Is the Quake modding community really this dead?

[FrikaC]

It's only somewhat dead because I've not been around as much. My theory anyway.

[xaGe]

FrikaC!! ..I like the theory...

It's only somewhat dead because I've not been around as much. My theory anyway.

[Error]

Nash. We, as a community, welcome anyone new and hoping to learn the fine art of Quake Modding. As one of them said, most of the activity takes place in the IRC chat rooms (we prefer realtime talkins).

So, please, come in to #qc or #darkplaces on anynet. Come on in and we'll see what we can do to help. I remember being a noob in this community and it wasn't too long before I was welcomed with open compilers. Hope to see you there.

[leileilol]

also avoid chris

[xaGe]

Funny... he told me the same thing about you!..

also avoid chris

[Urre]

I'd recommend avoiding both of them, and including myself.

[Sajt]

The Quake community is only for those who are cool enough.

[Urre]

w0rd

...except I don't do the community thing

[Electro]

I'm not cool enough.

[xaGe]

That's a lie...

I'm not cool enough.

[scar3crow]

The problem is that, at least to me, Quake exists in spite of itself. The communities are decidedly split into chunks, and lately I haven't been active in any of them really... For Quake, I would have to check many sites to get a sense of whats gone down, and with a low amount of content coming out, this can be quite disparaging. This is in stark contrast with the fact that I can just check Doomworld every 2 weeks and get a nice fix of Doom (and yes, lulz, when I have the patience).

Documentation is bad, I say this as someone who has tried using the documentation for years. Years. How many mods have I coded? Well I made one weapon mod which only changed one thing and few people played (no public release) but it kinda worked in its own way. But yeah, afaik, not much in the way of getting the fundamentals - not to far from when I tried to take up German, learning a handful of phrases, some phonetics and culture, but absolutely nothing of the actual structure and thus found myself incapable of moving forward from there on.

Granted I've never made a complete Doom map that didn't have some technical errors due to not quite Getting how to go about sector/linedef based construction - but this could largely be due to my own incompetence.

I do apologize for how little the I3d frontpage has been updated lately, but I have not felt motivated at all from a community perspective (to the extent of feeling outside of the community and thus taking from it only a handful of friendships). I will try to do some more updating, but I know you other guys have access (Error, DrShadowborg, Chillo, Randy, FrikaC) to the CMI if not the ftp as well. Don't let my inactivity and general pessimism interfere when things do go down.

...though I do wonder who all reads the front page, who doesn't read the forums and thus already knows most of what would be posted on it.

[Nash]

ZDoom's wiki is very newbie-friendly and it's well-written documentation like that I would really love to see happen for the Quake wiki at QSG.

See how a lot of stuff is explained, from the less-interesting technical detail of a feature right up to step-by-step instructions on how to get a feature working for your mod.

[FrikaC]

Well work on the Quake Wiki! Complaining about it gets no one nowhere. I've been trying to get people to help on it for years.

[scar3crow]

There is the simple fact that people like Nash and I do not know those things that need to be filled in to the wiki, hence the problem.

I mean I can fill in stuff about people, but... not the actual useful bits. My problem with the wiki is each time I went to it for coding help it read like... ...a coder who knows it well, who is writing for other coders who know it well, so it very much is a coder-for-coder style, and leaves things just kind of... out there.

This is of course not across the board, but it happens often enough that I end up closing the wiki because it reads more like arcane knowledge and less like information for how a system works.

Then again I dropped out of Music Fundamentals because I didn't get the Every Good Boy Does Fine Always crap, but rather the "You write alphabetically A through G, change tense on C, write bottom to top and write in the spaces and on the lines."

[Sajt]

FrikaC, it may seem redundant and a step backwards but I really think we should reinvigorate the Quake Wiki in a MediaWiki with the default wikipedia template, like the Doom Wiki uses. It's just somehow so much friendlier.