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Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by karim79 on Thursday August 10, 2023 @08:31PM (#37083589)
Incredible and just sent me way back to the nineties. To be fair, I'm talking about the first Quake game here. I had a PC rig on my bedroom floor which as I recall was a Pentium 166MMX, and my friend came over with a similar machine which was a bit faster (a 233) perhaps. No LAN cards insight.

Using one of my dad's ancient parallel cables and fooling Windows into thinking it was a LAN connection, which worked well enough, we played for days, until it got kind of tedious. So we then got into the whole modding scene - not creating anything, but downloading and testing the things which were out there. I will never, ever forget Girobot and KQP (Killer Quake Patch).

The Girobot bots were a force to be reckoned with when they didn't get stuck in the terrain. It was KQP which added all kinds of crazy mods/weapons/bot systems to the game that was the real gold. The Vampire Gun left us in stitches every time someone was hit by it, because it basically guaranteed a slow but not too slow death in which the hit player would crumble into little chunks of flesh. I miss the nineties very, very much.

Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by hypercube33 on Thursday August 10, 2023 @08:51PM (#37083745)
I had 8gb of downloaded-over-modem and sometimes T1 mods, maps, skins for quake 2 multiplayer. I miss the mods so much.
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by autoexec on Thursday August 10, 2023 @10:18PM (#37084333)
The endless amounts of user created mods, maps, and skins many of us enjoyed in early days were killed off so that game publishers could make a fortune charging us for a small selection of sanctioned DLC. In the process they killed off an entire ecosystem that grew up around user created content. Forums, review sites, file hosting, and generations of new talent who found their love of programing by creating mods all lost due to greed and a desire for control.
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by jasonb05 on Thursday August 10, 2023 @09:01PM (#37083853)
"Girobot", do you mean the "Gyrobot" by "Gyro Gearloose" [1]?

Also, I believe KQP had ZeusBots included (for reference).

[1] https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeBotArchive

Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by karim79 on Thursday August 10, 2023 @09:39PM (#37084069)
Thank you for the correction, sorry, it has been forever. The link is fantastic, thank you for that as well.
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by samplatt on Friday August 11, 2023 @12:27AM (#37085106)
ZeusBots were where it was at, for me.

First few computers were too slow to run Quake effectively, but then I had a Duron 900 (they ran slow AND hot!), bought a 'PC Powerplay' magazine that came with a CD full of quake mods, and a map with 20-40 of ZeusBots worked just fine!

Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by jasonb05 on Friday August 11, 2023 @02:59AM (#37085902)
Oh man, PCPowerPlay! I had my q3 mod written up in there in 2000 [1].

[1] https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/HumanDebrisArchive/blob/ma...

Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by samplatt on Sunday August 13, 2023 @09:50PM (#37116549)
Holy shit it's Soldat in the quake engine. Dude that's cool. Totally giving that a bash with friends if we ever LAN again.
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by dmclamb on Thursday August 10, 2023 @09:19PM (#37083964)
my dad's ancient parallel cables

With a null modem? I had same setup with my college roommate in our apartment. This was mid 90s, so it was Doom 2 and other FPS from that time.

Great memories.

Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by karim79 on Thursday August 10, 2023 @09:43PM (#37084105)
Indeed. My brother and I played starcraft using the same trick. When the fight started to escalate and there were hundreds of units fighting, the lag got really really bad, but it worked well enough that we kept coming back to it. That and Warcraft 2, Heretic, Hexen, all the rest. The best days in gaming IMO.
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by ido on Friday August 11, 2023 @01:44AM (#37085482)
it reminds me of the saying: the golden age of sci-fi is 15.
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by johnwalkr on Friday August 11, 2023 @08:14AM (#37087805)
Quake 1 (original DOS version only) supported null modem, but Quake 2 didn't -you had to use a null modem with Windows 95 dial-up networking, which was a bit more tricky to setup.