Since people are buying tft monitors... (like me) we need qw client which works fine with that kind of monitor... And i bet that almost all "new" players have a tft monitor... So as long as we have too old game for tft monitors we wont get any new gamers... or old players active.

Games like q3, q4, bf2, cod2 works fine with my monitor but qw just sucks too much.

Is there a technical reason for this? or is it because quake is so fast paced that its more noticeable than other games? hmm, q3 is fairly fast i spose... Also, if there is in fact a technical reason for qw + tft sucking, its important that any fixes created in the new client dont interfere with the mouse.. i have a hunch that the more you try and control the way frames are drawn, the more time it takes to do it thus adding to mouse latency (would be good if someone cluey could describe this stuff in more detail).

Yawn, all talk no action.

This topic will die like the rest.

/Grill on

My 25ms tft rox @ qw!

mixu: yep.

about the 'QW 2.0' thing:

If it were a commerical thing, ie. someone got some genuinely good ideas together for a sequel to quakeworld; the (superior) multiplayer component of quake1, got a talented team together and then went to some rich bastard for money with a sales pitch, then youd have (hopefully) talented, dedicated people getting PAID to do the insane amount of work required to make it. Then you have to deal with crappy commercialism. And theres the fact that a game with as steep a learning curve as quake just isnt commercially viable (especially while they've got everyone shooting dumbed down ai with poxy controllers via Xbox).

If there was ever going to be a Quakeworld 2.0, id want one that is still faithful to the original game in EVERY WAY that makes quakeworld the great game that it is, plus providing enhancements to both graphics (more advanced models, level mapping and texture mapping) and gameplay that dont end up changing it into something totally different. Both these things would become a controversial issue, especially with gameplay (tweaking of weaponry supported by some, others vehemently against the idea; if u now have curved surfaces, how should this effect player physics; etc, etc, fucking etc)... In the end, dem QW shoes are mighty big shoes to fill... and besides, i like qw shoes just fine...

...quakeworld shoes would be leet.

I have to say that I agree with mixu in this case.

And, you can do whatever you like, implement 24 bit, 262144 bit textures, .md68 models, q3 .bsp support and lots more, it won't attract the newbies. There is no way in hell to attract a noob without a will to learn this game, we don't have mind controlling software.

Really, the game is so specific that the only way to attract people to it is to remove all the div1 players and let loads of newbies in. The game is simply TOO hard for one, and you really have to WANT to improve to make any progress here.

So much said from my side

Diki: What are you talking about? I've been playing QW on like 3 different TFT LCD panels already (mid-end and low-end) without any problems. The only difference I noticed is slightly different look of the colours.

Seriously, it's something wrong with your settings or something. I used to think the same thing about the combination QW + TFT monitors but i've changed my mind. I use to play on a CRT in my apartment but this summer i'm living at my parents house where i'm borrowing a TFT (some shit from DELL, can't be that good etc) and it works just fine. I was really surprised when i first launched QW up to play some fun games on it thinking i would be crippled etc but it works really well. Of course a CRT is (probably) smoother, but TFT is really enough anyway.

I totally agree and in all the mainstream games it seems obvious to have something like this for the big tournaments. Imagine being able to spam a url on all the fucking sites in the world and then people can use the web browser and winamp to watch the final in the best game known to mankind!

Stream + (proper) Shoutcast = win

Regarding the idea of "Quakeworld 2.0",

It's actually something I've been thinking about before ever even reading this topic. In my experience, at least with my own circle of real life friends and family, people are shy to play the current Quakeworld with any client because of several relatively petty reasons:

1.) Some of the newer quake clients look good. But, they don't look like F.E.A.R. or Half-Life II or Prey or any of the newer games. The ones that do look good, like Darkplaces with everything cranked up, seem to implement very slow algorithms that run at 10 FPS on the wicked setups that my friends and I have, including a very expensive amd64 setup.

2.) I love the Quake retexturing project. I'm vastly thankful for all of the hard work that they've put into their project, and I'm always keeping up to date with them. But, I am reminded daily when my friends see me play Quake/Quakeworld that it's so bogglingly stupid to have one room full of very high-tec electronic equipment in a level, electrical lighting everywhere, advanced portals to take you from one place to another in an instant... and then realize that it's all built into an archaic sandstone-looking castle that's still using -torches-. The atmosphere of the original Quake textures and level designs is not appealing to anybody I know.

3.) I am told that the weapon selection is lame. It's not because it lacks weapons; rather, it's because nail guns aren't as cool and hip as machine guns. The shaft, I am told, looks so unbelievable (the models and behaviour of it) that it instantly detracts from the quality of the game.

4.) They tell me that Quake is too old for them. They liked it when we all owned DOS boxes, and even though some of us do still own era-approved Pentium Pro boxes, etc, nobody wants to play Quake on them. They want to play Rise of the Triad and Jazz Jackrabbit.

These are things that can easily be corrected with a new engine. I've been giving some serious thought to rewriting the old Quake code, since it's so confusing and obfuscated, in C++. It'd be a chore, and every time I seriously sit down to begin writing it, I end up working on my physics library or something else instead.

What would I like to see in a new version of Quakeworld? What do I think about when I consider what I'd like to correct from the original Quake source?

1.) Menus. I wrote a wicked menu GUI for another project of mine a long time ago that was very reminiscent of the Half-Life II UI. I'd like something like that for a new version of Quake. And even though we're talking about Quakeworld here, the console needs to be deprecated. With a proper UI, there should -very rarely- be a need to type something into a console.

2.) Gameplay. The gameplay needs to remain as it is. The physics need to remain as they are. If they are changed, it's no longer Quake/Quakeworld; it's something else.

3.) Graphics. It needs to look like the newer games that have been coming out. That, though, is a very complex thing to do. It involves altering the design of the stock levels, for starters, and it involves altering gameplay just a tad. When I saw how the portals in Prey worked, my first thought was, "Wouldn't Quake rock if you could actually peer into them and see what's going on in the other side?". Things like that would need to be serverside options - a server should decide how much they want the gameplay of the orginal game altered for the sake of graphical enhancement.

4.) Weapons. We need paralax-mapped holes that gape from the walls when they are hit by a close-quarters boomstick blast. A rocket needs to leave more than a black decal when it explodes. I haven't put much thought into changing the behaviour of the weapons overall, but I'd like to see them become more believable in general.

And, overall, the feel of the single player game needs to change. The levels need to all be redone - the monsters need botlike AI and need to be strategically placed. Torches and electronics need to be mutually exclusive - when was the last time you lit a lantern in order to see in your room before you sat down at the computer?

There's a lot of work that I'd like to see done, and I don't know if I really want to do any of it yet. I might be willing to help, but it'd be a major project that would require a tremendous amount effort on the parts of the large gathering of people involved.

wouldnt it be easier to just mod some modern game QW-like?

Quakeworld's strenght is the gameplay. I think the "target audience" has to be players who are already experienced in an other online FPS game. They can appreciate good gameplay and will have some skills so they won't get hopelessly beaten by the more experienced players.

I don't think improving the graphics will help much in bringing new players to the game. Newer games will always be ahead.

Installation and setup needs to be easier. I have clanmates who have played for years, but have trouble with their configs.

Also, it's a bit of a drag that you can't 100% legally distribute dmX maps. Any solution to this? The .map files have been released as freeware, right? But then you wont pass server mapcheck...

There are alot of very hardcore and dedicated players in QW. The only game I would or will ever play from here on in is qw. And being honest I am not good at the game but I still see it as being the best game out there and am hopelessly hooked on it.
Anyway so many of us are all interested in seeing this game here for years to come so why not set up a QuakeWorld fund/membership thingy. For example you pay money as an annual subscription to the QW Trust fund. Everyone throws in 10 Euro a year. You have a nice fancy site with the people who have contributed and who are helping promote the game.

There is at least 2000 players (probably more) around Europe at least. You would get a nice sum of money and use the money as a cash prize in a Lan event (QHlan) or something similiar. You advertise it as being the event of year and suddenly you get more attention and profile to the game as you have an event with a nice prize with all the top level players playing in the finals. It would definitely draw attention from people that QuakeWorld is very much stil alive and active.

I personally would pay 10 Euro to it each year even though I would probably not even enter. I have seen this work in other sports and events before. I think when you get people as passionate about a game or sport as we are about quake world, then I feel people would come on board with this. I think you then bring in a nice client, qw tv etc and you will bring in more players.
That make any sense to people?

wembley

Kalma,

The matter of making it easier to setup and configure QW properly is something that seems to get brought up alot... A total rehaul of the menuing systems in some of the newer QW clients could fix this pretty easily, though. A GUI to what-you-see-is-what-you-get configure your HUD, an intuitive interface to configure your graphics settings on a per-case basis, and even something to configure particle effects in engines that support them (I'd prefer WYSIWYG on a little billboard that updates with each change to show what it'll look like before you actually play the game, myself) would definately help.

I also recall reading somewhere (probably their website) that ezQuake has implemented a mechanism so that you no longer need to write boomstick scripts. Being able to toggle things like that on/off from a UI would make things easier, no?

Great changes begin with suggestions. What would your oldschool qw friends like to see changed in order to make their qw setup/configuration experiences delightful?

pleuraXeraphim,

Money is always good, and I don't disagree with your proposal... but, to me at least, QW is all about the fun. Being payed to win a tournament shouldn't be the driving factor that helps determine whether FPS Player A plays QW instead of UT200* or Q3A, etc...

Big yearly tournaments with cash prizes, etc., though? That's not a bad idea.

good to see we're talking about quakeworld 1.0 again ;p

Something that may take a bit of work, but would make life MUCH easier for noobs would be getting rid of cmdline variables altogether, ie. moving all the ezstart shit into the menus - most of which could be toggled on the fly, without a restart. it would be really cool to be able to change resolution, conwidth/conheight, etc, without the need to type shit in the .lnk properties ;/

Help popups for shit helps alot (like in ezstart)... i like the direction ezquake is taking with regard to menus, but still more needs to be done. I agree that an overhaul is needed. At the moment its just the same old menus with extra stuff tacked on... It needs a mouse driven gui (we already have that in FTE) with perhaps tabs at the top? This way you could have many options screens without too much clutter. you really could pack alot in there and still not overwhelm the newbie too much. i mean, what is there really thats all that important:

- gfx stuff. resolution is in here as well as conwidth/height (should really rename this to something more intuitive). could have extra tabs in here with categorised options (lighting, particle effect, etc). You could even make a section for addon gfx/sound/etc with like a gallery for viewing all the addon media in your collection - you just flick thru the list till u get that charset, hud face, whatever.. click apply.. viola!
- controls. can add tabs for teambinds, weapons script stuff, whatever!
- mouse stuff. sensitivity slider bar needs to be improved to give more control over it. toggle for dinput (FTE) etc. also wtf is with -noforcemparms -noforcemspd and -noforcemaccel? create toggles? scrap them in place of a standard?
- assorted other miscellanea. stuff thats important but im too tired to think of.

But thats the main shit right there... package it all neatly for noobs and it will help alot imo.

And the QWTV thing is the way to go, fo sho. As long as people can watch it fullscreen, at smooth fps, with everything clearly defined. Otherwise it may be hard to get the point across.

avx, maybe even an easier way to edit a HUD eh?
like build it in the client?
you just fill the folder with different face/ammo/armor-icons and the rest so the user can choose between them easily

avx, yeah remove the console, I bet that will help

*presses tilde*

DAMN THI GAME DOESNT HAVE A CONSOLE IT MUST ROCK *plays*

:E

goqsane,

I agree completely. There will always be a use for a console, and consoles are lovely things. I don't know where you got the impression that I ever wanted to remove functionality; rather, I think that nice GUI interfaces to simplify configuration of the insane amount of variables present in modern QW clients - a visible representation of the console variables - might be a valuable thing to consider. Underlying command-line interfaces will always be the shit.

http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1149583

that says it all really

avx
I agree with you too. I only play for fun but if there was just one Lan event or League each year with a nice cash prize
then it would bring back more players who desire money. Having one event a year with cash would definitely create a bit of talk and draw back in newbies. I guess thats human nature. For me I know I wouldnt be participating but I would be a fascinated spectator. At the back of it all the rest of us mere mortals will still continue to play for fun

I think a lot of you guys has the wrong approach about how to bring new blood into QW.

First of all, Quake is not a mainstream anymore, so do not wait it to become a new fever. QW has the biggest curve of learning ever, and most of the players hasn't the time or will to learn it. And since there are lot of easier games out there, our community will be always relegated to the hardcore players.

Second, people are not stupid, so do not try to convince them QW has better looking than Fair Cry, cause it's not. And we haven't the resources to make it look better and better and better... We are fans using our spare time to bring some improvements to our beloved game. We are not a company with loads of money. If you want to convince someone to play QW, ask yourself why you stay playing it, and use this arguments.

Third, I'm a QW player and I like to see some IMPROVEMENTS in the game, but it must remain the SAME GAME. If you want a NEW GAME, with new technologies, bla, bla, bla, it's ok! But it's not QW and I'm out!

And finally, yeah we desperately need a better menu for assigning keys. The actual one is depressive and remind an dinosaur! A menu like Half Life/CS is good enough.

I haven't stopped by to read things in a while and enjoyed reading this conversation.

A couple of reasons why Quake/Quakeworld will never be and can never be popular again:

1. You can't stop progress. New generations of games will always be coming out.
2. Old games aren't cool or hip with the 13-14 year old.
3. Due to #3, peer pressure will always cause most younger players to avoid playing something that isn't mainstream.
4. New games have marketing budgets -- big ones.
5. Old games can never be "news" -- this means they never get free promotion that a cutting edge game might get.

Now the above doesn't mean Quake isn't a better game than the newer games. It just means that success is a relative thing.

Be happy if you always have enough activity that you can play the type of game you want to play. Most games are not so lucky to have such a thing after 2 years, let alone 10.

I agree. But somewhere inside me, I always think that if we raise some money and get a major magazine to put out an issue dedicated to Quake 1 with lots of useful information, Quake 1 could go big again. Not huge, but maybe a lot more people will join. I think a lot of players are looking for fun, and the newer games don't offer much of it (see: doom3, q4). New games just don't have heart like they used to.

I think it could be 3 or 4 times as large. Maybe even 10 times as large.

But it would require something like the Quake Remodelling Project to be completed. Even fQuake isn't a total conversion and things would start to get very risky if anything high profile were done.

Some of the things that would be required to grow the community would be resisted by hardcore players. Some of the Doom communities have surprisingly large numbers of players, but Doom is a newbie friendly game a keyboarder can play and Doom has auto-aim (right?).

In Quake and Quakeworld, *bad* things happen to noobies and lower skill level players. It hurts the retention level.

Another example, the hardcore players love the absolutely graphically shittiest levels -- newbies aren't impressed with those box maps. You would have to have servers that simply DON'T have those maps available, for instance. And hardcore players would whine up a storm. So it would take some steely determination to make it happen.

Yeah, and I agree the newer games don't have heart and suck. Quake 3, probably the one decent Quake after the original, just never gave me any satisfaction. I could do the same things and I still didn't get any joy out of a frag, it seemed so void or whatever.

A definite goal is to grow things and improve things, from my personal point of view, an additional factor for me is that I enjoy doing what I try to do because I like to give back to the game what it gave me.

Say, what the hell are you doing up this late at night (5am ish) US time? heheh

I think we should promote QW through it's strenghts, and that is the great learning curve it has skill wise (not all 999999 console commands you need to get a nice setup, but the actual skills like bunnyjumping etc). What kind of players do we want to the community - singleplayers who likes pretty monsters, levels and explosions who will never even visit xs4all (thus are useless to us veteran players as cannonfodder ) or hardcore multiplayer zealots who begun their "career" with Q3/UT99 and haven't tried QW yet but would still be hardcore about it once they tried it out? If we want the second kind of players then i think that exposure (like streaming games, posting news on non-qw-only sites like esreality, telling your friend about big games etc) is the most important thing. Of course it helps if it's easy to get a proper setup to play with, but some decent default configs and #qwhelp etc should be enough for that, they're already used to this kind of stuff from their previous games.

I also agree with our brazilian friend Vegetous. If someone were to make this complete new "Quakeworld 2.0" game that's nothing like the original QW, then i'm probably out too.

Update
Forgot to mention that i also agree on the huge early tournament idea. Tournaments with something at stake is what makes spectators interested and later on they'll also try the game. I think we would get some players to return to the game anyway, players like Voo.

I can name countless qw remakes, all of which were hyped up to to no extent, then failed miserably.

let's see

tfc
fortress forever
fortress evolution
doom3f
etf
q4f
tf2 (probably)


those are all tf mods, but it is the same for dm. you cannot recreate quake.

hmm, it was probably 2am or something (i'm west coast us)

The biggest problem with QW right now is that it does not provide any eye candy (and to get new players you will need it).
And it is very hard to configure QW for a newbie.

Yes, Darkplaces (for example), the remodelling and retexturing projects make the game look better. But they are just fixing the symptoms: outdated sound, low-poly levels (and/or) low-poly models. In general just outdated look( and very sane feel )

To bring QW to the people, a new pak0.pak is needed. New menus (a matter of two-three hours for a photoshop/gimp freak), new sounds (any volunteers?), high-poly models with high-res textures and high-poly levels with high-res textures and "friendlier" lighting.
I don't mean reproducing a doom3, the quakeworld clients are capable of it anyways and it will just lead to an fps shock.

You can put 10240x10240 textures with bumpmaps and other things on the dm6. It will look like a 1996 dm6 with high-res textures - blocky and edgy

QW needs to replace id1/ and qw/ with content which can appeal new people. Hopefully there will be enough people who would participate at the project. Fortunately the gameplay is perfect

+1 participant

please, let's never touch the maps. It looks a lot better than the newer games' maps which focus more on eyecandy than on gameplay. if a few more people refuse to play the game becuase they can actually see their opponent in the map, then i think we're better off.