Doom3world

So we decided to release our latest alpha to the public since it doesn't look like we're going to have time to finish the mod. While the alpha is playable, its lacks polish and content and has a tendancy to crash. We're mostly releasing it so that other Q4 mod developers may be able to use some of the features we've implemented, or maybe somebody else will want to finish off the mod.

The updated readme (WIP) is online at
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~cjcone/q4f/q4f_alpha_readme.html

The mod is hosted on ModDB at http://files.moddb.com/5814/download-qu ... ess-alpha/

You can get the source from
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~cjcone/q4f/q4f_alpha_src.zip

Thanks to everyone who contributed to Q4F, especially doom3world in general.

A bit sad to hear, but sometimes the journey is the destination.

Thanks for releasing it; from reading the page it seems an immense ammount of effort was put into it. Too bad it couldn't go on.

Anyhow, best of luck in the future.

too bad its come down to this, but i guess thats part my own fault as well. I still regard the time when q4 was just out to be the best. was lots of fun, but i guess not only companies face the hurdle of games becoming bigger/complexer but mod teams as well

leaves you a bit worried what the future might bring i guess

there wasn't enough talent pool in the Quake 4 community to make a big mod. We put up applications all over the place but it just seemed nobody wanted to work with Q4

I have the same problem with my mod.. hoping that 1.4 and some of my new gamemodes will bring a little more life into the q4 scene, but its probably not getting better.
Thanx for releasing it anyway, I'll check it later =)

sorry it's not going to be finished by you guys. Glad to hear you're releasing everything to the public though, hopefully someone else will pick it up.

but now my rant...

I honestly expected it not to be finished. The excuse to jump D3 for Q4 was the first sign. Lack of an MP base isn't a decent excuse imho. If you wanted a good mp base you would of gone with everyone else & make another TF port for HL2 or UT2k4 but you (the team) decided to use D3 based tech. There was no reason to assume that Q4 would be more popular the D3, or that ETQW will be more popular (hope so). The talk at Q-Con about porting to QW, even though innocent enough, normally doesn't get asked unless someone plans on switching (it'll be hard to convince me otherwise. If a mod team wasn't mentioned I wouldn't of even thought twice).

Now there's no time to finish the mod. I didn't realize mods had to be finished to be released, let alone had a date. Not saying you didn't set a "we want it out by date X" for the team to get stuff done, but that doesn't matter. WireHead studios STILL hasn't released a 1.0 of generations arena because they haven't gotten the weapon animations system the way they want, ~7 years after they started with Q3A.

Yeah, finding people to help out is hard to. No different then any other mod group out there. That doesn't mean mods should be put on hold or canceled. So what if you can't find a certain position? The most critical position to a mod is a coder (if it requires it). You didn't ditch the mod so you're still there. You don't need a good modeler, you don't need a good mapper, you don't need a good texture guy & you don't need a good sound guy. All those parts are secondary because things can look like crap but still work. Especially for a basic TF game. Original TF was mostly Quake Quake weapons changed around, new skins, new levels & a couple new items. All the base models could be used, levels are just ports, could even just use the various MP skins/models for class's. Port some levels over (which is easy compared to making new ones) & all that's left is the coding. Or better yet let the community start ports for ya.

I'm sorry, but LMS, OpenCOOP, Duck Doom, Delta CTF and others pushed through all that & didn't give up because things didn't work out. I HATE when mods give up completely out of the blue. Hack, in August you guys were gung-ho & planned on releasing a stable version soon. Now ~4 months later it's all over. Didn't want to scale back, change things to fit what you've got, just done.

well, personally ive always been a fan of id software games in favor of the unreal games so its only natural for me to mod for id games, especially since i can apply things learned from q3 to d3/q4 so its an easier step. second we wanted a tf mod not only playing good but looking good too.


well, its not completely out of the blue. i joind the team in november 2005 and had 2 maps completed in 2 months time(mach/bases) but after that my inspiration seemed to dry up, nothing seemed to work anymore. and the rest wasnt really producing any results in the artwork department(maps/models/textures) and especially on a mod with alot of work in the art department its hard to have to pull the mod with just 3 people.

over time all on the team seemed to have dissapeared and reappeared a couple of times but to no avail. personally loosing all data on my hard drive 6 months ago made me stop mapping completely. I lost some very precious work, mainly textures i had been working on.

the quake 4 mappack challenge got me back on track since its still one of my biggest hobbies and i hope my idea for the map pack will have a big impact but thats always a gamble off course.

still i think my work on q4f was still the best work ive produced so far(including lots and lots of non-published work)

Actually there is enough talent, but most of them got totally turned off from the mod scene by all these idiotic people putting up applications for their crappy mods "me cannot make mapz but I release modz soon that will totally r0x0r".

This is really really sad!!

be carefull not to judge someone for their unfinished work even though i agree with your last statement a bit. I have started at least 5 big projects that i never finished(and never will due to hdd crash) but i never saw the final product as the goal.

the journey, the things i would learn underway were always more important and most things were just "ill just do something every day and see where it ends" and i think many modders have been down this same path and there will definately be others.

i rather tend to help out new people, no matter how low their skill might be, after all we all started out noobs and id rather help someone out then shoot them down or judge them

+1 with bolleh.

after downloading half a day, I finally tried it..
Woaaaa man, thats High Quality Stuff!
Really sad its not going to be continued, you have put a lot of work into it, and I have to say, it looks better than any other mod I've seen for Quake4!
I've created a news on esreality, so it will get more attention.

http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1306231

3j, the links are down (except moddb)

Thanks for picking my comment up.

I do not judge someone for their unfinished work. Would you agree that a 512 unit square box with a light, 4 stretched textures and two randomly arranged static models does not show the necessary base effort to attract qualified mod talent?

It's an inevitable goal conflict that every mod job application accompanied by a little media needs to be unifinished, otherwise the application wouldn't make any sense and a release announcement would get posted.

In my opinion it just is not enough to dream up an inconsistent story, write it down here together with a dreamed up feature list which puts every software ever announced to shame and then start recruiting for this "mod".

I expect a mod announcement to at least go hand in hand with a proof of concept study which at least shows off consitent artwork or consistent functionality code (Ground Zero is a nice example).

To make myself clear - in times where a mod or tc or however you call it requires so much skill, talent and time it's a base requirement that the team leadership / management must be expected to match or better surpass the on-hand work skill requirements.

A real talented mod contributer, no matter if an artist or a programmer, has the right to demand the time of his life he invests to be managed and led well so it doesn't vaporize. This life we're living is the only one we have and I wouldn't want to donate a part of it for a project which doesn't show the least bit of professionalism.

To get a mod out of the door is hard enough even with good leadership, but without it's impossible. So if the mod-announcer and job-app poster isn't even able to get this right, how can he be expected to take care of the time a team donates to such a project?

If id software posts a job application then a two-liner is enough "We're working on a new project and seek the best in the field. Please apply here.". If a mod seeks team members this isn't enough, especially if the team leader just wants a game done he himself cannot make and his parents cannot buy at WalMart.



That's a very important philosophical part which applies to life in general. Attention seeking mod announcers will never understand the meaning of these words.



A determined noob is a rough diamond and deserves every help possible. Some may even go so far and set up a whole forum dedicated to help them to advance, something like D3W for example...

But a dedicated noob typically climbs up the ladder from simple box map to a nice room in 4 to 8 weeks, depending how much spare time is available. He's also reading every tutorial available and has that lab-coat attitude to try to solve every problem he bumps into.

I started out as newbie as imaginable, I'm even a very late adopter to pc's in general, so I totally understand what you are saying.

But I never expected anyone on a board to solve my problems, all I wanted was someone who pointed me towards the right solution and explain me why I should go into a specific direction.

In my opinion people asking questions which can be 100% avoided by doing a first room tutorial before are equally annoying as those who answer every question with a "use the search button" line.

A newbie doesn't even know what to search for and more importantly, why to search for a tech specific keyword. So "veterans" need to be much more forgiving and willing to assist and newbies will appreciate that. The x percentage of newbies who doesn't bother to read the tutorials they got strongly suggested to read cannot expect to receive much help on any place on the web anyway.

I do think we both mutually agree on most things even if I often have a hard time to explain specific points in a second language.

Yeah. I gave it a try and it was going pretty well. I didn't play MP to see how the netcode was handled or how gameplay was done, but other than that, it looked quite strong. And there's some quite important features implemented there, like water, character classes, the sentry building, etc. Should be really helpful for any future mod developer.

Hmm....



That alone is getting me to download this...any chance of an explanation on how you did it?

I just had a run around, and I have to say that if it's been like this for a while, you should have released it ages ago.

Like you said some things could be more polished...but it's a mod, not a commercial product, and running around I couldn't help but feel this would be a lot of fun with a few other players.

I have created a linux build:
http://gtr.quakedev.com/q4f/game100.pk4
and fired up a server at gtr.ipax.at:28004

Hmm, I assume that was you I saw on the list a few minutes ago then. I tried to connect to it (the only q4f server on the list) and got an error that extra files were needed.

yeah, sorry missed to rename 2 pk4 files.
should work now.