Curiosity killed........

[Infernis]

I got some random questions for anyone who cares to answer them.

This site has been around for a long time. Is there anyone from the start still active today?
There have been many great Quake 3 mappers throughout the years. Does anyone know what happend to them and where they are today?
It's common that people play games in clans but have there ever been any mapping groups?
Are there people still active who work together with other people from this site?
Or are some people hanging out together [IRC, MSN, ICQ] and sharing design stuff that way?

Thanks in advance.

[cityy]

The only place I know where we are talking about mapping from time to time is #maverickservers on quakenet.

[Kaz]

#terrafusion on quakenet, but it gets a little creepy from time to time. #darkplaces on irc.anynet.org is a good channel for technical discussions (there are a few mappers there for Nexuiz)

edit: Team HUH, composed of like KnightMB, Raven, and others, made maps together I think.

[unitool]

I got some random questions for anyone who cares to answer them....

questions.

I can try to answer these. In order...

1. Yeah, people that were around in the beginning are still here. Me, for instance. I don't post very often these days since I am not doing anything, but I have been here since the start, as have many others, who are still active in the forums. You can page thru the archive and look at the join dates. Not sure how accurate they are; the site has gone thru a few changes and crashes over the years, but I am pretty sure my join date is correct.
2. Many of them got jobs as level designers or artists. Others were strictly hobbyists and are still mapping today as a hobby.
3. There have been mapping groups, usually made up of individual mappers of some note in the community. I wish I could remember the name of one.
4. It seems that most stuff I see here is individual work, probably because Q3 tech is one of the few remaining places where you can make something cool all by yourself.
5. I think this is the case. I know that there are IRC channels for mappers, but I dunno what they are.

Sorry I couldn't answer with more detail. Maybe other people can fill in the blanks for you.

[Infernis]

Didn't expect such fast replies. Thanks so far guys!

[sock]

This site has been around for a long time. Is there anyone from the start still active today?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by active, this place probably has a 3 to 1 ratio of lurkers to people that make stuff and post here. Quake 3 tech is really old and the only people left are just doing it for fun. If anyone wants the spotlight of attention then there is Unreal / TF2 / LFD etc that have gigantic communities. This place is like an old mining town that struck gold a long time ago and now is just a ghost town because the mine has closed!

There have been many great Quake 3 mappers throughout the years. Does anyone know what happend to them and where they are today?
Most people have just move on and play other games. The mapping scene has changed over the years and unless developers really support a community (like Valve/Epic) then it just dies.

Are there people still active who work together with other people from this site?
Not many, there are very few projects or maps made for Quake 3 anymore, let alone any projects involving a lot of people. Most 'working together' projects are mods like warsow or generations etc

Or are some people hanging out together [IRC, MSN, ICQ] and sharing design stuff that way?
I personally use MSN/ICQ with friends for design ideas and chat. I left IRC a long time ago, it always felt like I was waiting for a conversation to happen! A very weird place where people just idle and not talk.

[obsidian]

There are a number of people who have been here since the beginning (mostly posting in the other sub-forums), but a few who have been here since the beginning.

Other mappers are still around, some moved on to other games, some quit mapping altogether as they got busy with life, many actually work professionally.

Splash Damage used to be a mapping group, they created the mod Quake 3 Fortress before the members got together to form the actual company and then went on to create Wolf:ET, ETQW and now their new IP, Brink.

I don't think anyone works in large groups these days, mostly individual projects, but there is a bit of collaboration between members with beta testing and suggestions/feedback, etc.

I'm on the Q3W IRC channel (very active, but not much about level editing, mostly just a place to coordinate play times for multiplayer games). A few other IRC channels, but those are mostly idlers. I also have a few members here on MSN/Yahoo/etc.

[Foo]

Whats up Inf

I had an account previous to this one way back in 99, but lost in the sands of time. So I guess 'from the start' is true enough.

In terms of community - leveldesign.nl and map-center served as mapping community hubs and groups for a time - both now defunct. Splash Damage and func_msgboard are both still around but not catering for Q3 so much, making this place pretty much the central hub for Q3 editing (as far as I'm aware.

Chatwise, there's a bit of mapping activity on QuakeNet in #Quake3World and #Defrag. cityy, silicone_milk, fKd, myself, obs and a few other mappers lurk the Q3W channel a fair bit.

[v1l3]

The biggest mapping group that I ever saw, was the mappers that hung out at the Challenge Forums from the http://promode.org/ site. It was like a massive group that grew and grew. All of them helped each other..except for some that kept to themselves..yet kind of sat in the background. Pjw, wviperw, evillair, stormshadow, Fjoggs, Lukin, xFoo, pukka(thefury), Swelt and lunaran. You should recognize some of their names.
I myself sat in the background testing what I could, and I got to experience the whole wave of it..it was very cool. I wrote Tig at ..::LvL and got him to make a Cpma(promode) map section and he let me run, and it turned into a major explosion and I ended up finding my way of contribution.
Then..Q4 came, and it killed the whole scene..as some of them felt like they'd get criticized for mapping the old game and not moving forward to Q4..which sucked! So..I've dedicated myself to hating Q4 as a result, for killing one of the biggest mapping online community. ..but, oh well I guess.

[Foo]

I'm over the whole push towards the latest game releases. Q3/CPMA are so mature as multiplayer product now that unless a game can drop that kind of polish from day 1 - I'm not interested.

The downside is there's a dependence upon community size and it's unlikely to do anything but shrink.

[Silicone_Milk]

I think I wandered in at around 2002/2003 or so.

I remember one of the programmers (quakesrc.org - I think it was Echelon) ended up being sent to prison for arson (burned a damn church down)

[Kaz]

Yeah he is/was my web host - shits crazy!

[AEon]

This place is like an old mining town that struck gold a long time ago and now is just a ghost town because the mine has closed!

I'd say the gold is gone, but platinum in barely profitable amounts was found... IMO, this site is even better than before... but lacking in "participants"... of sorts.

[Infernis]

It's good to see that a discussion has started. I have to agree with Sock about IRC. Couldn't have said it better myself. I tried it numerous times, but it never lasted long on my computer.

@Foo, you still alive mate? Sup man? As you can see, I'm still lurking around....

I had a long talk with Kat from katsbits.com about the future of mapping forums. Things will never developed into what we were used to for lots of reasons. Sock painted a grim, but realistic picture. Not too long ago I'd spoken with Stjartmunnen about a Mapcenter reunion as well. Those things made me think about some of the questions I asked in this thread.

Like, who keeps in touch with who? What happend? How's everybody doing? Etc. Even though I'm a lurker, you still "get to know" people by reading posts and stuff. Just wondering what it would like 2 years from now. The whole lack of participants and shrinking community is another thing. I guess you would have to throw some die hards together as a group and keep it alive with that. Still, maps are coming out on a regular basis.

/me is just rambling

[cityy]

IMO, this site is even better than before... but lacking in "participants"... of sorts.

I can't tell how the site was in the past but I kinda really wish to see more people here.

I am hoping that quakelive will make mapping a popular thing again! Tech 3 is such a great engine, even though I just started playing the game/mapping for this game I couldnt imagine to drop it as a hobby.
So about your question, Infernis, I think it is really interesting and unpredictable. If quakelive will be a great success and people discover the forums or old mappers restart working with the engine it might even get busier here... but maybe that's just me dreaming.

My opinion about IRC:

Much trash talk, much idling but if somebody has a question he will definitely get a quick answer there. That's what I like about it. ( lol @ Obsidian's post about #quake3world btw.)

PS: Since we are already off topic: I noticed Method being online recently - anybody knows what he is doing and why he doesn't post here anymore?

[Infernis]

Method works at ID. It's a shame I lost my ICQ account because I used to chat alot with him. He's still online, just not active in the community anymore as far as I know.

Quake Live has been out for a year now, so that mapping craze should have come already. Besides, it doesn't support custom content officialy which basically kills any community map effort. Unless it changed, been a while since I played it.

Don't want to burst your bubble though

[cityy]

Yeah, I know he works at ID - he is one of the guys whose work made me start mapping (mainly is quakelive maps).

About the custom content support: Atm people are like "meh.. mapping for ql is pointless", that's what you said already. The reason for mapping not being supported is copyright issues. ID can't accept maps with custom textures, because they can't be sure about where the textures come from and under which license they have been released. So the main issue is that ID can't redistribute content that they dont own. Ofc they could release a texture set and hold a mapping contest but atm there is no texture artitst in the quakelive dev team since Method moved on to rage.

(^As far as I understood)

What I was thinking about is that private servers or dedicated servers, however you want to call it might make it possible to let the server owners upload maps that are not made by id. These maps wouldnt be an official part of the game and so not distributed by id. This would again make mapping for quakelive possible.

So I have hope!

[dONKEY]

Hey Inf, how's it going dude?

[Infernis]

@cityy: You know what they say: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

@dONKEY: You got mail!

[Infernis]

Funny that I come across this post almost exactly 2 years later. People have come, people have gone. Old names have returned, there was a switch in host if I remember correct and it's still going on

[obsidian]

IGN decided to do a dick move and stop their community hosting services, killing off a whole bunch of communities, sites and forums.

Some of the admins got id Software to intervene for Q3W and transferred the domain name back to id Software, cloned the database and now the forum is privately hosted. IGN's servers used to run really slow and the site would time out, so who needs them anyway.



For a little history, the first forum migration happened even further back, we used to run on a (IIRC) UBB forum, which got compromised a few times so MPlayer/Gamespy shut down the forum. I think it was a year before Q3W was back online, having upgraded to phpBB and emulating the old theme. We lost a lot of archived stuff, though you can find a lot of it on web.archive.org. Sometime when IGN took over Gamespy, this site had been funded based on in-site advertising (web banners) but for some reason during the transfer, IGN forgot about us so we were advert free for a very long time. It took them the longest time to find out, but by that time most people here were running ad-blocking scripts on their browsers anyway.

So in summary, this forum has never been better and it will never die.

...Unless DooMer dies from AIDS, then we're fucked!

[Infernis]

That's good to hear. Does anybody know the statistics of the site? How much traffic it generates? Active users? And so on....

[obsidian]

I don't know the details, but we get a fair bit of traffic from various people visiting the site for info through Google searches, etc. Active users aren't the numbers that they used to be, but really damned good for a site dedicated to a game that's over a decade old. I'd like to think we've carved out a nice little niche community.

[Infernis]

There's no admin account for your guys? You are by the far the most active poster but who's actually in charge of the site?

Sorry, don't mean to be nosy, just really interested in these things

[Eraser]

It surprises me that we do occasionally get new people to post on Q3W, but it's very rare for people to actually stick around. Having said that, I think the newbie-to-sticking-around ratio is higher for people who come here for Level Editing than people who end up in General Discussion or Q3 discussion.

Funny fact: a few weeks back the Quake 3 master server died and someone started a thread about it in Q3 discussion. It grew pretty quickly to a 4 page thread with I guess half a dozen of new posters. All of them are already gone I think but it does show that people are still able to find their way to this site.

I think the main problem is that Q3W is so old that the community that remains is pretty tight knit. If you don't have some reason and "skill" to find yourself a place here, then people bugger off pretty quickly.

Still though, Level Editing and General Discussion/The Void (there aren't any other really active subforums) are two separate worlds that operate in different modes. I think there's quite a few people who strictly post in either one of the subforums and not the other.

LE really is a source for technical information and a pool of creativity so it's policed a lot stricter than the rest of Q3W, and that's a good thing.