You could mix it. Hand crafted encounters with director filled areas between set pieces ... 

I think it's weird now because AD is the defacto version of Quake we play ... but that means you can't run any other mods alongside it. Hmm.... 

I think it's weird now because AD is the defacto version of Quake we play'

No, it's just a mod like any other. 

Quoth is still my Quake mod of choice. AD has tried too hard to harmonise (for lack of a better term) Quake's thematic in a fantasy direction, and in doing so has lost what I always really loved about Quake, which is the thematic dissonance. Easy example: I like seeing sci-fi health boxes in a medieval castle.

I have played some AD and it's very well made, but to me it will never be Quake, because unlike Quoth it changed Quake rather than simply adding to it.

Anyway, back on topic, Warren I have also dreamed of a Quake/L4D mashup for a long time. I envisage the director choosing between some pre-crafted encounters (and scaling them) in response to the players actions. You would also need to add a few new enemies, such as fast grunts with melee weapons and mini-bosses that have to be attacked from multple directions, etc. 

Was never meant as a replacement or even an upgrade. AD is it’s own thing, there will still be new maps for quoth and other mods.
AD is definitely the most polished mod though, I’m proud to have been a part of the team 

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