• MudMan
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    311 months ago

    I think long term, absolutely. At the time, though, very few people were playing online, and a lot of the praise heaped on Quake was for the single player game and the visuals, which I never got.

    I mean, I was on a Pentium 133, so I could play it pretty much as intended, I just thought it looked ugly. At that point in software mode I didn’t find it looked any better than Magic Carpet, which had stuff like animated waves and water reflections, and you could make a 3D volcano come out of the ground in real time. It’s pretty nuts how far the 3D characters took it.

    Side note: Magic Carpet is a technological marvel and we don’t talk about it enough. Peak non-accelerated 3D environments ever, right there.

    • bruhduh
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      111 months ago

      I looked up magic carpet and dayum it has fire physics, even now not all AAA games have that

      • MudMan
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        111 months ago

        Large scale terrain deformation and morphing in real time, procedural fire and magma, gravity physics for objects on slopes and, again, animated, reflective 3D water. All running on software with support for a high resolution mode.

        The year before the PlayStation 1 launched.

        It is a miracle of dark magic and computer science and I don’t understand how it can possibly exist. That game is the reason every time Peter Molyneux came up with some random, obviously impossible garbage everybody went “alright, but maybe?”

        • bruhduh
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          111 months ago

          Absolutely this, half a hour ago I’ve seen this game for the first time in my life on YouTube and thinked for myself, is it real? I mean castle appearing out of nowhere is alright, it is possible with that time tech, but red faction like destruction and fire and magma physics and water looking like it was made with shaders, oh my god i was shocked, and without need for gpu on hardware of that time? They made impossible possible