Quake's Player Speed (2017)

(rome.ro)

69 points | by klaussilveira 2 days ago ago

22 comments

  • jstummbillig 5 hours ago

    That's fun and somewhat ironic, considering how speeding Quake up became it's own art form. Shoutout to Rocket Jumps, Bunny Hopping and Quake done Quick.

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeDxelsLhikFHC8QnrcgQcg

    • Demiurge 3 hours ago

      I wouldn't call advanced movement "speeding up Quake". Speed in Quake and other FPS is an important factor that influences what you based on the speed that you have. Bunny hopping, air control, rocket jumps are not as useful when the base speed goes up. Also, less maneuverability, like in Quake 2, and bigger maps, mean that you have to be more judicious about your next move, and plan ahead more, stock up on more items, etc. There is an important balance to these things.

  • Joyfield 5 hours ago

    Could not the PVS step do the "check for max 350 polys" automatically? Or was it not fine grained enough?

    • dmurray 4 hours ago

      I don't understand what PVS is in this context, but it seems any attempt to completely automate this would struggle with false positives.

      There might be >350 polys visible from weird camera locations, but if the player is never there in normal gameplay you don't care about them. If they do end up in such a weird position in one game in a thousand (say a rocket jump lifts them up to somewhere normally inaccessible) it's not the end of the world anyway, the game will just render slower for a few frames.

      • Sharlin 3 hours ago

        PVS is the Potentially Visible Set, and yeah, it’s a conservative estimate of the polygons visible from the player’s current perspective.

  • djmips 9 hours ago

    Imagine as a creator slowing down your YouTube video before your upload to stretch out the content. That's what they did with Quake.

    • nine_k 6 hours ago

      The player speed in Doom is completely unrealistic, which is fun, but plays against immersion.

      In Quake, the player speed is less insane, more in line with human abilities, and it makes Quake feel more real. BTW the same is true for System Shock, where the player is not a sprinter champion at all (but can obtain a skateboard, but this is another kettle of fish).

      • some-guy 6 hours ago

        I actually find that Quake’s running speed is still quite fast by modern standards.

        • nine_k 4 hours ago

          Yes, but at least humanly possible. Likely not with all the gear, but at least as a player you feel more like a running person than like a flying pilot.

          Doom offered very nice gentle "bobbing" that added to the illusion of a real person's gait. Of course, only when you played single-player and switched off the "always run" mode. (Regarding this, I wish there were a popular FPS that would explore the notion of stamina, so that running mindlessly would be wasteful, but sprinting at critical moments would be an extra game mechanic. It worked reasonably well in Diablo, released in 1996.)

          • vikingerik 4 hours ago

            Diablo 1 had no running or speed mechanic, movement speed was always constant. Its expansion Hellfire allowed running in town but not in combat areas.

            Diablo 2 (2000) added the sprinting mechanic with limited stamina, but it panned out as irrelevant for gameplay. The stamina supply easily ramps up to more than you ever deplete so you just always run. And players wanted it that way since no one wants to walk slower, and the monster speeds were later increased to be balanced against players always running.

            • Retric 3 hours ago

              Not all gameplay mechanics need to last for an entire game. Stamina as an obstacle that you overcome plays into the power fantasy aspect of the game very well. Arguably it goes a long way to offset the feeling you’re slowly falling behind the power curve which is how they get people to grind without complaining about poor balance.

          • grandpoobah 3 hours ago

            Fortnite, one of the world's most popular FPS games, has the notion of stamina. In my opinion it has been poorly implemented and it's incredibly frustrating at the best of times.

          • fwip 16 minutes ago

            I feel like most modern fps games have a sprint with stamina.

      • duskwuff 4 hours ago

        This is true of virtually all FPS games. Realistic movement speeds feel unbearably sluggish in game.

    • bityard 6 hours ago

      I often go to YouTube to find teardowns and repair instructions. One thing I have run across is this niche where some guy out gal repairs something very slowly, over the course of an hour or two, with the mic gain cranked way up even though they say absolutely nothing the whole time. When I look at the channel, all the videos are the exactly the same and they have very high subscriber counts. I genuinely can't imagine who is watching these and why. But they must make a ton of money on the ad revenue.

      • Loughla 2 hours ago

        If I don't understand it, I usually attribute it to a fetish that I luckily do not have, yet.

      • jiggawatts 4 hours ago

        ASMR

    • flax 6 hours ago

      Every single YouTube video does this right now. They are all incredibly slow and take forever to get to the point (if there even is one).

      I have heard this is because there's a magic duration number for monetization.

      • dist-epoch 6 hours ago

        So if I listen at 2x, how many minutes do they count for monetization purposes?

        • nevster 6 hours ago

          Watch hours are literally how long someone watches. So if you watch a 2 hour video at 2x, it counts as 1 hour.

    • JodieBenitez 6 hours ago

      Since kiddos play them at 1.5, you would actually get a normal video :-P

    • LarsDu88 6 hours ago

      Imagine walking around your 3d map hundreds of times on a slow ass computer looking for frame views that exceed 350 polygons. Must have been a pain in the ass.