have never really got the "slot 1" weapon right IMO.

Enough said about Quake's axe. In Q2 we had that stupid peashooter, but I'd have prefered a blunt melee weapon - a broken-off length of concrete rebar for example - to bludgeon things to death with up close.

Doom 3 dropped the ball even further with the utterly pointless "fists" - why the hell not just give the player a wrench? Half the zombies are carrying one. Shooting slow zombies with a pistol was shit, I'd have much prefered to have just wandered up to them and bashed their skulls in with a bit of rusty metal. Ok, we eventually got the chainsaw, but at that point in the game I had so much shotgun ammo that I never had a reason to use it. 

Oh come on, the Q2 Chaingun was freaking great, hand grenades were cool, rocket launcher was different but well balanced, the Q2 GL was good...

Kinn:
Yeah the only good melee weapon in their games is the Doom chainsaw. I don't understand why they always make the melee weapon such crap, it wouldn't unbalance the game to have a powerful melee weapon. 

has a nice slot 1 weapon imho. it needs skill and can be effective in certain situations. 

"Doom 3 dropped the ball even further with the utterly pointless "fists" - why the hell not just give the player a wrench? Half the zombies are carrying one. Shooting slow zombies with a pistol was shit, I'd have much prefered to have just wandered up to them and bashed their skulls in with a bit of rusty metal. Ok, we eventually got the chainsaw, but at that point in the game I had so much shotgun ammo that I never had a reason to use it."

Because it was Doom. :) You had fists in Doom1 and Doom2 so it follows... 

Chaingun - too much flash, not enough bang, when compared to doom 1/2. The windup meant it could have done more damage or had a higher rate of fire, but it was normalised for some pussy reason.

Grenades - pretty good, but why are they still selectable when I have the GL? More importantly, why does my current weapon and item change to grenades when picking up new ones (from 0)?

Rocket Launcher just sounded and looked weak. Gameplay was alright.

I know these might sound like petty nit-picks but when its an FPS the first thing they should nail is the weapon loadout. The best weapon of the lot was definately the RG, a great evolution of the straight line weapon from Q1.

If you compare the standard q2 weapons with say, the Awakening set then there's no comparison. "What the hell were they thinking!?" was what a friend of mine said when we set up an Awakening LAN - talking about the original weapon loadout. 

I just don't see it. I hated Q2's clean/boring theme, even Q4 was more grisly/conventional id, but I really enjoyed the DM. Sure, Q3 topped it, but even now I am surprised by how enjoyable Q2DM is.

One thing which always strikes me as shitty is that they never really got monsters into Q3. Fighting monsters in Q3 would have been great. 

The guys who made the only SP mod for Quake3 - The Dark Conjunction.

It wasn't too bad, lots of bugs in the monsters and strange behaviours, but it was basically three of them in a cupboard for six months. I remeber the explanations of how they made the npc's work. They had to sit them on top of invisible trains so they could move (!) with pathfinding having to be made from scratch as well since it's based on item placement in the original.

Apparantly the end boss had a bug in the final build where if you didn't dodge it couldn't hit you, so they had to wake the programmer up after no sleep for a few days.

It's a pretty stylish tc, but the monsters are irritating.

Also, SidRial (other q3 tc) doesn't count because it only had traps.

They're the same guys working on this http://www.aceteam.cl/zenoclash/ but with a bigger team. 

While I respect the shitload of work they must have put both into that TC and to their current project, after checking out that site I have to say..

Holy Flinstones! 

Dark Conjunction is very :(((( 

they were rather nice in multiplayer because you could cook them and throw them so they would explode almost as soon as you let go, so you could catch people unawares and get them even if they dodged the grenade itself. 

But they did have monsters in q3. 

Does serve as a decent template for developing Single Player games and mods for the Q3A engine as the code is available for it, despite the aesthetic displeasure that game can give you.

The Dairyman site which is oriented towards single player game code is also worth checking out if you are into that sort of thing. 

is the best base for developing single player mods/games for the Q3A tech 

. 

Got em.

Did think this thread was never really concluded.

Reading back I see that I kind of derailed it by mentioning TDC. Stand by what I say though - it was the only mod to put singleplayer into Q3, doesn't matter how fucked alot of it was, there was an SP game there.

Here's a breakdown of what I've got atm;

Monsters:
I have z aware ogres, I tried it for the zombies but then lost the code doing a rollback, I mean to replace it. Didn't make a big difference but they played more real. Ogres made a big difference. They can hit you no matter where you are, but they don't lead there shots. Always thought it was strange that they have this complicated weapon but don't know what gravity is.

The Hk now uses all his animations for various attacks on the same theme - same as in Travail, courtesy of Patrick Martin's code.

Grunts use a slide, similar to the scrag but floorbound.

New Monsters:

Axegrunt - stole the idea from concentric, but they're now just grunts instead of knights with a different skin. Easy to kill and don't do much damage, but when placed well they're about as dangerous as normal grunts, discounting long range grunt sniping.

Berserk Ogre - No GL, two chainsaws, so does damage more consistently in his anims. I upped the damage a bit because the fat git is a bit slow to be dangerous. Really he needs to surprise the player or be in hordes. A bit of variation, really.

Player:
Chainsaw replaces axe, basically a copy of the Ogre version, but it gibs zombies after three hits.

That's it for code changes. I've toyed with various ideas but don't want to just vomit creativity onto a piece of white paper. When there's a need in the maps I might try some other stuff.

Having said that, some of these ideas came from things I always wanted Quake to do - is there anything anyone here always wanted to see in Quake? Nothing brand new, just behaviours that weren't believable or seemed stupid.

Fiends getting stuck I can't really help, but if anyone has any advice on that then cool. 

I hate z-aware ogres. Just like strafing grunts. I like them a bit stupid. With puppy-eyes and clumsyness. It's a huge part of the attractivity of Quake for me. 

was for running around te levels slicing away to se how far you could get otherwise known as a
"axerun"
but ofcourse you use the shotgun for secrets and explodeboxes ...and scrags ofcourse

and personally the ng is the only wep i usually use for the game
cool sound
cool model/animations
cool effects 

So it probably won't be liked then. Ah well, thanks for feedback in any case. 

Thought a bit.

Spirit,

fair enough, but I don't like being able to ignore ogres because they're too stupid to aim at me.

Then strafing grunts thing is something I might remove, I need to send out the betas for gameplay feedback. When they're done, that is.

meTch,

Sounds like you're talking about competition stuff there. That's fair enough, but I'm aiming for a more immersive sense of place than the original levels present in current FPS design.

Everyone's got their own style. In third party maps I like using the scrag groups to hurt each other before chucking a grenade into the cluster for some chunky gib rain. 

I hate z-aware ogres

it's crap the default behaviour can be exploited so easily, neutralizes completely their main strength.

The previous discussion about weapons I found quite interesting; at release time many were still playing with the keyboard only.

The question might be how to enhance them without turning Quake into Halo15 with crap like alt-fire etc.


Ijed: looking forward to your mod :) 

But next build maybe a month. 

the double chain saw Ogre :) The Ogre replacement I'm working on has talons set on the pinky. I would show the concept art, but its only rough and functional and only exist for alignment purposes in Blender. 

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/concept2_2.jpg 

Quite as creative as yours (all I did was c+p the chainsaw and 'animate' it) but he's working, anyhow;

http://shub-hub.com/index.cgi?action=uploadcomplete&serial=5bac275dfd77138ea59c78bbe5acfd38b82a99fc&numfiles=1&elapsedsecs=1&totalsize=31361&somefileswereblocked=&action=upload&f1name=ogreb.JPG&f1urlpath=%2fimages%2f&f1size=30524&

Are you think metal for the talons, Edie / Q2 style, or organic? 

Recall the alien weapons in System Shock 2 you could specialize in? The monsters in that game didn't really match the weapons in design temperament, but here I look at most of the monsters as extensions of weapon types.

Oh, and here is the Scag replacement :)

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/Naga.jpg