ekekekekekekl's comments

I was always super disappointed they didn't use Mode-X by default.

As a result, even though you could set Mode-X explicitly, it wasn't optimized so it went slower than plain 13h and wasn't even page-flipped. So there wasn't a compelling reason to use it, except for the square pixels.

They're not that similar in terms of how much space is spent on dark shades. In the doom palette the gradients don't go down to full blackness, and there's a technical reason for that; it's inappropriate for doom's engine.

The engines are very different in this regard, doom had no lighting. In quake you had lighting, and potential for dark shadows. The lighted colors needed to have range to blackness throughout, since they may occur in textures which get cast into full shadow. By limiting the full intensity of the colors chosen, smaller steps are achieved from black to full intensity across the 16 slots each color gradient was given. Those smaller steps improve the rendering quality, but the lower peak intensities contribute to the generally muted color-space of the game.

Doom and Quake do not use the same techniques as you mentioned above, that's incorrect. Quake was a major improvement over doom, doom more closely resembles the faux-3d "raycasting" of wolf3d. Quake is more like a traditional texture-mapped 3d engine, hence its 3dfx-accelerated readiness.

In the past I experimented with RGB direct-color modes in Mode-X (320x240x256) using a 332 format, to have the full color cube available and not have to preselect a fixed palette. This allowed a diverse color-space in a real-time 3d simulation, but the quality of the output was terrible due to the very few shades given to each color from full darkness to full brightness. This is why a game like Quake which would obviously benefit from a direct-color mode still ends up opting for a palette of dramatically constrained colors; it's just to improve the quality of the output.

In the world of 256 colors, the more advanced the 3d engines became the worse the colors got.

The very thing that made Quake so impressive at the time was the 3d with lighting and shadows on our 256-color displays. Nobody was doing that, probably because everyone assumed direct-color was a requirement, and with the VGA the only direct-color you could do was 8-bit "332". So while everyone was waiting for PC graphics hardware to mature a bit, id came along and gave a us a game full of browns, greens, and grays, and we loved it.

The bay area is just awful, do not move here^Wthere!

No, really, as these games progressed from the simpler wolf3d-style rendering where there was no attempt to shade things, which allowed a much more diverse set of colors, their colors became progressively less diverse.

Just look at the Quake palette: https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette

Note how much of it is wasted on gradients, this is to get the more realistic 3d shading out of relatively few colors. Of course they made some choices in designing Quake to better position itself for a successful result working within these limitations, but it's the limitations forcing their hand.

The game was dark. These (doom, quake) were 256-color games which needed to burn substantial portions of the available palette just to facilitate shading and shadows atop colored textures. The dreary look of the game is somewhat forced by the limitations of VGA.

Looks like they've found a way to profitably leverage recycled carbon fiber.

Rotary engine advantage in torque? This is nonsense.

The Wankel's design limits the eccentricity of the crank shaft which consequently limits torque to relatively low levels compared to a contemporary piston engine of similar fuel consumption. There is no torque advantage to a Wankel, it's at a disadvantage.