[quake3] Greetings

[monk at rq3.com]

[I apologize for the length of this--I tend to get long-winded]

To add my two cents, we (www.rq3.com) are trying to move from a Q3 mod to
an ioq3 standalone, though it would still basically use ioq3 as a base for
our QVM.  We like that we have someone else making the engine for us and
we can run on whatever the engine runs on.  That lets us concentrate on
working on the game code.

I tell you, though, replacing the baseq3 media that we used as a mod has
been pretty difficult.  And some of our coders have been hard to get ahold
of lately, too.  Maybe I can sucker that Scott guy with the Q3 on the ipod
touch to help out.  He used to roll with us back in the day until he
decided a paying job was somehow a better use of time.  ;)

We'll probably modify ioquake3.exe (or whatever) to become an automatic
launcher for our mod, Reaction.  There's an ego boost going on when you
can tell people to double-click Reaction and have it launch your own GAME,
even though it's using an engine developed by other people.  And, somehow,
it feels like when you do this, you're done.  You've made it.  You've
progressed from making a mod to making a game.  It's a psychological
thing, really.

We had many problems with people trying out our mod because they didn't
own a legal copy of Quake 3.  This honestly became a big issue.  For a
while the Q3 key auth servers were down so anyone could play.  Once they
came online again, most of our entire audience faded.  This was a mod that
had an Activision-sponsored online tournament with prizes being gamecasted
by ol' djWheat from, I think, TSN back in the day.

So getting rid of the key checking and the baseq3 media is worth it from
the mod-moving-to-standalone perspective.

But since we're keeping most of our code in QVM, any ioq3 updates we want
to roll in should cause minimal fuss.

Some people have mentioned other Q3 ports with far better features.  Stuff
that we, as content creators, really really like.  Chris mentioned stuff
like, "snow/rain/fog based on ET, GLSL and CG shaders, a new rendering
engine..."  The closest that ioq3 has gotten to any of that is the
framebuffer/bloom work that someone here did a little while ago and of
course the raytracing work being done now.

XreaL, Q3Evolution, and other projects offer much better graphical
goodies.  However, except for Q3Evolution 1.x, they either break all our
existing media or don't run on any platform except Windows.  Since our
team uses and games on Windows, Linux, and MacOS, that's just not
something we care to pursue.  Or they drop QVM support.  Or they have
broken bot support.  Etc.

This is all stuff that we either can't readily recreate or don't want to
give up.  It's great that a managed .NET version of Q3 has all these bells
and whistles, but if it only runs on Windows, that does us no good.

I wish some of these splinter projects would backport some of these
extensions as patches to ioq3.  But they never seem to.  Raynor was kind
of doing it with Q3Evolution 1.x, but mainly was merging ioq3 with some
features of XreaL rather than backporting some features of XReaL into
ioq3.  The problem with that is that while it lets us use our current
lightmapped maps and other media, we're at the mercy of one guy who may or
may not be around for merging in updates and bugfixes from ioq3.

As a content creator, it's frustrating.  ioq3 is too solid of a foundation
for us to give up, but we look longingly at some of the other projects and
wish we could let our artists do what the other projects allow.  For
example, the MDR/MD4 support was nice except that there wasn't the right
toolchain support that we could readily take advantage of it--the only
tool that could create these models was Milkshape while our
modelers/animators were using 3DMax and Lightwave, etc.

As for making a mod for ioq3, I think that's a great idea in general. 
Just use ioq3 as a big ol' virtual machine like Java or QuakeC or
UnrealScript or, didn't Doom 3 use a similar virtual-machine-esque thing
that abstracted the game/mod code from the engine so you could write one
mod and it would run on whatever platform that D3 was ported to?

Though I suppose that if the QVM still runs on baseq3, we could keep our
source closed, if we really wanted to.  So that might be a consideration
for making an ioq3 mod instead of directly modifying the engine.  We're
going full opensource, planned to do it since day one.

Anyway, I'll let y'all go back to doing something productive.  Thank you
all very much for your continued work on ioq3!  Hopefully sometime this
year you'll be able to play a Reaction standalone on everything from MacOS
to Slowaris or an SGI!

Monk.