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This is a copy of a letter I sent to ID and Activision a few months ago. These companies are loosing players in droves and the companies don't even care. Check out the PB forums and see the comments from all the irate players:

What happened to the Quake (2/3) Series?

This is basically an open letter to id Software and how little importance they place in their products. They are loosing players in drovers and their reputation is going down the toilet.

But first a little intro.

I began playing Quake 2 in 95 when some friends at work were having a DM/CTF LAN party. Needles to say I was hooked. I went out and bought the game and downloaded Map after Map. I Became pretty good and eventually became one of the best Q2 CTF players around .

The Q2 CTF MOD was, at the time one of the most innovative MOD's around and pretty much dictated what a Capture the flag Mod should be like. I enjoyed playing on the old YYZ CTF servers and testing new maps from some of the most awesome mappers at the time (Hafhead and gizm0 to name a few). Everyone was into the games, teamplay was amazing and cheaters were nonexistent because Id was on top of various hacks (wallhacking excluded).

Eventually, my scores started to go down and I was ending up at the middle of the pack at the end of rounds. I began spectating people and noticed that people were gibbing enemies from the side and from behind them and discovered the world of bots.

What is a bot?

Some n00bs may get confused by the definition.

There are two types of bots. 1) Used as an AI opponent on various servers to fill empty spaces on servers. These AI players have incredible aim. These bots are good if you want to practice aiming on the run. On Half-Life Servers you can tell bots by their ping. (They all have a ping of 5)

2) Players use the bot components noted in #1 and integrates the auto aim features into their character and play on servers with the auto-aim components. I'm not going to post any of the bot links but they are out there. The people who started using the bots to enhance their own playing experience were mostly pretty stupid. They usually configured their bots to cover auto aiming in a filed of vision of 180 degrees or more around them. What this means is that if a player with a bot is looking forward and they hit fire, the bot will hit anything 180 degrees or more around them without turning. Secondly, they will usually just (if playing a CTF map) shoot and kill people and not work on any of the team objectives.

One more thing to note is one other problem with Quake 2 was that Q2 Servers were susceptible to IP Ping Floods and could take down a given server.

ID Software has a practice of Stopping builds and not releasing any further upgrades or practices. Not long after this, I started to loose interest in this game.

This was about time that the Q3 Arena Demos started to Circulate around. I began playing this game and reading the advanced press from various sources.

When I learned that CTF would loose all the cool components that made Q2 CTF a classic, it was time for me to find a new on-line game to play.

I wasn't drawn to this game very much. Sure there were some cool things about it but I wouldn't buy it ($59.99 was the price I believe) when Q3 Arena came out.

I chose to buy Half-Life and still play it to this day. It's an amazing game and Awesome Mods are still coming out to this day.

In my opinion, if a company can't take what made a given game famous and remove some or all components in a multiplayer game in the next release of a game, the company looses face in the gaming community. No One Lives Forever 2 is a good example of this. No One Lives Forever 2 was initially released without a DM or CTF mod (DM were later added with the first Service Pack after MANY irate customer complaints) the MODs that made NOLF1 a classic (running over people with snowmobiles rock!!!).

Bought Q3 Gold

I was at a Wal-Mart one day and noted Quake 3: Gold for $19.99 and bought it for the heck of it. I was interested in seeing what became of the game and was looking at what it took to map CTF maps. I've been looking into getting into mapping and wanted to do some research into what is needed to create Maps. I soon learned this was a kettle of workms that I probably should not have opened. Install a pain on XP Long story short, Quake 3: Gold has to be installed in a specific manner (it has to be a complete install) on the primary partition, in the default 'suggested' path (XP Pro) (this information was found on the Planequake forums ).

I soon found out that this install was to be the source of some of the issues I've been receiving.

I also use The All Seeing Eye to connect to games and because Q3 wouldn't work in the manner I wanted to install the game in, ASE wouldn't work.

PlanetQuake, Fileplanet other quake related files

Ok, when I played Quake2, planetquake.com was the place to go for all information, patches, maps, etc. I went back to this site and went to the Quake 3 section and began researching what would be needed to update my installation. The planetquake site was slow (I'm on a Cable Modem) to load and took a good 2 minutes to load a page. When I found a given page on maps or mapping, the links that were available were outdated or didn't work. There was no definitive 'manual' on how to find different mods or what programs are needed to map and which files were the most up to date. The links they provided (when they worked...which was about 10% of the time) were anything but helpful. I found four different mapping programs, none of which I've gotten to work correctly yet.

Planetquake has gotten lazy in their old age.

I found the Q3 MODS and patches on fileplanet but due to the new structure of the site (wait in line?!?!?...LAME!!!) I would have had to wait 4-5 days just to download a few files. I searched all over the net for the files I needed on other sites and was able to finish the download in a day.

Once I got some semblance of a Q3 install completed, I connected to a Q3 Server through ASE.

I remembered in the Q3 Install and patch that a program called Punkbuster which is a program that would detect cheaters and bot users. I thought 'cool' Id is doing something about bots and cheaters!'

Punkbuster a nightmare to upgrade

When installing and upgrading Punkbuster to current Standards I was not able to either through the game or using the command line update util. I found out that the problem with the PB (again on XP Pro in Non-Domain mode patched to current standards) is two fold:

1) The Quake Final Patch Release does not install a couple of key files for some reason or another (I found this out on the Planetquake forums ).

2) XP has a default behavior in that all system directories are 'read-only' and cannot be changed no matter what you try (Group Policies, ACLS, command line attributes, removing simple file sharing, etc.). In the case of Quake 3: Gold on XP, the default install dir is 'Program files' directory. Punkbuster needs to convert a couple of HTML files to binary and since the Read-Only Attributes are pushed from the Root Level of the primary partition, PB can't make the conversion.

New Cheats out that render Punkbuster Useless

I'm not going to go in depth about this but there are a couple of serious issues with some cheats out in the wild that PB can't handle at the moment. One issue seems to be addressed. The other is a bot that is undetectable by PB and is being used more and more on Q3 servers.

Players are furious that this issue isn't being addressed (myself included) by ID.

Read the Punkbuster Forums . Just about every single post is a rant about when/how is ID/Punkbuster will be addressing the current hacking issues and how ticked they are on how this issue isn't being addressed. (Side note: as of approx 27.Jan.2003 Punkbuster's forums have been removed and this site is taking the brunt of the PB issues.

I played on some of ThreeWave's CTF Servers (A killer MOD by the way)the other day and played against bot users. Some of these players are so stupid they turned their bot settings to 180 degrees or more and all players on my team wereable to spot this immediately.

Before I wrote this article I played a Vanilla CTF Game on a Q3 Server and there were a couple of players who were killing players in midair with weapons with the littlest fire power or hitting people in midair (from long distances) so they fell and cratered.

Needless to say, the team that I was on were trying and were winning in caps for a while (but not gibs) slowly left the server after many of the players on my team left (we started with 8 and when I left there were 3 versus 7 on the other team).

What's going on ID?!?!?

You're loosing players that used to be hardcore Q2/Q3 players in droves and they probably won't buy any more of your games due to the lack of attention you're giving to the cheaters and hackers.

Also, as a result of my experiences, I have since turned my mapping interests to the Half-Life Mod 'Day of Defeat' and the new James Bond Game '007: NightFire'.

I tell you one thing, I'll never buy another ID product again.

Software is easy to fix, reputations are next to impossible to fix. Get with the program ID!!!

Dolemite

Quake had the best mods, ever. Hands down. Threewave CTF absorbed much of my time i should have spent studying and can be directly attributed to my poor ACT scores (I spent the entire night prior engaged in a ferocious clan battle against a german clan. We won, but the price paid was evident on my ACT scores...which I'll refrain from disclosing ;)).

And what about Quake Rally ? Jesus, those were some memories there. Really innovative control scheme that's just now catching on in other games. It did some really fantastic stuff with the Quake engine, but it just didn't seem as off the wall as.... Target Quake !!! God. A side scroller built on the Quake engine.. fucking _golden_ stuff there. Brilliant idea.. kinda reminded me of Abuse but in 3D.. :)

Oh hell, and what about the movies available for Quake? Remember Blahbalicious ? How about Operation Bay Shield ? Apartment Huntin ? Hell, the massive 4 hour Nehahra ?

Seriously, I haven't uninstalled Quake since 1996, i just keep transfering it over to my new hard drives whenever I upgrade. How the hell could I risk losing the ability to play Zerstorer or Scourge of Armagon ?


hehehe, i bet you thought i was going to forget the Quake Done Quick movies, didn't you? ;)

Personally, I would LOVE to see ThreeWave Capture The Flag for some iteration of Steam. That would help kick it off, and get some players for one of the best mods of all time (that was released too late into quake 3's existence, unfortunately)

This is an easy question. I just hosted another LAN party, and have thought this through a couple times. There are some places on the net to get info about how to have a LAN party, but I want to preface my comments so that you understand where I'm coming from. We had 11 people in attendance, though I was hoping for 15, so that will give you an idea of where I'm coming from, and we did it from noon till almost 10 pm last Saturday. (Hey, some of use are old guys bringing our teenagers these days. )

Some comments about the mechanics are in order because it goes directly to the issue of the fun factor. If you're going to play a game that can have a dedicated server, do it. I was lucky to be hosting this LAN party in a big conference room at my work, and had a "spare" quad Xeon with 2 GB RAM and 4 36 GB Ultra3 160 drives striped together as a server. It hosted all of the game servers I talk about below, and never even knew it was working. However, it took me most of a day to get all the configurations tweaked just right. On the other hand, no one person could take down the game because his computer crashed. We pulled a 24-port switch from a wiring closet that gave us less than 10 msec ping times. So, though setting up dedicated servers will be more work, it's more stable, and though switches are a little more expensive than hubs, they give great performance. One more thing, the point of a LAN party is to interact. Get everyone in the same room if at all possible. I've done it both ways (with people in individual offices so that we wouldn't have to move computers). Pack 'em in; it's much more fun. With On to the games...

We played UT DM FFA with the bonus pack relics to get everyone up and running, then we had a (small) UT one-on-one tournament. Again, the server hosted the FFA room and 4 tourney rooms all setup exactly the same way. UT - as of the latest patch - doesn't require a CD. However, it does require you to use a CD to load the latest patch. After that, you're good to go. You can even copy the CD to the server along with all the patches and bonus packs, and everyone should be able to get to them. I say "should" because Windows domain issues bit us in the behind and made browsing the server problematic. If you don't know what I'm saying, just make a bunch of CD copies for your friends to get up and running. I don't know if this sort of use of UT is legit, but based on the fact that Epic consciously took the CD requirement out of the game as of the 4.36 patch, I assume that they had this in mind.

After the UT stuff, I had everyone warm up to the Quake 3 engine in an Excessive Overkill DM FFA. If you haven't seen this, it's really neat. It'll wear you out, though, so don't plan to spend all day with it. Although it's available for UT as well as Q3, I like the Q3 engine slightly better, and that's what I went with. We only played it for about an hour before moving onto Threewave CTF, and that's what I really want to talk about. Threewave was the hit of the day. (I must point out that Threewave has been available for Q1 and Q2 as well, and though I have no experience with the Q1 version, I like the Q2 version just as well.) Once again, the dedicated server hosted both of these games as well. Once again, you can serve up the CD and the patches for your friends, or make copies of the disc. id Software made the game such that you can just ignore entering the CD key, and unless you want to play on a public internet server, you're fine. It was designed to play on a LAN like this.

I must change course here and talk about administrating the games: Q3 wins over UT. Although I have thought for a long time that UT was better, I got my opinion changed at this LAN party. Yes, UT has a web browser interface for administrating the server, but that - for me - means going somewhere else to do it. I don't want to tempt Windows 98 fate by Alt-Tab'ing over to a browser to make changes. (Hey, I had everything setup to play under Linux, but my hard drive ate it that morning. Besides, you can't Alt-Tab at all under Linux anyway.) So I wound up walking over to the server to get rid of the bots under UT FFA when everyone got up and running. On the other hand, changing something on the server with Q3 is easy with rcon. Yes, you have to know the command you want, which takes some learning, but you can just get a console in-game, do your thing, and get on with life.

On a related note, with UT you can use the in-game setup to configure your server and then launch in dedicated mode. On my particular server, with no 3D video card, I couldn't do that with Q3. However, setting up a config file for a dedicated Q3 server actually paled in diffculty compared to getting the command line correct for launching a UT server without the aid of the game engine. (I didn't realize till later that the UT engine tells you what command line it's using to start the game in the console. Grrr.) So, even though UT looks easier to setup and admin on paper, Q3 wins on both in actual usability in my book. And being able to change things on the fly for the group is a huge win. (For example: although Threewave allows you to call votes on lots of things in-game, most people aren't die-hard gamers like you and I, and don't understand how to respond to vote requests. Being able to hit "~", type "rcon capturelimit 7", and move on is really great.)

Some people say Counter-Strike is great, and I would agree on principle, except that I couldn't get it to work with a single CD-key. I tried this on a previous LAN party, and we seemed to be limited to 4 people on it. It was goofy for me, and I gave up trying to make it work. I didn't have time to set it up this time around, but I had planned on trying Strike Force, which is a Counter Strike-like mod for UT. It seems to have a few bugs, but being that it's based on UT, you wouldn't need CD's or keys for it at all.

We also have a sub-group that likes to play Rogue Spear. While I'm not a huge fan, I appreciate that we need to play it so that everyone gets to have some time on their favorite engine. However, this is one is definitely not LAN-party friendly. You have to either make copies of the disk or use a crack. Of course, we all had legal copies of the disc, and so were just fine playing this game. ;-) One bad thing about RS is that there is no dedicated server for the game. And it's the flakiest game I've discussed here. So, when the person hosting goes down, everyone stops. Get the person with the fastest, most-stable machine to host.

Lastly, we have some goofballs that like to play Starcraft, but play it at its fastest setting. To me, that takes all the strategy out of it, and I won't play it that way. YMMV. To me, using a strategy game like this in a LAN party is ridiculous becuase you have to sit out so long between rounds. Counter Strike or Rogue Spear are bad enough, but when a game can last for 30 or 45 minutes, that's just boring, except for the last two guys in the game.

We don't play it, because I really dominate in it, but I still love Quake 2 Lithium. You can tweak it to your hearts content, and I still think it's the best DM ever. Really fast-paced like Excessive Overkill, but not so senses-numbing. If you can get away with it, try it. You'll love it. And no CD's or keys, either.

dk

Making a bunch of troops that sap your enemies resources indirectly through killing their troops can only go so far and for me, only be so fun. A lot of responses to this story are going to refer to larger online games, perhaps with an interesting motif such as World War 2.

I don't really care about presentations when coming up with gameplay ideas. The theme can come later. Too many people in the game industry think they're in the movie industry as it is. :)

That said, I think an interesting strategy game would be one where you build a fortress in a 3D world out of blocks much like lego in a round turn much like the classic game of Rampart. Once the turn is up, each side is presented with a number of units (which grows every turn) to infiltrate and attempt to demolish the newly created base.

The game ends when all of the resource generating 'units' have been destroyed. The number of resource generating units depends entirely on the level chosen for play.

What is cool about this game:

• The harvesting of resources is automatically done until you fuck up. This is the opposite of a lot of RTS games, and removes an initial learning curve.
• The game varies wildly with each opponent that you play, as their architecture, traps and strategies therein allow for a far larger variant than a normal FPS 'tank rush' game.
• The gameplay allows you to set up "fun moments". This is a key aspect to multiplayer gaming these days. With games like CaptureStrike, the style of game allows you to set up conditions.

  For example, the basic premise of CaptureStrike is that one CTF team is entirely on offense and one is entirely defense. Both teams are loaded up with all their weapons and told to attack. Now you are a) Attacking with full health and armour and b) With teammates assistance. This gives the player an opportunity to do something incredibly worthwhile for his team, and keeps him riveted to the game. And, it's guaranteed to happen approx. once a minute. (CaptureStrike is really fun, by the way. You can grab the ThreeWave Q3CTF mod at this URL if you're interested in trying it out.)

Bad things about this game style:

• Infiltrating the enemy's base would probably be best done in an FPS style manner, but that only allows you to control one person at a time by conventional logic. If there are many people on a team, who is going to build the architecture?
• It would be possible, but tough to prevent architectural traps which lead to impossibilities. For example, you could make your base have a drop down ledge which you cannot get back up. When leaving your base to attack the enemy, you leap down, but cannot get back up. Now your fortress is impenetrable, but you cannot go home. Solutions to this are some algorithm intensive work, or perhaps a game style much like Capture The Flag, where you HAVE to go back to your base.

It's about time a new multiplayer gameplay strategy game style came to be. And these days, a game where you only need two players to be fun can be considered low risk- A lot of games aren't popular because they aren't popular. You need a bare minimum of four players to make a team game fun.

I wrote it last night. No, really.

\\\ SLUDGE

I'm a fan of Joystick101. I go there every day to check for any valid news links to my site. The writers opinions are always insightful. However, I think the author is off base on this one.

It's funny that John Carmack called these the halcyon days of polygon based gaming, and yet two years down the road, some flawed marketing is going to drop that down the tubes. Consoles are just not that essential.

I think we're finally arriving at at age where we can honestly say that games look exciting to people who don't play games. The same people who stop to watch movies playing at Future(Torture) Shop would now stop to watch some kid playing a game at some display stand.

Games truly look good for the first time, and there are enough excess polygons to throw around to express artistic ideas. I don't buy it.

I've been playing around with the design of a terrain engine. For those who don't know the basics of heightmap engines, the obvious thing to do is to have a grid of vertices. The height of the vertices is defined by a bitmap image, where each pixel's grayscale intensity represents the height of the vertex.

The result is that a grayscale image can be created in The Gimp, and the output sent to my (and many other) terrain engines after saving a file. This is an unsatisfactory amount of feedback.

I'd been doing some thinking about making a real terrain editor when it struck me that I would probably be recreating most of the tools and filters in The Gimp, but at a decidedly lower quality. I then realised that what I wanted to do is the opposite of plugins, additional filters, Perl-Fu and Script-Fu: I wanted to throw out the buffer where all the filters and tools are rendered to, and replace THAT with a plugin to the other end of The Gimp.

I am interested in replacing the framebuffer in The Gimp with a AF_UNIX socket which transmits the framebuffer data over to another app, which would be in this case, my terrain. I would be able to paint modifications onto my terrain with all of The Gimp's tools.

I'm pretty busy with my website these days, as we just went live, but I'm definately interested in looking into the code for The Gimp soon enough to see if this is feasible.

After reading the original story on Slashdot, I purchased one of these puppies and started playing with it.

I put up small review with some pictures

I really like the unit. I wanted something small that I could cart around data such as games, mp3s and others. I loaded Homeworld on to it last night and it ran surprising well in both OpenGL and Direct3D. As a little game machine, this sucker really shines.

I originally purchased it as machine to play MAME games on and so far this is working pretty well. My only complaint is I can't seem to get sound working with DOS MAME. The Sound Blaster DOS emulation on the SoundMax drivers seems to just crash. MAME32 (the win32 version) runs fine howerver.

In all, I really like the unit. It's a small size, but it's not small in its capability. It's a good powered machine and can play most of the latest games (Half-Life, Homeworld, etc). Quake3 does run, but the 4MB of texture memory really slows it down.

The TV SVideo and composite out is very handy for portability as well--you can take it to people who don't have a monitor handy and use any TV. I've been watching DVD movies on it hooked to my TV and it works very well.

I also like the fact its easily upgradable. It's a Socket 370, so as new Intel Coppermines come out, you can upgrade the processor easily. IBM is also producing newer small drives with larger capacity so it would not be unreasonable to throw a 24GB drive in there in the next year when one ships.

I'd recommend it for someone looking for an additional PC to their current one that doesn't take a lot of space and is easy to pack up and move.

His website is kind of "under construction" :)
threewave.com

Yeah, but at least ``It Worked!''

Good catch.

-ac

His website is kind of "under construction" :)
threewave.com