Recent Posts

I'll see what I can do.   

Scourge of Armagon guns look epic!  Will you post some gameplay videos with them?

Hungry for something new to see?  Wirehead has been hard at work pushing 1.0 forward.  Most of the changes so far have been internal code modifications and those are hard to show, but we've finally got some new eye candy for you.  As promised, some more Team Arena goodness.  This time, for the Slipgaters.

First up, the Mjolnir.  This can be found anywhere an Arena Gladiator picks up a Nailgun.



Next is the Proximity Gun.  It's spawns wherever Arena Gladiators get their Prox Launcher, and works fairly similar, though Quake veterans will appreciate the differences.



Finally, we have the Laser Cannon.  Who needs a chaingun when you've got freakin' LASERS that bounce off walls?



More will be added to the gallery as we move forward, so stay tuned.

I just don't seem to be very good with Champions.  I had been doing well with Nyx for a while, but after the last update it feels like I'm slogging through mud and aiming is downright difficult.  I've seen some strange behavior, like one player whose movement was all jittery, and projectiles from the nailgun was passing through him.  As for aiming... it seems like the mouse movement is coarse, even with smoothing turned on.  I can peg someone across the map with the rail in Q3, but in Champions?  I'm lucky if I can hit someone down a hallway.  I feel like the only way I'm getting kills right now is going berserk as Doomguy.  I'm really wanting to like this game, but for some reason I just can't get any good at it, whereas in Q2 or Q3 I may be rusty but I can hold my own just fine. 

Definitely thinking about cross-platform here. AngelScript uses JIT, and has wide support for calling conventions on many platforms, all of which it wraps nicely into a black box.

It's unlikely that I'll have time/inclination to build and maintain project files. So while the sky might be the limit, I'm only building for Win x86 right now, with plans for x86/x64 Linux and Windows. I don't care enough about OSX to build for it to be quite honest, but an Android ARM option might show up assuming the Linux build isn't painful to get working.

Everything I'm using is standard c99/cpp and known to compile on many platforms without hidden OS dependencies. AngelScript supports x86, x64, MIPS, ARM, Xenon, and PPC out of the box. Other stuff I've added includes stl (C++14 level at most), freetype2 (making it required now), nlohmann JSON (header only), and my home-grown bits. I'm considering POCO and ICU for some features, but that's it for big frameworks. Certainly no boost.

And just one update: the hunk allocation strategy supplied in the ioquake3/id base blew up in my face yesterday. I'm roughly 50% of the way through moving to using a shared_ptr factory in place of malloc. Crazy? Yes. Wish me luck...

That's an impressive feat.  I'm definitely looking forward to seeing where you go with this.

I am curious over one thing.  If you've ditched the .qvm functionality, have you considered the implications for cross-platform compiling?  That was the main pro for the .qvm's is their portability and keeping the game source separate from the engine.

Ahoy! Just two days after my post I hit showstopper problems with the boundaries between AngelScript/C/C++.

I had to take a big step back to refactor tonnes of stuff. Just got the engine drawing again. Attached: progress continues.

1) All of Quake3 now compiles as C++, and exceptions handle engine teardown. I can now wantonly include libraries without fear of them silently degrading & destroying the application over time. This opens up a huge number of possibilities... but I wish I could get back the week of life this exercise stole from me .

2) AngelScript everywhere: way bigger scope than I expected to achieve. It's already fully replaced q3_ui, with the basics working (text, images, input, key handling, click/hover callbacks). For cgame/game, the EV_* event pumping loops are the main entry point for scripts.

Making everything compile properly was a hell of a departure, but a source release in December still seems feasible. With any luck, I'll be back on track with writing actual features by the start of the week. I've had placeholders to override gentity_t::think screaming at me for a couple weeks and this cleanup business is getting boring ...

Hope all's well! More as it happens.

On the bright side, Wolfenstein and Doom both seem to be doing quite well. I think that the powers that be may simply have a hard time seeing where Quake fits in. They have these two other franchises that bring a very strong singleplayer element. To them, Quake is about multiplayer and little else. I think that the original Quake 1 universe is super compelling, but it's obvious that Id didn't favor it, as we instead saw three different Strogg themed games (not that that's bad either!).

Really, they could do a LOT to explore the Quake universe even within the confines of a multiplayer title. Heck, if Champions does one thing right, it's that it drips with atmosphere. It strikes a great balance in presented the tone of Quake 1. If they wanted to really explore that, they could make the "rune challenges" their own mini levels, like they were in Doom 2016. Each character could have a set of several challenges that not only introduces you to their abilities, but also explores the boundaries of the franchise.

Someone posted on the thread that Bethesda is aware of the problem now and is working on fixing it.  That gives me some hope that at least someone's doing something right over there in realizing how serious this one is.

I hear what you're saying on Gen, and it's definitely heartening to me.  I would have loved it if Id decided to do their own version of a Generations-style game using Id Tech 6, though it might have shut us down or at least made Gen Arena kind of irrelevant.  Not that we have the biggest fan base anyway at this point, but still...

I may not really end up playing Champions seriously, but I just don't want to see a Quake title fail to the point of us losing any future Quake games.  We may not ever get a proper Quake 1 sequel, but If Champions bombs it guarantees we won't see that or anything else down the line.  It's definitely not fair to the Quake fans.  That's my biggest concern here.  With most of Id's old guard no longer there and with Bethesda having ownership there's no telling where their focus will be.  It reminds me of when Origin Systems sold to Electronic Arts.  Eventually Origin was shut down, and we lost Wing Commander, Ultima, and a bunch of other series.  I'm not looking for a repeat of that with Quake, Doom, and Wolfenstein.  It just can't be allowed to happen.  I don't want to see Id shuttered because some exec that knows nothing about games decides to make a business decision and completely screws the fans.

Wow.

Phoenix, I would love to see them take you up on your offer! Really though, I feel as if Generations is already what Champions should be. It has enough class diversity to make things interesting, without the "lulz random" effect of one-shot abilities and vastly disparate armor/health stacks. Champions is certainly nicer to look at, but it also feels somewhat cluttered at times because of it.

I'm curious how an issue like this even makes it past initial planning. It is my understanding that Quake Champions isn't using Id Tech at all. That's why we can have something like the new Doom run so flawlessly, while Quake hits roadblock after roadblock on seemingly mundane issues.

It's apparent that Quake isn't a priority for Bethesda in any way, shape, or form. If it were, it would have one of their best teams on it instead of hiring it out to some no-name developer like Saber. It would be using a proven internally developed engine instead of the junk code that they settled on.

Instead of seeing meaningful design and solid coding, we get a nickle-and-dime cosmetics shop. They're selling people hats in place of solid gameplay. It's a real shame too, because the potential for a legitimately fun game is there.