There is no benefit to any of the dupe colours

Actually they're quite important in one particular of the quake engine, and further down the post you even mention it! They make the shirts/pants system work, the colours that are duplicated appear on different rows, and you'd need to replace the row based gradient system with something much more complicated to eliminate the duplicates and still have the same visual on the players. 

 

I also checked the colormap.lmp for duplicate color columns. If my quick Python script is not wrong, the eleven identical non-fullbright color pairs have identical columns between them, but obviously colors 76 and 247 cannot have the same columns because the latter is fullbright. There are no other identical column groups in the file.

As I understand it, only software-rendered Quake engines use the colormap. 

Not really. It would not have been hard to slightly vary those dupes up and as a result get a slightly smoother colormap plus no ambivalence when repalettising.

Here is a tweak I just did which should not have dupes (unless if fucked up slightly, which would not matter, the point stays the same.)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/post/func_msg/palettetweak.png

I converted the palette to 18 bit colour before doing the edits, since that is what VGA mode 13h could output afaik. (albeit stretched to full 24 bit space in this case) 

Not really. It would not have been hard to slightly vary those dupes up and as a result get a slightly smoother colormap plus no ambivalence when repalettising.

But you end up either changing the colours in an un-noticable way, in which case why bother - or you change them in a noticeable way and people would notice. I'm not convinced that making the palette a bijection has ever been on the mind of any designer.

Here is a tweak I just did which should not have dupes (unless if fucked up slightly, which would not matter, the point stays the same.)

I rest my case... 

The differences are minimal, but will in certain cases make a difference in the colormap, esp on lighter gamma settings.

What I am saying is that whoever made the palettes, likely Adrian and/Kevin, did not think too much about the technical side of things, so some dupes happened.

Worse than any of the dups is the horrible blue ramp though :P 

http://www.gog.com/game/quake_the_offering

As far as I can tell, they added Quake to their games list very recently. It's listed as Windows only. I wonder if they could add info source ports for other platforms there somewhere.

They will also stream the game on their Twitch channel in an hour or so.

http://www.twitch.tv/gogcom

And if you wonder who these people are, here's their answer.

http://www.gog.com/support/website_help/what_is_gog_com 

Actually some thoughtful person has written a review of Quake for them and mentioned Quakespasm and Quaddicted already. 

Does this have the soundtrack in some form? 

It doesn't clearly say that it has the soundtrack, even though it's mentioned in the full description. I will ask about this during the stream and report back. 

Yep, reportedly.

Makes me wonder if it's DOS Quake with the CD ISO mounted in DOSBox, but then one of the GOG comments mentioned seeing a 3dfx logo on startup, which ... really? Huh. I'll probably eventually grab it to check out the setup if no one else here beats me to it. 

http://www.gog.com/forum/quake_the_offering/music 

though that thread does not state in which form the OSTs are delivered. If it is an ISO (which would be neat) or MP3s/OGGs. 

Screenshots are GLQuake (or a fork that stayed very close to it), yuck. Size suggests music rips, <400 MB for Quake and the MPs can't be lossless music.

I wish they had contacted the community about choosing a proper engine. Quakespasm with some user-friendliness changes would have been perfect I would think.

Right *now* is the time for a great person to create a thread in their forums detailing the process to install QS or another modern engine that is not Darkplaces. Early threads win the popularity contest.

[Insert ranting about "source port" and "Trent Reznor's soundtrack" here] 

Yeah there are some threads about that already going on their forums, so the topic is out there.

Is your last thing referring to that open sore of a thread on the Steam forums? That guy is something else. Too bad people keep bumping that thread. 

Oh I forgot to mention... there's an id developer that posts in the "Early FPS" thread on Something Awful every now and then. He's quite aware of the mess on Steam and talks wishfully about doing something with QuakeSpasm but it's not a project that gets attention/resources. It's interesting to see they've done something a little different with GOG (and also that they've gone to the trouble of making a GOG release), so maybe they'll also clean up the Steam release a bit?

Random other thing: he mentioned a way to forcibly download a "Windows only" Steam game on OS X or Linux, if you need to get the data files. First you need SteamCMD from https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD

(And also I think you need a "regular" Steam installation in place, maybe?)

Then run it like this:

./steamcmd.sh +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows +login (user) (pass) +app_update (appid) +quit

Substitute in your username and password, and the app ID of the game. Quake's app ID is 2310. I just now tried it out on OS X and yup it downloaded all the Quake files (under ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/Quake ). 

Haha GOG just changed their Quake download so that the DOS version mounts a CD for the soundtrack music, and the Windows version is SOL. 

AHMED SAMI 

AHMED SAMI 

AHMED SAMI 

 

CHRISTIAN ZIGGURANT GRAWERT 

CHRISTIAN ZIGGURANT GRAWERT 

CHRISTIAN ZIGGURANT GRAWERT 

Any of you at PAX this year?