Awesome!

Is the cringe PR/Marketing akin to "false advertising"?

I'm also confused why they are using darkplaces in the first place, who even maintains that properly anymore? I hope whatever they do with it they fix the longstanding bugs and issues and release the source code back.

DracoNihil wrote:

Is the cringe PR/Marketing akin to "false advertising"?

I read "will melt your hardware" as "won't be playable on your hardware" and it's questionable if you can reliably define "will melt your hardware" as "will be playable on your hardware".

If that's the case then they must subscribe to the 'any publicity is good publicity' theory; I can already sense Voodoo2 owners getting their nerdy knickers in a twist.

for what it's worth there's this old 2017 post on Doomworld about it, which frankly, should be the real selling point - and not Fresch's "3D FX" nonsense.

I don't blame you! So far, every modern "retro" FPS has failed to meet my expectations. I think the fatal flaw is that they tend to latch on to one characteristic of retro shooters (usually some aesthetic aspect) and extrapolate upon that. Because of this, they end up being merely shallow caricatures of their inspirations. This is not what Wrath is. Without going into detail, I'll compare aspects of Wrath to other games: the combat model of Doom II (strong OUD and therefor emergent gameplay), the environmental feedback and interactivity of Duke Nukem 3D, and the atmosphere and spacial awareness/interactivity of Quake. NO procedural generation; hand-crafted levels all the way.

I'm already disliking the marketing. Bragging about running on the Quake engine when in actuality its a sourceport that is waaaay beyond the capabilities and looks of the original...which just kills the point of using an old engine.

Reminds me of all that indie platformer crap that claims "8bit NES graphics, soundtrack and gameplay!!" when its running sampled music, huge maps, custom-sized 32bit sprites and somehow large pixels make it "retro".

I know this sounds very elitist, but Id prefer if developers just advertised their games for what they are instead of claiming connections to other games that arent really there.

Munx wrote:

I know this sounds very elitist, but Id prefer if developers just advertised their games for what they are instead of claiming connections to other games that arent really there.

Not elitest at all. There's nothing wrong with expecting a little clear, transparent honesty.

https://twitter.com/3DRealms/status/1104032249194926081

lol

The box for Rad Rodgers: World One--which runs on Unreal Engine 4--also had a "retrosploitative" 3Dfx logo on it, so this isn't the first time modern 3D Realms has done this. Although with Wrath, they're pushing the pseudo-3Dfx support in their advertising a lot harder.

In mentioning the announcement of WRATH: Aeon of Ruin, we joked that a Voodoo graphics card would be among the QUAKE-engine game's recommended specs. Now 3D Realms humorously tweets that since they've received a Voodoo 2 card, WRATH will include 3DFX support

spoiler: it won't

So, pretty irritated with the way they're going about selling this to people, even if it is "just a bit of fun".

If they aren't planning a 95/98 port of the game, I did ask on the discord server if we will get files (see attached). Hoping that at the very least we get something out of a purchase that will let us do a port.

Has anyone ported Darkplaces to old win?

Here's the thing - older darkplaces does work on old windows, but the D3D10 backend overhaul threw a wrench into that (not dynamically loaded), followed by the SDL2 part, and a lot of GL1.x path refactory prior would screw over all the pre-Geforces, some shell path stuff, and of course the newer GCC compilers required. Wrath also uses CSQC, which is a feature that went through much evolution during this period so much that Wrath isn't likely to be compatible with older Darkplaces. The portal stuff's also a buffer trick implemented for Nexuiz long ago as well.

we're more likely see an "ironic joke" about it on April 1st however.

Sigh.

Well, at least I have a switch I guess? Kinda feel like I'm buying a ROM of a Genesis game that's impossible to put on a cartridge.

I wish they would make a new Duke Nukem first person shooter, though obviously one much closer (in almost every respect) to Duke Nukem 3D than Duke Nukem Forever.

Fred already tried, and I think we already know how well that went. 😐

I have some tidbits from theirs Discord.

leileilol wrote:

As for this stupid marketing bit

Capped at 666 fps, WRATH will melt your soul and your Voodoo 2... But it's okay. Software Rendering is supported!

Yeah, this is just BS, and they plan to update Steam store page listing:

1that actually needs to updated - no software renderer
2though we'll have an option to emulate it
3that said, software rendering (which I love the look of) does not perform well at all
4wrath would be a literal slide show

dumpsterac1d wrote:

Has anyone ported Darkplaces to old win?

You can still get Win 98 compatible build on dev site: https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/files … 110524beta1.zip

I won't hold my breath to Win 98 compatible client to be shipped with game, since as leileilol already mentioned, even LordHavoc already completely purged SDL1 from his source code. But, there is still chance for at least 32-bit XP compatible executable:

1we've modified DP, so you can use vanlla DP (probably) but will be borked. if we can do a 32bit build we absolutely will.
2our changes will be available for LordHavoc (the engine author) to merge them if desired.
3but yeah, I persoanlly would like a 32bit vesion (the test machine was running XP) but we had to switch over to 64 for a couple reasons
4but I think those issues have since been resolved and x32 is back on the table.

It's supposedly out on early access by now. So far the biggest complaint i've seen (from a certain echo chamber) is how it's "betraying the quake engine" by not having air strafing. 🙄

leileilol wrote:

It's supposedly out on early access by now. So far the biggest complaint i've seen (from a certain echo chamber) is how it's "betraying the quake engine" by not having air strafing. 🙄

It'd be funny if a lot of the "abused physics" was actually fixed so people have to re-think how to speedrun without that crazy stuff.

Hell, I don't know what Raven did to Quake when they made Hexen 2 but the player physics in that is all over the place compared to just standard Quake 1.

3dfx mode was a joke

Darkplaces allows you to go down to GL1.3 by adding vid_gl20 0 to autoexec.cfg and to GL1.1 by also adding vid_gl13 0, however this hasn't been tested. It will certainly disable some features, like dynamic lights on the items and any post processing, and likely slow the game down to a crawl. I'm not sure if it would be even possible to run this on 3dfx/Glide at all.
Also currently we only have a 64-bit executable, which would impede your attempts to run it on older hardware, but we'll probably add a 32-bit one when we iron out certain issues with it.

Long story short, all the modern operating systems pretty much require 32-bit or 64-bit binaries, and Darkplaces cannot run in 1 […]
Show full quote

Long story short, all the modern operating systems pretty much require 32-bit or 64-bit binaries, and Darkplaces cannot run in 16-bit mode, it wasn't really built to run on like a 486, and neither was WRATH.
The reason why we're currently shipping a 64-bit executable instead of a 32-bit one is that we were having some technical issues with the 32-bit build on some systems, so we chose to use the 64-bit one until the issues are fixed.
The game also requires more than 512 MB of RAM and probably something close to a Pentium 4 performance-wise at the very least, so you can't run it on 90s hardware.
Thanks for sharing the article, it looks quite interesting. If you have any press-related questions, better contact 3D Realms via e-mail.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1000410/discus … 17111857670701/