Category Archives: Quake

Quake’s Original Map Order

John Romero recently shared the original sequence of maps for Quake, as of March 26th 1996, using the internal file names. It revealed a different structure to how we think of the game. Where the final release is four distinct episodes with separate entrances from start.bsp, where episode one is a cross section of maps and styles, with the remaining episodes being primarily owned by a particular mapper and of just one theme, we now can see an earlier and different beast: There was no start map, and the game led with all of the base maps, before going through the themes of medieval, metal, wizard, and elder. Sure that sequence is familiar enough, but as I’ve covered before, Quake has a rhythm, where Doom has a flow. The interrupts of the base maps at the beginning of each episode lends itself to that rhythm. This original structure flows, more like Doom. Below you can see the full plan, and my write-up of how the sequence would go using the final file names, with the reference having been graciously provided by John.
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Quake and Doom’s Mechanics

So sock, level designer extraordinaire, had a tweet which triggered some interesting discussion:

I didn’t directly participate, as on this subject I find Twitter’s character limit to be too restrictive. Jehar and negke jumped in with thoughts, but I figured I would share mine here. At a glance Doom and Quake seem to be similar games. First person shooters made by largely the same team, and with the same key people of Romero, Carmack, and Petersen at the helm. But they have many fundamental differences, such that I find it hard to articulate it succinctly. As negke has dubbed me a master of verbosity, I shall do my best to live up to that. Continue reading →

Quake Map Jam 3 Post-Mortem

Note: This post was written before the pack was released, so I’m far more embarrassed as to the map’s quality now than I was when this was written.

I’ve been rather quiet for a number of reasons, but a big one was my participation in the Quake community map jam. This is the third like it, and it used a Zerstorer theme. Being so inexperienced in the ways of mapping, and a huge fan of the mod Zerstorer, this appealed to me as there is room for brutalist architecture in a Zerstorer theme.

quakespasm 2014-10-30 20-10-53-37

By brutalist architecture, I mean low skill. So I pounced on it. I am rather proud of the fact that despite its numerous problems, the small scale, the features cut, and having ~1/4th the detail level I would like, that I still completed it. It is a titled level which you can play from start to finish, with themes, traps, secrets, and little bits to it. So this is kind of a post-mortem, but since I mostly did things wrong, it functions more as a list of things I need to do next time. I probably won’t do another map jam because though the deadline kept me motivated, it also put some stress on my family life. Sure a Quake map was part of my “bucket list” (or backpack list for Quake), so we pushed through knowing the deadline, but in the future any mapping will be likely on my own timeline. I.e., over months, rather than weeks.

So all that being said, Continue reading →

How My Quake Looks

This was requested by onetruepurple in a thread about replacement textures and remakes of older game content with skacky and Daz. This is how Quake looks for me, 1680x1050x32 with the original textures, original lightmaps, realtime shadowmaps from dlights and the world, and a little bit of bloom. I am using a recent release of the DarkPlaces engine by my good friend LordHavoc.

I might do another post later on about the significance of art design, and how games age. You may have noticed that this post got its own category called Quake. Quake is an exception to me, it stands above all other games for a variety of reasons, and I do hope to showcase the game periodically on this blog.