Rubicon 2 style AD episode is my wet dream 

That would be rather lovely. :) 

I'm glad we have both to choose from. I tend to learn toward AD but I do enjoy Quoth. I have only made one map for each and I have to say the entity state system for AD and the DelaySpawn spawn flags for Quoth gives mappers so many more options with encounters that you could really simulate the LFD gameplay Warren is talking about. 

I'm glad we have both to choose from. I tend to learn toward AD but I do enjoy Quoth. I have only made one map for each and I have to say the entity state system for AD and the DelaySpawn spawn flags for Quoth gives mappers so many more options with encounters that you could really simulate the LFD gameplay Warren is talking about. 

I'd really like to see this happen as well. Ever since The Forgotten Sepulcher I'm always trying to play the latest releases (and older) with these effects. Would be nice to just have a toggle option in menu instead of moving files to the AD folder and risk breaking stuff lol

Hopefully if this DOES become a thing they include all the cool effects (armor, items etc) borrowed from the AD mod.

Noticed there's not many Quakespasm videos (let alone spike) on YouTube so I recorded some coop gameplay yesterday with a friend playing QS spiked https://youtu.be/hxcbEliwpxQ 

ID1 for life.

I'd like to see more rule 34 ranger art.

Seriously though, just more maps is fine, and 2017 was already great for that. 

Posted by Baker [65.60.237.219] on 2018/03/02 11:27:11
Mark V added a ground-breaking mouse driven menu http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61375&start=1835

Whether or not daft people notice today, it is going to have a major long term impact. I want to mention this first because user-interface matters. People don't like a shitty user-interface and frankly that is what Quake has offered and it sucks bollocks (did I get the UK slang right?)

Quake is not only a model community -- it is more than that. We dream. We fight. We try to give our visions, our hopes and aspirations.

We have heroes (sock, SleepWalker, Spirit) and anti-heroes (onetruepurple not to single him out -- I may well belong in such a group) and they all make valuable contributions.

But at the same time, Quake has a number of stodgy cruft-users and Steam me-too! newbies who don't know their arse from a hole in the ground.

So here is the question:

Is what Quake offers today completely satisfactory to you? Or do you demand more?

But I'm not going to kid around. Let's go full "balls out" here because if you man up, there is just no other way to do this ...

Real question: Am I alone in wanting Quake to be more than it is today?

To hell with it, let's see where this conversion goes!!! 

Not Sure If You're Talking About Engine Stuff Or Whatever.
#1 posted by Shambler [88.111.222.13] on 2018/03/02 12:04:02 spam
But mostly I am very satisfied with what Quake offers me today.

The combination of the enhancements offered by current engines and mods like AD, along with generally really nice, appropriate usage of those features by mappers, executed in a wide variety of maps that still give a good Quakey experience.....I think is great. There's not much I think should be added, except more of the same, and the continuation of a very gradual introduction of minor graphical / design enhancements.

There's a few things I would personally like to see, I'm happy for AD to become a main standard for Quake+++, as long as people remember it's a choice, and vanilla or other mods like Rubicon, Quoth etc are still great to map for. I'd like to see some of the older / less used mod stuff added to AD, specifically Floyds, re-textured Zer Mega Enforcers and Nemesats, the BloodCube, also the Nehahra railgun, all of which I think offer really cool gameplay. Graphically, better fluids would be the next step I think, maybe some subtle surface movement, better textures, even a slight reflectiveness - again the key is subtlety.

Set-up-wise I was going to suggest easier use of the -game malarkey rather than editing shortcuts, but then I realised that works fine changing dir in engine in Quakespasm, so that's fine.

In short, I don't want much more - apart from MOAR MAPS :) 

#2 posted by onetruepurple [178.235.146.159] on 2018/03/02 12:36:25 spam
Not 100% sure if this thread is strictly for user experience ideas, or holistically about Quake, but I have a certain Strong Opinion™ that I was meant to post in the "Quake in 2018" thread but it's probably too late to revive that...

The AI in Quake, and pathfinding specifically, is shit.

I mean, we all know it, but it needs to change from "it's shit, but it's ok" to "it's shit, and it's not ok". It's not completely satisfactory (as per the thread title) that even in 2018, Quake gameplay can be lamely cheesed.

Here's an example from Bal's (otherwise 100% excellent) 1024³ map: it's not immediately visible on that shot but the wall can simply be walked around. In a proper scenario, the Fiends would just find their way around the wall and rip me to shreds, but the Fiends wouldn't, since they just follow the one straight line the QC is telling them to follow at all costs.

This will be an unpopular opinion, but as Quake is slowly re-gaining popularity, we as mappers and modders MUST up our game on this end. I find it slightly embarrassing to recommend all the amazing new maps to newcomers and have them encounter idiotic, prehistoric AI.

It's especially embarrassing since such systems already exist as .qc!!

1. sock implemented an extremely robust pathing system in the In the Shadows mod that was then discontinued in Arcane Dimensions.

2. c0burn has another system, based on FBX waypoints (I think?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iooijPc7dbY&

3. Numerous older solutions from the inside3d times.

Ten, and even five years ago posts like these would be met with total bollocks like "who cares about smart monsters, I just shoot them :)", maybe it's about time everybody realised that smarter enemies make for a better QUAKE experience. 

 

Mark V added a ground-breaking mouse driven menu [...].
Whether or not daft people notice today, it is going to have a major long term impact. I want to mention this first because user-interface matters.

Wrong. There were mouse-driven GUIs for Quake engines before, and most of them never inspired other engines to follow suit. Even Makaqu has a mouse-driven GUI with a minimalistic approach, which uses the mouse wheel and buttons instead of a pointer and is therefore faster in most situations when we get used to it.

Another usability improvement implemented in Makaqu to make menu navigation faster is that the same command used to open a menu can also be used to close it. Press F8 to open the keys menu, and press F8 again to close it. No more pressing Esc multiple times to get back to the game. Has this ever been implemented in another engine? No.

When it comes to trends in engine coding, user interface doesn't matter. Technology matters. Engine coders enjoys to implement challenging technology, and this is why we've got multiple engines with CSQC and MenuQC support, which requires users to learn programming in order to modify the menus.
Meanwhile, the Makaqu engine has menus that are completely customizable through just 2 (menu_keys_clear, menu_keys_addcmd) or 3 (menu_clearmaps, menu_addepisode, menu_addmap) console commands, which any braindead user could do in a simple autoexec.cfg file. For over ten years, this never inspired anyone else to follow a similar approach to Quake UI customization.

Usability generally favors minimalism, but it's hard to not get ambitious when doing engine coding. Unambitious approaches doesn't sell.

Anyway, I've never implemented a maplist command and some of the other usability improvements that other engines have. I've stopped implementing usability improvements after noticing that most people don't care about them.

When usability is good, people don't notice it. And there's no demand for what goes unnoticed. This is why Quake engine usability tends to follow a reactive design-by-committee approach, fixing issues while ignoring improvements.

Real question: Am I alone in wanting Quake to be more than it is today?

You're not alone, but it's difficult to come up with a consensus about what "more" means. Most of what the community at large agrees upon seems to have been done already. Further efforts rarely achieve consensus and are most often considered to detract from what the authentic experience should be. Which is why I don't even try to promote Retroquad as a Quake engine anymore, and instead am developing it towards indie game development. Or maybe I'm just drowning in my own negativity, who knows. 

In Quake you can enter a room, shit yourself, and back out of the room to re-evaluate your strategy in the knowledge that a big conga line of monsters is not going to just perfectly chase you down all through the map.

Any enhanced pathfinding AI needs to appreciate that this sort of soft "tethering" of monsters to an area may be just a quirk of crap pathfinding at the moment, but monster area-limiting would certainly need to be a feature available to the designer in any future AI rewrite. But it can't be rigid, because you'd still want to be able to "pull" a monster to anywhere you want as well. 

He's spot on. AI needs a refresh. I'm sure there's some way it could be offloaded to the compiling stage like Q3A. So the mapper adds some entities to help with dumb monster behavior and then an external solution takes that data and bakes it into the map. Engines devs would then have the option of supporting the new AI feature or not.

Would this be feasible?

I appreciate the convenience of a mouse driven menu but frankly I have a high DPI mouse that always runs too fast in these types of UI. It's certainly welcome and I am all for making things more usable for noobs.

I think it's important to remember that communities have to grow to succeed in the long run. We want Quake as appealing and accessible as ever. I still think it's possible to create a set of standard that can be voted/agreed upon and then collaborated on by the brightest minds in our coding community. 

So the mapper adds some entities to help with dumb monster behavior and then an external solution takes that data and bakes it into the map.

Q3 looks at the connectivity of the BSP leaves to generate the AAS graph right? Something like that sounds like a possible approach, rather than the designer having to add loads of nodes everywhere.

Of course, once you have perfect pathfinding, it's then up to the designer/modder to write a load of QC code to do all the extra AI logic that stops the whole level playing out like a Benny Hill sketch. 

Honestly, advanced AI belongs to "what do you want to see in a mod", not "what do you want to see in Quake". AD is the perfect candidate to such a thing, and it already has tethered waypoints AFAIK. 

I think my breadcrumb solution is reasonably "ok"... it would mean if you were properly keen on running away you should still be able to do so.

the idea would be:

every 5 seconds or so the player spawns a short lived invisible entity (breadcrumb), if the monster can't see the player, it searches for that breadcrumb, and travels to its location if the breadcrumb has line of sight to the player.

If the breadcrumb doesn't have line of sight, the monster just continues on its usual dumb pathfinding.

this way the monster is likely to get an extra corner or so of pathfinding before losing the player 

Something along those lines could work. Not an invisible entity, but just a .vector field (self.enemyorigin?) containing the location where the player was last seen by the monster.

Since the sight line is a straight line, and monsters only navigate properly across straight lines, this should fit their logic.

Actually, this should be dumb easy. I'll take a look at the QC code now. 

Hmm, that would require a dummy entity anyway, as movetogoal is implemented engine-side. 

calls em "player trails" 

I'd love to see certain enemies use others as meatshields... chunkier enemies up front and center while the smaller ones try and flank the player

I'd also love to see ogres figure out how to lob grenades over other enemies heads at the player 

rather than the designer having to add loads of nodes everywhere.

I'd rather have control over it though - as no matter how good the implementation is there will be issues. 

what I'd like to see would be engines to FINALLY start supporting tracebox, so that this stuff can actually be implemented...
without that, good luck with this ai stuff... you'll need it...

but yeah, without this being some map-specific thing, you're going to drastically change the balance of various maps. 

Breadcrumbs is the only AI "enhancement" that should be considered.

The direct-path, omniscient AI is actually quite good and varied due to the way Quake handles AI states.

AI in Quake is handled on a per frame basis, allowing perfect coupling of the animation with the movement and movements to match the model. This prevents monsters feeling too floaty when walking. The simplistic AI lets the player be smarter, gives smart players a way to control monsters and make in-fights, and gives some monsters character. I always love it wgen shamblers wander off for a bit becahse they don't see me.

Getting caught on lips is bad though. 

Reading the DLL rant made me lose a few IQ points.

Something I'd like to see is an engine which focuses on a modern tool-chain with modern formats. No one is considering Quake engines for bigger TC projects because every project also seems to aim for compatibility and misrepresents itself and its capabilities.

When you look for ways to get started for mapping/modelling for modern Quake engines you still mostly get results for .MDL and Quake 1 BSP creation. I highly doubt most people (unless they are trying to cash in on the whole 90s FPS revival...) would want to work with their limitations. Most noobs stop when they realize that you can't crouch due to hull size limits. I GUESS EVERYONE JUST WANTS TO MAKE SIMPLE QUAKE MODS.

Engines just seem to do a little too much overall with their builtin HUDs, menus and scoreboards. If they don't support CSQC then mods have a harder time customizing the look and feel. Overall all the advanced engines are bloated hogs with an identity crisis.

Thoughts on currently relevant engines:
QuakeSpasm
To me was always a solid GL engine that just did NetQuake stuff well. I'd never consider it for development. Just for playing old NetQuake mods. Extending it to do more complex things might harm it in the long run, because it'll just be another FTE/Darkplaces.

Darkplaces
While it somewhat supports CSQC and somewhat supports Quake 3's material/shader system, doesn't do any of it well. It's only half QuakeWorld compatible as well. So as a developer I've run into a few problems.

FTE
Does everything and _most_ of it works. Sadly the engine just does way too much. 16 year old code sticks out and things regress more often, because it's all cobbled together in one giant binary, I often have run into bugs/features that hadn't been tested recently or at all. It's like the emacs of Quake engines. But probably more reliable than any GNU project...

ezQuake
Does anyone even consider this for development? I guess if you run a custom QW server you use it to test because there's this invisible community of QW players who seem to use it. I don't know anyone personally who does, but a bunch that have focus on retaining compat with those clients because half their player-base uses it.

Overall, all of the above aim to be Quake 1 compatible. Those who care about Quake and don't need obnoxious high-res texture-packs just usually stick with QuakeSpasm. Why? Because it focuses on one thing well. Technically, FTE is the most complex engine but it has less of an adoption than say Darkplaces because it's mostly competing with ezQuake in the QuakeWorld space. That's because everyone has a hard-time at comprehending what it actually is. The name suggests it's just another ezQuake alternative. That's where it's kinda stuck.

I don't follow QuakeSpasms development (I don't even use it), but I hope that those who maintain it know what they are doing. Don't give in to requests of adding support for non Quake file formats and conventions. Just stick to being a good NetQuake client that offers the feel of the original. Otherwise you're just a few inches away of supporting rtlights and giving little kids the keys to using their Rygel pk3s. It'll be like Darkplaces but with less features.

Having been busy in recent years, I just occasionally take note of what's happening in the engine world. So what I might be talking about is not relevant anymore. 

Does support colored lights.

I can agree on FTE. Not really sure where it fits in, no offense to Spike or anything.