Quake is 30 years old. I can't believe I'm still alive. I love this game so dearly. The mods were just incredible, KQP and Girobot in particular.
Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back. As in I had friends bringing over their big ass CRT monitors and PCs for a single occasion and also had ludicrously long network cables. My parents didn't mind, they somehow understood, even with LAN wires running across the kitchen floor. Priceless.
Edit: typo: lab -> LAN
vunderba 4 hours ago [-]
Story time! I was a kid when the original Quake came out in ’96. I don’t remember if I saw it in someone’s .diz file, a FAQ, or somewhere else, but I learned you could change the actual game physics through the console and most importantly you could do it mid-game.
I used to host LAN parties where all my friends from school would lug their PCs over, and we’d hook everything up over 10Base-T. One match, somebody was chasing me down and I’d completely run out of ammo. I fled down a corridor and jumped over a pit of lava - immediately spun around dropped the console and typed as fast as I could:
sv_gravity 1600
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
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.
And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.
johnwalkr 56 minutes ago [-]
At shop.nin.com you can buy a quake ammo box keychain. It makes the jump sound effect.
shuwix 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah ... "new features", especially the torches, to show me that FPU of 486 OCed to 150MHz is not enough :)
Good old days of 7-15 FPS being better than nothing.
pferde 3 hours ago [-]
Oh yes. I remember first playing Quake on a 486 and not liking it, because it felt like I was moving in a heavy sluggish tank, and later playing it on a Pentium, and loving it for the agile movement. The difference was huge!
pezezin 2 hours ago [-]
Quake was notorious for being the first major game to require a powerful FPU. Michael Abrash manually tuned the rasterization code to fit the Pentium pipeline, any other CPU didn't cut it.
herodoturtle 1 hours ago [-]
I recall we got it running pretty decently on an upper end 486 (DX4 100). That, and Winamp. Good times.
Beretta_Vexee 3 hours ago [-]
with a resolution of 640x480 or below !
DamnInteresting 4 hours ago [-]
> Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back
I still remember hours-long marathons of Doom2 deathmatch at my cousin's Novell cubicle farm after office hours, ca. 1994. Then Duke Nukem 3D (using Build to make custom maps [anybody here play NukeCity 1 and/or 2? That was me!]), then eventually Quake. Oh nostalgia, you rickety tower of mixed emotions.
ubercore 1 hours ago [-]
LAN parties were an odd but super fun part of being a teenager at the time!
amatecha 12 hours ago [-]
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)
johnwalkr 48 minutes ago [-]
Quake came out just before I started high school and I played it a lot in those three years. I remember playing quake 1 in the LAN in university around 2002 because it was easy to share the 50MB of portable files. Things moved so fast back then that it already seemed like a retro game. I didn't realise at the time that it was a timeless classic and I would still be playing it 25 years later.
ColdStream 10 hours ago [-]
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.
There were multiple test releases. You can find the older ones out on the web.
noisy_boy 8 hours ago [-]
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.
karim79 11 hours ago [-]
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.
doublerabbit 10 hours ago [-]
> lab -> LAN
Ah yes, those lab parties.
I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.
26 minutes ago [-]
ZuLuuuuuu 13 hours ago [-]
It is nice to see Quake getting some love from the publisher, but I feel like it is not enough.
A bit controversial opinion maybe but I really like Quake Champions and I spent a good amount of time playing it. I even bought some battle passes and merch to support the development. I was really sad that they basically put the game to life support just 1.5 years after its release. The game improved so fast during those 1.5 years, we were getting significant improvements with every patch. I always wondered how much more it would improve if they put just 1 more year into its development.
madewithdrama 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ThrowawayR2 13 hours ago [-]
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.
madewithdrama 11 hours ago [-]
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.
keyringlight 10 hours ago [-]
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'.
chupasaurus 10 hours ago [-]
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.
samplatt 6 hours ago [-]
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.
doublerabbit 11 hours ago [-]
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.
donatj 8 hours ago [-]
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.
raffraffraff 5 hours ago [-]
Xonotic has that old school feeling. It's an unfortunately tiny player base, and only a handful of servers with regular players. But if you are within ping of a busy server (like Jeff & Julius resurrection) you do run into the same people all the time, including the ones that run the servers.
bityard 7 hours ago [-]
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.
busterarm 11 hours ago [-]
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.
doublerabbit 10 hours ago [-]
Single player maybe, but that's nothing compared to the likes of UT or Quake.
busterarm 10 hours ago [-]
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.
raffraffraff 5 hours ago [-]
I haven't fired up UT99, UT2K4 or any of the Quakes for decades. Are there active servers where you could get a good DM session?
sitzkrieg 4 hours ago [-]
afps is pretty dead. there are a handful of people on qw, q2,q3 but if you don’t wanna dig around start with the microtransaction feature quake champions or the quake re release while people are playing it again.
also shout out to banana shooter or straftat if you want a quick fix in a f2p game. it’s not really afpsy but pretty fast movement and wacky guns in both
redsocksfan45 10 hours ago [-]
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chupasaurus 10 hours ago [-]
The people behind UT were reallocated to make Battle Royale mode for Fortnite which is the reason of the take off, not vice versa.
mikepurvis 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
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.
0x1ch 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Krutonium 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ZuLuuuuuu 12 hours ago [-]
Don't forget Reflex Arena!
sitzkrieg 4 hours ago [-]
while it’s the cpma 3.0 i always wanted its also bolstering 0 players and worth forgetting
baal80spam 13 hours ago [-]
> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players
This means that they not necessarily were all that great.
madewithdrama 13 hours ago [-]
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.
TulliusCicero 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
_carbyau_ 4 hours ago [-]
I've given up on PvP. What I never understood was; if I "git gud" then all that really does is shift the "I can't win" problem to someone else. It doesn't resolve it.
Now if you have fun playing the game while losing to others, don't have rewards (whatever they are) based on winning against others, well that's not a problem.
So now I play PvE and it is much more fun in a long term sense. There can still be stats about who the best player is, but everyone gets the rewards and has fun.
MindSpunk 8 hours ago [-]
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.
crummy 13 hours ago [-]
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…)
wmil 12 hours ago [-]
Marvel Rivals quietly matched your team up with bots if you lost twice in a row. I think that was a good system.
doublerabbit 10 hours ago [-]
Overwatch too, but it got boring after a while and their matchmaking was atrocious.
bashwizard 4 hours ago [-]
> If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up.
Have you really though?
I'd argue that what made arena shooters great was the steep learning curve and the grind to improve as a player.
The feeling of having practiced duels for months and finally being able to beat players that used to 50-0 you every game was better than any achievement in any modern FPS game I've ever experienced.
Gamers these days just doesn't really care about becoming better themselves. They want the instant gratification and that's why you have FPS games with super low TTK, perks, abilities, heroes etc. All to narrow down the skill gap between actual good players and completely new players.
Maybe it's just me but I find those games boring.
ColdStream 11 hours ago [-]
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.
moomin 13 hours ago [-]
Only in the rather reductive sense of “the vast majority of gamers are into other genres now”.
acron0 13 hours ago [-]
It can also mean the market has shifted which is more the case imo.
quasigod 10 hours ago [-]
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somat 2 hours ago [-]
I like to think that doom: the dark age is the quake 1 sequel we never got, I mean it has the doom name, probably for marketability reasons, but thematically it fits quake the first better, and it really fits if you include what quake was supposed to be before it was released as just another shooter, the only remnants of this planned quake are the excessive castles and eldritch horrors. Nether of which were present in supposed sequel. I think of it as three separate franchises bearing the name quake Q1, Q3/champions, Q2/4/wars
neonstatic 32 minutes ago [-]
You can't fight with the times. Kids want colorful mods, dance moves, and other stuff like that. Girls also play, they won't play things like the original Doom or Quake, and boys don't get to meet girls much if they are not playing the same games.
0x1ch 12 hours ago [-]
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.
epolanski 1 hours ago [-]
Twitch and arena shooters are just not popular.
bitwize 10 hours ago [-]
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.
k12sosse 9 hours ago [-]
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
orbital-decay 3 hours ago [-]
That's a problem of every commercial competitive game. Endless tweaking and new content kills most games, they never reach their potential skill ceiling. Sometimes it comes out good, but that's more of an exception.
Quake 3 was kind of like Latin of the PvP world (together with SC:BW, CS 1.6 and maybe Tribes 2), its great quality was that it was abandoned and frozen while also being extensible. This let the community decide what they like best (for example CPMA didn't take off despite being great on paper, because it was breaking a lot of VQ3 depth by being too fast for the maps it was played on), and let the players truly master the game over more than two decades. I recently played some VQ3 with agent and had zero hope of keeping up despite being in the top few dozen of players a bit over a decade ago. He's still playing and still keeps his chess-grandmaster sense of the game (and trash talk).
bitwize 5 hours ago [-]
The problem is there exists a version of Quake Champions where everybody plays equally. It's called Quake 3: Arena.
The thing is, Q3A was originally supposed to be a sort of primitive hero shooter, with the various characters falling into different classes: fast, lightly armored "light" characters, more robustly armored but slow "heavy" characters, and a class in the middle. This was scrapped before release.
randac 4 hours ago [-]
Well, a lot of it found a home in Team Arena, but that wasn't particularly well received.
orbital-decay 1 hours ago [-]
TA and its huge maps looked like id's take on Tribes without understanding what made Tribes good
kar1181 3 hours ago [-]
Quake was special for me, the first time I felt truly immersed in a world. I'd played doom/wolf, obviously, but being able to look down, and move in a 3d space just felt real in a way nothing had until then.
Then the multiplayer - lived in the sticks had a 33.6k modem - ping times on a good day of 300ms. Even with all the limitations (and lack of any sort of predictive netcode) that was it, a very expensive (we paid by the minute for phone bills!), game!
Later teamfortress came out from the guys at RMIT in Melbourne who later went on to Valve (Robin Walker/John Cook from memory) and TF set the bar for so much to come.
I know a lot of folks recommend masters of doom for the atmosphere at ID during quake's difficult development, but actually Michael Abrash's graphics black book (free on github - https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book) is an even better companion, still a wonderfully readable book today, but captures the mindset of the development that we can take much from still. Indeed Abrash's anecdote about sliderule jockey's in the day of pocket calculators rings very true today as we grapple with the impact of AI on our work.
How many of us can thank our careers to id for hooking us on computers and things like quakec and even quake2's game dll source and later full engine sources.
It's a real IdTech source port that will load the Remaster's PAKs and pretend to be the Remaster to Steam for achievement unlocks.
Dimension of the Machine was fantastic so I'm hyped to play Dawn of the Machine tonight :D
AgentME 10 hours ago [-]
>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.
Lammy 9 hours ago [-]
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?
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).
Nursie 6 hours ago [-]
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.
zquzra 5 hours ago [-]
q95.bat! Oh, the memories!
jervant 13 hours ago [-]
Nine Inch Nails also has some new merch and soundtrack album for the 30th anniversary:
I hate the trend of selling vinyl but not selling Compact Disc.
strictnein 5 hours ago [-]
In this case the CD exists everywhere. Just buy a copy of Quake on CD.
Lammy 4 hours ago [-]
Sure but…
- normies (not derogatory) wouldn't know that.
- original Quake CDs are of limited supply since new ones aren't being pressed.
- your CD player has to be smart enough to recognize Track 1 as data and skip it or else it will blast your ears with two minutes of loud static before the music starts.
- the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis and your player has to support applying de-emphasis equalization or else it won't sound right. I did check my copy when writing this comment and the TOC does at least flag `PRE`, so supporting players should do it automatically, but still there are loads of ways this can go wrong because it's a relatively niche CD feature and because most modern software players won't handle it at all:
It's a subscription service! When the vinyl wears out, buy another!
yeasku 3 hours ago [-]
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thecrumb 14 hours ago [-]
I have no idea what any of these are LOL
Dawn of the Machine is available as a free update for Quake owners on XBOX Series X/S, XBOX One, Microsoft PC Store, Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2 (via backwards compatibility), and Nintendo Switch versions of Quake.
I do still have my Quake CDs...
bsimpson 13 hours ago [-]
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).
officeplant 13 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
efficax 13 hours ago [-]
They're called "pak"s for quake :)
bsimpson 13 hours ago [-]
It's been so long since I've put the CD in, I forgot.
gambiting 13 hours ago [-]
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.
nizmow 13 hours ago [-]
Quake was a DOS game.
gambiting 13 hours ago [-]
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.
zquzra 10 hours ago [-]
Memories, many memories. I remember the endless nights playing Quake on dial-up, 190 ms ping, listening to Nirvana.
There are still people playing on some servers, and the challenge is higher than ever. Although I still have the reflexes, the tics, and I know the maps and respawn times, I had a very hard time fitting into the games. I imagine that for someone starting today, it must be impossible to face 30 years of muscle memory.
noisy_boy 8 hours ago [-]
I have introduced my son to online Quake III servers where people still play regularly. The Quad Damage voiceover is still cool as hell.
ctippett 8 hours ago [-]
190ms? You lucky bastard!
(hopefully you're familiar with Monty Python...)
parasti 14 hours ago [-]
Every emoji in this post seems bigger than the last.
silversmith 14 hours ago [-]
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"?
pvtmert 14 hours ago [-]
Around 2020, I think tools like Notion (notion.so) made it popular. Even the Huggingface itself is an emoji...
It does show up as the poop emoji followed by .la in google search results, but not in a firefox address bar.
koutakun 10 hours ago [-]
>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.
walrus01 10 hours ago [-]
Yes absolutely to avoid phishing sites with idn homograph, homoglyph attacks. Personally I'd like to see the punycode first then the emoji
_verandaguy 14 hours ago [-]
LLM-driven writing's been a big part of this trend, unfortunately.
efskap 13 hours ago [-]
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...
dawnerd 13 hours ago [-]
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
markedathome 13 hours ago [-]
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.)
mgfist 14 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT was the first place to really do it to this extent
2OEH8eoCRo0 14 hours ago [-]
Look inward at our infantile and excessively positive industry. We are just trying to have fun! Do you hate fun?
grenoire 14 hours ago [-]
Did an LLM draft this garbage copy?
Narishma 13 hours ago [-]
Yes.
sph 13 hours ago [-]
Likely em units and missing closing tags.
namdnay 13 hours ago [-]
If you read this and you haven’t played arcane dimensions yet, drop everything and go and do that. It makes the quake the best single player FPS ever. The mechanics are even better than vanilla quake, the maps are gorgeous, the enemies diverse and fun. Absolute perfection
sph 13 hours ago [-]
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.
misterflibble 44 minutes ago [-]
I think it's a lot easier to run mods with the Linux source ports and so far I've had no issues running arcane dimensions (AD).
To run that mod from a CLI with most source ports, you just need to make sure that you specify a path to your original Quake .PAK files and set the -gamedir to the path of your AD mod folder.
OK you guys convinced me. Just tested it now, plays really good
misterflibble 44 minutes ago [-]
I love it and with the original music it's even better, especially the levels in the second chapters hub
jiffygist 14 hours ago [-]
Does the new episode work well in opensource ports? (don't feel like installing steam rn and don't care about nightdive port)
AgentME 13 hours ago [-]
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.
eseymour 14 hours ago [-]
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.
13 hours ago [-]
ZiiS 13 hours ago [-]
Whilst they owe me nothing with the amount I played my CD, feels a bit harsh to trade on the 30th aniversary but only support much newer sales.
ColdStream 13 hours ago [-]
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.
joshmarinacci 14 hours ago [-]
Is this an update for the original quake or do you need one of the newer ones?
AgentME 14 hours ago [-]
It's for people who own the original game on Steam or one of the other supported digital storefronts.
testfrequency 14 hours ago [-]
New. Modern platform versions from their respective stores.
RobRivera 13 hours ago [-]
I have zero real excuse for never having built the game from source.
I have played with the modding surface available in the quakeC files tho!
I was experimenting with a game design element where firing a weapon didnt decrement the ammo, but auto fired.
In other words, you always fired whatever you had out, removing the ammo hoarder behavior, but also makes you very cognizant about explosive barrels and where you point that rocket.
_rwo 4 hours ago [-]
so awesome; as a side note I still host quake net pl (plz do not visit it, it's hosted on my home NAS and currently supports up to 10rpm xD) which was dedicated to Quake 3 and have origins starting 1998; I need to figure out how to keep it alive once I'm dead, lol
insert: how do you do, fellow kinds meme jpg
html5cat 13 hours ago [-]
Surprised they didn't port these to Mac yet. Between M series and Game Porting Toolkit (4 now?) it seems like small effort can unlock huge wave of new players nostalgic for childhood game.
MindSpunk 7 hours ago [-]
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.
html5cat 3 hours ago [-]
If i understand correctly Bethesda has the original IP and would just need a regular apple dev account if they wanted to publish, no?
VCFundedGenYer 13 hours ago [-]
Nope. Unless Game Porting Toolkit is free and open like Proton, there is little to no prospect of the macOS gaming landscape to improve.
html5cat 3 hours ago [-]
it is free though, no? am i missing something?
upmostly 12 hours ago [-]
Emoji are clear indicators an LLM wrote this post. Ugh.
bsimpson 13 hours ago [-]
I had the Mac version of Quake II.
They encoded the game as an audio CD, so you could toss the disc in a boombox and listen to the soundtrack when you weren't playing. Very cool!
nizmow 13 hours ago [-]
This was actually just how CDDA music tracks worked in almost all CD games in the late 90s. :)
hamdingers 11 hours ago [-]
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 got more play in my car than they ever did in my Playstation.
bsimpson 11 hours ago [-]
HOLY SHIT THOSE SOUNDTRACKS WERE JUST CDS?!
THPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.
vor_ 11 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
vor_ 11 hours ago [-]
It was just a standard way to play CD-quality audio tracks (by actually playing CD audio tracks!).
formerly_proven 13 hours ago [-]
There's a reason you used to have a separate four-pin cable going from the CD drive to the sound card ;)
ColdStream 13 hours ago [-]
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.
11 hours ago [-]
ZiiS 13 hours ago [-]
Strictly speeking the was a seperate track with the game, the music was just in the native Audio CD format.
rzzzt 13 hours ago [-]
How many hours did you play when you found out you can dismiss the "computer updated" notification?
The Quake type of graphics but in HQ makes it look a WHOLE lot like Dusk the game.
AngryGoblin 2 hours ago [-]
It was always crazy to me the Quake team never jumped on the boomer-shooter bandwagon by releasing a new retro Quake... Excited to play this.
Absolutely played the arse off Quake 2 multiplayer when I was a young'un too, weirdly made so many IRL friends from local Quake 2 servers, you don't really get that from modern multiplayer games...
sqemo 9 hours ago [-]
Quake is still around. It's a nostalgic game from decades ago, but I'm surprised it still exists
fiatpandas 13 hours ago [-]
Is there a technical reason why this update won’t land on GOG?
Uvix 13 hours ago [-]
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?).
razorbeamz 9 hours ago [-]
No Switch 2 mouse mode support?
artemonster 12 minutes ago [-]
celebrate with another round of layoffs, hooray
j_aime 7 hours ago [-]
Who wants to start a clan?
cubefox 4 hours ago [-]
It's interesting that the new Quake episode was developed by an external studio (MachineGames) rather than inhouse by id Software.
sitzkrieg 4 hours ago [-]
machine games made all three of new episodes
cubefox 4 hours ago [-]
It raises the question whether they have become better at making Quake games than id Software themselves.
cluckindan 3 hours ago [-]
There is no ”id Software” any longer.
cubefox 2 hours ago [-]
At least the post on the Bethesda website is attributed to id Software.
speak_plainly 13 hours ago [-]
I bet this is an attempt by Microsoft at trying to win back fans.
I also noticed IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat promoting a Minecraft playthrough, which I would assume is paid for by Microsoft given what they’ve been saying lately: https://youtu.be/IgJru9870_A
We will be inundated with low-effort fan service until morale improves.
ColdStream 13 hours ago [-]
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.
sufficientsoup 10 hours ago [-]
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.
system2 13 hours ago [-]
I have Quake on Steam. Just updated, but I do not see Dawn of the Machine.
markus_zhang 13 hours ago [-]
I see it at the bottom once you select "NEW GAME".
nsxwolf 13 hours ago [-]
Does it work with the MS-DOS version?
ColdStream 12 hours ago [-]
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.
johng 12 hours ago [-]
I had to stop playing online FPS's because the cheating got so bad. I really miss the days of COD/MW2, that was kind of peak for me. I had been playing since Doom on modems... but never saw the cheating so bad. Instant spawn, headshot, nuke.
I don't have a PC anymore so most of the top tier FPS games I can't play anyway since they require kernel level anti-cheat.
Rendered at 10:16:13 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back. As in I had friends bringing over their big ass CRT monitors and PCs for a single occasion and also had ludicrously long network cables. My parents didn't mind, they somehow understood, even with LAN wires running across the kitchen floor. Priceless.
Edit: typo: lab -> LAN
I used to host LAN parties where all my friends from school would lug their PCs over, and we’d hook everything up over 10Base-T. One match, somebody was chasing me down and I’d completely run out of ammo. I fled down a corridor and jumped over a pit of lava - immediately spun around dropped the console and typed as fast as I could:
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
And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.
Good old days of 7-15 FPS being better than nothing.
I still remember hours-long marathons of Doom2 deathmatch at my cousin's Novell cubicle farm after office hours, ca. 1994. Then Duke Nukem 3D (using Build to make custom maps [anybody here play NukeCity 1 and/or 2? That was me!]), then eventually Quake. Oh nostalgia, you rickety tower of mixed emotions.
Definitely made high school much more fun.
https://archive.org/details/q3DemoTEST
There were multiple test releases. You can find the older ones out on the web.
I wish we could get those days back. Cars loaded with CRT monitors and big machines and bags of all sorts of stuff.
Ah yes, those lab parties.
I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.
A bit controversial opinion maybe but I really like Quake Champions and I spent a good amount of time playing it. I even bought some battle passes and merch to support the development. I was really sad that they basically put the game to life support just 1.5 years after its release. The game improved so fast during those 1.5 years, we were getting significant improvements with every patch. I always wondered how much more it would improve if they put just 1 more year into its development.
And UT3 was definitely not a great game by anyone's measure.
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.
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.
They're just all single player focused.
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.
also shout out to banana shooter or straftat if you want a quick fix in a f2p game. it’s not really afpsy but pretty fast movement and wacky guns in both
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.
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.
UT4 was a tech demo.
This means that they not necessarily were all that great.
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.
Now if you have fun playing the game while losing to others, don't have rewards (whatever they are) based on winning against others, well that's not a problem.
So now I play PvE and it is much more fun in a long term sense. There can still be stats about who the best player is, but everyone gets the rewards and has fun.
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.
Have you really though?
I'd argue that what made arena shooters great was the steep learning curve and the grind to improve as a player.
The feeling of having practiced duels for months and finally being able to beat players that used to 50-0 you every game was better than any achievement in any modern FPS game I've ever experienced.
Gamers these days just doesn't really care about becoming better themselves. They want the instant gratification and that's why you have FPS games with super low TTK, perks, abilities, heroes etc. All to narrow down the skill gap between actual good players and completely new players.
Maybe it's just me but I find those games boring.
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.
A lot of potential, killed by committee
Quake 3 was kind of like Latin of the PvP world (together with SC:BW, CS 1.6 and maybe Tribes 2), its great quality was that it was abandoned and frozen while also being extensible. This let the community decide what they like best (for example CPMA didn't take off despite being great on paper, because it was breaking a lot of VQ3 depth by being too fast for the maps it was played on), and let the players truly master the game over more than two decades. I recently played some VQ3 with agent and had zero hope of keeping up despite being in the top few dozen of players a bit over a decade ago. He's still playing and still keeps his chess-grandmaster sense of the game (and trash talk).
The thing is, Q3A was originally supposed to be a sort of primitive hero shooter, with the various characters falling into different classes: fast, lightly armored "light" characters, more robustly armored but slow "heavy" characters, and a class in the middle. This was scrapped before release.
Then the multiplayer - lived in the sticks had a 33.6k modem - ping times on a good day of 300ms. Even with all the limitations (and lack of any sort of predictive netcode) that was it, a very expensive (we paid by the minute for phone bills!), game!
Later teamfortress came out from the guys at RMIT in Melbourne who later went on to Valve (Robin Walker/John Cook from memory) and TF set the bar for so much to come.
I know a lot of folks recommend masters of doom for the atmosphere at ID during quake's difficult development, but actually Michael Abrash's graphics black book (free on github - https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book) is an even better companion, still a wonderfully readable book today, but captures the mindset of the development that we can take much from still. Indeed Abrash's anecdote about sliderule jockey's in the day of pocket calculators rings very true today as we grapple with the impact of AI on our work.
How many of us can thank our careers to id for hooking us on computers and things like quakec and even quake2's game dll source and later full engine sources.
It's a real IdTech source port that will load the Remaster's PAKs and pretend to be the Remaster to Steam for achievement unlocks.
Dimension of the Machine was fantastic so I'm hyped to play Dawn of the Machine tonight :D
You should rephrase this as just "Install Quake on Steam, but then" for newcomers who need this advice to be able to understand it.
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 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.
https://shop.nin.com/
- normies (not derogatory) wouldn't know that.
- original Quake CDs are of limited supply since new ones aren't being pressed.
- your CD player has to be smart enough to recognize Track 1 as data and skip it or else it will blast your ears with two minutes of loud static before the music starts.
- the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis and your player has to support applying de-emphasis equalization or else it won't sound right. I did check my copy when writing this comment and the TOC does at least flag `PRE`, so supporting players should do it automatically, but still there are loads of ways this can go wrong because it's a relatively niche CD feature and because most modern software players won't handle it at all:
https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/index.php?title=Pre-emphasi...
https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Pre-emphasis#...
Dawn of the Machine is available as a free update for Quake owners on XBOX Series X/S, XBOX One, Microsoft PC Store, Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2 (via backwards compatibility), and Nintendo Switch versions of Quake.
I do still have my Quake CDs...
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).
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
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.
There are still people playing on some servers, and the challenge is higher than ever. Although I still have the reflexes, the tics, and I know the maps and respawn times, I had a very hard time fitting into the games. I imagine that for someone starting today, it must be impossible to face 30 years of muscle memory.
(hopefully you're familiar with Monty Python...)
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.
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.
To run that mod from a CLI with most source ports, you just need to make sure that you specify a path to your original Quake .PAK files and set the -gamedir to the path of your AD mod folder.
I downloaded the arcane dimensions mod from here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/arcane-dimensions/downloads/arcan...
I hope that helps!
The quality of life improvements are done very well and I would recommend. Heck even if just for the new lighting engine.
I have played with the modding surface available in the quakeC files tho!
I was experimenting with a game design element where firing a weapon didnt decrement the ammo, but auto fired.
In other words, you always fired whatever you had out, removing the ammo hoarder behavior, but also makes you very cognizant about explosive barrels and where you point that rocket.
insert: how do you do, fellow kinds meme jpg
They encoded the game as an audio CD, so you could toss the disc in a boombox and listen to the soundtrack when you weren't playing. Very cool!
THPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.
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.
Never knew about the 4 pin link.
Absolutely played the arse off Quake 2 multiplayer when I was a young'un too, weirdly made so many IRL friends from local Quake 2 servers, you don't really get that from modern multiplayer games...
I also noticed IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat promoting a Minecraft playthrough, which I would assume is paid for by Microsoft given what they’ve been saying lately: https://youtu.be/IgJru9870_A
We will be inundated with low-effort fan service until morale improves.
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 don't have a PC anymore so most of the top tier FPS games I can't play anyway since they require kernel level anti-cheat.