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First Person Shooters (Games) Quake Entertainment Games

ioquake3 1.36 Goes Gold 176

Time Doctor writes "The de-facto standard in Quake 3 engine technology, ioquake3, has hit version 1.36 recently. It includes a garbage bag full of improvements: in-game VOIP; optional external Mumble (voip); OpenAL; IPV6; anaglyph stereo rendering; Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; new SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64; improved console command auto-completion; persistent console command history; improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools; colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems; multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders); PNG format support for textures. Of course, there are even more fixes for security holes and other bugs in there. So, if you don't like ads and queues in your Quake 3 experience, get a copy of Quake 3 off Steam and copy your data files and key into your ioquake3 directory."
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ioquake3 1.36 Goes Gold

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  • I requested a built-in torrent app as part of that 'garbage bag' BUT NO, THANKS A LOT.

    Well, at least it's got 3D support natively. About damn time.

    • Why the hell should a torrent client be part of a game engine?

      • Why the hell not! :)
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        I'm pretty sure he's joking... but that said, it would be good for sharing custom maps & game assets between multiple players on a server, without hammering the server's bandwidth too much. If it were implemented in an appropriately hands-off, transparent fashion, anyway.

      • by Tom ( 822 )

        to distribute maps and other assets, which in a download-from-server approach use up precious bandwidth of the server. You know, the machine that you want to have maximum throughput and minimum latency to at that precise moment in time.

      • To share the open source maps. Steam and userbuilt games like Sven Coop are burdened by lengthy load times for new maps. And game downloads for purchased games like Darwinia or Half-Life 2 are pretty painful at times.
  • and it still looking good. I own the game but I never got into it as UT99 was just so much more fun for casual gamers like me. Perfect game balance and tight levels don't make up for an everlasting brown deathmatch :-)
    • I was the other way around. I just couldn't quite get into the UT's the same as Q3. My friends still play a lot of UT, but we do have the odd Q3 game. But my wife and I like Q3 best.
      • by sahonen ( 680948 )
        At LAN parties we play UT because the skill ceiling is lower so the less skilled among us don't get owned so bad... When I'm playing for my own enjoyment it's Q3 all the way. It just *feels* better to me, the movement, the weapon mechanics and balance, etc.
        • by hitmark ( 640295 )

          my issue with UT was a very local one, that people continually only wanted to play on the "low gravity" maps.

          that, and Q3 being mostly 1vs1 duels, and the only team game people wanted to play was CS, made me give up on FPS games fully...

          • by sahonen ( 680948 )
            Yeah, I dislike Q3 duels for various reason I won't get into... And Counter-Strike is a joke with skill being mostly determined by who can outsmart the random number generator better. But if you like Quake and team games, you should try out the team-based modes in Quake Live, especially Clan Arena (my favorite). Another great team based game I've been playing for a long time is Dystopia, a mod for the Source Engine.
      • by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) * on Thursday April 30, 2009 @04:52AM (#27770153) Journal

        The irony, of course, is that in the wider battle for the online gaming marketspace, both Q3 and UT lost out very badly indeed to a free mod for an aging game based on a hacked around version of the original Quake's engine (ie. Counter-Strike).

        I think looking back, Quake 3 was the point at which id went from being the undisputed industry leaders in the fps genre to "one among many". With the original Quake and Quake 2, if you played fpses online, you basically played one of those games, or one of their mods. There were a few other minor niche games, but none of them really had much of a wider community. Counter-Strike was the last game to really unite a majority of the online fps scene under a single banner and, as it starts to fade away, there doesn't seem to be any single successor (on the PC at least), but rather a broader fragmentation.

        I wonder if the same will happen in the MMO market once WoW jumps the shark? If, rather than having one all-consuming leviathan in the market and a few minnows trying to snap up a few hundred thousand users around the edges, we'll end up with a situation with multiple MMOs well up in the millions, but no clear pack leader?

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by delt0r ( 999393 )
          I hated Counter Strike. It was just too slow. Different strokes for different folks. I think theres plenty of room for more than a few "ordinary" FPS.
          • And that's why GunGame Deathmatch was invented for CS.

          • by hitmark ( 640295 )

            slow? every time i played it, people was just about run and gun, no plans, no tactics, just "GO GO GO" and shoot from the hip while rounding the corner in a jump...

        • ...once WoW jumps the shark?

          WoW launched riding a jetski over a tank of sharks with lasers on their heads

        • The irony, of course, is that in the wider battle for the online gaming marketspace, both Q3 and UT lost out very badly indeed to a free mod for an aging game based on a hacked around version of the original Quake's engine (ie. Counter-Strike).

          Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod. It had nothing to do with Quake, other than being in the same game genre.

          • by hitmark ( 640295 )

            valve started developing half-life using the quake1 engine, gradually porting in code from the quake2 engine, and writing some of their own.

      • With all this positive commentary maybe I'll upgrade from QuakeII! Nahhhhhhh, doesn't get any better than Q2 WoD.
  • Don't you mean a grab bag?
  • Steam is terrible and you can't sell your old games bought via that dreadful system.

    And I still have my old QuakeIII CD ... somewhere ...

    • by Sockatume ( 732728 ) on Thursday April 30, 2009 @04:36AM (#27770075)
      Maybe you sold it.
      • by Aladrin ( 926209 ) on Thursday April 30, 2009 @05:57AM (#27770509)

        This got modded 'funny', but I think 'insightful' would have been a lot better mod.

        Seriously, the 'you can't sell the game' argument falls apart for so many reasons.

        1) If it's a good game, you aren't going to sell it anyhow. At that point, Steam's easy and free replacement policy (just redownload it!) is much better than a physical CD.

        2) Even if you -can- resell it, you won't get the original price. You'll be lucky to get 1/4 of the price simply because you took the game out of the store.

        3) How many people have sold a used PC game lately? No stores will buy them back to resell because it doesn't work for PC gamers like it does for console gamers. That leaves other gamers via EBay or Craigslist. Personally, that's such a bloody hassle that I'd rather just lose the 1/4 of the cost I might get back from it.

        • No stores will buy them back to resell because it doesn't work for PC gamers like it does for console gamers.

          Stores take back console games? Opened ones?

          Nah, seems like anything remotely disc shaped and flat is sold "as is" with no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

          Ever try returning pancakes? Same deal.

          • He said buy back, not return. Walk in to blockbuster/gamestop/[insert your local used game store here] with a bunch of console games and you'll walk out with cash (albeit not nearly what you paid originally). Walk in with a bunch of PC games and you'll walk out with... a bunch of PC games.

          • Local stores here take back console games, for exchange only.

            Of course, you can trade in your old console games for cash at many stores, and doing so with PC games is nearly impossible.

            Personally, its not worth it and I just keep my games usually but my wife recently sold off $100 worth of my old PS2 games I don't play anymore.

        • by delt0r ( 999393 )
          This is not really true. In my experience there is a large sub-community that buys a game one weekend then sells or trades it in a few weeks/months later. They don't keep the game on the hard drive, they just are not interested in a game they have "finished". The boxes they return are mint and they usually get 50% or more the *current* retail price. The CD keys work fine (if its through a shop it has to be).

          I have got quite a few second hand games off these kinds of people and have never been disappoint
          • Those people are why renting is so popular for console gaming. I'd love to see a version of Steam that offered renting tbh.

            Oh well.

            • by delt0r ( 999393 )
              Well some of these guys (my brother for example) just does not rent them. He likes to have them for 2-3 weeks and says buying then selling is cheaper.

              But then again he keeps buying a xbox then selling to get a ps3 and trading that in for a wii which he then sells on ebay.... Perhaps he is not the best example to use.
        • I sell some of mine back, to a local used game store, just to free up some space and let kids who are short on spare cash play old games. It also lets me play some slightly old games I didn't bother to buy new.
        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by Hurricane78 ( 562437 )

          1) As soon as the Steam servers go down, this argument goes down with it. ^^
          By the way: I can not remember having a Steam login, and I bet it does not exist anymore. But I have HL2 as a Steam game, which came with my old graphics card. So how exactly do I download this again?? (Hint: I can't!)

          2) Even if yo don't get the original price, you get some money, and the *other* person can own and play it too!

          3) That argument is irrelevant, because it's not about the money. It's about being able to actually *own* a

          • Your Steam login still exists, they don't delete accounts with paid games for inactivity (that would be retarded). You forgot it (hint: what e-mail address were you using at the time, you can recover your password that way), but GP poster forgot where he put his Q3A disc, so whatever.

            And I have a feeling that your game discs will decay before Steam's servers go down.

          • by Aladrin ( 926209 )

            You didn't buy the game through Steam. You bought the physical CD, then it installs Steam.

            Buying a CD of a Steam game does indeed hurt the buyer, since it's the worst of both worlds.

        • by ragefan ( 267937 )

          This got modded 'funny', but I think 'insightful' would have been a lot better mod.

          Seriously, the 'you can't sell the game' argument falls apart for so many reasons.

          1) If it's a good game, you aren't going to sell it anyhow. At that point, Steam's easy and free replacement policy (just redownload it!) is much better than a physical CD.

          And when Steam goes out of business, you have nothing at all to show for any of the games you have purchased.

          At least with the physical media, what happens to id does not affect the physical media.

        • And those problems keep me from buying more PC games. I mean, if I can't get rid of it if it sucks balls, why would I take a chance on it? I'd rather spend $60 on something else. Hell, that'd at least double many people's RAM.
    • Steam isn't that bad, as it keeps all my games in one place forever and I never have to worry about finding the disks later when I want to play for 15mins and then get over the nostalgia I was feeling before.

      If Steam goes down and away forever? Then oh noes I have to search for 30 seconds to get the game I bought and paid for on Newsgroups.

      What is bad about Steam is that there is no built-in torrent support to make the damn games download faster. That should be a GD requirement for any of these online-based

    • I still have an unopened l33t tin edition for Linux. CD was shipped separately so it would arrive before christmas, so I never needed to open the tin.

  • by sahonen ( 680948 ) on Thursday April 30, 2009 @04:16AM (#27769965) Homepage Journal
    First off, QuakeLive hasn't had queues in MONTHS. It also has many more players and skill matching to keep games competitive. Seriously, why the shot?
  • I hope that some team will finally create something more original than a remake of Quake 3.
    Whereas I truely admire the effort that those teams put in, I think it's a shame that, few exceptions withholding, almost none of the games made with this source is truely original.
    Most of the times it's just games that have all the assets replaced, maybe a few weapons added here and there, but always exactly the same gametypes (or small variations) from what we've seen in Quake 3.

    When is some team going to stand
    • by sahonen ( 680948 ) on Thursday April 30, 2009 @04:38AM (#27770079) Homepage Journal
      The reason is that Quake's gameplay has become a de-facto standard of sorts for competitive gaming. Most real-life competitive sports that people play regularly have been around a hundred years or more, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that computer gaming has standardized on older games as well. Quake isn't alone, we also have Starcraft in the RTS world, Counter-Strike in the team-based tactical FPS genre and probably a few others. For games as entertainment, yes we do want original ideas. For games as competition, we want stable platforms that players can rely on to stick around for a while to make the investment in developing skills in those games worthwhile.
    • Have you ever played UrbanTerror? It has edge-climbing, wall-jumping, weapon-recoil, the works. The only thing CS has over UrbanTerror at this point (other than player base...) is flashbangs and ragdoll effects, but ragdoll is not really important to gameplay.
      • by bcmm ( 768152 )
        UrT isn't really comparable with CS. Also, IIRC UrT used to have flashbangs, before they were replaced with smoke.
  • Dear id Software, (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nitroyogi ( 1471601 ) on Thursday April 30, 2009 @05:50AM (#27770469)

    Please officially (re?)release hordes of Q3A CDs all across the globe. Its a fine game! Kids and grown ups alike all across the world would enjoy it. It can easily be the de-facto standard in entry level serious gaming.

    You can cut down on support explicitly. Its OK. Quake community is very smart and big. It can easily support newcomers. But the legit media is something always desirable - it is convenient and trustworthy. But please sell it cheap. Around 4-5$. You will easily find lots of CD pressers and distributors to take away all the logistic pains from you.

    And there would be assured buys of millions of legit cheap Q3A CDs by enthusiastic gamers worldwide. Its already a must-have game in your game collection anyways. Every body will be happy.

    Maybe, its a business decision to stop issuing more Q3A CDs. So please make another one to start issuing it again. It won't make you losses. No way. And gamers would be happy.

    The core game is awesome & kick-ass. 3rd party mods, addons, maps, etc make it ever so expandable. The community will always have some innovative way to modify it. Look at 'WoP'! Amazing!

    In the end, I can only make a request. Please start selling Q3A: Gold Edition CDs again.

    Over & out!

    • by gosand ( 234100 )

      Please officially (re?)release hordes of Q3A CDs all across the globe. Its a fine game! Kids and grown ups alike all across the world would enjoy it. It can easily be the de-facto standard in entry level serious gaming.

      Damn, I'm old. I miss Quake MegaTF, which was the last time I seriously played online.

  • by trawg ( 308495 ) on Thursday April 30, 2009 @06:44AM (#27770793) Homepage

    That little sotto voce whine about the ads in Quake Live is really lame. It's a free game. Are you seriously so obsessed with hating ads you'll pass up the opportunity to get a free game (which, by all reports from amongst my Quake-fan friends, is excellent) and cop the occasional ad?

    I'd rather not buy Quake 3 again (it's not just "getting a copy" of Steam, you have to buy it) and just enjoy Quake Live.

    ioquake is a fucking awesome project, but seriously

    • by kentrel ( 526003 )

      He's wrong too. Sounds like he didn't play quake live, but just listened to some of the whingers from its first day. Quake Live doesn't even have queues any more. That was a temporary system they brought in when they went public to give them time to bring in more servers.

      The ads are usually nothing more than a billboard in the background that you barely even notice. It might as well be another wall texture for the amount of difference it makes to the gaming experience.

    • True, you do have to buy the copy via Steam, but they run so many sales -- when I picked up Q3, I got Q3 and TA for about $10(!). At this point, with source code freely available, I look at it as paying $10 for the data files, to do with as you wish. Pretty freakin' good deal, if you ask me.

    • That little sotto voce whine about the ads in Quake Live is really lame. It's a free game. Are you seriously so obsessed with hating ads you'll pass up the opportunity to get a free game (which, by all reports from amongst my Quake-fan friends, is excellent) and cop the occasional ad?

      Yes.

      I play games to get away from the real world for a while. I already see ads on TV, walls, billboards, underground and my cellphone. That's more than enough, I don't want any more of them.

      I'm mostly free of them on the web,

    • Quake1 is both free and more fun than Quake3. Graphics in engines like FTEQuake work with Quake1 through Quake3 maps, and have shaders, bloom, etc.

      Plus you can play CustomTF. =)

      http://quake.phoenixlabs.org/ [phoenixlabs.org]

  • Quake Live? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by destroyer661 ( 847607 ) on Thursday April 30, 2009 @06:47AM (#27770807) Homepage
    Uh.. What's the point of buying Quake 3 anymore when Quake Live exists?
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by anjilslaire ( 968692 )

      Uh.. What's the point of buying Quake 3 anymore when Quake Live exists?

      Uh, no Linux support yet?

    • For me to finally uninstall Q3 would require Quake Live to give me (in no particular order) RA3, Threewave CTF, OSP, CPMA and Defrag. Then we'll talk.

  • But did they fix the exploit in Quake 3 where players with higher frame rates jumped longer? It's a known bug in the physics engine [psycco.de].

  • Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; new SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64; improved console command auto-completion; persistent console command history; improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools; colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems;

    At this rate, we should just expand it to take over those trivial remaining functions entitled to the operating system, and give it to Apple.

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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