Absolutely. It's a good release. It's not perfect but, hell, it has put Quake in the spotlight temporarily. That can only be a good thing.

I do wish the MP support wasn't so barebones. I know it's NQ but they could have at least allowed custom maps, dedicated servers, some kind of matchplay (not full-blown KTX/KTPro but _something_ other than straight DM).

The engine definitely has some bugs and differences from Q1. I've finished 95% of the content in Nightmare and I've seen a few glitches in my 28 hours (lol, I have a problem) of playtime; scrags phasing through walls, lifts and doors causing monsters to glitch through geometry and pop through walls, etc. For the most part it's been great though, and the little visual touches (relit maps, clever and judicious use of dynamic lights/shadows) are really nice without detracting from the experience.

I played the bots for a few minutes just to cheese the LG discharge achievement (I did it legitimately in DM first but it didn't unlock) and the bots seem decent. Haven't done a side-by-side comparison to fbca or frogbot but they're certainly good enough for a quick match if you don't want to put up with the slightly weird-feeling prediction code in MP.

In general, I have very few complaints about this release. Yeah, it's not the Quake engine we're all used to, but they've got Kex behaving really, _really_ closely to it. Performance seems good out of the box, custom SP content compatibility is impressive considering they basically started from scratch, and the feature set is great for casuals and people who haven't touched Quake in years, if ever.

It doesn't make existing source ports obsolete - if anything it makes them more important. It doesn't replace QuakeWorld. It's not the be-all and end-all of Quake. It's just a new facet, a shiny toy for the community to play with, and that's fine.

Considering I essentially got it for "free" since I already had Quake on Steam, I'd say this is an example of id and Bethesda actually getting something right. That, if nothing else, is cause for celebration. 

/facepalm

In what world does this situation require "damage control"? 

well, considering that we're living in a world where bethesda wants you to make a fucking bethnet account and sign a dozen dense anti-consumer eulas to play netquake(!) matches... in nightdive's janky, closed source, windows-only engine with borked movement that caps the framerate at 60fps instead of 72 for some reason... but it's portable, so that means it's automatically okay i guess.

>It's not the be-all and end-all of Quake
most normies are going to be introduced to quake with this version for however long it's sold (because setting up quakespasm is hawd!!) so... then again, it's a nightdive remaster, so they'll probably abandon it entirely in a year from now ;) 

I'm still trundling through it on the Switch at a rate of a few maps per day, currently just over halfway through e3.

Yes, there are a handful of bugs and performance regressions that weren't in the original game. Yes, if I had source code (and a Switch devkit) I could go in and fix them. Hell, even if there weren't bugs, there's still stuff I'd have done different. And it'll never replace my preferred source port on the PC.

You know what, though? I don't give a bollocks. It's Quake on the Switch and it's an absolute blast. The developers have totally NAILED the controls; it'll never beat keyboard and mouse, but for a controller setup it's as good as can be and feels very natural. It's a Switch so I can carry it around with me, pull it out for a quick scoot through a map or two if I have time that needs killing, it's just the perfect match of pick-up-and-play gaming simplicity with the platform best suited to it. 

Personally, I don't understand why they had to break compatibility with mods by introducing new code. Maybe it was easier to adjust the game to their engine instead of doing it the other way, but now you can't just simply play Kex-optimized paks outside of the official port. I dunno how it is vice versa, though. They will want to push their own addon distribution system, I guess. 

VkQuake is starting to push some updates to allow for compatibility with the new content. It only seems a matter of time before this is a fixed problem for everyone. 

The main constraints here seem to be: BSP2 (not sure if the new engine supports it) and licensing (mods using e.g. Hexen 2 assets would need legal clearance from the owners of those assets). I don't think it's a code compatibility thing at all.

Meanwhile, the vkQuake changes seem to work fine, and the new content now plays clean, at least so far as running through a small handful of maps is concerned. It's obviously going to be necessary to grab the localized strings as well.

Ideally vkQuake could now become a sample implementation of the required sourceport changes for the new content and everybody else could then get to join the party; that would be cool. 

> The amount of entitlement, whining and simple rudeness centered around this release is absolutely mind blowing. I am embarrassed to be a part of this community right now.

Dear dumptruck, why do you not save yourself all this embarrassment you keep suffering through?
Get yourself and its silly ego out of the fucking spotlight, hand over QM ownership to the community and remove yourself from the mod team, and just enjoy the content as a lurker! There, happy Dumptruck. 

Can you take the internet dick-measuring contest offline please? 

> Somebody releases a cool new update for Quake.

> Manchild whines and cries even though there's literally nothing stopping him from playing Quake exactly the way he's been doing for 25 years.

Honestly, it's the sort of behaviour you'd expect from a toddler. This is the internet though, so I don't know why I expected anything better. Anyway, back to the actual topic at hand seeing as this is func_ and not whatever discord got mentioned above.

I'm loving a lot of MachineGames' and NightDives' additions. Highlights for me so far are playing through Dimension of the Machine on nightmare difficulty which has had me spamming quicksave like a true hero, and easily jumping in to a deathmatch on The Edge with some randoms who were roughly my skill-level, instead of the omnipotent monsters that dominate QuakeWorld.

I'm looking forward to seeing some future curated content, especially if it spurs this talented community in to action.

Something I think would work really well is if they could introduce that old coop mod where increasingly difficult waves of monsters spawn in a small arena map. I'm pretty sure one of the regulars round here made it years ago and it would be perfect for a bit of crossplay. 

They all have the same number of frames as the original MDLs, with the exception of a handful of models (pickups, grenades, etc) where the MDL has only 1 frame but the MD5 has 2.

So it looks like all you need is an MD5 loader and some rendering code and they'll function as drop-in replacements.

I've grabbed some loading code from here http://tfc.duke.free.fr/coding/md5-specs-en.html which works perfectly with them.

I haven't yet decided how I'm going to do the rendering, but I'm inclining towards animating the skeletons to keyframes at load-time and just putting them into the same in-memory structures as MDLs use. 

We are already converting some of the MD5s for the AMQ. But not too many, only those which weren't fully convincing so far.

We are running into some obstacles, though, since headgibs are missing (which we are currently trying to create) and there are no mission pack MD5s at all, which is really disappointing. 

The Dimension of the Machine maps are BSP2, so it definitely supports BSP2 already. 

Yeah it does support BSP2 but some of really huge maps like ad_tears crash on loading with Hunc_alloc failed error. 

Ah, nice to see that BSP2 made it in; so it's really just a matter of internal buffer sizes then, eh? That's something that could be patched in future revisions of the engine I suppose.

MD5: I'm modding my own (unreleased) engine to load and draw them natively; i.e. unconverted. That seems to be the best way to handle it, otherwise converting them down to MDL will just bring back vertex wobble, and getting rid of that is one of the whole points of using MD5s. 

Yeah, when playing the MPs the difference between the new weapon models and the existing ones is kinda stark.

The MP enemies generally look fine to me though, although I think it might be cool if the Spike Mines had a dynamic light in them since they're so unbelievably lethal.

I don't know why they didn't just reskin the new GL and LG for the DoE weapons. Doesn't seem like it would have taken much effort.

For SoA, I mean the laser gun model looks OK as it is I guess, but the laser beams really need some dynamic light now, similar to the enforcer and deathknight projectiles. The Mjolnir hammer could probably do with a slightly higher polycount version.

I'm sure the community can pump out better versions of these in no time. 

Posted over at Doomworld. In general, I am quite satisfied with the port already. However, there are a few things which should be addressed before I can give my seal of full approval. 

I'd be in broad agreement with pretty much all of your points there. One I would add is that the underwater warp effect is also too strong: that needs to be taken down a bit.

MD5 work: I now have the new MD5 models loading and drawing in my own Quake engine. Bye bye vertex wobble! A few items remaining to be done include proper bboxes, normals, and taking a pass over the code to clean it up a little.

I animated the skeleton pose data to keyframes at load time, which allows for maybe 95% code sharing with MDLs when it comes to drawing them. 

One interesting thing to note, in terms of model rendering — they actually have a cvar called “r_nolerp_list” which is either for mod compatibility or because they couldn’t think of a better approach than fitzquake to disable interpolation per model (an extra flag on each model would be the cleaner approach IMO)

@NightFright — curious how the conversion went for the models with lots of tiny details (like ogres teeth) — do they get distorted in the process? Also the ogre model in particular has a problem where the death pose is partially under the floor, the arms penetrate badly. It might be something you can fix post conversion by editing those frames. 

I agree also. There's however many more things... For one, I actually like that this port has particles behaving closer to original DOS/WinQuake, not getting smaller at a distance like in GL variants.

But as I already mentioned, for example you can't fully look up and down, just like orignal game. Which gives off impression that the goal is to be as faithful as possible to original. But the Nightmare skill is changed, NOT keeping to the original way.

These things would be really nice to have as options. The more options to turn on/off stuff, the better :) 

I am not doing the conversions to MDL by myself, it's Seven and osj in the QuakeOne forums. They could tell you more about it.

According to osj, some detail gets lost during the conversion, but that's only an issue with the view weapons. Monsters seem to be fine. We already got the Ogre, Vore and Zombie on Github. None of them have issues. Ogre doesn't clip into floor when dying without adjustments necessary, so it seems to be a problem with the Kex port.

We will not use Kex' Knight, Shambler or Shub since our models are better, but the rest is debatable. From the weapons, we'll only take the rocket launcher, the rest is pretty much on the same level. 

Not a complaint, just curious: Does anyone know why the health packs haven't been censored? Most games stopped putting a red plus symbol on their health items after the Red Cross started complaining about it (one would think that they'd take being associated with "health" as a compliment, but apparently not.) Indeed, all the classic Doom medkits in the "BFG Edition" re-release were censored. And looking in the new Quake pak files, it seems that censored skins for the MegaHealth and whatnot do exist (with a red square instead) but they don't actually appear in the game, just the old red crosses. I wonder why? 

What are the MDL animations like in-engine? The biggest problem there was always the conversion of position data to a 0..255 scale in 8-bit, which loses precision and causes vertex wobble - most easily visible if you notarget and look at a monster in it's idle pose (but some monsters don't animate in their idle poses). That was something that obviously had to be done to get it running on a MS-DOS machine with 8mb of memory.

The biggest benefit of the MD5 models comes from using full floating point positions, which completely eliminates vertex wobble. I can take or leave the extra vertices and bits of detail (ogre teeth/etc), but eliminating vertex wobble is important. 

I have only checked the Ogre, Vore, Zombie and RL conversions in QSS so far. On these I wasn't able to spot any distortions or vertex wobbles, their animations seem clean and pretty much identical to the MD5 originals.

Again, there might be some detail loss, but monsters often don't get too close to you, so it's not a problem. Weapons can suck, though. Round shapes have more edges and so on.

They are using Noesis for the conversion, btw. As far as I know, no manual adjustments are necessary. Osj already posted all conversions over at the QuakeOne forums, btw. 

Where exactly did you find the censored health textures? I quickly poked around but didn't find them.

My guess is that the Red Cross thing is a red cross on a white background. Which is what many games in the 90's had as a graphic for medkits. Duke Nukem 3D 20th Anniversary World Tour also changed medkit symbols from red cross to a pill. But Quake uses red cross on, well, dark brown or black background :)