oh, and cheers for the heads up sleep 

The upgrade is already finished. Everything went very smooth, surprisingly. 

"But all the 'pro' players are whining about it. "

NO!!! 

dm6 - almost broken in q3, now broken due to the new spawn system. It's basically impossible to come back against good players. I've never been great at this map, but even other players I was losing against told me so.
dm13 - camp fest, which just is no fun. i mean, a map more defensive than ztn? It basically feels like the guy who hides in the best spots wins. oh yeah, and in the areas where camping isn't > *, it's shaft aim only.
(i always mess the new maps up)
t7 - i did dominate another guy with experience on my first play just because of my superior aim. super lollercoaster simple. Just not necessary to go into anything more than the most simple mind games.
t9 - super huge and wrong scale, shitty teles, camp fest. As a mapper, I feel disgusted to even TRY playing this. And when I did, it totally sucked. 

thanks for the warning, seems everything is working! 

What would be things you could imagine being funded with amounts of say about $50 that would be of great use for many Quake people? Maybe some itches that annoy you for years but no-one ever fixed?

Think of bounties, some FOSS projects have things like that. 

I could imagine these:

Engine:
-Ogg Vorbis support for cd track emulation (and other uses)

Stuff:
-Quoth fdg/whatever, or has that been done now? How about QuArK support?
-QuArK port to Linux. Might be way out of the league.

Some articles? Research? 

Bounties would be a very interesting idea. I could see people doing stuff they wouldn't normally if there was some money involved. 

just ask Negke 

Dare I ask: What did Negke do for money? ;-) 

gargled an ogres balls in exchange for a shiny nickel. 

Just got around to playing Shambler's Castle, the 1 level "quake in doom3 engine" mod. I was a bit sceptic and obviously purists will easily find some things that don't feel "just right", but overall it was actually really fucking good and great fun. 

 

To "however long ago that came out and everyone loved it", Jago. 

first thing i did was replace all the 44khz weapon sounds with original 11khz stock quake sounds. 

well I'm doing a lecture/talk on Quake, as a less formal "cultural lecture" here (at this university, in front of a small academic audience) early next year, I'd take $50 for that (lol). I'll still be doing it either way though.
I'll convert the talk to an article and post it somewhere afterwards. It's tentatively called "The Lingering Legacy of id Software's Quake: A Glimpse Into Thirteen Years of Darkness." Various aspects of Quake, its inspirations, history, artistic style, level design stuff, legacy and etc will be touched on.

For the record I don't think academics should get paid public money to study videogames, I'm even a bit iffy about film. Those things culturally perpetrate themselves; I guess I'm a bit conservative on this one but I think part of the point of literary study is to preserve classic literature like Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, etc. 

That sounds very cool! Wish I could attend. 

so academics should only study dead art forms? 

though if something's in your exact same language (no language studies required) and not more than 50 years old, you're not really making an effort to put yourself in the mindset of another culture. I can see the benefit society gets out of historians and even about people who can explain cultural/literary history, etc, but I don't see the justice behind someone playing GTA3, writing up their opinion (laced with suitable jargon of course) and collecting public money. Academics is supposed to be difficult (if not boring). 

Okay, I guess i agree with that.

But, I think video games is a pretty interesting and rich art form, and I would like somebody to be thinking deeply about it. Game reviewers rarely do, game makers are often too busy making games to write about it, and even when a reviewer or developer writes something really good about games, it's hard to find because there is no organization trying to collect or catalog all of that writing.

So I guess i'm saying since academics shouldn't be doing it, could we at least have some faux-academics to meet all of these needs? 

im doing my senior project on quake and how it learns you computer stuff :O 

I agree that that should be done (lol, I'm doing it, though I'm doing it for free and for fun).
I guess what I'm saying is that the people who should be doing that are journalists, culture writers, and more thoughtful reviewers who want to publish something more extended based on their work and experience. These people are a lot more in touch with current culture than academics. 

Your title's too long. Something easier to digest would be better. "The Lingering Legacy of id Software's Quake" alone sounds good to me. 

 

Anyway... this is what i waste my time on for the last ages. (Project has a strong tcl dependancy - see installation notes). http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net