Wirehead Studios

Sorry, folks...but I have to say that it gets pretty lonely in a server with no one to play with. Ok...start the violin. Anywho, I have not been in these servers for over a year, but I come back to see not one, but TWO updates for the game, and I have no one to play with. I hope to see some of you folks out in the battlefield again soon.

Taco signing off...

That is true and it is dis-heartening to some degree but here's why it is dead right now:

Real Life: School is a prominant obligation to most on the boards. Me... between working about 30-40 hours weekly and studying with my 1-3 hours of daily assignments, I get barely enough time to get up take a shower, have some coffee and read the morning paper while stuffing 2 peices of half cooked toast down my throat hole as I am on my way to school or work. My relax time all week is Saturday night and Sunday. I am highly active in my church and am a youth leader in the youth program at Church. I will also be busy during the summer going out  to countries like Polond, Hungry, and maybe the Netherlands to serve in missionaries. I might even sweeze QCon into it. ;)

Those are my reasons anyway, I try to make it, but like you said no one plays.

I try to get on the euro if i'm not with the band, and last night i brought my 2 sons for a while. i think it must be just time of year.

it is hard to play as strogg.

Netherlands, eh?  Maybe you can help bring Tabby and Alucard into the fold while you're there.  ;)

Aye, I've been extremely busy as well, I know I'm going to be tied up next weekend for certain, and it's damned hard for me to play during the week at night lately.  I've also been very sick for the last few days.  I'm going on day 3 now, and it's a full blown upper respiratory infection.  I don't get these often, I'm extremely resistant to viruses, but every once in a while one comes along that knocks me flat on my keel.  I can't even so much as squawk right now, so thank God for whoever invented keyboards.  I did manage to get some action in on the Euro Gen game yesterday.  I wasn't any match for Tabun in my weakened state (still afraid of me when I'm Doom, Tabby? <3 ) but I managed to get a few frags in at least, and the game did pick up for a while until I got too fatigued to play.  Good games all around, and the diversion from feeling generally rotten was quite welcome.  Congrats to Tab for finally getting a new screen!  We've missed you on the servers, glad to have you back, even if it does mean I have to take 2nd place on the Euro server again. ;)

I checked for a US game about 9:15 PM and nobody was around.  I wasn't up for playing, but I was hoping we'd have a game at least.  Oh well, this seems to be the norm.  Servers die off for a while, then pick up with a vengeance again.  Seems cyclic, and directly related to "how f'ing busy" everyone gets this time of year particularly.

I can bring myself into any worthwhile 'fold' by myself, thank you very much. ;]

I'm glad to be back in action (more or less), too! It's been so long that it all feels new again, I'm going to be bunnyhopping into the lava/slime for a while, I think :] Good fun. Too bad you caught  something bad again, I hope it's not that bird-flu thing that's got people worried around the world, now..
And yes, I'm always 'afraid' of Doom - no matter who's playing it. One lucky ssg shot and gone is tanked up Tab! :]

I think everyone is afraid of DooM. In fact, it's the only class that scares anyone with any weapon, even Doomers are afraid of other Doomers. oh and I' m glad you fixed that problem you had with your monitor. I'll see you in the servers. :evil:

Sweet, I just need to find my Quake 3 so I can install it.  I formated my computer after I put in my first batch of parts. And who knows, I might see Tab down there. :] That is if it goes through, that's why i said maybe. ;]

Personally, I am still waiting for the beta stages to end.  I said this back in January of 2004 and my opinions haven't changed a bit.  I'm not going to get into Generations until it has a solid build and doesn't have those funny little errors that beta versions have (such as the weapon animations not being complete).  As soon as the big  "one point O? comes out, I'm gonna start my engines and play myself some Generations, and I reckon I won't get tired of it for a very long time after that.  Until then, I will just continue to be silent and watch from afar.  It would be a shame if it never comes out...  But I have confidence in this team that it will come out eventually, otherwise I wouldn't be checking the site and forums anymore.

 I live there  :D

I'm still around as well, but my work schedule and my school schedule limit me to the early hours of the morning now.  I'll try to pop in on a game this Wednesday if I can.  Generations Arena is pretty much the only game/mod that I play online with any degree of frequency.  :)

Both perspectives are correct in a sense.  We are what is called a "public beta".  That is, not "gold", but not purely a "closed beta" either.  In a closed beta, development occurs inside the team only (That's what's going on behind the scenes right now and between public beta releases, at a slower than normal pace at the moment).  The public releases (.99d, .99e, .99f, etc) allow us to get feedback from the public regarding gameplay, bug reports, etc.  It also allows the public to test drive the mod and participate, although in a somewhat limited role, in the development process.  We release milestone public betas when we think we have enough significant changes and a stable enough build to warrant a public test drive.

Lightning Hunter:  I wouldn't call lack of animations an "error" so much as being incomplete.  Don't worry though, we already have two class's weapons animated behind the scenes and I'm working on some "required stuff" that has to be done prior to animating the other two.  Check my .plan out for more info. ;)

Folks, I appreciate no one lashing out at me for not simply thinking about the possible circumstances with everyone else. I totally understand, too about responsibilities, but I have yet to not procrastinate on my college studies. I like gaming, therefore I procrastinate. It is something I need to pray about more and more.

For Llittle Washu, that is wonderful that you are active in the church. Just as a word of encouragement, keep putting the Lord and the church before this game, as should I. If you would, please pray for me, too. The other saints and I here in Nashville shall pray for the Lord's increase in those nations. Grace be with your spirit.

Farewell for now.

As it should be.  :thumb:

Maybe it isn't technically an error (such as an error in the code), but it is a visible bug in my opinion.  If you look at mapping for example, I feel that a texture misalignment is a bug, even if it doesn't break a law in the code.  In most cases, the map author even knows about the texture alignment problems.  I still consider them errors in the map. :)

I've always been meticulous about what is released, even in my own projects.  Some of the projects had team members who wanted to push the release even though things were messy and not complete.  I ended up having to complete all those things myself because everyone else was too lazy.  I hate having the public play something that isn't complete, because then they sometimes won't play the final version due to the previous release being messy.

Don't get me wrong, I think you guys learned a lot from the fans by releasing these public beta versions.  However, I feel that many people are taking these releases too seriously- as if they are complete and any release afterwards is only a patch.  These weekly games for example make me feel as if this project is done when I know it is not.

Oh, and I have already been keeping up with your .plan btw.  ;)

Thank you for the words of encouragement I appreciate it very much! :] So I may see Kingu as well... Oh the possibilies... :D

A bug is like an error or a problem that was not intentional, not known, or a technical problem in  code, a model or texture. This whole thing with no animations is a known thing, and not a "bug".
I am exited about the point O so to speak. I know there are alot of bugs to clean out with the new animation code and net code. I thought about asking if I could be a beta tester, but I guess you might have enough seeing that development is slow and all.

Ha ! Ya know, I knew I was forgetting one of my forums, and this was the one. I feel so horrible now, *snickers.* I, myself, have been extremely busy myself. I've been working 2 jobs along w/ going to school full time for 8 months. I've also been out of the country twice and had to attend QuakeCon. However, I just dropped one of my jobs in hopes that I can get everything organized before I move out to Seattle in 2 months. Progress has been slow thus far, haha, figures. I did however get a vid card from a friend in Canada while I was there. A gf4 ultra (which is far better than my current gf2 mx), and I've been hoping to play some gen to test it out. But, alas, I'm busy and everybody else is busy. Tis the way of life I spose.

And pho, I hope you get to feeling better soon. *huggles* :)

haha, I guess I personally don't see any difference.  If I release something knowing that I have a bug in it, does it seize being a bug?  If I have a hundred things wrong with something that I release, none of them are bugs because I know about them?  What if Generations was released right now as version 1.0 and the animations weren't fixed, and the team decides they were too lazy to do them after all.  I can't imagine people downloading it and saying, "oh, the lack of animations aren't errors because the team knows about it, therefore we shouldn't be bothered by it". ;)

I guess It REALLY doesn't matter. :)  We all agree that these things need to be completed, whether they are "bugs", "errors", or just "incomplete". ;)

Examples:
Bug - A rocket deals the damage when it hits an enemy but doesn't spawn an explosion sprite/model.
Error - Someone picks Doom, kills Visor. Visor drops Shotgun, Doom picks it up. Game crashes saying "Bad item index 21 on entity"
Incomplete - Fist model, icon, sounds ect are all included in the installation, but you cannot select it in any shape or form as it isn't coded in yet (same logic with weapon animations).

Quake 3 by default doesn't have "true" weapon animation. It has to be coded in.
Q3 animates weapons through the *_hand.md3
It isn't a "true" animation due to it just moving/rotating the model.
The alternating barrels on the Slipgate Nailgun isn't possible on the default Q3 code.
Reason for them not having animations yet is what they need isn't possible yet. You can't have a grenade get twisted (Strogg) with just a *_hand.md3.

"What if Generations was released right now as version 1.0 and the animations weren't fixed, and the team decides they were too lazy to do them after all. I can't imagine people downloading it and saying, "oh, the lack of animations aren't errors because the team knows about it, therefore we shouldn't be bothered by it". "
That actually wouldn't be a bug, if it was a planned feature.

If I decided to make my mod not have any first person weapon models, does that make it a bug? Nope, because I planned to do that.
If I planned to have no first person weapon models and every weapon except the Shotgun had no weapon model, there's a bug. Shotgun shouldn't have it.

Bugs that are in my mod:
"Tracer" weapons don't spawn any blood on the "death hit" (shot that kills them). So I can shoot enemies and they bleed, but if the shot kills them, no blood is spawned.
Shells float if they land on a mover.
Dead bodies will only bounce on jumppads if the client hasn't respawned yet (so their corpse will continue bouncing on the jumppad forever if they dont respawn, but the moment they respawn, it stops bouncing).

Errors:
None anymore we had TONS of "bad item index" errors though.

Incomplete:
Weapon animations (we have a weapon which works the same way as the Slipgate Nailgun animation wise, alternating barrels). Currently it will fire from both barrels, just the barrels are stationary.
Chaingun doesn't have a spinup/down. Currently it just fires instantly. Not a bug as it IS planned just isn't availible yet.
Our own weapon models, having the Q3 plasmagun fire chaingun bullets just doesn't work lol

Anyone who downloads your mod and has no clue what you have intentionally left in and out will assume your example above is a bug.  You have to see this from a fans point of view and not a creator.  This is what I do with my own projects; otherwise, you will miss an awful lot of things that the fans will complain about.


I knew all this already.  I have been following Generations for several years you know.  ;)

Like I said above, a fan that has no idea what you intentionally left in and out of the mod WILL think it's a bug, unless you intended the mod to not have any weapons as part of the game play (ie. a single player adventure in which you use no weapons).

I wasn't going to speak on this subject anymore, but heh.  Whatever. :P

Thank you, l4mbs.  Right now I feel so rotten I wish it were time to set myself on fire so I could be done with it.

I can help explain a few of these since I've run into some similar things.
This is a result of how Q3 does shotgun code.  Q3 machinegun doesn't have this problem, but shotties do.  Why?  CG_ClipMoveToEntities can't clip against a corpse.  The reason is when trap_linkentity is run on the server after a player is killed it clears entityState.solid.  Machinegun code sends the blood impact with the bullet trace, and traces BEFORE player_die so it always traces correctly.  Since the shotgun sends a seeded random and does all the client tracing locally the entity is already removed from the client's solid list by the time the event reaches the client.  This will always be the case, even though the event is sent in the same snapshot as the player death because client entities are always processed first.  I tried hacking CG_ClipMoveToEntities to make players solid even when dead, but so far it's only worked on a local server.  I just decided it was easier and didn't eat up any real bandwidth to just fake it by sending blood impacts from the server's impact points (post .99f, so don't look for it in Gen yet) and told the shotgun code on the client to not draw blood impacts at all, only wall impacts.  It means you'll see a few extra wall impacts behind a player who just died, but hey, at least you can see you hit the guy. :)

That's because Q3's mover code sucks.  Grenades do the same thing.  Don't even get me started on func_rotating..  I had to rewrite a lot of it for Gen so that movers could work properly with projectiles, dropped items, corpses, etc.

That's because when the player respawns a "fake player" called a "bodycue" is put in its place.  As long as the player hasn't respawned the corpse is the player.  Once the player respawns it runs copytobodycue and creates the copy of the player.  It's not a perfect carry over, some stuff is still shared between the corpse and respawned player (like clientinfo_t stuff) and some stuff isn't.  The "bouncing body" is a result of something not getting cleared on the server so the bouncepad is treating the dead, unrespawned player the same as if it were a live one.  You'll have to decide if you want all corpses to bounce, or no corpses to bounce to fix that one.  Shouldn't take much to tell a jump pad to ignore corpses.

Yes, the weapon animation system is a "from the ground up" venture.  There's more than one way to do it for sure.  I won't say any one way is the "right" way.  Depends on how complex your animations are, how complex the weapon behaviors are, and how "in sync with the server" you want your prediction to be.  Our current animations in .99f are just hacks.   The real animation system is what nobody outside the team has seen yet.[/color]

Hate double posting, but I had to get an :rtfm: in for that one.  Usually we put a "coming soon" or a "not done yet" or "known issues" section in the user's manual and/or readme files.  We always encourage people to read the manual.  The manual is your friend.  Whoever reads our manual is our friend too.  :thumb:

I myself love manuals! ;)  Unfortunately, most of the people who download mods don't read manuals though.  They would rather take one look at the incomplete stuff and use their delete key correspondingly.

This thread has gone off topic with this anyway...  If you guys would rather call it incomplete than buggy, then fine with me.  It doesn't change my opinion about anything one way or the other, and I still won't treat the current beta releases as finished.  Yes, I know I am very picky.  :o

Thanks for the pointers there Phoenix.
LoRE has been working with the shotgun code for quite awhile now and the best he achieved was extra blood being spawned.
It worked but was odd, the death shot spawned the blood he coded in, but "normal" hits spawned the blood he coded in AND the blood it was suppost to spawn, so needless to say the best fix we had was a FPS killer lol. I will have to forward your message to him.

About the Bouncing body, we want corpses to bounce on jumppads. The glitch is what I said, it stops after they respawn (as it is no longer a client). We have dead bodies take teleporters too (again, they won't if they respawn).
Currently we are tying to get all items to take teleporters and jumppads. We did have all projectiles take jumppads but it got too weird seeing a rocket hit get fired at a jumppad from above, then it suddenly does a 180 degree turn instantly and goes back up. So we just made Grenades take them.
All weapon projectiles go through teleporters (minus BFG as our projectile is too massive to fit through most teles).
We are wanting dropped weapons, shells, gibs to all take jumppads and teleporters.

Well projectiles would be easy to teleport.  Just treat them like a player in  the teleporter code, or check for clipping into a teleporter in the projectile movement code.

Gibs in Q3 are pretty much a client-side effect.  When someone gibs, they are changed from ET_PLAYER to ET_INVISIBLE, and an event - EV_GIB_PLAYER - is sent to the client with an origin point.  It spawns the "meatspray" at that spot, and that's the end of it.

Here's what I modified on the client when I was attempting the "get the blood to show on the shotguns".  If you can use it and make something work out of it, be my guest.  Like I said it worked on a local game, but not at all with lag.  I might tinker with it again sometime, might just be something stupid I missed.

File is here. (http://www.planetquake.com/wirehead/phoenix/misc/shotgun_code.txt)

There are two logical places to look regarding interactions.  Since we're dealing with teleporters and projectiles, that narrows it down to:

1)  The code that a teleporter uses to, well, teleport things and
2)  The code that makes missiles fly through the air and do missile-related things like, well, blowing up.

Well we know teleporters affect players.  What exactly are players?  Players, to the code, are entities, just like missiles are.  So what we need to do is look at the teleporter code and see how it tells one entity apart from another.  Low and behold, doing a simple text search for the word "teleporter" in the "game" folder yields a file called g_trigger.c.  Sounds promising, let's search the file, and what do we have here?


Well there you have it.  It ignores anything that's not a client (if ent->client is null, like in the case of a missile, it ignores it), anything that's dead, and does a check to see if it should only teleport spectators (so spectators can go through doors).  If all the conditions are met it examines the teleporter's target then runs "TeleportPlayer".  Well, if you want it to teleport a MISSILE you need to do the following:

1)  Code a function called TeleportMissile that basically does for missiles what TeleportPlayer does for players
2)  Check other->s.eType against ET_MISSILE.  If true, then run your "TeleportMissile" function.  Make sure you do this check BEFORE you check against ent->client or it will return without reaching your missile check.

Any questions?[/color]  ;)

At least we now know there we all are.......... :thumb:
I'm under the red spot.

No, you would have to download the game source code and code it in. Won't include Generations stuff though (as that is obviously not included in the source code)

Aye, and you'd have to set up to compile it, and you better know something about "C" or be prepared to learn it the hard way (like I had to).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Quake 3 Arena's game source does not require Visual Studio to compile it.  It comes with batch files for compiling the .qvm's, and a version of a freeware compiler (LCC) so you only need the source code and a little setup work, at least, on Windows-based systems.  For the record, I do most of my coding in Wordpad.

Now keep in mind this is the Q3A 1.32 GAME SOURCE, not the ENGINE SOURCE.  That's a totally different source and DOES require Visual Studio .net or better to compile.

I actually registered on this forum to ask this question, This is a great mod with great potential. I think a little 5 vs 5 CTF would be awesome, even just for a few minutes. It would be great if we can liven up some of the servers a bit.