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!

This is becoming a king of duke nukem forever =p

Your bacK? get back to work :P

Haha. Hey, now it is dark here in northern latitudes so it's time to kick some ass. C'mon, if it more or less just works (no deps to the original Q3 data packs) and the licensing things are worked out, then just release it already "as it was in v3.2" and add additional polish and love later! It's more important to release 80% now than 100% never. So, are there any Big Issues (tm) left that are really showstoppers before packaging it up and putting it down the wire? I see that there's only one critical bug in the bug tracker currently, and I presume it is one that can be fixed for now by setting some kind of max limit to the fps. While would be surely a nice technological feat to allow unlimited fps, it doesn't add anything to the actual gameplay (not many displays (good old CRTs) can update the screen that fast, let alone I think it is hard for us humans to notice any difference above ~100Hz frame rate). I believe this happens with the current version...

(gack the word limit and linefeeds...) ---- Remember that it is still you that are controlling the main distribution channel and the source repository, so if you open up the source now, you could be also controlling the effort to clean up the source as well. I'm sure there would be more interest in the public to do this, if the source was available. It may be hard to open up the code you have worked on and taken care of so long, but still you get to choose what goes in the main distro. ---- Hell, name another game that has as good, fast paced and networked gameplay and is runnable on modest hardware... Maybe there are some, but this is the one I like most. ---- It's great that you as a team are still keeping the project alive! Enormous props for that! It is much appreciated. Whatever you choose to do, I hope that your efforts will flourish. ---- peace out

I agree with jusic, and there also is no other game that satisfies me in a way that this game does when i play it. Maybe it's nostalgy, what do i know? But the fact is that I've been looking for a replacement (as other friends of mine) for quite some time now (due to the lack of server/players in rq3) but without success. This game has a unique feel to the gameplay that no other game just does not have. Personally I hold that high and think that "unique fast pace humorous gameplay feel thingy to it" should not be taken for granted. Allthough there are other "action" games (like aq2) out there, but i still feel that rq3 is the best. Maybe I am a minority? I don't really know. :P

I've got balls of steel!!

Yeah, actually, part of it is wanting to get some type of framework in place for distribution of source, "official" binaries, and stuff like maps and models and such. That's also part of the holdup--hard to get someone who can either fix our current sites or make a new one who we can trust or who we already know. Maybe I can try calling in a favor with Blaze. ;) We have the sites already done but we lost ONE critical file that all the PHP looks to for common functions. For some reason it was never backed up and when we migrated servers, it never went with us. I know that if we release without having something in place, any efforts to make new stuff or improve things will kind of be random. Now that we are using Q3 GPL code, our next release will have to have the source, too, so we do need to have something better ready to go first. Frustrating!

jopes: try TF2: lot old aq2 and rq3? players are moves to that one. I must say its diffrent but much funnier!

Stop bull*beep*ting and make the game. another stupid topic , You have been making this game since i was a little kid . Now it's time to publish it ....

Well, let's get something straight. RQ3 3.2 has been released for YEARS now. If you own a legal copy of Quake 3, you can play it. It's a fact that we had the most players during the time the id Q3 auth servers were down during an office move for the better part of a year. Once a valid key was required again for all players, most of our playerbase evaporated overnight. So in a way, we've been chipping away at this over the last few years to give those who are still interested a completely free way to play. Most of the team had moved on years ago to other games and projects. I can understand your frustration--it's not much easier for us! But while your enthusiasm is commendable, I can't help but notice you're not very positive or inspirational in your suggestion that we just, you know, finish it. Just sayin'.

Bah, we just want that game. I can't understand how stupid games like counterstrike make it to the top and how pure awesomeness like rq3 starts evaporating slowly....

it's not that we're not inspirational or positive monk, but some of us check this website twice a day and every time there's an update my reading speed increases to 10words/sec, just to get disappointed every time. heh i'm more anxious about rq3 standalone than i'm anxious about starcraft 2.

Work MOAR FASTAR!

Hello! gbgfdck interesting gbgfdck site!

Very nice site!