Wirehead Studios

Yes, I know it's been a while since anything has been posted about the updates.  We've been heavily involved in beta testing and bugfinding, and I've taken an aside to work on some map-based shooters that have been long overdue.  I've also been rather ill of late, age takes its toll on this old bird now and again, but rest assured the code IS progressing, just a bit more behind the scenes than in previous weeks.  What are involved in these shooters you might ask?  There's a preview on the Laced Neptune board, but let's just say everything short of melee weapons will be available in some form, along with a few nifty extras I've not yet implemented.  A complete shooter SDK will be released with 99c for mappers so that you can take advantage of these new toys to make some rather interesting tricks and traps.

What else will be forthcoming in 99c?  Well so far we have included dead-on accurate Slipgate weapons physics at long last, as well as Strogg weapon physics.  That means rocket explosions for you die-hard Quakeworld fans are based on the exact same math as in Quakeworld!  Doom's rocket and plasma velocities have been corrected to be dead-on to old-school as well, and a problem with the Strogg BFG lasers has been fixed.  There might be a few more weapons tweaks, but beyond that I'm not going to spoil much more at this point except to say that hopefully we'll have those lovely ammo boxes in place and working by release time.  The release is still "when it's done", and I won't set any speculative dates, but we're edging closer.

On the matter of the artwork:

As some of  you may have noticed, I was extremely productive a while back, and now basically.. not at all :] - no need to worry, I'm still alive. As soon as I'm done with my 3 programming-projects for school, I'll get back to the items.

I'm pretty sure the powerups won't make 99c, unless our flaming bird thinks otherwise, that is :]

cool just wanned to ask how far we where with 99c.

anyaway I also thought to make and idea forum where you could put in some ideas for gens menus.
(no more gametypes or bot items or anything ele )
more something like saying what you saw in other mods that was very handy.
(like uie player ,model menu)
or even other. [asking for pho for permission (you may close it whenever ya want)]



to Tab .
Ive been starting in ut skinning now and im progressing pretty well
gona release some models on the internet soon, can you give me some last advises.


and can sombody gimme the irc link to the wirehead channels

And 99c will kick ass i promise you that :)

Games keeper:  Go to http://www.wireheadstudios.net/ (http://www.wireheadstudios.net/) There you'll find Java IRC and if you have mIRC you'll find the adresses to WHS IRC servers.

News flash..... a bot survived multiple quad damage rocket hits fired by a slipgater. If I remember right, a slipgater firing a quad damage rocket would splatter another slipgater most of the time. The same way for Strogg-war marines. If another guy's rocket with quad didn't turn you into mush it would still kill you and send the body flying. You guys might want to increase the damage of all the weapons slightly for 99c. There are games with one shot kill modes and then there are games like digdug where badguys have to be pumped up with an airhose. I think the best would be a happy medium somewhere in between. Like I said before, all the weapons especially the bullet weapons, are a little wimpy. In quake 1 the mighty perforator nailgun could sometimes bust a shambler into giblets if you've got quad damage. The double barrel with quad could splatter a shambler every time. Another player at point blank range could be killed with the doublegun with one hit,,,,,,,,,,,without quad damage. Just a few examples there to think about.

Fear not, but Phear, for your concerns have already been addressed.  Slipgate's weapons physics were subjected to a massive recode to bring them nearly 100% in line with Quake.  The rockets do exactly the right amount of damage, and have the appropriate knockback.  This is no longer "hacked in".  Quake 3 uses a different falloff calculation for splash damage from Quake 1 and Quake 2.  We've adapted the same math from the old games to the rockets and grenades, and corrected all projectile velocities to be dead on to the originals.  This includes Doom's rocket, plasma, and BFG speed as well, although Doom's damage falloff has not at this point been modified.  Doom calculates differently from the Quake series, and will take a little work.  Hand grenades also now have the proper explosive punch from the original Quake 2.  Watch for those "bombagranites", they'll pop you into juicy bits a bit easier now.

The only explosive weapon for 99c that still has a fairly weaker radius calculation is the Earth Mortar, but don't by any means think it is a weak weapon.  The reason is has a less damaging radius blast is that the shell gets there so fast and it has a fairly fast refire.  The idea is to pummel something repeatedly with it, or lob shells into hard to reach places that another rocket launcher couldn't think about getting at.  That's the nature of the weapon, it has a LOT of advantages so the weaker radius balances it out.  Skilled Earther's either land their mortar shots dead-on, or use the blast to weaken an approaching foe and then use the gat(s) to finish the job.  Speaking of which... bullet weapons are quite viscious in Gen.  The smaller machineguns are not very powerful, but they never were in the original games.  Earth's Gat and dualgats, Strogg's Chaingun, and Doom's Heavy Chaingun are the ownage weapons when it comes to lead.  Doom's chaingun also has the unique ability to be VERY accurate if you feather the trigger.  With skill, and a good connect, you can take people out quicker than with a railgun that way, and even give a rail camper some serious grief.  That long refire on the rail means a clear window to pepper the guy repeatedly.  It's very intimidating to be on the other end of that, especially if you can't see where it's coming from.  The double shotties for Strogg and Doom are close range smack-o-laters that have no equal, although the Arena shotty is still a fearsome gun to contend with.  Doom's 12 gauge, often overlooked, is extremely damaging and effective at medium ranges and on flat open areas you can dominate with it.  I know this, because I've done it repeatedly.    From a lot of testing experience I can safely say that the bullet weapons are pretty much perfect.  I might double-check some of the spreads a bit to be safe, but I've no trouble mowing stuff down with hitscan, especially Dualgats.  I've wasted 3 bots in the same room spamming all sorts of explosive ordinance at me with those, and still had ammo to spare to take on one that respawned nearby a second later.  Slipgate's lead was never very powerful to begin with, but Slipgate is all about shaft, rockets, and pills.  99c does balance out Slipgate a bit by switching the railgun pickup back to the super nailgun instead of another rocket launcher, and the railgun ammo now gives 50 nails.  Nails are a bit more plentiful now, and the rocket boxes give you 5 rockets instead of 10, just like every other class except Arena.  Slipgate has to work a little harder to get that rocket ownage, but getting hit by one of those things will kill you very quickly.  You also won't find a Slipgater with a backpack full of 100 rockets every time you blink your eyes.

Now if you're on a modem, I can understand the bullet weapons being problematic.  I ran pretty much a 26.4 connect and averaged 400 ping for a LONG time before I got cable.  I'd routinely empty 300 bullets into thin air as a result, and maybe wing someone.  We did make bullet weapons more net friendly in 99b, so that helped tremendously over 99a.  There's not a whole lot I can advise there except practice at it, and if you're having serious trouble with one class, try another for a while.  Doom is very net friendly to high pingers, and Doom's rocket launcher is formidible.  Omega-X pings up there and I've seen him make shots like a pro with it recently, as if he had no lag.  I must say, he's been improving a bit.  A lot of it can be the map, or your opponent too.  Against a bot ping is fairly irrelevant, but the changes in the weapons in my opinion, and in the opinions of the usual die-hard Quake and Quake 2 players, are good changes and drastically help the "weak" feeling in the Q1 and Q2-ish explosives.  We'll keep working hard on 99c, and edging ever closer to 1.0 so hang in there, improvements are on the way!

most of the time i've been playing either by myself against bots or with my brother via a shoddy home ethernet lan network using a bnc cable. he doesn't like generations much because it has trouble on his computer and also he was the one that brought up the weapon wimpiness to me. he was slipgate class and unloaded his rocket tube into some bot while he had quad damage. the bot took a lot of beating to go down, and he also complained about the nailguns being garbage, very unlike the old quake ones. he said the nails come out slow meaning they have a very low velocity now and that they don't do the damage they used too. if you fixed all of this, is it on a patch for 99b somewhere, or will it not be available until 99c comes out???? i've looked at the files page on this site and their doesn't seem to be any new stuff. is there another download page i should know about???? i recently got my brother so pissed at everything quake3 that he deleted all of it. he blamed it on me putting a homespun bot called pimp in the arena too many times. pimp is a razor clone that can dance around like yoda on episode2 in the duel with count dooku. :ph34r:

dunno about the bot being able to take slipgate rocks that were quaded, which i know for a fact is bull, but some of these other issues have been or are being dealt with.

As I've said before, all 99c projectile velocities have been timed and matched to the original games, and Slipgate rocket damage calculations are correct in 99c.  There are no updates because we're still working on it.  You don't want us to release a buggy update just for expediency's sake, do you?

also the doom rockets ????

You people do read all posts in this topic from Phoenix, no?  Please read them before asking about stuff thats been posting quiet recently.

Phoenix posted this at the start of this topic

No, of course you shouldn't release junk just to be quick. That's what microsoft does deliberately so they can make expensive updates to fix the crap they just released. Hence every version of windows being full of bugs and expensive as hell too. Question: how did you guys put ladder support in Generations? I noticed in regular Quake3 you can get trapped in part of the Slimy Place remix because there's no ladder support. Also it might be that the bot that survived quad rockets had lots of armor. It probably didn't take good solid hits every time, but seriously in the old quake if you get a quad damage and point your rocket pipe just in front of your feet, usually you fly up as chunks of meat and a severed head. In quake2 I once fired a rocket meant for something else and it exploded next to my brother's cyborg character. It was quad enhanced, and the limp body was launched sideways like a rocket. Except that it was a gross example of friendly fire, it was a very funny site.

Ok, time for some eye-candy.  While the weapons themselves aren't new, I have been busy getting these models properly positioned for first-person view, and getting them "in-game".  Note that a hand model will be added to some of these weapons shortly.  Until we can get them properly on a screenshot page, here's the quick and dirty version :evil:

Streets of old Boston with the MP-40 in hand (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/mp40.jpg)
MP-40 blazing away with the standard Q3 muzzle flash (for now) (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/mp40_shoot.jpg)
Blaze prepares to storm the building... (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/mp40_2.jpg)
Last thing the first guy he runs into will ever see (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/mp40_3.jpg)
Let's barbecue a rug (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/napalm.jpg)
Blaze shows off the Napalm Launcher (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/napalm_2.jpg)
Third-person shot of the Mortar (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/mortar_2.jpg)
Great perch for lobbing explosives, and a nice gun to do it with (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/mortar_1.jpg)
Testing out the Mortar (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/mortartest.jpg)
Testing out the MP-40 (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/mp40test.jpg)
Third-person view of MP-40 during testing (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/pics/earth/mp40test2.jpg)

Damn nice pho! The shot of the flamer shooting down is great!

I have a lot better pics of the flame shooting down int 3rd person as well as better 3rd person shots of mortar.
;p

Then stop bragging, and hand them over!  We want good screenshots!  :D

Very nice Phoenix. What about Hunter's sorgskin boots? Are any of the Arena models going to make it into 99c? Riddler never commented on the bots I sent. I know they all use the id player models that came with Quake3 and don't have any new skins. I used old models and skins so nobody would have to download anything to use my bots. I used botstudio to make them so they're ai code isn't anything earthshaking either. Too bad I can't make them smarter. Too bad I can't make maps yet either. I always have high hopes and lofty ideas, but making them real is no small feat. :ph34r:

For the record, any player model and skin that's available in the retail Quake 3 game will be available for use in the upcoming Generations version .99c.  Thanks also for the reminder about the Id models, I need to write class definitions for those, although I'm not sure where we should put them.  Anyone know what the favorite game of each of the guys at Id is?  If so we can match the models accordingly.  Custom skins for a player model should drop in just fine as well, and hopefully we'll have some to include with the .99c release.  We would discourage trying to adapt custom models outside of the normal Q3 ones to work with Gen for the .99c build.  Although possible to do so, full third-party model support will be implemented later, and a full SDK will be forthcoming at that time on how to adapt an existing model to work with Gen, and how to build one to be fully compatible with the new model stances we have in mind.  Creating a model for Gen with the extra animation frames will NOT break compatibility with use of a model in normal Quake 3 Arena.  More on that later, I have other things to discuss for now.

GAMES KEEPER this one is especially for you.  You'll be happy to know that the Generations game filter has finally been fixed.  It wasn't hard, it was just a matter of having so many other things to do that I didn't get to it until now.  When you click the "Multiplayer" tab in .99c it will show ONLY Generations servers.  This should make finding servers much simpler, no third-party browsers required, although a bit of patience is since it takes some time to scan every server on the net.  I've tested it out, and all available Gen servers did show.  Of course, after you get the list  you can always add to your favorites with just a click, and they'll be right there for you the next time you log on. :)