Quake

[EnderAndrew]

Carmack in all his wisdom and generosity has released the source code for all 3 Quake games.

 

(As a side note, someone ACCIDENTALLY leaked the beta of Quake 4 in much the same way the alpha of Doom 3 leaked, and in both cases ID looked the other way. Is this there new marketing scheme? I'm not kidding. I played Doom 3 two years before the game shipped.)

 

I'm curious what nifty things people have done with the Quake engines. I also haven't played Quake since the original, and I barely played it then. Has anyone improved upon the source code to make an even better engine that will still play the originals?

 

Out of respect and curiousity, I'm thinking of picking Quake 1-3 up. Any recommendations for engine remakes, mods or patches?

[Kaftan Barlast]

I still play Q3 from time to time, it gives me the kind of rush not even drinking a whole pot of coffee could give :D Its just so insanely fast and furious

 

 

If youre going to play Q2 then I absolutely suggest that you download John Carmacks OpenGL porting of it. Thats about the only essential "mod" I can remember.

[EnderAndrew]

I thought the Quake games were written in OpenGL natively, or am I crazy?

[213374U]

Alien Quake was awesome. Scariest mod ever. I'm not sure you could still find it, though.

 

There was another great mod that turned the game into essentially a Battlefield kind of game. "Airquake" it was called, methinks. Funny how that mod is somewhat unknown, and the BF games that take after it are some of the best selling ever.

 

The graphics weren't that great in any of those, as both are mods for Quake 1. But still, they were fun as hell.

[Kaftan Barlast]

I thought the Quake games were written in OpenGL natively, or am I crazy?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

 

Up to Q3 they used their own system/platform, which I dont know much about. OpenGl and 3Dfx didnt begin to be used until the 3D cards came for real which was after Q2 had been released

[BicycleOfDeath]

Quake's Tenebrae mod.

http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/

[alanschu]

Quake 2 supports OpenGL natively. It came with the default OpenGL driver support, as well as 3dfx OpenGL (the miniwrapper for it) and PowerVR support.

 

 

Quake 1 did have a patch though, and it was called GLQuake. Although I think the game was always coded in OpenGL, just not with 3D accelerator hardware support. I assume it just used the software OpenGL driver, as I can't imagine reworking an entire engine to support OpenGL if it didn't support it to begin with. Unless it's easier than I figure.

 

 

3D cards became "for real" quite a bit before Quake 2 was released. The Voodoo had already been out for a while, and I believe the Voodoo2 had already been released before Quake 2 came out. Quake 2 was still the definitive FPS when such chips as the Voodoo3 and TNT2 Ultra came out. ATI's first "gaming" chip, the Rage128, was specifically optimized for Quake 2.

[EnderAndrew]

Quake's Tenebrae mod.

http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I saw this and was quite impressed. The links to the Quake remodeling and retexturing projects however seem to be down.

[Yst]

ATI's first "gaming" chip, the Rage128, was specifically optimized for Quake 2.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I think it's fair to consider the (1996) Rage a gaming chip for its own pre-voodoo moment in history, and it was billed as a 3D accelerator, which was a perfectly reasonable title for it at the time and was accurate in practice, insofar as it did provide some limited support for hardware acceleration of, for example, Mechwarrior 2. At any rate, it was no worse than the NV1 or Virge (which, was my own first 3D card) among pre-3DFX attempts at gaming chips, even if the Verite did ultimately outclassed it.

[EnderAndrew]

The Rage Fury Pro was my first 3D card.

[Yst]

My Quake era 3D card history went

 

Number Nine Imagine 128 (2MB - S3 Virge): Awful. Nicknamed the 3Decelerator by users. Unfortunately, like the NV1, a product which didn't find a historical purpose, though at least Nvidia learned and continued to improve after their own first problematic attempt, whereas for S3 it was all downhill from there.

 

Matrox Mystique (4MB): Alright. Not great. Provided some pretty impressive acceleration for Tombraider, and was a pretty good 2D card with some interesting options, at least, which was what Matrox was famous for with the Millennium line.

 

Diamond Monster 3D (4MB - Voodoo Chipset): And so the revolution began. Incredible stuff. The tech demos that 3DFX produced were even more impressive than game performance. I was painfully jealous of the folks who had the (6MB) Canopus Pure3Ds or Obsidian dual-chipset voodoo cards though. Those Obsidian cards were like the holy grail, for the time. To touch one would have been ecstasy.

 

ATI Rage Pro (8MB): Interesting attempt at support for higher colour and a wider range of 3D resolutions. Also, a typically imperfect ATI attempt to bring proper OpenGL to the desktop at a price below that of the horrifically expensive and underperforming (in games) contemporaneous Permedia OGL cards. All good, well-intentioned ideas. Problematic execution.

 

Diamond Monster 3D II (12MB): Yeah, I got the 12MB version, for whatever difference that made. And so the slow decline of 3DFX began. It was fast, but it was the antithesis of everything 3DFX's opponents were trying to do: they were trying to innovate. Most of them would fail, but by virtue of its own failure to make any attempt to revolutionise its chipset design, so would 3DFX.

Edited September 26, 2005 by Yst

[Kaftan Barlast]

Quake 2 supports OpenGL natively.  It came with the default OpenGL driver support, as well as 3dfx OpenGL (the miniwrapper for it) and PowerVR support.

 

 

Quake 1 did have a patch though, and it was called GLQuake.  Although I think the game was always coded in OpenGL, just not with 3D accelerator hardware support.  I assume it just used the software OpenGL driver, as I can't imagine reworking an entire engine to support OpenGL if it didn't support it to begin with.  Unless it's easier than I figure.

 

 

I remeber when that patch came, I just got the versions wrong.. now that I think about it I played Q1 on the internet and that means it was sometime in 1996. Anyway Q1 didnt use OpenGL at all first:

 

I have been using OpenGL for about six months now, and I have been very impressed by the design of the API, and especially it's ease of use. A month ago, I ported quake to OpenGL. It was an extremely pleasant experience. It didn't take long, the code was clean and simple, and it gave me a great testbed to rapidly try out new research ideas

 

source

 

 

I had a Matrox PowerVR card, it sucked. Developers stopped supporting the technology fairly quickly too. I remember it didnt support the flashy new things like coloured lights in what must habe been Q2

Edited September 26, 2005 by Kaftan Barlast

[BicycleOfDeath]

Quake's Tenebrae mod.

http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I saw this and was quite impressed. The links to the Quake remodeling and retexturing projects however seem to be down.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

There's also one for Q2 that's a WIP [work in progress] as of now.

[angshuman]

[There's also one for Q2 that's a WIP [work in progress] as of now.

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Are you talking about Tenebrae 2.0? I believe according to the devs, Tenebrae2 is based on the Tenebrae1 code. However, the project seems to be dead -- the last update was sometime in March 2004.

[EnderAndrew]

There appear to be a few modifications of the Quake 2 engine, but none of them quite as polished or as nice as the Quake 1 rewrites.

 

I imagine with the Quake 3 code out now, that Tenebrae 2.0 might base itself off that code since it was early in development.

[alanschu]

ATI's first "gaming" chip, the Rage128, was specifically optimized for Quake 2.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I think it's fair to consider the (1996) Rage a gaming chip for its own pre-voodoo moment in history, and it was billed as a 3D accelerator, which was a perfectly reasonable title for it at the time and was accurate in practice, insofar as it did provide some limited support for hardware acceleration of, for example, Mechwarrior 2. At any rate, it was no worse than the NV1 or Virge (which, was my own first 3D card) among pre-3DFX attempts at gaming chips, even if the Verite did ultimately outclassed it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

I was actually referring to the Rage128, which came out in the 1998/1999 area. I was wholly unimpressed with a Rage Pro 8MB I had received for free. It didn't have native OpenGL support, and obviously no Glide. Imagine my confusion when I figured it would be possible to play 3D games, but since Glide was still the big boy I was SOL.

 

The Rage128 (Rage Fury) was the first ATI card I had that had good 3D performance. It had fantastic Quake 2 performance, though initially it had subpar performance, particularly on AMD K6 processors. Then they released a patch that had 3DNow! support, and I was in a whole different world. Finally I could play games with fast 3D support!!!

 

As I'm a supporter of the underdog, I continue to support ATI. Although their Linux drivers leave a lot to desire. Fortunately I don't do too much 3D activities in Linux.

[EnderAndrew]

ATI's top-end GPUs are getting killed right now, and their new Crossfire platform is pretty pathetic.

 

Add to that most every major game release I've seen over the past 2 years has issues with ATI drivers, I can't see why anyone stands behind them.

 

NVidia offers better stability, better drivers, better performance for the pricepoint, and better high-end options for the enthusiast.

 

You have have 4 GPUs in SLI, or 2 in full 32x PCI-E modes. ATI is just now limping to multiple GPU support, yet their two best GPUs in Crossfire is beat by two 6800 U's in SLI or 1 7800.

 

ATI also refused to offer x64 drivers for the longest time. ATI lives on the gaming market, but refused to recognize and support the x64 market. It just doesn't make sense. The newer 5.9 Catalyst drivers are the first that will install on x64 without a workaround.

 

I find that unacceptable.

Edited September 27, 2005 by EnderAndrew

[EnderAndrew]

By the way, and more on topic, I found this.

 

http://tremor.quakedev.com/cleanq3.html

 

It is a project to clean up the Quake 3 source code, fix some bugs, and make some very minor tweaks. If it is like his versions of Quake 1 and Quake 2, it will also increase documentation and basically act as a springboard for someone who wants to futher develop or mod the Quake 3 engine.

 

There are aspiring developers on the forum here, and I felt there are probably people here who would appreciate this.

 

http://tremor.quakedev.com/cleanq3.html

 

There is also a Quake 3 SDL port.

 

http://mitglied.lycos.de/Q3Coderz/quake3sdl/

 

Also on topic, I've found a couple modded Quake 1 engines.

 

http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/ - The most active

http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/ - Inactive but popular

http://tremor.quakedev.com/tremor.html - Again, active

 

Tremor doesn't include much info on their website, so I don't know if it is as feature rich. My knock against Dark Places is that they don't offer improved models and textures it would appear.

 

Tenebrae is inactive.

 

Anyone play any of these? Which would you recommend?

[alanschu]

I haven't had problems with an ATI driver for a long time, which is why I'm not bothered by them.

 

I'm also not concerned with the multi GPU platform, since I cannot afford it, nor do I feel it is necessary.

 

I haven't been keeping up on things, as my Radeon 9800 Pro still serves me just fine. At the time the Radeon 9600 series was far and away the best bang for your buck.

 

 

A quick check though, and I notice that the Crossfire X850XT can beat two SLI 7800 GTX chips in Half-Life 2.

 

Based on the benchmarks at Tom's Hardware it still looks like ATI = DX9 (or at least Half-Life 2) and nVidia = OpenGL. In both cases, performances are still plenty fast enough.

 

The most intriguing thing about the Crossfire that I noticed is that it doesn't require identical cards.

 

EDIT: Interesting that it's better to play Half-Life 2 with 1 card rather than SLI (!)

Edited September 27, 2005 by alanschu

[EnderAndrew]

http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/revie...nVybF9wYWdlPTEw

 

Here are benchmarks, and a SINGLE 7800 beats two x850s in Crossfire mode in Half Life 2, a game designed and optimized for ATI. When ATI's best cards, two of them in fact, can't beat a single NVidia card in a game optimized for ATI, then that's sad.

 

And instead of buying two x850s and spending like $1200, plus a new $200 Crossfire motherboard, you could just buy a $100 SLI motherboard, and two 6800's at $200 a pop and get the same performance.

 

$1400 cost from ATI. $500 from NVidia. Same performance in an ATI-centric game.

 

That's DirectX which ATI is supposed to own. In OpenGL games like Doom3, ATI is flat out humiliated.

 

Again, I can't think of a single major release where ATI hasn't had major driver problems. Doom 3, Half Life 2, Vampire: Bloodlines and KOTOR:2 all immediately come to mind where ATI had major issues.

Edited September 27, 2005 by EnderAndrew

[alanschu]

So which site is more accurate?

 

 

EDIT: And thanks for ripping on my purchasing decisions.....

Edited September 27, 2005 by alanschu

[alanschu]

Another analysis of HL2 performance:

 

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2541&p=5

[EnderAndrew]

I find it really odd that the 7800 GTX can get 100 FPS with 4xAA and 16xAF with one card, but with Tom's Hardware running them in SLI, two of them together only get 58.

 

How do you drop from 100 to 58 FPS by going from one GPU to two GPU's?

 

So let's go to a third source.

 

http://images.planetamd64.com/athildja/Lea...I/HL2%20SLI.png

 

In this Half Life 2 benchmark, they try a single 7800 GTX versus a 7800 GTX in SLI.

 

The single card gets 94 FPS average (mind you this is at 1600x1200 and at the lower resolutions like the other benchmarks were using, I think the 100 or higher FPS is pretty feasible) and the SLI setup gets 114 on average.

 

This seems right in line with the benchmark I posted earlier, and it makes Tom's Hardware's benchmark look rather unusual.

 

Edit: Check this!

 

 

Seems that ATI has a real big problem with AA.

Edited September 27, 2005 by EnderAndrew

[Guest Fishboot]

Well, ATI was cleaning up pretty well during that 9500/9700/9600/9800 generation, and Nvidia came back. I'm not going to sharpen the fanboy spurs and ride off on either horse. Really, graphics technology is almost the ideal consumer market, since it's so easy to research, so brand loyalty isn't even a factor. If Matrox coughs out a card that murders ATI and Nvidia on benches by God I'll go buy one.

 

How do you drop from 100 to 58 FPS by going from one GPU to two GPU's?

 

Bad overhead on the MB SLI?

 

 

 

IMO the whole SLI/Crossfire thing feels like a hot-rodder fad. The upgradeability argument is offset in a few obvious ways (loss of purchase freedom, loss of maneuverability, possibility of odd price drops, a bigger power supply, questionable bang for buck, etc) and if the fad oes away the driver support will probably get thin and the parallelization advantage will get even thinner.

Edited September 27, 2005 by Fishboot

[Yst]

ATI's first "gaming" chip, the Rage128, was specifically optimized for Quake 2.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I think it's fair to consider the (1996) Rage a gaming chip for its own pre-voodoo moment in history, and it was billed as a 3D accelerator, which was a perfectly reasonable title for it at the time and was accurate in practice, insofar as it did provide some limited support for hardware acceleration of, for example, Mechwarrior 2. At any rate, it was no worse than the NV1 or Virge (which, was my own first 3D card) among pre-3DFX attempts at gaming chips, even if the Verite did ultimately outclassed it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I was actually referring to the Rage128, which came out in the 1998/1999 area.

 

I know. And I was disagreeing that it was ATI's first gaming chip, as you described it, my point being that even the original Rage3D was a chip aimed at a gaming audience interested in 3D acceleration, back in 1996, and actually did accelerate MW2 in hardware using a Rage-optimised edition of the game. I recall ATI ran a marketing campaign directed towards gamers for the Rage, which included PCGamer ads for the Rage illustrating the effects of anti-aliasing and their collaboration on the custom edition of MW2.