4647. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-235.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 13 Jun 2006 10:24:03 [ Pimp my run ]

Whatever man, Roethlisberger is my hero!

4646. Karthik (eliserver.eliresearch.com) – 13 Jun 2006 10:00:59 [ Pimp my run ]

Always wear a helmet when you run.

4645. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-235.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 13 Jun 2006 09:48:42 [ UPD: Escape Beta 3 ]

RC: I've been deliberately avoiding player stats on the server because it's so easy to cheat. It does lead to a certain good kind of encouragement, though... I'll think about how we might do this.

RC/mjn: yes, tags are the idea. Really not so much "tags" as "ad hoc filtering", so that levels can be a part of a collection ("bot pushing"; "simple"; "adventure") without being in a separate directory. At the same time I'll need to improve performance of the level browser, but that won't be too hard in a complete rewrite.

mjn: You can currently center the level manually by pressing ctrl-arrows while playing. I can add a centering key too, if you like... maybe "Home."

I don't think a player reputation system is a bad one; maybe just a division between "trusted" and "new." There aren't that many players that I couldn't manually upgrade people to "trusted" status after they've uploaded a nice level. I think it would also be easy to work the other way; discounting accounts that say "cooked" on obviously uncookable levels, etc. (I've already planned to do this for the rating system, but haven't got to it yet...)

4644. mjn (pool-71-104-119-117.lsanca.dsl-w.verizon.net) – 13 Jun 2006 04:39:56 [ UPD: Escape Beta 3 ]

Small feature request: could there be a key to recenter the view on the player?

As far as level browser suggestions, how about letting players assign predefined tags to levels? (Like the categories RC mentioned above.) Judging by flickr and Amazon, I actually don't have much confidence in tagging systems, but with a predefined set of tags, maybe it might work.

Of course, the same folks who "cook" obviously uncookable levels would probably screw up the tags as well. And they're probably greater in number than the rest of us. So I guess I don't have any idea how to prevent that kind of damage, short of a player reputation system or something.

4643. RC (216.129.187.77) – 13 Jun 2006 01:35:49 [ UPD: Escape Beta 3 ]

Tom:
These are just suggestions and do not imply the game needs improvement.
Sorting by type (block pushing, sphere pushing, bots, artistic, standard, combo, ect). I would be tough if not impossible.

Predefined categories that required certian components. Like a category for speed runs. Where levels are made loose on purpose and the author's solution doesn't count.

Player stats (levels made, speedruns, cooks)
Just throwing out ideas.

4642. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-235.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 12 Jun 2006 21:57:02 [ Pimp my run ]

Yeah, I think Monroeville is only 10 miles, so if I didn't have to come back I think I'd be all set. ;)

4641. Cort (pool-70-20-75-230.pitt.east.verizon.net) – 12 Jun 2006 21:28:17 [ Pimp my run ]

whoa, dude, I think that the JAG Haus has often talked about the disease you mention; apparently it's one of the few cases where a well-trained dermatologist can save your life.

Nifty gadget and congratulations on an awesome run! Soon you'll be running to Monroeville for fun.

And the maps for the RCT were updated only 11 years ago, not 30. :)

4640. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-235.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 12 Jun 2006 20:18:09 [ Quake 3 Done! ]

Man, I loved Quake 3 Fortress.

4639. PanzerIV (modemcable142.209-202-24.mc.videotron.ca) – 12 Jun 2006 19:27:30 [ Quake 3 Done! ]

For the chart "stat-tracker", it show how much people were playing the game at X houre and X month so yes you can see how much people are still playing by watching how low the bar is on the graph at the current day.

OMFG, I've just done a "01/01/2006 to today" with Q3, Q4 and UT99 and the numbers at the moment are Q3 with 3100 players "4100 last month", UT99 with 2700 "3100 last month". Those two game folow very closely with a small advance for Q3 all the time. And to finish, Q4 with 400 "biggest since 2006 was 1000 players and lowest was 0 for a while lol". Well, nothing is more clear than a picture so look on your own at: ht tp://img149.imageshack.us/my.php?image=untitled0185770dd.jpg

Yeah ET:QW is the next big game. id is also suppose to have a new title "new franchise" in developpement but which it's name is unknow at the moment but it's been confirmed that they are doing a Return To Castle Wolfenstein 2 which I await a lot too.

I really hate consoles but Gears of Wars is the only thing that I wish PC will have. It's been rumored that someone "Epic or Microsoft" will port it onto PC somewhere later after it's release on Xbox360.

There is a 1.3 patch being tested as you must have saw in the esreality forums. Still I'm pretty sure that it will come out too late to save Q4. This game is already dead to me and I won't be playing it once the new batch of good games will be out, this autumn. What's sad with mods is that even if they really rock, not enough people play them so if the game doesn't have a default/stock gameplay that kickass, the game won't be able to create a wide community around it, so mods will get no chance to get popular. It's like Quake 3 Fortress 2.0 which came out a year too late. 1.0 was being very played but when 2.0 was out, even if it was very good, it had 0 players and never worked. That's not cool for devs which "wasted" time to build it.

I'll tell you the main reasons why Q4 was a total failure:
- Quake 3 was very good so the whole community was expecting at least something equad or even better, for the multiplayer but those idiot prefered to put all their effort on the singleplayer and let the multiplayer's job to raven. Kinda like Doom 3 which had a cool singleplayer but a really poor multiplayer, programmed in a few houres.
- They added a few very good features in Quake 4 but they modified too much the "core gameplay" which made it stand appart from Quake 3. Especialy by doing smaller maps with slower movements "people didn't take it" but still I could have got used to it as it wasn't that bad though I prefered the fast way of Q3.
- Now the main problem... BUGS! Even now with patch 1.02, the game still have a lot of sound issue which everyone is having. Not just 5-10% of players. It could be understandable if you were using an onboard soundcard but I do own the best one "Soundblaster X-Fi" and I do have problems...
- The netcode is horrible. A player with a ping of 20 will own someone with a ping of 80+. Every servers lag like hell. When I refresh the browser, there is only 5-10% servers with a ping under 100! Mostly for a fast paced game like Quake, it is unplayable with a high ping. I heard on the forum that many people, if not half the players of Q4's community, where playing the game only on Lan.
- The game took forever to support "Auto-Download" and still it's not even working good in 1.02 so every goddamn time that you try to connect to a server, you either miss a file or can't download it connect so you can play on almost no server at all.
- 3/4 of servers are passworded so there is even less choice to play online. And for Tourney/Duel servers, which I like a lot, it's 90-95% that are passworded... so fuck off.

Those were the main problem from Quake 4. If you add all the other small issue, there is even less reason why someone would play Q4. They should have done a "Quake 4 Arena". By this I mean, no singleplayer and all the thousand of houres they wasted on singleplayer should had been used to make a perfect multiplayer. Also "personal opinion", I prefered much more "as my friend" the dark/hell/gothic theme from Quake 3, than the futurist one of Q4.

4638. terpy (c-24-18-102-110.hsd1.wa.comcast.net) – 12 Jun 2006 18:37:35 [ UPD: Escape Beta 3 ]

Tom 7 said (way back):

>>Aww, when I say "you guys" I of course mean "you guys and gals!"

So why not say, "you gals"?

terpy


/////
-OO-
o

4636. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-235.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 12 Jun 2006 00:32:43 [ UPD: Escape Beta 3 ]

Thanks wowei! I'm going to make the 'cheat' keys more obvious because they are not really cheats and most of the advanced players know about them and design for them.

Especially zooming and scrolling...

4635. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-235.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 11 Jun 2006 23:34:25 [ Runblog cont'd ]

No, just the artist formerly and currently known as Prince.

4634. wowei (p54ae5865.dip.t-dialin.net) – 11 Jun 2006 22:49:50 [ UPD: Escape Beta 3 ]

Hey Kirima, hey RC, first thing to point out I am very fascinated by the little bugger, Tom created. :) And I bet you wouldn't quit for a long time also. I'm down to 58 unsolved levels, and of course my goal is to solve them all =-O
... in the next twenty years or so ;) And one thing has to be made clear, we all are learners - well, I am.

It's nice to see new people "joining the club" and creating their own new levels and making more and more progress in the next few attempts. It indicates the spreading of the game and its fascination.

At the moment, when there is some time, I replay older levels to rerate them from my actual point of view. I assume I underrated some really nice ideas in former solved levels only cause the presentation didn't match my taste. For instance it took me some long time to discover the zooming options and the <d> and <y> keys. So every piece of art that I didnt like because of big size or because of too much magic panels and teleporters, hadn't a chance to gain higher ratings here at my place.

I think almost every level is nice and only a very few are really stupid levels that didnt make at least a bit of fun to play. And as Tom said before, having fun and giving fun should be the only aim of this game. I enjoyed so many almost genius ideas, a lot of nice and lovely designs and of course there were and still are some hard challenges. I too want to create one of those "ultimate crushers" :) but ... ;)

We all should spread the information much more widely, that there is a wonderful game out there that entertains intellect, esthetic senses and creativity.

keep on keeping on!

greets

4633. Tadbot (c-68-80-152-28.hsd1.pa.comcast.net) – 11 Jun 2006 22:03:34 [ Runblog cont'd ]

Question I was wondering: In "what are u runnin from lol" from aad19, are the following lyrics intended to be a reference to Atalanta?
I'm training to be a prince
and I don't mean the guy who sings

4632. Kalypso (cpe-68-173-146-35.nyc.res.rr.com) – 11 Jun 2006 17:38:38 [ Quake 3 Done! ]

This thread never dies.

4631. Kalypso (cpe-68-173-146-35.nyc.res.rr.com) – 11 Jun 2006 17:38:25 [ Quake 3 Done! ]

yes I do speak french, my family is from the carribean, Haiti

thank you for the compliments, on the portfolio, i appreciate it,
in the mean time enjoy Quake 3, i love that game.
i have to start practicing more, developing drawing skills and playing less games, but it was fun as hell while it lasted.
play to your hearts content, i may never play again.

the comparison chart is embarassing, i hope ID and Raven are watching because that is the destruction of a perfectly lucrative franchise, a great way too loose millions of dollars and fans. are the values on the chart the number of players that are still playing?

Yeah people on the forum sound very dissappointed, i feel the same way, but thats the way it goes, enemy territory might be a lot of fun. i am going to check out more reviews and see what its about, anyone with and Xbox 360 should enjoy "gears of war".

I have a feeling that someone is developing a miracle patch, or miracle mod to make quake 4, the quake game that it was meant to be, because the community isnt going to sit back and watch the franchise slip into oblivion, simply because raven fucked up.

I am wondering what specifically anyone has noticed that made quake 4 so inferior to previous quake games... it felt like a noticeable let down to me but i still cant put my finger specifically on what made the game so uninspiring...

4630. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-235.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 11 Jun 2006 16:06:01 [ UPD: Escape Beta 3 ]

Ultimately I think it's going to be impossible for players to keep up with every level. I think there are a few who have solved every level (or nearly every one), but it's hard to keep that up without constant attention. I used to be a completist, but now I've slipped to 874/1010, and there are some levels I haven't even tried yet.

I want the game to be fun without having to have goals like "solve every level." Part of the plan here is a redesign of the level browser to take into account the fact that there are over a thousand levels out there... I want to make it faster to browse, have it provide smaller challenges of varying difficulty, and most of all, make it easy to identify the best levels and reward more those who upload great levels. This is high on my list, right after fixing the bookmark system (and perhaps adding sound, which is almost done). Suggestions?

4628. PanzerIV (modemcable142.209-202-24.mc.videotron.ca) – 10 Jun 2006 16:54:34 [ Quake 3 Done! ]

As for Quake 4. I wouldn't hope too much about it. The game is born-dead and you can look by yourself on this stats tracker by selectioning Q3 and Q4 with a date, on the link below.
www.nofrag.com/gstats2/avance/?GameList=1

The most popular Forum Community from Quake 4 is there "link below". I participated in it for a while, after getting tired by seeing that even if we were A LOT of people complaining about the game, that it changed nothing at all.
ht tp://esreality.hexus.net/?a=post&forum=22

I've looked at every single pictures from your website "portefolio" and I gotta admit that you really have a lot of skill in drawing! :O
www.atelierfrancois.com

Just wondering, do you speak french???

4627. PanzerIV (modemcable142.209-202-24.mc.videotron.ca) – 10 Jun 2006 16:42:57 [ Quake 3 Done! ]

Hmm why the hell are 90% of servers, all running ExcessivePlus?! I tryed it and it's really horrible and 1000x worse than stock Q3. It's sad that all servers sucks but at least I'll be able to play from time to time in my own server in 1vs1 with my friend. Thanks again for the cd-key Kalypso.

I love Unreal Tournament but since a while I've got sick of UT2004. It used to have a lot of servers with cool and good regular players and lot of activity with clans on ladders, specialy in Onslaught but now it feel very empty and the game is dying. 3/4 of servers that still exist and which have a good ping are demo! So playing the same map over and over make it even worse. Also I don't know whats up with this game's netcode but it's one of the worse that I've ever seen and the bug in the UE2 engine which can't be fixed is really annoying "rocket and flak shell not registering". Also like you said, there is not enough close-quarters fights and everyone play medium to far range, like chicken cowards and they only use hitscan...

Me too I find it amazing that this thread is still active even after 5 years lol.

You can be sure at 100% that I will have Quake 3 unninstalled forever within 6 months. I only reinstalled it to kill time since there's just boring games at the moment, like Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2... I'm waiting for Enemy Territory:Quake Wars and more especialy, UT2007 :D

4626. Kalypso (cpe-68-173-146-35.nyc.res.rr.com) – 10 Jun 2006 16:03:57 [ Quake 3 Done! ]

PanzerIV check your email,

yeah quake 3 was fun, but i have a strange suspicion that quake 4 will improve. Id really dropped the ball by letting raven take over, it was a bad idea. They make good games but the change was too drastic.

and the Unreal styled games, though i play them often, are simply too hectic for me, quake 3 is more elegant and streamlined. and also the arena's are smaller making for more intimate combat and close quarter action. Oh well... we'll see, games in general simply arent hitting my spot like they used and it always seems that the newer titles progressively lack something that the previous ones had...

but amazingly this thread continues on a little longer.

to beat xaero you should camp behind the pillar next to jump pad where he lands to pick up the rocket launcher, and shoot him the moment his feet touch the ground, you simply have to wait for him back there and get ammo the moment he dies, then go back and hide. its cheap but its the only way to beat him on nightmare, his aim is inhuman.

4625. paul (cpe-71-72-157-80.woh.res.rr.com) – 10 Jun 2006 01:54:41 [ NEW: Tom 7 Entertainment System site ]

Dude I like your stuff!!
your should release at www.8bitpeoples.com
I think alot of people in the netlable community would enjoy hearing from you. I just stumbled on your site. Paul email me paulshuler at fastmail dot us. peace keep jamming!

4624. RC (216.129.190.163) – 10 Jun 2006 01:47:00 [ UPD: Escape Beta 3 ]

I feel the same way. Here I sit with 935 of 1009 solved and just keep solving puzzels so I can stay caught up. There are some levels I think I will save until I grow old and retire and still probably never solve.
Levels with a million buttons/bots ect in an effort to make it difficult are not as rewarding to solve because they are solved more by brute force rather than logic. I like levels where you can basically see what has to be done but have to figure out how to do it. If that makes any sense. There are alot of great levels out there already and it is hard to come up with something unique. However some of the new group of level makers are making some good levels too. I am guessing the pro's did not start out with their best stuff either. Originally I thought I should not upload a level until it was polished, but as it were most of mine were not anyway. Now however, I think it is probably better to get new ideas out there and see what others can do with them.

4623. Kirima/mm (140.114.78.83.cust.bluewin.ch) – 09 Jun 2006 21:04:29 [ UPD: Escape Beta 3 ]

I'd love to give something back, too! I'm keeping on trying to create interesting levels, I'm working on it, but I'm not satisfied of what I'm doing and I'd only upload levels that would make a certain sense - to at least myself. It's so easy to create silly levels, but so really hard to figure out a real escape-challenge! I guess you all know what I'm talking about.

One of my problems is: those silly levels are not an inspiration at all, on the contrary, playing too many of those make me feel as if the game itself would be kind of silly as well... It's just not motivating at all. Whereas great levels always indicate more great ideas! Great levels make me feel as if I'd work in a just superbe team of level-creators and I'd love to participate and to contribute something so that the game itself could continue to grow-up.

I wonder how others feel? I noticed that the "pros" haven't created any new levels for at least a few weeks or months. And I'm wondering what could be the reason for it? John Lewis? Max?

I didn't edit any levels recently, because of this kind of "anti-motivation". I've kept on playing, so today there are 51 not solved levels left for me. Levels that I just can't solve... And I feel kind of like quitting. I won't, but for the moment, it just feels like I'd want to stop being one of those escape-freaks.

I always thought that this game is incredibly growing and interacting and worth while continuing to play and to be part of the crew! But right now, I feel kind of lost and not too interested in the game any more.

I would not want to quit! And I'd miss it. But I'm really, surely, honestly not motivated any more.

No, in fact, I'm already missing something.

4622. kathy (dhcp-57-59.dsl.telerama.com) – 09 Jun 2006 12:59:01 [ Back! ]

the song is badass. :) and catchy... good find.

i think "never trend away" even sounds kind of romantic...

4621. mike (h-67-100-132-235.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) – 09 Jun 2006 08:39:29 [ Runblog cont'd ]

Nice scale bar.