We want to give a big THANKS to everyone who supported our game during the last few months. The game has indeed been Greenlit by the Steam community and we are in the process of forging the next chapter of RQ3.

For those who don't follow us on Facebook, here is something to get you up to speed. In our recent update (click on that link, you don't need a Facebook account to see the update), we announced our Steam Greenlight campaign for Reaction. Go check it out and vote for us. Mucho appreciato.

And here are some important snippets from our Greenlight page:

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Hey Everyone!

Thanks for all the support in helping us to get Reaction onto Steam! We really appreciate it!

We're in the middle of updating Reaction to version 1.1, which introduces a bugfix for off-server http download code [among other things] and stable versions for all three major operating systems: Windows, Linux and OSX.

Once we have that update ready, we'll be launching servers in multiple locations to get everyone up and running as well as a server guide for those interested in hosting their own servers. So stay tuned for that!

If you'd like to help out in any areas - please feel free to post in the discussion area!

Thanks again and stay tuned, we're just getting this party started!

Hubba hubba!

So as people have figured out by now, this is in fact a beta and we've got some rough edges. This falls into two categories: 1, the gameplay can be tweaked. 2, the video requirements are KILLER.

For 1, please keep mentioning stuff you find either in comments here or in comments on facebook. Ideally you'd enter them into Bugzilla, but any way we can get feedback is good with us!

For 2, it seems like we're under siege about the video requirements; we're on deadly ground for having our glimmer man draw from the fire down below like a patriot (even though he's a foreigner) to stuff more graphic goodies in the game. Some of our fans are out for justice, but we can't act like we're marked for death or we'll end up half past dead. After working on a game for a decade, I think it's easy to see that we're hard to kill. In light of that, I'm going to make the executive decision that you'll want a Geforce 8800 or better or a Radeon 3650 or better to enjoy Reaction. You may be able to get lesser video cards to work, but no guarantees. Intel video? That might just be exit wounds when it comes to Reaction.

To help make things easier for everyone, I humbly request that players take a few demos every so often. Best when on a full server, of course. Just one or two maps, ya know? ZIP 'em up and email them to me. We'll pick out one or two demos that seem to be good for benchmarks like the old Quake "timedemo" stuff. Then we can start getting feedback on which video cards are good to go and which ones totally suck. You can hit me up at monk@rq3.com so I can learn all your secrets, err, I mean so we can pick a nice, taxing demo to distribute as "reactiontimedemo" or something of the sort. Also, heck, we may use some clips for promo material like a trailer! Ya never know! :D

So to sum up, if you run an Intel Atom with built-in video or have a really weak nvidia 8400 GS, well, Reaction might be a bit too much to handle. Quake 3 ran fine on those because Q3 did most of the video rendering on the CPU, not the GPU. SmileTheory's rewritten chunks of the renderer to use features on the GPU. This lets us make more pretty stuff and also do more with less of an fps hit. May be hard to accept, but if it was still all being rendered on the CPU with the new effects, even a new Geforce 680 would be popping out single digit fps.

We'll see what we can do to tweak things to at least work on lower-end video, but no promises.

The servers are pretty much all in Europe so if you're in North America, your pings might not be too hot. I think zakk from ioquake3 might have a North American server set up but I'm not sure.

For some criticism of gameplay, well, if you're going to criticize Action Quake 2, the gameplay that Reaction is based off of, yeah, of course you're going to find fault with Reaction! Such things are bound to happen. :) Can't climb ladders in LCA? If so, that's a bug that should be looked at. We'll take any and all criticism and suggestions into account though, hey, some things might not be changed, gameplay-wise, for a vocal minority. If you run into an issue where the map auto-restarts when the round is supposed to begin, well, that should have been fixed? I guess let us know if you're running into it. Maybe it's a Linux-only thing?

OS X, yeah, we're planning on this but no one on the team (except for the guy who did the original unauthorized Q3 port to iPhone, yeah Blaze, I'm lookin' at YOU) really does Mac programmin'. So we'll get to it when we can.

Other random stuff I've seen since release... yeah, you can get juggled when shot. Some default button assignments can be better, I think. You can customize the crosshair though I thought we did something different for SSG zoom to obscure outside the scope. I'll have to check. The game should work fine on WinXP and if you get errors about GL_ARB_blah stuff, that's related to the video card and how old it is or what it supports, that kinda thing. So you won't need to update to Windows 7 to play the game though you may need a more recent video card (just make sure it has XP drivers before you get it, if you go that route!) Our Bugzilla should be workin'? If not, please let us know in the comments here!

Thanks again for your patience and the time you spent to check us out! We're workin' to improve things!

I mean, come on, really. It's not like in the past we've messed around with our fans in any way whatsoever.

It's not like we would promise something for a decade, that's TEN YEARS, and then just release the windows package, 64-bit linux package, 32-bit linux package, and source code on April Fools Day, right?

What're the odds that we'd want you to please check our buglist and comment to say if any are still valid bugs or even to add new bugs that you discover in the Bugzilla under the "beta 1" version so we could keep track of this stuff?

It's been so long that we've strung you along that this HAS to be yet another prank, right? We wouldn't want you to report your fps and video cards in the comments section or forums to make sure performance is ok with all the eyecandy turned on, that'd be just plain crazy!

We sure as hell wouldn't want you to enjoy yourselves with a beta 1 release and promise to include more maps in a beta 2 release as we get them revamped for the new renderer. And imply that a Mac version was also on the way. No, that'd just be a total April Fools joke. Totally!

Word on the street is that id has gotten tired of running the Q3 master servers. You can always use a different one! For now, try:

http://www.rq3.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2431

Spread word to server ops. At least the rq3 and ioquake3 ones should be around for a while in case Zippy gets tired of hosting his own! (and if it is a home connection I would not want him flooded with traffic, etc.) :)

master.rq3.com
master.ioquake3.org

Doh! Sorry 'bout that, been craaaaazy with RL stuff. Either that or I've been lazy and apparently no one else knows how to post news (glares at the other people who do know how to post news)!

First order of business, you'll get more updates using this thing that I hear the kids are into nowadays called "Face Book" or something like that.

http://www.facebook.com/reactionq3/

I don't actually use social media very much so I'll probably still use this as a platform for random updates. That being said, we've been making sideways progress. Sideways? Ayup! With the random free time of everyone involved, we've enlisted the help of SmileTheory to basically port the renderer improvements that Makro came up with into the renderer that SmileTheory's got sitting in the ioquake3 "features to include Soon(TM)" bin, more or less. This makes it easier not only for us to keep up-to-synch with the ioquake3 code when improvements are made there but also it's easier when random parts of the team disappear for a while due to RL needs.

I think the renderer is just about there for the Reaction-specific features. Plus, SmileTheory of course has many other features that he came up with himself or ported from XReaL or ETXReaL or whatever it's called now. Hopefully we'll have a release this year. We're close. Golly but we're close!

I'll try to catch up on some of the email and video links that popped my way though it's not as easy (or fun) to update the Vault with links. Was a tad easier 10 years ago when the site was more like a CMS instead of now when I have to do it all by hand (Vault, Guild, Backlot). This site's fine but the other three are kinda limpin' along.

Thanks for keeping us in the back of your mind! We appreciate that our fans are still anticipating the next release! :D