I'm touched by the recent support and suggestions regarding crowdfunding/etc. I don't think I can post reliably enough for Patreon, but if you want to donate on a once-off basis, you can buy me a coffee here: www.buymeacoffee.com/quakespeedrunsexplained ❤
Many creators do it on a per video basis - and even then you can choose not to charge supporters if you feel it's shorter/not what folks are expecting. I'd personally be happy to pay per video, and patreon means it just happens automatically.
i buy you two if you dig into qw slide1.qwd . The one and only important map for racing in qw. The hardest of all. Pure slope , pure slide, pure speed.
I agree - you don't need to publish every week or month. If people like your work - give them a way to easily support you on a regular basis! They will decide themselves how much they want to give, but they'll know they are helping you at least a tiny bit.
And without texture filtering it somehow looks better, than some other 3d games from that same era (with texure filtering, well, it looks sharper and better to me withoug filtering). It has its own charme and to be honest, it looks better that way, even better than even some newer indie titles (that want to look "retro").
Absolutely, modern Quake maps are insanely beautiful. ...I mean personally I think the base game already was, but... yeah. What impresses me is that even when using all custom textures they manage to make it feel like Quake anyways.
@@steverussell7005 Holy shit, is there some server config that would make utopia_v3 beatable in Q1? Cause that would be a good fucking meme. Almost reason enough to run out and learn trenchbroom.
Having played some Source engine games (TF2), everything here seems completely normal. Its cool how some "bugs" transferred from Quake to Goldsrc to Source to possibly Source 2 and continue being used 20 years later.
the biggest difference i notice is on modern source engine games you dont get extra height from jumping up slopes (unless you have a good amount of speed) & the extra height you can get from hitting a slope with speed is a lot lower than in quake but other than that, really everything works as i would expect and hope from slopes (though the grenade thing is silly)
Because they used a modified version of the Quake engine. Goldsource is modified Quaqe, Source is modified Goldsource, Titanfall and by extension Apex Legends uses a modified version of Source.
@@indestructible247 Havok is used as middleware, Quaqe is still the vast majority. Source and Goldsource actually were developed in parallel for a few days; Source was essentially the experimental branch, whereas Goldsource was changed very little as HL1 was about to release. Although Havok is more important than most of the (and I have to stress this) _many_ components used in Source, Quaqe is so engrained in it that John D. Carmack II once said: "there are still bits of early Quake code in Half-Life 2"; which makes it more appropriate as a predecessor.
Quake and Valve engines movement is something I regret not having gotten into at a younger age (due to lack of time and energy). Nowadays I do some bhop, rocket jump and surf casually but my movement is never as impressive as talented runs I see on this channel or elsewhere. Some people really seem gifted with this sense of virtual space and timing.
The way I heard it explained was that slopes convert between horizontal and vertical velocity. Jumping down a slope converts your downwards velocity into forwards velocity, and jumping up the slope will convert forwards velocity into upwards velocity, so really upward and downward slopes have the same behaviour, just in different directions. We could use a video from Matt's Ramblings to explain what causes ramp jumping and surfing behaviour in the code.
When touching a slope the players velocity perpendicular to the slope is clipped. Lets say you only have horizontal speed hitting "straight" into a 45 degree slope, for easier visualization of the phenomena lets rotate the frame of reference 45 degrees so the surface now is just a flat 0 degree "slope" and the player is moving downwards-forwards with an angle of 45 degrees, when hitting the surface the vertical velocity is removed and you only have the horizontal speed (parallel to the "slope") left, by changing back our reference frame you are now going up the 45 deg slope. This is happening against basically all surfaces by the way. Jumping is just adding 270 of Z-speed to the players velocity vector, so that is how ramp jumping works. Surfing is happening because of slopes that have a Z-part of the surface normal less than 0.7(A slope with close to 45 degrees and higher) is not considered as ground (No friction) in the movement code and you move with air movement (accompanied by previous mentioned velocity clipping against surfaces).
What I like most about Quake speedruns is that they don't rely so heavily on obvious glitch exploits. Instead, people beat records by exploiting rules that seem to be enforced consistently according to some kind of internal logic that in itself may be weird and unintuitive, but not unpredictable or obviously broken. I guess grenades getting stuck on slopes might be right on the edge of what I'd consider a glitch, but it never really occurred to me as overtly broken behavior when playing the game casually. I just accept it as a quirk of the physics simulation. For comparison I watched a great speedrun of Blood where a lot of the skipping tricks involved opening doors on yourself to essentially noclip yourself past sections of the map as the game struggled to put the player back outside solid objects. Build engine jank allows for these kinds of skips across the board and seems so obviously inadvertent compared to what really amounts to physics quirks in Quake.
Yes! This is exactly how Quake speedrunners feel. In its own weird way, Quake is almost unbelievably stable and glitch-free. It just feels like a perfectly designed first person racing game :)
Yeah it seems like a game where the regular intended mechanics are so refined and versatile that speedruns really are more like e sports level play. In contrast you have half life 2 where you can give gordon noclip by turning him into a boat, deleting the boat, deleting gordon, and then turning gordon into a ghost thats immune to bullets and can jump through walls. You can also smash books into peoples heads to teach them how to teleport, break the sound barrier by going backwards but forwards, and sometimes backwards but forwards but backwards.
A lot of the older runs on Speed Demos Archive used to be the same way, for all types of games. They were great to watch because playing fast meant playing by the rules, but also playing incredibly well. These days a lot of speedruns are just wars of attrition against RNG until you finally clip through the wall and spend five minutes running to the exit.
@@Squant dont make that mistake man, new and different =/= bad. dont be a boomer who hates change. not only do precise glitches take just as much skill, but there are both glitch allowing and glitchless categories, everyone gets what they love.
Then there's OOT speed running, where you do seemingly random nonsense for a couple minutes and suddenly win because you were secretly reprogramming the game itself to show the end credits.
really cool to see all these examples. counterstrike has large and separate but overlapping communities for bhop, kz climbing, and surfing, with really advanced application of these techniques. quake speedrunning was the origination of them all and still the best combination of all the movement techniques
Maybe it's because I've played Quake games for so long, but I find the slope jumping pretty intuitive. Jump velocity is added to your current velocity, so if you're moving up when you jump, you jump higher! I'm making a platformer (Fist of the Forgotten) that really emphasizes this type of movement, but it definitely doesn't click for everybody. As for why grenades stick to slopes, if I recall correctly, the code checks if the normal of the surface relative to the motion of the grenade is below some threshold, which makes sense on flat ground -- once the grenade is moving almost horizontally it should just stop bouncing. If it's on a slope, however, that normal check can be in line with the grenades movement (moving close to being in line with the slope), so it just stops in unrealistic places.
I was today years old when I learned that grenades bouncing downwards on slopes are always stuck. I guess it's time to put that knowledge into good use :)
i love how the ID games, didnt make a set of rules, but instead a set of variables when designing how the game can be played. it gives it a sandbox feel, and so many options considering the only way out is through.
They didn't make a set of variables but they made it a game engine, similar how they did it in Doom (don't know about Wolfenstein). This means that there was a game engine driver that that was programmed in QuakeC, and therefore completely variable. This is how all the mods and conversions could be made. Valve bought the engine for Halflife.
Interesting to see a different kind of video that goes more in-depth about a gameplay mechanic. I'm all for it if you have more of those! (I'm aware of Matt's Ramblings too btw, but those are more tech-heavy)
I like that you describe slopes as "humble" as if they are the most powerful entities in the Quake universe but they don't make a big deal about it and just kinda chill out on maps occasionally lending their power to speedrunners that happen to pass by.
What's hilarious is, that... fits the "incomprehensible Other Place" vibe of Quake perfectly actually? "Oh, the ramps here are sentient, by the way. Nbd."
I don't agree, that slopes increasing your vertical speed while going up them, nor increasing your horizontal speed while jumping down them is a bug. It's a simple implementation of elastic collisions with respect to the Newton's law and conservation of inertia. If it were a bug, it probably wouldn't have persisted through Q2, Q3, ... But then again, I'm sure it was recognized as one of the main aspects, that separated quake games from all the other contemporary FPS and why I still rate these engines far, far above all other FPS engines (the other being quake's netcode).
I was going to say something similar. Most of the tech related to slopes is perfectly intuitive even if you know nothing about Quake or Source engine games, and the rest of the tech becomes somewhat intuitive once you understand Quake's air movement. The only exception here is grenades stopping on slopes.
In Quake 2 you get the height but also the speed is preserved, you just kinda slide them up. You can land on them while falling or moving up right after a jump, makes no difference.
Thanks for that explanation, i've never ectutally known, on how it is possible, that some people are moving that quickly in quake and quake engine based games. Now i know for sure. I've never got to much into that kind of games to be honest, even though i like to play some fps, but i appretiate it, if someone out there makes a good explanation video like yours, it is a blessing. Quake and Doom always had some fascination to me, i played different versions of those iconic titles (PC, Sega, SNES, N64, PSOne) and they have a special place in my heart. Always appreciate this kind of content.
I always love these sorts of tricks from classic games. It certainly doesn't hurt that people have been playing these particular games for a long while now. I wonder what current games will have that sort of longevity.
I remember me and my entire clan (at the time) playing surf maps in counterstrike. So much fun. Some of the madness I could pull off... good times. All thanks to the quake engine :)
It seems a LOT of games have this quirk with slopes, not just Quake. I recall even doing this in Everquest Online Adventures, which barely even had much of a physics system at all (being an MMORPG), and could abuse slopes to slowly crawl to the top of the walls in Freeport.
In an alternate universe, Daikatana was the spiritual successor to Quake 1. Imagine how much cooler that big sword would've been, if it wasn't just a MacGuffin on a stick.
The collection of clips in this video is damn near pornographically satisfying. You can't be doing this to me man. 😩 But far one of my favorite elements of Quake's movement. I always visualized it like your character is a rubber ball that you're throwing at an angled wall.
I used to play Quake when i was like 6 and hardly understood what i was doing. No idea why i would need this video now, but it is extremely entertaining. Thank you
To think that this game's children had managed to keep so much of this game's DNA alive. Plenty a time have I used inclined surfaces as a launch pad for my speed shots and I have certainly made a good few uses out of ramp surfing and ramp climing. Man. It feels weird to see skills that I have learned in a game so much younger than Quake would carry over quite well.
Great video! I'm very familiar with the Doom engine but don't know much about Quake, so this was good to demistify. It would be nice to have a video even about basic movement like bunny hops and that mid-air wiggle modern runners seem to do. I guess that wiggle was discovered later because early runners don't seem to do it.
Karl Jobst has a good video covering the history of Quake speedrunning and the techniques used. m.ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-43d8fICz6gM.html
"to an outsider this must be very confusing" me, charging into slope ,flying across the map,landing on a different slope and taking zero fall damage in tf2:"yeah, it seems about right"
Have you ever played the original Slide mod those slide maps came from? It was really well done for it's time, though you can probably blow through the maps way faster without the hoverboard with modern movement techniques.
Yes! Love that mod. A couple of the maps were converted into speedrunning maps, like you said: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gm05zx0D3HM.html
Thanks for this video. I was yesterday on a slide map and this helpful to get more used to how Quake behaves regarding the slopes. :) Over a year I played Quake on the couch with a controller, but now I back with keyboard and mouse and it makes more fun.
I was expecting you to pull out a formula or code snip it at almost every transition, this reminds me of the missile knows where it is meme because you describe the slop without ever telling us exactly how it works
I grew up playing almost exclusively games using this engine or engines based on it. The physics and nuances make just as much sense in my head as real life does.
Engine: Hah these vertical and horizontal blocks are easy to handle. Developer: I've added diagonally ones to the 3D models. Engine: Oh shit. I mainly remember the surf maps on Counter Strike Source.
It's also interesting how slope coordinates are handled by the engine itself. If I remember correctly from my Q1 mapping days, BSP holds center of a plane, along it's facing vector (it's oriented 0,0 for flat floor), plus list of unique intersecting vertices. The presence of vector may be indication of math behind it - quake just applies simple modifier based on angle difference, adds vectors and voila, next n.
man- just seeing the air strafes- seeing the little surfs- I'm so glad so much of this tech seeps into later Source games. Even Apex has geoboosts relative to surfing.
It's funny how the people who played these games have an alternate sense of physics programmed into us, i played a lot of half life and got into surf maps very easily, it just makes sense :p.
if i can make one suggestion, please consider displaying the names of the maps and the players whose demos you've used in the video on the screen during appropriate segments because it would be a godsend for exposure
i spent too much time trying to make that first jump on that EJ3 map that i realised i'm just not in that league. saw a demo a later and understood it's not for mortals like me
Imagine the enemies on these map seeing the player just bounce off a few surfaces at high speed and exit the level before they can even get a shot off.
7:35 I believe its because you are jumping on an edge which causes the physics to go wacky. In halo 2, there is a thing called super bounce where you land on edges and it will launch you sky high. it was a thing on the xbox version, probably fixed in halo 2 vista and halo aniversary and I think it may be related to that.
Believe it or not the classic Sonic games have very similar slopes; jumping on an upward incline will make you jump extremely high, but you can also jump three quarters in a loop to get a lot more speed on the descent allowing you to build absurd speed instantly without a spindash. Because of these quirks, I'm inclined to believe the higher jump height and faster speed from slopes are intentional and aren't bugs.
I only ever played quake once, on easy since I was more focused on enjoying the basic movement, but I love watching it. I love TF2's movement as someone who mostly plays medic, and have spent a few hundred hours on rocket jump maps. It's remarkable how the jurf mechanics popularized by the map(s) of the same name are comparable to quake pretty much one to one, right down to the syncs.
I played Quake when it was first released. I was 15. I played the CRAP out of that game, but here I am, nearly 30yrs later, only to learn I was supposed to Mario a switch to a hidden door?! I always just hopped from the ramp!
I had no idea that the Source engine got their weird slope physics that made Surf maps possible from Quake! Guess they never "fixed" it, as apparently Goldsrc was directly based off the Quake engine. Now I wonder if Source 2 also still has it. Imagine how insane a CSS surf map would feel in VR
I think it was quake 2, I believed myself to be decent at strafe jumping and movement in general, then I attempted surfing levels and it was literally playing a new game.
Something that you missed here that I think is important to explain it all is vector physics.... when jumping on a surface in quake rather than a true jump (as we see is most modern games) the quake engine applies a vector of speed. This is the a relative angle based on current speed, current inputs and surface you are jumping off. While this is known by any quake players, those that don't know it won't understand what's happening.
You know... being part of the OG Quake scene really was special, as the game was basically a wholesale collection of quirky 'oops' turned features. While we obviously must give a nod to Doom, it was Quake that pretty much brought up most every "quirk" that is now implemented as "standard". And kudos to the competitive scene, be it FFA, TDM, DM or speedrunners, because not a single soul ever thought "ahh... this needs to be fixed". Nope, everything was both embraced and incorporated into the play style. You know it's a special thing when just about every bug and quirk it had was not only "promoted" for general use and not seen as a detraction but was taken in as "added value" :D
... the part of me that has made puzzle game maps hates this because removing backroutes is a normal thing there and so this feels like "don't use slopes in your map".
