Recent Posts

Some clarification about how to make GPL-compatible tribute maps...

A GPL remake is a remake that follows the GPL license. It seems a bit complicated, but the key points to remember is that any package under GPL must follow four freedoms:
- freedom to use the package
- freedom to modify the package/create derivatives
- freedom to redistribute the original package
- freedom to redistribute the modified/derived result
And in order to achieve that, in addition to the map itself, there should be a license file and the sources of the assets (.xcf or .psd for images, .map for the BSP, etc.) either packed with the file or in a separate file.

Further expanding:

You have to redo the map geometry from scratch. While you shouldn't deviate too much from the original layout, you don't need to make the new map a 1:1 exact copy of the original... you can go to make it very similar, but without the need to check the exact size of each brush of the original bsp...
About textures/shaders, you can use those included in stock OA 0.8.8... plus add your own or even third party, but you have to be sure they are GPLv2 compatible (licensed under GPLv2+, Public Domain or CC-0 by their original authors). For better following the license, you should provide "sources" (e.g. xcf, psd) of your multilayer images. Also shader code is subject to copyright.

Counting also the hidden ones, OA 0.8.8 includes something like 50 maps (I don't remember the number now), and their textures and shaders are there for you, to be used directly or to be used as a starting point for creating your own gpl assets.
You can't reuse q3a or ut99 textures... but you can use oa textures! Tributes need to recall the original maps in layout, but texturing is up to your taste!
You can also create copies of the textures from OACMP Volume 1, if you wish, as they are GPL.

About pk3 models to be placed into the map, you cannot reuse those which came with q3radiant installation, but if you wish you can make your own using programs such as Blender or Maverick Model 3D...
However, IMHO you don't really need to include additional pk3 models or sounds in order to make a good map. :-)

Some links you may find useful:
- Garux's "NetRadiant Custom" fork (updated map editor. Of course there are also other editors supporting OA maps.)
-- NetRadiant Custom "releases" (downloads)
- OpenArena gamepack for the editor (works with NetRadiant 1.5, GTK Radiant 1.5, and I don't know if also something else)
-- Gamepack direct download zip (extract "games" and "oa.game" into your NetRadiant folder. Should also include a default "shaderlist.txt" that you can use to start from -usually goes into baseoa folder-.)
- OACMP Volume 1 v3 download in case you wish to reuse (copy) some of its assets, as they are GPL.

[June 1st. - Deadline for volunteers]

Hello everyone. This post is just to remind that, according to the rules pages linked in the first post...

June 1st. - Deadline for volunteers

So, who else is interested into creating one or more maps for this mappack, please express your interest soon!

Discussions about it can happen in this post or in the Discord server.

custom maps are in

Just for the record, today I hard reset-ed my phone... and while Play Store told that OpenArena was large so it would have only downloaded it under wifi (and I was under wifi), after downloading it looked like only 16 MB, and at first startup it looked like it downloaded stuff with its download engine...
... but I was busy doing other things, I didn't actually check downloading times of the two phases...

Yeah people got sloppy with their passwords, either choosing an easily guessed password, or using the same username and password on multiple sites and one of those sites (like a forum) got compromised allowing access to something more important (a git repo).

[Source:]

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/attackers-wiping-github-and-gitlab-repos-leave-ransom-notes/
Attackers Wiping GitHub and GitLab Repos, Leave Ransom Notes

Attackers are targeting GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket users, wiping code and commits from multiple repositories according to reports and leaving behind only a ransom note and a lot of questions.

The targets who had their repos compromised use multiple Git-repository management platforms, with the only other connection between the reports besides Git being that the victims were using the cross-platform SourceTree free Git client [1, 2, 3, 4].

While BleepingComputer couldn't get in touch with Atlassian, the company behind Bitbucket and SourceTree, one user supposedly received a statement from the company saying that:

"Within the past few hours, we detected and blocked an attempt — from a suspicious IP address — to log in with your Atlassian account. We believe that someone used a list of login details stolen from third-party services in an attempt to access multiple accounts."

After infiltrating the victims' repo and wiping out all commit history, the attackers will only leave behind one commit named 'WARNING' containing a single file with the following contents (the ransom note):

This "warning" ransom note asked victims to send a 0.1 BTC, which equivalent to roughly $568, in order get their data back.

To recover your lost code and avoid leaking it: Send us 0.1 Bitcoin (BTC) to our Bitcoin address 1ES14c7qLb5CYhLMUekctxLgc1FV2Ti9DA and contact us by Email at admin@gitsbackup.com with your Git login and a Proof of Payment. If you are unsure if we have your data, contact us and we will send you a proof. Your code is downloaded and backed up on our servers. If we dont receive your payment in the next 10 Days, we will make your code public or use them otherwise.

On the BitcoinAbuse platform, the Bitcoin address used by the attackers already has 27 reports, with the first report having been filed on May 2.

However, when searching for it on GitHub we found 392 impacted repositories which got all their commits and code wiped using the 'gitbackup' account which joined the platform seven years ago, on January 25, 2012.

Despite that, none of the victims have paid the ransom the hackers have asked for, seeing that the Bitcoin address received only 0.00052525 BTC on May 3 via a single transaction, which is the equivalent of roughly $2.99.

There are no details at the moment on how the attackers were able to get access to their victims' accounts but, as one StackExchange user said, even though he had 2FA enabled, he "never got a text message indicating they had a successful brute login."

One report states that GitHub has been suspending accounts and investigating after the attacks have been detected: "GitHub suspended my account last night whilst they investigate, I should hopefully hear from them today. I might have just been lucky."

Additionally, while GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket haven't yet issued any statements regarding the ongoing attack, the users have been scrambling trying to find a solution to fix the issue, with an ongoing discussion being available HERE and a possible fix in this StackExchange post.

GitLab got back to BleepingComputer with the following response from the company's Director of Security Kathy Wang:

We identified the source based on a support ticket filed by Stefan Gabos yesterday, and immediately began investigating the issue. We have identified affected user accounts and all of those users have been notified. As a result of our investigation, we have strong evidence that the compromised accounts  have account passwords being stored in plaintext on a deployment of a related repository. We strongly encourage the use of password management tools to store passwords in a more secure manner, and enabling two-factor authentication wherever possible, both of which would have prevented this issue.

Atlassian also provided a comment saying that they are "contacting all impacted Bitbucket Cloud users with the following statement. Only users impacted by this are getting the communication:"

Bitbucket Cloud Security Advisory: Unauthorized Access to your Repository

We are contacting you because your Bitbucket Cloud repository was recently accessed and deleted by an unauthorized third party.
We are in the process of restoring your repository and expect it to be restored within the next 24 hours.
We believe that this was part of a broader attack against several git hosting services, where repository contents were deleted and replaced with a note demanding the payment of ransom.
During this attack, a third party accessed your repository by using the correct username and password for one of the users with permission to access your repository. We believe that these credentials may have been leaked through another service, as other git hosting services are experiencing a similar attack.
We have not detected any other compromise of Bitbucket.
We have proactively reset passwords for those compromised accounts to prevent further malicious activity. We will also work with law enforcement in any investigation that they pursue.
We encourage you and your team members to reset all other passwords associated with your Bitbucket account. In addition, we recommend enabling 2FA on your Bitbucket account.
If you have any questions or would like further assistance, please contact our support.

Sincerely,
The Bitbucket Team

A GitHub spokesperson also got back to us with an official statement:

GitHub has been thoroughly investigating these reports, together with the security teams of other affected companies, and has found no evidence GitHub.com or its authentication systems have been compromised. At this time, it appears that account credentials of some of our users have been compromised as a result of unknown third-party exposures. We are working with the affected users to secure and restore their accounts. We encourage all developers and customers to use two-factor authentication and strong and unique login passwords as a standard practice.

[g_harvesterFromBodies <0 or 1>]

I just noticed this thread has not been updated after the code has been merged into master.

So, for the record, the feature is available in gamecode nighly builds (for testing as OAX mod) since some months.

The setting is g_harvesterFromBodies <0 or 1>.

0 = Classic TA behavior: skulls spawn at generator. Default.
1 = "From bodies": (like some other games "greed", collect" modes) skulls spawn where characters die. In case they end up in a "nodrop" area (e.g. inside a deadly pit), they will re-appear at the generator.

Okay. No problem, that was just a thought.

Thank you for the explanation.

[No.]

No.  This was on my NOTTODO.  


i'd prefer not to step on any Zenimax toes at all especially as QL is a paid product. QL's paks are encrypted for a reason.


The majority of the maps on the workshop are generally stolen from sites like LvL anyway.  There's very few original authors there (and those very few submit q3 versions of their maps to LvL, so)

[I was skeptical at first]

First, as usual let me say that the idea may be stupid. However let's say it anyway, this forum section is here for this...

Hi! Yesterday a guy on Discord told me about how to make a Quake Live map load into OA.

In case you are interested, I'll sum it up here:

1) Get a QL map pk3 file (there is at least one website which allows you to download files from Steam Workshop -a place where you can find third party QL maps- without the need to log into Steam. I don't link it here because I'm not sure it's 100% legal.).
2) Open the .bsp file in it with a Hexadecimal editor (such as HxD hex editor).
3) Locate the "2F" (47) in the top line (probably at offset 4) and change it to "2E" (46), and save the file.
4) As the modify you just made to the .bsp causes the .aas (bot navigation file) to be considered "outdated", if you wish to play with bots you need to update/recreate .aas using BSPC tool (like "bspc -forcesidesvisible -optimize -threads 4 -bsp2aas mapname.bsp"... if you are a mapper, you know). Maybe there is some way to manually tweak the .aas file instead, but I don't know.
5) Update the .pk3 with your custom .bsp and .aas files.
6) Load the map in the game. You should not receive "CM_LOADMAP: MAPS/MAPNAME.BSP HAS WRONG VERSION NUMBER (47 SHOULD BE 46)" anymore.

I was skeptical at first, but I personally tried it with three maps, and they more or less turned out to work.
- The first map (kidcooler) clearly was using all custom textures, so no texture missing. But bspc took a long time to run, showed a lot of warnings about bevels and mergewindings and at the end failed due to running out of space for reachings. Compiling without "-forcesidesvisible" created the .aas file instead, but then the bots would not move unless they were seeing an enemy.
- The second map (aerospace) easily compiled .aas file and bots seem to navigate quite well. I was surprised to see that it had very little missing textures, it looks like I've been lucky with it.
- The third map (wintersedge) easily compiled .aas file and bots seem to navigate quite well. But it showed a lot of missing textures (opting for a snowy-themed map backfired, it seems. However also with those from q3a, you can find some maps which show many mssing textures. And OA3 will have that "auto missing texture replacement system" which may mitigate the problem.).
Of course, no QL-specific items showed up (e.g. no green armor +25), but the maps seemed actually playable anyway (apart from the problems I mentioned above). Although the process to make them work, while not so hard, still isn't actually comfortable for average users.

To come to the topic title... the "idea" is "what about doing a test allowing the game to also load version 47 maps, then try more third party QL maps to see if they would work well or not?" In case the results are acceptable, maybe one may consider keeping the feature (although maybe still mentioning it's not an official supported feature and one would use it at his own risk), or remove it otherwise?
I don't know if that would be an engine or gamecode thing, however it should be a very little change.
Note: the fact that so many descriptions of this list of maps (I think various were converted from Q3 to QL^[1]) mention "bot working" makes me fear that QL bots files may not be completely compatible with Q3... but I can't tell for sure, I have no idea about how to test at the moment. I don't know about the process/the tools used to create maps for QL, and for my tests above I simply used the BSPC version I use for OA maps.

I don't know how the licensing of third party QL maps works... but probably, shouldn't be so different than using the old (pre-gpl) Q3 maps and mods in something different than Q3 (and hey, QL maps probably are even made using GPL tools nowadays, I don't know). Of course, I would point out that users would do that at their own risk.


^[1] Of course if a Q3 version of a certain map exists, it should be better to use that one instead.