id tech 3 games support

[befno]

Well, I didnt know where else to put this thread, please anyone in charge move it to the appropiate area if it doesnt fit here.  Recently Ive been looking into other quake3 based games, since I am interested in id games and id powered games in general.  It seems like other than q3, oa, and the wolfenstein games, there is little to no online activity in quake3 based games. Anyone know if there are people still gaming online any of those games, like for example, heavy metal fakk2, and is there anything from them worth porting over?

[MIOW]

e.g.

http://dpmaster.deathmask.net/?game=tremulous&showplayers=1

http://dpmaster.deathmask.net/?game=urbanterror&showplayers=1

[Udi]

MIOW started to list the free (free as in beer, but some of them is open source) games based on the id Tech 3. You may have a little more luck with them, since they're free:

• Reacton Quake 3
• Smokin' Guns
• World of Padman
• Plus Tremulous and Urban Terror MIOW mentioned before

You could try some of the commercial games which are still available through Steam or other ways:

• Call of Duty
• Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy
• Return to Castle Wolfeinstein

The other id Tech 3 games either does not have multiplayer, or you can only purchase them on CDs. There's a full list of them on Wikipedia.

[fromhell]

There's still an Elite Force crowd believe it or not.

Medal of Honor Allied Assault is STILL ridiculously popular.

The games you mentioned i.e. FAKK2 use Ubertools, which is licensable from Ritual and was never GPLed. Many games use this extension set (Alice, MOHAA, Elite Force2) for a better single player gameplay, skeletal stuff, path nodes for npcs, event triggers, even the interface (it's not a Team Arena menu script)

[Udi]

The games you mentioned i.e. FAKK2 use Ubertools, which is licensable from Ritual and was never GPLed.

Is that the reason why the games using it aren't available on any digital purchasing site?

[fromhell]

The reason is that Ritual's non-SiN games are purely license tie-ins that have their deals expired too, presumably (especially for EF2, that one barely sold at all, ritual's biggest flop ever, considering it went in beta almost-finished in Dec 2002 they still had time to release it long enough before the Paramount thing)

Ritual also changed their business to strictly catering casual gaming now.

You can still buy Alice and the MOHAA series.

Another thing i've noticed with ubertools games is that they disable overbrightbits (one of the best features in idtech 3). Enabling them apparently does color glitches on menus and tik particles

Ubertools also comes with DDS texture support which is patented, as well as BIK and MP3 playback which are of course big-nonos. There's also FTX support, probably added in 1999 when 3dfx was still relevant coming out with their own open source texture compression. No game ever used FTX afaik.

[befno]

Yeah, I was mostly asking about the commercial games, not the GPL source derived free ones.  I have most of them, they're pretty good. 

Is there really an Elite Force Crowd? I havent been able to find anything besides bot matches on their servers. Pity.  Since I think it was the first game that used the quake3 license its mp is very similar, to not say identical, to quake3's.  Is that crowd bigger than the jedi knight games' crowd? I dont know much about them, but I would assume online matches with a flashing sword would be completely annoying.  I tried MOHAA, didn't like it very much.  I think wolfenstein plays better for some reason. 

So, all quake3 games that used Ubertools would you say are less popular online because of that?  Havent played fakk2 online, but i assume it would be like heretic 2, since it's 3rd person.  And, does Ubertools make easier to mod for the games it's enabled on? It was touted as providing much better and easier system for making custom content.

[fromhell]

Ubertools is popularily used for streamlining development for single player campaigns with NPC ai, nodes, scripted events, and the like. It's similar to Raven's ICARUS for Elite Force, Soldier of Fortune 2 and Jedi Outcast. There was no multiplayer support with it in the earlier Uber titles, that starts with MOHAA in Dec 2001

[befno]

Ubertools is popularily used for streamlining development for single player campaigns with NPC ai, nodes, scripted events, and the like. It's similar to Raven's ICARUS for Elite Force, Soldier of Fortune 2 and Jedi Outcast. There was no multiplayer support with it in the earlier Uber titles, that starts with MOHAA in Dec 2001

Great, thank you for the information! SoF2 is another somewhat populated game nowadays, although sometimes it tends to look too much like urban terror.  It's interesting that MOHAA is still the most popular MoH title, much more so than the later titles that have now 0 activity.