What Quake Needs ...

[Baker]

This is my own personal list of the things I think Quake needs, for discussion and talking out loud purposes.

I look at Quake from the following angle...

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Quake is composed of the following people ...

1. Players
2. Engine authors (C++)
3. Mod makers (Quake C)
4. Modellers
5. Map makers
6. Server Admin
7. Miscellaneous (Utility makers, Waypoint makers, loc files makers)
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Players are a valuable commodity and give life to the game. Most people who make things want their creations to be used. Players also have the least responsibility and can be replenished.

A lack of players is not necessarily a problem as that problem can be fixed if the game is fun.

My larger concern about the future of Quake is how hard it is to locate the tools for those other types of contributors to Quake.

This is part of the reason I started working on the Quake Navigator, but admittedly it is only a "good start".

Quake is one of the easiest games to make maps for. That's why the mapping community is still going so strong.

I would also assume, but can't be sure, that Quake is one of easier games to make models for. I don't know whether or not that is a true statement.
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What I would describe as a couple of the greater risks is that the information and tools required for QuakeC, modelling and mapping disappear.

An additional risk is that finding the information to do any of those becomes so difficult to locate that one would not put forth the effort to do so.

3 things that I think are missing from the Quake community:

1. A prepackaged document set that can downloaded of docs related to engine programming with source codes of a few of the different major engines and maybe bundled with whatever tools are useful for engine development.

2. A prepackaged set of utilities useful for modelling with a good number of documents.

3. A prepackaged set of utilities useful for mapping with a good number of documents.

4. An internet depot with a ton of existing Quake models. Maybe packaged into a big 7-zip file. This stuff tends to get lost. Spirit has a big single player map archive, and honestly --- if it didn't exist, I *know* some of that stuff would be lost.

5. #4, but of mods and mod source code. Is QuakeTerminus the only place that even knows of a handful of those? And no, I don't think the moddb model is sufficient. Yes it is exists, but the stuff is buried. Don't make new modders "go fish".

I think Quake is a wonderful game and any of the above can be experimented with by novice developer-types.

... But not if the stuff doesn't exist and not if it is so hard that it can't be found or if finding it takes more time than actually developing something.

[FrikaC]

Quake is actually a bad game for modellers for a number of reasons. The Quake MDL format is kind of terrible (low resolution), the only tool for making Quake models, qME, is a complete joke. For other games such as Quake2 onward, modellers can create PPMs - plug in player models. For Quake, you cannot. The PPMs fuel modelling communities for all those various games, as a modeller can make a model and release it as a standalone object. In Quake, a new mod is required to use new models. You can't even do Quake3-syle map models... Also, no bones.

[scar3crow]

90% of what we are talking here is organization and communication.

In the past few months Ive discovered more Quake community sites than I knew functioned because I started digging around, just today did I find quakeboard.net

IIRC engine authors operate in C, not C++, but yeah thats the general idea.


Basically with this post you kind of hit upon one of my goals for QExpo. QExpo being a means to an ends, not an ends with no means. Laying down groundwork for what there has always been the potential of continuing, yet seemed to needlessly stop because we became scattered.

[leileilol]

I used to run the idea behind 4. until technical difficulties.

[Baker]

I used to run the idea behind 4. until technical difficulties.

What were the technical difficulties?

[leileilol]

the server

also it was mostly forum hacks really

[Dr. Shadowborg]

Quake is actually a bad game for modellers for a number of reasons. The Quake MDL format is kind of terrible (low resolution), the only tool for making Quake models, qME, is a complete joke. For other games such as Quake2 onward, modellers can create PPMs - plug in player models. For Quake, you cannot. The PPMs fuel modelling communities for all those various games, as a modeller can make a model and release it as a standalone object. In Quake, a new mod is required to use new models. You can't even do Quake3-syle map models... Also, no bones.

I'd have to agree with quite a bit of this.

On the other hand though, Quake2 and up seem to suffer from a massive lack of NICE new weapon models, along with weapon code to go with them. I don't particularly care to think about how many damn mods I've tried for Q2 expecting to see some new weapon models, only to find just another sameskinned machinegun model masqeurading as a nailgun or some such.

At least Quake HAS a modeling program specifically designed for it that doesn't cost megabuck$ and loaded with a bunch of crap you're likely never to use, but nevertheless serve to add new levels of confusion to using it, be it rather crappy by "modern" terms. This is something that very much pisses me off at the "commercial" game developers.

My dream and ideal of the "Ultimate" FPS would be something along the lines of the UT engine (in terms of capability to render large areas for fairly low system requirements balanced with acceptable prettiness factor) packaged up with an easy to learn interpreted language such as QuakeC, and shipping with BOTH a map editor(along the lines of pre-hammer worldcraft) AND a model editor that's nice and simple to use, but with enough goodies such as bones to actually make it a halfway decent editor.