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15 March 1999 23:19:47 GMT   -   Update by Alex

Q3A Questions Answered
Xian and Zoid have been active on sCary's q3 msg board recently and have answered the following questions (thanks again to dogweazle for spotting the posts) :

I have a level (dm) for quake2 that I am working on and am almost finished with it. I just have to add lights and weapons,ammo, and items. Well since quake3 is just around the corner I just want to save the map file and port it to quake3. Will this be possible?? I know I will have to change a bunch of stuff like make the stairs smaller and change all the textures but this way I have a rough draft to start from. I also can't wait to play with the curves :) I am using QEradiant so I am use to the editor that will ship with quake3. Thanks in advance....

Q3Radiant can read in either Q1 or Q2 map files, so you should be able to convert your existing maps with a bit of work (mainly retexturing)

-Xian

Will it be possible to accelerate in Q3 in the same or similar way as in Q2. This was so nice and gave the gameplay more speed.

Yep. Strafe jumping is in Q3A at present.

-Xian

I have, what I hope, is a reasonable request. For CTF games would you (id Software) please not have the game spawn players into the enemy base. Now admittedly, I don't play CTF very often. It just doesn't make any sense to me why anyone would be respawned inside the enemy base. If there is some good reasoning behind this, I sure would appreciate someone explaining it to me. It just seems like a waste of time and usually a cheap frag for the opposition. It's extremely rare for a respawned player to be able to actually _capture_ the flag armed only with the default weapon. Certainly it can be done, but not often enough to make it worthwhile to attempt.

I agree with this. The way we have it is that the red and blue team spawn on team specific pads that should be placed in their bases or close to them.

-Xian

Q2CTF pretty much followed this rule as well. The only exceptions where q2ctf4 (just outside the actual 'internal' bases) and q2ctf5 since the base room was a big huge room to begin with.

The usual way my CTF worked was everyone spawned in their base at start, but respawns occur whereever the level designer put deathmatch spawn points in the map. This gives a good random distribution of respawns, but also removes the problem of you assaulting an enemy base, killing everyone, only have them respawn in the base you killed them in (StarSeige Tribes does this alot and drives me bananas).

It's really up to the level designer for the spawn pads.

This is message is discussion about previous CTF versions--we'll see how Q3A's method works out. :)

/// Zoid.

Benchmarking FAQ
Looks like a load of people are still emailing Brian Hook with a load of questions about the latest Q3A benchmark test results. Here's his latest .plan update with some answers to some of the questions :
Seems like every product I have to go through the same Q&A with benchmarks and deal with the same stuff. I think I'm going to save this update for an FAQ next year :-)

1. "Why don't you test on a Pentium/PentiumMMX/K6-2/P2/Celeron/Linux/WinNT, is it because your engine sucks?"

No, it's because John hired me as a programmer, not a professional benchmarker. I could easily spend weeks doing nothing but benchmarking in every conceivable configuration. The last round of benchmarks was attempting to show what a high end configuration is capable of. We will likely run some benchmarks on a lower end CPU at some point, but this type of stuff pretty much eats an entire day, and Q3TEST is a bigger priority right now.

2. "Dude, Q2 benchmarks shows XYZ running faster than ABC, so obviously you're screwed up"

Q3 is not Q2, and has a different set of performance criteria than Q2. Just like Q2 was different than Q1.

3. "It's not fair that you were comparing an overclocked XYZ vs. an underclocked ABC"

The benchmark numbers were on a preliminary build of an unreleased game running on pre-production hardware using beta drivers. In other words, this stuff is subject to change. That said, both the TNT2 and V3 were running at their lowest common clockspeeds (125/150 on the TNT2 and 143 on the V3).

Q3A vs. UT vs. TF2
U-Games have put up an article comparing the 3 big forthcoming deathmatch only games : Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament and TeamFortress 2. Source - Voodooextreme 16bit vs. 32bit Rendering 4:07am EST - Jams Why should you go for a 32 bit 3d card rather than a 16 bit Voodoo2/3 ? Check out Brian Hooks latest .plan update : Another common question is "If V2/V3 are so fast, why would anyone want to get a TNT/TNT2/R128/S4?" The biggest downsides to running on a Voodoo vs. a 32-bit accelerator are: - blurier textures (both because of gl_picmip 1 and the 256x256 max texture size) - reduced image quality because of banding - no stencil buffer volumetric shadows (which aren't a first tier feature of the graphics engine anyway) So if you have a V2, you're not missing out on THAT much compared to a TNT, but the TNT will definitely look better in 32-bit mode. The only thing a TNT in 16-bit mode offers over the V2 are A.) no need to gl_picmip and B.) larger max texture size, which translates to crisper textures. Server Problems 4:07am EST - Jams The web server keeps randomly reseting itself and the cgi-bin keeps going down :( I hope this will be sorted out soon. Sunday, March 14, 1999 Older Maps in Quake III Arena 4:28pm EST - Jams Christian Antkow made a post to sCary's Q3A msg board about old maps in Quake III Arena, thanks to dogweazle for the info : I saw a few posts about people wanting older maps in Q3A. We don't have any concrete plans, but *IF* they were to be included in Q3A, it wouldn't be in the single player rotation. They'd probably be included as "easter egg" maps for net/lan play only. And yes, Tim has done a conversion of Q1DM6 to Q3A. As stated above, it's unknown at this time if these maps will ever be released. I personally really hope they do include a few older maps in the final game. New poll and archives 4:28pm EST - Jams Ok there's a new poll up, thanks to Dr_EviL for the idea! Also got round to putting up a poll archive to showcase the innovative and imaginative poll ideas we have had in the past :)


Your weapon of choice?
Machinegun
Super Shotgun
Grenade Launcher
Plasma Gun
Rocket Launcher
Flamethrower
Lightning Gun
Railgun
BFG

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