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 :) 

Have been playing around with this since the release. Most of the usual player preference type of tweaks / cvar changes (they stuck around) can be applied via the console or kxengine.cfg file located in users\saved games folder.

However, the engine does not execute autoexec's, even though .rc's are still present in their respective .pak's with a few lines of their own added in tells it to. Still, any changes made to kxengine.cfg via the console or direct editing is permanent, until you go change the variable by yourself. However, even though there is an alias cmd, aliases do not get written permanently to the config file, using either way. So I went ahead and added my aliases to .rcs in the paks to get them permanent. Querying returns the default values for all of the cvars and cmds and short descriptions for most of them, which is a nice addition.

I'm used playing with headbob, underwater warp and weapon kickback toggled off. Headbob and kickback has the usual cvars for them. Underwater warp has four related ones. However, there are also newly-added single cvar toggles in there for the bob (which the menu option uses) and the warp. I bet they were also planning to offer the latter as an option through the menu, but somehow forgot about it for the initial release (just like the modified backspeed). Menu options for kickback and warp would be nice, considering this update's also released on the consoles.

Curated mods (which is only Q64 at the moment) get placed in their own folder, as a .pak under the related \Saved Games folder and are activated via the menu. Q64 has its music stored in the .pak, so it looks like that's a feature too (does not read .flacs however, and all the .oggs on offer are sadly lacking in quality).

The biggest problem here is that kxconfig is shared. ie, want to play Q64 with filtering on, in lo-res mode, with a lower FOV than usual, etc. Those changes are written in the same config file the base game uses, so you have to revert them back one by one upon deactivating the mod. I think the only way to overcome this right now is to create an .rc with those values and stick it in Q64's pak. But that's advanced editing with which most of the users won't bother. I think it would be better to have autoexecs back.

Loved the Machine though. They clearly put their heart in it. Though E1 and E3 are mostly of run-of-the-mill corridor-crawling fare, E2 and E4/5 more than make up for it. Lots of new textures and skyboxes, different and nicely merged themes, faultless and detailed brushwork, tasty use of colored lights and fog, even bits of environmental storytelling and progression reminiscent of modern community content. Overall, it was a nice surprise that is handled pretty well on all aspects and a welcome addition to the official content imho. Looks like 'returning for nostalgia after many moons' folks are getting impressed by it too - so, it will hopefully serve well for the longevity of the game. 

It does execute them at least to some extent, as dropping my autoexec.cfg into the correct id1 folder (not the original one, the re-release one) changed my fov and playername. 

Thanks for the clarification, Jago. Of course, I was working within the rerelease's \id1 folder. It wasn't a full-on autoexec on my end though. I just put in my aliases to see if I can get them working that way, to no luck. So I went for the .rc. 

are changed and if you are used to QW-style "go through weapons 1, 3 and 3 and then fire the weapon selected" aliases, broken.

The gist of the issue is that:
1) The "fire" is now *in_attack
2) *in_attack cannot be chained together with things

You can bind *in_attack to a key, but you can't use it in an alias. Going through weapons is different too. You can do something like this:

unbindkey 4
alias quickswitch_nails "switchweapon 3 2"
bind 4 "quickswitch_nails" 

Yeah, I've figured those out through the config file, have seen the quickswitch in the .rc too. Rather than gameplay-related ones, I'm used to have some in my QS/QSS setup for toggling things on and off, in conjunction or by themselves. A liquids transparency one, a lightstyles one, a track cycler, a screenshot mode toggle, a contrast cycler and a gamma cycler. I don't need all of them right now, I was just trying to get my shot alias working. Had to split it to two buttons tho', since bind was returning a 'it is already bound' type of message.

While reading your post, I've remembered those unbind / unbindkey key cmds. Thanks, think I figured in this instant how to get it working on a single key. Will check. :) 

Even though the original maps all have built-in water transparency support due to them being recompiled, the related variables all default to 1. I guess they wanted to have the authentic look on that part, but still wanted to support transparency in case anyone wants it so.

Something's funky with the teleporter texture tho' (I'm sure it was also mentioned before in this thread). It defaults to "1.0", which should equal to "1" of course, but still has transparency enabled with that value. Reinforcing the r_telealpha cvar with a value of "1" makes it solid as it's supposed to be in the instant, though it still reverts to its original value and wrong looks upon the next launch. Guess this needs to be fixed on their part. 

Yeah, the teleporters look like shit with transparency. Gotta put that in my list. 

The "censored" health .lmp's are located in \steamapps\common\Quake\rerelease\id1\pak0.pak in the "progs" folder. They even have animation for the non-rotten packs. It's strange they weren't used. Maybe it's as you say, the lack of white background turned out to be "good enough."

Yeah, I remember when almost all games had the Red Cross on their health packs. Funny how things change. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see the Swiss flag being used instead. Ridiculous. 

The maps store wateralpha/slimealpha/lavaalpha/telealpha in the worldspawn key, and the engine reads them and uses them as overrides for the cvars.

The maps also have their fog settings in worldspawn, including sky fog. 

The new sound files are 44khz files but the sound data in them is lowpassed at 22khz, so the files are actually twice as large as they need to be. That's probably not worth patching. 

The remastered sounds sound a lot better in Quakespasm with sndspeed 44100. Nice find! 

Yeah seems they found all the 22kHz sounds they could (some of them they didn't) and just batch-converted them to 44100. I tried the new ones in Quakespasm, it sounds better than in the KEX Engine Enhanced version, less clipping, but it's still there. I think it's mostly due to most of the sounds being super loud and compressed (meaning dynamic range) themselves.

They also have couple of unused Fiend sounds in the rerelease sounds. After playing Quake for all this time since '96 the new higher quality sounds just feel "off" for me, so I'm gonna stick to original muffled noisy 11kHz ones.

It's awesome to get the higher quality sounds anyway, I use HEALTH1.WAV as my message tone and PROTECT.WAV as ringtone, time to upgrade :) 

One of the involved people who's is present on Quake Mapping Discord confirmed it's because there's no white background:

> its not a problem in quake because it's not on a white background, it's a plus on a bunch of green techy stuff 

https://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/MD5_1.jpg

https://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/MD5_2.jpg

Note that this is in a regular source port, NOT the Quake 2021 Kex engine.

Note also that these are the actual source MD5s copied over, NOT conversions. 

If you want to see some MDL conversions in action, we have already added those we wanted to the AMQ. Check latest dev build on Github. 

Had a look at an Ogre in e1m3; the first one you encounter in Normal skill (around the corner to the right, not the one behind bars), looking at it with notarget on and viewing it's idle animation.

This I guess is a case of different things annoying different people in different ways, but I see some very extreme vertex wobble in it.

This was with frame interpolation on. Maybe it's less pronounced if you switch off frame interpolation? 

I have interpolation on in QSS and tbh it looks just fine to me.