Thursday, December 30, 1999

Official Q3A FAQ Update -- 8:44 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Official Quake III Arena FAQ has been updated with a solution for crashes when changing to a CTF level from a DM level or vice versa.

Why does the game sometimes crash if we callvote to another level while playing CTF?

In version 1.11 of Quake3 the game will crash if players try to run a CTF game on maps not designed for CTF. Do not perform a callvote requesting a map change to a non-CTF map without changing the game type first. Before changing maps always make sure you have the correct gametype set.

g_gametype 0 â€" Free For All
g_gametype 1 - Tournament
g_gametype 2 â€" Single Player
g_gametype 3 â€" Team Deathmatch
g_gametype 4 â€" Capture the Flag

This crash will be fixed in the first point release of the game.

Thanks loonyboi.

Stopping Q1 Cheating -- 4:15 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's John Carmack updated his .plan with reports of an existing QuakeWorld anti-cheat proxy that could also be used for newer versions of Q1/QW.

Several people have mentioned an existing anti-cheat QW proxy thatshould also be applicable to modified versions:

http://www.students.tut.fi/~zibbo/qizmo/.

Clan THP Page Up -- 12:21 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I finally got around to creating a page for our new Quake III Arena/Unreal Tournament clan called (cleverly enough) The Haus of Pain. Most of the members came over with me from my Shogo MAD, the Old Married Guys [RIP]. Basically we are a bunch of older folks (22 and up) who enjoy playing Q3A or UT in a l337 haX0r-free environment. We aren't good necessarily, but we do have fun.

Q3A Level Editing -- 10:18 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As I mentioned before, I've been trying my hand at Q3Radiant to see if I can make my own level for Quake III Arena. I managed to get the über-lame "two rooms and a hallway" map done. It's a start. Q3Radiant is not exactly user-friendly, but it does appear to be quite powerful.

I've been scouring the web for level design tutorials. Sadly most of them look like they've been written by people for whom English is a second language. The best ones I've found so far are on Quake3Mods.Net. Check them out if you plan on trying to design levels.

Q3A Help -- 10:09 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Various Quake III Arena help pages have been updated/improved today:

• Barry's World's Quake 3 Guide
• PlanetQ3's Quake 3 Arena Newbie Guide
• GameFAQ's unofficial Quake III Arena FAQ

Thanks to everybody for these links (I saw them on several sites).

Wednesday, December 29, 1999

Fun with a 28.8K Modem -- 7:34 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's John Carmack updated his .plan with some fixes and a bunch of good tips for folks trying to play Quake III Arena on the 'Net with a 28.8K modem. Here's a sampling:

I have been playing a lot of Q3 on a 28.8 modem for the last several days.

I finally found a case of the stuck-at-awaiting-gamestate problem that turned out to be a continuous case of a fragment of the gamestate getting dropped. I have changed the net code to space out the sending of the fragments based on rate.

Note that there have been a few different things that result in stuck at gamestate or stuck at snapshot problems. We have fixed a few of them, but there may well still be other things that we haven't found yet.

You can still have a fun game on a 28.8 modem . . . Make sure your modem rate is set correctly. If you have it set too high, large amounts of data can get buffered up and you can wind up with multiple seconds of screwed up delays.

Only play on servers with good pings. My connection gives me a couple dozen servers with mid 200 pings. 56k modems often see servers with sub 200 pings. If you ignore the ping and just look for your favorite map, you will probably have a crappy game.
. . .
I just implemented "sv_minPing" / "sv_maxPing" options so servers can restrict themselves to only low ping or high ping players. This is done based on the ping of the challenge response packet, rather than any in-game pings. There are a few issues with that -- a LPB may occasionally get into a HPB server if they happen to get a network hiccup at just the right time, and the number used as a gate will be closer to the number shown in the server list, rather than the number seen in gameplay. I would reccomend "sv_minPing 200" as a reasonable breakpoint.

Q3A Map Pack -- 6:08 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Quake3nation.de has a major map add-on for Quake III Arena, including a whopping 12 new maps in three tiers. The site is in German so you may want to wear lederhosen or use a Babelfish. You can download the maps here. It's a 21 megger, so pack a lunch.

Thanks Evil Avatar.

Update! These maps are not the original work of the author of the map pack. They are a "best of" collection from around the Net. I do not know if they received permission from the authors to do this. I caught this when I looked at a screenshot and recognized Tom Mustaine's map (story) in there.

Update #2: Here is a translation of the readme.txt file with a little help from a Babelfish:

Here is my newest level pack. In the pack are 11 new Deathmatch levels and 3 new CTF levels. Also, a few additional modifications were made e.g. new Crosshairs, new Lightning gun, new Razer Model :ID etc....

Installation: Simply unpack the contents of the zip file with Winzip into your Quake III Arena/baseq3 directory, and then start Quake3.

Take care! Fetze (RoNiN) E-Mail: AngelDustxxy@gmx.de

Official Q3A FAQ -- 3:49 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id has posted their official FAQ for Quake III Arena. Included is the bug that I spotted and found a work-around for (story):

When I try to play a team game with bots, they will not follow my directions

This is remedied by removing any characters that are not a letter or a number from your "player name". For example if your name is "~cooldude~", change it to "cooldude" and you should be able to control your bots. We are fixing this in an upcoming release.

Thanks Blue for the heads-up.

Q3A Shader Manual -- 3:47 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's Paul Jaquays updated his .plan with news about the Quake III Arena shader documentation.

The Quake III Arena Shader Manual is available for download.

Yes, Q3A map and model makers, here's the Christmas present that Santa's elves hadn't quite finished yet. It's in the format of an MS word document and has some graphics nested in it, so it's a little large.

ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/tools/Q3Ashader_manual.doc.

Kenneth and I are playing around with making a simple html version of it, but that may be a little while yet.

DE UT CTF Maps -- 12:48 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

How's that for abuse of acronyms? Anyway, now that I have Unreal Tourament, I finally got around to downloading the Digital Extreme's Capture-the-Flag maps. Both are very nice. CTF-Orbital is a classic CTF map with plenty of room for lots of players. CTF-HallOfGiants is a huge cavernous room with low gravity and cool tubes to propel you all over the level. Because everything is so big and so open, it really taxes your framerate. Later today, I'm going to fire up a slew of bots and see how they play. You can get CTF-Orbital from Digital Extremes or Unreal Universe. You can get CTF-HallOfGiants from Digital Extremes or Unreal Universe. Or you can get them both in one ZIP from Unreal Universe. Just unzip them into the UT Maps subdirectory.

Linux User Saves Hotmail -- 10:06 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've seen links to this all over the place. It seems there was an outage in Micro$oft's much-maligned Hotmail system over the Christmas holiday. Why? Because they forgot to pay Network Solutions for their domain name. Ummm. Yeah. Some enterprising young man (a Linux user, no less) wanted to get his email so he put the registration on his credit card to restore service. I would certainly hope that M$ would give him a little more than the $35 for keeping their sorry butts afloat. Check News.com for the story.

Memory Prices Dropping? -- 9:59 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ars Technica pointed me to this article on PC World. Memory manufacturer Kingston has cut its prices 20-50%. Hopefully this will start a pricing war that will bring memory prices back to something resembling reasonable. At least until someone coughs in Taiwan . . .

CliffyB .plan Update -- 9:45 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic's Cliff Bleszinski updated his .plan with his suggested settings for Unreal Tournament competition settings.

Past Two Days' News

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