Hey there, we're preparing to submit a bunch of patches from our Space Trader fork. some include:<br><br>- skeleton models + tool + exporter<br>- deluxe mapping<br>- utf suport + font tool<br>
<br>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.<br><br>These should be coming as soon as we get more iTouch work done.<br>
<br>-cam<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 5:52 PM, <<a href="mailto:monk@rq3.com">monk@rq3.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
[I apologize for the length of this--I tend to get long-winded]<br>
<br>
To add my two cents, we (<a href="http://www.rq3.com" target="_blank">www.rq3.com</a>) are trying to move from a Q3 mod to<br>
an ioq3 standalone, though it would still basically use ioq3 as a base for<br>
our QVM. We like that we have someone else making the engine for us and<br>
we can run on whatever the engine runs on. That lets us concentrate on<br>
working on the game code.<br>
<br>
I tell you, though, replacing the baseq3 media that we used as a mod has<br>
been pretty difficult. And some of our coders have been hard to get ahold<br>
of lately, too. Maybe I can sucker that Scott guy with the Q3 on the ipod<br>
touch to help out. He used to roll with us back in the day until he<br>
decided a paying job was somehow a better use of time. ;)<br>
<br>
We'll probably modify ioquake3.exe (or whatever) to become an automatic<br>
launcher for our mod, Reaction. There's an ego boost going on when you<br>
can tell people to double-click Reaction and have it launch your own GAME,<br>
even though it's using an engine developed by other people. And, somehow,<br>
it feels like when you do this, you're done. You've made it. You've<br>
progressed from making a mod to making a game. It's a psychological<br>
thing, really.<br>
<br>
We had many problems with people trying out our mod because they didn't<br>
own a legal copy of Quake 3. This honestly became a big issue. For a<br>
while the Q3 key auth servers were down so anyone could play. Once they<br>
came online again, most of our entire audience faded. This was a mod that<br>
had an Activision-sponsored online tournament with prizes being gamecasted<br>
by ol' djWheat from, I think, TSN back in the day.<br>
<br>
So getting rid of the key checking and the baseq3 media is worth it from<br>
the mod-moving-to-standalone perspective.<br>
<br>
But since we're keeping most of our code in QVM, any ioq3 updates we want<br>
to roll in should cause minimal fuss.<br>
<br>
Some people have mentioned other Q3 ports with far better features. Stuff<br>
that we, as content creators, really really like. Chris mentioned stuff<br>
like, "snow/rain/fog based on ET, GLSL and CG shaders, a new rendering<br>
engine..." The closest that ioq3 has gotten to any of that is the<br>
framebuffer/bloom work that someone here did a little while ago and of<br>
course the raytracing work being done now.<br>
<br>
XreaL, Q3Evolution, and other projects offer much better graphical<br>
goodies. However, except for Q3Evolution 1.x, they either break all our<br>
existing media or don't run on any platform except Windows. Since our<br>
team uses and games on Windows, Linux, and MacOS, that's just not<br>
something we care to pursue. Or they drop QVM support. Or they have<br>
broken bot support. Etc.<br>
<br>
This is all stuff that we either can't readily recreate or don't want to<br>
give up. It's great that a managed .NET version of Q3 has all these bells<br>
and whistles, but if it only runs on Windows, that does us no good.<br>
<br>
I wish some of these splinter projects would backport some of these<br>
extensions as patches to ioq3. But they never seem to. Raynor was kind<br>
of doing it with Q3Evolution 1.x, but mainly was merging ioq3 with some<br>
features of XreaL rather than backporting some features of XReaL into<br>
ioq3. The problem with that is that while it lets us use our current<br>
lightmapped maps and other media, we're at the mercy of one guy who may or<br>
may not be around for merging in updates and bugfixes from ioq3.<br>
<br>
As a content creator, it's frustrating. ioq3 is too solid of a foundation<br>
for us to give up, but we look longingly at some of the other projects and<br>
wish we could let our artists do what the other projects allow. For<br>
example, the MDR/MD4 support was nice except that there wasn't the right<br>
toolchain support that we could readily take advantage of it--the only<br>
tool that could create these models was Milkshape while our<br>
modelers/animators were using 3DMax and Lightwave, etc.<br>
<br>
As for making a mod for ioq3, I think that's a great idea in general.<br>
Just use ioq3 as a big ol' virtual machine like Java or QuakeC or<br>
UnrealScript or, didn't Doom 3 use a similar virtual-machine-esque thing<br>
that abstracted the game/mod code from the engine so you could write one<br>
mod and it would run on whatever platform that D3 was ported to?<br>
<br>
Though I suppose that if the QVM still runs on baseq3, we could keep our<br>
source closed, if we really wanted to. So that might be a consideration<br>
for making an ioq3 mod instead of directly modifying the engine. We're<br>
going full opensource, planned to do it since day one.<br>
<br>
Anyway, I'll let y'all go back to doing something productive. Thank you<br>
all very much for your continued work on ioq3! Hopefully sometime this<br>
year you'll be able to play a Reaction standalone on everything from MacOS<br>
to Slowaris or an SGI!<br>
<br>
Monk.<br>
<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br>
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<br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>