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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
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.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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?
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 :-)
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.
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.