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JohnNy_cz

Age :39

Group: Member

Location: Czech Republic

Did spend a lot of time playing QW and developing ezQuake back in the day.

JohnNy_cz

Clients / 5 May 2013, 13:04

QW coding can give you fame, money and joy

It's true. It did all that for me. I got mentioned in lots of QuakeWorld movies and interviews, got lots of kudos from people in IRC chat and on QW servers, it was one of the biggest things on my CV that helped me finding my first full-time well paying programming job, and I enjoyed coding QW as much as I enjoyed playing QW.

And all that goodness can happen to you if you decide to do some QW coding too. It is a great thing to do when you study at a college and don't have the time to take a serious job.

The ezQuake project is now led by

dimman who is currently one the most active QW developers, so if you wonder about doing some QW-client development, he's the guy to talk to.

What does QW need?

ezQuake's goal in 2005-2010 era was to make QW easy to install, start, configure and play. Along with that there's been lots of modernization, such as QTV playback. Some of these goals still apply, some are more or less done, but I think there are new important goals in the air.

Firstly it is user accounting. I don't follow modern games too much, but the single pattern I notice about every successfull multiplayer game is "The User Account". The place, where a new player can see his or her progress, receive awards for completing tasks, where various statistics can be browsed, performances of the best players seen in numbers, where established players get the motivation to play more games - to improve their statistics even more, to be better than "that guy", to do match making.

Some of this can be seen at stats.quakeworld.nu, but I think it is still far from the ideal. Recently the Subsurface ladder has been revealed to public as a beta QW match making platform, a project with lots of potential in it.

"The User Account" would be a very nice project where many things need to be programmed from scratch, an opportunity to build a base for something bigger, an opportunity to use many modern and open technologies, such as REST, XML, JSON and what not, so that other developers can build on that with their projects too.

I know the QW scene has a lot of potential programmers, it always surprised me to find out about players who I've known for ages and who never seemed interested in QW hacking that they are actually programmers. There's lots of you out there.

Comments

2013-05-06, 05:20

wernerml

Great motivation JohnNy!
I've always been proud of all the effort of the QW community. Still moving on, with no money involved (like most of new games).

2013-05-06, 10:36

mushi

Thanks for sharing your experience. It's great to have your example on how you can invest your time doing something that you like AND that being useful to get a better job. That's really something ppl underestimate.

Another positive thing about your text is that you chose ONE priority as the next big thing in qw clients. This will help ppl focus on that goal, and reading your story, it may be the the trigger point for someone.

Hopefully someone will step and take control of this User Account project. IMO it's also important that someone with experience will take the role of Sofware Architect to help delivering a highly integrable piece of software.

2013-05-06, 11:19

carapace

Yes! User account integration between qw.nu and the game client would be wonderful! There�s tons of interesting stuff to be added and you can get lots of ideas from games like dota 2, quakelive, starcraft 2 and so on.

2013-05-07, 02:07

Willgurht

i agree it is what you call the user account which is needed if we want it to bee big for real. subsurface attempts to be that, but there are many miles left.

Ive got some great UI proposals from jisse and bps that should improve the look trem. once implemented.

In matter of days hifi managed to code the q2 support in subsurface.

the feedback from persons like mushi or ake vader is qualitywise on the level of an experienced tester in a sw dev company.

i almost believe the quake community is more skilled at sw dev on avarage, then playing qw

and btw, if any1 wanna join the quest for the holy grail, you are welcome to contribute to subsurface.

the current implementation uses mainly java-ee technologies and maven for build.

2013-05-07, 14:34

TheBeats

I say start a poll to find out how many exactly can code.... and what languages (might be tricky to filer how many people voted and the combined language skill count)

like: c++, c, js, php, sql (any form), asp, ruby, python, perl, lua, opengl, java, ...

2013-05-07, 14:42

Willgurht

i think counting languagues is a bit 2002..

i think the only metric that that is somewhat objective is points on stackoverflow.

2013-05-07, 14:49

JohnNy_cz

That'd be 0 for me...

Anyway, I don't want to influence too much what should be done next in QW-dev, mostly people contribute what THEY want to do, and not what somebody else told them to do. "The User Account" was meant mostly as an inspiration.

2013-05-07, 20:31

dirtbox

I can code HTML/1.0

2013-05-10, 15:27

mushi

OpenArena mod Aftershock has login.
they hav this homepage http://aftershock-fps.com/ where the user registers, and then in the client config you just set login and password and BAM, stats are on the site.

maybe something can be reused from this, as aftershock is on git: https://github.com/aftershock/aftershock

so the code is available.

edit: i've taken a look at the code, and the interesting files are:

code/server/sv_rankings.c
code/q3_ui/ui_login.c
code/q3_ui/ui_rankings.c

maybe someone can port this to our clients /servers easily?

2013-05-10, 22:28

#10

Ake Vader

By far the most interesting project right now has to be the ladder site, something which should be endorsed, tested and tried out by all the QuakeWorld players out there! It is as close to the holy grail as we get.

I'm puzzled by the fact that not more players have tried it out.

2013-05-17, 10:32

#11

dimman

Unfortunately I am and have been really busy right now IRL, so I'm probably the most inactive qw developer right now. Hopefully I'll get some time after the summer to get more active with coding.

The most talented coders in the QW-scene right now is without doubt Spike and bigfoot. Unfortunately they aren't as known in the QW scene due to their engines not being very widespread (yet) for QW.

More coders are needed, really really needed. Someone needs to fix/cleanup and maintain the server part of things. It's now just lying there rotting away.

Today you don't need to commit to anything just because you want to help out. It hasn't been easier to help out than now. Most stuff is on github, just fire away a Pull Request or just do it the regular way: send a patch, if you want to fix something.

You might have to motivate your changes, but seriously, is that a problem?

2013-07-21, 18:25

#12

sauroman

I think the User Account is only a marginally important thing for a new player and presents some implementation issues. It's my opinion that global stats and awards are distractions and not in line with the actual play experience. And they might seem very ancillary compared to some modern games that are more focused on stat grind. I'm not convinced this system would offer much to a new player.

I also think an Account could reduce the accessibility of QW a bit. I've just started playing this game with a friend, and part of the reason I chose not to try QL is because I didn't want to ask my friend to manage another set of credentials, and my old account seems to have been culled. QW provides some immediate content which is nice for introducing people. The game is relatively uncomplicated in many ways which gives it the chance to lurk in the background of social groups and clans.

Of course it wouldn't be necessary to set up an Account to start playing, but it's potentially one more barrier to community integration.

I'm a new player and had some difficulty articulating, so maybe I've made some irrelevant points. And I'll have to look into Subsurface