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Quake 2018: How Maps And Engines Are Better Than Ever.
Considering the following:

1. We're getting more map releases than we've been getting in nearly 20 years, and they're all of decent quality at the very least, and superb (that which are rivaling the undisputable classics in quality) at most.

And...

2. In 2008, for every 5 demos for a map:
- 2 would be Fitz 0.85,
- 1 would be aguirRe's AGLquake,
- 1 would be DarkPlaces,
- 1 would be JoeQuake or some other QW engine (???).

Each and all of those with their own protocols and idiosyncracies.

These days almost everybody uses Quakespasm - an actively maintained and cross-platform engine - as a standard.

Conclusion:

After a slump in the early 2010's, Quake is finally doing better than ever, with the player and mapper base growing and the game itself slowly creeping back into mainstream attention.

Discuss... or not!!
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Kinn You Might Be Rright. 
But even if so, I don't think untraceable anons should be making the similarly toned accusations. At least if there is disagreement you can be identified to answer to. 
 
exactly why i didn't post my folio, thanks for proving me right dipshits. typical forum troll bs. 
And The Same Applies To You Echoes. 
 
 
Yeah, further discussion is counterproductive.
Just make your models for FTE with md3 or iqm.
Also Chillo already remade all Quake monsters, we have few shamblers and grunts from other artists too.

exactly why i didn't post my folio

Well if you have top notch portfolio, it will defend itself.
If you can't pull off better models than what we have (from Chillo etc.) then it's a waste of time imo. 
Kinn's Post Deleted At His Own Request. 
 
Woo, Late To The Party 
So quakespasm has had a slow gradual creep toward more detail, thankfully it's been handled fairly well so far.

My concern regarding adding x new model format to QS would be modellers bringing models that are way over-the-top in level of detail.

The concern is that this would make the pixel density of the map textures look stupid.

For maps to be consistent with the models, we would need to use high def textures and would need to start including environmental assets in our maps. It could quite easily get out of hand.

Some kind of poly-count restriction is still needed IMO. Alternatively a workflow / tools that can be leveraged better to bring modellers in. 
Quake Engines 
When I first came back to Quake around the time I released Q-Deck I was still using DirectQ. I loved that engine. I moved over to Fitz and Mark_V sometime after when I started getting errors loading my maps, I started seeing engine limitations.

Now I pretty much have transitioned to Quakespasm. It's feature set has matched many of the things I enjoyed in Mark_V (the weapon view model being large like winquake, engine speed, extra menu features etc)
QS has surpassed it though as it has added a cool low res pixel looking mode with r_scale, decent controller support and Mark_V seems to take about 30 seconds to boot up whereas QS is instant.

I'm still waiting on good splitscreen support though, that's definitely the holy grail for engines. I know FTE has it but that engine doesn't have the ease of use of MarkV OR QS. 
@echos 
Your fiend is top quality! That video just freaked me out!!

Ok, but honestly, there is no quake 1 engine that can handle or do it justice; I mean in a real in-game scenario. Multiple enemies, rockets, particles, physics etc...

Seriously, if iD Software wants to make a singleplayer campaign for QuakeChampions, they should def give you a call. Or better yet, call them.
It's not that your work isnt great, it's just that,
it doesnt fit quake1. Thats like trying to remake minecraft with 24bit textures and curved surfaces.

I hope you find someone to help you remake quake in the unreal engine or qchamp's (where it belongs) I'd love to see that fiend in a dark alleyway :) 
Edit: 
Well, that wasnt your model i assume. oh well. 
@R00k 
He got ip-banned from posting after getting lynched by the terrafusion crowd, so don't expect a response from him here.

You can find him on irc if you need him. 
If You Mean Echoes. 
He hasn't been ip-banned from here at all.

I edited two anon posts that were abusing him, edited Kinn's post on request as it was quite inflammatory, and also edited another abusive post from echoes under another name. This is just to 1. stop anon trolling, and 2. keep the discussion civilised.

I haven't been following the discussion itself. 
Okay Apparently Marking As Spam Blocks IP. 
So unmarking echoes inflammatory response under "FU" alias, so hopefully the ban is reversed?? 
 
Oh yeah, IPs are blocked if you flag spam unless the post is by a registered user. This is for the days when we only used it for true spam by spammers and not questionable posts from community people. I guess I need to separate that out at some point. In the short term you could register an account to get around it. 
 
And unflagging the post would clear the IP block , correct. 
Not Getting Banned If You Spam Shite. 
Sounds pretty reasonable to require someone to have an account for that little perk. Currently I don’t think there’s any advantage in having an account beyond looking more legit. 
... 
the 2 posting crap at me were clearly Kinn and/or khreathor, if you want to find out just check ip logs. was it an honest mistake i got banned? shambler was siding with kinn that i'm some kind of liar or don't know anything. why were the other posts edited and only mine was marked as spam? why not edit all posts, or mark all as spam? the one specific way that results in me banned and not the others was taken, and it took more effort to do it that way.

@rook, it's not my model but i like it too. i was just trying to show what's possible and that there are others like me who want to ruin quake by putting nice looking things in it. i have already put my models into fte, dp, and ue4, they look very similar in all three. ue4 is better in some ways, but it's mostly due to how much easier it is to make things for that engine. it's pretty much bare-metal here, coding GLSL shaders by hand for example instead of a node based shader editor w/ drag/drop UI. things could be better and there's lots of room for improvements. Shader editors, PBR materials, blendshapes, lots of things that would make life easier or improve the looks.

for the little babies who got mad at me for saying i didn't like that bright picture of quake: i think you're a llama if you play quake on fullbright mode with no shadows in it, we would consider that cheating back in the day.

it's right up there with wearing all-black skins to hide in the shadows so nobody sees you in MP. also it looks like crap with no shadows, the shadows are meant to be seen.

i prefer to expand limits to make quake better but if your idea is to reduce limits, i don't think you should do that at the engine level, why not just make a reduced limit mod and ask mappers to target it.

one of you suggested a poly-count restriction on the engine to prevent new things. great idea if you apply it to the mappers too and not just the modellers.

it would mean saying goodbye to things like "Arcane Dimensions" !!! 
Echoes 
Sorry for the confusion. I'll try to be clearer: There is currently no edit option for moderation, only "Mark as spam". I have used the terms interchangeably, but it's only one action - "Marking as spam" is the only censorship option we have.

In this event:

Two anon posts abusing you were marked as spam.
Kinn's post was marked as spam on his request.
Your anon (i.e. posting as a different unregistered name "FU") was marked as spam as it's too close to anon abuse.

I had completely forgotten that this also results in an ip ban which was not the intention at all. As per discord:

[10:00] onetruepurple: so by marking an echos post as spam, you did in fact IP ban him
[10:02] Shambler: does it?
[10:02] Shambler: oh
[10:02] Shambler: well
[10:02] Shambler: ffs
[10:02] Shambler: that needs fixed
[10:23] onetruepurple: ggwp not figuring it out after years


Hope that's clearer. The standard I'm trying to stick to is that anons do not get to post abusive / provocative / trolling message because they are not accountable and cannot be consistently answered to (unlike registered users, e.g. if you took offence to Kinn's post you can answer directly to Kinn). Unregistered users sticking with a consistent username have more leeway of course. 
 
players don't remember models or formats, they remember maps. 
 
the 2 posting crap at me were clearly Kinn and/or khreathor, if you want to find out just check ip logs.

Pls... I'm not a 13yo small dick troll, who has to hide behind anonymity to insult people... I can do that while being logged-in :D

one of you suggested a poly-count restriction on the engine to prevent new things. great idea if you apply it to the mappers too and not just the modellers.

Yeah but maps still keep retro look, they are just getting bigger (in most cases). Their "poly" density feels right for retro stuff.
It won't happen with models. You'll build 50k tris model, put 2k texture on it, but entity size in game will stay the same. It will look off imo, with weird pixel and polygon density. Same thing happens when you put 4k textures on a low poly level, it doesn't feel right.

i prefer to expand limits to make quake better

We can expand engines like FTE and keep QS lightweight for stuff more close to vanilla. I don't see any problems here, especially when FTE is good for TC mods.
Tbh best option would be porting Quake to Unreal4 and then you have all eye candy stuff and all modern tools available.

i think without question the best model format would be either FBX or collada

COLLADA is an intermediate XML format which gives big ASCII files and you have to parse it to get data, you can't just load it like a binary file.

FBX has binary format, but there is a problem with license when you are using it in open source projects. That's why Blender has some bastardized FBX importer/exporter which can't handle half of the features. 
Kreathor 
I think he's whole shtick was "Geez guys why isn't it possible yet to make something that looks like UE4 in a Quake source port? Pfffttt" - referring not only to characters, but environment as well. Realtime radiosity lighting, raytracing blah blah blah.

The answer of course, is the same answer every time this comes up, which is "Use an engine that's designed to do all that modern stuff, like UE4, but you'll probably have to wait for Unreal Engine 5 for the realtime raytracing stuff, I don't think 4 does that yet." 
@khreathor 
I suggested the poly count restriction. Something like md2 format. The idea being to gradually increase the quality level so that the models keep up with the other things that the engine is capable of, without being over the top of course. What other quality of life stuff could other model formats bring us?

So a more philosophical question then... Is it better to have the tools and limit yourself?, or is it better to have the tools limit you? Because I can see both arguments and I don't know if there is a right answer.

I made a thing because I'm curious.
https://www.strawpoll.me/16504178 
 
I support the notion of having the tools but the mapper limiting himself/herself.

Maybe the tools could have "soft" limits, though, meaning that they have the option of warning the user when some limits are exceeded but still having support for higher/unlimited limits.

That way users don't need to be stifled but still be informed when they're about to cross the line. 
What Kinn Said... 
The standard answer to "I'm making my own game and I want a custom Quake engine that has all of these features that $OTHER_ENGINE has" is: "why don't you just use $OTHER_ENGINE instead"? - It'll save yourself and others a lot of pain and suffering.

What's sometimes difficult to get people to understand is that the cost of a new feature is not just the time to initially implement it.

As well as coding it up, testing it, debugging it, integrating it, and (optionally) documenting it, you also need to maintain it and ensure that it co-exists peacefully with any other new features that might also be implemented in future.

This increases complexity on an exponential scale, and it's well-enough known that people can have difficulty fully appreciating how quickly exponential scales explode.

Take Nehahra as an example, because it's a good one. Few engines support Nehahra, and the reason why is that it's a pain to integrate with other engine features that have since become standard.

To be more specific take Nehahra fog. Nehahra uses a different fog algorithm to what is now standard, and while that's a simple-seeming case, what it actually means is that anything you do that touches or interacts with the fog code now has to be tested twice. And because virtually everything does that, a simple feature has effectively doubled part of your workload.

Now implement Q3A-style fog volumes and watch your workload triple, as well as being in a position where you have 3 different fog systems and you need to sort out how they interact with each other.

That's why when people say stuff like "Can I have features X, Y and Z, Source and Unreal have them" the appropriate answer is "well go use Source or Unreal then". 
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