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Well, what more is there to say about Quake? I love 'im like a son. And I have some great memories of his birth, of his growing up, out in the world. All the LAN parties, all the levels, all the demos and speed-running contests and challenges... it's been a great 5 years for good ole Quake. So good, in fact, that he got two brothers: Quake II and Quake III, who made their own way in the world; established their own unique identities and accomplished their own goals. But to me, there's just something about Quake 1, the original, that keeps pulling me back into its dark embrace. I think... it's the rawness, the edgy violence and the unsettling, menagerie of wild creatures we pulled from the nethercore of our mind's eye and then placed among the tattered ruins and ancient walkways of Quake's wind-blown crevices and scenic vistas. Creating those fantastic and impossible environments was a challenge from the very beginning. We were accustomed to having the editor, or at least the graphics engine, take care of such trivial things as connecting walls to floors, evenly lighting entire rooms, and making it easy to create doors and doorways. That was the familiar universe of our baby, DOOM. We were in the new universe of Quake, where once again we were inventing our own rules and trying to play by them, or at least create by them. It took a while to get used to the freedom of creation in the new engine and to get the right feel for scale and space. Countless maps were worked on and discarded. I remember many maps that I thought were going to turn out great, but just didn't make the cut in the end. I wish I had copies of those old guys -- I spent a lot of time in them, thinking about them during their creation, learning how to create spaces with them. Really, the only visible remnant of my early, slightly-off perception of Quake-space is in e2m6, The Dismal Oubliette. In the area where you take the elevator through the three floors, the hallways are very cramped and dangerous -- I didn't have the right scale in there and didn't have time to correct it before release, but I knew it was wrong. Ah, well. A defective gene was left in, but it's not the only one, thankfully. For a long time now, I've kept one remnant of Quake's creation that I had to cut out. It's the Lost Entrance of the Dismal Oubliette. Yes, there used to be a much more interesting beginning to that area of Quake, but I had to amputate the guy and cauterize the wound into its current state, the starting point of e2m6. I remember spending many hours trying to get it just right, to create the feeling of an awful, cavernous pit for the player to get out of and into the real horror of the Oubliette. It added a nice bit of gameplay time and I'm sorry that it had to go, but we set the .BSP file size at 1.4Mb and had to be strict about it. But today, on Quake's 5th Birthday, I will give you a personal piece of Quake's creation that I treasure. Be careful with it, it's fragile and one of a kind and was created back in the mists of time around QTest's release. I've named the map E2M10.BSP and am including the E2M10.MAP that chronicles its creation. Looking closely at the .map file will reveal some long-lost entities that we had in Quake and I'm not sure if I even remember what they did...
e2m10.zip Unzip all the files in your quake\id1\maps directory, run Quake, pull up the console and type map e2m10 and spend a little time in a creation that was destined for release, but didn't make the cut. First off, I must say HAPPY 5TH BIRTHDAY, QUAKE! And with this birthday yell, I'm not only directing it toward the game Quake but to everyone who has ever been involved in playing Quake until their eyes fuzzed over, who ever spent days deathmatching on a LAN or over the Net, to all the creative people who worked hard on their mods, levels, models and textures..... this birthday is for everyone who really cared about Quake. Later, I might post something from Quake's development that at least I find interesting. Might be around midnight or so. :) An astute site reader and Dangerous Dave historian from the Netherlands, Frenkel Smeijers, emailed me and corrected my Dave history -- I had quite mistakenly omitted the Dangerous Dave in "Copyright Infringement" entry! And what an important entry it was: it marked the beginning of id Software. I expanded more of the information in that section and added more pictures, so you might want to check it out again.
I have a few Article links to check out (way more coming soon), several recommended Resources for my games, a few Walkthroughs (send me links if you find any more good ones), and the Downloads pull-down doesn't do anything yet (I'll get to it!) I just got back from E3 on Monday, so my next update will post some info about that experience! Oh yeah, Asia Carrera is a huge Unreal Tournament fan and she got a picture taken with my bud Cliffy... check it out right here. About the site update: If you see any mistakes or have some good suggestions for content or other sections, click on the Email Me link above and tell me what you think! If you don't like this site, then PLEASE get the hell outta here and don't email me about it because I immediately delete those emails. :)
Also, each of the Apple II games will be downloadable and runnable, but right
now there's no links to those files; there will be in the future, so cool
down. Here's to hoping everyone won't have a problem with the Flash
menus or the minimum amount of Game content!
just replaced ZDOOM on my desktop for my favorite flava of DOOMage. It's amazing the amount of features they've packed into this thing: full 3D view (just like all 3D games today), excellent client/server architecture that supports hopping in and out of games, CD audio, very simple interface for launching multiplayer games, WADs, mods, etc. Excellent lighting effects on all the fires and lights in the game..... mouselooking and shooting rockets with a crosshair for aiming.....there's just too much good stuff in Legacy DOOM -- go get it.
The first hint that I didn't know everything I should know was when I asked the sales guy for 256Mb of RDRAM. He told me I had to buy 2-128Mb sticks because the RAM has to be doubled. Wow, I thought that idea went out in the late 80's. Okay, so I bought two sticks, which ended up being more expensive than one stick of 256Mb RDRAM and it was even more expensive than the P4 itself! So, I get home all excited to upgrade (because I like that sort of thing!) and after doing everything, I turn the power on and.... nothing. Then I see this piece of paper with blue ink on it that came with the motherboard and it tells me that I need a special P4 power supply (the ATX12V). Uh. This is the first time since the PC was introduced that the power supply changed. There's 3 power plugs: one for the P4, one for the heatsinked chipset, and one for the motherboard and peripherals. Geez. Next day, I go and get the power supply, get home, install it, and ... nothing. I figure it's the motherboard because I'm not even getting POST error codes. So I wait another day because Fry's is closed. I exchange the motherboard, bring it home, do the complete replacement of everything again, and turn it on. Nothing. What the hell. I've pretty much had it -- I'm taking the machine to Fry's and have them figure it out. Took the machine to Fry's and find out that I made a pretty dumb mistake first off by not paying strict close attention to the placement of the jumpers for POWER LED and POWER SW. From my case, the POWER LED jumper has three slots with a wire in slot one and one in slot three. So, common sense-wise I thought I was putting the jumper on correctly, but the 850i motherboard only takes two prongs for the POWER LED, so my jumper had to have one slot hanging off the edge of the jumper bank. The incorrect placement of the POWER LED made the POWER SW jumper be off by one slot so there was no way I could get power to the motherboard. Lame. The other problem was some mysterious grounding problem. The tech there didn't know where the grounding problem was located so he just took everything out of the machine and put it back in after verifying that all the components that I bought worked correctly. Then my machine would turn on, but give a boot error when Windows 2000 loaded. The tech said that because the P4 architecture is so different, I would need to do a complete rebuild of the OS -- it wouldn't just auto-install all the low-level motherboard drivers as expected. I buy another 40Gb hard drive. I get home to install Windows 2000 and everything goes great with it, except for the fact that I had to install it in the first place. Then, I install my new Radeon 64Mb DDR video card. Doesnt' work. The drivers are dated from September 2000, so my guess is that they were written without the new P4 architecture in mind. I download the latest drivers (10Mb ) and install them and finally the system works perfectly. Let me just say this: the Radeon is amazing. The 64Mb DDR will display 2048x1536 in 32-bit @ 75hz (and every single resolution below that, of course). Then, I experience 1.5Ghz speed. Whoa. It's more than twice as fast as the 800Mhz PC I was used to. I love it and can't wait to try out all the games again with the Radeon at 1.5Ghz! Time to upgrade Stevie's machine too! Cool things about the P4: Hibernate works great with Windows 2000; booting up the 850i motherboard is cool because all the bootup text is hidden and a full-screen P4 graphic is shown; booting the machine is ultra-fast!
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News Archive 05/12/2001 - 06/27/2001 News Archive 11/2000 - 05/07/2001 News Archive 07/2000 - 10/2000 This
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