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Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

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Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#111

Post by simias »

kipi wrote: post #17
eps wrote: post #10

I don't follow. This code is not C or C++, so it's not actually from Quake. So what's with "this is how this was coded" and "here are the bugs, but it's only my guess"? The code is avaialble, why guess at all?

Hello, video creator here. This is indeed the actual code, and it is written in QuakeC, a language created specifically for the game logic in Quake. The part I'm not sure about is why the creators wanted to add in extra side beams at all.

I think your guess seems plausible, although maybe it was simply an effort to widen the beam to better match the graphics? The lightning effect is rather wide and it may have been surprising for the player if the hitbox ended up too narrow.

I haven't played Quake in the better part of 20 years so I can't comment from first hand experience, but judging by your top-down view at around 41 seconds, the single beam visually seems to intersect with a bunch of enemies while not dealing any damage (probably as a combination of narrow hitboxes on both the beam and the enemies).

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#112

Post by itsagavin »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #87
cubefox wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closest guy to Carmack today seems to be Brian Caris, who developed virtualized geometry[1], a rasterization based rendering technique where the geometric detail of static objects is adjusted to the screen resolution in real time. There is another talk (can't find it right now) where he mentions Carmack as an inspiration. I wonder what Carmack would be working on today if he was still in the game engine business.…

There's some really big innovations happening in e.g. rendering like that; I wouldn't be surprised if the complexity and work involved in just Nanite is 10x that of the whole Quake engine. Similarly there's the work nvidia is doing, using AI technology to upscale graphics instead of rendering things at 4K.

The idea is that, the derivative came after the virtuoso. Of course what came after is more complex costs more takes more is more impressive blah blah. Dismissing those that thought the thought or solved for a problem before it was, is such a dumb thing people do.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#113

Post by magicalhippo »

Eisenstein wrote: post #36
hardware2win wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>probably one the top 10 programmers of all time By what metric? Popularity? PR? Net worth? Complex software? Competitive programming? Impact? For every "top" SE there are tens of similarly skilled engineers that you have never heard of

> By what metric? His record speaks for itself. I know it is tough to imagine what it was like programming 3D engines meant to run on graphics non-accelerated PCs running DOS, without the internet knowledge or collaboration available to us now, but the stuff he was doing was absolutely revolutionary. He basically created PC gaming as we know it today by creating a market for 3D accelerators and before that by doing i…

An interesting read into some of the insights that Carmack had which lead to the revolution that was Quake can be found in the "Ramblings in Realtime" articles[1] by Michael Abrash[2], who helped John develop Quake's 3D engine. Abrash wrote the rather famous "Graphics Programming Black Book", now available for free[3].

[1]: https://valvedev.info/archives/abrash/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash

[3]: https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#114

Post by newsclues »

boredemployee wrote: post #84
tekmate wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

worse even, it killed off many vibrant quake 3 communities that had been going from 1999 to 2008 because half the people started playing quake live and the other half stopped playing alltogether

Exactly that! They just killed a really cool (somewhat toxic) community. To me Quake World is the best multiplayer game of all time. But Quake 3 comes next and was really really fun to play. Quake Champions is a great disappointment.

Quake Live was just Quake 3.

Champions was something different.

The community was on life support, and the attempt (Quake Live) wasn't enough to bring people back to good eSports, as the market had moved on from pure skill based games.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#115

Post by ChoGGi »

Sharlin wrote: post #75
RobotToaster wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably didn't expect many people to get more than half way through the game.

It was a different time. It's not like today when everybody has a Steam collection full of games played just a couple of hours and then abandoned.

I swear I'll finish more of them when I get some free time.

Though it certainly is nicer on my wallet to normally grab games on sale.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#116

Post by methodin »

willvarfar wrote: post #50
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it came out I didn't quite like it. I was like, what's the advantage of 3D when it all looks so polygon-y? Duke Nukem "3D" looks better! The atmosphere was brilliant though.

Duke Nukem 3D was built on the 'build' engine, which was built by a super cool 18yo called Ken Silverman http://advsys.net/ken/ . Back in the 90s John Carmack was asked "If you could just hire anybody from the 3D world, who would you hire?", and he named Ken http://advsys.net/ken/carmken.htm

Thanks for the link! This really took me back to the games I grew up on that influenced me (haven't heard the names ROTT or Redneck Rampage since the 90's)

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#117

Post by tomashubelbauer »

Agentlien wrote: post #69
Eisenstein wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good chance it was John Carmack, probably one the top 10 programmers of all time. He basically built the Quake engine himself. There is a pretty decent analysis of it here: * https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php I recommend checking it out. EDIT: i was thinking of the analysis done on Quake 2, which is more about the engine: * https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/index.php while the one about is regarding th…

I loved the video, I love this type of analysis of bugs and glitches. This comment, however, just makes me nervous. It's like my innermost worry. I spend so much time trying to do a good job which I can be proud of and yet I always know there are bugs and I just hope not too many players notice and get annoyed by them. And here we are, pointing out poorly written code in practically ancient software and attributing i…

People speed run this game. Understanding every line of it is a part of the process and the reason people care who wrote what line is because it has a lot of culture and history associated with it. If you work on stuff that will make this kind of impact that makes people care like this you will feel proud having your bugs picked apart, not ashamed for having put them there in the first place. And if you don't rest easy knowing any bug you ever make probably won't see a thousandth of the effort being put into understanding and attributing it.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#118

Post by tomxor »

kvark wrote: post #5

They missed the 3rd(!) bug in those few lines of code? The normalization was done before zeroing out the Z component, so the resulting vector isn’t actually normalized.

Yeah that's the first thing that drew my attention, if you normalise and then remove a component... now you know for sure length whatever you are doing is dependent on the direction of the input vector.

I still find vector programming hard though, so if I was writing anything like this I'd always visualise it as part of my testing. i.e temporarily render out the other beams and possibly the intermediate vector as necessary (pretty much what they did in this video). That makes testing easier to verify and debugging way more intuitive.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#119

Post by i_c_b »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #21
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying I never conjure the spaghetti but whoever coded that really was deep into the tail end of a caffeine, coding and sleep deprivation binge ;)

>whoever coded that really was deep into the tail end of a caffeine, coding and sleep deprivation binge ;) That's most indie game devs of the period, but more so at id Software which splintered the team during Quake's development due to internal squabbles, causing John Romero and others to leave id. You can even tell that from the quality of Quake's levels which start with beautifully crafted and intricate levels, an…

"You can even tell that from the quality of Quake's levels which start with beautifully crafted and intricate levels, and as you approach the end, progress into "whatever, let's just ship it, this is gonna sell" kind of levels that were mostly just boring repetitive filler to pad the play time."

IIRC (this is well-documented if you want to double check), Tim Willits made most of the Episode 1 maps, John Romero made most of the episode 2 maps, American McGee made most of the Episode 3 maps, Sandy Peterson made most of the episode 4 maps, and John Romero made most of the level 1, military base themed maps in each episode.

The episode 4 maps are often barren, lacking in details, and missing much of the beautiful interconnections of earlier maps... but this is also true of Peterson's maps from Doom (he did a lot of episode 3 in the original Doom, IIRC). So I think it's more of "this guy might be a strong game designer in a lot of other contexts, but the specific needs of making cutting edge Doom/Quake style maps isn't a great fit for him".

I was at Raven Software at the transition from the Doom engine and other 2.5D engines to Quake (and then Quake 2, and then Quake 3, and then Doom 3), and there were a number of existing designers who were fine game designers in earlier, 2d contexts who found their skills severely out of sync with the changing demands of 3d map making, and most of them eventually had to transition to other roles or leave the industry.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#120

Post by barbariangrunge »

cubefox wrote: post #74
Eisenstein wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By what metric? His record speaks for itself. I know it is tough to imagine what it was like programming 3D engines meant to run on graphics non-accelerated PCs running DOS, without the internet knowledge or collaboration available to us now, but the stuff he was doing was absolutely revolutionary. He basically created PC gaming as we know it today by creating a market for 3D accelerators and before that by doing i…

The closest guy to Carmack today seems to be Brian Caris, who developed virtualized geometry[1], a rasterization based rendering technique where the geometric detail of static objects is adjusted to the screen resolution in real time. There is another talk (can't find it right now) where he mentions Carmack as an inspiration. I wonder what Carmack would be working on today if he was still in the game engine business.…

He was a little bit. I wonder what he was up at meta before switching to agi
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