RQ3 Interview: MP*Birdman 1. We have the obligatory question, who are you, and what do you do on the RQ3 team? I'm MP*Birdman (the clan tag seems to have become part of the actual nick over the years), and I'm the lead content creator for Reaction, meaning it's my fault when you notice all of the little bugs and hiccups in any of the models and the like. 2. Well then how great ActionQuake2 fans are you? Pretty big. I started playing in around September of 1998, when a fellow floormate in my university residence told me to play. I had no sound, puny software resolution only, and had no idea what I was doing, but I was hooked. 3. I was wondering why you wanted to make ReactionQuake3 and why you didn't just stay with ActionQuake2? Two reasons, really. In 2000, I was living at home, without an internet connection of my own, and just LTK and CGF bots to keep me company. After a while, I found my interest in racking up massive scores against them to be waning, and I wanted to play real human opponents again. At about the same time, Blaze made a post on a forum filled with old Action Quake 2 players, asking if it would be possible to make Action Quake 2 with the Quake 3 engine on our own. Since I couldn't really play much AQ2 anymore, and I was there when the project first started up, I joined up. 4. What is your favourite feature/stuff about RQ3 and why? Probably the replacement models. I was constantly hacking my .pk2 files in AQ2 to have the nicest weapons, HUD, console background, and such that I could find. That was the biggest single disappointment to me, that in Quake 3, the sv_pure setting would mean that I couldn't have that flexibility. However, our Icelandic friend, Johnny Bravo, has coded in a really nice way to allow changing weapons and such, so now I can mix and match models and skins to my content. That, and there's nothing quite like knifing Black Monk with half a dozen different types of knife, and watching him cry differently with each one afterwards. 5. What plans do you have for the future of RQ3? Now that we're done the "Beta" phase, and into a full release, there's not a ton more that needs to be done for the art side. I'll probably keep making new replacement weapons and skins though, and maybe some more player models as well. I already have two or three models started that I can work on. 6. Can you give us any spoilers on future add-ons or features that will make it's way into the mod? Most of the models and skins I've made have already been shown on Reaction's main website, so I wouldn't count those as spoilers. I do have plans though for a new sniper rifle, as well as a new m4 model however. 7. What is your weapon of choice and why? Probably knives for pure artistry and skill, but for any maps that take long range work I usually take the mp5/laser, and use that against all those nasty m4's. Although once in a while, I do take the handcannon or knives into maps like Urban 3. 8. Coca Cola or Pepsi? I'm a water man. Litres and litres of water a day. 9. Oh yeah when will the next release be here, if you know yet? I think we're looking at May as the latest we want to release anything. We have a rapidly approaching freeze date for content set, however, which should give us a good chance to iron out any last minute bugs we might have. Hopefully, we wont find any, and we can release fairly shortly. 10. Of course I have to ask, what is your favourite mod out there besides RQ3? Hrm.. As far as mods go, the only other one I really play on a regular basis is Natural Selection for Half Life. However, I also enjoy a good game of Battlefield 1942, Nethack, Neverwinter Nights, and of course Action Quake 2. 11. Will the CGF(Computer Generated Forces) be made for RQ3 (I really like those missions :D)? As far as I know, we have no plans to add CGF missions to Reaction at the moment. It would be nice to allow for more scripting ability however, and to let the bots have more than a "find-seek-kill" mission set. If we find it's feasible to do so, we may add something similar in, or we may find some other way to have mission. For example, maybe have certain spawns always be used for a "mission" on a map, and have triggered bot spawns as you move to the other end of the map. I don't know how feasible we would find that to be though, without more access to the bot and engine code. It would be nice to at least try to add it in though. 12. Are you going to add some cool recording options like for example the MVD feature for CPMA, for having some cool demos lying around or for the Movie making people out there? We don't have plans for adding MVD at the moment, but now that we're into the adding features stage, we might add it later on. We'll have to see. In the meantime, we have various commands built in for demo taking, like autoaction, that lets you automatically record and screenshot your matches, as well as commands to record screenshots for a movie in .jpg format, rather than .tga format, which saves a fair bit of space. 13. How is it working out for you with the rest of your team? Not hard at all. We have people all over the world working on Reaction, so the only real hurdle is time zones. People all seem to get along fairly well, and communication isn't a problem since we all speak English. On the odd time that we disagree, we usually manage to resolve it without much hassle, often by making the suggested change into an option. 14. If you had a chance to add one game engine feature to make your mod better, what would it be? I'd like more control over the mod code. There have been alot of things we just can't touch due to the way Quake 3 is setup. Other than that, a nicer model format setup would be nice, for transferring of animations and nicer deformations. 15. btw how long has this project been in the making? The forum thread Blaze started was in October of 2000 if I recall correctly. Development was fairly slow for a while after that though, until eLDeR_MMHS started coding away. Since then, some of the people have changed, but progress has been pretty steady. 16. What is on the top of you todo list atm? Probably to finish working on a sword/shuriken knife replacement that was requested in the forums. I'm just working on the animations now, and with any luck at all, it will be ready in time. Other than that, I'm mostly hunting down and fixing problems in the flashes and weapon shaders, trying to make sure that everything works right without any conflicts. 17. How has it been working with the Quake3 engine, positive/negative sides? Having 32-bit colour is a godsend after the 8-bit of Quake 2. Having that, and shaders to let you make things glow, shine, deform, become transparent, or otherwise change is also really nice. Having higher polycounts available is also nice, as it lets you have more flexibility in what you do. We've been trying to keep polycount and map detail levels down to the original Quake 3 levels, so that people with low-end systems can still play, and even with that restriction, the added detail is lovely to have. As far as things that aren't so nice, sound is probably the largest one. Between having less control over sound cutoffs, and Quake 3's method of queuing, it can be fairly disappointing at times about what we can do. Other than that though, Quake 3 has alot of nice toys either built in, or that we've managed to add that really add a nice feeling to maps and gameplay in general. 18. Do you think you'll be able to get all the good old original Aq2 maps ported over to RQ3? Probably not. If we could get in contact with everyone who had made a map for Quake 2, and got all of them to give us permission, then it might be technically possible. As it is though, many of those maps are unreachable, or have denied permission to port a certain map. Add in the fact that it takes alot of work to do a nice port of a Quake 2 map into Quake 3, and it gets even less appealing. And, of course, many mappers have their own ideas they want to work on, rather than copying over another design. The other problem with porting maps is that in many cases, due to the restrictions of the Quake 2 engine, the maps are a little blocky. In many cases, that could be changed in Quake 3, but so many people become attached to a certain little special jump from one outcrop to another that any real change to the map shape is anathema to them. Putting a restriction on mappers like that really makes porting a map less appealing in my eyes. 19. Since 2.3 is your next release, what is the next big release in plans for now, and are there anything you can tell us about it? We've decided to scrap the "beta 2.3" name, and call it just 3.0, effectively ending the beta stage, and making this the first complete release. We've added alot of new features to 3.0 from 2.25, including new gameplay modes, replacement models, new and improved maps and map features, and bug fixes. Once 3.0 is released, we'll have to see what we want to add next. There will doubtless be some features requested from the players, and we'll want to look at those, and then whatever else we decide to add above and beyond that.