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Posted by davemckay1 [81.134.152.69] on 2010/09/06 17:37:30

All,
Earlier this year I discussed the development of a new Quake site on func_msgboard in the thread:
http://www.celephais.net/board/vie...
I'm pleased to announce that it's finally online at:
http://bit7.org/quake
The site covers all games in the Quake series, but it's primary focus is Quake I and Quake III / Quake Live.
I had to cut down a lot of content in order to get the site online and decided simply to cut anything that wasn't finished in order to do this, so if anyone notices anything amiss or broken please let me know. The site includes a fairly large mirrors section (http://bit7.org/quake/mirrors) and I haven't been able to get the contact details for all of the sites hosted there, so if anyone knows those of any of the site authors please post a note here.
Lastly, I'd also like to expand the map reviews section of the site, (http://bit7.org/quake/maps), so if you'd like to contribute or suggest a review of one of your favourite maps.
Kind regards and hope you enjoy the site,
David.

Woot
#1 posted by Vondur [195.218.191.171] on 2010/09/07 13:17:45
nice site!
though, a pity you use wrong textures on your quake 1 map screens. they look awful, to say the least.
Feedback
#2 posted by davemckay1 [81.134.152.69] on 2010/09/07 14:38:56
Thanks for the kind comments on the site. About the textures, I've used the quake retexturing project, starbuck's debaser textures in the ezquake engine for the screenshots. I'm aware of darkplaces, tenebrae, quake reforged and all the others, but think they detract too much from the original atmosphere of the game. Which would you consider the right ones?
Best Regards,
David.
#3 posted by onetruepurple [89.77.120.196] on 2010/09/07 14:43:38
Which would you consider the right ones?
The original low-res ones :)
There's a lot of effort put into that website, great work. This is the sort of thing that planetquake should have had but never happened.
Yep
#4 posted by Vondur [195.218.191.171] on 2010/09/07 15:04:00
original textures are the best i'd say. also u got kinda big fov there, i'd say maybe lower it a bit to 100 or something.
Looks Good
#5 posted by dfsp_spirit [92.228.57.242] on 2010/09/07 15:11:33
The site looks pretty cool and it seems like you put lots of work into it. Good job!
(I'm not sure if you need Q3 custom map reviews btw. We already have LvL which is a great Q3 custom map website.)
FOV / Textures
#6 posted by davemckay1 [81.134.152.69] on 2010/09/07 16:20:20
I'm kind of surprised everyone suggested the low-res textures over the updated versions. The original plan for the site was to have a widescreen and thinscreen view, with each page outfitted with alternate image sets accordingly, but this was put aside for the moment in order to get things online. The FOV of the images is not particularly high, but they are taken in windowed mode at odd resolutions and trimmed down, you can see some of the widescreen versions for comparison here:
http://bit7.org/quake/maps/quake/e...
http://bit7.org/quake/maps/quake/e...
or
http://bit7.org/quake/maps/quakeli...
http://bit7.org/quake/maps/quakeli...
Nice Work Dave
#7 posted by starbuck [92.236.80.129] on 2010/09/07 17:07:24
some of the the pictures look like they've been stretched horizontally more than vondur's mom. I think the letterboxed screenshots are a good idea though, if you frame them as nicely as you did in that first shot.
Pretty site, looking forward to seeing more. The maps pages are interesting - more interesting is that I still don't know half this shit after playing this game for 12 years. Only visual gripe is using that monospace font for body text, but it won't keep me awake at night.
Maybe I'm getting old, but i didn't recognise my textures in the screenshots. I appreciated the namedrop though, it helped my low self-esteem issues greatly.
More Responses
#8 posted by davemckay1 [81.134.152.69] on 2010/09/07 18:26:02
About whether to cover Q3A/Quake Live maps on the site, I know that nothing of this kind could become greater than LvL in terms of the sheer quantity of maps reviewed and comments available. The goal of the reviews section is to showcase some of the best levels available and provide background info, developer commentary and other intesting info on the game design.
As I said if anyone would be interested in contributing a review of one of their favourites, or a second opinion on one of the reviews already present, I'd appreciate it.
Font(size)
#9 posted by megalodonNL [85.146.84.169] on 2010/09/08 03:17:03
Don't know if it's been mentioned already (too tired to read back), but I find the text on the game info pages difficult to read.
Further: nice efforts!
Agree
#10 posted by ijed [190.22.28.152] on 2010/09/08 03:34:21
The white/grey texture could end before the text starts, becoming black.
Nice site :)
Backgrounds
#11 posted by davemckay1 [81.134.152.69] on 2010/09/08 11:42:36
Thanks for the continued feedback, a few people have added some comments about the background loading, for some reason I haven't chosen a background colour for the pages, so will be updating that so it will display as black while it loads, hopefully this will fix the problem. I'm not sure why it's so slow to load in IE, I've done most of the development and testing in Opera and Chrome.
#12 posted by metlslime [159.153.4.50] on 2010/09/08 20:07:39
how about compressing the image so it isn't 1mb in size? You could also make it 1/2 the current height and just fix it so it tiles seamlessly.
Funny
#13 posted by Megazoid [78.32.145.101] on 2010/09/09 01:09:26
I can't see how you can say your mirrored content "has since become unavailable elsewhere". Since you ripped Tresh's Quake Bible directly from my site, you must have been aware that my site was still... available.
Having had my childish moan, I have to say I'm all in favor of mirroring, and a lot of my content was also erm, "mirrored". I just happen to have done it 10 years ago. Buggered if I asked anybody's permission either. F*ck um, if it's on the Internet, it's free. ^^
Responses To Metlslime And Megazoid
#14 posted by davemckay1 [88.104.12.179] on 2010/09/09 13:59:13
About the background images, it's obviously more of a problem for some users than I anticipated, so I'll have to think about how to update the site to work around this.
As far as the mirrors section goes, I wrote the description before I put much of the content together, and could probably do with updating it a little.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Update
#15 posted by davemckay1 [88.104.11.100] on 2010/09/11 16:37:18
I won't post every update here, but I've added a review of CT3DM5, as recently announced on this forum. It's online at:
http://bit7.org/quake/maps/quake3/...
Nice Site You Have Got There
#16 posted by Ankh [88.199.103.6] on 2010/09/14 21:20:00
So how about making the quake pre-release version available now?
I love the map reviews with all the background information. You are a really big fan of the game to have all this stuff.
Just read about beyond belief:
http://bit7.org/quake/maps/quake/b...
Yeah
#17 posted by nitin [203.202.43.53] on 2010/09/15 06:05:55
all the reviews seem more informational than usual which is actually quite useful IMHO.
Lol
#18 posted by negke [88.70.236.245] on 2010/09/15 10:35:56
A detailed review of a start map?! Surely the best part of the whole episode...
Reviews
#19 posted by davemckay1 [81.134.152.69] on 2010/09/15 14:46:52
Thanks for the kind comments on the reviews. I've got a very large number of partially finished reviews that need cleaning up and finishing off, so hope to be adding more soon. As I said if anyone wants to contribute a review of one of their favourites or has some information they think may be relevant, please send an email along to info@bit7.org.
I added the reviews of the start maps by way of finishing this page:
http://bit7.org/quake/maps/quake/s...
Linking to all maps (that I'm aware of, named 'start'). As I mentioned above, reviews of the other bbelief*, rogue and hipnotic maps are all started, but not ready to be published yet.
I Like Your Website, It Looks Very Professional
#20 posted by RickyT23 [86.142.195.34] on 2010/09/16 12:59:54
2 points:
1 - The screenshots seem a little dark on my monitor. I would increase the brightness and contrast of them by just a tiny margin.
2 - You are using some nice hires textures. And a nice engine (Darkplaces I think?)
If you are gonna use the hires textures (with normalmaps etc) you might as well turn the eyecandy on. Type the following commands into the console (or just paste them in, Darkplaces will let you do that):
r_glsl_offsetmapping 1
r_glsl_offsetmapping_reliefmapping 1
this gives a parralax effect, which is like STALKER or Crysis HQ style. Good for screenies :)
There are people here who will crucify me for suggesting this (like the purists who suggest using the original textures), but the way I see it is that you might as well go all the way if you are gonna use the modern hires sets. There is always this set of textures, too:
http://games.on.net/file/14291/Ryg...
Screenshots And Engines
#21 posted by davemckay1 [81.134.152.69] on 2010/09/16 15:17:49
It seems that there's no consensus on the best form for screenshots. Part of the reason I haven't added any of the Quake2 reviews yet is that I was unable to get any of the modern engine / graphics packs to work correctly and consistently (missing textures on items, crashes, etc).
In response to Ricky723, although the screens look fine on the monitor I designed the site on I've since seen it on laptops and can understand what you mean. The current Q1 screenshot set was taken in ezQuake, not Darkplaces. As I said earlier in this thread, I've chosen ezQuake as it most closely resembles the original game in comparison to the other new engines available. The work the designers have done on the other projects is impressive, but doesn't feel like Quake to me.
ezQuake is what I imagine GLQuake would have become if id had continued to develop it over the years, and texture sets like those from the Quake retexturing project provide high-res versions of the originals, rather than re-interpretations. Whenever you read the comments on an ultra high-res model, or texture, the most common one seems to be 'that's not how I imagined it would look' - surely one of the toughest challenges for anyone looking to create updated versions.
It's a shame that so many different texture packs, model sets and branches of the engines have appeared, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and without enough co-ordination between the authors involved. Rather than four or five different versions of the same model/texture for each engine and another five available elsewhere online, for example, I would much prefer to play a game where, no matter how highly detailed, every Rottweiler (or Grunt, or doorway, etc) didn't look exactly the same, but open source style projects always suffer from these kinds of problems.

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