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Comment by ColdStream | Hacker News Reader

3 weeks ago, John Romero did a play through while discussing the entire design and build process of the game.

It was actually pretty cool how they designed the first room to demonstrate almost every new feature of the engine and how the first level is made to walk you though most of the new gameplay features.

https://youtu.be/PU7HkttPfAo?si=LnD4vJeCiUojhojt&t=728

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Yeah ... "new features", especially the torches, to show me that FPU of 486 OCed to 150MHz is not enough :)

Good old days of 7-15 FPS being better than nothing.

Oh yes. I remember first playing Quake on a 486 and not liking it, because it felt like I was moving in a heavy sluggish tank, and later playing it on a Pentium, and loving it for the agile movement. The difference was huge!

Quake was notorious for being the first major game to require a powerful FPU. Michael Abrash manually tuned the rasterization code to fit the Pentium pipeline, any other CPU didn't cut it.

I recall we got it running pretty decently on an upper end 486 (DX4 100). That, and Winamp. Good times.

Memory has tencency to bend reality for better.

Every room with torches was max 9FPS on 320x200 on DX2 OCed to 3x50MHz, literally 50% performance over your PC. Turnig off all objects through console made torches vanished and FPS doubled.

My OCed DX4 got around 15fps, but I agree my memory of what was deemed “playable” back then probably wouldn’t stand today.

IIRC it came down to something crazy simple, like, using the FPU registers to bit-blit was the fastest way, but only on the genuine Intel Pentium.

Exactly. I remember schoolmates with AMD K6 (which had exceptionally weak FPU) having to purchase atleast the cheapest OpenGL GPU like Rendition Verite V1000 to play with decent FPS, while guys with 166MMX could play it software rendered.

So many modern games have such a clunky movement in comparison.

Till this day, there's literally no game with such smooth movement as had Quakeworld or Q3A CPMA/Defrag.

They've literally reinvented "platformer speedrunning" to a whole different level.

with a resolution of 640x480 or below !

Fun fact: The pattern of the torches' flickering is encoded via special strings in the source code:

https://jasemagee.com/post/2022-03-27-26-year-old-quake-ligh...

YOU CAN JUMP ACROSS

And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.

At shop.nin.com you can buy a quake ammo box keychain. It makes the jump sound effect.

Dang it, sold out :(

That is also the approach that Nintendo took with Super Mario Bros, as in the first level you almost cannot avoid to learn that, for example mushrooms=good and goomba=bad [1]

[1] https://mainstream404.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/how-super-mar...

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