Wanton Hubris

Remember Quake? I mean the original. The one that ran in 640×480 if you had a kick ass machine? The one that had real time lighting on the rockets and we thought that was jaw droppingly bad ass? Yeah, that one.

I got to thinking about it the other day and thought I’d see if anyone had ported it to the Mac since id Software released the source code all those years ago. Sure enough, someone had! OK, so I had the executables. I needed data. I installed it on my PC (I still have my original CD, natch) and copied the data from there to my Mac. Bingo! Quake running on my Mac.

Now my curiosity was truly tingling. Are there any level editing tools on the Mac? I started looking around and while they were tough to find, I did manage to score a ported set of compiling tools here. These aren’t perfect in that they munge path names pretty badly and you have to put WAD files and things in directories that you don’t really want to but, hey, at least they work.

Then I went hunting for a MAP file to compile. Much to my surprise, John Romero released them all! Yes, every MAP file from the original Quake.

With that in hand, I still needed a decent WAD file to compile the MAPs against. I found what I believe to be the last one in existence here (scroll down to the “quake.wad” download).

And it all works! There are a few missing textures here and there and the tools aren’t the current versions so, yes, there are a few maps that compile into states that Quake won’t load but fuck it - it works!

I’ve been playing the game over the weekend and really enjoying being back in that place. Quake was where I really got started doing level design and it’s where the seeds of my professional career were planted. I’m going to stay in this world for a bit. I like it here.

I took a browse through my server stats for the last few months and in the 2 1/2 months that ‘Shooter in the Abstract‘ has been available it’s been downloaded 7,906 times. That’s pretty darn good for a free shooter game that was made entirely for fun! Love it.

I play  ‘Shooter in the Abstract‘ once in a while and I still enjoy it.  I got on a roll this morning though and busted out a personal high score!  I’ve never been anywhere near this sort of score before:

Read it and weep!

I felt that I had built enough pieces to create the urban scene that I wanted.  The experiment was a success! It is fully possible to use SmartFolders in Cheetah 3D to lay out pieces created in seperate files and render a proper scene.  This is great news for my future projects.

I wanted to get a different kind of look for this render so I went with matte white.  No specular, no normal maps, nothing.  Nothing except polygons and the lighting engine inside of Cheetah.  I took the roof off because it really lets the sunshine in and blasts out the white to nice full range of gray tones.

Several shots for this one!

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Everything modeled and rendered in Cheetah 3D.

A simple door so we can add some exits to the area.

 And some misc junk to drop around the scene and stick to walls. I’ll like need to make a few more items in this category but not too much.  Maybe a garbage can and a sign or two.

Air conditioning seems pretty important. That’s better!

What kind of urban scene doesn’t have cardboard boxes?  Please!

Work is going to be hectic for the next couple of weeks so work on the urban project will slow somewhat.  You’ve been warned!  Prepare yourselves accordingly!  Hup!

This is actually a composite of several pieces put together but they all basically work to form a staircase.  I can use pieces of this for other purposes so this work should prove useful many times over.  The stellar staircase!

I’m not all that inspired this morning so this seems like a good time to do some of the basic pieces I’ll need.  I can also rotate the one on the right 90 degrees to get a nice vertical window so these should fit the bill nicely.  The wiztastic windows!