Zwiffle:
Just to shed a bit more light, necros and I have narrowed down the specifics of the comp and have most of the content completed. We've penciled in January 15th for the start date, which leaves a week to cool off after SM40 has finished.

This should be an interesting event because of the new stuff and the general theme. The rules are more generous than for either the Winter Pack or SM40, partly because we want to allow mappers some room to get to grips with the new stuff, but it will have restrictions. So if it looks like many of you wouldn't be able to contribute because of other commitments over the next couple of months, speak now so we don't end up playing to an empty theater.

metl:
the only features that are 'in demand' for FitzQuake afaik are -
fix the skybox bug
bumped edicts
model interpolation

iirc, you said you'd implemented the skyfix already. This hasn't been an important feature before because mappers are only beginning to use skyboxes for Q1. I'm obviously biased here cos I want to see/use my own skies, but the framrate benefit of skyboxes over scrolling clouds should also be noted here.

The increasing of limits seems to be a bewilderingly contentious issue. I don't have any intention of making highly populated maps, though I would like to play Kinn's forthcoming epic in FQ rather than any other engine.
Unless increasing these engine limits has a significant impact on other features, I honestly don't know what all the fuss is about. Coders confuse me.

Model interpolation is nice and there will be - ahem - lots of new reasons to want it. But it is ultimately eyecandy, so I'm easy. 

thanks for the comments. I think you're right that those are the only remaining much-requested features, but there were actually a number of others that used to get asked about, such as fog and skyboxes and colored light (and some of the major glquake problems, too.)

Anyway, I have a version that has been very close to completion since last summer, but i've been having a really hard time fitting fitzquake in my schedule since then. I hope to get it out soon just becuase I hate having a bunch of new features and fixes coded but nobody being able to enjoy them.

P.S. skybox fix and edicts bump are already in it, but model interpolation will not make it (this time.) 

Sounds great.

i've been having a really hard time fitting fitzquake in my schedule

And by schedule you mean "John Fitzgibbons is now the soul property of EA Games"
Do you think they called it 'crunch' time in reference to the sound one's social life makes as it dies?

I hate having a bunch of new features and fixes coded but nobody being able to enjoy them

We hate that too ;)

skybox fix and edicts bump are already in it, but model interpolation will not make it (this time.)

I can live with that :)
Your efforts, as always, are much appreciated. 

Metl, your engine is already by far the best custom engine around; I was using it to test a fast-vised version of Marcher, and could not believe how smoothly it rendered the main outdoors area. It felt like I was playing a full-vised version - it's *that* efficient :D

I, for one, don't give a hoot about model interpolation, but I welcome the edicts bump and the skybox fix :)

Actually, the big problem with running my new map in FitzQuake, isn't the edicts (#edicts actually never rises above 500 thanks to my efficient monster spawnage techniques ;). Rather, it's the usual packet overflow/disappearing models (only a problem in the final PainKiller-esque battles), and sound capacity also seems unchanged from standard Quake (many of my ambients get lost) I appreciate that changing these may affect the network protocol; I don't really know if there's an easy solution for this. It would be nice to have two versions of FQ - one for multiplayer, and one for single player (with high capacity), but maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here ;) 

boo!

I gues I can wait some more. 

If you haven't full vis your map then that could be the reason that models and sounds don't show up! 

Hehe, yes - in fact at the moment, the entire map is just one big packet overflow in FitzQuake, because it's only fast-vised. But thanks to Technology(tm)!, I can take this into account when I estimate what the packet overflow situation will be like in the full-vised map (cordon bounds are a mapper's friend!)

I guess at the end of the day I'm the only one to blame for wanting horde combat, but there are quite a few mappers who are now going down this route (necros and tronyn spring to mind). 

I think Marvin Gaye sang that. 

Er, thought you might want to see this:

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=69379#69379 

are there incompatabilaties between the Phoenix method of interpolation and the FitzQuake renderer?

http://www.planetquake.com/qer/tutorial4.html 

Do you think they called it 'crunch' time in reference to the sound one's social life makes as it dies?

That made me laugh surprisingly loudly. Cheers. 

thanks for pointing it out :D

actually, I'm suprised I was the first to use the trefoil knot as a map layout, it really is the perfect definition of level flow... but kinda saddens me that the larger level I had based on the design that I'm too lazy to finish will now feel less original. :( 

You won't need to worry about it, now will you?

Lazy. 

reminded me of this: http://www.bathsheba.com/ I'd like to see a map based on some of those sculptures ;) 

snagged that 6555 like a champ ~ though I forget what the significance of that number may be in hocus pocus terms 

Number of hookers your father had to fuck to get you. 

I've always been curious how Quake 1 plays 11khz wavs just fine, but if played in an audio editor or app, the quality is obviously degraded. I know why it's degraded, but I don't know how Q1 "does it". Anyone know? 

in Fayette-Nam at the time, he probably did them all. 

Some of the .WAV files inside Quake are actually recorded as 22 Khz. The engine automatically resamples all of them to 11 Khz. 

But I'm still curious how 11 Khz sounds good in-game as opposed to not in-game. 

 

crate icon closest we have to a heart 

This is one of the funniest things I have ever read:

http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/PP5.html

This guy is trying to paint Half-Life as a "metaphor for neoliberal market-dominated globalization." I think. Some highlights:

The rise of the 3D game played a key role in the emergence of the information commons. While film and TV productions require comparatively expensive set designs, production crews and distribution channels, videogames could be produced by small groups of programmers, and played on inexpensive console systems and handheld devices. The advent of the Web in the early 1990s spawned multinational gaming communities, wherein fans, designers and programmers from across the planet could meet, play online, and exchange game-related media and news. Videogames very quickly became a privileged site where multinational cultural forms could touch base with new types of multinational politics � everything from the anti-Maastricht mobilizations which swept the European Union to the pro-democracy struggles of the East Asian region.

I mustn't have noticed that happen. When do I get to touch base with Cambodian nationals?

By contrast, actual theme music is deployed sparingly, thereby maximizing its impact. These are often conjoined to scripted events, e.g. the running bass line triggered when players don their power-vest for the first time, the exhilarating thrash metal music during the player�s first battle with the military death squads, or the guitar feedback pulse played when obtaining the plasma rifle. Most impressive of all is the prelude to the cliff battle of Surface Tension, when the roar of a passing military jet accedes to a low bass pulse, then a metallic drum-and-brush rhythm, with very light feedback. This reprises Valve�s opening theme music, which consists of a minor 3rd and another minor 3rd, a half-step below the first � an unmistakable music reference to the sonic palette of late 1990s hip hop (e.g. Kool Keith�s 1996 Dr. Octagon album).

One of the most entertaining scripted events in Half Life occurs when the player-character dies and must start over from a saved game. During the death-sequence, players literally watch their character�s skull roll across their field of vision: one eye is still in the socket, which could either be the ironic reprise of HAL�s disembodied gaze in Kubrick�s 2001, or the Information Age update of the medieval memento mori, depending on one�s morbidity level. This is the comic parody of death, a computerized gallows humor in the grand tradition of James Whale�s Frankenstein (1931) or Sam Raimi�s Evil Dead (1981).

What the fuck game was this guy playing?

Id�s quotation of video forms is perhaps the most interesting story of all. Id�s action games fused the visceral kinetic energies of the 1970s horror and Hong Kong films with the registers of the 1980s sci-fi blockbuster (e.g. the audacious action sequences of James Cameron�s 1986 Aliens, without question the cinematic highwater mark of Anglo-American neo-conservativism). But where Aliens exorcised the grisly reality of corporate neocolonialism by means of a reactionary biologism � the monstrous hunger of the aliens for human bodies � id biologized the technologies of neocolonialism.

This has to be a joke, or else this guy is masturbating all over himself as he writes this. I was guessing that his paper was overdue because he played Half Life all weekend, but according to his index site he is, in fact, a teacher of this nonsense.

The sample in question is a glowing crystal extracted from Xen, but what is striking about the ensuing catastrophe is the displacement of the generic science-fiction trope of the mysterious alien element or technology by a threatening hypermobility � specifically, the translucent green teleportation nodes of the Xen aliens. Matter is displaced by mobility, in a manner which irresistible recalls the hegemonic fiction of the neoliberal era � the utopia of a weightless, frictionless, and bodiless information economy. The reality was that the information economy was economically profitless, socially polarizing, and deeply destructive to the bodies of consumers and workers, as Doug Henwood�s magisterial After the New Economy documents in devastating detail.

Aliens teleport from another dimension, and voila, it's a utopian information economy. Brilliant! 

There is a similar moment of qualitative transformation in Half Life, and that is the counter-mobilization of the videogame culture against post-Cold War neoliberalism. The most characteristic form this takes in the 3D action genre is, of course, the spectacular production and consumption of informatic bodies � something which includes, but is by no means limited to, onscreen violence. The informatic body is a work-process. It anchors the game-play in the same way that the complex editing techniques of the martial arts thriller anchors the canonic Hong Kong action films, ranging from Robert Clouse�s Enter the Dragon (1973) to John Woo�s Hard Boiled (1989). What separates the informatic body from its social antipode, the information capitalist or silicon billionaire, is the fact that game-players must actively construct that body, by exploring and mapping the game-world, acquiring tools and strategies, and mastering the ability to operate in 3D space. At its outer limit, the informatic body turns into a cipher of the informatic laborer: that is to say, the patient, laborious acquisition of high-technology or service sector skills.

I have no idea. But, brilliant!


Even better is the next chapter of this epic. He spends most of the thing raving about how the single player works of Niel Manke redefined the genre.

http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/PP6.html

The third Coconut Monkey adventure, Saving Private Monkey (the title refers to Spielberg�s medium-grade war drama, Saving Private Ryan) is simply outstanding. After being transported back in time to the Normandy landing, Coconut Monkey must fight through hordes of Nazis in order to return to the present.

Holy mother of fuck what? Spielberg�s medium-grade war drama?

I can't read this anymore. Some else plunge in for me and post some highlights, my eyes hurt. There's seven whole chapters. 

that is all.