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Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

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

#141
post #115
post #75

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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.

I was looking at my Steam library and wishlist last night, in anticipation of the upcoming summer sale season (other storefronts have already begun their summer sales), and I was somewhat disappointed in myself. Even though I try to only buy games on sale, I think I'd likely save money overall by only buying (and finishing, if I'm enjoying them) games at full price when I'm ready to play them vs. speculatively buying games on sale.

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

#142

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Have you played the remaster? It has a lot of subtle upgrades (and more polygons of enemies is one of them). It's really good.

I also loved playing Tenebrae Quake on the Mac. Not sure if it's still around though.

It's not, but the DarkPlaces engine [0] reimplements many, if not all, of the realtime shadow features and has an X64 Mac build (but no ARM build, as far as I'm aware), and is still getting active contributions on its Github repo[1].

[0]: https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/index.html

[1]: https://github.com/DarkPlacesEngine/darkplaces

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

#143
post #140

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It was extremely difficult to play for newcomers. You almost didn't even get a chance to frag old school players once because of the skill discrepancy. I could hang with most of the higher tier guys, but there were some that just seemed nearly invincible. They should have had more resources for developing skills. After I stopped playing, I discovered that some were playing Q3 at ramped up physics speeds in single pla…

> I discovered that some were playing Q3 at ramped up physics speeds in single player. When going back to playing at regular speed, it feels like you're playing in slow motion. That's amazing, like training at altitude but for e-sports.

it's not actually that helpful because a lot of the skill comes from muscle memory and that's not just for aiming but mousemovement also has a significant influence on movement

for example there's something called a circle jump where you use precise mouse movement to get the most efficient angles so that your movement speed is maximized from your first jump

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

#144

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> 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…

I remember he dropped Doom 3 on us with fully dynamic lighting and shadows in like fucking 2004 or something. I remember getting my hands on the engine leak (in 2003?) and absolutely getting my mind blown to see shadows dancing on the wall (at like 8 FPS on my athlonXP geforce4 rig) at something resembling real-time, in the same map that was used at the Apple developer demo where Steve Jobs announced mac support. All…

> If that isn't a top 10 programmer performance than I don't know what is.

Nobody's saying he isn't brilliant. But it's not possible to declare him as a "top 10" programmer without actually taking into account all the other programmers.

I think there are at least 10 other programmers that you've never heard of, but that have had as much or more impact on society in general as Carmack did.

Isn't it enough to just say he's brilliant? Ranking programmers is a fool's errand and serves no purpose other than to devalue other brilliant programmers.

(Also, I think measuring how brilliant someone is by how much impact they've had on society doesn't make much sense. Those are two entirely different things.)

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

#146
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Doom games have little to do with the original Doom gameplay, perhaps because it wasn't that good in retrospect. For Quake there would be more potential for something like a remake.

Strongly disagree that the new Doom games have better gameplay than the old ones. Every fight is a giant monster trap. IMO it showcases the worst aspect of the original doom games.

> have better gameplay

That isn't exactly what they said.

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

#147
post #119

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>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 m…

FWIW while i also found Petersen's maps on the weird side geometrically, at the same time i think they were among the most interesting to play (both in Doom and Quake) as he often tried to come up with various gameplay tricks and traps to break the "mold".

His Quake maps especially give me the impression that he was more into trying to come up with ideas on what is possible for the player to do in the freedom allowed in 3D space than how to make a good looking environment (especially in Quake's theme that didn't really have to conform to any realistic constrains and could have shapes floating in space, physically impossible architectures or whatever).

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember he dropped Doom 3 on us with fully dynamic lighting and shadows in like fucking 2004 or something. I remember getting my hands on the engine leak (in 2003?) and absolutely getting my mind blown to see shadows dancing on the wall (at like 8 FPS on my athlonXP geforce4 rig) at something resembling real-time, in the same map that was used at the Apple developer demo where Steve Jobs announced mac support. All…

> If that isn't a top 10 programmer performance than I don't know what is. Nobody's saying he isn't brilliant. But it's not possible to declare him as a "top 10" programmer without actually taking into account all the other programmers. I think there are at least 10 other programmers that you've never heard of, but that have had as much or more impact on society in general as Carmack did. Isn't it enough to just say…

I don't think anyone here means top 10 in a strict ranking sense of the phrase. But I think Carmack very easily has a place amongst the pantheon of programming gods, whether you measure by 'brilliance' (whatever that means) or impact. He has done a ridiculous amount of innovation over the years, and set the pace for game engine and real-time rendering development for something like 20 years.

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

#149

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…

Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. Carmack is great but you can't really say he's better than say some guy you've never heard of who wrote a bunch of absolutely brilliant algorithms inside a missile defense system and it's all super secret. Or someone who did amazing work on a compiler Carmack used or brilliant work in an OS kernel that you're never going to know about, or some AI code, or something…

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

#150
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Doom games have little to do with the original Doom gameplay, perhaps because it wasn't that good in retrospect. For Quake there would be more potential for something like a remake.

Strongly disagree that the new Doom games have better gameplay than the old ones. Every fight is a giant monster trap. IMO it showcases the worst aspect of the original doom games.

But gunplay and movement is the essence of Doom, unless you're saying that the best part of the original Doom games were the labyrinthine level design
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