did i ask the wrong questions or why does nobody answer to my threads? is there still a q4 mod community?

greez

Was there ever a Q4 modding community? It was a pretty terrible game to be honest, you won't find as much support for it as you would Doom 3.

pretty much everything repling to here is about non-doom 3 tech stuff. Sorry.

(The D3-tech stuff seems to be ignored more & more)

I'm happy today that there's ~6 threads just talking about tech stuff.

I don't know much about Q4, I know more about D3. Q4 changed a lot of things around & most of the people who tried to make stuff for that quit because they said it was to hard (the stuff they always said was hard was pretty much the same as D3 though, go figure!).

gavavva wrote:

It was a pretty terrible game to be honest

It' s not terrible at all, the singleplayer was really good and the multiplayer was solid, but had no chance to become the next Quake 3 Arena.

Tetzlaff wrote:

gavavva wrote:

It was a pretty terrible game to be honest

It' s not terrible at all, the singleplayer was really good and the multiplayer was solid, but had no chance to become the next Quake 3 Arena.

yep, that's how I see it too.
last good Raven game IMO.

there are a few Q4 mods and maps but nowhere near the quantity of D3, as said they changed a few things and the game wasn't as popular as D3.
same applies even more to Prey.

The problem is that there aren't many Q4 modders, and of those, not many of those have focused on scripting (I mainly stick to the C++ SDK side). I'd planned to do a little investigation before commenting on them but haven't gotten around to that yet.

I just played through Q4 about a month ago. Haven't played it since when it first came out. Still a fun game IMO.

Didn't they move a bunch of stuff, like scripts, into the SDK? Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought I recall things being moved into the SDK. That alone would cause people to stay away honestly, especially if they were so used to Doom 3 and so much stuff being able to be edited right in notepad, it would be a big change and not one people would really like.

AI was put in the SDK, I know that. They also dropped some neat features D3 had.

IMHO, if it's not by Valve, Epic or Crytec, this is not the time in game history to expect tons of help for a mod team. It'll rebound eventually, but right now even modelers/animators seem to think that D3 tech is poison & to much work to produce anything worthwhile. Lots of misinformation about there about the tech. From my personal experience, Q2 is harder to mod vs D3.

Tetzlaff wrote:

gavavva wrote:

It was a pretty terrible game to be honest

It' s not terrible at all, the singleplayer was really good and the multiplayer was solid, but had no chance to become the next Quake 3 Arena.

You gotta take gravavva's comments with a pinch of salt.

Remember he's working on the most amazing game ever, so anything compared to that is horrible :lol:

In fact, It was less horrible than VeilFailstein. :mrgreen:

=FF=Sturm wrote:

In fact, It was less horrible than VeilFailstein. :mrgreen:

What are you guys talking about? They are both great games. Don't even try to compare the new ones with the classic ones. It just doesn't make sense.

If your expectations were for it to be a legendary game, then no it failed bad at it.

=FF=Sturm wrote:

In fact, It was less horrible than VeilFailstein. :mrgreen:

Wolfenstien for PC has a higher resale & new game valve vs Borderlands & AvP. Both of which came out WAY after Wolf did, both of which were considered better games by critics. I find that pretty interesting my self (I found Wolf to be the easiest of the three, borderlands to be the most boring)

Personally, I thought Wolf SP & AvP SP+MP are awesome.

Quote:

They also dropped some neat features D3 had.

I can't think of what those would be. I can only think that Q4 improved on D3 in many ways, some of which were rarely ever used and some not widely known. AI, vehicles, lipsync-scripts, outdoor areas.

A lot of people thought the GAME of Quake 4 was bad compared to Doom3, and I'd have to agree, but that says nothing about the ability of the engine itself when you strip away all the content and do your own thing with it. It's just that people want to _mod_ a game that is already popular, as opposed to taking an appropriate engine from a game that nobody plays and trying to do something fresh and new. You'd get no support.

LDAsh wrote:

I can't think of what those would be. I can only think that Q4 improved on D3 in many ways, some of which were rarely ever used and some not widely known. AI, vehicles, lipsync-scripts, outdoor areas.

The scripting vs SDK code was a big drop imho (ETQW was the best of both worlds). Removed the per-poly hit detection. Those are the two big technical things that pop to mind right now (wikipedia is useless: no technical description of the engine. Nothing on modwiki either, but I don't expect it there). lipsince was a definite plus but w/o any free tools to make your own it didn't help modders at all (nobody seemed compelled to make tools).

Everything else I can think of (lower texture quality, AI, vehicles, outdoor areas) are things that aren't specific to Q4, they could be done in D3 or Q4 w/o any engine changes. It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pretty much remake Q4 in D3 w/o much trouble but not the other way around.

The Happy Friar wrote:

LDAsh wrote:

I can't think of what those would be. I can only think that Q4 improved on D3 in many ways, some of which were rarely ever used and some not widely known. AI, vehicles, lipsync-scripts, outdoor areas.

The scripting vs SDK code was a big drop imho (ETQW was the best of both worlds). Removed the per-poly hit detection. Those are the two big technical things that pop to mind right now (wikipedia is useless: no technical description of the engine. Nothing on modwiki either, but I don't expect it there). lipsince was a definite plus but w/o any free tools to make your own it didn't help modders at all (nobody seemed compelled to make tools).

Everything else I can think of (lower texture quality, AI, vehicles, outdoor areas) are things that aren't specific to Q4, they could be done in D3 or Q4 w/o any engine changes. It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pretty much remake Q4 in D3 w/o much trouble but not the other way around.

there was the material interaction that could allow different surface types to respond accurately from within a single texture. Flesh splattered and made the appropriate sound effect, while metal would ricochet etc, that was pretty cool.

The Happy Friar wrote:

The scripting vs SDK code was a big drop imho (ETQW was the best of both worlds). Removed the per-poly hit detection. Those are the two big technical things that pop to mind right now.

And yet those two things are in the game code not the engine, so a mod could change. The bbox hit detection is simply enabled by setting a clip model that is a cuboid rather than using the player model. For scripting you can use it a lot if you wish, they just chose to move more of it into the game code for performance reasons.

I happen to agree with both of those changes, and would actually pull even more out of scripts and into c++

Quote:

everything else I can think of (lower texture quality, AI, vehicles, outdoor areas) are things that aren't specific to Q4, they could be done in D3 or Q4 w/o any engine changes. It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pretty much remake Q4 in D3 w/o much trouble but not the other way around

If you include the things done in the patches there's a whole load of mp things d3 doesn't have - repeaters (q4tv), > 60fps, built in http server for downloads are three major engine side changes that d3 doesn't have.

Q4 also has a more advanced particle fx system and support for glsl shaders

Quote:

And yet those two things are in the game code not the engine, so a mod could change.

A lot of people won't touch SDK code without a programmer, but will touch scripts. By moving it into the SDK, it removes this group of people, which is probably larger than you would think.

Also having a whole load of MP advancements over doom 3 means nothing when both games have nearly 0 player support(except d3 coop). It could have the greatest MP abilities in the world but without anyone playing it you can run me off the an impressive list of MP features and it would never be anything more than an impressive list of MP features.

sadly true. but rage will be released "soon". and carmack will probably make idtech4 open source (as always). this would change things, as you can release your mods as complete builds. think about iod3, ioq4.

its harder to get a playerbase if everybody needs a working d3 or q4 copy with cd key etc.

AnthonyJa wrote:

And yet those two things are in the game code not the engine, so a mod could change. The bbox hit detection is simply enabled by setting a clip model that is a cuboid rather than using the player model. For scripting you can use it a lot if you wish, they just chose to move more of it into the game code for performance reasons.
I happen to agree with both of those changes, and would actually pull even more out of scripts and into c++

I was under the impression that the bounding box was a code change, not something that could be "fixed" by just making a detailed model. The biggest issue with how they did the scripting is that you can't undo what they did w/o SDK changes but with Doom 3, if you wanted to put ai/weapons in the SDK you'd already plan to use the SDK. I just don't see any advantage to that, speed, capability, etc.

Quote:

If you include the things done in the patches there's a whole load of mp things d3 doesn't have - repeaters (q4tv), > 60fps, built in http server for downloads are three major engine side changes that d3 doesn't have.

Q4's MP was made to compete against Q3A, and it failed. D3 wasn't. D3 is more technically advanced vs Q4 in MP (lighting, per-poly, everything synced) but it did use more bandwidth. If id put all the stuff that Q2 players loved about Q2 MP then I would of seen Q4's MP being a hit. As it is, it had more limits vs Q3A. But the http server was nice. Love that in r1q2's server code. But I'd have a laundry list of what should of been added vs the Q4TV & 60fps. Those turned out to be features added for people who didn't really intend to play the game.

Quote:

Q4 also has a more advanced particle fx system and support for glsl shaders

I don't think it has a more advanced particle system, it just has a nice FX editor. As far as I can tell both Doom 3 & Q4 have the same capabilities in the particle/FX department, Q4 just got the nice editor. That's one thing I do love. and a better GUI editor.

I REALLY wish id put that code in to a D3 patch. GLSL shaders are nice though. One of those things not used enough imho.

From a gameplay standpoint, I think that Q2 engine mods actually could make a better MP game vs Doom 3 or Quake 4. You'd have all the network transmission advantage of Q2 (all the movers work network, lights on/off, etc. w/o any extra work) plus you can have the graphics fidelity of D3/Q4.

A few more things removed from Q4 (I remembered): monster/player IK, manual surround sound speaker positioning & material sound differences in MP. Why they took out the sound positioning is beyond me. It was never used in stock Doom 3 but I found it immensely awesome.

I know they took out the other stuff for efficiency but the game was released in 2005 not 1995. I expect it to have more bells & whistles vs Quake 1's mp (which it had less!)

Quote:

sadly true. but rage will be released "soon". and carmack will probably make idtech4 open source (as always). this would change things, as you can release your mods as complete builds. think about iod3, ioq4.

its harder to get a playerbase if everybody needs a working d3 or q4 copy with cd key etc.

Not only that, but the source code will hopefully afford more in-depth engine modifications, and imho will be more popular for modders, since it will more than likely end up being id's final fully-moddable engine. I think I'm more excited about that than the release of RAGE, really.

Quote:

sadly true. but rage will be released "soon". and carmack will probably make idtech4 open source (as always). this would change things, as you can release your mods as complete builds. think about iod3, ioq4.

its harder to get a playerbase if everybody needs a working d3 or q4 copy with cd key etc.

Not only that, but the source code will hopefully afford more in-depth engine modifications, and imho will be more popular for modders, since it will more than likely end up being id's final fully-moddable engine. I think I'm more excited about that than the release of RAGE, really.

did i ask the wrong questions or why does nobody answer to my threads? is there still a q4 mod community?

greez

Was there ever a Q4 modding community? It was a pretty terrible game to be honest, you won't find as much support for it as you would Doom 3.

pretty much everything repling to here is about non-doom 3 tech stuff. Sorry.

(The D3-tech stuff seems to be ignored more & more)

I'm happy today that there's ~6 threads just talking about tech stuff.

I don't know much about Q4, I know more about D3. Q4 changed a lot of things around & most of the people who tried to make stuff for that quit because they said it was to hard (the stuff they always said was hard was pretty much the same as D3 though, go figure!).

gavavva wrote:

It was a pretty terrible game to be honest

It' s not terrible at all, the singleplayer was really good and the multiplayer was solid, but had no chance to become the next Quake 3 Arena.

Tetzlaff wrote:

gavavva wrote:

It was a pretty terrible game to be honest

It' s not terrible at all, the singleplayer was really good and the multiplayer was solid, but had no chance to become the next Quake 3 Arena.

yep, that's how I see it too.
last good Raven game IMO.

there are a few Q4 mods and maps but nowhere near the quantity of D3, as said they changed a few things and the game wasn't as popular as D3.
same applies even more to Prey.

The problem is that there aren't many Q4 modders, and of those, not many of those have focused on scripting (I mainly stick to the C++ SDK side). I'd planned to do a little investigation before commenting on them but haven't gotten around to that yet.

I just played through Q4 about a month ago. Haven't played it since when it first came out. Still a fun game IMO.

Didn't they move a bunch of stuff, like scripts, into the SDK? Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought I recall things being moved into the SDK. That alone would cause people to stay away honestly, especially if they were so used to Doom 3 and so much stuff being able to be edited right in notepad, it would be a big change and not one people would really like.

AI was put in the SDK, I know that. They also dropped some neat features D3 had.

IMHO, if it's not by Valve, Epic or Crytec, this is not the time in game history to expect tons of help for a mod team. It'll rebound eventually, but right now even modelers/animators seem to think that D3 tech is poison & to much work to produce anything worthwhile. Lots of misinformation about there about the tech. From my personal experience, Q2 is harder to mod vs D3.

Tetzlaff wrote:

gavavva wrote:

It was a pretty terrible game to be honest

It' s not terrible at all, the singleplayer was really good and the multiplayer was solid, but had no chance to become the next Quake 3 Arena.

You gotta take gravavva's comments with a pinch of salt.

Remember he's working on the most amazing game ever, so anything compared to that is horrible :lol:

In fact, It was less horrible than VeilFailstein. :mrgreen:

=FF=Sturm wrote:

In fact, It was less horrible than VeilFailstein. :mrgreen:

What are you guys talking about? They are both great games. Don't even try to compare the new ones with the classic ones. It just doesn't make sense.

If your expectations were for it to be a legendary game, then no it failed bad at it.

=FF=Sturm wrote:

In fact, It was less horrible than VeilFailstein. :mrgreen:

Wolfenstien for PC has a higher resale & new game valve vs Borderlands & AvP. Both of which came out WAY after Wolf did, both of which were considered better games by critics. I find that pretty interesting my self (I found Wolf to be the easiest of the three, borderlands to be the most boring)

Personally, I thought Wolf SP & AvP SP+MP are awesome.

Quote:

They also dropped some neat features D3 had.

I can't think of what those would be. I can only think that Q4 improved on D3 in many ways, some of which were rarely ever used and some not widely known. AI, vehicles, lipsync-scripts, outdoor areas.

A lot of people thought the GAME of Quake 4 was bad compared to Doom3, and I'd have to agree, but that says nothing about the ability of the engine itself when you strip away all the content and do your own thing with it. It's just that people want to _mod_ a game that is already popular, as opposed to taking an appropriate engine from a game that nobody plays and trying to do something fresh and new. You'd get no support.

LDAsh wrote:

I can't think of what those would be. I can only think that Q4 improved on D3 in many ways, some of which were rarely ever used and some not widely known. AI, vehicles, lipsync-scripts, outdoor areas.

The scripting vs SDK code was a big drop imho (ETQW was the best of both worlds). Removed the per-poly hit detection. Those are the two big technical things that pop to mind right now (wikipedia is useless: no technical description of the engine. Nothing on modwiki either, but I don't expect it there). lipsince was a definite plus but w/o any free tools to make your own it didn't help modders at all (nobody seemed compelled to make tools).

Everything else I can think of (lower texture quality, AI, vehicles, outdoor areas) are things that aren't specific to Q4, they could be done in D3 or Q4 w/o any engine changes. It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pretty much remake Q4 in D3 w/o much trouble but not the other way around.

The Happy Friar wrote:

LDAsh wrote:

I can't think of what those would be. I can only think that Q4 improved on D3 in many ways, some of which were rarely ever used and some not widely known. AI, vehicles, lipsync-scripts, outdoor areas.

The scripting vs SDK code was a big drop imho (ETQW was the best of both worlds). Removed the per-poly hit detection. Those are the two big technical things that pop to mind right now (wikipedia is useless: no technical description of the engine. Nothing on modwiki either, but I don't expect it there). lipsince was a definite plus but w/o any free tools to make your own it didn't help modders at all (nobody seemed compelled to make tools).

Everything else I can think of (lower texture quality, AI, vehicles, outdoor areas) are things that aren't specific to Q4, they could be done in D3 or Q4 w/o any engine changes. It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pretty much remake Q4 in D3 w/o much trouble but not the other way around.

there was the material interaction that could allow different surface types to respond accurately from within a single texture. Flesh splattered and made the appropriate sound effect, while metal would ricochet etc, that was pretty cool.

The Happy Friar wrote:

The scripting vs SDK code was a big drop imho (ETQW was the best of both worlds). Removed the per-poly hit detection. Those are the two big technical things that pop to mind right now.

And yet those two things are in the game code not the engine, so a mod could change. The bbox hit detection is simply enabled by setting a clip model that is a cuboid rather than using the player model. For scripting you can use it a lot if you wish, they just chose to move more of it into the game code for performance reasons.

I happen to agree with both of those changes, and would actually pull even more out of scripts and into c++

Quote:

everything else I can think of (lower texture quality, AI, vehicles, outdoor areas) are things that aren't specific to Q4, they could be done in D3 or Q4 w/o any engine changes. It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pretty much remake Q4 in D3 w/o much trouble but not the other way around

If you include the things done in the patches there's a whole load of mp things d3 doesn't have - repeaters (q4tv), > 60fps, built in http server for downloads are three major engine side changes that d3 doesn't have.

Q4 also has a more advanced particle fx system and support for glsl shaders

Quote:

And yet those two things are in the game code not the engine, so a mod could change.

A lot of people won't touch SDK code without a programmer, but will touch scripts. By moving it into the SDK, it removes this group of people, which is probably larger than you would think.

Also having a whole load of MP advancements over doom 3 means nothing when both games have nearly 0 player support(except d3 coop). It could have the greatest MP abilities in the world but without anyone playing it you can run me off the an impressive list of MP features and it would never be anything more than an impressive list of MP features.

sadly true. but rage will be released "soon". and carmack will probably make idtech4 open source (as always). this would change things, as you can release your mods as complete builds. think about iod3, ioq4.

its harder to get a playerbase if everybody needs a working d3 or q4 copy with cd key etc.

AnthonyJa wrote:

And yet those two things are in the game code not the engine, so a mod could change. The bbox hit detection is simply enabled by setting a clip model that is a cuboid rather than using the player model. For scripting you can use it a lot if you wish, they just chose to move more of it into the game code for performance reasons.
I happen to agree with both of those changes, and would actually pull even more out of scripts and into c++

I was under the impression that the bounding box was a code change, not something that could be "fixed" by just making a detailed model. The biggest issue with how they did the scripting is that you can't undo what they did w/o SDK changes but with Doom 3, if you wanted to put ai/weapons in the SDK you'd already plan to use the SDK. I just don't see any advantage to that, speed, capability, etc.

Quote:

If you include the things done in the patches there's a whole load of mp things d3 doesn't have - repeaters (q4tv), > 60fps, built in http server for downloads are three major engine side changes that d3 doesn't have.

Q4's MP was made to compete against Q3A, and it failed. D3 wasn't. D3 is more technically advanced vs Q4 in MP (lighting, per-poly, everything synced) but it did use more bandwidth. If id put all the stuff that Q2 players loved about Q2 MP then I would of seen Q4's MP being a hit. As it is, it had more limits vs Q3A. But the http server was nice. Love that in r1q2's server code. But I'd have a laundry list of what should of been added vs the Q4TV & 60fps. Those turned out to be features added for people who didn't really intend to play the game.

Quote:

Q4 also has a more advanced particle fx system and support for glsl shaders

I don't think it has a more advanced particle system, it just has a nice FX editor. As far as I can tell both Doom 3 & Q4 have the same capabilities in the particle/FX department, Q4 just got the nice editor. That's one thing I do love. and a better GUI editor.

I REALLY wish id put that code in to a D3 patch. GLSL shaders are nice though. One of those things not used enough imho.

From a gameplay standpoint, I think that Q2 engine mods actually could make a better MP game vs Doom 3 or Quake 4. You'd have all the network transmission advantage of Q2 (all the movers work network, lights on/off, etc. w/o any extra work) plus you can have the graphics fidelity of D3/Q4.

A few more things removed from Q4 (I remembered): monster/player IK, manual surround sound speaker positioning & material sound differences in MP. Why they took out the sound positioning is beyond me. It was never used in stock Doom 3 but I found it immensely awesome.

I know they took out the other stuff for efficiency but the game was released in 2005 not 1995. I expect it to have more bells & whistles vs Quake 1's mp (which it had less!)

Quote:

sadly true. but rage will be released "soon". and carmack will probably make idtech4 open source (as always). this would change things, as you can release your mods as complete builds. think about iod3, ioq4.

its harder to get a playerbase if everybody needs a working d3 or q4 copy with cd key etc.

Not only that, but the source code will hopefully afford more in-depth engine modifications, and imho will be more popular for modders, since it will more than likely end up being id's final fully-moddable engine. I think I'm more excited about that than the release of RAGE, really.

did i ask the wrong questions or why does nobody answer to my threads? is there still a q4 mod community?

greez

Was there ever a Q4 modding community? It was a pretty terrible game to be honest, you won't find as much support for it as you would Doom 3.

pretty much everything repling to here is about non-doom 3 tech stuff. Sorry.

(The D3-tech stuff seems to be ignored more & more)

I'm happy today that there's ~6 threads just talking about tech stuff.

I don't know much about Q4, I know more about D3. Q4 changed a lot of things around & most of the people who tried to make stuff for that quit because they said it was to hard (the stuff they always said was hard was pretty much the same as D3 though, go figure!).

gavavva wrote:

It was a pretty terrible game to be honest

It' s not terrible at all, the singleplayer was really good and the multiplayer was solid, but had no chance to become the next Quake 3 Arena.

Tetzlaff wrote:

gavavva wrote:

It was a pretty terrible game to be honest

It' s not terrible at all, the singleplayer was really good and the multiplayer was solid, but had no chance to become the next Quake 3 Arena.

yep, that's how I see it too.
last good Raven game IMO.

there are a few Q4 mods and maps but nowhere near the quantity of D3, as said they changed a few things and the game wasn't as popular as D3.
same applies even more to Prey.

The problem is that there aren't many Q4 modders, and of those, not many of those have focused on scripting (I mainly stick to the C++ SDK side). I'd planned to do a little investigation before commenting on them but haven't gotten around to that yet.

I just played through Q4 about a month ago. Haven't played it since when it first came out. Still a fun game IMO.

Didn't they move a bunch of stuff, like scripts, into the SDK? Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought I recall things being moved into the SDK. That alone would cause people to stay away honestly, especially if they were so used to Doom 3 and so much stuff being able to be edited right in notepad, it would be a big change and not one people would really like.

AI was put in the SDK, I know that. They also dropped some neat features D3 had.

IMHO, if it's not by Valve, Epic or Crytec, this is not the time in game history to expect tons of help for a mod team. It'll rebound eventually, but right now even modelers/animators seem to think that D3 tech is poison & to much work to produce anything worthwhile. Lots of misinformation about there about the tech. From my personal experience, Q2 is harder to mod vs D3.

Tetzlaff wrote:

gavavva wrote:

It was a pretty terrible game to be honest

It' s not terrible at all, the singleplayer was really good and the multiplayer was solid, but had no chance to become the next Quake 3 Arena.

You gotta take gravavva's comments with a pinch of salt.

Remember he's working on the most amazing game ever, so anything compared to that is horrible :lol:

In fact, It was less horrible than VeilFailstein. :mrgreen:

=FF=Sturm wrote:

In fact, It was less horrible than VeilFailstein. :mrgreen:

What are you guys talking about? They are both great games. Don't even try to compare the new ones with the classic ones. It just doesn't make sense.

If your expectations were for it to be a legendary game, then no it failed bad at it.

=FF=Sturm wrote:

In fact, It was less horrible than VeilFailstein. :mrgreen:

Wolfenstien for PC has a higher resale & new game valve vs Borderlands & AvP. Both of which came out WAY after Wolf did, both of which were considered better games by critics. I find that pretty interesting my self (I found Wolf to be the easiest of the three, borderlands to be the most boring)

Personally, I thought Wolf SP & AvP SP+MP are awesome.

Quote:

They also dropped some neat features D3 had.

I can't think of what those would be. I can only think that Q4 improved on D3 in many ways, some of which were rarely ever used and some not widely known. AI, vehicles, lipsync-scripts, outdoor areas.

A lot of people thought the GAME of Quake 4 was bad compared to Doom3, and I'd have to agree, but that says nothing about the ability of the engine itself when you strip away all the content and do your own thing with it. It's just that people want to _mod_ a game that is already popular, as opposed to taking an appropriate engine from a game that nobody plays and trying to do something fresh and new. You'd get no support.

LDAsh wrote:

I can't think of what those would be. I can only think that Q4 improved on D3 in many ways, some of which were rarely ever used and some not widely known. AI, vehicles, lipsync-scripts, outdoor areas.

The scripting vs SDK code was a big drop imho (ETQW was the best of both worlds). Removed the per-poly hit detection. Those are the two big technical things that pop to mind right now (wikipedia is useless: no technical description of the engine. Nothing on modwiki either, but I don't expect it there). lipsince was a definite plus but w/o any free tools to make your own it didn't help modders at all (nobody seemed compelled to make tools).

Everything else I can think of (lower texture quality, AI, vehicles, outdoor areas) are things that aren't specific to Q4, they could be done in D3 or Q4 w/o any engine changes. It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pretty much remake Q4 in D3 w/o much trouble but not the other way around.

The Happy Friar wrote:

LDAsh wrote:

I can't think of what those would be. I can only think that Q4 improved on D3 in many ways, some of which were rarely ever used and some not widely known. AI, vehicles, lipsync-scripts, outdoor areas.

The scripting vs SDK code was a big drop imho (ETQW was the best of both worlds). Removed the per-poly hit detection. Those are the two big technical things that pop to mind right now (wikipedia is useless: no technical description of the engine. Nothing on modwiki either, but I don't expect it there). lipsince was a definite plus but w/o any free tools to make your own it didn't help modders at all (nobody seemed compelled to make tools).

Everything else I can think of (lower texture quality, AI, vehicles, outdoor areas) are things that aren't specific to Q4, they could be done in D3 or Q4 w/o any engine changes. It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pretty much remake Q4 in D3 w/o much trouble but not the other way around.

there was the material interaction that could allow different surface types to respond accurately from within a single texture. Flesh splattered and made the appropriate sound effect, while metal would ricochet etc, that was pretty cool.

The Happy Friar wrote:

The scripting vs SDK code was a big drop imho (ETQW was the best of both worlds). Removed the per-poly hit detection. Those are the two big technical things that pop to mind right now.

And yet those two things are in the game code not the engine, so a mod could change. The bbox hit detection is simply enabled by setting a clip model that is a cuboid rather than using the player model. For scripting you can use it a lot if you wish, they just chose to move more of it into the game code for performance reasons.

I happen to agree with both of those changes, and would actually pull even more out of scripts and into c++

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everything else I can think of (lower texture quality, AI, vehicles, outdoor areas) are things that aren't specific to Q4, they could be done in D3 or Q4 w/o any engine changes. It wouldn't surprise me if someone could pretty much remake Q4 in D3 w/o much trouble but not the other way around

If you include the things done in the patches there's a whole load of mp things d3 doesn't have - repeaters (q4tv), > 60fps, built in http server for downloads are three major engine side changes that d3 doesn't have.

Q4 also has a more advanced particle fx system and support for glsl shaders

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And yet those two things are in the game code not the engine, so a mod could change.

A lot of people won't touch SDK code without a programmer, but will touch scripts. By moving it into the SDK, it removes this group of people, which is probably larger than you would think.

Also having a whole load of MP advancements over doom 3 means nothing when both games have nearly 0 player support(except d3 coop). It could have the greatest MP abilities in the world but without anyone playing it you can run me off the an impressive list of MP features and it would never be anything more than an impressive list of MP features.

sadly true. but rage will be released "soon". and carmack will probably make idtech4 open source (as always). this would change things, as you can release your mods as complete builds. think about iod3, ioq4.

its harder to get a playerbase if everybody needs a working d3 or q4 copy with cd key etc.

AnthonyJa wrote:

And yet those two things are in the game code not the engine, so a mod could change. The bbox hit detection is simply enabled by setting a clip model that is a cuboid rather than using the player model. For scripting you can use it a lot if you wish, they just chose to move more of it into the game code for performance reasons.
I happen to agree with both of those changes, and would actually pull even more out of scripts and into c++

I was under the impression that the bounding box was a code change, not something that could be "fixed" by just making a detailed model. The biggest issue with how they did the scripting is that you can't undo what they did w/o SDK changes but with Doom 3, if you wanted to put ai/weapons in the SDK you'd already plan to use the SDK. I just don't see any advantage to that, speed, capability, etc.

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If you include the things done in the patches there's a whole load of mp things d3 doesn't have - repeaters (q4tv), > 60fps, built in http server for downloads are three major engine side changes that d3 doesn't have.

Q4's MP was made to compete against Q3A, and it failed. D3 wasn't. D3 is more technically advanced vs Q4 in MP (lighting, per-poly, everything synced) but it did use more bandwidth. If id put all the stuff that Q2 players loved about Q2 MP then I would of seen Q4's MP being a hit. As it is, it had more limits vs Q3A. But the http server was nice. Love that in r1q2's server code. But I'd have a laundry list of what should of been added vs the Q4TV & 60fps. Those turned out to be features added for people who didn't really intend to play the game.

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Q4 also has a more advanced particle fx system and support for glsl shaders

I don't think it has a more advanced particle system, it just has a nice FX editor. As far as I can tell both Doom 3 & Q4 have the same capabilities in the particle/FX department, Q4 just got the nice editor. That's one thing I do love. and a better GUI editor.

I REALLY wish id put that code in to a D3 patch. GLSL shaders are nice though. One of those things not used enough imho.

From a gameplay standpoint, I think that Q2 engine mods actually could make a better MP game vs Doom 3 or Quake 4. You'd have all the network transmission advantage of Q2 (all the movers work network, lights on/off, etc. w/o any extra work) plus you can have the graphics fidelity of D3/Q4.

A few more things removed from Q4 (I remembered): monster/player IK, manual surround sound speaker positioning & material sound differences in MP. Why they took out the sound positioning is beyond me. It was never used in stock Doom 3 but I found it immensely awesome.

I know they took out the other stuff for efficiency but the game was released in 2005 not 1995. I expect it to have more bells & whistles vs Quake 1's mp (which it had less!)

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sadly true. but rage will be released "soon". and carmack will probably make idtech4 open source (as always). this would change things, as you can release your mods as complete builds. think about iod3, ioq4.

its harder to get a playerbase if everybody needs a working d3 or q4 copy with cd key etc.

Not only that, but the source code will hopefully afford more in-depth engine modifications, and imho will be more popular for modders, since it will more than likely end up being id's final fully-moddable engine. I think I'm more excited about that than the release of RAGE, really.