/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3309745
a number of quake's assets including ranger, humanoid enemies, the HUD (+main menu and console), and parts of level geometry were designed to be rendered at a lower vertical resolution than displayed, then stretched out to fill the gap, much like Doom (with identical examples like the facepic on the HUD becoming much more natural looking when stretched)

however, other parts of the levels, larger enemies, most powerups and pickups, and the smaller console font were designed to be displayed 1:1 with no stretching involved

quake is kind of a mess of art assets smushed together, so it makes sense some of them are meant for doom-style 320x200-stretched-to-320x240 and others were created later on in the dev cycle once the graphics and engine had advanced far enough they realized they didn't need to stretch things

most ports like quakespasm and most players play at plain 1:1 and just deal with things looking kind of squashed

>>3154189
>>3154192
On top of that Quake enemies are just really stumpy in general.

It seems like Quake really should use the same intentionally-stretched-aspect-ratio thing Doom does- and for all the oldest screenshots of Q1 I can find (game mags, previews etc) some screenshots are stretched but others aren't- but everywhere I've looked says that it was meant to be played 1:1.

I don't know why no one has made a fuss about this before, because now I can't un-notice it.