Some minor updates to these:

http://backlot.rq3.com/
http://vault.rq3.com/


Oh look, I found enough material to create this:

http://guild.rq3.com


I slightly updated the docs and majorly updated the contact information section:

http://www.rq3.com/docs/


Holiday time for me in the US so things are gettin' busy. I'm thinking of writing up a design doc for what the website news/content system should be in case we find a web programmer with enough free time at some point in the future. Rather than me pining away for "just make it pretty!" it would be nice to actually give something solid for someone to work on.

The docs will need revamping and I'll work on that as I start to get a better idea of where we're at with Reaction. I need to collect all the content we have and get associated license text for it, figure out how to do that sanely as some content will be under Creative Commons, some will not. It's mainly finding the time to get our ducks in a row with all of that.

As mentioned, we have SVN set up for when we do our release, so that's a load off the mind. We also have a bugzilla bug tracking system which should be handy. Our forums were upgraded and I have even approved a new user! Yay! Might be a spambot anyway, but it wasn't an obvious one if so. Sorry for being silent for like 2 weeks, took a bit of time to get some permissions sorted out on the website so that I could actually update some of this stuff! Maybe I'll jack around with TTI's XML main site here and add some permanent links on the left side to bugzilla and the satellite sites. I'd say that that shouldn't be hard but the last time I did something like that, I broke our download page! Not my fault, it was an old version of some file! I swears it!

That's about it for now. Mainly unexciting behind-the-scenes stuff I'm working on at the moment. Once that's squared away, there should be nothing holding back from a "legal" or "infrastructure" standpoint. I know, I know, boring stuff and you just want a release already! But I think it's important to have the info there and ready to go. :D

Thank you again for all your patience with all of this!

Well, so what have I been up to? I tolds ya I wanted to get some of the websites working again.

So I did.

http://backlot.rq3.com/
http://vault.rq3.com/

There's a slight issue with permissions (I'm guessing) for displaying the manuals for each respective site, but hopefully that will be resolved in short order. I basically recreated the sites from the broken PHP to static HTML 4 (sorry TTI, no XML!)

Took a while and some content was lost to a mySQL db that either no longer exists or we no longer have a user/pass to for these sites, but I think it worked out well enough.

The Guild is next though I'm not 100% sure how long that will take. It has the disadvantage of having never actually been completed and I don't think I can get a general idea of what was there from the Internet Archive. Once that's done, next up is upgrading our forums to the latest phpBB and putting on some better anti-bot CAPTCHA stuff so we don't get 50 or so bot registrations per day. No, seriously, even years later we're still getting that many on a daily basis!

EDIT: JBravo upgraded our phpBB to the latest and we have newer CAPTCHAs enabled so hopefully that will cut down on the spambots. I just sent out a giant spam mail to announce that to all forum members.

To make it less of a herculean task to update the sites after I bring them back to life, I might end up partly reconverting them to PHP at least for a "header" and "footer" like the old PHP version of the sites used to do. We'll see how that goes.

I am afraid I am no longer confident that we'll release before the year is out; I was highly optimistic many a month ago, but hey, things didn't happen. I'm still committed to getting this released so I'm chugging away at what I can do when I get the time for it. Thanks again for your patience! I'm glad I can at least finally show you some tangible progress!

So the satellite sites are a lost cause. The PHP is right screwed. Too many missing files. I'll end up writing some type of placeholders in regular HTML to get something in place and maybe someday we'll get a bit more of an automated system in place.

I also need to sucker someone into upgrading our forums to PHPBB3. Then finally deciding on what anti-spam junk to install so I can open up registrations again. I know it's not hard to do, but I just jacked up our downloads page (TTI fix pls thnx) so I know not to trust myself with it!

SVN and a bugtracking system are already in place, so that part's good to go at least.

Anyway, that's the current push for me, getting the web infrastructure finally working like it should.

Me either!

Sorry for the lack of news updates, it's been a busy summer here in the northern latitudes (/me waves to the oz and nz readers!) and I've just been slacking. I apologize!

We got a nice bloke who was working on actually updating the Quake 3 rendering system, sort of like how ioUrT did it except when we opensourced we'd actually, you know, release our source for that for others to use. So not as ambitious as XreaL's improvements but something that would still allow for higher complexity in maps. The coder used to work with Blaze at Hermitworks on SpaceTrader and that video of Q3 ported to the iPhone y'all saw about a year or two ago.

Well, both good and bad news, he got busy with a new job. Good for him but bad for us in the sense that we have some of the work done to offload 3D rendering from CPU to the GPU with fancy words like VBOs, GLSL, HLSL, and other things that I only get a vague gist of.

Most of the semi-active team has kind of been busy the last few months. Me doing nothing productive, TTI working on the UI pretty much solo, Makro busy with his job, JBravo busy with his job, Blaze busy with his job, our current sound guy is... well, he's busy but we don't have any current sound work needing to be done so that's no problem. One bloke who was going to redo some of our web stuff ended up not having enough time due to... too much work at his job. While on one hand I'm like, "dammit!" on the other hand, with the worldwide economy kind of sucking right now, I'm glad so many people associated with Reaction are at least working!

A short while ago a bloke named steve submitted some bug reports:

http://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4294
http://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4293
http://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4190

Thank you very much for taking the time to submit those, steve! We'll have to check them out. I had been avoiding doing much testing for a while with Reaction because my 3D card was having problems. Heating issue. I removed the stock heatsink because it had a wire that the fan kept hitting, was driving me nuts! So I figure, no sound is best, right? I got a passive cooler for my nvidia 9600GT, this sucker (pictures linked in the first post, that's not me, just an example). Worked great, my temps went down from 70+ celcius to 40-ish. Problem is, I think the RAM or VRM heatsinks didn't do enough so when I played a 3D game and it went to 53-ish celcius, the whole computer hard-locked. I finally got a fan set up to blow directly on it (the thing takes up 3 freakin' slots, 1 for the card, 1 for the heatsink, 1 for the fan mounted on it) and now it's rock-solid and I can play 3D games again.

Anyway, that's my tale of woe. I need to get back in the groove for testing and feedback so TTI doesn't feel like he's the only one working on Reaction. Now that I can actually, you know, test stuff, it should be easier. At some point I'll also see if I can sucker JBravo into merging the current ioquake3 SVN to our code as they've had a ton of closed bugs in the last few weeks and some may be beneficial to us. But I'm thinking I'll wait a bit more because some zany German named Thilo (from ioEF fame, remaking of Star Trek:Elite Force as a standalone) along with icculus himself and Timbo and several others from the ioq3 wrecking crew have been churning away at their bugzilla. Churn, baby, churn!

Again, I apologize for the lack of updates. That's totally on me. And maybe Makro because he forgot his login to the news system. Oh ho ho!

http://bugzilla.icculus.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=Reaction&content=

So, wondering what we're up to? I've finally finished migrating all known bugs and feature requests from random forum posts into a Bugzilla system gracefully provided by the blokes at ioquake3! They are having a biannual fundraiser to keep their servers humming along, so if you're interested feel free to chip in!

Anyway, if you're interested in seeing our progress, feel free to check out Bugzilla. If you notice anything that you can provide more detail on, please add an entry or if there's a bug we missed in 3.2, please make a new bug! You can also feel free to /msg me in IRC or just talk in the regular channels or email me at monk@rq3.com with any additional bugs or features you may have.

I'll get a list of who I need to get permissions from sometime and if anyone knows where to track these blokes down, please contact me or leave a comment. But that's a post for another time!

We're looking to release content under this license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

These people have given their permission (in no particular order):

Oddjob
EvilFutsin
Shmitz
Frost
Spyder
Centurion
Foxfingers
Pheles
Makro
TTI
Monk
Lognoreng
LST
Leon
Baka
guyincognito
voodoochopstiks
NicoDem-X
Hellchick
MoP
Birdman
Wiuwe
jopes
Presenter
Gimp


These people have NOT given permission:

Jesper Kyd - the music he gave to RQ3 has since been used in a commercial compilation, so while he's letting us use the music for free, it can NOT be licensed under creative commons. What this basically means that if you want to use the music yourself commercially or noncommercially, you need to contact him directly for any licensing terms. Not a problem, really!


I'm still waiting to get permission from:

Johnny Rocket - busy guy!
slatfats - email bounced, map stuff
jester - email bounced, map stuff

...

I have some other blokes I need to try emailing or contacting. I'll do another round of spamming soon and see where we stand after that!