I've stayed for two reasons: although I regularly dip in and out of Quake modding, this site remains the most mature (mostly!), welcoming, supportive and creative forum I've found and used regularly. I've been part of many 'communities' for the various aspects and interests in my life, and this is the only one that I've stayed with for anything approaching the length of time I've been here. Secondly Quake remains the most amazing entity; I still doubt there's a game that is both so comparatively simple to mod, yet so leads to such diverse results. Even with my megre ability I've turned out a dinosaur mod, a mod based on a sports/quake version of a childhood game, a 3rd person platformer and now a mod set in the real world. (I can't pretend I could have done all or any of that without the help of others mind)

Anyway, thats it.