Wirehead Studios

Since ID software is pretty much using Steam as their main market place now, will this mean that Generations Arena will have Steam support?

If so, how hard will it be to implement?

Generations is moving to a stand-alone executable based on the Quake III Arena 1.32 engine source.  I do not know if it will be compatible with any Steam-distributed versions of Quake III Arena as of yet.  I don't know how mod support for Steam-distributed Q3A is set up at present.  I think I'll worry about that after we get closer to release of 1.0.  Right now, if a Steam-distributed version of Q3A can run mods for Q3A then I would think .99f would run under it, provided hunkmegs can be set properly.  Anyone that's able to test that out please let me know what happens.

You can buy Quake 3 off of steam? OH GOD WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!?

Seriously, I can find a collection of the first three quakes (no expansions though) at friggin wal-mart...

The big question is will non-Steam versions of Q3 still be online-compatible?

I fail to see why they wouldn't be... but then I usually try not to concern myself with the doings of evil business people.

You can add any game to your Steam list already. I'm not sure how much more support you'd want, unless you're thinking along the lines of Generations phoning home anytime you want to play (annoying).

Phoenix, how does the team plan on making Generations stand-alone? I know that a lot of mods have gone that direction since the source code was released, but I was under the impression that Generations required the characters and such present in Quake 3. I don't know much about the released source doe, but I was under the impression that it was merely the engine and contained none of the actual game's content (art and such).

I said stand-alone executable, not stand-alone game.  By this I mean Quake3.exe will not be able to run the Generations.  Generations.exe will be required to run the generations, however, Generations cannot run without a retail Quake III Arena install.  This means it is still a Quake 3 mod, it just uses it's own executable.  This does two things.  First, the engine source (that is used to compile Quake3.exe or in our case Generations.exe) is governed under the GPL license and must be open source.  The game logic source for Generations is not derived from any GPL'd source and can remain governed by the Quake III Arena 1.32 point source license.  This allows me to keep the game logic closed source because Generations Arena must be used in conjunction with a retail install of Quake III Arena.  This way no licenses are violated but I don't have to make the game logic public, only the engine source.  If the licensing seems confusing don't worry about it.  My main concern with that is in keeping the game source closed so that it's harder for people to write cheats.

So as a breakdown here's what the different engines will be able to do:

Quake3.exe can:

Run Quake 3 Arena (obviously)
Run Quake 3 Arena compatible mods
Use Punkbuster

Quake3.exe cannot:

Run Generations 1.0 as a mod.

Generations.exe can:

Run Generations 1.0 (obviously)
Run Quake 3 Arena
Run Quake 3 Arena compatible mods

Generations.exe cannot:
Use Punkbuster

That's the plan anyway.  Now you're wondering... why am I even bothering with our own executable?  Several reasons.  Here's just a few:

1)  Particle system.  I can move it engine-side and reduce the overhead on the cgame module.  Running particles in cgame is very inefficient.
2)  Modified sound system.  I can do old-school style sound queing and attenuation controls that I cannot do with Quake3.exe as it is now.
3)  Added shader functionality.  I can (and already have) added extra shader functions for controlling some graphical effects.
4)  Bug fixes.  There are several problems with Quake 3 1.32 that really needed fixing, like not being able to keep a server up over 24 hours without it causing timer integer overflow problems with animmapped shaders and any other timer multiplied vars.
5)  Memory handling.  Instead of having to tell people "set your com_hunkmegs!" I have a forced minimum set in the engine.  Also, I've enforced a higher zonemegs to prevent z_malloc crashes on large maps.  Com_zonemegs is hard limited in Quake 3.  Even though it acts like a changable cvar it never unlatches (it would require reloading the executable to override the default value so it really never can unlatch!)
6)  Better dynamic light handling and possibly some other graphical improvements.

I don't want to break backward compatibility with other Quake 3 mods that run fine under Quake3.exe, but I needed to add functionality to the engine that was lacking.  If I have to break compatibility for something to work in Gen I will as a last resort, but no matter what else I do you will need to have Quake III Arena installed and patched to 1.32b or 1.32c.  That much will never change, and that's how I can use a stand-alone engine without the game itself being stand-alone.

The biggest "pro" I see with having Id games on Steam is the compatibility updates with Vista. I myself will stick with Windows XP Pro as long as possible, but inevitably the day will come when I will have to go to Vista Ultimate. Having the peace of mind that Q1 ( :slippy_love:) will still work on the latest version of my OS pleases me a lot. I've been very Nostalgic lately for the classics.

I posed that question to see whether or not I will need to keep a standalone version of Q3 on my machine as well as the Steam version. That's all. Wirehead, like many of the other Q3 modders seem to feel the same way as you do Pho. I have no issues either way.

At this time I don't know how the Steam version of Q3A works so I can't really say just yet.

Hopefully XP will be enough to hold us through the Vista-generation all the way to the next version of Windows.

Thanks for the explanation Phoenix! It would seem as though a lot of interesting possibilities will present themselves from such.

McDeth, you could always switch to Linux. You can get pretty much any Id game running under a mainstream distribution with little trouble. I'm not sure about MacOS. Personally though, I just switched over to XP last year. I was happily using 2000 Pro before. Of course, XP wasn't worth using when it first came out.

No problem.  I'm also glad to know I'm not the only holdout on XP.  I just switched to XP this year myself.  I'm not touching Vista for the same reason I held out on XP... reasons that in retrospect appear were well justified.

Funny you mention that, I was actually thinking about trying Linux out for a while. I duel booted my system with Ubuntu a while back because a friend of mine recommended it for data recovery and achieving. I even tried using a couple emulators to run Q3A (and to make this an "on topic" response, I'll add I tried running Steam and GenArena as well). As a gaming platform, I have to give it a low rating. I wasn't pleased with the driver issues I ran into with my ATI Radeon X1950 and how shitty the graphics looked with HDR on a few steam games.

Pho: I am planning on buying the "Id pack" on Steam in the near future. I will make sure to give you a full report on how they organize mods. You may not have to do anything if it's set up like the "non source" mods compatibility.

If you ever buy that pack, please check out the contents of the GCF of the id pack (Steam\Steamapps). Maybe it contains the original exe's of those games, meaning that you would be able to extract the files from the GCF and run them without Steam.

No, Linux isn't great overall for gaming, but I was under the impression that Quake3 runs somewhat natively. At least, without the need for an emulator. I had always used Mandrake before it went entirely commercial. Recently I've been tinkering with Kubuntu (never been a fan of Gnome) and Mepis to a larger extent. I don't know about the ATI drivers, but up until just a few versions ago I thought my nVidia ones were a dangerous pain to install. In all fairness though, the last ATI card I had was promptly returned and replaced with an nVidia one because the drivers were horrid in Windows and caused odd conlifcts with everything. I don't think that would be the problem, but I've been very weary of ATi drivers and hardware since. *shrugs*

I've run Quake 3 Arena and compiled it on Kubuntu as well.  As long as your drivers are in it works fine.  I've not used KB since Breezy though.  I need to set my other drive up yet.

I know this is a kind of old topic but I was checking out the prices on Steam... :!: generally they were higher than what you could find at Wal-Mart and other stores! What are they thinking?

Why would you want to buy Q3 again just to play it on Steam?.

Why can`t you just enter your serial number to register the game with Steam?.

hmmm, I haven't tried that yet. Don't think I will either. It plays fine without Steam. Has for years. I know I'm not gonna bother with it.

I think Id is offering it on Steam as a way to reach some of their newer audience.  Some people have never played Q3, and it's probably because they grew up after the old Quake games were popular.  I know Carmack has said he liked Q3 the best and wishes it still had as much of a following as it used to.  This is a way to allow for potentially new players, and if Id makes some money off it in the process, well that's their right isn't it?

As for those of us who have Q3 on CD, I agree - why bother with Steam if it works without it?  I rarely ever load Steam myself.  I prefer games to be portable, and I dislike "managed" anything as a rule.

Yeah... steam seems like it could be nice for chattin with other players/making clans/finding online games like ASE but seems to be little more than a program for buying/installing games, don't get me wrong it's better than buying one from some obscure site and given a 253 character number you need to redownload your game.

No need to play Q3 through Steam, since it works fine without it. Besides, I don't want to play Q3 at half the framerate. Let's face it: Steam is a resource-whore, a buggy program and it likes to update itself on a daily basis! However, it's a great distritution platform.

Because the registration tends to fail. I have a number of titles offered on steam that I purchased retail, none of said codes could be successfully registered.

UPDATE 11/29/07

I purchased the "ID" pack on steam due to the fact that during the move I misplaced a lot of my software (hint: it was stolen).

The file structure is the same except it is under a steam subdirectory. From what I understand, it probably won't be necessary to change any part of Generations Arena. The end user will have to make sure that they install it under the steam version if they have it.

That is all.

i havent had a proublem with steam since shortly after it launched. I think the attacks that steam is "buggy" are unfair these days though they were valid once. Steam is easily the best online game distribution method (legit anyway) i've used. Of course thats not saying much since most online game distribution methods donkey balls.

McDeth, what about using its own executable?  That's going to be my primary concern.  Right now .99f might work with Q3A because it's using Quake3.exe to run it.  1.0 will be using Generations.exe, which is based on the GPL Q3A source release.  That may complicate things a little.

That's interesting.

I took some screen shots of the file structure since I have no idea what you *need* exactly.

I know mods like "Garry's mod" were able to successfully implement their own executables into the Steam console without breaking a sweat albeit they were source based mods. I am going to assume the same should go for any Steam based application.

If worse comes to worse, I can lend you my steam login and you can download my copy of Q3 for testing purposes.