ETQW Mods

(__MaX__) #1

Hi everyone,

I don’t know if the devs are reading the board, and i didn’t find any mails for technical informations… so asking the community is the last solution ^^

So, here we are. I’m MaX co-leader of the Requiem AA team ( we released a trailer today) , a single player mod for Quake 4. Actually here is our problem : quake 4 isn’t really played at all, and so… there are not much people who got the game.

We are thinking about enemy territory QW, but… the first and major problem for us is the AI question. Is there any ai code in ETQW or will it be possible to use the original AI code from Q4 or D3 to implement it in enemy territory to make possible a single player conversion of the game ?

If it’s possible, is there lots of modifications to make ? I mean, will it be really long to make this conversion of the base AI / monsters behavior ?

Thanks in advance…

(kamikazee) #2

Q4 is built seperately from ET:QW as far as I’m aware, so all codebase unique for Q4 is probably not available in ET:QW.
And even if it’s available, it would be mostly inactive as ET:QW uses no AI other then an objective system.

Please bear in mind that I haven’t worked with any Doom 3 engine SDK - so I might be wrong - but these can count as assumptions that it will take quite some work to port it.

(__MaX__) #3

Actually, there’s an AI base code in each game (doom 3 and quake 4)… and, i think that doom 3 is the base of everything made in quake 4. So i thought that some of the features of d3 and the new optimisation of q4 would be available through the ET:QW sdk… i’m not really a coder, i just look to see how some stuffs works… but if a game is based on the same engine than another, it’s possible to import and adapt some classes in it ? is it ? I can’t really estimate how much work it will need…

(carnage) #4

it has been mentioned in several interview that the changes and advances in technolgy with ETQW have altererd the engine so much that its cosidererd a new engine and so most everyhting in the game when you think probably has a differnt aproch to doing things

-rendering, new mega textures could be other things
-netcode, reworked for more open maps
-physics, new aproach for vehicles and probably to suit networking
-AI, not mention of bots and in a MP game the AI code would be radicaly differnt to SP anyway

you could find ETQW a very inapropriate game to make a SP mod for and switching just for a larger player base is a good move in terms of potential audience but it could even mean your mod would never reach a playable stage

(Sebultura) #5

According to me, no SP means no AI in the SDK, but I remember (wrong ?) that they talked about “drones” or something like that, so if it’s the case & if it’s the same kind of things as “repair drones” in Q4, then maybe there’ll be minimum AI…

Anyway, I haven’t studied the whole stuff in details, but I think that both D3 & Q4 AI code can be ported to ET:QW (if the SDK keeps the same structure).

(Zarkow) #6

AFAIK, ET:QW wont contain any singelplayer or ‘bots’ at all. Please tell me if I’m wrong.

(jimb0) #7

Zarkow: you’re right, the developers mentioned several times that it’s a multiplayer-only game, with no bots.

There will be minimum AI though. Some strogg classes (sniper, engineer) have drones that do some tasks.

D3 and Q4 only have monster AI, which are basically very dumb of course. To navigate on a MP level, there’s a lot more decisions to be done… I don’t see why one would want to ‘port’ any of that to ETQW. Better start from scratch, using the drones as a model or something.

(carnage) #8

it sounds unlikly that there will be AI for drones even. if you consider they would need to navigate the map in some way so they would require waypoints or a .AAS or similar. that is a lot of work for something as simple as just one drone. i think its likely that the drones would be remote controled by the player or have a much simpler way of navigating the maps then what would be needed to make bots that can actualy play the map as a human player would