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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

New Q3A Patch And Mods 104

Posted by Hemos from the live-with-it dept.
Warrior writes "Id Software released the newest patch for Quake 3 Arena yesterday, version 1.25. However, the patch literally "breaks" all mods made for the game. GameSpy has an article that addresses the issue, getting id's stance and talking to authors of some of the most popular mods." It sounds like the patch is actually correcting a lot of issues, and while it's too bad that it breaks the mods, sometimes you have to do that to get things working properly.
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New Q3A Patch And Mods More

New Q3A Patch And Mods

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  • Where if you have IPX and TCP/IP on your system, the game will see "itself" on BOTH networks... it's a bug which has been around ever since Quake1 (thence a crash bug), and in every game that has license the engine.... you would think they would get around to fixing it...

    --
  • take a look at what good 'ole John Carmack had to say about your "better game" on slashdot a while back.

    http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/09/20/2020210&cid=59 [slashdot.org]
  • So go play UT while you wait (sarcasm obviously too subtle for this member of clan[AC])
  • Er, the changes are applied equally for everyone. Here's a hint: if your m@d skilz depend on exploiting cheats in the game, you're probably not that good. I have mixed emotions for what you say.
    Yes, all changes affect everybody that _decides_ to apply the patch.

    Nobody exploited cheats in a game. They took the game to another level by understand the game throughly. A cheat is one, when the other people dont know you are using it or when it gives someone an unfair advantage. All the tactics and techniques hardcore gamers use are known and, most of all, when in a tournament, they all use the same machines and they are not allowed to use real cheats (using brighter skins, aim bots, etc).

    What the original postar was talking about, has NOTHING to do with top players cheating. It has to do with ID software nullifying what they had learnt and forcing a change in gameplay.

    You would complain too if you were a good tennis player and someone decided to make the court bigger, the size of the ball smaller and different material. Maybe you wont be good anymore. Not that you are not good at tennis. You are good at THE OLD tennis. All the tricks you had to make the ball land were you wanted or bounce with a desired effect are gone.

  • Well, i dunno what you all are thinking with modding quake 3. It seems soooo hard to do, so why do it? Go over to www.TreadMarks.com and download a demo of that. All you do is open up the .ent files with a text editor and change what you like, it's been made to be editable to an extent that a fool like me can get it, it just takes a little time to get a few things, most comes naturally. As you get better, and if you have some really good software, you can easily make new weapons. I could, if i had enough ideas, make 20 new weapons in a day using gimp, blender, and a few other programs. You all should try it, but you need a good 3d card. Most people say if you have a 500mhz processor, than you can't have a video card below a TNT2 or you'll have a really suffering game, :-(. But, it is never as good as the full version of the game, which i suggest you buy it now. The next full version seems a little iffy, so you'd prolly need to download the full version now. Can you use dirtballs Quake to make walls for your enemy or to flip in the air in a 2 ton monster and frag people with a mid air blast? I LOVE this game, and i thought i'd try quake, but now i can't seem to get enough of those late hour contests. It's super easy to get onto a server, just click connect to server, and select a place to play. You guys don't know what your missing... but there's a problem, it is made for windows, and i never have been able to try out WINE on it, but i think it'd work... Now, i've never done much research on quake, so I expect you have to have some pretty fun stuff and maybe you can make craters, but i dunno about flying at someone at 200 kmph and making them flip out of control :-.
  • When I read the announcement, I was suprised to see "breaks all mods, source in a week or two so they can recompile". Since mods are the heart and soul of the Quake series, wouldn't it have been smarter to just wait that week or two?

    The patch may be great and does your laundry, too, but if it leaves players with nothing while they wait an unlikely minimum of a week or more before the source even comes out (nevermind waiting for the mod makers to come up to speed with new releases, which is the unavoidable part), mmm...some suckage for the players for a while. :/

    Buuuut, I guess this is redundant and rather obvious...(or not, I mean, it *was* released. :))

    Thankfully, my main game is still Quakeworld TF. >;)
  • Say no to Mario Physics too.
  • ID releases source and encourages people to make mods. This is not a situation where dozens of mods have broken and won't ever be fixed. Yes, there seem to have been some communication problems between ID and q3 community, but nobody died (in real life ;-).

  • Removing The 1.25 Point Release (Score:3)

    by citizenc ( 60589 ) <caryNO@SPAMglidedesign.ca> on Saturday September 23, 2000 @08:06AM (#759558) Journal
    Being an admin for GameSpy Arcade [gamespyarcade.com], I can vouch for the fact that it DOES break the mods -- badly. I've been giving users support for the past two hours. I will tell you guys what I tell them:

    If you have already upgraded to the Quake 3 Arena Point Release 1.25 public beta, you can revert to 1.17 by doing the following: 1) Delete the pak4.pk3 file located in your /baseq3 folder 2) Reinstall the Quake 3 Arena Point Release version 1.17


    ------------
    CitizenC
  • the spirit of tennis is to hit the ball back and forth, hopefully to a spot where the opponent can't get to it.

    i don't think that topspin, backspin and slicing were part of the original tennis design specs.

    if everyone has the same opportunity, without any extra equipment (bots), and it doesn't harm the server, then i don't see how it can be considered cheating?

    take q2 for example.
    run around or walk around. those are your two speeds. if you want to run away or catch up with someone, the end result amounts to who can cut corners better. does that model real life? do you run as fast as these guys down in sydney?

    now, take strafe jumping, which is seen as cheating by some. however, it can be done by anyone, and introduces a new dimention to gameplay. all of a sudden, being "better" doesn't just mean "can twitch faster." suddenly, you *can* catch up with that guy running away from you, because you can strafe-jump better than he can. or you can beat that guy chasing you with a rocket launcher to a package of health. or you can jump from one ledge to another so you can cut someone off, or come up in surprise behind someone else. or even if you see someone not strafe-jumping, you can guess that it might be a newbie, and instead of just railing his ass to gibs, you might go a little easier on him, so as to not scare him away from the game.

    i see differences in ability a *good* thing. some people say bunny-hoppers look silly. well, so does everyone running around at exactly the same speed.

    - Lt.Hawkins
  • As much as I like Q3A, Id, and company, what's with this? Valve pulled this exact same stunt, and nearly ruined Action Half-Life.

    I dunno, I don't get it. Is there a good reason behind these kinds of decisions?

  • C'mon guys, what're you talking about? I want to know what happens and what you can do when you tweak your system to get 125fps ... I've got an AMD750, and I've been trying to tweak the crap out of it, and I don't see any differences...

    What sort of tricky jumps are you talking about? BFG creep, and stuff like that?

    C'mon, fill us in here, 'leet Quake Gods...
  • I've got a Mac G4 and an AMD750 PC that I want to upgrade to v1.7 (well, when I can finally find a 1.7 point release installer for the Mac that doesn't hang, but that's a different story), but the problem is, I've done the upgrade on my PC to 1.7 and it no longer talks to the linuxdedicated server I set up on my local LAN for private deathmatch games...

    So is there a new version of linuxdedicated server for 1.25 that will work with this point release, or should I wait a while?

  • Maybe you stopped reading after that part. The smiley on the end of my original message indicated a joke - get it? I suck - if other people didn't practice so much I would be more competitive.

  • i don't think that topspin, backspin and slicing were part of the original tennis design specs.

    I don't argue that some "unexpected" attributes of a game are fair and should stay in. For example, Carmack went on record as saying that he didn't foresee rocket jumping. I think most would agree (Carmack included) that rocket jumping was a valid skill that didn't harm the spirit of the game.

    But that doesn't mean that all unexpected features are good. It has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. The spirit of the game of Quake is a test of reflexes, spacial memory and (to some degree) strategy. If a feature breaks the play balance by giving a player an unfair advantage by practicing a skill not in the spirit, then it should be eliminated, like imperfections in a tennis court.


    --

  • Fact: Rocket Jumping was originally a bug. IT was a 'quirk' in the wya the physics worked in Quake 1, they knew about it before release but ID decided to leave it in, and it has been in Q2 and Q3...
    ----
  • Is there gonna be a version of Q3A on CD that has all of the updated code included? A kind of "Quake III Arena 2.0," if you will? Because if there is then I'd just rather wait a year or so and buy the game again if I have to. Thanks.
  • Good Lord, how do you play Quake and not hear about strafe jumping. Have you tried reading an single tutorial or article online, even once?

    And you probably wonder why you keep respawning every 10 seconds or so like clockwork.
  • I thought the last part was the joke, not the whole thing. Sorry.

    __________________________________________________ ___

  • Thats not actually a fact, except maybe in Quake 1.

    There is a specific piece of code in the Quake2 and Quake3 source code to improve rocket jumping, I dont have the source code here (but I do have it at home) and the code actually greatly increases the knockback of weapons you use on yourself (rockets and grenades).

  • Good Lord, how do you play Quake and not hear about strafe jumping. Have you tried reading an single tutorial or article online, even once?

    Actually, no.

    And you probably wonder why you keep respawning every 10 seconds or so like clockwork.

    I have no idea what you're talking about.

    I have been using strafe jumping for months, I just never heard of the term.

    __________________________________________________ ___

  • Have I ever played Quake3?

    Hehe... I can't tell you how much of my life I've dropped into that game. Or Doom, that thing probably got a good year of my time.

    I'm hardly on my way to losing, most of the surfaces are not grates in the level, and I learn my lessons well... I don't run in a pattern someone can trace through a thin wall without being able to see me.

    And who says I've ever lost a game because of it? Not to say I haven't lost, but it's never come down to one cheap frag some lamer got by exploiting a bug in the system.

    People who whine when exploits are taken away usually aren't good enough to win without them.
  • My e-mail to id's CEO:

    X-Sender: toddh@mail.idsoftware.com
    Fair point. The correction is in process on www.quake3arena.com, but we
    can't change the readme file without a version number change.

    tsh

    At 01:41 PM 9/26/00 -0400, you wrote:
    [...]
    >With regards to the recent controversies regarding the beta point release
    >(1.25), I believe that it would have been important to state the beta
    >nature of the release off of the download page and in the readme file. The
    >first indication I saw that this release was a public beta came from Graeme
    >Devine's .plan stating that "I think we're going to call this a 'Public
    >Beta'." I think it is fair to say that most users would expect to see
    >critical information on a readme before seeking out a .plan. Perhaps its a
    >lesson learned. As of today, though, the quake3arena.com site still does
    >not list the release as a beta.
    [...]
  • I think that if you cannot maintain backwards compatability while fixing/improving a product, you shouldn't worry too much about it.

    Take this example: Have you ever tried to program something for Windows? 50% of your program code ends up being random system calls that don't do anything anymore. Why is this? Because they can't sacrifice any backwards compatabilities, and thus remain stuck with miles of legacy code. hPrevInstance, for example, almost never comes in handy in Win95, but its still there nowadays because Win 3.1 apps use it.

    And many programming languages remain unchanged because of the same reason- they have to maintain backwards compatability rather than becoming easier to program.

    Anyway, those are just my thoughts on the matter.
  • I kind of get the feeling that some of this may have actually been intentional on id's part. I mean, they forgot to mention that the release is a beta?! Something seems fishy...basically, they want to introduce some new code, but they need it to be tested. This new code basically breaks everything, so that no one will recommend upgrading to it. Given this situation, how do you find people to test? Forget to mention that it's a beta. Then all those people (we all know those people) who like to have every little update for everything installed the day it comes out will be your unwitting testers (won't they ever learn?). Mission accomplished. Sure, this paints id in a pretty bad light, but how long has it been since the last update? I find it hard to believe that this was rushed, and things this important were accidentally omitted.
  • iD has made the same mistake as Valve did with their patch. It breaks compatibility with mods, changes the physics/feel of the game, and was done without notice. I called the HL 1.1 patch the "disaster patch", and it sounds like iD made the same mistake.

    The problem was, when Valve "seeded the new netcode and other details to the bigger mod authors prior to the patch release," they did a very sloppy job of it. After the HL 1.1.0.0 patch, there were exactly two mods which had new versions available immediately. Many mod authors were extremely angry at Valve for not even notifying them that their mods would no longer work. Many mods were never ported at all. In fact, my favorite mod (Half-Life Jailbreak) had already been abandoned, and I had to get the source code (no easy task, the only person who had it uploaded a corrupt copy before going idle, I ended up with a corrupt copy) to port and clean up the whole thing as open-source (GPL is incompatible with Valve's disclaimer, so it's a custom license, OSML).

    A good percentage of the people who didn't even play any of the broken mods were mad at Valve for the patch, because of the new net code. Basically, it was a blessing to people with badly-optimized dial-up connections, and a curse to anyone with anything better. The net code change might as well have been a physics change, because the messed-up netcode totally changed the feel of the game. For those modemmers who benefitted from the netcode and didn't play any broken mods, there was a load of controversial changes to boot.


    ------------------
  • Calling this a Public Beta was clearly an afterthought. Otherwise, shouldn't that have been mentioned in the readme [quake3arena.com].

    I'm not sure what the rush to get this out the door for the Win clients was. Most people weren't expecting mush from id until closer to the Team Arena laung, right?>

    I think a better idea would have been to hold off on any release until the source & multi-platform builds were ALL ready. That way you don't have the Linux/Mac crowd upset for not releasing anything; the Win crowd upset for releasing an upgrade that screws with the mods in ways that the mod builders can't do anything about. Talk about not being able to see the forest from the trees!

    Graeme Devine (Designer / Project Manager) says he "thought we'd never get this out the door!" (.plan [bluesnews.com]). Maybe waiting would have been prudent. Also, "Because we've added so much I think we're going to call this a "Public Beta".": do you think or do you know? Which is it?

    Well, I hadn't run thru single-player in a while. Guess this was the chance I was looking for?

  • I was actually about to make this exact same post; stupid id people just lost a lot of respect in my eyes. It seems as if you could earn a lot of respect by listening to the community....
  • I believe... Valve did a good job in preparing the big release, especially for the popular mods. id Software didn't. :(
  • I installed the 1.25 patch, and played a CTF match with the bots, it was great! That is, until it froze up (in Windows 2000; that means there's something wrong). I told Paul Jaquays, and he's gonna relay the message. So just hold off until they're sure it's ready.

    Also notice the red bordering on the console; that's an indication that it's BETA.

  • Football players shouldn't train as hard as they do, it's just a game. And they don't deserve multi-millon dollar salaries either. Personally, (this is all my opinion) I don't think you should be paid for playing a computer game, be it Half-Life, Quake 3, what else; this merely glorifies the twitch reflex. If you work so long at a game that it's mortally upsetting to you when the authors make adjustments which lower your skills (even though it's quite likely you'll get used to it eventually), you're probably trying too hard.
  • I find opinions like this in the majority of less experienced players. I can find no explnation other than envy and ignorance. Er, the changes are applied equally for everyone Exactly. id has removed or weakened two skills that require practice and intelligence to use effectively. This is equivalent to, say, limiting all serves in tennis to under 100mph. It flattens the learning curve. It makes it harder to differentiate between two players of similar but not equal skills. I fail to see how this can be considered a good thing, unless you enjoy games where no skill is involved and wish to see q3 head further down this route. Here's a hint: if your m@d skilz depend on exploiting cheats in the game, you're probably not that good. These 'cheats' are present in the retail game and require no special soft/hardware to exploit. They are known to pretty much everyone except the very inexperienced, who in any case would be largely incapable of taking advantage of them. I think that it is safe to say that strafe-jumping and the 'shoot through walls bug' are outside most people's definition of cheating.
  • Better graphics do not a better game make.
  • I noticed that I cannot play demos (even id Software's). I just get kicked to the main menu. I also noticed others posting about it on alt.games.quake3 newsgroup. :(

  • Fact: Rocket Jumping was originally a bug. IT was a 'quirk' in the wya the physics worked in Quake 1,

    No, it was not a bug. A 'bug' is when the code is broken in some way. A 'quirk' is when the code works correctly, but in an unexpected way. Rocket jumping was a quirk of the physics, but it was not a bug.


    --

  • What have you been smoking? And where the hell can I get some? These players have learned to use the physics to their advantage, not lame z-bot aim scripts and hacked proxies.

    Learn a little bit about what you're talking about next time before you think about talking out of your ass again.

  • Nobody exploited cheats in a game. They took the game to another level by understand the game throughly.

    OK, maybe I shouldn't call them cheats. But they are bugs in the game that cause the game to behave in a way that it wasn't designed.

    You would complain too if you were a good tennis player and someone decided to make the court bigger, the size of the ball smaller and different material.

    This is more like if someone found out that a particular spot on the court had an imperfection that caused the ball to skew, and then practiced hitting that exact spot. And then complains when someone comes along and fixed the imperfection: "Hey man, what about all the hours I put in to hit that exact spot???".

    A court imperfection is not part of the spirit of the game of tennis, and these exploits were not part of the spirit of the game of Quake.


    --

  • What kind of moves are you talking about?
    --
  • This is incorrect. You clearly haven't written any mods for Quake2 or Quake3, so I'm not sure why you thought it would be a good idea to comment as if you knew what the problems being faced are.

    I haven't worked much with mod making for Quake3, but I did program the Gamers Extreme (GXMOD) modification for Quake2, and what I do know of Quake3 mods leads me to believe they are pretty much the same, just with the added option of the QVM.

    The basic problem is that the modification code, as shipped, in not particularly designed for clean and easy extention and only uses a basic form of object orientation (in ANSI C). To make meaningful modifications, you have to go into id's source and actually change things around. When they themselves change this base source code to supply bug fixes and new features, you're now stuck doing diffs against what you started with before and what you have now and then figuring out how to repatch the patches you made to the original source to the new source. Given that your code is strewn about id's code, this can be a lot of changes, and many of them may be incompatible as you might have already fixed bugs id is just fixing now, and perhaps you fixed them in a different way. In any case, its far from just a recompile.

    Now, to be sure, good coding practics should have lead people to isolate and comment their changes as much as possible (this saved me on a couple of point releases for GXMOD, enabling a turn around of only a couple of days when new patches were released), but its still far from trivial, even in those cases.

    Also, I'm surprised that id hasn't realized by now (a similiar sort of broken mod syndrome occured during the 3.14 version era of Quake2) that they MUST release the modification source at the same time as the binary patches! I could understand the business decision to get the patch out now for everyone and worry about the mod users later if the mod users were a tiny majority of people. THEY AREN'T!! Look at HalfLife/CounterStrike/TFC, look at Quake3/RA3/WFA/Q3F/etc. A huge number of people (in some cases a majority) playing these FPS games are doing it mostly through mods. Please take that into account next time, and clean up and package the code and release it at least at the same time as the binary patches!! A few days or a week previous would be even better!

  • "GRAMMAR". No, he's right. Especially in the context, I should have checked.

    Besides, I am a stupid fuck. Everybody tells me so.

  • I addressed the problem of mod makers in a different post (a reply to the first post).

    But I also wanted to sound off a bit on the changing of the physics.

    In his .plan, Robert Duffy said:

    Splash damage through floors was a bug. It is fixed, live with it.

    I think this is a particularly bad attitude. I play Quake3, and when I first learned (the hard way) that you can take damage through thin floors and thin walls (for those not familiar with it, basically, world geometry isn't used as an occluder vs rocket radius damage) I thought it was slightly stupid. But, like most players, I have adapted to it and it has grown almost into another dimension of gameplay. Sure, it might be a bit confusing to people who are new to the game, but I think the trade-off of allowing a deeper game play experience later is worth it. Much of the same argument applies to strafe-jumping....

    The fact that these issues weren't intentional doesn't mean they should be fixed if that isn't what the people playing the game want. Rocket jumping, if what I've heard time and time again is true, wasn't intentional...And that's lasted all throughout the Quake series because the players found it created a deeper game. So, in short, Duffy's explaination is just lacking. You can't just say it had to be fixed because it was unintentional, you need to give a more solid argument on why this change was needed.

    In any case, it seems like a real bad idea to change all this stuff now....Didn't John Carmack semi-publicly reprimand Zoid for changing physics late into Quake2's release? And yet they do the same for Quake3.. Oh well.

  • That is, until it froze up (in Windows 2000; that means there's something wrong)

    Ummm yeah, SOMETHING IS BROKE!!... Windows 2000.

    BAHHHH, Hah Hah Hah Hah...

  • Like will this new update mean that Quake3 might finally run as well on my box as Unreal Tounament does?

  • I'm just a casual Q3A player, I just play occasionally for fun. The server I play on doesn't feature any mods, why should I have to wait for the Mod authors to be happy before I get my update from ID?
    Surely people who use mods are capable of simply not installing the update until the mods are ready, or are ID sending round goons with BFGs to force everyone to upgrade?
  • A recompile of the mods is all that's required for this to be a non-issue. The recompiled code is then going to be compatible with Q3:Team Arena.

    Come on - is this a problem for all you kernel builders? [sarcasm]

  • Poor planning... (Score:4)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Saturday September 23, 2000 @05:06AM (#759595)
    When HalfLife was updated with new netcode at some point (I forget which version), Valve seeded the new netcode and other details to the bigger mod authors prior to the patch release such that most mods had updated versions shortly after the patch was released.

    It looks like ID here didn't seed the changes, and didn't indicate that most mods wouldn't work with the change (omitted accidently). This indicates lots of poor planning on Id's part, as more people play the mods than the standard Q3 modes. You'd think that with similar problems encounters by UT and HL, they would learn as well, but...

  • Double standard? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Er, why is it OK for Quake to release a patch that fixes stuff, but breaks mods, and it's OK...

    and

    if someone like Sun, IBM, Apple or (gak) Microsoft does the same thing, people rip 'em a new one?

  • Everytime an expansion pack has been released for Quake or Quake 2, a new patch has to be released to add the new functionality. BTW, when is Quake 3 Team Arena coming out?
  • Isn't Carmack the one who said the Linux version of Q3A didn't sell much more than to cover cost? Gee, I wonder why. The Linux version of Q3A was released yay weeks (months?) after Windows, and all the patches are released yay days after Windows. It's been about 6 months since 1.17, couldn't ID have waited another THREE days to release the 1.25 patches for all platforms simultaneously?

    By delaying the Linux and Mac versions, it's also giving the whole gaming community the impression that Linux and Mac are on the back burner, that they aren't important. I paid $69.95 CDN for Q3A for Linux and I love it. I just wish they stopped considering us Linux users as second-class citizens.

  • It's not the broken mods that piss people off... (Score:3)

    by EvilDonut ( 164879 ) on Saturday September 23, 2000 @05:11AM (#759599)
    The broken mods are a basicly a non-issue, it's just a question of the authors updating their code when the source is released.

    No, the problem is that id has changed the physics in the game. In the previous versions, people have been tweaking quake and all their hardware so that they would be able to sustain a constant framerate of 125 fps. The reason for this was that it enables a player to pull off all sorts of cool jumps and navigate the maps easier and faster.

    Changing this nine months after the game is released is considered by many as a Bad Move, and I tend to agree. I have yet to hear from people who like this change.

    Top players have been practicing these moves over and over and over again in order to raise their playing level and stand a chance at $100.000 tournaments like those run by The CPL [thecpl.com]. Basicly, this new patch throws ours of practice out the window, because these tricks become useless... Not so hard to understand why people are pissed now, is it?

  • The market for Linux are insignifigant compared to the market for Windows games. If you were a game developer would you rather put all your work into a perfect and release it for Linux, so that two people can buy it. Or would you release it to Windows were you can make a VASTLY larger amount of money, and then release it to Linux to pick any money still available? The day video games stop being about money, and about the "art", is the day every FPS gets rid of the obiligatory rocket launcher and "experimental" weapon that works perfectly, kills all the monsters in the level, and puts on a nice light show in the process.
  • they'd have just called their patch an upgrade to Quake 4, and charged everyone $89.99 to break all their existing mods.

  • Re:It's not the broken mods that piss people off.. (Score:3)

    by F452 ( 97091 ) on Saturday September 23, 2000 @05:21AM (#759602)
    With all the money available I can see why people take it so seriously, but maybe they shouldn't practice and obsess about it so much. It's just a game. And then this newbie wouldn't get slaughtered so much at CTF :-)
  • If you use beta software, you should understand what you're getting into. It may not work, thats why its been released as a beta - so that it can be fixed before a final release!

    To be honest, I think its good that id are bothering to listen to the bugs people want fixed, and are fixing them on a regular basis. If only all companies, and not just in games either, worked this way...
  • I can totaly understand why this would piss you off. Who wouldn't be upset to learn that their chance at big money for playing a game had been taken away? It's this type of free market GREATNESS that allows any starving person to pull themselves off the street by merely wishing their problems away, and applying God and give all! The point I'm trying to make is that it IS hard for me to understand how anyone could POSSIBLY be upset by this. There are better things to worry about. Here's the kicker: It is a game. I'm not sure that "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" is really true anymore, (was it ever?) There are lots of valid privacy and technology issues out there. This isn't one of them.
  • A lot of places pay people for being one of the top players on the server. I don't see anybody saying that "football players shouldn't train as hard as they do, it's just a game." So what, even if it's just a game, it's still nice to win.

    __________________________________________________ ___

  • Unreal Tournament's patches have been backwards-compatible (well, almost completely, maybe break a few mods) and network-compatible, so that people with an older patch (heck, as old as retail version on CD) can still play on a latest-patch server. No doubt this Q3A upgrade is disappointing and frustrating to authors... All I wish is that UT's rendering engine was as fast as Q3A's--that's the primary reason I play UT very seldom--it's too slow on my computer (it pushes 10-15fps average during fights, while Q3A manages 25-35fps average during fights--HUGE difference).
  • As I understand it (I haven't installed 1.25 yet), this update minimizes the effect of strafe-jumping among other physics. For me, strafe-jumping was why I preferred UT over Q3. The strafe-jumping phenomenon started in Q2, but to me, I think it exploited a bug in the movement code rather than a planned method of movement. id kept the code the same in Q3, but for some reason to me it doesn't seem the right thing to do.

    I know I'll get many who disagree w/me, but when exploiting a "bug" becomes a major force in talent level in a game, I think the game itself loses something. Just my opinion though, I know there are rabid strafe-jumpers out there who don't want to lose their abilities to a patch udpate.

  • Please define "strafe jumping" and what they did to "fix" the "problem". I have been playing quake for months now and never heard of this term.

    __________________________________________________ ___

  • This mod is horrible - it screws up the game's physics. One of the features of the mod is to convert all of the QVM stuff over to the speed dlls (which gives you a slight boost in fps), but it makes strategies like strafe jumping useless - for this reason, none of the pro players are switching their Q3s over..
  • This is something that I'd expect over at BluesNews [bluesnews.com], not /.
  • Usually when there are people out there (such as myself) who chose your software because of the features your software had (in this case strafe jumping, shooting through thin floors) you wouldn't take these features out in a future upgrade that will be required to use your product. (new servers wont accept 117 clients) Now the strafe jumping and shooting through thin floors aren't the only reason I chose the game over all the others....they are just a part of the unique feel that the game has...and they are an important part. I believe Id has really alienated a lot of gamers here and I wouldn't be surprised if they (myself included) abandoned their game for a different game that they seem to want to be identical too (read: unreal tournament) I'm very dissappointed with Id.


    My Home: Apartment6 [apartment6.org]
  • Having a 125 FPS machine isnt about practice or intelligence... But only those who have such machines can use those imperfections in the game..
  • If the net in tennis was made of elastic and a particularly good shot would fly right through it, would you consider that cheating?

    Go outside, load up your rocket launcher (what do you mean you don't have one!), and shoot through a cast-iron wall. I bet whatever's on the other side will remain intact.
  • I for one think it's about time for this upgrade, they should have fixed the cheat bugs a long time ago... yeah so I'll have to wait for a few weeks to get all the mods, so what. That's why I have two copies of Q3 intalled. The new features are prety cool too, I can hardly wait for the new addon from Id.
  • I'm not sure that "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" is really true anymore, (was it ever?) There are lots of valid privacy and technology issues out there.

    Since when is privacy "news for nerds"? At least Quake is technology related. I wouldn't mind at all if the political crap went away on this site (especially when the people running the site rarely have any idea what they're talking about).


    --

  • Sysadmins should be paid as much as they are because all they basically do is cater to an industry that purpously makes tools hard to maintain. Not so pretty when the shoe is on the other foot isn't it?
  • I meant "shouldn't". And for all those brain-dead moderators who don't get the gist of my post (Subtlty 101 should be a require class) I mean that football players work hard, sysadmins work hard. They both bring stuff to humanity. Entertainment is just as important as getting work done, plus football players bring tons of money into the economy. (Ecomonics 101 should also be a required course.) As such, they both deserve what they get.
  • Have you tried plying the lokigames newsgroups for help? I used to get lockups but it was fixed by upgrading to the nVidia driver for Xfree4 and now everything is sweet.
  • > If you play a mod, don't upgrade!

    The problem is, some servers have ALREADY upgrade ! Argh.
  • MicroProse was one of the most highly regarded computer companies in the Flight Simulator market. they made computer games that were used by the military because of their realistic physics model and complexity. F15 and F16 simulators were their main thing...
    Falcon4 was microprose's last big project. it was a HUGE undertaking and very well might be the most sophisticated computer game (certainly the most complex flight sim) ever made. Beautiful AI, war engine and VERY realistic radar and physics make it incredibly ambitious. the source code, of course, was heavily guarded.
    The game was well recieved, but the major criticism was that there were some bugs and some other little problems that made it hard for the super observant flight sim users to use properly. Some AI bugs, some missles fired outside their parameters, etc. little things, but important things. It took months for patches to come out and when they did, they weren't great. here was a KICK ASS game that simply didn't reach it's full potential because it was in a dying company. It had a strong fan base that couldn't do more than wait and do a few Hex edits to make it all better.
    BUT when microprose was bought by hasbro and hasbro dumped the flight sim division, an angry programmer posted the entire f4 source code WITH the patches online.
    what it's done that's great was spawn a whole series of really good 3rd party (OS) patches for this incredible game. Real open source gaming? not on purpose, but the effect is wonderful.
    it's an interesting kind of Open Source development. it didn't happen on purpose, but it proves something: you can have a successful commercial product that's open source. quite frankly, compiling such a huge thing (about 600 megs) is too big except for the REALLY advanced users and most people would buy the binary anyhow. but it makes things like patches and addons happen much faster. I waited 3 months for the first patch to come out of the dying MicroProse website, as opposed to 1 week for the latest patch to come from 3rd party people. You still have to buy the game, but all of the latest great stuff is added on because of the "open source" nature of the program.
    I wonder if this could be used to help promote open sourcing of games and large, killer apps. Clearly open sourcing hasn't hurt falcon4..in fact, it's increased the fan base. the hardcore game site, combatsim.com gave falcon4 an initial review that was decent, but after the open source patches came out, they said it was like playing a masterpiece. hm.
    an explanation of what happened HERE [netscape.com] and HERE. [combatsim.com]
    an explaination of hex editing and source editing http HERE [slashdot.org]
    i wonder if this might be the next big push in software...companies working with mod/patch developers..it seems to work well with games whether intentionally or not...

    ----- go to www.questionexchange.com.

  • Sorry, I have to side with the AC on this one (and I'm a well-known Grammar Nazi).

    According to the dictionary [dictionary.com], sense 18 for break:

    To render useless or inoperative: We accidentally broke the radio.

    No metaphor about it. To "separate into pieces" is only one of the valid definitions of "break".

    Now, I may agree that "literally" is redundant, since to "break something" and "literally break something" mean the same thing.

    --

  • The problem I've got is its DGA 1.0 mouse handling which is simply and completely not usable for Right Play. Which also means I dual-boot every time I've got to load Q3A.. it's a shame, because Q3A *SURE* runs like mad and wonderfully, except for that slight mouse handling "bug" (which is unfixable because of XF4's architectural changes).

    XFree86 4.0.1 is going to be the standard in the next couple of months (to start with Red Hat 7, not that I dislike them, just that I prefer Debian by a way long shot), so there's absolutely NO reason to NOT support DGA 2.0 in the next 1.25 patch.

    I'm using NVIDIA's drivers, if that can answer why I use 4.0.1 and not 3.3.6, which runs DGA 1.0 perfectly. Before I hear the open-source zealots, just know that Quake 3 is also, ahem, closed-source.

  • Yes it's a bug. You ask it to list what games are on your network, and you get twice the number of games listed.

    In Quake1, if you picked the "wrong" one the game would crash.

    Yes it's a damn bug, and i hope they will fix it!

    --

  • And then this newbie wouldn't get slaughtered so much at CTF :-)

    Heh, no kidding. Those damn rail gods own me over at Springfield server.

  • He reprimanded Zoid for changing the physics in a way which would affect the single player game.

    ...

    I don't have an opinion on the situation.


    --
  • It was in there when the game was designed. Someone discovered that neat trick. Anyone can do it. (with practice) Who is to say that it goes against the spirit of the game?

    The main disputes issues with the patch are:

    1. Breaks Strafe jumping.
    A lot of us play this game competatively. We spend a lot of time practicing these tricks and specializing. For instance my CTF clan has 2 extremely good strafe jumpers who are our flag runners and several amazing Railers who play D.
    This brings strategy to the game.. since your Defense has to be very good to nail the other teams flag runners, since chances are u will not catch them once they are out of the base.

    2. Through floor splash damage.
    This is actually a VERY good quirk! It helps to discourage campers on high platforms. A good railer camping up high can take out anyone without any fear of geting killed. (Especially on maps that require jumppads to get to the platform) With through floor splash he can be "removed" from that spot by a few carefully placed rockets.

    Like I said before the game was released with those quirks.. and they are changing it 9 months later. Thats years in gaming terms compared to sports. That's like after 20 years of tennis they ban slicing because somebody doesn't like it and it was an unforceen exploitation of the "real world" physics when tennis was invented. There is just something not right about that.
  • There are ways to program so that updates are less of a pain. I keep all quake3 engine interaction in a single module, the rest of the source is seperate. This allows me to only upgrade a single source file. I have already upgraded Quake3Rally to the new version within a few minutes. This is a general rule for programming anyways and I do it for all my projects at work. If you plan ahead, it makes things much easier down the road.

    /skw|d
  • Usually the surfaces and walls you can shoot through are thin platforms or mesh like surfaces, If you're in a match with someone and they kill you by shooting through a floor, chances are you were less experienced at the level and it's a sign you are on your way to losing. Instead of blaming your loss on a level quirk you didn't know about maybe you should learn from it and not stand there next time.
  • It might help to check out CVS (no pun intended). You can use it to track external (ie "vendor") branches of the code, and help integrate their changes with your own. It can probably be used retroactively by importing your starting point, committing your changes and importing the new release.

    It obviously won't help with the protocol restrictions but might be useful.

    You can find out about CVS at Cyclic's home page [cyclic.com]. There's also a manual section [cvshome.org] and a section in the on-line CVS book [red-bean.com] about vendor branches.

  • You are wrong, it is in Q3. Originally Carmack had fixed this Q2 bug in Q3test, but he decided to bring it back when a lot of players complained that Q3 didn't 'feel' right without it.
  • Alright, I suspect I'm older than most of you, so I'm going to use up my middle-aged curmudgeon points here.

    It doesn't LITERALLY break the mods. "Break" is, in this case, a metaphor, and is even placed in quotes in the sentence (the patch literally "breaks" all mods).

    "Literally" not does not mean "especially", it means "actually".

    If I literally slap you in the face, it doesn't mean that I really pissed you off, it means that I actually struck you. If I literally break your game, there should be real bits on the actual floor.

    Sorry, I know we have a Grammer Nazi, but this is more of an issue of meaning rather than syntax, and it just grates on me. It's like signs that use quotes for emphasis: 'Check out our "sale" prices' (apparently they're not really sale prices at all).

    Thank you. I feel better now.

  • Thats right, I agreee. The new version did finally fix smp support, though. Changing the physics of a game is bad. Fixing smp is good.
  • The 1.1.1 patch to half-Life broke a lot of mods.. while it added support for in game menus, and a lot of improved netcode, it changed the way the model animation works, breaking one of my Favorite mods:

    Action Half-Life [action-web.net]

    Even though not as far along as things like Counter-Strike, Action had some nice features such as dives, rolls and making a corpse dance to your machine-gun.

    All of which broke. Now the A-Team is spending more time on Action Unreal Tournament [action-web.net], than AHL. They promise to bring those features back in AHL once they get a working AUT running. At least AUT looks more true to the first Action, Action Quake 2. [slashdot.org] That mod is a classic, who remembers that lovely sniped headshot sound, or limping around bleeding from your leg?

    Yes, I shamelessly plug my lousy music in my sig. Tell me what you think of it sometime!

  • Re:Note (Score:3)

    by Fishstick ( 150821 ) on Saturday September 23, 2000 @05:40AM (#759634) Journal
    True, however the code needed for the recomplie is not yet available:

    Mods for Quake 3 Arena will require a recompile for use with 1.25 and above as we have added in a lot of mod requested features which added trap calls and changed the event system a bit. I'll get the source posted asap so all the teams can get their new cuts up. Look for it in a day or two.

    So mod authors are telling players to hold off upgrading until after a new version of the mod with 1.25 changes is available.

    A couple of days doesn't sound too bad. Probably a little longer than that for most of the mod authors to release updated binaries and then a little longer again for all the servers to upgrade. This could piss you off if your 'clan' had a trash-talk-induced match to defend the groups honor and they had to wait a week because their best player upped to 1.25 and couldn't play. ;-) (that's sarcasm)

  • Of course, if we were playing Unreal Tournament (the better game in my opinion) where security and performance patches come rapidly, we wouldn't have our mods break. :) Just touting the better game...
  • Since the patch is only in the beta release stage, you can make an argument that it is too early to denounce Id for their lack of warning. In fact, anyone who downloads and installs a beta patch without expecting problems deserves whatever they get.
  • What pisses me off is that there's a patch for the windows version, but none for the linux (or mac!) versions yet.
  • Strafe Jumping is a method to increase your movement speed by holding the strafe key (either left or right) and jumping repeatedly. It allows you to move at speeds faster than if you had the haste rune. It is not easy to master, but once done, you can literally run circles around the opposing players.

  • I respect K&R's usage, yes -- "break" in this context is a useful metaphor, but it's still a metaphor. If I had unplugged Dennis Ritchie's PDP8 I would have "prevented it from working", but I would not have broken it. On the other hand, a broken cookie still tastes good -- it still works.

    "Break" is fine, but drop the "literally".

  • May I say that valve announced this patch for a very long time, and that all the info about the patch was available for a long time to (mod) developers before the patch was released to the public...
    I think this is the Action developers fault, Counterstrike (my favorite) worked at that time with 1.1.0.0, if you remember?
  • All of the gameplay fixes (e.g. splash bug, dropped sounds) in this release were originally done BY the mod community and sent back to id. Now we have to merge our versions with their ever-so-slightly-different version, and pick up all the changes they made along the way to support Team Arena. We're talking line-by-line comparisons here, for the most part, as we've all made extensive changes and additions to the 1.17 code.

    You know it's sad when our greatest developers don't even understand the fact CVS will simply MERGE the conflicting files between the MOD's source and ID's new source. Obviously, ID'd programming god's understand this, and felt that there was no reason to give a heads up. ;)
  • The reason the Mac community in particular likes this release is that it is the OS X release. UT isn't going to be ported to OS X, but the Quake port suposedly has a huge perfomance boost (to the tune of +10 fps at least) due ot the native OpenGL support in OS X. Seth
  • q3dm6 between the railgun and the RL platform above YA (TMP map) q3dm13 jump up to the 100 Health from the floor can't think of anymore useful ones off the top of my head. low ping and >125 FPS makes these jumps easier also com_maxfps should to be set to 120
  • I disagree.. I'm not a Q3A expert, and my machine probably wont go over 30fps in Q3A, but when you're playing against people who camp on platforms, sometimes the only way to take out the other player is to shoot through the platform..

  • Apparently, you've never actually made a Q3 mod (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23, 2000 @05:57AM (#759648)
    Gotta love those clueless optimists. A recompile is required, yes, but it's not ALL that's required by a long shot.

    All other the mod makers I've spoken to about this over the last 12 hours or so are basically preparing themselves for many days or even weeks of absolute hell. Right now, we've got a completely fux0red binary release that breaks everything in sight, and no chance to even *start* trying to make our work run with it for several days yet because we have no source, and it won't be released until the patch is stable. Given the current state of the patch, I'd say a few days is an extremely optimistic estimate of when it may actually work. When we do get the source, yeah, if your "mod" consists of replacing the LG model with a CG and making it fire bullets you'll be up and running again in 10 minutes. But if you've put significant development into your mod, like OSP; CPM; CPMA; RA3; Q3F, then odds are you're going to be in deep trouble.

    All of the gameplay fixes (e.g. splash bug, dropped sounds) in this release were originally done BY the mod community and sent back to id. Now we have to merge our versions with their ever-so-slightly-different version, and pick up all the changes they made along the way to support Team Arena. We're talking line-by-line comparisons here, for the most part, as we've all made extensive changes and additions to the 1.17 code: I think Rhea and I have both restructured just about every piece of the code in the months that we've had to work with it.

    The protocol has changed; we KNOW the client-server data has changed with it. There are a bunch of new toys in 1.25, like 2 new awards. There were only two free PERS_* slots before, and we can't expand them because there's a hard limit in the protocol. We used those empty slots to pass information around that would require monstrous hackage to do any other way. What would you like to bet that AWARD_DEFENSE and AWARD_ASSIST now occupy those slots?

    For almost all of us, we make these mods in our spare time: we have jobs; family; friends, and other Real Life demands on our time. If it only takes us 40 hours to merge things, that doesn't mean we'll be ready in a week: it means we'll be ready in a MONTH. In the meantime, sites like PQ are still encouraging people to download 1.25...

    We had no warning of this patch at all. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying id owe us anything. They were kind enough to release the source so that we *could* make mods, and there are hundreds of thousands of gamers worldwide who appreciate that. But had they released the source to us *before* putting out the binary patches, not only would we have been able to slash the delay before being able to ship our mods but they'd also have far fewer bugs in the patch itself. As it is, there's going to need to be at least one more patch after this one simply to fix all the new problems that are showing up. That means even more time between when newbies install the 1.25 binaries on their machines and when they can actually play the mods they enjoy so much.

    ModMaker was railed by id
    ModMaker: wow. didn't see that one coming...

    arQon

  • Re:...next couple days (Score:3)

    by MousePotato ( 124958 ) on Saturday September 23, 2000 @06:02AM (#759649) Homepage Journal
    You gotta stop... You should be happy there is a Linux port or a Mac port, period. From what I have heard the Linux port did not even break even. JC and crew should be commended for taking the chance and putting out a product for various platforms. They didn't have to do that. The fact they did means Linux is no longer second class (if we were someone else would have to port it). Personally, I think that Id shipping a commercial Linux port of the game (within a reasonable window) elevates Linux as a viable market and will put pressure on the rest of the gaming industry to do the same. Until Linux is a more profitable endeavour to publish for, than say some other OS, getting mad about the lag in releases of different versions of a game will only hurt all of us. Complaining makes the alternate OS community look like a cranky eliteist bunch, an image we need to improve rather than perpetuate.
  • There is no indication in the documentation, either the readme with the patch or at sites like FilePlanet that this is a beta release. The readme even says this is a "point release" which means it's a must-have.

    I, personally, I'm not too concerned; in two weeks, likely, this will have all been cleared up, and mods will be happily running with protocol 45. Q3A mods are not my sole form of gaming at the moment. However, I do fault ID for the sudden release (and I do read PQ so I didn't see anything indicating it was to be out soon) when all other major mod'ed FPSs have given fair warning to mod authors prior to a patch.

  • In the previous versions, people have been tweaking quake and all their hardware so that they would be able to sustain a constant framerate of 125 fps.

    Or, I can see another revolt because they seem to have removed damage transfering through the floor. After watching the recent demos, it seems that tracking opponents from below has become another strategy. To be honest, getting rocked from below seems like valid damage to me, but that's just me. ;)

  • Top players have been practicing these moves over and over and over again in order to raise their playing level and stand a chance at $100.000 tournaments ...

    Er, the changes are applied equally for everyone. Here's a hint: if your m@d skilz depend on exploiting cheats in the game, you're probably not that good.


    --

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