feels like the video games have begun to reach a point of maturity akin to older forms of art
in the art world, that usually means a revolution or 'new wave' is nearby
i thought 'cruelty squad' and its ilk were the harbingers of the 'new game'... but yea it seems harder to build that kind of devoted community if you don't release your own editor
Wasn't Cruelty Squad built with the Quake level editor? It runs on Godot, but apparently uses a plugin called Qodot which lets it use Quake levels directly.
ah that's awesome! I saw the Godot part and didn't think it would have borrowed from Quake, maybe there's hope...
The medium continues to grow within the purview of the original communities.
Quake hasn't enjoyed _as much_ change as Doom, with source-faithful engines like Quakespasm being standard and the likes of Darkplaces being niche. However, the Doom community both embraces faithful ports like prBoom, Crispy, and Chocolate Doom; and carries at its centre the wonderful GZDoom engine.
GZDoom zigs where every other game engine zags. Rather than moving away from BSP into static meshes, and other standard "modern" shifts, GZDoom embraces the fundamentals that make it mod-friendly. It maintains BSP at its core, and while it supports voxels and meshes it remains 2D-focused. What it adds is all the trappings that make it attractive to rapid iteration: good scripting, a toolkit of predefined events, and tools with excellent asset importation and management.
If I imagine where Quake would go, if it were to follow GZDoom's model, I imagine it would lean into Quakeworld's client/server architecture, the QVM, realtime vis, static lighting, and so forth. Particularly the static lighting; which is something I find modern engines tend to treat as a performance feature and not an aesthetic feature.
Both Quake and Doom, but moreso Doom, have unrealistic lighting; with overly sharp and unnatural transitions. When playing modern games everything is softer, the shadows are more natural, the scenes are realistic; but they lose that harsh aesthetic that gave rise to the horror of Doom and Quake. The shadows aren't just dim, they're black, and who knows what they hold.
Anyhow, I digress.
It maintains BSP at its core, and while it supports voxels and meshes it remains 2D-focused. What it adds is all the trappings that make it attractive to rapid iteration: good scripting, a toolkit of predefined events, and tools with excellent asset importation and management.
Well, it also expands the world format too, so one can do full 3D maps. In fact one of the games with great vertical level design i've played recently is Hands of Necromancy which is made with GZDoom.
I agree, it's great to see people rummaging through old game engines to find the "right medium to express their thought", the way one might rummage through a pile of art supplies.
The only thing I personally think is a shame, is that the structure of interactive experience inherently lends itself to collage — to a potential for different "scenes" made from entirely distinct "media" — but that it's prohibitively difficult currently to (seamlessly) weave together different game engines into one game art project; especially when some of those engines aren't open-source engines, but only exist in the form of old games that are usually turned into art through ROM-hacking.
An artist should be able to have me walk through a door in an RPG Maker game end up playing a Quake level! And then, upon killing a certain enemy, be suddenly in a bossfight in a SMW ROMhack! And then, upon succeeding or failing in the boss fight, I should be able to either end up in their custom Unreal-engine-coded finale, or back in the RPG Maker "space" from before! All without loading times or futzing with the display settings!
I've been working on a "solution" to this "problem of artistic collage" — a runtime that supports custom (i.e. zero-installed from the internet on demand by a game) sandboxed cores wrapped in realtime-per-frame in-memory-state import/export logic, where "a game" is actually a set of sub-game modules, with each module being expressed in terms of its own core, and having either a plain API call (for open engines) or a RetroAchievements-like memory-watch rule, to trigger state-transitions over to other modules.
I know about the developer who, instead of building their game, decides to build a game engine. But that appears to have not been enough for you - this appears to be a game meta-engine! :)
It sounds like quite a technical achievement to accomplish that, but it also sounds like it would fill only a very tiny niche of developers who actually want this and are willing to build assets in entirely different engines just so they can transition to different aesthetics during the game.
Not to knock on the idea though - it would certainly be very cool to see. Curious if you have any other use-cases in mind for such a technology?
Curious if you have any other use-cases in mind for such a technology?
Yes. In fact, the collage thing is the secondary pie-in-the-sky non-MVP use-case.
The primary use-case: a Mario Maker-like UX for playing cloud-hosted ROMhacks, where each ROMhack's game engine has been carefully cut down so that the experience is of just playing a level in isolation, with some state (e.g. life counter) managed by the runtime and passed in/out of the running core; where, just like in Mario Maker, the UX takes over between executions of the "per-level simulation", and so it's the UX, not the game, that determines whether you retry on death; and that determines what happens next when you "complete" a given level. So it can do various things like run you through playlists of experiences, shuffle a filtered set of all experiences, etc.
That "cutting down" of ROMs into game engines would be automatic/generalized, and would involve the classic techniques of "program-slicing", applied to the domain-specific tooling of emulation: input-movie control-path tracing + memory-watch rules for where the "boundaries" of the sub-engine in the game are, followed by unreachable-code and data elimination; then base memory-state capture to kick off the game at a given point + overlay-state synthesis to control what it looks like when it kicks off. Jumping control "out of bounds" ends the emulation, with memory rules to then determine whether that constituted a "win" or a "game over."
Also, the base "game engine" ROMs would have all IP "assets" (art, music, etc) removed / factored out; these would instead ship as [modder-provided] "game asset" packs, of which there could be multiple used in a single game project, and which would synthesized into ROM memory-bank files at publication time.
End-user supplies base-game ROM images locally; client synthesizes "game engines" from these ROM images. Or clean-room reversed "game engines" can be distributed, given that they're an alternative compilation from the reversed source, that doesn't contain any of the original game's assets — those all being wholesale replaced by the mod! — and so (I believe) don't violate copyright. In which case, the end user having the original ROM image available, only unlocks the ability to (potentially) "change the asset theme" of the game from its custom one, back to the original game's IP assets.
The core user-story, would be sitting there with a controller in hand, continuously consuming free-to-play "experiences", presented to them through playlists / recommendations / shuffle. (Game jams would be playlists!)
But there'd also be a store — for buying experiences that artists want to charge for, yes†; but also for buying asset packs, or for licensing the use of "engines" that others have put their hard work into developing, since the same UI that lets you play the games, is also the UI for publishing the games. (I'm not sure if I want to get involved with it being a UI for developing games, though. Maybe for the multi-module stuff; but I'm more expecting tooling like GB Studio and Lunar Magic to step in on the development side, allowing export to a package format that you'd use to publish on this thing.)
† (Paid experiences could have "demo versions" that show up in the free-to-play shuffle; where at all times while playing the demo, there'd be a little unobtrusive UI element that could take you to the store page for the paid version of the experience.)
You could add whatever "game engines" you want to this platform — as these aren't just limited to being ROMs, but rather can also contain a "native layer" (I'm currently thinking a PPAPI executable, even though it failed in its original browser use-case.) Engines can be designed "on top of" other engines; all the extracted-from-game-ROM game engines would actually be running on top of a set of native emulation-core engines that ship with the runtime. But "RPGMaker-compatible runner" is an engine. Love2D is an engine. RenPy is an engine. StepMania is an engine. The early Win32 GameMaker engines are engines. The Macromedia Flash projector is an engine. Etc. You can publish experiences with these, too; and there would be porting tools to take finished projects from these runtimes and shift them onto the platform.
And, perhaps less obviously, big third parties (e.g. Adobe, Unity) could publish pay-to-license engines on the platform, where you could design your more domain-constrained engine to run on top of their engine, and the whole licensing/royalties aspect would be handled automatically.
---
One of the key things I actually want from this project, is to "commodify" these other engines, in the way that MAME/RetroArch/etc "commodify" emulators into cores. I want to "containerize" all the old Flash games, old visual novels, RPG Maker 95 projects, etc. such that you could just pick-up-and-play them the same way you can pick-up-and-play a ROM on a modern multi-core emulator. And with all the same modern niceties, e.g. cloud-based save-states, super-resolution, etc.
The other, perhaps less obvious trick here, is that you can slice up the actual original games themselves — the ones whose game engines are the basis of the mods — and allow the bits and pieces of these original titles to be listed as these same kind of bite-sized "experiences" on the platform — but where these "experiences" are only accessible to owners of the original game (i.e. to people who have the ROM image locally, or maybe who have bought the game from its IP owner(!) through the platform; or who can prove they have paid some other licensing fee to the IP owner, e.g. by SSO-binding an account of that IP owner's platform that proves they have access to a subscription tier that comes with leased licenses for those titles.) Sometimes I just want to re-play a particular small section or mini-game from one of my favorite old games. This platform would treat that section/mini-game as its own addressable resource that I can navigate to and play.
The fact that's not just a link to your design docs is a massive ADHD signifier ;-)
walk through a door in an RPG Maker game end up playing a Quake level! And then, upon killing a certain enemy, be suddenly in a bossfight in a SMW ROMhack!
I just learned about this [1] yesterday but seems to be the first data point I've seen regarding something like you describe. Very cool to see, and it definitely blew my mind that things like this are now being developed.
a well-developed aesthetic that is used as an informed choice
For too long, pixel art and other "dead" technologies like Q1 mapmaking were largely treated solely as kitchsy "retro" or "nostalgic" aesthetics and not worthy of study, refinement, and enjoyment in their own rights.
Personally i'm of the opinion that if you can point at a game and say "that looks like a XYZ game" where XYZ is some period-specific identification then that itself makes XYZ a visual style.
E.g. "that looks like a PS1 game" or "that looks like a 90s game" or "that looks like a DOS game". And that includes "that looks like a PS3/X360 game" too, even if it is probably too soon for many to accept that :-P
Huh, an interesting conclusion to me is that I'm another decade or so there will probably be nostalgic artwork recreating the HDR, brown, grimy vibes of late aughts action games
oh god. oh... oh no.
well, i think you're right.
If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend checking out the story of MyHouse.wad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wAo54DHDY0
If you want to go in spoiler free, I'd recommend downloading the WAD and playing it through blind. But if you don't have the time for that, there's a ton of great youtube videos that covered the topic.
I agree. At one point pixel art or lowpoly 3D was the best you could do. Now it's an aesthetic choice. I'm actually using raycasting (ala wolfenstein 3D/rise of the triad) for a hobby project because I think there's still interesting things you can do in it that haven't been explored.
Well said!
I think video games are their own art form, now, with indie studios making beauties like Noita and AAA behemoth bottegas crafting entire worlds with every little corner containing art to explore should you take the time to walk, like the London depicted in Watch Dogs: Legion.
If only more companies had the courage and vision to make their games fully-moddable, thus transforming and extending their lives, like ID Software, Bethesda, and Bohemia Interactive have done.
I've been enjoying more mods than new games recently. When devs make something for pure love instead of money the results tend to be good. Eg.
- Stalker GAMMA
- RLCraft
- Ashes 2063 series (A dooom total conversion mod)
- Quake Arcane Dimensions
- Kerbal space program realism overhaul
- Krastorio
- Morrowind refined
- Portal reloaded
Fantastic work from these artists, the engine really just lends itself to these environments it seems!
As a side Anyone know of a good way to get the geometry of Quake maps out as a 3d model? I thought it would be quite cool to view these on the web. Either individual buildings or as a fly-through.
Edit:
Found the following leads:
1. https://github.com/sbuggay/bspview
2. https://github.com/passiomatic/elm-quake3-renderer
the engine really just lends itself to these environments
So I used to think "this would make one hell of a Quake level" in places that it would be really inappropriate to think that: government buildings, hospitals, a school or two. It occurs to me now that these were all Brutalist-influenced buildings. This is something I never ever talked about, growing up in the wake of Columbine.
In retrospect I guess it's not that I'm a psychopath, but that I unconsciously recognized that that sort of design was smack in the middle of the Quake engine's wheelhouse.
Still probably going to keep those thoughts to myself.
My friends and I made levels of our school campus dorms, etc. for both Doom and Quake. This was all prior to Columbine and nobody thought it was strange in the slightest; on the contrary everyone thought it was awesome (faculty included). A couple of years later, and who knows how it would have been perceived or if we would have even felt that it was appropriate.
We only had two buildings with an architectural style that favored the game environments though. They were both built as "modern" buildings some time in the 70's. Somewhat unsurprisingly the school has since torn them down at great expense and replaced them with buildings that are stylistically compatible with the rest of campus.
We did that post-columbine. One of our friends made the map in something like CS or something. Our little friend group thought it was awesome, but it was also tacitly understood that at no point could we tell anyone outside our tiny little trust circle about it, god forbid they thought we were like the columbine kids, instead of just trying to play a game in like, one of the two buildings we spent half of our lives in thus far. I don't know if he ever even ultimately shared it with us. We also made the school in a starcraft map using the blue resources as hallways IIRC, and were quiet about that one too, for the same reason haha
Do you guys really think you could have had issues with that?
I mean it is only natural to want to recreate with a good amount of fidelity anything you know well. Be it a map for an FPS or a racing track for a racing sim using a known road/city.
This was right when “zero tolerance” school discipline was in favor of administrators. Doing something like that could get you put in A) in school suspension, B) suspension or C) expelled where I lived.
Can you be suspended/expelled from a school for things that are done outside of school? I don't think you can in the several countries I've lived in.
For threats (real or implied), absolutely.
I don't think making a map for a videogame, as realistic as it can be, ever qualified as a threat.
I can only speak to the US, but this didn't stop school administrators - their interpretation was more important than credibility when it came down to decisions made immediately post-Columbine. Parents demanded action from the administrators, even if none was needed, and so administrators needed to demonstrate that they were doing something. Bans on long coats, primarily black outfits, discussing video games, etc. weren't uncommon.
Activities done outside of school that were discussed in school absolutely made it onto this list and would result in suspensions.
Toys R Us. 90s. Teammate made a map of our store.
Pure. Therapy.
9/11 happens and those maps are now dust (no pun intended).
What’s the connection to 9/11?
This reminds me of the time I made counterstrike skins based on me and my friends. Seemed like a fun idea, and at first it looked great, but once we started killing each other in game, it quickly felt very ghoulish.
It's okay if it's Quake, just don't suggest it to be used as a Postal level
Moscow subway (which have had terrorists blow it up) just have officially released a counter strike bomb map based on a fictional station a few days ago.
You might also be interested in: https://noclip.website/ (not quake maps)
I also know https://www.halospawns.com/app used to have quake maps (dm6 at least), but can't find it now.
This does the trick quite nicely (unless you want them textured, anyway) - https://github.com/fzwoch/bsp2obj
I tried it on the map BSPs from https://github.com/fzwoch/quake_map_source/tree/master/bsp
Edit: Following a sibling comment, Trenchboom can also export as OBJ from the GUI
most maps these days are made with something called trenchbroom. Try opening a map and looking for export options. You can open the original game's levels too
Bethesda recently announced there won't be a Quake Pro League next year, massively depressing news. IMO Quake is peerless in its mechanical skill and speed requirements, truly one of the most challenging games in the world, like comparing Go to lesser strategic games.
Frankly, they should have pulled the plug years ago. The game has been dead for years. I try to watch every QPL grand final and it has been a borefest. Most exciting moment was the million dollar tournament. Newcomer beating Vo0 in spectacular manner.
StarCraft, which MS also owns these days, at least had traction for about a decade. Quake Champions was a bad game and it failed immediately. Maybe NS could finance proper Quake and StarCraft games with their infinite cash
it's a genre issue. these types of games will never be popular to most people given the alternatives now available
Agreed, and people (presumably under 20) even call them "Boomer shooters" :( I get pretty upset about that, especially considering how unbearably Fisher Price Fortnite and Valorant etc look, to say nothing of their completely lacking the hardcore, balls-to-the-wall fast aiming, prediction and spatial planning.
It takes the most difficult mechanical aspects of Counterstrike and makes it 10x faster; apparently "kids these days" have no appetite for the challenge.
John Romero wants you to feel okay about the term "boomer shooter". [1]
Pull quote:
"The funny thing about boomers, it doesn’t even matter because for people who made up the term boomer shooter, anyone who’s old as a boomer, boomers are actually the kids of World War Two vets.
"That’s my mom. My mom is 20 years older than I am. She’s actually a boomer. So, boomers are not typically developing games.
"It’s funny. It’s a funny name. And I usually say it is a boomer shooter. It’s got a shotgun in it. It makes a big boom sound and you’re shooting. it doesn’t bug me. It’s really like you’re trying to nail the aesthetics of the style and that’s like that’s a phrase that kind of says what you need to know."
[1] from https://howtomarketagame.com/2023/09/25/john-romero-on-his-b... and HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37649594
I am old and don't get upset. Some of the best games over the last few years are Boomer Shooters. My favourite do far is Turbo Overkill - double jump and crazy air control right from the start. Plays better than Doom
Go is one of those games I could never understand whether a move I was making was a good one or not. It just felt like I was randomly placing stones and then at the end had to count up and see who won as I certainly had no clue how it was progressing. Is that normal for new players or am I particularly challenged in that area? Chess is a less abstract game where I can generally tell what's going on.
Regarding Quake, I think you're right. Nothing else is quite like it.
You're not alone. It takes a bit of studying to figure out the strategy of Go, which is primarily conceived of as creating different shapes. Shapes of stone groups impart certain properties to the group.
When I first started playing Go, I realized I thought about it like Risk. I was trying to draw Napoleonic battle lines on the board, and push back the opponent. And it kinda worked for very entry-level games, but mostly didn't make sense? Because then the opponent would just place somewhere behind my "line" and it all fell apart.
Over time, I started imagining each of the spots on the board as being a person in a city. And placing a stone, really, was like bringing the AOE II priest to "wololo" convert the person to my team. So really, the goal wasn't to create battle lines, the goal was to pick and choose who on the board to join my team, so that by the end of the game, I would have the most influence in the city. (I've heard others describe it as planting plants to grow over the majority of a garden, which is similar) At that point, I started choosing spaces around the board in order to make sure I had enough friends in each neighborhood that I would be the most popular person there, even once my opponent started advertising in the region too.
That begs the obvious question, are there different neighborhoods that are more important than others? And the answer is yes. As you learn about eye shapes, you'll realize its easier to be popular and own in a corner than it is a side, and a side than it is the center, so when you start the game, you prioritize being popular in these regions, in that order (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqpqa5NCbMY&t=52s)
And then over time, I've learned how to do that more and more efficiently, and the tradeoffs that come from that.
It also helps to start on smaller boards, then move to bigger ones as you get a feel for what's going on : )
Given how much they neglected Quake Champions (or the Quake IP in general) this doesn't come at a surprise I'd say.
eSports are going through a slump right now. Psyonix also cancelled upcoming RLCS. Instead it's going to sponsor a bunch of smaller tournaments like salt mine with 10-20% of the budget of last year's RLCS.
Noooo you just give me that sad news to me. I really enjoyed watching Quake Pro League previous seasons. The finals where a big event to me, I cook some special stuff to watch those games. I'm a fan of the player Raisy, who several times finished in second place and never won the tournament. Sad that he may never have that opportunity again.
Here is the video of the last final when Rapha beat Raisy 4 to 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI4M5u5IxAA
Is there still a big Quake community out there? People playing new / cool maps?
There is a huge Quake mapping community that has been consistently producing amazing new maps, map packs, and full mods.
* https://www.quaddicted.com/
* https://www.slipseer.com/
* Quake Mapping Discord where all this goes down https://discord.com/invite/f5Y99aMWhat's a good entry point if one wants to get started playing? Acquire Quake (1? 2?) on Steam and then server browsers just work as-is?
https://discord.com/invite/eu9B2Jv - Quake for newbies
https://discord.gg/EyPV44hpPz - Quake 1 community
I'm just looking for some text that explains how to do it, not to join a community. But thanks! :)
You use ironwail (https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail), and start downloading and playing maps from the sites above :).
I still play Quake Live, and I can confirm that we are all still playing the same 5 maps.
"Almost Lost" and "Campgrounds" are brilliant works of level design art. Why bother playing any other map?!
Great game and it is still amazing to me how after all these years I am still finding new moves or nuances of the physics engine to learn and practice.
And an even larger Doom community. I took part in NanoWADmo last month, the map making month. There are hundreds of hours of top-tier map content out there, a huge number of "megawads" (32 map packs). Anything by skillsaw is great, and no end in sight is pretty special too imo
OH man. So many hours in Quake - I'll have to learn how to get one of these engines up and running.
Easy setup:
1) Download and unpack ironwail (best engine).
2) Copy id1/ (from your official Quake install directory) to your ironwail directory
3) Launch ironwail
Adding and launching a mod:
1) Unpack the mod into your ironwail directory
2) Launch ironwail
3) select the add-on
If you have quake on steam, ironwail will automatically detect it.
If you want to directly launch into a mod you can create a shortcut or use command-line parameters.
There's something called quake injector too, which makes it even easier to get access to maps, at least ones on quakespasm. You probably still need to add them manually if they're from slipseer, but i think most are on both sites
Ironwail can download some popular add-ons in game. Not as robust as injector, but is extremely accessible.
Running QBJ2 in a modern source port is really simple: unpack the QBJ2 and the source port into the game dir, run the executable, switch with "game qbj2" in the console. Personally, I prefer https://github.com/Novum/vkQuake because it allows disabling texture smoothing. Too bad vkQuake development has been put on stop recently.
Personally, I prefer https://github.com/Novum/vkQuake because it allows disabling texture smoothing.
All hardware-accelerated Quake source ports that I'm aware of allow you to disable texture smoothing, going all the way back to the original GL Quake (if not earlier).
It was historically set through the console (rather than through a graphical menu), via the `gl_texturemode` command
On modern hardware capable of trilinear filtering, the appropriate texturemode to disable texture smoothing (which keeping the other niceties of hardware acceleration) was
```
gl_texturemode "GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR"
```
For the Ironwail engine, which is the currently preferred Quake source port for modern 3D hardware, options on whether or not to use texture smoothing (and other "retro" aesthetics like whether to use square or circular particles) are things that can be toggled in the video configuration menu.
nquake streamlines a modern install to a normal installer
The brutalist design in the Talos Principle 2 is superb, highly recommend if you're a fan of this style!
Also I wanna shout out this game if u like brutalist architecture. It's a forgotten masterpiece imo. https://store.steampowered.com/app/265690/NaissanceE/
Thanks for the recommendation, this looks great. And it's FREE.
Talos 2 was one of the 1st games to impress me with its graphics in a while. I've never seen a game with such a big yet also detailed and fancy looking world. Also the anti-aliasing is the best I've ever seen.
I reckon they used a lot of procedural (maybe AI?) tools to make all the meshes and texture them and so on.
Talos Principle is a slept on masterpiece, its shocking it isn't more widely known about. I've been engrossed in the second game all week and the photo mode is a very welcome addition.
Been enjoying this a lot since it's release. Getting towards the end of the game ~80% of the way through and appreciating a bit of a difficulty spike as I had found that the game was a bit on the easier side for most of it.
Graphically great and I had partially picked it up as a UE5 game that I was already interested in.
If you enjoy brutalism and video games I highly recommend Control. Beautiful, beautiful game.
I can second this. I literally just completed my first playthrough of the game over the weekend (backlog pain is real).
The architecture and design in the game is the best brutalist work I've seen in a game.
If you enjoyed Control (and don’t forget the DLCs!) you will probably also enjoy Alan Wake 2 which is part of the same universe and interconnected with it.
(I never played the first Alan Wake but it’s not a hard requirement, there are recaps on YouTube)
I hated Brutalism before playing Control. Just look at how intimidating the Boston City Hall fortress is, as it looms over you, while you try to even find the entrance.
But Control's architectural and furnishings atmosphere was very appealing, and it warmed me towards the Boston and Cambridge buildings that I'd previously disliked.
Screenshots: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/the-real-buildings-that-in...
Boston definitely makes it hard to love.
Some of the best ambassadors for Brutalist architecture I've experienced are the Barbican in London and the Bonaventure in Los Angeles. They make good spaces for people.
I am still playing Q2 on a daily basis. You can download Q2 and see all live servers without downloading an address file. http://q2s.tastyspleen.net/
There is still an active development for quake2 executable and anticheat detection.
There are roughly 20-30 people playing almost on a daily basis. We have tournaments too. (This year's tournament will play its finals).
You can also check q2servers.com. Most players have been playing for over 20+ years. The average age is between 35-55. Twitch and discord channels are also very active. Finally we are playing with voice chat (which is kind of useless considering the speed of the game).
what engine do you use? yamagi?
Q2Pro is the standard in the servers. You'd get kicked or see warnings without it:
I'm in that demographic. Started playing Q2 online in 97/98 before switching to Q3A in 99. Lately I've been playing Q2 Enhanced. What I miss the most is the OSP tourney mod.
What qualifies something as "brutalist"?
Vox had an episode on the subject recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhuHiL8Pug
“Brutalist buildings are characterised by minimalist constructions that showcase the bare building materials and structural elements over decorative design.”
The scene has existed since the beginning, but the work that has been coming out of the Quake community for the last 6 years or so has been outstanding. They keep making more and knocking it out of the park. I've played all of it, and keep coming back for more :).
I think TrenchBroom deserves credit for that.
What I often remembered most from first person shooters is the architecture, and music, even though I didn't focus on it at the time.
I frequently also dream architecture or vistas. I love those dreams. Sometimes I wonder if I chose the wrong profession.
I also love some architecture that noone that I mention it to seem to understand. Those buildings just speak to me in a wordless manner.
Forerunner (Halo) structures and half life 2's Citadel probably harbor the strongest place feelings I've experienced. You almost don't need to tell an explicit story in those places, the walls do enough
Making quake mods when I was 12 got me interested in programming. I think my last one was 'Tellytubbies: Must Die'. It was fun making maps, models, textures and editing sounds of teletubbies in pain.
Mapping and modding Quake 2 and 3 pushed me from Basic and HTML/CSS into much less forgiving C/C++ programming around the same age -- wouldn't be the engineer I am without it. It's invaluable to modify something you know and understand and extremely rewarding, which is the first thing I teach to friends who want to learn.
Was this for Quake 3 or Quake 2 or?
quake 1
Looking at those, I could just feel myself plugging my 3DFX2 card into my Matrox Millenium II.
I've still got a Voodoo3 in a Pentium 3 machine. around here somewhere.
I thought these were images of Boston City Hall at first.
VR ports for many of the quake and doom series can be had here: https://github.com/DrBeef
As an old fan of both Quake and Brutalism, this is perfect.
The site seems to be getting hugged to death currently, though
I get simulator sickness :(
Archived: https://archive.ph/VKkYa
This is cool.
I'm trying to make a push to get richter/antiquake to compile to wasm. I think I can knock it out this month. I just want to host my own Slide Quake server on a Cloudflare worker.
Level design was my first contact with the development side of games, i remember spending a lot o time to make the most miserable and unplayable maps on valve hammer editor, to at one point have a map used in a zombie mode of a server on cs 1.6. Amazing to see these communities stil exists
Just wandering around the hub map is a freaky liminal space experience.
My favourite game, hands down. This pleases me immensely. Can’t wait to load RTX and these new maps.
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I love how level creation for games like Doom and Quake has developed into these small, independent scenes, with a rich community history and a real sense of taste and refinement in how they approach designing for these games. In the same way that "pixel art" has evolved from a necessity driven by the limits of early hardware, through early attempts to recreate a "retro" look, to the point where it is a well-developed aesthetic that is used as an informed choice.
It might sound a bit pretentious, but it really feels like the video games have begun to reach a point of maturity akin to older forms of art, where people are no longer fumbling around in the dark so much, or chasing the technological zeitgeist. Instead creators are consciously embracing and exploring different limitations and aesthetics, in the same way a painter might use different types of paint, with all these diverse styles and scenes, which are at once independent yet also informed by each other.