I just discovered Xfire.com is the popular thing with the gaming kids these days; 12 million users, about 150 thousand on right now!

Xfire is a instant messenger client aimed at gamers, that logs what games you play and how much and uses the info to rank the games, listed at xfire.com/games/ , it tells you what games your friends are playing and which server they're connected to. QW is inaccurately represented on the site, it's ranked #811 with only 9 hours of play! While quake 3 for example is #56 with 4798 hours of play. To get it to detect your playing you have to change 'glqwcl.exe' to 'ezquake-gl.exe' in xfire_games.ini file, and for some reason it only lists 25 servers worldwide.

I know many QWers wouldn't see the point in using the Xfire service, but imagine how it would benefit QW if every player's game-time was logged and put QW in the top ranks of Xfire.com for potentially 12+ million users to see!

You can disable all the extraneous features, there are plugins for Pidgin (linux/windows), Miranda IM, Trillian, or Adium (Mac OS X) so you may not even need to install the official xfire client, all that matters is that you have xfire running (running from OS start will be best) and make it detect and log your QW playing, in order to swell the rank of QW at http://www.xfire.com/games/.

Instructions I gave here were flawed, new ones at wiki.quakeworld.nu/How_to_get_Xfire_to_detect_QuakeWorld

Any ideas why there are no screenshots? Simply noone made any yet or they just don't support them for QuakeWorld? I tried to make a screenshot in QW, pressed scrolllock+s but nothing happened...

We should make them put ezquake-gl.exe as second executable in the xfire_games.ini by default - like Q3 has quake3.exe and that new custom challengeq3.exe, they have two sections in the ini file.

And the third problem is that Miranda plugin doesn't work for me, login always fails.

Can't find the xfire_games.ini file.
I have Vista 64bit, someone know where I can find it?
I tried to "search" but didn't find it.

Jimo: its in programData/xfire, but first you need to open folder options (in your control panel or in tools tab inside a folder), then go to view tab and tick "show all hidden folders and files" because programData is hidden by default

if i didnt explain very well: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial130.html

The answer is that QuakeWorld doesn't support something that's called "XFire In-Game" which is needed for screenshots to be made and accepted by the system. I'll try to find some more info on this, maybe it could get added to ezQuake relatively easily.

Thanks Time!

Jimo: np
foe: accept us in the clan ^_^

And when you all are visiting the xfire.com site.
Check my old Live For Speed screenshots http://www.xfire.com/screenshots/jimoh/

I think it's more advanced than that, because it actually knows what server you're connected to and stuff.

I'd guess it just monitors opened UDP connections

adding ezquake to report to xfire by default with a yes/no question in the installation would be incredibly good, if that's possible to include without violating the gpl. i guess it could be if it's just a plugin to xfire and not the xfire client

You still need to register and to do that you need to download their client. Not much stops you from using it from that point.

I've emailed the Xfire team suggesting them to update the default entries in the .ini file and offering help with proper support. With some values inserted (copied from Q3 section in the .ini) I was able to take screenshots and capture videos, but it looks like they don't allow videos and screenshots for QuakeWorld yet.

It's the truth. Most "gamers" out there play WoW. I always make these comparisons to traditional sports, but, really, think about real world: in the real world is everyone playing professional futbol or tennis or whatever? Pro players are a huge minority. Most people are playing street hoops or futbol between two garbage cans, etc, and you can think of WoW as futbol between two garbage cans if it makes you feel better

Couldn't someone just code a xfire client that we can run in the background and will show us as playing qw 24/7?

A job for big Zalon!

How long do you think it would take them to wise to it ?


I think of WoW as a mugwump; 'Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addictive fluid through their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. Addicts of Mugwamp fluid are known as Reptiles.'

Well done Johnny_cz.

Don't tarnish the mugwump name.

Mugwump was one of the top dogs in oldschool american qw

Heheh oh, I'm referring to the creatures that William S. Burroughs created in naked lunch

if you are on vista, your xfire_games.ini will be in C:\ProgramData\Xfire\ regardless where you installed xfire

Well it looks like only about 15 people have started logging their QW game-time, it's still vastly under-represented on Xfire, it's ranked 526 of about 1200 games, which is its highest rank to date!..

Come on people, just get Xfire and start logging your QW time. It only takes a few minutes to setup and you can feel good that you're helping to represent QW in public, to millions of people, 250 thousand online right at this moment.

Once you've spent 5 minutes setting it up you can forget about it, but who knows, maybe you'll even find it useful; being able to find which server people are on in a few clicks and join them immediately, without having to load quake first.

It looks like very few give a fuck about the misrepresentation of QW to potentially 12,080,179 million people (and rising). I beg any programmers reading this to take a look at these links, and determine if something along the lines of Zalon's (probably jk ) suggestion, to make a tiny program hardcoded to report qw game-time to the Xfire database, could be done easily: Description of the Xfire protocol, project on sourceforge.net description says: 'Libxfire is a project that creates a library in C++ to connect on the Xfire chat network. It can be used to create xfire clients.' And for a probably more up to date source, the popular Gfire plugin for Pidgin

None of those contains way to register, even the protocol description (!)
To register you need to download their client. Since there why wouldn't you use it.

The library is outdated (well maybe it still works, but it's c++ anyway, writing a boring C wrapper would be necessary), converting the pidgin plugin to work with anything else looks like way2much trouble, writing it all from scratch from the protocol specification is uh ..

And then there's screenshot and video capture functionality which I guess works only with the official client. And it's nice to use it. USE IT

Finally the div0 delay will be good for something!

Mm, it would be pretty impossible to get a good enough ranking that people started noticing it? :}

I'll still check it out tho.

I'll make this a sticky topic for a while, perhaps more random people will notice it then.

JohnNy_cz, You can register from http://www.xfire.com/register/ . Did you get a reply from the Xfire people you emailed regarding screen/video capture, updating detected exes?

NeFuRii, it's daily time.

Thanks Ake.

Oh, nice, I didn't know about that link.
Nope, no reply yet, but I guess when they get back to work after this winter holiday they will write back.

We need more people to join, to support QW on it's journey to beat WoW with its 514,821 play hours today. We're currently at 143 as peak.

Some ridicolously high numbers some games have... :}