drive.google.com/open
Hello arena gladiators,
I'm incredibly excited to announce my new Quake III Arena mod, Uber Arena. I've been working on this on-and-off for a while as a hobby project to practice software programming in a familiar context outside of just writing boring console programs. I'm now in university taking classes for computer science with the hopes of eventually finding some good-paying programming jobs, but while I definitely have more serious aspirations in the realm of software engineering, that certainly doesn't mean I can't have a little bit of fun building some personal projects for my favorite games. I really enjoy the feeling of finally solving tough problems, which this mod has offered plenty of (and still has a few yet to be taken care of), but it has undeniably been very educational as well. And with Quake 3's 20th anniversary coming up, I suppose now is a good time as any to get started if you're going to be modding for such an old game, hehe :p
As for the mod itself, Uber Arena is not a total conversion or major overhaul of Quake 3, but rather is a collection of new game mechanics and items that extend the base game experience in a manner that attempts to remain true to Quake's core principles such as on-spawn equality. There are no abilities, loadouts, or similar concepts that would cause players to spawn with different setups. Just as with the original game, item control and positioning are absolutely key to being successful. The specific methods employed will be radically different, but the overall fundamentals are unchanged. I tried to come up with some interesting ideas that most arena FPS games, or perhaps FPS games in general, do not consider.
Uber Arena has the following features:
- 5 new and/or modified game mechanics
- 3 new power-ups
- 2 new holdable items
- 3 miscellaneous items (2 of which use a modified backpack model / skin made by DaEngineer)
- 1 new map-specific mechanic
- 6 remixes of older maps to test the new mechanics, including 2 revisions of classic id software
See the documentation provided in the link below for more information about the new features included in Uber Arena:
drive.google.com/open
This mod is, as you might expect, very VERY work-in-progress - particularly visual / stylistic effects. Right now I am more concerned about functionality and bug fixing though.
Some known bugs that I'm still working to get ironed out:
- Item knockback doesn't interact well with items on movers.
- Trampolines occasionally send you bouncing much higher than you should. This behavior is rare and I haven't been able to consistently reproduce it; it seems very RNG-ish.
Also if you have some older custom maps that you think would work great with some of the new items - particularly trampolines - feel free to share! I'd love to see what you come up with.
DOWNLOAD (Version 0.5):
drive.google.com/open
Have fun and enjoy - I'm really looking forward to seeing what your thoughts are!
Edited 447.22 days after the original posting.
Edited 942.77 days after the original posting.
The weapon upgrade mechanics / Uberweapons is a pretty cool idea. Took me a moment, to work things out, but kind of cool. Can be a little dominating in a 2 player match with an Uberweapon, but no issue in DM at all.
The audio files when picking up a power-up are not very clear.
The trampoline is a great idea and I really like how crouch works to stop bouncing. Did feel like a "jump" press when bouncing should bounce you higher. Maybe this extra height from jumping on a trampoline should taper off to a max height value or something like that.
I wanted to throw out a weapon to clear up a weapon slot. This may be a feature already built in but I did not find it.
Some kind of player visual would also be nice when a player has an Uberweapon - maybe only when selected?
I enjoyed the modifications to all the maps. Great stuff!
I took another listen at the power-up sounds. The Conservation and Scavenger sounds were attempts to approximate the Quake 3 Announcer voice by using a bunch of audio manipulation, but after comparing them to the base powerup sounds I can certainly see how mine would be unclear in comparison. I might consider replacing them with some generic sounds. Audacity can't replace professional voice acting, and Christian Antkow would do a much better job than I could :p Thanks for the heads up!
Yeah the trampoline is probably my personal favorite mechanic in this mod. I like the possibilities it opens up for movement, and they're just flat-out fun to use, especially on the dm17 revision.
I haven't included a feature to toss weapons, but I can definitely add that in. Would be very useful for team games!
I eventually plan on giving the Uberweapons distinct skins from their original counterparts, to make it a bit more clear beyond mentioning the name in the selection menu. Unless you meant from a third-person perspective (a player sees another player holding an uberweapon), which is something I haven't considered yet, but that is a very good idea and would help other players steer clear of uberweapon users.
Thanks a lot for your feedback and advice!
There is now a video overview of all the new items / game mechanics featured in Uber Arena:
www.youtube.com/watch
For instance, I've coded in a visual effect for players holding uberweapons (suggested by Tigger-On and dumptruck_ds) to help other players identify them, which of course was coded in cgame. Shows up fine with the .dll's. But when I compile the cgame vm, it's like I never made any changes. But even stranger is that the game (not cgame) vm compiles just fine and reflects my changes there. I don't remember changing any settings whatsoever that could've caused this - I'm saving the vm's to the same directory and I have not modified the batch files since setting them up properly. I check the compile log for the cgame .vm and it doesn't give me any errors; it claims the compile is successful. If someone who has had this issue before could shed some light, it would be greatly appreciated.
drive.google.com/open
Video:
www.youtube.com/watch
Trampoline demo video:
www.youtube.com/watch
Changelog:
- Added 3 new maps:
Original Author: Joel "wviperw" McDonald
- Chaos Citadel (ua_kaos)
Original Author: Dmitry "Vondur" Svetlichny
- Coriolis Effect (ua_lun3dm1)
Original Author: Matthew "Lunaran" Breit
- Added an alternate upgrade for the Arc Lightning Gun for duel mode only. It multiplies the LG's knockback 25 times, allowing for pinning enemies against walls.
- Added Light Armor (gives 25 armor points). The entity name used is identical to the one used by the CPMA mod, which means any maps that use CPMA's light armor will work with Uber Arena as well.
- Conservation now allows players to use weapons that have run out of ammo. In addition, the ammo and weapon pouch counters turn green while Conservation is active.
- Rampage now plays an ambient heartbeat noise while active.
- Ion Plasma Gun now plays its own unique bounce sounds, rather than using the grenade bounce sounds.
- A 3D weapon pouch model now appears next to the weapon pouch counter.
- Renamed Ammo Crate to Super Ammo Crate.
- All sounds converted from stereo to mono, for compatability with standard Quake 3.
- All 2D icons and trampoline surfaces are now unaffected by r_picmip.
- Entire codebase moved to the ioquake3 codebase. Does not affect compatability with standard Quake 3.
Hope you enjoy!
Details here:
www.quake3world.co...m/viewtopic.php
IP is 47.219.38.45.
I attempted to connect on another installation of Q3 and had the same issue. I did some research and found out that sv_pure 1 was the culprit. My pak0.pk3 apparently got changed at some point and the checksum was failing, but I had a clean backup copy (my copy of Q3 is a physical one purchased many years ago on eBay) and replaced it in both of my installations and was able to connect.
I also have 3 Nightmare bots running around on the server to keep the games flowing, and the map rotation for the server cycles through all 6 maps that come with Uber Arena.
Let me know if it works for you! If you still have issues I'll probably disable sv_pure altogether (which should be fine, since it's a casual server for testing purposes; doubt people would go to a nearly 20 year-old game to cheat)
Edited 18.7 minutes after the original posting.
thank you for your quick reply
i tried uberarena in linux ioquake3 with no pb (punkbuster) support.
i tried uberarena in win-xp ioquake3 with pb support enabled.
still got the error message above (invalid game folder) in both.
i never can understand why anyone cheats - all they are doing is cheating themselves. anyway, i digress.
thank you for your time & energy in this.
...richoi...
I went ahead and restarted the server with sv_pure 0, so it should no longer do checksum verification (tested on my end as well by using different pak0.pk3's, with backups of course). If you still have issues connecting I may consult the good folks over at the ioquake3 forums for assistance.
And by the way, thanks so much for your interest in the mod so far! Any thoughts on what your favorite mechanics / ideas were?
Edited 2.3 minutes after the original posting.
i am now able to log into and play uberarena.
thank you.
using ioquake3 (linux & windows, both worked).
helped my brother get it set up too.
i am still a noob to this mod so don't have much feedback yet. have to watch the youtube video (for version 0.1 --> www.youtube.com/watch) again.
thank you.
www.moddb.com/feat...ptember-23-2018
(Scroll down to the bottom of the post in the "Friday" section)
Needless to say, this is a very exciting honor and I can't thank the good people over at ModDB enough for deciding to feature it. It certainly wouldn't have been possible without the great support of all the people who have tried it out and offered feedback, suggestions, and even development support. If you still haven't checked out Uber Arena, now is definitely a great time to do so!
Edited 1.38 minutes after the original posting.
I heard about this mod, which needs maps, so I decieded to make one for it.
I decieded to make a CTF level, because (as I know) there is no CTF level right now in the mod, but... I have some problems...
My map (V2.0 which is almost done) works well in vanilla quake (actually ioquake3), but in uber arena, it's a different story.
First of all, I got spammed the same error flooded the console with "Fatal:out of level items" error, and I'm really sick of it...
This probably caused by the new items, (or the shootable pickable items. Idk...)
Deleted the first map, because I thought it was construction problem, and started a new one. As I said, the second map works well in vanilla, but not in uber arena...
The flag icons covering the weapon/slot numbers, and bots seems not interested of the new items. Mostly they pick them up, because the're in the way, and the bot navigation is different frorm like how the bots navigate in vanilla.
The weapon pouch system is good if you play against other players, but if you play against bot, it's just terrible.
Sad watching them trying to pick up weapons while they have 3/3 or 5/5 weapon slots...
Only tested these and the mod on my map.
Why there is no uber melee and uber machinegun? You could make them uber with the tuner holdable, and I have few ideas for them.
Wow, I'm really excited to hear you're making a map for Uber Arena - your previous work is nothing short of stunning and I really look forward to seeing what you have on the horizon! Sorry to hear it's not working out in the mod so well though. I sent an email your way to discuss the issue.
Haha yes, the bots are definitely not very smart right now which is something I am hoping to resolve soon. I've found some interesting articles online on the bot code and how it works, but one thing that concerns me is that the majority of botcode is in the botlib folder, separate from the game / cgame modules. I wonder how a modder would be able to change this code and integrate it into a standard mod? Or is the only bot related code that can be changed for a standard Q3 mod (not a standalone) the ai_ files in the game module?
I had initially skipped the gauntlet / machinegun when designing uberweapons partially because they're starter weapons, and also because I haven't thought of cool ideas for them, but now that you mention it, I'm really interested / open in giving them upgraded version as well. As you mentioned, they could be made uber with the tuning device, or one could put machinegun / gauntlet weapon pickups in maps. I'd absolutely love to hear your ideas for their uberweapon versions! I always love hearing the cool ideas other people have and how they contrast with my own approaches.
Edited 2.73 minutes after the original posting.
I hope in the future bots will be smarter than now! :) I hope you'll find the way to make them smarter.
I have couple of ideas for the uber machinegun:
It would be cool if we can dual-wield it (I know in third person view this would be a challenge...) or we can deploy it as a turret (only one per player until the players death) or the uber machinegun can shoot tiny rockets or something.
The uber gauntlet would be usable as a shield (only in frotn of the player) which absorbs buletts and reflect/deflects projectiles (would be very useful for flag carriers I think).
What do you think?
Edited 26 seconds after the original posting.
I can't imagine how uberNailgun uberChaingun, uberProxLauncher and uberGrapplingHook can be. This also gives a reason to add the Gauntlet and Machinegun into the maps and give the player uberGauntlet and uberMachinegun.
Keep up the good work!
Edited 22 seconds after the original posting.
Uber Nailgun would probably have an armor-piercing (always does full damage regardless of armor) ability, similar to the Lava Nailgun from Quake MP2 or the ETF Rifle from Quake 2 Ground Zero. A more gimmicky idea would be nails that leave behind clouds of toxic gas behind them which linger for a few seconds after the nails fly by (basically just recoloring the clouds the nails already leave behind green, and making them last longer), giving it area denial prospects like that of the GL / Prox Launcher.
Since the CG is just a beefier MG, the Uber Chaingun would probably be modeled after whatever functionality the currently hypothetical Uber Machinegun would have.
Uber Prox Launcher is a tough call since the weapon is already pretty powerful and abusable, so I would either treat it like the BFG and just go crazy with it, or nerf it first and then base the uberweapon version off of the nerfed version. To me, the Prox Launcher being as powerful as it is is more likely the result of poor planning as opposed to an intentional design decision, so the second option sounds more appealing to me.
Uber Grappling Hook sounds funny. One easy idea would be to increase the speed of the hook itself. Could also make it so that the hook can pull other players towards you, and fling them around, somewhat like the Gravity Gun from HL2.
Integrating Team Arena support in some fashion - like what Generations Arena is doing now - is something I've considered and would love to do at some point after getting some more polish done on the mod. The major problem would be the hardcoded limits for certain item types. For example, q_shared.h declares the power-up item limit to be 16, and trying to exceed that or change that maximum value results in weird, undefined behavior. To make room for the three new power-ups I had to undefine the four Team Arena runes. I could maybe move them over to a new category (since they already work fundamentally differently from standard power-ups, which makes one wonder why id lumped them in the same category in the first place), but it'd definitely require some major restructuring.
It looks like the uber Gauntlet / uber Machinegun is picking up traction. Given that they're starter weapons, and thus you already have one copy of each upon spawn, I was thinking of making it so you'd only have to pick up two gauntlets / two MG's to get their uber versions, but as a tradeoff their uber versions aren't as powerful as the uber versions of the non-starter weapons.
As for the Prox Launcher, it could be a spidermine of sorts, you shoot it into the floor and make it walk towards any enemies that are in close distance. Kind of like the Mine Layer from Unreal Tournament 2004. Or go the Flak Cannon route and make it a mortar. I was already aware that mines were overpowered, so nerfing them could be a good idea.
www.dropbox.com/s/...ux/entities.ent
I'm adapting 10 OpenArena maps for this mod (4 CTF and 10 FFA), might require testing and some help. :)
Edited 29 seconds after the original posting.
I also have worked on trying to add a third-person indicator for uberweapons to warn other players, but my attempts at implementing it have failed for reasons I still struggle to fathom. I started a thread over in Q3W a while back about this issue (www.quake3world.co...m/viewtopic.php). Admittedly it was created back when the code was still very messy, but I have ran into the same issue on a clean source (both standard and ioq3 sources) and with my current source code. The basic issue is that I want to set an entity flag whenever an uberweapon is obtained for client-game communication, but they aren't transmitted over to cgame for whatever reason. It also poses a barrier to doing things such as putting in a tracking sound for homing rockets, or using distinct projectile effects (for example, I'd like to use magenta or some other color for ion plasma bolts).
I'm super-excited to hear that you're doing some Uber Arena map adaptations for Open Arena, and thanks for the entity file! Your contributions are enormously appreciated and I look forward to seeing which maps you chose and how they turn out. Definitely reach out to me for updates and if you need any assistance.
www.dropbox.com/s/...na-gamepack.zip
Edited 32 seconds after the original posting.
Not many changes, just opened the third floor by enlarging the ceiling, adding trampolines, adding a lower chamber for a double pouch/ammo crate team, and replacing MP weapons and items with UA items.
As it's an OpenArena adaptation, it comes with sources and license.
drive.google.com/f...3SpEj2KmOi/view
Changelog:
- Added 2 new maps:
- Tarnished Steel (ua_bal3dm4)
NOTE: Item layout based on the OSP version (ospdm3)
- Tyrant Twilight (ua_tyrant)
- Added uberweapons for the gauntlet and machinegun. Only two pickups of these weapons are needed to acquire them.
- Vampire Gauntlet: Damage inflicted by this weapon is given back to the player as health / armor. 1.3x increased speed and 25% damage resistance.
- Piercing Machinegun: Does full damage regardless of armor (while still damaging armor); zero spread.
- Changed how uberweapons work in duel. Every time the player obtains an uberweapon, a limited amount of "ubered" ammo is provided to them. This can be viewed through a separate ammo counter at the bottom-right corner of the ammo icon next to the regular ammo counter. Once a player uses up all of their ubered ammo, the weapon reverts back to normal.
- Added the Tyrant medal, awarded for obtaining 2 uberweapons in a single life and for every uberweapon picked up afterwards.
- Power-up initial spawns are no longer random; they are now always guaranteed to spawn 45 seconds after the match begins. The 120-second respawn time is still in effect.
- If the player has 3+ copies of a weapon (in other words, they have an uberweapon), any additional copies they pickup won't count towards their weapon limit, and they can continue to pick that weapon up even if they have reached their limit. Suggested by CannerZ45 at ModDB: www.moddb.com/mods...oa...version-02
- In previous versions, only players that were first hit and poisoned by the Toxic Railgun, then were fragged afterwards, would lose a frag. Now, players fragged by the Toxic Railgun will always lose a frag, whether it is immediate or after being poisoned.
- Weapon quantity / uberweapon indicators now present in the weapon selection bar. Silver squares with "2" for weapons the player owns 2 copies of, and gold squares with "3" for uberweapons.
- Super Ammo Crate colors revamped - now cycles through multiple colors instead of a single rainbow-colored texture. Icon remains the same. In vertex lighting the box will be gray.
- Uberweapon names now appear on the weapon selection bar (intended from the beginning, but accidentally left out due to a qvm-related issue).
- Fixed a bug where dropped items that received knockback would respawn at the map origin instead of disappearing. Thanks to Martinus for bringing this to my attention.
- Fixed a bug that caused rockets to try to fly towards previously fired homing rockets if only one player was present.
- Fixed a bug in which an item that shared a spawn with another item(s) could cause the next item in the team chain to spawn early, instead of having the knocked item return to its original location. Such items would either be stuck in their new positions post-knockback or even be removed from the map entirely after pickup.
I've also restarted the Uber Arena server (address 47.219.38.45) updated with version 0.3 and the new maps. As always feedback (especially in-depth gameplay feedback) is appreciated; create conversations about how to innovate the arena FPS genre while remaining true to its principles.
just looked at briefly. so far, liking the indicator numbers in the weapon selection bar; the toxic rail gunner glow is nice as are the additional 2 maps.
one note, in the 2 new added maps, i played with 2 bots, sometimes bot skins turn very dark - black, is that a normal effect?
20 years for Q3 and still enjoying.
Download:
drive.google.com/f...eWDcFKG0G3/view
- Changelog:
- Christian Antkow, the original Quake 3 announcer, now voices the Conservation and Scavenger power-ups, the Tyrant medal, and the main menu intro. HUGE thanks for your work; it is a real honor to have you involved in my mod!
- Torn to Shreds (uadm9)
Original Author: Dan "CardO" Shannon
NOTE: Based on the QueToo version; originally a Quake 2 map
- Factory Frenzy (uadm10)
Original Author: Nick "Nickster" Hambrecht
- Out on a Capture (uactf1)
Original Author: Tigger-On
NOTE: CTF version of Out on a Rampage (uadm3)
- Spirit Collision (uactf2)
Original Author: Tim "spirit" Schäfer
- Newly redesigned menu, with a cool Matrix background effect courtesy of Stefan "sst13" Scholz (from his "Campgrounds Matrix Edition" map)
- Holdable items, as well as the gauntlet / machinegun, can now be dropped by players upon death or specating. If the Storage Capsule is dropped, it will revert to Standby Mode, and any item carried in it at the time (if any) will be dropped along with it, including items that normally couldn't be dropped like armor and health.
- Storage Capsule now displays the icon of the item it is currently carrying above its own icon.
- Players carrying uberweapons can now be identified by glowing orbs encircling their player model. The color of the orb corresponds to whatever weapon they are currently carrying; for example, players with the Homing Rocket Launcher will have a red orb.
- New piercing machinegun sound.
- New homing rocket sound (tracking beep noises).
- New multi-grenade skin (hazard stripes; brighter green light flash).
- New arc lightning color (gold).
- New ion plasma bolt color (magenta); inspired by the Q3Test plasma gun.
- New toxic railgun sound (hiss).
- New BFG30K bolt color (blue).
- New Conservation firing sounds.
- New Scavenger aura.
- New map loading screen.
- Added the g_bouncy cmd. Treats all walkable surfaces as trampolines. Intended for development purposes, but can be fun to play around with.
- Ubered ammo no longer used up while Conservation is active.
- Moved Storage Capsule state messages to the client; now prints as large text in the same manner as the normal holdable activation message.
- Fixed a bug where players that approached a flag with a capture-mode Storage Capsule would look like they picked up the flag, even though they really didn't (and cannot)
- Fixed weapon limit stats being hidden by flag indicators in CTF.
- Fixed a bug that would cause items knocked onto movers to continue to be affected by those movers after respawning.
- Fixed a bug that prevented players who weren't carrying the enemy flag from returning their own flag by touching it.
- Fixed a bug in which a knocked-away flag that returned to its location didn't generate a return announcement, and would continue to identify as missing.
- Fixed a bug in which a player who uses an item they were currently carrying in the Storage Capsule would cause the original item (the one they picked up and captured in the first place) to disappear as if it had been picked up.
- Fixed a homing rocket related movement bug that persisted due to only appearing in .vm compiled game code.
- Fixed a bug in which the game would crash if a player attempted to use an item in the Storage Capsule that was originally a dropped item.
Edited 51 seconds after the original posting.
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