My Quake wishlist
Andrew S. Wheat
Okay, you've all been waiting for it, so here it is: my quake wishlist
for Quake 2. Maybe nobody from id will ever see this, but it's still fun
to dream. Many of my wishes are, it think, not unreasonable with the
current engine (wish some exceptions) but are memory intensive. Pah.
Memory is cheap. Make them optional and recomend that everybody have
16megs at least for optimum performance with all features enabled. So
without further ado, my list:
1) Corpses with volume. I seem to recall in Qtest that you could stand
ON a monster corpse. Well, I liked that. It ruins the immersive nature
of the game to find yourself walking through corpses. Of course this
leads to problems if you have a shambler corpse wedged in a doorway and
can't get by, so that leads me to wish 2.
2) Gibbable corpses. I want to be able to maul those poor dead
beasties. If the'd take a couple hits before pulping that could be fun.
Make them twitch in reaction to your pummeling.
3) gibbing of corpses or "dead" zombies with the axe! I want to be able
to lop off heads, arms, torsoes. I can easily immagine a corpse lying in
my way, so I whip out my axe and hack at it a little bit (the corpse
twitches with each sickening *thunk* as my axe bites into it, and blood
and mini-gibs spray) then with a final *splut* the corpse bursts into
ripe red gibs, showering all over the place.
4) Permanent gibs. If you can have the gibs around for a little while
then make them permanenet. Why do all those lovely bloody chunks
disappear leaving only heads. LAME. Okay, so mayvbe in a multiplayer
game with too many player gibs around things would get too slow or memory
filled, so make the gibs (and corpses) disappear in a que, so the oldest
ones fade from view. Hell, that's how bodies are handled, isn't it?
5) many, many more frames of animation for everything. I love watching
the beasties move, and I wish they moved with more variety.
6) related to the solid corpse notion: make corpses "roll" to the lowest
point. Add sitting up or propped or slumped over corner death positions.
Don't let corpses wedge in walls or eachother if you can help it.
(Immagine this: You kill a Scrag and it rebounds off the wall and slumps
against the corpse of a nearby shambler.
I'm not too sure about this one. The minimal collision detection would
seem to dictate that there would still be a certain stiffness to the
corpses, and they'd end up with inexplicable space between them. Would
it look more natural to have a scrag proped against a shambler corpse,
but have there be strange space between them on closer examination, or to
have the bodys intersect as they do now so the scrag is burried inside
the shambler corpse. Perhaps with a nice blend it can be okay. If the
scrag is propped, but still intersecting some it might still look natural.
7) More types of foes. Since we're working from a CD here why not have a
different set of foes for each level? I mean, it can't be that hard to
change the uniforms on the soldiers from base to base.. just have new
textures.
8) Hub play. Okay, I'm a sucker for Hexen's hub play idea. I love going
back to a place I've already been with new keys to unlock things. it
effectively makes the levels much larger and more involved.
9) Recognizable objects. I love the midevil atmosphere, but I wish there
was more to the environment to draw me in. Design the hubs around real
castles perhaps, with chapels with nasty things lurking in the crypts
below, wells you can leap into to explore the nasty middens, stables,
kitchens, chimneys, smitheys... they needn't be cluttered like Duke, but
if they were recognizable, so you could walk into a room and say "oh,
this is a bedroom" that would be cool.
(A scenario for you: You walk into a bedroom. As you approach the huge
four poaster bed a pair of zombies rise up gruesomely from it. You
destroy them easily and slip through to the gardrobe (a simple hole near
a window perhaps) and drop down into the middens where you do battle and
perhaps find a hey or secret.)
10) Rotating and swinging walls, floors, doors etc. I'm not sure i this
is possible. It may take major engine changes. It irritates me though
that every door or trap moves only on one axis. I miss the awesome
swinging doors of hexen, and the grinding gears and rotating rooms of Duke.
11) Flying. I'd leave the rocketpack paradigm behind and make flying an
action based on "flapping wings" Perhaps you use the jump key to flap.
if you stop you plummet, but if you keep it up you can go higher or bob
in place. make it like good old Joust. (come to think of it, this is
not unlike the use of the jump key while swimming. It doesn't add
another set of keys to think about ( I hate flying in Duke because I need
those two extra keys.. too complicated) but you get the advantages of
areal combat.) The disadvantage I see here is that youd have people
bumping their head on the sky, which would be mighty odd. Perhaps the
flapping action gives you smaller and smaller altitude jumps until you
simply can't go any higher, so it feels natural that you can only go so
high, and you don't feel like you're encountering an "edge of world"
barrier, which decreases the immersiveness.
12) Also to help with immersiveness: fix the sky. In qtest you could
fire a rocket into the sky and it arched off forever. Now you can hit it
like a cieling. Hell, you can shoot the sky with a shotgun. It makes
the game feel sillyand enclosed.
So those are my ideas. If I had QC and a map editor I'd be working on
some of them right now (but I'd probably never get anything done.. I'm
basicly a dreamer.) I hope some of them make it into Quake 2.
What do you think, sirs?
--
-Silverblade the Grey Wanderer (47 Jaguar games and counting,
MST3K # 65531, Founding member: Gonzo for Lemur Movement)
"I'm back! (and better than ever!)" MST3K Season EIGHT on Sci-FI!
Andrew S. Wheat
Here's a couple mroe wishes:
1) Customisable inventory. Have an inventory screen where you can choose
to drop weapons or store them in one of perhaps four slots (hanging from
left shoulder, right shoulder, left holster, right holster) and use the
number keys 2-5 to access those slots. Add a backpack of course where
you store things you don't have in holsters, but you can't get instant
access to backpack items. I envision several advantages to this: a) the
ability to rationalize a guy carrying all this hardware. Perhaps
animations for weapon changes can be added to show you that you're
drawing a weapon from a holster etc. b) other inventory items that you
can use without scrolling through an inventory. Want to use a stim
pack? go to the inventory screen and put it in your sholder holster,
then when you need it press 4 and instantly you use it. I've said it
before: I hate the Duke inventory, but having strategc inventory items
does ad flavor to the game. c) this actually increases strategy (which
might be a Bad Thing(tm) in id minds, but I'd quite like it) because
you'd have to think about what 4 things you need at hand. Slot 1 would
revert to bare hands or a kick or something. Not the axe, because that
should be a weapon of its own.
2) Show what weapon the player is using, please! I wish the same weapon
graphics that you see rotating in mid air there when you grab them could
be shown in the player model's hands, so you can see what somebodyt is
using. And add animations for trading weapons from each of the 4 holster
locations (i.e. reaching over left, right sholder and down to hips) and
an animation for inventory management (maybe crouching and rifling
through a bag. I can picture this: You creep up on a deathmatch foe
while he's in the inventory screen, and see the player model rifling
through a bag, oblivious to the world. Supprise! Boom! Splat!)
There's so much I want to do with this beautiful engine while keeping the
speed, mood, and simplicity of the game. Oh, I wish I had the resolve
and the programing know-how to be working on this now!
Matthew Shaylor
tana...@netcom.com (Andrew S. Wheat) wrote:
>2) Show what weapon the player is using, please! I wish the same weapon
>graphics that you see rotating in mid air there when you grab them could
>be shown in the player model's hands, so you can see what somebodyt is
>using. And add animations for trading weapons from each of the 4 holster
>locations (i.e. reaching over left, right sholder and down to hips) and
>an animation for inventory management (maybe crouching and rifling
>through a bag. I can picture this: You creep up on a deathmatch foe
>while he's in the inventory screen, and see the player model rifling
>through a bag, oblivious to the world. Supprise! Boom! Splat!)
... and if they were trying to say a message you could have an
animation of them holding a microphone, and if they were using the
console you could have them holding a scroll, and if they were using
the menu then they could hold one of those "Q" things. Hmm, maybe
this is OTT but it would be fun, nice idea anyway.
Matthew Shaylor