besmella-quake v5.0: quakeworld news - cowboy and gun slinging
news
FrikaC interview
7:44:27 PM - 29 March 2006
vb interviews FrikaC
What is your name, rank and serial number?
Erm, Ryan Smith. Rank, rank.... Captain. Captain sounds good, right? I
think Hawkeye from MASH was a Captain, and he got to smoke cigars in an
operating
room, so he must've had some clout. Combine that with all the tail Captain
Kirk got, and you've got one helluva military rank. So yeah, call me "Captain".
Serial Number? Well let's see uhmmm. 6 and a half or there abouts, or maybe
twelve.
How did you get into Quake?
Via Doom in around 1994. My brother and I first got the Doom shareware from
some crazy department store shareware disc (since we did not have internet
access),
along with a bunch of other games. After playing and liking both the ROTT
and Doom shareware demos, we went and purchased both games. We played the two
games religiously on our two PCs linked with an (now completely obsolete)
null modem cable for years, until I finally got dialup access in late 1996.
That
was the magic year, and all the sites were ablaze with the news of Quake's
release. We were quick to get our hands on the shareware, downloaded from
ZDNet's
hotfiles.com, which at the time meant something.
Our quasi-obsolete machines could barely run it, and it became a reason for
us to upgrade. In the mean time, I discovered the world of modding, via the
Barney Doom mod. It fascinated me. I had programmed many games back on my
Commodore 64 in the 80s, and I was anxious to play with game logic in modern
games. However, nothing was really 'open source' back then, and modding for
Doom and the like, you never really got to work with actual code. Most
programming
languages required expensive compilers, or were so underpowered as to be
ridiculous. After we finally upgraded I noticed id had released the QuakeC
source
and tools to build it. It was a chance to once again code for games and I
snapped at it.
What is it that you like about the great game?
I like nearly everything about it. I love the QuakeC language, and the
tools to build it. I love the way the maps are constructed, they're
relatively simple
and straightforward. I love that it's multiplayer, both cooperative and
deathmatch. More recent games have increasingly dropped or neglected
cooperative.
I also love all of the monsters, they each have unique roles in the game
world. I even actually love the three 'themes': tech, medieval and runic, they
manage to keep the game fresh when a theme changes.
Sure some of the game could've used a little more polish, but id software
did a great thing making the game so open, anything you wanted to 'fix' you
could.
So the thing I guess I love most is how open it was, it is and it continues
to be.
Out of all your work, what has been your favourite?
I follow a very specific pattern when I code. I work tirelessly on a mod
for months, sometimes even years. Then I hit a roadblock, either life gets
in the
way, I lose something important in a crash or I just lose interest for a
week and I don't have the energy to get back into the fray. Sometimes, very
rarely,
I actually finish something.
When either of those two stop conditions come about, the project goes sour
on me. If it was actually finished, I hate it for what I should have done and
neglected to do before calling it 'finished'. If I didn't manage to finish
it, I get mad at whatever reason stopped me and lament what I never got to
complete.
Perhaps I'm too much of a perfectionist, but as a result I despise all my
work mere minutes after it's 'done'.
The one project that, for me, I still have an ounce of pride left in is the
FrikBot,
it also helps that it remains my most famous project. I value it the most
because it's simple, comprehensive and relatively complete.
What Quake project by a creative mind other than yourself is your favourite?
I love almost all of MauveBib and his brother Harb!inger's work, especially
Defeat In Detail.
I once tried to join the
ELF
team to assist in creating DiD, but for some reason they turned me down.
What is your favourite way to play Quake, eg: mod, gametype, map, engine,
opponents, teammates?
I seldom actually play standard Quake much anymore. The majority of the
times I actually fire the game up if because I'm testing some modification
for myself
or someone I'm helping. The mods I enjoy change rapidly. Mods I actually
sit and play are few and far between. The last one I really spent any real time
on was Wazat's brilliant mod,
Conquest.
As far as gametype, I've always been a big fan of cooperative, as I state
previously. When you can hear and see the other player's screen as I can with
I play with my brother, deathmatch is out of the question, however, that
ability is helpful in coop.
My engine of choice is
DarkPlaces.
LordHavoc has done a wonderful job with the engine. Days after the source
code release I started on plans for my 'modder's engine', which had a vast list
of planned features. For years I had been living with the limitation of
QuakeC and the Quake engine holding me back from the games I really wanted
to work
on. When the source release came out I realized I could engineer away these
limitations and work free from the burden. After a number of false starts,
I began to notice LordHavoc's engine was rapidly not only becoming the best
looking engine out there, but also the most modder friendly.
So my favorite way to play is a good coop game with DP, even though that
seldom happens these days.
Over all your years of gaming, what game other than Quake have you liked
the most?
I've enjoyed many many games, and have modded for a few. The game I
probably enjoy the most beside Quake is Neverwinter Nights by Bioware. It's
a great
RPG, that with the addition of the prestige class pack from the Player
Resource Consortium, it is nearly endlessly replayable. I go for the hack
and slash
and the strategy of building a character, not so much the 'role playing',
however. To the uninitiated, the role playing refers to you pretending to be
an elf or a dwarf and acting and speaking as such within the gameworld. It
is a major no-no on some servers to speak out of character.
The reason the communities of Quake and NWN simply don't get along is the
Quakers recognize their game is a game. It's a fun, bloody contest, the story
and depth of character is nearly non-existent. By contrast, some of the
Neverwinter Nights community see the game mechanics of what they're playing as
a tool to tell stories. Quakers largely think of NWN as boring, filled with
text and with little actual gameplay. The fans of NWN, on the other hand
picture
all players of First Person Shooters as, well, the worst CS players you can
imagine. Both of these generalizations are at times true but also completely
unfair.
And now a few questions suggested by the community. What's your favourite
Quake-related memory?
The time I deathmatched with Kryten and Menagerie from the Inside3D forums.
I fired up GameSpy and was browsing the list of servers, and happened across
two names I recognized. I joined the game just as they were wrapping up and
hardly got a word in edgewise, I think the chat was, in between random acts
of gibbing, "Hey, it's me from the forums at Inside3D!", "who?", "FrikaC!"
"oh, you, what do you want?" "n...nothing, just hi" "hi" but for some reason
I still remember that night fondly.
What do you think about the Quake community nowadays?
I think it's tired. I know I sure am. The modders have been nearly
eradicated, while there's still a strong player and mapper base, the
modders are biting
the dust left and right. I think it's because modders are generally
ambitious, they want to make full games with each idea they've come up
with. While
you can do that with Quake, especially now that the engine source code is
out, the problem now is there's newer games our there with full open source
code.
If you want to turn your mod into a full game, and most modders do, it
becomes advantageous to use the latest engine to gain the graphical
advantages it
brings.
You are a veteran Quake coder. What are your plans for the future, and what
are you developing now?
My plans for the future revolve around another kind of engine I'm
developing called MAGE. Which is an acronym for the mindArt (my made-up
company) Game
Engine. It's the engine behind
Qake,
which I released during the last QExpo, designed to be a generic 2d tile
based game engine with a QuakeC like virtual machine.
Have you thought about Quake's 10th anniversary and
QExpo,
and if so, what are your plans for it?
I've thought about it a lot. I've been so busy as of late, I haven't had a
chance to whip up even a simple Quake mod for it, but as the deadline
approaches,
I'm sure to come up with and code something for it. Maybe a new release of
Qake will be in order by then, but I'm sure the community is probably already
getting sick of it.
I guess you agree that releasing Quake stuff under GPL has been a good
thing after all. But do you think there are some disadvantages this step
brought
to Quake? Do you think they should have released more or less stuff from
Quake under that license? Where do you think Quake could be (in the best
possible
case) if id software didn't do that?
In my circles, the releasing of Quake, it's tools and it's engine under the
GPL was never, ever considered a 'bad thing'. There was concern among some
programmers
out of the QuakeWorld community needing to suffer from cheats that could
arise, but the proxies of the previous generation had showed that very little
could be done, even when you had complete control over all the
communication back and forth to the client.
For me, I almost always play in tight groups where we know there are no
cheaters, on mods where cheating would be pointless anyway. So yes, the release
of all that code to the public and the abilities it gave us coders was
almost always seen positively. I see very few real disadvantages from it.
As far as should they have released more or less things under the GPL?
Well, there's quite a few tools that I wished were GPL, such as Worldcraft
1.6 and
others, but id has no control over any of those. Realistically, I don't see
what more they could have gpl'd. They map sources would be interesting, but
more or less a novelty. They could help one or two
retexturing/
etc. projects, but they really don't help the modder community much.
Releasing the rest of the content as GPL is going to become kind of moot as
projects such as
OpenQuartz
fill the gap. So I think releasing more under GPL is kind of pointless, and
releasing less would not have been feasible. The things gpl'd were Quake,
QuakeWorld
and the basic tools. If they never released the engines we would have never
had any of the good fortune that has brought, and if they had never released
the tools, new games based on the engine would be up shitcreek without a
paddle.
How do you pronounce xhrl?
"
Ecks Hurl". I derive that from my pronounciation of URL, "Yurl", and yes, I
know that it should probably be "Earl" or something similar, but yurl just
sounds
funnier.
Any last words?
Zug tug.
vb
--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.3.2/293 - Release Date: 3/26/2006
_______________________________________________
AGRIP-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.agrip.org.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/agrip-discuss
