Id Software • Hacker News Board

Re: Id Software

#151

Post by digi_owl » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

wowtip wrote: post #58

kar1181 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the comments below observe, I think the types and number of experiences built on the back of new (to mainstream audiences anyway) technology were transformative. In 92 the Amiga 1200 came out, a wonderful computer with great hardware but unfortunately it never made it big. Four years later in 1996 mass market PCs were coming out with Pentium processors, 3dfx accelerators, high resolution bitmap displays, internet…

I wonder sometimes, what could be built using today's tech if it was focused like Amigas back in the day with a single hardware spec and a dedicated OS just for that platform. Without regard to backwards compability in OS, like BeOS at the time. What would a revolutionary Amiga 1000 look like in 2018? With modern hardware and latest OS/system ideas. Gaming consoles could be considered examples of this, but they are k…

Given that outside of the Switch the consoles are x86 AMD made socs, even consoles have bowed to the PC.

In hindsight i feel the Amiga's custom chips was actual an Achilles heel. Yes it allowed each model to sprint out of the gate, but it also limited how far the user could upgrade them.

In contrast the only thing on the motherboard of a PC of the era (once we hit the 386 and later) was the CPU and RAM. Everything else lived on replaceable boards hooked to a bus. And as the Pentium era showed, even the bus could be "replaced" by placing a new one (PCI) side by side with the old one (ISA).

All this allowed a continuation of sorts, where a humble DOS box could live on into the Win9x era in some way or other.

Re: Id Software

#152

Post by digi_owl » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

froasty wrote: post #96

coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era.* In an era when most mainstream movies are way dumbed down, I doubt games got much more "artistic" and "narrative". (Especially if one considers the text and graph…

Agreed. Just look at franchises that were around in the 1990s and compare them to their 2010s counterparts. Almost none of them look good in comparison to their antecedents. Deus Ex -- You play as a cybernetic anti-terrorist operative in a prosaic and cynical vision of the future fueled entirely by the conspiracies of the mid-90s BBS scene. The world is complex, coherent, and fleshed out. You have the illusion that y…

I think some article in PCGamer back in the day quoted Warren Spector regarding Deus Ex, and its complexities, as him regularly going into his office and sitting down to figuratively bang his head on the desk while asking why they make things so hard on themselves over and over.

The decision that the player should be able to win via multiple paths, be it sneaking, gunplay, or something else entirely, really made it a beast to work on.

Damn it, there is a whole sub-section of one of the maps were you can encounter mobs you normally only encounter towards the later end of the game. And you do this by following up on a missing person and finding a way into the sewers.

That said, i keep coming back to a quote found over at Filfre, where one of the people that worked on the early Lucasarts (still Lucasfilms Games back then) games muses over how game developers have a bad habit of getting distracted by new toys.

Meaning that whenever some new hardware came along that allowed more of something, more colors, more sprites, more anything, they would invariably churn out a mass of shallow action games or similar to show of how many sprites or colors they can make the hardware push. Effectively the industry is rolled back by several years of development practice (and i dare say something similar happened with mobile tech when the iPhone released).

And it may well be that as we keep having AMD and Nvivida push out new GPUs, that we are stuck in a rut of continually colorful and well rendered but bland games.

Never mind that with the gamepad being the more likely input device, many interfaces are hampered (Deus Ex inventory tetris anyone?).

Re: Id Software

#153

Post by nakedne » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #137

nakedne wrote: post #126

Is there a good entry point into quake mods these days? When I was a kid in 1996 I toyed with Quake C but really had no idea what I was doing. I'd love to toy with mods again but not really sure if there is a good way to get started. Most of the resources I knew of 22 years ago are gone or significantly outdated.

Check Quaddicted[1] for some singleplayer maps. The most common engine by far is Quakespasm[2] which keeps the original style but fixes bugs, reintroduces some features from the software renderer that were lost in the original OpenGL version (fullbrights, lightmaps that go above 100%, non-power-of-two textures, etc) and removes and raises some hardcoded limits. You probably also want QuakeInjector[3], which is a "qua…

Awesome, thanks for all of this information. It's much appreciated!

Of the 3 quakes, which is easiest to dive into mod development?

Re: Id Software

#154

Post by digi_owl » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

scruffyherder wrote: post #20

DooM is not only fun, but it's great fun to play around with from the inside, or even to port. I've helped bring Doom to the x68000, which was quite the mission as the only compiler we had that could build 'large' executables was GCC 1.39 which had been translated into Japanese. But it's been fun doing ports to OS/2, DJGPP v1, Watcom C, and of course various other Unix via the X11 code. The GPL'd code was 'cleaned up…

IMO Quake 1 was the pinnacle of moddable ID engines.

This because it used its own language, quake-c, and a simple compiler. Beyond that there were few inherent limits to the engine, so people set of making wild weapon packs (some having up around 20 guns that could have multiple modes), RPGs (abusing the hell out of how the game transferred character state between maps), even simple flight sims and driving games.

Come Quake2 you needed VC++ to do mods (leading to a way fewer single developer experimental mods), and come Quake3 there was a hard cap on the number of weapons the mod could contain.

Re: Id Software

#155

Post by pizza234 » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

a008t wrote: post #80

pizza234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in…

Video games have gone Hollywood. Largely because of improvements in graphics, game budgets have gone way up and studios are afraid to take risks. Hence you get mostly sequels, online cash cows, linear on-rails shooters/cinematic experiences that are easy to sell. Content is expensive to produce so studios are afraid of "wasting" it. Yet I was still discovering hidden things in the original Deus Ex 10 years after I fi…

How many games have you played in the last, say, 5 years?

I suspect that many people in this discussion reference big names because they played in the past, but don't play anymore, therefore talk about what they actually see advertised.

> Largely because of improvements in graphics, game budgets have gone way up and studios are afraid to take risks [...] 1997-2004 [...] good enough that cool things could be made yet bad enough that small-ish creative studios could compete

Big studios are only a part of the gaming production landscape.

There is a lot going on in the small/indie studio segment; I've randomly picked up the first link for "Best 2017 pc games", and roughly half of it was not AAA.

Nowadays, with the availability of game frameworks, the entry barriers to game development are pratically non-existent, to the point that at least one critically acclaimed game was made with... Game Maker (in fact, lauded for the narrative).

Re: Id Software

#156

Post by sdwisely » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

cubano wrote: post #88

kar1181 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the comments below observe, I think the types and number of experiences built on the back of new (to mainstream audiences anyway) technology were transformative. In 92 the Amiga 1200 came out, a wonderful computer with great hardware but unfortunately it never made it big. Four years later in 1996 mass market PCs were coming out with Pentium processors, 3dfx accelerators, high resolution bitmap displays, internet…

I always dislike it when the Amiga 1200 is mentioned as a forerunner to modern computing and the wonderful, albeit buggy, Atari 1040ST, released in 1985 , is totally forgotten about Using the Motorola 680000 with 32 bit internal/16 bit external buses and color bit-mapped graphics, my ST, hardware wise, totally blew away all other PCs from a technical POV and it just annoys me when the Amiga gets all this love the and…

It's certainly not forgotten in the music world. It's still a fantastic midi sequencer. I've definitely used mine within the last fortnight.

Re: Id Software

#157

Post by wilsonnb2 » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

Crespyl wrote: post #146

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Currently, I think video games are a terrible way to tell a story. Much worse than a book, tv show, or movie. The way games are used as a narrative medium is by shoving movies inside them and forcing you to watch them instead of actually playing the game. Its like going to the movie theater, being handed a book, and told to read the book while we pause the movie between two scenes. Obviously some games are ex…

Games are certainly a different way to tell a story, but I wouldn't say "terrible". > The way games are used as a narrative medium is by shoving movies inside them If that's how a game is presenting its story, then yes; they likely would be better served by simply making a movie. Games are an interactive medium, but that just means that storytelling in games will be different and use different tools than other medium…

The reason I say it is a terrible way to tell a story is not because you can't tell a good story in a video game, but because most stories don't benefit from having gameplay elements thrown into them. In fact, I think it takes away from the story because the storyteller loses control over important things like pacing and the person experiencing the story has to constantly switch between story-mode and gameplay-mode.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is pretty much the only game I can think of that does this successfully, and I don't think it's something that can be done with any story. Books and movies, on the other hand, can tell pretty much any story. They are universal, while video games are limited. I believe that to be inherent to the mediums, and not just because we are still learning how to tell stories in video games.

Emergent stories are not storytelling and have no bearing on video games effectiveness as a narrative medium. They are stories, yes, but they are not being told. They are being created in real time by the people playing the game, which is quite fun but not storytelling.

Re: Id Software

#158

Post by elsonrodriguez » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 7:21 PM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #32

If you'd like to try out Doom now, there is an OpenGL port called Doomsday[0] which is very complete and loyal to the original, while smoothing out/modernizing things enough to make it genuinely fun for modern players. For instance, you can look in all directions with 'mouse look' and jump and run faster while pressing shift, and there are dynamic spot lights attached to certain things (e.g. fireballs), even though t…

For those more fond of the multiplayer aspects, Zandronum is the definitive multiplayer port:

https://zandronum.com

150 people playing right now, tons of crazy mods (Survival mods, RPG-like leveling, Megaman, etc).

Re: Id Software

#159

Post by alias_neo » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 8:10 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #100

alias_neo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean? Also, I agree with emergent situations, as a gamer, I'd call myself an "explorer" I'll check every nook and cranny, often, with modern games, I end up breaking things because I go places I shouldn't yet, instead of following what the developer expected of me. As for replayability, I agree that it has mostly been lost, but, I don't feel it's a b…

> Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean? I think the parent poster means this: that because each "scene" in an AAA game cost a lot to produce, they want every player to experience it. If it was entirely optional, then some players would miss it, and then how can you explain to them why the game was so expensive? So they must see scene; in order to ensure this, the game becomes more…

That's for explaining. Makes sense now.

Re: Id Software

#160

Post by alias_neo » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 8:12 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #109

alias_neo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean? Also, I agree with emergent situations, as a gamer, I'd call myself an "explorer" I'll check every nook and cranny, often, with modern games, I end up breaking things because I go places I shouldn't yet, instead of following what the developer expected of me. As for replayability, I agree that it has mostly been lost, but, I don't feel it's a b…

Fallout 3 and Oblivion were two of my favs, New Vegas and Skyrim sit in their plastic wrap since day one, as I haven't found the time to commit to them. Fallout 4 got some 60 hours of my time compared to Fallout 3 in which I spend over 400 hours. None of these games are scripted in the same way CoD is. RPGs certainly have a lot of scripting, but they're at the other end of the spectrum - broad scripting rather than d…

Like the other reply, thanks for explaining. I see what it means now. This is one of the reasons I explore games so thoroughly, don't want to miss anything.