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Rocket Arena For Quake 3 Arena Released
Manb writes: "As of a few minutes after 9pm EST the long awaited mod was released for download from a slew of mirrors. Rocket Arena has been hyped to be the premiere addon for the final Quake edition from Id Software. With the releasers saying that it will redefine gameplay by changing the core of the Quake 3 engine it is a very promising release. There even seems to be a integrated mp3 player to listen to your own music while fragging your opponent. Even with a soundtrack to this release it is a must download for any Quake fanatic. It's a little hefty weighing in at 56 megs for the client, a meg for the server, and ~70 megs for the soundtrack it's not for the faint of bandwidth. Check out the homepage here."
"There even seems to be a integrated mp3 player to listen to your own music while fragging your opponent."
Uh-oh. MS better integrate an MP3 player in the Doom clone they've already integrated into Excel...
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Rocket Arena was really fun for Q2, and this promises to be a great deathmatch mod with Q3A's superb engine.
For a little more strategy and teamplay, check out Quake 3 Fortress . This is a port of QuakeWorld TeamFortress (some of you may have experienced the bastardized "Team Fortress Classic" in Half-Life) to Q3A, and it's very nice. Q3F has 9 different classes of characters battling in teams in several different styles of play (capture the flag, capture "command points", and soon stuff like "kill the president").
I play it more than I probably should, but if you mourn the Quake 1 days or are looking for something new, check it out!
Nicely-done page - first thing I get is a pop-up box saying "Please come back with a CSS compliant browser such as IE or Netscape 6 (or Lynx)". How about if THEY come back with an accessible webpage?
I dunno exactly how long the beta test for Rocket Arena Q3A was, but it needed to be longer with a few more testers who could point out some of the simpler problems.
I was a big fan of Rocket Arena Q2 back when I played Quake II. I loved the team play and survival aspects of it. Realisticly, it was what Quake should have been for deathmatches.
However, playing RAQ3A last night, I was horrified by how much had yet to be fixed. The menu, though fancy, is dreadful. When you go to the mp3 player, mp3s don't play, there's no exit button to the menu, and it seems overly burdened with functions.
Also, the download is 60 megabytes just for the client side, and it's multiplayer only. There's no playing against the bots when the master server is down, no practice...
And in some arenas, when you're booted back to the main arena for some reason, there's only a few spawnpoints, all about floor height, so if more than a few players spawn at the same time, they'll be stuck together, which is not fun at all.
And it seems that many server admins are confused by how to setup a server. I was on quite a few last night which had bad time limits or confusing play.
crt probably did make another breakthrough mod for Quake, but it seems that it needed more brewing. Hopefully he'll fix these problems and make it a bit easier and better before too long.
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
I think what you want is CrystalSpace. It's a 3d rendering engine that supports dynamic lighting, terrain, particles, sprites, everything. So go ahead and write your Quake clone for it.
:-) )
What?
Oh, I see. You want a game where you can go out and frag people, not some dinky little walktest. Well, you have the source. Go out and write one.
Well? Go and write one already!
Still here?
Ah ha, too difficult for you? You just wanna frag? Well go play with your little closed source Quake3.
Rant, Flame = Off, Off (tuple packing and unpacking! Gotta love python!
Seriously though, the open-source business model is not suffieciently developed for Id to make any sort of money off of Quake3 if they open-source it. After all, they couldn't exactly sell very much support. But people are already working on open versions. Not just fraggers, but also RPGs and more. Check out the Crystal Space projects page for more info. And instead of complaining about commercial companies doing what comes naturally to them, go and write something better.
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link without error message
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server
enjoy, in spite of an extremely bad web author. (still generates error, but at least you can see the links)
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You know, this is amusing. If Q3 were Open Sourced, anyone could modify the source code and integrate whatever music playing technology you want.
OTOH, if Q3 were already open-sourced, licencees of id would have no need to pay licensing fees for the Q3 engine.
Id are such pathetic hypocrites. They release Quake on Linux, but will not Open Source it.
Er - check again. Quake has been released on Linux and the source is under the GPL which is an Open Source compatible license (if that's what you mean). Try here for more info.
IMNSHO, id are as far from being "pathetic hypocrites" as it is possible to get. Not only have they donated large sums of money to the FSF, they pioneered the development of games under Linux with their Doom and Quake releases. Added to that the source for everything up to Quake I has been GPLed. No-one really knows how the business model of Open Sourced games works yet, but I would say id lead the way in walking the tightrope between commercial profit and open code. I have no problem with a closed engine and open game logic - it makes mods possible while preserving the company's profits.
Open Source Quake 3 now! Or better, someone write an Open Source Quake!
Even better than that, go and download the QuakeForge's source which is comprised of the pristine original sources from id plus loads of bug-fixes and enhancements...
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Id is not being hypocritical by releasing quake for linux, but not making it open source.
Umm, actually Quake *is* open source (GPL). I suspect that in a few years, Q2 and Q3A will be as well.
There are any number of reasons why iD might not want to release their sources right off the bat. Chief among these is that they are a business, and their primary responsibility will always have to be making money for the stockholders. Aside from retail sales, iD does a good bit of its business from licensing its game engines to other companies. Even if other companies were scrupulous enough not to lift any of the engine code directly, were it made publically available from day one, you can bet there would be a lot of competitors scrutinizing that code and trying to implement similar clean-room versions.
iD may not have the most altruistic business model around, but it's still a pretty good one: profit from the cutting edge tech for a couple of years, then give it to the community when something better comes along.
Keeping things closed-source for a while also helps keep the multi-player gaming experience more honest and enjoyable for everyone. There have been problems with cheaters in online games since day one, but they become MUCH worse when mischief-makers have complete access to the sources.
Do NOT listen to Upbeat Depression - Ultra-Violence while in midgame - especially do NOT listen to the beginning or the ending of that tune. You will be forced to enter console mode for a while and you will lose. In fact delete that mp3 file right now !
...
Whoewer selected a tune with samples of "running water" in it to be included in a networked- multiplayer- 12_hours_straight_gameplay- no_sleep- no_eat- and_especially_NO_TOILET_break game is a very sick person or a very good prankster.
I have to go now
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If designers continue to cater to the limitations of Netscape 4 the platform will never die and exciting new technologies like CSS and DHTML will not be usable. SOMEONE has to start using those technologies first, to drive up adoption of newer browsers that support these technologies. It's not going to be yahoo.com or cnn.com, it's got to start with smaller sites like my page.
The problem with Netscape 4 is not that it doesn't support CSS (Lynx doesn't support CSS and it renders the page fine). The problem is its half-assed support for CSS. It thinks it understands CSS, but it really doesn't. If AOL/Netscape would just release a version of NS4 that flat-rendered any CSS pages the results would be much more usable. I tried to make sure the page was accessible to text based browsers as a lowest common denominator, and for visually impaired people (although not many of them play Quake I would imagine).
I know a lot of people would be happy with a web that was just black text on a white (or grey for old-schoolers) background, but some of us are intrigued by the possibility of near-pixel-perfect accuracy in web page rendering. It opens up an amazing range of creative possibilities.
There are CSS-compliant browsers available on every major platform today. If you're still using 3 year old technology (Netscape 4) perhaps you should consider upgrading. If you aren't happy with those other browsers, perhaps you should contribute to making them better.