Inside3D Asks #4: Quake 1 and the community.

[Sajt]

[Baker]

[Spike]

[Baker]

[hondobondo]

being a C/OpenGL genius, and also the most artistic person in the civilized world, i mod for quake because it's EZ. i suck at C (never had a class), and am only remotely adequate at QuakeC

the tools are easy to learn (QME,BSP), the code is easy to learn, but powerful, and the rewards are immediate. plenty of help from the community (if you can speak opengl and C, even better!), plenty of source code to draw from, plenty of assets to ape, ITS A WIN WIN! i mean LOSE-WIN if you're not the sharing type

[MasterSplinter]

[Electro]

It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel, saturated by it.

[ajay]

In my late teens (28+ years ago) I started programming on BBC Micro's (link for non-Uk ppl: ) and, although it never went much past "Hello World" in Basic (although years later, in about '94, I'd get a 2nd hand one and programme more complex things like Lottery Simulators and the beginning of graphics...) I loved it.
From my teens on I was somewhat a frustrated programmer; on dropping out of my 'A' levels I took up a computer course at college; it split it's focus 50:50 on programming and what was then called 'Operating', which was basically changing the big tape reels, putting paper in the huge printers and typing the odd word of conversation on green-black screens with Intel in the US.
It didn't motivate me much, and was as far as my toe got in stepping into the waters of computer related careers.
1995 eventually arrived and I got a job in the LD service I still work in today, 2 months afterwards it got it's first PC and 2 marvellous things happened: we stopped having to handwrite all our many, many documents, and I got back into computers.
Later in 1995 we got a PC at home, hooked up to the internet and about the 131st thing I downloaded was qtest. Wow. But the harddrive was tiny (can't remember exactly) and I ended up deleting it. Then the game proper was released, I bought it, played and finished it. What struck me, apart from the scariness of shamblers (I totally ran away on sighting the first one), was smoothness of this completely 3d world. Never seen anything like it. But I'll be honest, a year or so after its release and I lost that much love for Quake the game, as far as MP goes I've never been big on it; I played Doom LAN matches, I played a little Quake and Quake 3 MP online and even some Halo with my son, but its never been a big draw for me, for any game.
Then I was in PC World of all places, and found this toolkit for Quake, which allowed you to change the game. Make maps, change code and graphics "
anyone could do it!". I bought it and found, well actually anyone could do it, as I obviously could. The pack wasn't great, and I found myself needing help from the net. You can guess what site I found...

I've stayed for two reasons: although I regularly dip in and out of Quake modding, this site remains the most mature (mostly!), welcoming, supportive and creative forum I've found and used regularly. I've been part of many 'communities' for the various aspects and interests in my life, and this is the only one that I've stayed with for anything approaching the length of time I've been here. Secondly Quake remains the most amazing entity; I still doubt there's a game that is both so comparatively simple to mod, yet so leads to such diverse results. Even with my megre ability I've turned out a dinosaur mod, a mod based on a sports/quake version of a childhood game, a 3rd person platformer and now a mod set in the real world. (I can't pretend I could have done all or any of that without the help of others mind)

Anyway, thats it.