Over the course of the last 18 months there have been quite a few people who have taken an interest in modding using the Quake engine.
You might consider MDave the progenitor of modern Quake modding when he made Kurok for both the Sony Playstation Portable and Windows using a modified FitzQuake, this introduced the idea of the Quake engine being used as the vehicle for creating single player 3D games via total conversions that are very non-Quake in nature (i.e. not of the Quake 3 mindset like, say, Nexuiz).
Solitude and Beyond
Look at the high ethics projects like MDave's Kurok and the Solitude project. Yes there are grubby little unprofessional PSP/iPhone/PSP projects out there breaking da GPL and using trademarks and stealing models and sounds -- Just like many Quake modders in 1996-2000 (Eternal War (theft)? QuakeLives engine (GPL)? Aliens Quake (trademark)?). Don't judge all the new modders based on this. Instead look at the role model projects like Solitude and Kurok.
The Solitude project is very professional and they've been at it for 18 months. They've made a ton of models, implemented a lot of QuakeC, made tons of maps and textures, follow the GPL and strive to have a clean and respectable project. They have made everything from scratch and although they are openly making the game very Halo like, as fans of that game, they have made all content themselves.
Beyond
I saw this on the Left4Quake site:
http://left4quake.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=237
Take a look. Ironically people have actively resumed an interest in Quake mapping and modelling. Mostly because projects like Kurok and Solitude have opened eyes.
Bottleneck: The Quake community is resource empowered, but documentation-averse
Closed source communities where you are supposed to be a servant to some closed-source corporate entity and be their slave (Unreal, Valve, <insert name>) most amateurs are pretty much limited to making media.
Models, maps, sound.
Maybe some elementary game logic like scoring systems. Possibly some elementary freedom to make their own effects or other limited control via dlls or scripting of some sort.
And they live on the DirectX island --- an island that unlike OpenGL isn't multiplatform or even very portable to other 3D APIs.
As a result, those communities don't have any sort of deep engine expertise or game mechanics understanding like you have to have for QuakeC.
Engine Portability
Quake 1 has 153 files of engine source, many of them unnecessary for any given build. Maybe 100 total. Quake 3 had something like 1500 source files of code. I don't know if Quake 3 is very portable to non-traditional platforms, but weighing in at 1500 files is a big manageability problem not suited to mastery.
DarkPlaces, if I recall, weighs in than less than the original Quake in C files (and half the code is so well written it is a source of personal envy) but is weighed towards desktop strength memory, video and performance and an array of library availability and forward looking graphics API availability to function and very locked to OpenGL functionality. DarkPlaces represents a technical and performance problem for porting to non-traditional platforms. GLQuake uses, I believe, less than thirty different OpenGL API calls ... maybe it is less than twenty (I am thinking 13, but I don't feel like looking right now and don't want to be wrong. MH would know without looking, heh
).
If you want a decent 3D game that is fully "yours" that runs on these new non-traditional platforms, Quake is a highly viable candidate with features like Half-Life map support extending the palette, especially since it is always about the first thing to get ported to any platform.
Enabling Quake
I think the following new developments in the last few years will help enable Quake modding to flourish:
1. This place, especially the great QuakeC tutorials section and all the concentrated expertise here.
2. ZQuake (NetQuake compatible Quakeworld engine. No bells and whistles or bullshit to remove, versus, say the eZQuake engine that is so oriented towards a single mod as to be walking out in the wilderness). Face it, people don't want lag when playing online and that one thread says how to kill the bunny in QW
3. Spike's CSQC WinQuake prototype.
4. Quake Remake. A whole horde of QuakeC goodness.
4a. New Soul of Evil, RQuake and every other open source mod created in recent history like Forwards Compatible, TransloQuake and "My AISquad Thing".
5. Worldcraft 3.3 + QAdapter. The "non-traditional" Quake modders love the thing.
6. Quoth. It was a prototype mod of packing in a lot of good [and some rare] features in a Quake mod (breakables, earthquakes, flashlight, func_ladder, precache model and sound) under one solid roof.
7. Quake-Life. Avirox lighting up the imagination by emulating tons of Half-Life features in an open source mod. Quake MVP for 2008, IMHO.
8. Alpha support and fake vwep. Yes this matters, people like glass. And fake vwep allows crappy vwep in QW while the "right" way to do it is discovered.
9. "Enhanced color in maps". At the present time, via Half-Life map support. Likely in the future, PCX will be added into the Quake map compiler I suspect.
10. MH's Direct3D Wrapper - Fine, Microsoft and video card companies --- break OpenGL on Windows 7 or release crap drivers. At least the engines will still run as long as Microsoft doesn't figure out how to break Direct3D8 or foobar mouse support yet.
11. DarkPlaces and FTEQW: Seemingly infinite R&D and experimentation. Before taking up engine coding, I just didn't "get it". Then you look under the hood and you do.
12. aguirRe, metlslime and MH: Super high capacity maps.
13. R00k: Frankly, Qrack just has so much awesome stuff in it.
14. R00k. R00k has done more to take complex concepts requiring great expertise and reduce them to plug-and-play code than anyone since QuakeSrc.org. Anti-Wallhack as 1 function? CURL download as a trivial modification? I mean seriously!
15. FTEQCC. I couldn't tell you the differences between the different compilers, but just the #IFDEF capability alone is killer.
16. Active efforts to preserve, categorize and protect Quake's history and the large body of work invested in it: This includes Quaddicted, Chip's QuakeWiki.net and other similar works. I'll shoehorn the QuakeOne Navigator in there, plus everyone who contributes to the QuakeWiki and acts like Func_Msgboard having a comprehensive links sections and so forth.
By the way, the reason that the new modders ask for help a lot is that it is really, really hard to figure out how to mod in Quake with the lack of good docs. Don't blame them, it isn't their fault! As a guy that was bombing this place with questions in 2006 and Func_Msgboard in 2005, believe me I know.
There is a lot of unseen momentum and I really think it is going to hit the boiling point eventually.
What do you think will happen if, say, a truely open platform like OpenPandora emerges as a portable device?
http://www.open-pandora.org/
