![shaftwhores only by [EXE]dann](/files/avatars/2007/51852-shaftwhore.gif "shaftwhores only by [EXE]dann"){kind=small}
Hello, could you introduce yourself for the people who don't know anything about you?
I'm the creator of and project lead for CPMA, and the project lead for Q4MAX. I apparently have quite a reputation in the Quake community for both the work that I do and my low tolerance of stupid people, which tends to lead to people having rather polarised opinions of me. :)
In the past you have said that your real job is being a software consultant, what does it have to do with creating network protocols?
Most of my background is in financial systems and client/server design, which are pretty dependent on "pushing bits" as quickly and efficiently as possible. When you're carrying millions of trades a day on a global network, you have to do it well or it just doesn't work.
Would you ever trade your real job for a game developer job on the best of terms possible?
If "best of terms" means "matching my income", sure. But the game industry doesn't pay anything close to true market value: there are enough people who want to get into it because they think it's cool that companies can get away with underpaying their staff. The obvious downside to that is the whole "pay peanuts, get monkeys" aspect of it, which is why the quality of most games sucks SO badly these days, even when the "difficult" parts, i.e. the core game engine, is bought rather than developed in-house.
What progress has Q4max made in Q4 since 0.71?
Read The F**king Docs. :P
:'(
On top of some pretty beefy performance fixes, MAX now has just about everything a competition mod truly NEEDS, as well as support for games like CA and FT that new and "casual" players tend to go for. AnthonyJ deserves a LOT of credit for the work he's done turning Q4 into a playable game.
What is the architectural structure of Doom3 engine compared to the somewhat clean Q3 client/server approach?
Carmack made a comment along the lines of "The Doom3 engine isn't really suitable for multiplayer" years ago, and man, he wasn't kidding. People seem determined to try and hammer square pegs into round holes despite that. I can't speak for Doom3, but working with the Q4 code is hell, plain and simple. It's ATROCIOUS. Probably 75% of the time Q4MAX has taken so far has gone into just cleaning up the mess (which, on the bright side, tends to lead to fewer bugs at least) rather than actually adding features. There's no real reason it COULDN'T be a good platform for MP (although the framerate cap will always make it inferior to Q3 in terms of responsiveness etc) but it would take a depressingly large amount of time and effort to turn it into one, and already has just to get this far.
How has MP been implemented in Q4 in general, is it really a copy/paste from Q3?
Big chunks of it are, yes: right down to duplicating the same bugs that we (the OSP team) fixed in Q3 over five years ago.
Do you think that Raven has extremely bad coders or is Q4 just an example of current production necessities?
I'm not in a position to answer that with any degree of authority, but my gut feel is that while it's probably more the latter than the former, neither is the real problem: chronic mismanagement is. The announcement that Raven were developing Q4 was made in *July 2001*, and had reportedly been doing so for at least six months already. Think about that for a second: they spent FIVE YEARS working on it, hemorrhaging god knows how many millions of dollars, and that joke of a 1.0 release was what they had to show for it?! Either someone at Raven should have lost their job over that, or Raven/Activision/whoever didn't care about MP *at all*.
You've said that Q4 has more potential in gameplay than Q3, do you think that potential will ever materialize?
No: I said Q4 had the potential to be a better PLATFORM than Q3. At the moment though, Q4 is still far behind on both fronts. The gameplay changes in the 1.3 patch, while conceptually noble, weren't adequately thought-out or playtested. 1.3 helped the sluggish feel of the game, but hurt it just as much in other aspects by making the already-small maps even "smaller", turning it into even more of an aimfest than it already was. I still think Q4 can be "saved", but someone has to care enough to actually do so, and I don't know if id think it's worth the effort. They took a HUGE credibility/goodwill hit from Q4, so it really comes down to the cost of fixing the game versus the lost sales on ETQW, and that's ToddH's decision to make.
What do you think about CPL choosing Q3 over Q4 for the moment?
It's absolutely the right call. Q3 isn't just a better game and a better engine (as far as competitive MP goes), it also has the *infrastructure* needed to support MP that Q4 is still lacking in the form of GTV etc, and the larger player- and spectator- base. If Q4 becomes as good a platform as Q3 *on all fronts* some day, I'll be the first guy to argue for switching to it. Until then, it's just daft to adopt Q4 when its ONLY merit is "it's newer".
I'm the creator of and project lead for CPMA, and the project lead for Q4MAX. I apparently have quite a reputation in the Quake community for both the work that I do and my low tolerance of stupid people, which tends to lead to people having rather polarised opinions of me. :)
In the past you have said that your real job is being a software consultant, what does it have to do with creating network protocols?
Most of my background is in financial systems and client/server design, which are pretty dependent on "pushing bits" as quickly and efficiently as possible. When you're carrying millions of trades a day on a global network, you have to do it well or it just doesn't work.
Would you ever trade your real job for a game developer job on the best of terms possible?
If "best of terms" means "matching my income", sure. But the game industry doesn't pay anything close to true market value: there are enough people who want to get into it because they think it's cool that companies can get away with underpaying their staff. The obvious downside to that is the whole "pay peanuts, get monkeys" aspect of it, which is why the quality of most games sucks SO badly these days, even when the "difficult" parts, i.e. the core game engine, is bought rather than developed in-house.
What progress has Q4max made in Q4 since 0.71?
Read The F**king Docs. :P
:'(
On top of some pretty beefy performance fixes, MAX now has just about everything a competition mod truly NEEDS, as well as support for games like CA and FT that new and "casual" players tend to go for. AnthonyJ deserves a LOT of credit for the work he's done turning Q4 into a playable game.
What is the architectural structure of Doom3 engine compared to the somewhat clean Q3 client/server approach?
Carmack made a comment along the lines of "The Doom3 engine isn't really suitable for multiplayer" years ago, and man, he wasn't kidding. People seem determined to try and hammer square pegs into round holes despite that. I can't speak for Doom3, but working with the Q4 code is hell, plain and simple. It's ATROCIOUS. Probably 75% of the time Q4MAX has taken so far has gone into just cleaning up the mess (which, on the bright side, tends to lead to fewer bugs at least) rather than actually adding features. There's no real reason it COULDN'T be a good platform for MP (although the framerate cap will always make it inferior to Q3 in terms of responsiveness etc) but it would take a depressingly large amount of time and effort to turn it into one, and already has just to get this far.
How has MP been implemented in Q4 in general, is it really a copy/paste from Q3?
Big chunks of it are, yes: right down to duplicating the same bugs that we (the OSP team) fixed in Q3 over five years ago.
Do you think that Raven has extremely bad coders or is Q4 just an example of current production necessities?
I'm not in a position to answer that with any degree of authority, but my gut feel is that while it's probably more the latter than the former, neither is the real problem: chronic mismanagement is. The announcement that Raven were developing Q4 was made in *July 2001*, and had reportedly been doing so for at least six months already. Think about that for a second: they spent FIVE YEARS working on it, hemorrhaging god knows how many millions of dollars, and that joke of a 1.0 release was what they had to show for it?! Either someone at Raven should have lost their job over that, or Raven/Activision/whoever didn't care about MP *at all*.
You've said that Q4 has more potential in gameplay than Q3, do you think that potential will ever materialize?
No: I said Q4 had the potential to be a better PLATFORM than Q3. At the moment though, Q4 is still far behind on both fronts. The gameplay changes in the 1.3 patch, while conceptually noble, weren't adequately thought-out or playtested. 1.3 helped the sluggish feel of the game, but hurt it just as much in other aspects by making the already-small maps even "smaller", turning it into even more of an aimfest than it already was. I still think Q4 can be "saved", but someone has to care enough to actually do so, and I don't know if id think it's worth the effort. They took a HUGE credibility/goodwill hit from Q4, so it really comes down to the cost of fixing the game versus the lost sales on ETQW, and that's ToddH's decision to make.
What do you think about CPL choosing Q3 over Q4 for the moment?
It's absolutely the right call. Q3 isn't just a better game and a better engine (as far as competitive MP goes), it also has the *infrastructure* needed to support MP that Q4 is still lacking in the form of GTV etc, and the larger player- and spectator- base. If Q4 becomes as good a platform as Q3 *on all fronts* some day, I'll be the first guy to argue for switching to it. Until then, it's just daft to adopt Q4 when its ONLY merit is "it's newer".