- 7 - Weapons & Quads : last but not least,
here comes one of my favourites. In this mode, all players start with an
axe. However, each time you touch a quad, you upgrade to a more powerful
weapon
(shotgun-supershotgun-nailgun-supernailgun-grenadelaucnher-rocketlauncher-lightning).
If someone manages to grab the 8 quads, he/she's given Quad damage for a few
seconds and all quads are respawned, which means other players can try to upgrade
their weapons, too. The frag system works as follow: the more powerful the weapon
is, the less frags you get for killing someone and the more powerful your
victim's weapon is, the more frags you'll get for killing him/her. For example, if
you kill a poor chap with an axe with the lightning, you'll get one frag. If
he kills you, however, he'll get 8 frags. If he had had a rocket launcher,
then he would have got only 2. The fun part of this game-mode is that you
have to calculate whether or not you are ready to take "risks".
Upgrading to a more powerful weapon might make it easier for you to kill people but
you have to know that access to health items is denied in this mode so that,
at one time or another, you are bound to be killed and that, if you had a
powerful weapon, your opponent might get loads of frags. It's hilarious to
see people with lightning being killed by bots with axes and, believe me,
scores can change very quickly in this mode.
-
- Well ... I think that's all you need to know.
- Don't worry if you see that you are being denied
access to some features of the menu after you chose a particular alternative
game-mode. This is logical stuff, really. For example, quads are respawned
in the Quad Hunt mode, so this option is automaticaly toggled to non-default
(2) ... etc. If you see a particular option becomes unavailable after you
chose a game-mode, don't insist, it probably has a purpose.
-
- HOW DO UQC MAPS LOOK LIKE ?
-
- There are no "specific" map for UQC. Well,
not yet, anyway. However, you have to be aware that UQC DOES need particular
entities in order to run properly. For this release, you have two
possibilities: either use maps with hard-coded flagpoints or maps with
map-coded flagpoints.
-
- Hard-coded flagpoints - UQC will look for
these by default (temp1 = 0). In this case, this means the location of the
flags, quads and arch has been coded into progs.dat. In other words,
all you need to do is download the map somewhere, launch UQC, loac the map and that's it.
So far, the following maps are supported:
-
- dm7.bsp
- argonaut.bsp
- jndm6.bsp
- bsdm11.bsp
- klzinsanity.bsp
- area7.bsp
- mgdm2.bsp
- gomdm4.bsp
-
- Of course, more will come in the future. I plan to
release "updated" progs.dat files with support for more maps as
often as I can. I'll add my own "flagpoints" and of course those
people will send to me (I'll explain below how to do that). Note that it
is often better to build a FrikBot waypoint file together with the
"flagpoints". If bots move around the level better, it probably
means that they'll also play UQC better.
-
-
- Map-coded flagpoints - UQC will NOT
look for these by default. You'll have to type "temp1 1" in the
console before loading the map for these to be taken into account. In this
case, this means that the flag, quad and arch locations are contained in
the map, not the code. The advantage is here that you don't need to wait
for a UQC update to play on any map you want, since you can add the needed
entities yourself to maps.
-
- The entities are the following:
- For the flags : quad_flag1, quad_flag2,
quad_flag3, quad_flag4, quad_flag5, quad_flag6, quad_flag7, quad_flag8,
quad_flag9
- For the quads : quad1_spot, quad2_spot,
quad3_spot, quad4_spot, quad5_spot, quad6_spot, quad7_spot, quad8_spot,
quad9_spot
- For the arch : arch
-
- Add these to any map you want, and you should be
able to play UQC after setting "temp1" to 1. I decided not to include any
any of them in the UQC release because I didn't want to go to the trouble
of asking all mappers for authorization, however, I did zip a UQC and
non-UQC version of strafin5.bsp as well as elfdm4 to give you guys examples. You can
download them if you want.
-
- HOW DO WE BUILD FLAGPOINTS ?
(See Demo4.dem)
-
- Ultimate Quad Capture comes with a built-in
flagpoints editor which makes the flagpointing business a piece of cake.
- Note that there are two ways to use it. Either you
are a mapper and you can keep the log file resulting from using the editor
to simply add the UQC entities to your maps (via a program like Quark, for
example) or you are not willing to map-code the entities and will send me
the log file so that I can hard-code the flag/quad/arch locations.
- Well ... anyway ... I'm gonna show you know how to
use the editor.
-
- First of all, load up Quake with the
"-condebug" command.
- After launching Quake, you need to set
"temp1" to "2". So, before loading the map you want to
flagpoint, type "temp1 2" in the console, then load it.
- Once you have spawned, you'll see a menu.
-
-
- This
menu gives you info on the important keys of the editor. Let's start with
the following, first:
-
- [F5] - This will spawn a flag where you are and
print its location info in the console.
- [F6] - This will spawn a quad where you are and
print its location info in the console
- [F7] - This adds 22.5 degree to the angle of the next
flag you are going to spawn.
- [F8] - This sets the angle of the next flag
back to zero.
-
- As you can see, you can spawn as many flags/quads
as you want, it doesn't matter. They all dissapear after a few seconds.
They are intended as "previews", if you want.
-
- You have to follow the part of the menu that is
under the keys description. So, for example, when you start, it tells you
that the BLUE FLAG is the first entity you should find a location for. So,
move around, find a good location, press [F5] a few times and [F7]/[F8] to
set the right angle. When the last flag you spawned looks ok to you, press
[F10] as asked. This will print a message in the console log and make the
editor move to the next entity, the BLUE QUAD.
- Do with the blue quad what you have done for the
blue flag, except that you have to use [F6] and not care about angles. You
last flag should still be there (hurry before it dissapears), so stand
close to it, try a few locations by typing [F6] and, once you're happy
with the last blue quad location, press [F10].
- You'll then see that the editor moves to the RED
FLAG ... well ... just find another location for that one and follows the
exact same steps as above, not forgetting to press [F10] when
you're satisfied with the position and angle (in the case of flags) of the
entity.
- When you finally come to setting up the
"arch" location, act as if you were setting up the location of a
quad ([F6]). You'll get a message when you're done.
-
- Then, close Quake and check the qconsole.log file
in your UQC directory. You'll see that you can now spot all needed
locations very easily.
- If you're a mapper, just print these and add the
entities to your map via a program like Quark.
- If you're not, paste the log into a mail window
and send it over to me. Do NOT send me the log. COPY-PASTE
it. Any mail with attached logs will be automatically thrown in the bin.
Sorry about that ... this is my paranoïd side.
- I'll do the best I can to include support for
newer maps in the next versions of UQC and sending me your logs could help
me doing just that, so don't hesitate!
- No need to say that if you are a mapper and if
you're working on a UQC map, I'd love to hear about you, too ... :-)
-
-
- Here are some tips you should try to follow to
build the best and most efficient flagpoints out there.
-
- 1- Make sure that you put the arch in an
obvious location, preferably one that has free space around it and which
people can access easily. This is mainly for bot games. Bots have a harder
time to navigate through levels and if you put the arch in an area that
they have difficulties to reach, this will turn botmatches very unfair and
eventualy boring for you.
- 2 - Place the white Quad far from the arch but not
too far. This is again with bots in mind. If you put the arch at
one end of the level and the white quad at the other end of that level,
chances are that bots will be unable to take it and bring it to the arch
on their own. Of course there are other ways to pick up quads (e.g killing
someone), but still. On the other hand, you shouldn't put it too close to
the arch so that it is not too easy for you to pick it up and
capture it.
- 3 - Try not to place quads really too close to the
arch. You have to keep in mind that in UQCC, captured quads are respawned.
If you put a quad next to an arch, it could be easy for anyone to pick up
and capture quads several times on a row in a couple of seconds. You don't
want that to happen.
- 4 - There are some places which bot are more
likely to run through. Choose them to put quads. Exemples of these are
areas close to respawn points, areas around teleporters, areas above
lifts, areas around or against walls and (funnily enough) areas under
water. Avoid, on the other hand, areas that can be reached only through
intricate or dangerous jumping (e.g a platform above lava), very narrow
platforms or places that are in the middle of a very large, empty area.
-
- IN-GAME QUICK-GAME EDITOR ... Wh00t
! (See Demo2.dem)
-
- Hehe ... this is the "secret" feature I
was teasing q1dom developers over on #qexpo and you'll see that, while
it's really, really simple, it is very effective and very cool.
-
- So what is this thing, mmm ?
- Well, the quick-game editor, as the name suggests,
enables players to quickly set up a UQC game (or any of the alternative
game-modes) on ANY map they want, even if they are neither hard-
nor map-coded. That means you don't have to worry about anything, just
load the map, do a few things and you are set.
-
-
- Here is how it works :
-
- First, you need to tell UQC you are going to
switch to that mode. So, in the console, type "temp1 3" and then
load the map you want to play.
- You are going to see a menu on the screen telling
you to press [F10] to set the BLUE FLAG location.
- Go to a good place, where you think that point
would look good, stand still and press [F10]. You are then going to be
asked to do the same thing for all the other points (red, yellow, pink,
purple, orange, green, brown and white) and at last, the arch. When you're
done with setting the position for the arch, bang!, you're respawned and
all flags, quads and arch are there ... you're ready to play. Yehaaaa!
-
- That's it ... explaining what the in-game editor
is was like coding it: both darn simple and darn effective :-) ...
-
- One last note, though: it's a good idea to use
this editor before you submit log files with flagpoints to me. I mean,
play around with it, experiment different locations, see how bots react
and then get the info for the best locations in the flagpoint editor
("temp1 2").
- Also note, of course, that, while the in-game
editor enables you to quickly play UQC on any map you want, it doesn't
save anything. All location information will be lost as soon as you exit
the map. So, think about building a proper flagpoint log file (as
explained above) if you're playing the same map over and over again and
submit it to me, so that it can make it to an updated progs.dat release.
-
-
- Known Bugs
-
- However "cool" UQC is (or well ... looks
to me ;-)) ... I have to admit it's a coding disaster. As I like to say,
I'm sure FrikaC would get a heart-attack looking just at 5% of its code.
If there were tutorials to show newbies how NOT to code, then I'm
sure I could write a lot of them.
- I'm not a great coder, but I do try hard to
achieve the effects I want to achieve. Unfortunately, the price to pay is
often very "heavy" or redundant code and - yes, I have to say it
- loads of very, very ugly hacks. That's one of the reasons why I
scrambled the code ... because any other modder looking at it would banish
me from his view afterwards.
- On the whole, though, I must say I have been
pretty careful in not trying to overload the mod with features, tracking
bugs and correcting them the best I could. I have succeeded, I think ...
with some rare exceptions ...
-
- - First of all, you might notice some problems in
newer engines with quad glows, sometimes. They flicker, at times. This is
a result of a hack I HAD to implement. I'll try to look into the
problem, but don't expect it to be solved very soon, because it would
imply re-writing an important part of the quad-related code. Anyway, it's
not that bad, really and it doesn't happen with all the quads.
Things will be fine in GLQuake and Winquake, of course, since these don't
have colored glows (doh).
- - Demos do NOT run under WinQuake or GLQuake. I
guess the fact I recorded them under TomazQuake is the reason why. Quite
frankly, I didn't feel like re-recording those, so simply replace the
"quake.rc" file in your UQC directory by the one in the fix
(rc.zip), so that you don't get errors anymore.
- - Quads sometimes fall out of the level when the
person holding them is fragged. This usually happens when the killed
player is very close to a wall and the dropping quad is thrown far away.
The reason why this happens is that I pushed the dropping curb a bit too
far. Oh well ... the Quad will respawn correctly, don't worry.
- - Alternative game-modes can get strangely
mixed-up if you do not make sure that you come back to the main menu when
you're using the in-game options. If this happens, restart the game and it
should be fine.
-
- Plans
-
- I'm pretty satisfied of UQC as a base. I mean, as
far as my tests could tell, this is a pretty stable mod. So I'm gonna be VERY
careful when I'll be adding new features to it, because I don't want to
screw that base up.
- I think my plans for future versions will go in
four directions:
- 1 - Add support for more maps. Obviously
the simplest thing to do. I'll be adding map little by little and update
the progs.dat as often as possible. After all, this will represent a very
small download for users, so there is now way I'll hesitate.
- 2 - Add game-modes. Even though I insist on
UQCC being the core mod, I must admit alternative game-modes are both fun
to code and fun to play. I mean, the core is there, so coding these is
like coding a mutator for UT, really. So you can expect more of these in
the future, that's for sure.
- 3 - FBX support. At the time of this
release, FBX hasn't been out yet. As far as I know, FBX has been built
with q1dom in mind. I therefore believe it will be excellent for UQC,
which shares a lot with the domination gameplay. I'll do my best to
implement it as soon as I can. On another side, I also have serious plans
about improving the bot to play UQCC and the alternative game-modes
better. I'll keep you guys informed.
- 4 - Aesthetics. UQC is cool but, let's
admit it, it doesn't look that gorgeous. I have been mainly working
on code and left the rest aside. Now that all that was needed for a
"proper" release is done, I'm going to look into fields that'll
make UQC prettier to look at. I'm mainly thinking about models, skins
(there are a few bugs there, too), hub, etc ... I'll also look deeper into
glowing and transparency effects.
- 5 - Engine. Build a TomazQuake-based
souped-up engine for UQC? Why not. I'll be looking into that as well, but
not straight away ...
-
-
- Here is a list of the people I'd like to thank :
- - Myself ... Muahahahahaaaa ... I mean ... come on
... I have worked hard on this thing and, quite frankly, I do deserve a
"thank you" for the time spent on it :-)
- - Akuma for providing me with secret information
on the q1dom mod.
- - FrikaC for the Frikbot. Great bot ... there is
nothing you can say against it, it's simply the best plug-in bot out
there. I can't wait to see FBX.
- - FrikaC (again) for being so helpful on #qc.
Thank you for helping me fix a couple of bugs and make my life easier.
- - Tomaz for TomazQuake. Without it, you'd have no
nice glowing effects in UQC. Your engine is the best out there, Tomaz, and
I hope you'll keep the good work going!
- - Tomaz (again) for coding help and suggestions
... I can't really remember what he told me that helped me with my
UQC qc code, but I do remember he helped, so thanks, Tomaz.
- - All the various mappers who made the maps now
and soon supported by UQC. I mean, I chose the easy way by making
flagpoints hardcoded and using external maps rather than maps I did on my
own ... All the credits for these maps of course go to the original
mappers. Keep on rocking, guys!
- - Quest and the all the FrikBot waypointers. While
the UQC bot work ok without waypoints, I have to admit playing with
waypoints is a real plus.
- - The saint skin is not mine, so credits go to the
original skinner.
- - Golgotha for the track01 music of the
introduction demo.
- - By the way, I was just kidding about Akuma
providing me with q1dom secrets ... I did tried, but he remained silent as
a tomb :-)