"SynQ": Why the future won't resemble the past

[Baker]

I think moral of the story with view weapons is that often they look great sitting on the ground, but very few of them look good centered -- something they did real well in Quake.

[Baker]

Hey! That red armour isn't

You know, I have so many different ideas for reskins (and in some cases there are multiple models available) and the process is so easy that I think there will be a control panel in the front-end that lets someone select what you want to use -- since everyone has different opinions of what looks "ok" vs. what looks terrible.

[Baker]

I really need to quit slacking and release another one of these. It plays very well against the bots and online --- if you don't get too picky about the texture alignment/lack of theme cohesion/other stuff like that (which I do get picky about). This is almost bad because sometimes I find myself wasting time playing the bots rather than doing something productive like I should be doing.

Some very minor changes to the health display on the HUD, nothing to write home about (it is software renderer compatible too):

Old HUD health display was a little blah to me with the solid color yellow:



New:

[Baker]

Hmmmm ... this wasn't as painful as I suspected ...

It's not entirely aggravating converting a Quake 3 map source into a Quake 1 map source.

Some Quake 3 maps look like they'd play well in Quake 1. There is 1 map in Nexuiz that I would KILL to play in Quake 1; maybe 2 or 3 of them.

I like the typical Quake 3 architecture that you don't see in Quake 1. I like the stairs, the work on the door entrances and such.



Something to think about in the future; I can only imagine how much of a pain it would be to align all the textures ... haha

I have to admit, one of the most intriguing possibilities is taking some of the structures and saving them to rapidly build new maps from "prefabs" extracted from the maps.

[Baker]

Download: SynQ "Alpha 007" 7-Zip 33.0 MB (you need WinRAR to open it)

SynQ "Alpha 007" Development Release:

7-Zip format, you will need WinRAR or 7-Zip to open the download.



Summary

Some pretty nice ambient sounds and in general the sounds are pretty good now. They don't sound like Quake, but after 10 minutes of battling bots you won't notice.

Many improvements, but still much work to be done. Right now is sort of locked to DarkPlaces due to the default settings. More later.

Optional non-GPL add-on (put in id1 folder if you want to use it):

http://synq.quakedev.com/alan-yen-te...artz-model.pk3

[Phenom]

I'll give it a run!

[Baker]

In my haste, I didn't do the download link right on my prior post.

Fixed.

[Entar]

Well, after a little of working with a few things to get it to work in Vr2 (including adding some new features to Vr2, yay!), I played it. Weirdest. Game. Ever.

It's definitely not Quake, but it's still cool. The skyboxes that are included are really good, with the exception of "nite" which has some border issues. I like the sounds. I see there is still some OpenQuartz content...

For some reason, when I have my particles.script file in my setup, Vr2 crashes and I don't know why...? Also, why the heck is the lava on the start map blue? And for some reason, Vr2 didn't like the .png textures included in the pack (all the other textures were fine) - did you use some weird png format?

All in all, it's a great start, but it needs work to become something especially cool. I still wonder about that particle script thing though...

[Baker]

It uses the standard PNG format for the textures using the convention that DarkPlaces expects.

All in all, it's a great start, but it needs work to become something especially cool.

Agreed

Also, why the heck is the lava on the start map blue?

Some people believe you wait and wait and wait and make sure everything is perfect before you do an update.

But with something with the scope of this size, I don't believe in doing that.

Frequent releases force one to keep things organized and you have to use discipline.

So basically, I plan on updating this a lot and the parts about it that aren't good will be in the updates anyway.

Add: in the end there will be no PNG textures, only TGA because of the load times factors (it doesn't take long anyway, but that's beside the point). I use PNG when I am working on things because PNG Windows will preview PNG textures in a folder and won't do that for TGA.

[Lardarse]

That's why you use the thumbnails feature of IrfanView (or something similar)...

[Entar]

As I've been saying, I'm most excited about this project for its modding possibilities - to that end, I tried grabbing vr2mod and running my deathmatch map (with the Nexuiz textures that are included) with the Synq content...

Fun stuff

[Baker]

It's a lot easier with dual monitors and 18 folders of textures to just preview them in Windows explorer :d

[Baker]

Fun stuff

Looks great Entar :d

As I've been saying, I'm most excited about this project for its modding possibilities

I personally can't wait to hit the QuakeC part of this. Lardarse has some great ideas and I have my own stack of thoughts mostly from RQuake

Of course, the entities in the maps will need to remain the same to stay backwards compatible, but using RQuake-ish entity translation to use custom monsters.

Add: I really wish Quoth were GPL, at least the entirely new monsters like the Drole and the Gug and whatever other ones are entirely new creations.

[Baker]

I modified the conchars because the colors in OpenQuartz had very poor visibility. I didn't like the numbers and made my own. This new one isn't perfect, but it is much better for readability.



It's software renderer compatible and is really 128x128 pixels (I enlarged for the above)

[Entar]

I personally can't wait to hit the QuakeC part of this. Lardarse has some great ideas and I have my own stack of thoughts mostly from RQuake

Meh, I'm meant something more along the lines of being excited about people making their own mods and being able to make them standalone with this. Unless you make an interesting mod (hm...), I'll probably just replace it with my own, personally.

By the way, what happened to all the monsters in many of the maps?

Of course, the entities in the maps will need to remain the same to stay backwards compatible, but using RQuake-ish entity translation to use custom monsters.

Yes indeedy.