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.
If you download the jam, go into the "maps" folder and on the following url, https://sbuggay.github.io/bspview/ (1), use the "Load Map" button you can see a basic version (broken skyboxes) if you load a .bsp file.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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'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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
> 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
Wow! I love the way you phrased this, and your post in general. It put into words something I had struggled to express.
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
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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:
If you download the jam, go into the "maps" folder and on the following url, https://sbuggay.github.io/bspview/ (1), use the "Load Map" button you can see a basic version (broken skyboxes) if you load a .bsp file.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
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.
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.
https://transport.mos.ru/mostrans/all_news/117153
I also know https://www.halospawns.com/app used to have quake maps (dm6 at least), but can't find it now.
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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...
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.
The architecture and design in the game is the best brutalist work I've seen in a game.
(I never played the first Alan Wake but it’s not a hard requirement, there are recaps on YouTube)
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.
https://github.com/Antiquake-rs/antiquake-rs
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).
I'm inclined to grab a copy and see what's new, and jump online to find out just how rusty I am.
https://github.com/skullernet/q2pro
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.
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.
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?
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.
[1] https://archipelago.gg/
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.
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
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
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.
- Stalker GAMMA
- RLCraft
- Ashes 2063 series (A dooom total conversion mod)
- Quake Arcane Dimensions
- Kerbal space program realism overhaul
- Krastorio
- Morrowind refined
- Portal reloaded
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.
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.
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Graphically great and I had partially picked it up as a UE5 game that I was already interested in.
I reckon they used a lot of procedural (maybe AI?) tools to make all the meshes and texture them and so on.