I could be completely off, but here goes.

I think what American means when he says the monsters will have as many frames of animation as your computer can handle is this: Bascially, the artists will generate the "key" frames for the models to be animated with. But, if for example, it takes 1 second to get from frame A to frame B, and your computer is running at 30 FPS, the engine will automatically generate the 28 in-between frames. Thus, 1 frame per frame drawn.

Slipgate,
>I was wondering if you knew of any plans to add a shield to Quake 2?
>I'm not talking like your midevil metal shield,. I mean a power shield
>like in Dune. An item you could pick up that when switched on envelopes
>the player in this blocky transparent sheet. Imagine what that would
>look like in GL Quake. It could be used against engery weapons, the
>would just reflect off, maybe even back at the shooter. Things like the
>rail gun and such would pass through though. I guess this is more of a
>suggestion than a question, but maybe you know who to suggest it to.
>Thanks for your time.
>
>-Christopher aka Generic

Yes, there will be an energy shield in Q2. Chicks, too.

Before I talk about work stuff, I just wanted to say that I'll be the keynote speaker at the next Art Institute of Dallas graduating ceremony. It's the first type of function like this for me so I'll let you know how it goes.

Been working on the weapons for the game. They look pretty damn cool if I say so myself. Over the last couple days we've been able to get 5 weapons ready for the E3 show in Atlanta: hand-held blaster, machine gun, rail gun, chain gun and assault shotgun. I built and animated them while Adrian and Kevin did some really cool textures (I sneaked in a texture on the blaster!).

John did a kick-ass effect for when bolt or bullets hit a wall: particles fly in the opposite direction of the surface it hits. The technical term BTW for the direction a triangle or surface faces is "normal". For example when you "reverse" the "normals" on an object, whatever was facing OUT now faces IN. So what John did was to cause a stream of particles and smoke/explosion objects to emit in a direction OPPOSITE the normals of the surface being shot. Pretty fucking cool to see.

I've put hands back into the game as well and added little touches to the anims like the fingers tapping restlessly on the pistol grip when the player is isn't shooting.

All in all E3 will be the first taste of Quake2 gameplay for the general public. But after seeing the screen shots from other games over the past week, I have to say that any taste of Q2 will quickly lead to a feast!

Ps

p.s.
I received a lot of comments on the Crackwhore I gave to Xian to put up. I agree that just because she's my ideal cyber-babe, she may not be yours. Most of the comments I received were flattering, but most also had some hints of reservation about putting such a voluptuous "socially irresponsible" version of womanhood in Quake2. Please. I hope that the rest of you guys (and gals) who have a brain realize that that model was done as a break from dark monsters and as an indulgence of my "sex-starved, degenerate tendencies". It was also done as homage to the Crackwhore Clan. Rest assured the female character in Quake2 will be intelligent, witty, great at conversation, cleaning weapons and firing from a prone position. Just kidding. She'll like it on top and all the time.

ddodson wrote:
>
> Slipgate,
> I need to know if id is planning on including a GL version right
> into Quake2? I read somewhere that you will be able to start the game,
> and then choose to play standard 256 colors, or GL. Is this true?? Please
> get back to me. I went out and bought a Diamond Monster 3D just for
> Quake2. Thanks.
>
> Dan Dodson
> e-mail: ddodson@micro.honeywell.com
Quake 2 will be a single EXE, with normal, GL and Verite rendering built in, able to switch between the different render modes (though just like GLQuake.exe and Vquake.exe you only want to use the ones you can).

The game will have colored lighting built in and look best of all in GL mode, so your Diamond Monster 3D will help.

The lighting in Quake 2 is colored in that not only can lights be of any color, but if two different colors of light glow on something, there is full color mixing, and the object will shine the color it "should be". For example, if red and blue lights shine on a surface, it will look a bit purple :).

Normal mode Quake 2 will make all the lights plain white light like Quake 1.

Just imagine what your Monster 3D will be doing for you soon and drool :).

I'm glad you felt you could ask me this, feel free to send any more questions my way because I can either personally answer them or bring an id software guy to their attention.


--
Slipgate - AKA Ismail Saeed
mailto:isaeed@erols.com
The Fault Line - Quake 2 news: http://www.quakemania.com/faultline/
Includes Quake 2 FAQ.

Colored lighting in the GL version is amazing! It's used perfectly and not overdone. Walls by lava taken on the natural looking red glow of the molten liquid. It really ads to the atmosphere. I really hope eveyrbody has a GL capable card by then because it won't be nearly the same experience without one.

Your start weapon is a laser gun. You never run out of ammo, but the charge goes down if you hold the fire button and will go back up if you let go.

The rail gun. This is very much like the one in the movie eraser in how the projectile fires and looks. It goes through anything until it hits a wall. Tim blew through 3 guys lined up with one single shot and turned them to gibs. It was great. There's even an enemy with one, so you better watch out!

The Disintegrator gun. This was REALLY cool and I hope they decided to keep it in the game. It fired a sort of white plasma looking ball. The only difference was that instead of dynamically lighting things as it went, it dynamically DARKENED them, almost as if it was antimatter sucking up the light! Demonstrated on a monster, the bad guy starts to dissolve into ball like objects. Those that have seen the movie Lawnmower Man know what I'm talking about. You have to hit them a couple of times and then they just disappear, fading away more each time. If you just hit them once and stop, they will fade back in in a few seconds. You can also accidentally disintegrate yourself if you're not careful.

They mention a blackhole type weapon that used dynamic darkness also.

There were various other weapons. The weapons haven't all been decided on yet.

The monsters are so cool! There are a ton of different monsters now, none taken from Quake. They are much more detailed looking and the animation is much smoother.

The monsters are persistent bastards about following you. They'll follow you to hell and back given the opportunity. Running is not always an option either, as some of the monsters move at player speed.

The ducking from rockets is really cool! I saw at least one monster also dive to the ground to avoid getting hit!

There are a lot of monsters. I already saw more monsters than were in Quake 2 even though more are to come. I finally figured out what one of the dudes in the screenshots was. It was a hover dude and he looked great sitting there swaying gently back and forth a foot above the ground with his jets going. Apparently Paul Steed is a madman at cranking out monsters art/models so he is making it possible to have plenty of different types. There's even going to be hazardous indigenous life in various nooks and crannies. A killer turtle thing was mentioned (I like turtles, I want this in the game).

One of the monsters with sharp pointed arm (in screenshots I think) sat there when idle and would sharpen his arm and move his mouth when pointed sometimes. There was a medic monster that was kind of like an archvile from DOOM2. There are many more but I can't remember them all and they weren't all finished.

Tim showed me how you can hide in the shadows and make a noise and have a monster hear it, come out looking for you, not see you hiding, and then go back to what he was doing.

The radiation boxes, and other things are movable now and very integral to comleting the game in some cases.

Strategy will be much more important. Tim suggested that a Strategy guide for Quake 2 might actually be useful, unlike the ones for Quake.

Tim showed me quickly how you would go through the unit solving the puzzle ('goal') for each level to complete the unit objective.

The status bar is much less obtrusive now. I like the idea of seeing more of the game.

There was a fairly good sized gun turret that you went up to and sort of took over, aiming it and blowing away enemies as they came around the corner.

Well, that's all I can remember for now, but I wanted to share some of it right now.

June 16, 1997 (early AM)

This is too cool. I installed a 3Dfx Voodoo board in my Intergraph workstation, and the damn thing _worked_. Just when I was about to lost my faith in the PC, it comes back and does something unexpected (like working the way it's supposed to).

Anyway, I now have an Intergraph Realizm + 3Dfx Voodoo on my desktop, using a second monitor instead of a cheezy pass-through, and THIS, my friends, is the ultimate QuakeStation. Awesome for development, level editing, and playing. The only pain is that I have to keep creating/deleting the 3Dfx OPENGL32.DLL in the Quake2 directory.

Oh well, small price to pay for the best of both worlds.

June 15, 1997

Let me preface today's rant with a real quick disclaimer -- these complaints are directed at high end accelerators that implement the ENTIRE OpenGL pipeline in their drivers, so it is expected that they'll be buggy. Not only that, but since very few applications really thrash the hell out of an OGL driver implementation, bugs are expected. It is our intention that Quake2 and, maybe some time later, QE4, will be good OpenGL conformance tests.

Quick comment: a good "level editing" board implies someone is using QE4, but QE4 is only being used by id and our partners at this point in time. So our experiences looking for a good level editing are largely moot, but we're relaying the information anyway just to keep everyone informed, and also to keep IHVs on their toes. And just in case one of you psychos out there wants to write your own Quake editor with OpenGL, I figure talking about our experiences can't hurt.

Okay, now the fun part...

Jesus, the completely crappy drivers on high end OpenGL systems are just plain appalling. Today John and I attempted to get Quake2 and/or QE4 (our newer level editor) up and running on something other than the Realizm. Our two boards we had on hand were a Glint 500TX based board and a Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 102.

The 500TX wasn't that bad -- its fill rate was pretty abysmal, sure, but it still worked. It was missing some important features, such as tex- subimage, thus making it not the best board in the world. However, it is close to obsolete since the MX is supposed to be out from 3DLabs sometime soon, so it's sort of irrelevant. The MX looks interesting though.

We tried the Dynamic Pictures Oxygen102 again, and the results weren't, um, encouraging. We have a little game going now: "How fast can a new board give us the Blue Screen of Death under Windows NT?"

The Oxygen102 won.

We tried to run QE4 at a higher than supported resolution (the 102 we have only has 4MB) -- we tried it at 1280x1024 w/ Z-buffer, which should have caused the driver to fail during a wglCreateContext() call or something. *bzzt* We got the Blue Screen of Hate instead.

So we tried bumping the resolution down to 640x480. Well, QE4 killed the system again, this time for no apparent reason. And when we ran Quake2, it turns out their driver doesn't support texture objects and it reports a completely and utterly whacked out GL version string (they put in their driver version number, not the GL version number).

AND their drivers still require a reboot doing a resolution change, which is just completely inexcusable in today's world.

Anyway, we're going to try and get an Oxygen 202 or 402 to see if things get better with more RAM. Unfortunately, all this occured with the very latest driver revs. *sigh*

So as of today, the Intergraph Realizm looks like the best level editing graphics card, and the 3Dfx Voodoo is still the best game play accelerator out there. Which means that nothing's really changed in the past six months or so. *irk* For a low-end level editing card, a Permedia w/8MB or a Permedia2 /w 8MB might be the way to go -- just don't expect to run Quake2 or GLQuake on it. In the mid-range the Integraph Intense3D 1000 looks pretty cool too.

I'm going to check out some other boards pretty soon and will keep you folks up to date.

Have I mentioned I REALLY want the next crop of accelerators to show up?

I am sorry, Underground Aspect has shut down. Since I never really got anybody to my page ( maybe 15 people a day). I am not out of the Quake 2 business, I will be working on the telefragged.com site. To go there please click here.
Aspect ka8pyh@zoomnet.net

Ever since I've taken over the "webmaster@idsoftware.com" e-mail address, I've recieved a number of e-mails from concerned youth and parents about the satanic and demonic content of id's previous games (DOOM and Quake).

For the record, Quake II will have no demonic or satanic references. It is a pure cybertech sci-fi shooter set in the future.

Doubtful, but I agree that it would be cool to see different weapons in peoples' hands. The problem of course is data stored and speed, etc. If the program has to store every weapon within each player model, then it would not be possible. Maybe we could do a weapon class (i.e. BIG gun, normal gun and little gun) and swap out a weapon model for those classes. I'll talk to John and Kevin about it.

ps

>Mr. Steed,
>
>Thanks for asking my previous question!
>
>On Undernet IRC, American stated that the monsters in Quake 2 have as
>many frames of animation as one's system can handle. Is this true, and
>if so, how is this accomplished? If not, how many frames of animation
>do the monsters have?
>
>Thanks again!
>
>--
>Rotwang
>tloeschk@bmt.net

Rotwang,

I don't know exactly what American meant about the number of frames handled being dependent upon your system. He may have meant the frame interpolation which does work based on how powerful your machine is. Basically, all monsters in Q2 will have the following suite of animations:

- Stand
- Attack
- Walk
- Run
- Pain
- Defense
- Duck
- Death

Depending on the monster, there will be as many as three variations for each type of action above. Some monsters (like the TANK) will be too tough or too cool to duck or defend themselves so that type of animation won't be there. And there won't be too many variations of walk, run, defense and duck. So theoretically a monster could have up to say 15 or 16 different animations he could perform at any given time. Allowing for each animation averaging from 10 to 60 frames a monster could have a total of 600 frames of animation. So far, however, the basic grunt has the most frames, weighing in at about 350. This breaks the 256 frame barrier John set up in Quake and isn't really recommended due to the overall amount of memory required to store the data. This limitation is why companies like Valve have chosen to use skeletal deformation as opposed to the vertex deformation that we currently use. Of course we favor the latter because it gives us more control over the look of the model's final animation.

In Q2 Kevin and I have really tried to focus on giving as many versions of the more redundant actions that the monsters do as time permits. Actions like pain, death and standing anims are seen over and over and over, so it would be cool to see more variation there. Overall, the fans will love the power of the actions, especially the deaths. More powerful knock-backs, characters flipping end-over-end and an overall more realistic sense of WEIGHT is our main ambition when doing the character animations. You'll FEEL the impact of monsters flying back and slamming to the ground.

To increase speed and allow us to have even MORE monsters at any given time, John has put in a "level of detail" feature which allows far-off monsters to be represented by just a couple triangles and increases their number to maximum count when close-up. This should be available on the regular version of the game and not just GL Quake2. Hope that helped and answered your questions.

ps

Lets have another meeting on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday of this coming week. I'm more than positive we can finally get guys from Id Software to show up and people like blue, maybe we could get American to give us some more pics ( an avi would be nice heh). Non the less let me know, I plan to unveil the new permanent home of The Nebula and return it to its previous form with constant updates and such.

Best Regards,
Jon Ruff

>Mr. Steed,
>
>As I was looking through the Quake 2 screenshots, I noticed something
>curious. Are the monsters in Quake 2 modular? I've noticed the
>chicken-walker legs on two different monsters, and wondered if other
>monsters share similar apendages as well.
>
>Thank you for your time!
>
>Rotwang
>Quake News Informant
>tloeschk@bmt.net

Ben,
Whenever we make models we usually make the arms and any cyborg parts as seperate objects. This makes it easier to make skins for them and animate them. Also due to the extreme cybernetic nature of the bad guys in Q2, seperate parts are used to convey a sense of the mechanical.

ps

Well, while I was over at id Software yesterday American was kind enough to show me all the stuff that they will be giving a demo of at E3. My overall impression was "WOW, this place is HUGE" I mean, you look at the levels and they have this great feeling of grandness, like you get when you walk into a cathedral or the likes.. the texture work was outstanding, amazing they can do that stuff with just 256 colors to work with. He showed me a few of the new weapons, as well as about 5 monsters.. Those animated gifs on the web page don't do the monsters justice, they all seem to have multiple attacks, and are just plain freaking cool. And yea, that screen shot of a monster ducking under a rocket is a reality, American was firing rockets down the hall at one of the monsters and it was actually dodging / ducking under the rocket. uh... stuff that I observed:

- Weapons are slightly offset to the right, ala Duke3d.
- When you fire a weapon it actually moves around similar to when you fire that cool chain gun in Turok for the n64.
- Monster animations, wow.. they look so smooth...
- Colored lighting, they are using it everywhere, and not overboard either, just that feeling of real life color wherever you go.. adds a whole new feel to the game. No colored lighting in software, GL only.
- I'll give a much more in depth report, including some solid technical data when I pry into their souls at the Quake2 booth during E3 next week.

6/13/97
COOL! Was up on Quakecast talkin' smack about Q2. Had a good time and felt the interview went well. Those guys (and girl) seem like they're having a good time with the show. Kudos to them as well for some intelligent questions.

Speaking of which, I'd like to begin an education for the layperson in some of the terminology I'll be using as I talk about my work and techniques and stuff. Forgive me if I'm too basic, but I'll get more advanced as I go along. Let's first begin with the most basic terms in 3D graphics: "polygons", "faces" and "vertices". For those of you not familiar with these terms, let me walk you through a simple exercise. For this exercise you'll need a small, plain cardboard box, a ruler and a fat magic marker of a dark color. Grab the marker and make thick "dots" at each corner of the box. Then take the ruler and connect each dot so that each square side of the box has a diagonal line bisecting it. What you now have is a "polygon model" each triangle you see is a "face" and each dot is a "vertex" (more than one vertex is referred to as "vertices").

Now in the computer, vertices are drawn using the "cartesian coordinate system" That means as you hold your box and look at it, each vertex is represented in the space around you by a set of three numbers which line up on three "planes" or three "dimensions" called "x", "y" and "z" (hence the term "3D"). Bring your box up to your face and look at the front top right corner. This isn't necessarily the same for all programs but for example in ALIAS, the "vertex" behind the one your looking at is farther away on the "x" axis. The "vertex" to the left of the one you're looking at a lesser value along the "y" axis, and the "vertex" below the one you're still looking at would be at a lesser value along the "z" axis.

Thus we have a mathematical representation of any point in "space" that a computer can work out and "connect the dots" with a "face" that can be a color or have a picture drawn on it. Put a light above the box and you'll get shadows and/or reflection, etc.

So now you know when I say that the character models I'm working on have anywhere from 400 to 750 polygons (or "triangles" or "faces") and they're animated by "manipulating the vertices" then you know what the hell I'm talking about.

So let me just close with a quote from someone I've known for a long time, "Ouche-day ag-bay ay-say at-whay; You got somethin' to say BOY, you come out and SAY it." -Deets Luap

**********
6/11/97
Wow. Shocked would be an understatement when describing how I feel about all the responses I've gotten over my .plan. I just want to say one thing: You guys out there are totally COOL! Out of the 51 responses I received, 3 were flamers and the rest understood what my .plans were all about: id.

That's right. If you are a fan of id then you got the gist of my postings. BTW if you aren't a fan of id why are you reading this? I wasn't out to piss the guys off at any other company especially the ones in the "Dallas Gaming Community". I was out to proudly declare how cool id is and how cool it is to work here. Jeff was right about my devotion to family and friends. Well id's part of my family now and I'll always defend my own when it comes to it.

And for you "PEDophile bitch"-calling dudes who think I'm consumed with myself consider this: I am a total fan of id's. Always have been. I'm just like any one of you out there who has had this really cool thought, "What if I were at id? Wouldn't that be fucking cool?!" Well it is and I'll strive in the future to stay off my soapbox and stick to the point of these apparently high profile mind dumps: Keep telling you how cool id is.

ps
p.s.
The reason why I deleted my previous .plannage is because it was just too friggin' big. I still stand by my previous words but wish the guys at IS (especially the artists) hadn't taken it the wrong way. I completely thought their stuff ROCKED when I visited (and still do). And as far as Jeff goes, who turned him on to the job there in the first place?

Well, I have to admit that the response to my .plan file was more than I expected. Everyone's comments were great and I tried to respond to as many as I could. If I haven't responded to yours yet, I plan to (er, no pun).

Just wanted to drop a quick line about myself for those curious since my first one was pretty technical and after a re-reading pretty boring as well. Basically I got into the computer gaming field after being born in Alliance, Ohio, attending 22 public schools spanning 5 states, joining the Air Force and spending nearly six years in Europe (Iceland, England, and Germany mostly along with every other in between).

I made an name for myself at Origin down in Austin, TX (Strike Commander, Privateer, Wings of Glory, Wing Commander Academy, Bioforge, Wing Commander III, Wing IV) and after several start-up company abortions moved on to Iguana Entertainment, also in Austin. Iguana got old pretty fast (spent time around Cyrus Lum for awhile, though). Next, I went to California and worked on a "Wing Commander on Wheels" game called Propaganda at Virgin Interactive's in-house development effort (later re-named, "BURST" if you can believe that). While I was the art director on that project I got a call from a headhunter wanting to know if I'd be interested in showing the guys at id my reel.

I immediately thought it was a joke: "Yeah, right." (At that point id was without a doubt the Camelot of gaming to me and the reverence with which I held the company and its elite members still holds today (tear wipe, sniffle, sniffle). So anyways the guy convinces me he's legit and I send id my one and only ORIGINAL cut of my demo reel I made several years ago (have since gone strictly to CD to show my stuff). I was THAT determined to get my foot in the door. Well id never even looked at my reel. By the time they got it they had decided to make an offer to someone (someone whom I vowed to have hunted down and his second and third finger of his mouse hand broken).

Well needless to say I WAS BUMMED. There goes my reel, there goes my one shot at the only company for which I'd give up an art director position on a high profile game. BUT as the head hunter placatingly adds, there's always the possibility that the guy will turn down the creators of DOOM and QUAKE. I wanted to hit the patronizing moron. Who in their right mind would turn down id?Well the guy turned 'em down. Amazed yet not really surprised (id knew that I was the ONE...er, well maybe I knew I was the one), I was flown to Mesquite and interviewed with Kevin and Adrian.

Just to illustrate how cool these guys are I'll just tell you about one aspect of the interview. When it was decided that they wanted to hire me, they dropped the question dreaded by all and feared by most: "How much would it take to get you here?" Hearing the words from my pilot-fish-for-a-recruiter, "Don't talk money!" I said fuck it and mumbled, "pay me what I'm making now and I'll be here tomorrow." There. It was done. No bargaining. No protracted rumination. Just say it. There was a pause and then Kevin says, "Well, Adrian and I have to discuss this," and they both walked out of the room. HOLY SHIT! I just blew it! I should have asked for minimum wage or something. Geesh! I'm such an IDOT! So again to illustrate how far they're up the cool meter, they came back in and offered me substantially MORE than what I was making in California. That was the third time I was completely FLOORED speechless in my entire life ( the birth of my son, the surprise shower thrown for me at Origin for the birth of my daughter) I had to ask them to repeat it and then mustered every erg of self control not to jump around and whoop and yell. Any other employer would have said, "Cool, let's do what he says and match his current salary."

So since then the rest has been a roller coaster ride and has been unequivocally the best thing that has ever happened to me during my 32 years of life - besides the first time I got laid, or married or kids. But you know what? It only...gets...better.

I might add an SMP rendering module to quake 2, depending on time constriants. I have the framework set up, but it would still take me a day or two.

LostReality luvs Sniper
I AM A GENIUS!!!!

Well, I got 17 of Gateway's teasers (so far), so at least according to that test I am!!

Update:
Jim, that makes you a genius too; that scoring system is rather binary ;-) I guess you're just a genius who had more time; I stopped when I hit 17.

Oh yeah, sCary... I did it myself. You've been hanging around Bob too much, ya cheatin' bastard! ;-)

0 = Number of people who give a D about our "scores".



And now back to the real world...

This .plan file has not been set up by its owner yet. He or she might want to do something like this:

Work: <972 613-3589 x.50>
Home:
Office Location: id
Basic schedule:

Well it's about time I got with the program and made an entry here. Since I just got back from the 3D Design conference in San Francisco, I'd like to start with some views and opinions on a couple of art tools, mainly Lightwave and 3DSMAX.

First I'd like to say that 3DSMAX is my main choice for cinematic animation. I'm slowly moving to it for low-poly modeling as well, but for now I model in that old dinosaur, 3DS4. Since I'm fortunate to have no budgetary constraints or fiscally anal supervisors holding me back I have three machines at work and three machines at home which combined run the programs I use on a daily basis:

3DS4
All kinds of external plug-ins for 3DS4
Animator Pro
Alias Power Animator 8.0
3DSMAX
A plethora of 3DSMAX Plug-ins
Photoshop

Recently I paid a visit to Ion Storm and was shown Lightwave by a couple artists there. I was impressed with how proficient and devoted they were to the program, and even considered buying a copy of it. However, after doing some research and attending the 3D Design Conference, it became apparent to me that MAX is definitely THE NT program to stick with. Why? Two reasons: support and longevity.

Lightwave doesn't have one tenth the support MAX has in terms of people developing for it or maintaining it. I also have a gut feeling that Lightwave won't be around for very much longer in its current form. With companies like Alias and Softimage going to NT, Lightwave will have to add quite a bit more to its versatility and functionality to keep up.

The only thing Lightwave has going for it is COST. It is a relatively inexpensive program. If you're a smaller company or start-up company like Ion Storm who can't afford the higher end tools or if your artists can't really grok the more complex programs like Alias and MAX, then Lightwave is probably best for you. One turn-off in particular I noticed with the program is that it can't save out the meshes the way they need to be saved out for the Quake engine. Alias does with no problems (MAX doesn't, either, though.)

Another thing that bugs me about Lightwave is that I didn't see any cool animations done with the models. The guys at the aforementioned company are modeling up a storm, but in order to be an effective modeller in our genre one needs to be animating or understand how the model will be animated. Jeff Wand showed me a pretty decent spider but the joints didn't seem to have enough faces to support movement. Maybe this is due to Jeff's lack of animating experience, but I hope the hoops the guys at Ion Storm will have to go through to get their models in the game won't be too time-consuming. If geometry has to be added to help support movement, then the model has to be re-saved and re-grabbed by the software. Again, Alias is great at animating characters and giving the most amount of control over vertices and general mesh deformation for low-poly animations.

Eventually, I'll be doing everything in Alias once I find the time to devote training in that, but for now I'm happy looking at my three 21" monitors using a variety of programs to get the job done.

So I guess I'll get back to work finishing up the player weapons for Quake2. And let me close by saying that I know that everyone is going to be very very surprised and very, very, VERY pleased with the follow-up to Quake. Once again, id will brush away the competition with no talk, no over-blown media hype, no egos and no bullshit. We will simply let the game speak for itself. And you know what it says? It says "WE ARE GONNA KICK SOME F@#$ING ASS!"

Prepare yourself.

Time2Quake (http://www.time2quake.com) is proud to announce the official launch of our sister site Quake2.com (http://www.quake2.com)

Our Quake2 news section is in the very capable hands of Spam[69], formerly
of the Quake II Headquarters news site. You can always find the latest and
greatest on the eagerly awaited Quake2......just a sec......this just in:

We recently got some info from John Carmack about .dll's and Quake 2.
Here's the mail:

> Will the source code be c or c++?

-C

> I realize your using msvc but will the source have anything msvc
> specific, IOW, how hard will it be to port to another win32
> compiler?

-We will use VC++, but it should be pure ANSI, compilable with the win32 gcc port.

> Will this change anything concernig net play, like will both client
> and server always have to be running the patch or would only the server
> need it, like it is now?

-I don't think I am going to do client side DLL's, but that could possibly
change.

> Oh, you might want to let people know about lcc-win32, its a freeware win32
> compiler w/ source code and its all in a 1.4 meg zip. This would be great
> for people who cant afford a comercial compiler. its at

-I like LCC, I ported it to the jaguar's risc chips a few years ago.
-If someone writes a dll tool for it, that should be a fine compiler to
use, and
-it wouldn't require all the bulk of gcc.

-John Carmack

Check back often!! Quake2.com, your one stop shopping experience for all
that is now and is to be Quake2.

Figin
http://www.time2quake.com

since you were asking JC about radiosity lighting you might find the following link interesting:

http://www.garymct.com/

Quaker Joltmeal is no more. I will be concentrating on game design and
programming for the whole summer.
It's possible I may return in a few months with a whole new news page, but
as of now - I have other plans.

<----------------------------------->
|Thanks to those of you who visited,|
|and those who sent me feedback. =) |
<----------------------------------->

erraticAvoid (neilr@nsis.com)

Somebody (who was unaffiliated with the page) announced a couple days ago that Wampey's Censuses had been updated. That report was untrue.

Wampey's Censuses has NOW been updated with new questions (including the important issue of best 1st-person game of all time), results, and responses.)

The results about having a female quake character in Quake II are up. The people want her.

http://www.planetquake.com/census/

Thanks,
Digital Savior

> Dear Mr. Carmack,
>
> I've come to wonder exactly how much the BSP format of Quake is
> changing in the work you are doing....... You've made several
> finger updates (including your latest one) about changes to the BSP
> format and more robustness in the engine.
>
> My first question is about the limitations of the BSP in Quake 1. I
> know that QBSP only compiled maps with 4096 or less brushes, and
> although I have asked many serious level writers (including members
> of Hipnotic) I have never gotten an answer to this question: Is
> 4096 brushes a limitation of the Quake 1 engine or is it just a
> limitation plugged in QBSP? If QBSP would compile BSPs with more
> brushes, would they run in Quake 1? If not, will this 4096 brush
> limitation be bumped up to something higher in Quake 2?

The brush limit is arbitrary, you could increase it and quake 1 maps would still work. There are a couple 16 bit limits in the file format that cannot be increased, though. I removed some of those in quake 2.

> About engine improvements: Right now Quake's engine only supports
> individual concave solids, for convex shapes you use multiple
> concave solids. Is one of the improvements you are working on the
> ability to have convex solids? If the 4096 solid limit is still in
> place, this would allow more complex maps than Quake 1 did (because
> a room could be 1 solid instead of 6)

Concave solids are best represented as unions of convex solids.

> When you say QRAD is radiosity lighting, I understand dynamic
> aspects like the shadow of a block moving along with the block
> instead of being stationary, but what else does radiosity exactly
> mean?

Qrad doesn't have anything to do with dynamic lighting, it deals with light bouncing off of all surfaces, instead of just coming from lights.

> My second question regards MAP writing. Is basic map writing going
> to remain the same (brushes descibed with numeric matrices,
> entities classname and spawnflags) with just a different set of
> entities being the standard?

Basically.

> For colored lighting: I am ASSUMING colored lighting is
> available..... if not, set me straight :). My question is how a
> person can dictate the color of a light in writing a map, is it
> something akin to a new "color" spawnflag on the light_*
> classnames? For light in Quake, when the light coming from two
> light_ entities collide their basic brightness (at least how much
> of it is left as it has been dissapating) is mixed to some
> degree..... I'm not sure if the actual intensity of the light is
> mixed.... will color "mixing" be present? For example, if yellow
> and blue light both shine on an object in an area, will that glow
> faintly greenish?

You can specify rgb values for lights. Full color mixing is supported.

> Will colored lighting be available to those playing Quake 2 in
> standard (non GL, non Verite) mode? Exactly what as you see it now
> will be the visual advantages to Quake 2 GL over standard and Quake
> 2 Verite over standard? Are you moving most currently GLQuake only
> features over to be available in standard also (like colored
> lighting)?

No, it is only in the GL version. Other versions will use mono lighting.

> My last question...... will Quake 2 in standard mode be 256 color
> graphics or 16 bit?

It is 256 color.

John Carmack

Quake, Quake 2, and the stylized are registered trademarks of id Software, Inc.