Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

Quake 3 sucked. Great engine, no actual game involved.

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Yeah, the old school quakes are the best. I do prefer quake 3 in multiplayer, though.

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Marathon is teh fun. I used to play that a lot.

Erm no. One of the biggest challenges in writing Quake was to get a fast software renderer running on a 66MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM and 1MB of video RAM.

Under DOS.

And they pulled it off.

Only once Quake was ported to Windows was a hardware-accelerated port written.

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Descent does count as a First Person Shooter

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When I say about the clans from Battletech, I was talking about the Noble Descendants of Kerensky, not the annoying tart that we hate.

Thank you, Captain (Sargeant?) Obvious. 2.5D is a colloquialism, not a technical term.



Har. You should tell that to the creators of Catacomb 3D (incidentally, that would be Carmack and Romero as well) and its predecessors.

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I've just played the basics: Doom, Doom II, Wolfenstein, a bit of Quake, Duke Nukem, Medal Of Honor, Rabbit Algebra, and a couple others I don't remember.

That's not 2.5D, that's 3D but using 2D sprites as actors. The maps themselves are "rendered" in something that's more or less 3D. Maybe 2.6D, but not 2.5D, as that's reserved for games like Megaman X8 and the sidescrolling levels in Smash Bros. Meleé.

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CLOCK

whatever it is, i just wanna know what games people have played that are like these kinda games.

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I saw a dog today...

Nobody cares about the DOS version.

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Yeah, they're cool.

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All-around screamfest! Get out there and represent I & I, Jah Jah Warriors!

Seriously, folks, would it kill you to read the Wikipedia article? (And FYI, if you wanna get all fancy with the diacriticals, it's spelled mêlée, though the game's title omits them entirely, which is also valid.)

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I don't need to read the Wikipedia article. I lived it.
Hell, I've still got a 3dFX Voodoo 2 Card sitting in a PII-233 collecting dust in my personal PC museum (otherwise known as the front hall closet).

If you wanna talk old-school 3D games, how about The Bards Tale
That was "3D" in that you could move in the four cardinal directions (N,S,E,W) and the walls has a parallax to them. No up or down or actual depth.. and it was in , sure... but it looks sorta 3D. I still have that game. And the original box in came in. And no, I'm not selling it.
Sadly, the old Apple II+ gave up the ghost a long time back, so I can't play it anymore (not that I'd really want to.)

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I used to love the original Dark Forces. Shooting Imperial Bucket Heads was once listed as one of my favorite hobbies. I hated the level with all the Dianogas, though (that's those trash-compactor eyeball octopus creatures). And that one level where you have to take on THREE, count 'em, THREE Kell Dragons with nothing but your bare hands! Now TELL me Kyle Katarn isn't one tough son of a bantha!

Now, Dark Forces II: Jedi Knigget was prooty cool, too! Kyle Katarn, now with Force-Wielding Light Saber Action!

I never did beat Mysteries of the Sith (the Jedi Knigget Expansion Game). It was a lot tougher than DF2JK, and I didn't like Jan Ors as much as Kyle.

Jedi Knigget II: Outcast is really cool! For some reason, Kyle quits being a Jedi and goes back to being an ordinary merc (how exactly that fits with DF2JK and MotS makes me wonder). But I like how you can operate gun turrets, ATST's, and other crap (although I hate how you can't get a 1st Person view in the ATST - hard as crap to drive the thing when you're seeing from 20ft behind the thing).

Of them all, I'd have to say my all-time favorite is DF2JK.

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Sadly, the later-generation of Star Wars games didn't get much better. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II (KotOR II) were awsome games, but holy crap were they bug-filled. It was like paying for the privilige of playing them in the Beta stage. Thankfully, there's some official "override" hacks you can get that fix the most serious (quest-breaking) bugs in KotOR II. So, it's not completely screwed. I give KotOR II an 8 out of 10 for gameplay, a 9.5 out of 10 for graphics, and a 3 out of 10 for promptness of patching. Woe is you if you bought the Xbox versions.

The PC version of KotOR II still has some serious bugs that need patching, but the patching team at Bioware has moved on to making the final NWN patches (NWN is their flagship game) while they prepare for NWN II. The NWN engine was the first to use the Aurora Engine, KotOR and KotOR II, as wel as Jade Empire also used variants of that engine. NWN II will use a completekly new engine, but it's still more or less a development of the Aurora engine, just as the Aurora Engine was influenced by the old Dark Alliance engine, which in turn was the succesor to the Infinity Engine.

Belive it or not, Bioware is actualy working on a new patch for NWN. Not bad for a game that was first released in 2002, huh? And it's not just a bug fix,either. Nope, they're putting in the tilesets and portraits that were previously only in the "Pirates of the Sword Coast" add-on.. so it's not actualy new, but it will mean that people will be able to use the artwork in their own NWN moduals.

That's one thing about NWN: great support for it didn't die off a few months after it hit store shelves. They created a whole community of entusiastic, actively contributing fans. They actual encouraged people to make profesional-quality add-ons and to distribute them for free. heck, they even manuvered IGN into hosting the community for free. hows that for a game developer? I kinda think of KotOR and KotOR II as cash cows that Bioware fed to the XBOX crowd in order to keep NWN alive and kicking.

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Way to totally miss my point.

Your original statement implied that Quake was only hardware-accelerated, whereas it was in fact only software rendered for a long time. Not until about 6 months later was an experimental OpenGL (and therefore not DOS) renderer released.

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Anybody else ever play Blood? That's a classic.

*Raises Hand*

Huzzah for "voodooing" your enemies to death

http://www.planetblood.com/controlz/blo ... ons.html#9

How about Shadow Warrior?

Wanna game that is as politically uncorrect as possible? Give Lo Wang and Shadow Warrior a go.

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What part of "but it still could run in software rendered mode." don't you understand? Look, the software rendered mode was fine, and very commendible, but that wasn't what I was talking about. Yes, the initial version of Quake didn't have 3D accelorator support, but once it did, software rendering's goose was cooked. Quake didn't really take off in popularity until 3D acelerator cards came along and Quake added in 3D redering card support (3DFX Glide and later OpenGL). Once people saw the difference between software rendering and hardware rendering in the same game, it sounded the death of software rendering. Quake ushered in 3D accelerator cards, and you can't deny that.
There's a reason 3D rendering isn't done in software anymore, and Quake was the litmus test.

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That's completely inaccurate. Quake was an immediate success and the game's popularity was completely self-sustained months before either GLQuake or WinQuake were released.

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Every single games magazine I've ever read has referred to 3D graphics and 2D Gameplay as 2.5D. I suppose it works the other way around too, but either way it's a silly notion.

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CLOCK

I've played Doom 1 and Doom 2, Blake Stone, and Nightmare 3D.

I don't think many people have played those last two...

Well, that's not how I remember it. But then, I always was a bit of an elitist bastard.

I'm not denying that, even in software rendered mode, Quake was inovateive and noteworthy. I'm just saying that it's impact visa-via hardware rendering has had much longer lasting repurcusions.

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Ahhh... blake stone. Wolfenstein with aliens and lasers. I miss these "good" games of yore.

To Sarge:

Keep an eye on your language. If you hadn't noticed we run a tight ship around here.

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The only game like that I ever played was Corridor 7: Alien Invasion, and despite it's crappiness, I played the heck out of it.

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Indeed it has. You misinterpreted my misinterpretation of your statement.

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say, is it just me or do alot of theese games seem to run off of the Doom Engin?

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i think all these old games are much betetr than all these newer ones... cept for the entire jedi knight series. that, i hope, will never die... and jedi outcast... drawing stuff in the wall with a lightsaber = fun as heck! dark forces is pretty unique, like how you can throw them grenades, jump, duck, and scream when you fall... adn chasing those little mouse droids in the first level... ^.^ ive never played an old game where you can do all that! now just to move from star wars to some older games, doom didnt really have many objectives except for, shooting beasts from hell, but marathon had like, objectives and more things to do. more of a storyline to it than doom.

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I saw a dog today...

Its just a term. No one really thinks that it is half a dimension. Flash professionals and actual macromedia workers use the term 2.5d to describe 2d flash that has the effect of appearing almost 3d, or has similar perspective. I believe that the thread starter used the term to describe a game where you can move in 3d space, but characters and objects are just sprites.

Nothing can be rendered as one dimensional.

They still dont. Processors have video cards on them.
There was a FPS tank game for atari. Battlezone, I think? Amazingly, it was able to run on an old 4004 processor in production.

That is true. Plus, as a 3d developer, I can say from experience that your card matters way more than a program. Speaking of which, I am picking up my new video card and processor this week. I hope it will help with the 3d SB email I am planning.

No, video cards have GPUs on them. If you build a video card that doesn't have a GPU... it's still a video card.

Battlezone used vector graphics. Lines, lines, more lines, and the ilusion of 3D. It was the vector-graphics equivilent of software rendering.

I hope you get a AMD Athlon FX 62 and a Quad-SLI 7900 rig. It has a drool-factor of 11.

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