For all this talk about quake coop how come nobody wants to play quake coop? 

I'm with Lun... if you completely erase any penalty for dying by letting players keep their guns and not have to walk back to where they died, there's no point in having a concept of 'death' in the game. I'm definitely with the people who want to make Quake Co-op harder and more fun by dint of being a challenge. 

Yeah, same here with the CTF flags :P 

I do.

But silly pixar stole you away from me. :( 

it's more a matter of who I want to play it with 

... 

in SP, when you die, you press a key to restart the map and *immediatly* you're back in the action. you're playing right away, killing things again.

in dm, when you die, you press a key to restart the map and *immediatly* you're back in the action. sure, you don't have any guns, but guns are fast to come by, and there's always the threat of being shot.

in coop, when you die, you press a key to respawn, and you walk around, picking up guns, not shooting anything (since all the monsters are dead), meanwhile, you know your teammate is still having fun killing things... finally, 45 seconds later, you've got all the guns again, and rejoined your teammate/members. well, he's already slugged through another 45 seconds of the map without you.
think of it from the other guy's perspective:
your teammate dies, and now your gameplay experience isn't coop anymore, it's SP. you need to wait 45 seconds before gameplay is coop again. sure, you can sit around, not playing and wait, but that ruins the flow.
and if you keep playing, well, that's fine, but it's not different if you loaded up the map yourself.

downtime in between death should be as short as possible, so maps with hub layouts would be prefered so that the distance you need to walk to rejoin in the action isn't to great, as well as being able to replenish your weapon loadout.

or, as an alternative:
both respawning monsters and respawning items.
when you die, you are sent back to the start, and now, you need to not only rejoin your comrades, but fight your way there. in fact, your team mates could fight their way backwards to help meet up sooner. 

or, as an alternative:
both respawning monsters and respawning items.

That's one of the main reasons I suggested that monsters and items respawn infinitely, but not at an impossibly hard rate. 

But silly pixar stole you away from me.

Ssh, people will think I work there.

And there's always the interweb. Is Fitzquake based on netquake or quakeworld? 

I should actually be able to connect to internet quake servers at work now. I'd be WELL AND TRULY up for some Quake 1 or 2 coop pretty soon. I just need to get them installed at work.

You up for it?

Anyone else? 

aye 

glquake, meaning netquake. 

I love you, Than! Of couse I would love you run around with you nekkid in a coop game! 

I just apparently need the right client. 

Would be nice with a good way to view the ammo/health/armor counts of the other players with a hud, so you don't have to keep asking the other guys how much health/armor/ammo they have. 

playing Q2 coop with my friend. he was a server, so that's why he was saving all of his weapons and ammo, while I had nothing but blaster (Q2), and I still enjoyed the game (with almost nothing of weapons/ammo).

The fun of coop mode is to play with your friend, while none of ammo/weapon affects you while you're playing. At least that was the way it was for me. (posting drunk anyway) 

currently, the code that governs how monsters behave in realtion to being shot by multiple players is to simply get angry at the newest player to shoot at it.

i think this area could use a lot of work.

i've been experimenting with more powerful monsters of late, and i've found that they become not only easier, but trivial in coop, since as long as two people shoot at a monster, it will continually switch between the two and never get any shots off.

i've alleviated this by implementing a sort of timer, which will only allow the monster to switch enemies after a certain amount of time (about 8 to 11 seconds).

while this works, i think maybe a bit more sophistication could be cool...

if each monster built up a threat table based on how much damage it was taking from each player, and decided to on that basis who to attack, it might make play more interesting.
ie: if one player is wailing on a shambler with the SNG and another is trying to keep it distracted with the SG, ignore the SG player and try to get rid of the SNG player.

i dunno if this moves away from the spirit of quake though, which is supposed to be simple and straightforward, and i don't even know if this would be balanced... hoping for some opinions on that.

also, i think chthon's ai needs to be reworked to make him more effective in coop, but that's another story. :P 

also, who woke the monster up in the first place might get a bonus to it's threat level or something like that...

or maybe even what weapons the player is carrying. although, that could be mitigated by simply switching to a weak weapon like the SG and then after the monster is awake, swtich to a more powerful weapon... *shrug* 

that's similar to the type of AI one sees in MMORPGs, where players use the monster's "aggro" state as part of their tactics. 

One would expect large monsters not to necessarily focus on any one player. A hell knight might try to get between two players and swing his sword to hit both, or a vore would toss a ball at any player on it's 'enemy list' that was visible. The way it stands now, or even with a timer, two players could be standing in clear view of a shambler, but as long as the third player who's the shambler's current enemy is hiding nobody will be in immediate danger.

A monster in coop should queue up enemies, and maybe rank them on who's done him the most damage so far, and just attack whoever's convenient. 

but as long as the third player who's the shambler's current enemy is hiding nobody will be in immediate danger.

ITT lunaran makes sense [56k lol]

Let's try 'but as long as the shambler has a third, hiding enemy, nobody will be in immediate danger.' 

You would probably want to factor in distance for melee monsters. There's no sense having a whathcamajiggy cross half the map to attack the other player when he's going to take critical damage before he gets there. 

indeed. too much WoW i guess. :P
i like lunaran's idea better, but instead of having an enemy at all and queueing up attacks, to simply always be searching for a player, even if it's already angry and fighting.

heck, even throw in something like WoW's Secondary Targetting System where a monster will randomly target another player for a few seconds before switching back to it's primary target.

and yeah, Pushplay:
threat assessment would give bigger bonuses to players close to melee monsters, so a fiend would be more likely to attack someone in jump range than someone who is far away.

also: maybe when more powerful monsters die, it would make any other weaker monsters go after the one who killed it.
just a random thought. 

Have you seen this demo:

http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/coop/mad/nightmare/4p/sha_1022.dz

(four players with axes vs some enormous number of shamblers)

Takes the 'but as long as the shambler has a third, hiding enemy, nobody will be in immediate danger' idea to ridiculous extremes :) 

The map can be found here:
http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/mkt.pl?level:shafted

I watched part of it, but it would probably be more enjoyable with a 4-way split screen and 200% gameplay speed.

I was surprised that pushcoag had speedruns. The coop runs are pretty cool.