The fact that the game was produced at a locked fps rate of 60 straight out of the gate

and only 6 months later the Q4MAX mod was developed for competitive play.

The game is actually pretty good, especially cause it's running at 250+ fps and the servers are smooth as fuck.

It's also shitty in most people's eyes because it's a lot harder to hit in, in certain situations.

I recall them altering the hitbox from a square/rectangle to a cylinder type deal later in an update. Is that hitreg a hitbox deal or a netcode thing

Wasn't there some type of sound issue as well?

Sound was bit iffy unless you you had an OpenAL sound card, also the lack of a proper enemy model didn't help. I remember someone making a Keel/pm model though.

Only people with no ears would have had a sound issue. The OpenAL was a bonus if you had a card at the time that supported it, it just made for better sound, like being able to hear exact spawns etc.

Oh, I never had one; I just remember the complaints on here.

FWIW Quake4 was released on 18 October 2005, and q4max was used at CPL Winter on Dec 14th 2005, so that’s less than 2 months. Agreed that obviously things kept improving with each release rather than everything being solved in that first build, but it didn’t take long to have quite a big impact on things.

Yeah, q4 was a fun duel/tdm game, as to the lashing out, it was mostly a ESR plus-whoring thing. I remember lots of people playing. Iirc what broke the Camel's back was the herd mentality after ESWC dropped it for q3.

pawning it off to other developers

Bad release of afps game is tradition.
Good release would be awkward. ;)

Q4 - don't remember, opinions were so bad that I skipped it
QL - had subscription model
QC - performance, round duels...

QL's subscription model I look back and i think about it, it really wasn't that bad, compared to what people were complaining about and what not. I do think they made the mistake of not making all the maps completely free to play since some of those maps historically been free to download for the community for a while.

QC on the other hand, it was promised by Tim Willits that Sacrifice was going to be the premiere and main esports mode for QC for a while, then performance shit the bed on it (because game's engine was basically an game engine designed for xbox 360 games). Round based duels was one of the worst ideas ever, never should've seen the light of day. it took two years to make the game better, and i think it's in an okay-er state, game is not as good as QL or DBT at the moment.

(forgot to mention: 2v2 tdm in QC people liked more than garbage round based duels and sacrifice, cause it was closest to what classic duel will ever be, plus it's easier to play with 1 friend, teammate.)

QL's subscription model - I do not remember the prices but I think it was quite expensive. Also remember that in 2007 games like CoD4 were released so just compering it what was available on the market doesn't feel like a right decision to do.

And what happened on steam release? Loadouts.

But I agree with most of the points.

ah yes, the infamous 9/11 quake live steam update.

"then performance shit the bed on it "

Do you remember when they told us it was because they were collecting data in "real time" and that made the game run shitty and it would only be a few more months and we would all be glad they did it?

what a bunch of losers

I wanted to keep the post on a TLDR; sorta thing, but yes i remember the Redshell controversy.

the game felt worse after.
i like the game a lot it just performs like shit

I wonder if Q4 have the same mouse input bug that DOOM 3 have. At least at 60 fps if you use over 800 DPI the mouse will skip and do weird things when doing very fast motions.

Had this problem when speedrunning it.

q4 has best mouse input out of all FPS games, (overwatch comes second)

Try Reflex Arena then

60fps
ugly graphics compared to source and unreal engine 2.5
sound issues
no working server browser on release (had to use some custom shit like xfire and skq4)
changing the movement physics from 1.3 to 1.4.2
later making 91 fps the standard in a game with significantly smaller hitboxes and faster movement
turning the singleplayer into a doom3 ripoff which made the game lose sales as no singleplayer fans wanted to buy the same game twice.

interestingly enough, raven software (which worked on the mp until syncerror took over) is still alive and well. in fact they were responsible for the recent dmr-14 and mac10 meta in warzone which nearly would have killed the game, had they not fixed it in the last few patches.

Raven Software moved on from making games w/ Id software's tech to making and working on COD, COD Warzone changes and making new guns and I think new maps for COD:MW in 2021?

Syncerror + Tim Willits is what went wrong.

Those two are like king Midas, only that they turn everything they touch into shit.

Reverse Midas Touch!

High sys requirements, Buggy release, bad Single Player campaign, outsourced game development, a lot of parallels to QC here ...
additonally, not much of a change compared to q3a ...
in this regard QC actually took a good direction, on the other hand it had an early access lul release with no mods and a menu system from the 90s ...

lol you cannot compare q3a to q4, q4 is like 100 times faster game dude, your eyes must have been fucked up by a gorilla or u never actually loaded q4max multiplayer

Did you ever play q4 1.0? I guess nothing before 1.4, when it was already too late to “save” q4, despite lots of good changes.

xactly, and still just adding crouchsliding doesnt make q4 a totally different game ... and yeah the rusty texturesets didnt help the looks of the game ... and yeah crashes are not good, at least q1-q3 basically never crashed, u see how much of a difference it makes having a guy like carmack delivering the maincode instead of some wannabe spaghetticoders

crouchsliding changes the game speed and mechanics it is like air control in cpma, without corners in game, it becomes much faster and much more in skill base

Was horrible to play online. Could barely hit 15% LG with like 25 ping or so.

IMO, it's a combination of two things - poor performance, and a lack of auto-download for user generated content at launch.

The poor performance was improved fairly rapidly by the community both through mods and also by maps that had lower performance requirements (simpler lighting etc), although it did take us until the final releases before we really got it "smooth" on most hardware.

However without the automatic downloading of maps/mods, or even a good error message telling you what you were missing, "the masses" would have really struggled to even connect to a server. Even once autodl was there, it was complex to setup and had a couple of bugs that took a while to iron out, causing more frustration and loss of players.

Yea, I tried running a server for quite a while and remember putting non-trivial effort into ensuring http redirects worked as they should. Maintaining the files on the game server, then the http server... Yes it worked but it took some babysitting

Not that Quake Live is much better. Running Q3 servers was as easy as starting an executable with a cfg. Now one has to deal with all kinds of bullshit. Trivial it is not

For the general mass appeal the absence of decent bots for MP was deadly I think.
At least for me. I got the game early on, went to the MP section and couldn't find any way to play against bots which made me close the game for several months. On the bright side searching later for MP bots for q4 made me discover competitive quake so it had some benefit:)

Back in the q3 days we used to team up against bots etc., not possible in q4. Sabot was somewhat ok on some maps, the q4max bots never really left the alpha state although they looked very promising.

today automatic download is a standard, but in 2005/06 very rare

Not rare in the quake series though - q2 had it in 1998 and q3 supported it back in 2000 (both official, not 3rd party solutions).

To be fair, both added it in the patches rather than initial release version, but I would have hoped they understood how important it was, since it definitely had a big impact on people’s ability to find a server they could connect to as soon as there was third party content.

you are debil still sulking over a closed code q4max,

keep waiting for arqon ressurection, people are already porting q4 to warfork engine

No sulking here.

Since q4 itself isn’t GPL it wouldn’t (legally) help you at all to open source q4max if you were looking to somehow port bits over to warfork.

How have you got on with fixing MaxStats for modern browsers?

Nobody wants to fix your ancient code. (maxstats). Mb they will do something like ql stats, idk.

Porting quake 4 to war fork engine and open-source q4max are two opposite things to do.

Open source q4max is needed to fix and dig shit in q4max itself. Which has tons of issues and bugs.

Why would I bother putting any effort into releasing the rest of the q4max code if you cannot even be bothered to fix the bit that is already open source and you wanted a fix for? I expect someone capable could make maxstats work with a modern browser in less than an hour.

The truth is that there is nobody who has both the skills necessary to work on q4max and the time/enthusiasm to do it since q4 has been dead for 10+ years, so whether it is open source or not is irrelevant.

being open source might attract the right programmer, who is incidentally also somewhat interested in Q4. the odds are not great, but it's possible.

But with closed source you are basically looking for a q4 enthusiast who happens to be a capable programmer as well. what are the odds for that? Getting struck by lightning is more probable I'd say.

With open source people might try and report to us if they have any improvements or bug fixes once in a while.

It may not be quaranteed but it is definitely possible.

With closed source nobody can do anything, and someone is even trying to port q4 to warfork engine...

q4 is not dead, not compared to dbt qc and other noob games

U should come and play yourself.

You will get totally addicted in few games, 250hz tickrate is not something u ever experienced in q4 before.

What is there to fix? It's not like browsers have stopped rendering old HTML. I just looked at this image https://media.moddb.com/cache/images/mods/1/9...XStats.jpg

I'd be willing to dedicate an hour to it. Where's the code?

Being html / php / JavaScript / xslt/ xml files, the code is all in the q4max release zip and on any server running maxstats.

I’ve not tried it myself for a long time so I am only guessing based on his vague “it doesn’t work with modern browsers” report.

There was some JavaScript code which might now be blocked by security tightening which allowed you to get some limited functionality without having php and a server (browsing stats locally and it searching the local disk for files). Possibly that client code stops the server code from working when the browsers detect it doing naughty things (which with a proper server isn’t needed as the php code parses all the xml to generate the stats).

My guess would be you just need to strip out the support for the client side and the serverside stats will then work fine, but I’ve not tested it myself so don’t know for sure.

Edit: second guess is that actually it works fine, but he has configured it wrong. I remember server admins getting confused with how to set up the linkage between the stats folder in the game server and the stats folder in the webserver install, since the q4max/stats/*.xml files need to be exposed via the webserver to allow you to inspect individual games, and entirely separately the php code parses and analyses them to generate summary data

What is there to fix?

I took a quick look. The server-side stuff works perfectly fine with modern browsers (tested in latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, along with Safari on an Iphone). There is however a small issue in the php end. The call to xml_parse_into_struct from within MAXStats/import/SofeeXmlParser.php needs the final parameter changed from &$this->_struct to $vals, and then assign $this->struct = $vals, otherwise php refuses to load the code (I guess it's a minor syntax error which newer versions of php handle differently - I was running Ubuntu 18 / apache 2.4.29 / php 7.2).

Other than that, it works fine (after installing php-xml, which if absent causes it to fail, and took me a depressingly long time to realise why....).

The clientSide stuff doesn't appear to work as expected (see import/functions.js loadStatDirs_evil() and maybe getBrowser() if you want to try and make this work), but that was only really providing a pretty index page to the .xml files, which do seem to render via the .xsl correctly. The interesting stuff is all in the server side code anyway, so I would ignore this.

pass from me. good thing it works

Q4 was a single player game which was not designed with multiplayer in mind

The Single Player was even lackluster, if not plain bad.

Q3 was still the much better multiplayer game.

Q4 was a game noone wanted or asked for, superfluous, worse then its predecessors.

Q4 SP was really crappy, first quake game i never finished.

You're the first person I've seen parrot the same experience as myself, I thought I was the only one which thought it was meh.

The scene where you become a strogg was cool, after that you get the strafejumping physics.

The MP was garbage on release date. Q3 with OSP was lightyears ahead. As always, when the community made it playable it was too late.

To me it looked like a rehash of Doom3 textures and the progession of the game were like levels thrown here and there.

More than nobody asking for it it's that it wasn't what people were expecting.

6 years after quake 3, people expected a good single player sequel to quake 2, that was absolutely amazing as a single player game (even if maybe not the direct successor to quake 1 lore wise).

Quake 4 failed to be a decent sequel to either quake 1 or 2 storyline. For years the only memorable part of quake 4's single player campaign was the cutscene where you get captured and turned into a strogg in first person. Now that's being forgotten too.

And at the very least a multiplayer section on par with quake 3, but with futuristic graphics.

Instead we got a buggy mess that failed to be technically as good as quake 3 in spite of being a carbon copy of the gameplay except for the added butt scooting bullshit.

Thinking about it, it's 20 years that we're waiting for at least a quake 3 with next gen engine.

Id software can't even deliver that.

What really boggles my mind is that due to competition mods and enthusiast forums like this, Id has
had access to all this data about what makes for a good multiplayer quake, yet they have never taken pointers from said mods, etc.. on which features to implement in their games.

What do you mean? They did exactly this with ql and then some.

QL on release date was trash. Horrible netcode etc etc. People stuck to Q3 for years until catched up. By then it was too late.

QL had higher number of players than q3 from release up to this day. Just saying, not advocating for playing ql in 2021.

The game felt too heavy, not slick and smooth as Q3 or QW. Q2 engine was also pretty good, but I didn't like the techy look, but at least the engine was good. Q4 had both bad engine feel and annoying techy look. QW was too brown.

Q3 had techy maps while still remaining varied. Somehow the entire package worked.

q4 is much smoother than any other quake right now... much smoother

It also had super annoying clipping (or no clipping at all) at least in the beginning, and it felt like jump height was either too low or the height differences in the maps were built 1-2 units too high. Made the movement super clunky despite the crouch sliding.

"All of the above", kinda. IIRC
- no airstep => getting caught on a 8u stair, feeling like you jump lower
- taller players / view height => increases that feel, and changes the perception of overall speed as well as scale (any direct q3 map conversion was... ick

yeah i remember playing dm6 and having difficulties with the pillar section on YA. amazing

Its also because it was the doom3 engine and most of quake players had already decided (rightly so) that the engine was garbage for MP.

I actually played the shit out of Doom3 and Q4 multi but I wasnt oblivious to their shortcomings.