ioquake3

In a recent message to the IOQuake 3 Mailing List, Ryan C. Gordon (a.ka. Icculus, famous for helping port many popular games to Linux/Alternative OSes) mentioned that he submitted his final patches towards VOiP on IOQuake3. He was the one to first submit the patches for VOiP suport on IOQuake3. Maintaining compatibility with the vanilla distributions of Quake 3 was the developers’ goal, and it’s been fulfilled.

Voice over IP is now available in IOQuake3 and there are no conflicts with the vanilla Quake 3 engine. The support for it is there at the core, but it hasn’t been polished out completely due to concerns of compatibility, as stated above. For this reason, it is difficult to create a User Interface for the settings, but this could be left to individiual mod or game developers.

There are still things worth doing: adding a real UI (including
controls, config menus, VoIP field in the server browser, a real
recording meter, and displays of who is saying what), blacklist support,
recording support outside OpenAL, fix audio streams when saving a demo
to an AVI, figure out where that echo is coming from, positional audio,
"QuakeRadio", etc...I don't think I'll have time to work on any of these
in the near future, but I'm happy to advise any volunteers that want to
take a shot at them.

Of the many things that Icculus included in his final patches include:

documentation in voip-readme.txt (anyone can feel
free to improve or reformat that, if they like), a cheesy VoIP meter to
show how well the game "hears" you when recording (best I could do
without changing the UI or cgame code: +set cl_voipShowMeter 1), and
support for transmitting to just the people in your crosshair or the
last person that attacked you (+set cl_voipSendTarget "crosshair" or
"attacker").

He also included a scrolling credits screen (Product of him trying to familiarize himself with the Q3 UI) which so rightly credits the great developers and maintainers of the engine.

Zakk had some Google AdWords credit which he used on advertising IOQuake 3. Hopefully this gets IOQuake 3 some more exposure!

Jay Weisskopf from the Mailing List just showed us some of his latest work. A beautiful set of IOQuake 3 Icons. Zachary seemed to like them so who knows, we might even use them! He also submitted an icon of this image which we should definitely use as the website favicon, hopefully Zachary agrees.  Check them out, nice job Jay!

For a long time now, we haven’t released a new version of ioquake3. You’re probably wondering if we’re dead or not, then you see how we’re talking about VOIP, or IPV6, or stereoscopic rendering or whatever, and you want in on that action.

For you, precious reader, we now have Angst Builds. Enjoy.

As a follow up to this article about the excellent q3osc musical environment built using ioquake3 I had a quick sit down with Robert Hamilton and talked about q3osc, ioq3 and everything in between.

If you haven’t heard of q3osc this will make for some great reading, after the break

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Lets examine two quick points:

• Hardcore gamers like choices.
• Hardcore gamers like VOIP.

Based on these theories, ioquake3 is adding VOIP support for the next release. This internal support is going to bring along with it support for (entirely optional) Mumble positional VOIP audio. More nerd-speak after the break, the short and quick of it is, however:

We’re going to have VOIP for mods/new games, and baseq3. This is a pretty radical departure from the initial goal of not changing anything in baseq3, and is probably the single largest (obvious) end-user benefit for using ioquake3.

The fact of the matter is that if you want to blame someone for allowing it to be included, you can blame me (Zachary, lead omnipresent overseer of ioquake and related entities). If, however, this makes you happy and you want to praise somebody, give either big ups OR big props to Ryan Gordon (lead intergalactic space nerd) and Ludwig (Herr Angst).

Please, do not spoil them with both ups AND props.

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Robert Hamilton of the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics has just released a fully usable version of q3osc.

From the Forum post:

q3osc is my updated version of Julian Oliver’s older q3apd mod which streamed user data from quake3 to the Pure Data (PD) audio processing language. I’ve built a similar project from a clean ioquake3 codebase and included a complete oscpack c++ lib to properly output not only user position data over osc but also individual projectiles, like plasma ball and BFG balls. The short of it is that that output can be used in a music software environment like PD, Max/MSP, Supercollider or ChucK to build interactive musical environments.

What does this mean? Means you can make music by playing the game! Some video demo’s included after the fold.

Check out the CCRMA wiki with complete specs and full information about it.

Also:

If any mappers out there would like to build some environments which could be used for musical performance, please let me know. My mapping chops aren’t exactly stellar.

So all you mappers get to work making some awesome maps for a really cool project!

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Update 2: The mailing list move is complete, archives are fully available now.

Update 1: The mailing list move is almost complete, archives remain to be moved because Dreamhost support isn’t done yet. But everyone who was subscribed should be resubscribed. Please refer to http://lists.ioquake.org/ for all inquiries regarding the discussion list now. The Discussion list is the only list that is moving for now.

The main discussion list is moving to lists.ioquake.org. Things are going as planned with this move, but are taking a little longer than expected. Expect another update when the move is complete.

With all the 3D frenzy for home entertainment systems going on, ioquake3 did not want to fall behind, so as of the latest SVN revision ioquake3 officially supports rendering of stereoscopic images. Actually, we’re not quite sure whether this works for quad buffer based rendering methods for shutter glasses as we lack the hardware (can someone give us a heads-up on this? Any SGI fanboys here?), but rendering of anaglyph images definitely does.

You need to have red-cyan glasses to view these images in their full glory. As always, the cvars and switches needed to turn on this new functionality can be found in the changes to the README. I have also written up an extensive information page about the techniques behind stereo rendering on ioquake3’s wiki to get you going on stereoscopic ioquake3.

Finally, after the merger of the separate codepaths for different operating systems to use SDL, one of the longest outstanding bugs on our bugtracker could be resolved. The latest version in our subversion repository supports the upcoming internet protocol version 6 completely. New features include:

• client-server connections via IPv6
• scanning for IPv6 servers on a local subnet
• client can now query multiple master servers for server list
• server lists from master server may contain IPv6 addresses
• new engine-side functions for banning clients from the server

For a quick overview of the new cvars and commands to use these new features, you can have a look at the changes in the README.
A server can handle ipv6 and ipv4 connections simultaneously, so don’t be surprised if a server shows up twice in the server list. IPv6 servers will be marked as using the “IPX” protocol for now, as support for this protocol has been dropped and the corresponding string needs to be changed to “UDP6″ in the game code, so coders of modifications, please change ui_servers2.c accordingly.
There’s a test server running at ipv6.tjps.eu, which can only be reached via ipv6. Feel free to give it a go and find out how well the new protocol is performing!

One of my favorite gaming communities has always been the Shacker community. Recently their “Visceral Monkey” started the “ShackQuakeLive” site for playing quake3 and related mods, go check it out and then join their server to kick some shacker asses.

Their server is even set up for http downloading, one of my favorite ioquake3 features.

Enjoy.

Stephan Reiter wrote into the mailing list with this amazing news (both videos are embedded after the break):

Hi everyone!

I’ve been working on a raytracing library during the last few months. Last week I was able to integrate it into the ioquake3 source code. This allows for switching between traditional rasterization and raytracing using a cvar. There are also some debug modes specific to the raytracing-mode.

I’ve posted two videos at YouTube showing Elite Force Raytraced, which is based on Thilo Schulz’s excellent Elite Force patch for ioquake3.
The 1st video focuses on raytraced reflections and other changes of the look: http://youtube.com/watch?v=jLFrP0c7VWw
The 2nd video is basically a record of a bot deathmatch: http://youtube.com/watch?v=C_6Icf2m_C4

I intend to release this code soon, but I plan to take some more time to polish it some more.
Comments are appreciated.

Keep up the good work, ioquake3-community!
Thanks,
Stephan

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We have done quite a bit of work towards unraveling mysteries presented by the recent Xcode (2.5 and 3.0) and Mac OS X (10.5) releases. Here is the rundown of the current state of things. If you want maximum compatibility in the Universal Binary you create, your build system needs to meet the following criteria:

• Must be running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
• Must be using XCode 2.3, XCode 2.4(untested), or XCode 2.5
• Must have MacOSX10.2.8.sdk, MacOSX10.3.9.sdk, and MacOSX10.4u.sdk installed. (These come with XCode, but you may have to install them manually)

The make-macosx-ub.sh script should detect all of this for you. The resulting binary should work on all Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 systems.

You can still build a Universal Binary when running Mac OS X 10.5 using XCode 2.5 or 3.0, but the best you can do is compatibility with Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 systems.

Several ioquake3 based games were compared recently over at Linux-Gamers.net. The article should be useful for non-linux gamers as well, due to the multi-platform nature of all the games mentioned within.

I just committed a patch to SVN from Hobbes for Slackware SlackBuild support, thank you Hobbes!