[quake3] Greetings

[Cameron Tofer]

Hey there,  we're preparing to submit a bunch of patches from our Space
Trader fork. some include:

- skeleton models + tool + exporter
- deluxe mapping
- utf suport + font tool

plus a bunch of fixes.  we're trying to make them as clean as possible, we
won't be submitting everything as we want to keep ioq3 as a clean base and
not a dump for everyone's favorite features.

These should be coming as soon as we get more iTouch work done.

-cam

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 5:52 PM, <monk at rq3.com> wrote:

> [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.
>
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>
>
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