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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.
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