Download Version 0.5:
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

Quake 3 maps and 4 user-made maps, all used with permission.

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 keep in mind that bots haven't been optimized for the mod yet at all. I need to do some more research on modifying Quake 3 bot code for mods. I have a feeling that bots will never be able to learn to use trampolines very well (at least not without an entirely new .aas compiler, which is way beyond my level of knowledge), but I can imagine the other mechanics being workable.

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.

Just played through all three maps :]

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!

Glad to hear you liked it. :)

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!

Heads up!

There is now a video overview of all the new items / game mechanics featured in Uber Arena:
www.youtube.com/watch

Unfortunately I just ran into an issue with compiling my .vms. When I compile and run the game using the .dll's all three components (game, cgame, and ui) work fine. When I compile the .vms, changes in game show up, but modifications to cgame don't appear at all. I have my mod directory set to read .vm's, and it reflects all of my older cgame modifications (like the trampoline bounce sound, or the weapon limit counter), but my newest ones are not showing up at all.

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.

Possible cached (temporary) build files? Clean the work directory's and re-build.

Version 0.2 is now available for download!
drive.google.com/open

Video:
www.youtube.com/watch

Trampoline demo video:
www.youtube.com/watch

Changelog:

• Added 3 new maps:

- Run Don't Walk (ua_wvwq3dm5)
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.

(As for the cgame qvm issue from my earlier post, it seems to have resolved itself after switching over to the ioq3 codebase. Still not sure exactly what happened though...)

Hope you enjoy!

If any Q3 mappers are interested I set up a "mapjam"-like event for Uber Arena maps over on Quake3World, focused on taking advantage of the trampoline mechanic. It's more of an experiment and I'm not expecting a lot of entries (if any), but I figured it couldn't hurt to try.

Details here:
www.quake3world.co...m/viewtopic.php

Started a dedicated test server for Uber Arena. I have made an attempt to forward the necessary ports, but if you still have issues connecting please let me know.

IP is 47.219.38.45.

hello...uber arena mod is fun..tried to connect to your server ip listed above..get msg "invalid game folder"..i'm guessing my uber folder in wrong place..my specs: running linux with ioquake3, uberarena folder is within ioquake3 folder. thoughts, suggestions appreciated. thank you. also, are there bots playing on your server in case there are no human players? thank you.

Hello richoi,

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.

hi EmeraldTiger...
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...

Hi richoi, no problem - I'm more than happy to help in any way I can. :)

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.

hi EmeraldTiger...
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.

So glad to hear you got it working! It's great that you even got your brother to try it out as well. I will have to think of a good time to schedule a match and get people together. :)

Recently posted Uber Arena on to ModDB to gather up some more publicity. Little did I know just how much it would actually get though - it has been featured in the September 23rd ModDB Editorial, as well as receiving a mention on the official ModDB Twitter and Facebook accounts!

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.

Hello!
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.

Hello Martinus!

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 will finnish it soon, and I hope you'll like it! I'll send it to you soon.
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.

Tried in both ioQuake3 and OpenArena. Had a lot of fun in both games. It works surprisingly well in OA.

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.