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New Q3A Patch And Mods
Warrior writes "Id Software released the newest patch for Quake 3 Arena yesterday, version 1.25. However, the patch literally "breaks" all mods made for the game. GameSpy has an article that addresses the issue, getting id's stance and talking to authors of some of the most popular mods." It sounds like the patch is actually correcting a lot of issues, and while it's too bad that it breaks the mods, sometimes you have to do that to get things working properly.
Being an admin for GameSpy Arcade, I can vouch for the fact that it DOES break the mods -- badly. I've been giving users support for the past two hours. I will tell you guys what I tell them:
/baseq3 folder 2) Reinstall the Quake 3 Arena Point Release version 1.17
If you have already upgraded to the Quake 3 Arena Point Release 1.25 public beta, you can revert to 1.17 by doing the following: 1) Delete the pak4.pk3 file located in your
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CitizenC
C'mon guys, what're you talking about? I want to know what happens and what you can do when you tweak your system to get 125fps ... I've got an AMD750, and I've been trying to tweak the crap out of it, and I don't see any differences...
What sort of tricky jumps are you talking about? BFG creep, and stuff like that?
C'mon, fill us in here, 'leet Quake Gods...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I've got a Mac G4 and an AMD750 PC that I want to upgrade to v1.7 (well, when I can finally find a 1.7 point release installer for the Mac that doesn't hang, but that's a different story), but the problem is, I've done the upgrade on my PC to 1.7 and it no longer talks to the linuxdedicated server I set up on my local LAN for private deathmatch games...
So is there a new version of linuxdedicated server for 1.25 that will work with this point release, or should I wait a while?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I'm not sure what the rush to get this out the door for the Win clients was. Most people weren't expecting mush from id until closer to the Team Arena laung, right?>
I think a better idea would have been to hold off on any release until the source & multi-platform builds were ALL ready. That way you don't have the Linux/Mac crowd upset for not releasing anything; the Win crowd upset for releasing an upgrade that screws with the mods in ways that the mod builders can't do anything about. Talk about not being able to see the forest from the trees!
Graeme Devine (Designer / Project Manager) says he "thought we'd never get this out the door!" (.plan). Maybe waiting would have been prudent. Also, "Because we've added so much I think we're going to call this a "Public Beta".": do you think or do you know? Which is it?
Well, I hadn't run thru single-player in a while. Guess this was the chance I was looking for?
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I believe... Valve did a good job in preparing the big release, especially for the popular mods. id Software didn't. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Also notice the red bordering on the console; that's an indication that it's BETA.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Better graphics do not a better game make.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I noticed that I cannot play demos (even id Software's). I just get kicked to the main menu. I also noticed others posting about it on alt.games.quake3 newsgroup. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Nobody exploited cheats in a game. They took the game to another level by understand the game throughly.
OK, maybe I shouldn't call them cheats. But they are bugs in the game that cause the game to behave in a way that it wasn't designed.
You would complain too if you were a good tennis player and someone decided to make the court bigger, the size of the ball smaller and different material.
This is more like if someone found out that a particular spot on the court had an imperfection that caused the ball to skew, and then practiced hitting that exact spot. And then complains when someone comes along and fixed the imperfection: "Hey man, what about all the hours I put in to hit that exact spot???".
A court imperfection is not part of the spirit of the game of tennis, and these exploits were not part of the spirit of the game of Quake.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What kind of moves are you talking about?
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I haven't worked much with mod making for Quake3, but I did program the Gamers Extreme (GXMOD) modification for Quake2, and what I do know of Quake3 mods leads me to believe they are pretty much the same, just with the added option of the QVM.
The basic problem is that the modification code, as shipped, in not particularly designed for clean and easy extention and only uses a basic form of object orientation (in ANSI C). To make meaningful modifications, you have to go into id's source and actually change things around. When they themselves change this base source code to supply bug fixes and new features, you're now stuck doing diffs against what you started with before and what you have now and then figuring out how to repatch the patches you made to the original source to the new source. Given that your code is strewn about id's code, this can be a lot of changes, and many of them may be incompatible as you might have already fixed bugs id is just fixing now, and perhaps you fixed them in a different way. In any case, its far from just a recompile.
Now, to be sure, good coding practics should have lead people to isolate and comment their changes as much as possible (this saved me on a couple of point releases for GXMOD, enabling a turn around of only a couple of days when new patches were released), but its still far from trivial, even in those cases.
Also, I'm surprised that id hasn't realized by now (a similiar sort of broken mod syndrome occured during the 3.14 version era of Quake2) that they MUST release the modification source at the same time as the binary patches! I could understand the business decision to get the patch out now for everyone and worry about the mod users later if the mod users were a tiny majority of people. THEY AREN'T!! Look at HalfLife/CounterStrike/TFC, look at Quake3/RA3/WFA/Q3F/etc. A huge number of people (in some cases a majority) playing these FPS games are doing it mostly through mods. Please take that into account next time, and clean up and package the code and release it at least at the same time as the binary patches!! A few days or a week previous would be even better!
But I also wanted to sound off a bit on the changing of the physics.
In his .plan, Robert Duffy said:
Splash damage through floors was a bug. It is fixed, live with it.
I think this is a particularly bad attitude. I play Quake3, and when I first learned (the hard way) that you can take damage through thin floors and thin walls (for those not familiar with it, basically, world geometry isn't used as an occluder vs rocket radius damage) I thought it was slightly stupid. But, like most players, I have adapted to it and it has grown almost into another dimension of gameplay. Sure, it might be a bit confusing to people who are new to the game, but I think the trade-off of allowing a deeper game play experience later is worth it. Much of the same argument applies to strafe-jumping....
The fact that these issues weren't intentional doesn't mean they should be fixed if that isn't what the people playing the game want. Rocket jumping, if what I've heard time and time again is true, wasn't intentional...And that's lasted all throughout the Quake series because the players found it created a deeper game. So, in short, Duffy's explaination is just lacking. You can't just say it had to be fixed because it was unintentional, you need to give a more solid argument on why this change was needed.
In any case, it seems like a real bad idea to change all this stuff now....Didn't John Carmack semi-publicly reprimand Zoid for changing physics late into Quake2's release? And yet they do the same for Quake3.. Oh well.
I'm just a casual Q3A player, I just play occasionally for fun. The server I play on doesn't feature any mods, why should I have to wait for the Mod authors to be happy before I get my update from ID?
Surely people who use mods are capable of simply not installing the update until the mods are ready, or are ID sending round goons with BFGs to force everyone to upgrade?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It looks like ID here didn't seed the changes, and didn't indicate that most mods wouldn't work with the change (omitted accidently). This indicates lots of poor planning on Id's part, as more people play the mods than the standard Q3 modes. You'd think that with similar problems encounters by UT and HL, they would learn as well, but...
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
No, the problem is that id has changed the physics in the game. In the previous versions, people have been tweaking quake and all their hardware so that they would be able to sustain a constant framerate of 125 fps. The reason for this was that it enables a player to pull off all sorts of cool jumps and navigate the maps easier and faster.
Changing this nine months after the game is released is considered by many as a Bad Move, and I tend to agree. I have yet to hear from people who like this change.
Top players have been practicing these moves over and over and over again in order to raise their playing level and stand a chance at $100.000 tournaments like those run by The CPL. Basicly, this new patch throws ours of practice out the window, because these tricks become useless... Not so hard to understand why people are pissed now, is it?
they'd have just called their patch an upgrade to Quake 4, and charged everyone $89.99 to break all their existing mods.
With all the money available I can see why people take it so seriously, but maybe they shouldn't practice and obsess about it so much. It's just a game. And then this newbie wouldn't get slaughtered so much at CTF :-)
I can totaly understand why this would piss you off. Who wouldn't be upset to learn that their chance at big money for playing a game had been taken away? It's this type of free market GREATNESS that allows any starving person to pull themselves off the street by merely wishing their problems away, and applying God and give all! The point I'm trying to make is that it IS hard for me to understand how anyone could POSSIBLY be upset by this. There are better things to worry about. Here's the kicker: It is a game. I'm not sure that "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" is really true anymore, (was it ever?) There are lots of valid privacy and technology issues out there. This isn't one of them.
"You must do the thing you think you cannot do" E.Roosevelt
Sysadmins should be paid as much as they are because all they basically do is cater to an industry that purpously makes tools hard to maintain. Not so pretty when the shoe is on the other foot isn't it?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I meant "shouldn't". And for all those brain-dead moderators who don't get the gist of my post (Subtlty 101 should be a require class) I mean that football players work hard, sysadmins work hard. They both bring stuff to humanity. Entertainment is just as important as getting work done, plus football players bring tons of money into the economy. (Ecomonics 101 should also be a required course.) As such, they both deserve what they get.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It was in there when the game was designed. Someone discovered that neat trick. Anyone can do it. (with practice) Who is to say that it goes against the spirit of the game?
The main disputes issues with the patch are:
1. Breaks Strafe jumping.
A lot of us play this game competatively. We spend a lot of time practicing these tricks and specializing. For instance my CTF clan has 2 extremely good strafe jumpers who are our flag runners and several amazing Railers who play D.
This brings strategy to the game.. since your Defense has to be very good to nail the other teams flag runners, since chances are u will not catch them once they are out of the base.
2. Through floor splash damage.
This is actually a VERY good quirk! It helps to discourage campers on high platforms. A good railer camping up high can take out anyone without any fear of geting killed. (Especially on maps that require jumppads to get to the platform) With through floor splash he can be "removed" from that spot by a few carefully placed rockets.
Like I said before the game was released with those quirks.. and they are changing it 9 months later. Thats years in gaming terms compared to sports. That's like after 20 years of tennis they ban slicing because somebody doesn't like it and it was an unforceen exploitation of the "real world" physics when tennis was invented. There is just something not right about that.
It doesn't LITERALLY break the mods. "Break" is, in this case, a metaphor, and is even placed in quotes in the sentence (the patch literally "breaks" all mods).
"Literally" not does not mean "especially", it means "actually".
If I literally slap you in the face, it doesn't mean that I really pissed you off, it means that I actually struck you. If I literally break your game, there should be real bits on the actual floor.
Sorry, I know we have a Grammer Nazi, but this is more of an issue of meaning rather than syntax, and it just grates on me. It's like signs that use quotes for emphasis: 'Check out our "sale" prices' (apparently they're not really sale prices at all).
Thank you. I feel better now.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Mods for Quake 3 Arena will require a recompile for use with 1.25 and above as we have added in a lot of mod requested features which added trap calls and changed the event system a bit. I'll get the source posted asap so all the teams can get their new cuts up. Look for it in a day or two.
So mod authors are telling players to hold off upgrading until after a new version of the mod with 1.25 changes is available.
A couple of days doesn't sound too bad. Probably a little longer than that for most of the mod authors to release updated binaries and then a little longer again for all the servers to upgrade. This could piss you off if your 'clan' had a trash-talk-induced match to defend the groups honor and they had to wait a week because their best player upped to 1.25 and couldn't play. ;-) (that's sarcasm)
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
All other the mod makers I've spoken to about this over the last 12 hours or so are basically preparing themselves for many days or even weeks of absolute hell. Right now, we've got a completely fux0red binary release that breaks everything in sight, and no chance to even *start* trying to make our work run with it for several days yet because we have no source, and it won't be released until the patch is stable. Given the current state of the patch, I'd say a few days is an extremely optimistic estimate of when it may actually work. When we do get the source, yeah, if your "mod" consists of replacing the LG model with a CG and making it fire bullets you'll be up and running again in 10 minutes. But if you've put significant development into your mod, like OSP; CPM; CPMA; RA3; Q3F, then odds are you're going to be in deep trouble.
All of the gameplay fixes (e.g. splash bug, dropped sounds) in this release were originally done BY the mod community and sent back to id. Now we have to merge our versions with their ever-so-slightly-different version, and pick up all the changes they made along the way to support Team Arena. We're talking line-by-line comparisons here, for the most part, as we've all made extensive changes and additions to the 1.17 code: I think Rhea and I have both restructured just about every piece of the code in the months that we've had to work with it.
The protocol has changed; we KNOW the client-server data has changed with it. There are a bunch of new toys in 1.25, like 2 new awards. There were only two free PERS_* slots before, and we can't expand them because there's a hard limit in the protocol. We used those empty slots to pass information around that would require monstrous hackage to do any other way. What would you like to bet that AWARD_DEFENSE and AWARD_ASSIST now occupy those slots?
For almost all of us, we make these mods in our spare time: we have jobs; family; friends, and other Real Life demands on our time. If it only takes us 40 hours to merge things, that doesn't mean we'll be ready in a week: it means we'll be ready in a MONTH. In the meantime, sites like PQ are still encouraging people to download 1.25...
We had no warning of this patch at all. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying id owe us anything. They were kind enough to release the source so that we *could* make mods, and there are hundreds of thousands of gamers worldwide who appreciate that. But had they released the source to us *before* putting out the binary patches, not only would we have been able to slash the delay before being able to ship our mods but they'd also have far fewer bugs in the patch itself. As it is, there's going to need to be at least one more patch after this one simply to fix all the new problems that are showing up. That means even more time between when newbies install the 1.25 binaries on their machines and when they can actually play the mods they enjoy so much.
ModMaker was railed by id
ModMaker: wow. didn't see that one coming...
arQon
You gotta stop... You should be happy there is a Linux port or a Mac port, period. From what I have heard the Linux port did not even break even. JC and crew should be commended for taking the chance and putting out a product for various platforms. They didn't have to do that. The fact they did means Linux is no longer second class (if we were someone else would have to port it). Personally, I think that Id shipping a commercial Linux port of the game (within a reasonable window) elevates Linux as a viable market and will put pressure on the rest of the gaming industry to do the same. Until Linux is a more profitable endeavour to publish for, than say some other OS, getting mad about the lag in releases of different versions of a game will only hurt all of us. Complaining makes the alternate OS community look like a cranky eliteist bunch, an image we need to improve rather than perpetuate.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
In the previous versions, people have been tweaking quake and all their hardware so that they would be able to sustain a constant framerate of 125 fps.
Or, I can see another revolt because they seem to have removed damage transfering through the floor. After watching the recent demos, it seems that tracking opponents from below has become another strategy. To be honest, getting rocked from below seems like valid damage to me, but that's just me. ;)
Top players have been practicing these moves over and over and over again in order to raise their playing level and stand a chance at $100.000 tournaments ...
Er, the changes are applied equally for everyone. Here's a hint: if your m@d skilz depend on exploiting cheats in the game, you're probably not that good.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.