Oswald Rant: QC2k2 – A Mapper’s Perspective – A RabidCow Rant
QuakeCon 2002 would have to be considered a success by anyone who attended or heard about it. The BYOC was at least twice the size of last year (I didn’t attend last year but everyone who did said the same thing).
The DOOM3 Theatre was a blast. Bladekiller and I just squeeked in at the last moment. We tried early on and were refused entry because of our backpacks, with camera equipment, so we had given up (we didn’t want to leave that stuff outside the theatre while we watched). As we walked around Sunday and things were winding down, we were invited in by Tim Willits of id Software for a showing with himself and a couple of others. Don’t let little kids see this game! Whoa, it was pretty sweet! Pretty scary as well.
I unfortunately missed John Carmack’s speech, but apparently he told everyone that the engine will be limited to 4 players for multiplayer. That lead to a heated discussion in the mod conference (which included Apoxol and Rick Johnson of Raven Software, who will be making Quake4). A lot of modders were really upset, including me. I love the large multiplayer games and wanted to go further than what we have now (I mean, ya gotta use you new super fast dsl/cable line for something [G]).
I whined at Tim Willits about that on Sunday and he told me that it will be completely scalable, with no hard limit…my fingers are crossed…
The ATI people were always providing free coffee, Bawls, personal fans, entertainment (movies on widescreen displays with nice big comfortable chairs, massage therapists and friendly conversation, as well as huge amounts of prize money for the really skilled players).
The real highlight for me was meeting the people. Oswald was wonderful, as were the other members of the SID team that I got to spend some time with. Apoxol, Meaty, CrazyButcher, Sweetnutz, Thaddeus and BBQ. It was great meeting people I have talked to on the forums, and Ydnar, the incredibly talented programmer who builds q3map. It was a great pleasure to talk to |NV|S, and share ideas and techniques, as well as all the other great mappers that were in attendance.
The players in all the Clans were a pleasure to meet as well. Urban Terror supporters such as Tapper, MCinBigD, Bama, Snake, Scarecrow and many others (I hate to miss anyone because everyone that I met was great! |NV|S and several others offered the use of their PC’s to us selflessly…something I would not have expected, considering how difficult it is to tote a system across a country for a couple of days.)
A really special thanks has to go to 27 and his wonderful wife, Amy. 27 did a bang-up job of building a couple of new versions of 2.6 for an impromtu test at QuakeCon and Amy was understanding and supportive, even though she was loosing her husband into the dark abiss of the code world.
Speaking of the 2.6 build, it was great! Everyone who played it loved it and we are talking the really competitive players here. Sure there are still a few bugs, but no one said it would be perfect. SID should be congratulated on their achievment. It will be a great improvement over the current version and through extrapolation that means it is the best game available, commercial or mod :).
Finally, the people of Dallas were wonderful as well. Everyone who worked on QuakeCon was dedicated to being helpfull and friendly. Security was tight (a couple of PC’s were abducted the first night) but you never felt like you were in a prison. The Police and security people were always courteous and went over the top in every way. An example was one time that I had been in the ATI booth with Bladekiller. I left to check out some Gigabit ethernet stuff and when I came back she was gone. In a crowd of a thousand people, I scanned around looking for her. A police officer standing by one of the entrances caught my glance and smiled and said “she went over here…” and pointed to where she had gone. How much better does it get?…
A Picture of Oswald in front of his office…
