If licensing had anything to do with your luck of the spawn of course. Supa, in her predatory grace, has released a new version of Hunt or Be Hunted, the team based, bot friendly mod which works on about any map you throw at it!

If you are not familiar with HOBH, players can spawn as soldiers, or as fiends. Soldiers are fairly typical, and fiends are what you would expect (though there are some wonderful variants, brilliant stuff), but it isn't a straight fragfest, the name of the game is elimination. If you die, you respawn in a weakened form, a grunt or a brood, and must earn your keep in your weaker form to regain your previous strength. When the entirety of your team is dead, the round is won, there is much rejoicing, victory spreads across the land, and all join hands to eviscerate one another again! The mod comes stocked with bots and the gameplay is designed rather well to their strengths, so even if you can't find a friend, you can still find plenty of gameplay!

The new features in this release are:

• For DarkPlaces users, a UT2kx style doublejump


• Weapon tweaks, pushing melee attacks, and curving rockets that inherit your velocity


• Nextmap voting to end the round and cycle to the next map

You can leave Supa a comment in this thread, and the download can be found on Quaketastic right here!

FrikaC has released a new version of the excellent Quake image handling app, Fimg 2. Think of this as a more up to date version of what you would see with Adquedit, Wally or Texmex, particularly useful for things like texture wad manipulation. Go give it a download right here!

In the aftermath of IGN's announcement, a lot of gears have come into motion, such as Lardarse, leileilol and Spirit working on creating standalone localized versions of entire sites. Willem has volunteered Quaketastic for hosting static sites. MauveBib has relocated the Electronic Liberation Front site, which was formerly hosted by PlanetQuake, rather than waiting for the ax to fall, and a new site, QuakeSoldiers (which is curiously Quake 4 oriented) has launched to provide hosting for those seeking a new home for their site.

Though this is great news for sites hosted on PlanetQuake, it leaves the question of, what is to become of the other great community sites that were traded around earlier in the decade for profiteering by corporate gaming? PlanetDiablo, PlanetHalfLife and many others, is there an effort to save those sites?

Need an injection of Quake? Getting antsy without some Ogres to circlestrafe with a supershotgun, but can't be bothered to load a site, click a link, and extract an archive? megaman and Spirit have heard your cry, and have released the first alpha of Quake Injector!

Quake Injector is a handy dandy application that connects to the Quaddicted single player database, displaying in a nice table all the sp maps it has available, which ones you have, the maps rating, summary and screenshot, and of course, automatic download and installation! It can be configured to whatever engine you prefer, and accepts additional command line arguments. This makes for simple one stop shopping on playing your favorite single player maps, and trying out new ones.

Go check it out at Quaddicted, leave some friendly comments, or respond to Spirit in the Inside3d thread!

IGN has announced that they will be discontinuing their hosting services at the end of this August; they will be moving to a new data center, and they're not taking any of the hosted sites with them. What does this mean? The destruction of 13 years of Quake sites, culture and community on PlanetQuake, never mind the many other hosted sites for other games such as Half-Life and Diablo within IGN's control. There has been no major announcement of this, simply an updating of the IGN Hosting FAQ along with an email sent out to those being hosted. CocoT shared his copy of the email via a Func_Msgboard thread and linked to it as well in this Inside3d thread. Spirit of Quaddicted quickly picked up on it as well.

This is a rather huge but also rather silent change for a significant chunk of the gaming community, and may indicate once more the shift in gaming from the community, to the consumer.

Allow me a moment on the soapbox to conjecture that this is not the end of such consumer oriented changes. Games have become less of a culture, and much more strongly resemble a traditional industry and media form; centralized hosted sites are being bought up and abandoned or burnt down, while actual direct community content decreases ever the more in presence without direct sponsorship of a commercial house, a house that is interested first in the commercial prospect, and will not maintain that community if it becomes less economically viable. In short, though there may be passion, it is superseded by revenue.

I urge all of you to continue to make the great content that you do, I apologize for my lethargy in keeping this news page up to date, and I urge you even more to take a personal stake in archiving that which you love from the Quake community, and any other game you hold dear. There are many applications and extensions for the purpose of saving websites to your hard drive - this goes beyond maps and mods: there is community gold to be had in the reams of text of old clan and individual pages and their reaction to news, to be had in the fan fiction and the webcomics. We at Inside3d will do our best to keep this domain community focused, and work in tandem with the other Quake sites to make sure our community is nurtured, no matter how commercial and contemporaneous the industry surrounding our art form may become.

avirox or xavior, depending on where you see him, has posted a very nice two part tutorial in the forums on how to do your own CSQC based GUI menus. GUI menus you say? That's right, no more awkwardly formatted centerprint menus, avirox has paved the way to sleek presentation for your very own mod! Though he follows CSQC optimized for FTE (as he did it himself for a QuakeWorld project), it is assured that it should work with only a little alteration in DarkPlaces as well.

The tutorial handles events such as submenus, floating description panels, logos and the historic Chalcedonian positions on CSQC. Go give it a read here and leave a comment while you're at it!

ThunderWalker CTF has a new community site, and some handy dandy specific sections to suit your every need and get you into the game as quick as possible. Want a guaranteed game? You're in luck, there's a big 3 hour event of it this Saturday, the 25th at 10pm EST, ThunderWalker Extravaganza Smackdown XI, featuring a wide array of maps, you can read the official announcement here!

Orion, not one to rest on his laurels, or his feet, has already updated Quake Soccer with many additions!

• Goalkeeper Bot - A bot who autospawns in front of the goal to defend it for his team


• Jumping has returned
  
• Speed boost is now a toggle


• Stamina trait has been added to balance out jumping

You can grab the initial update here and the patch to add jumping support to the bots here! There is talk of getting a game going online in the thread, so be sure to leave a comment!

Orion, showing what an athlete he is, has released Quake Soccer, and conveniently for us Americans, named it Quake Soccer, despite not being American! Yay for mixed up terms across national borders!

The mod is rather simple, there are two goals, the ball landing in a goal gives points to the team opposing that goal, exactly as you would figure. I assume the mod uses FBX since impulse 100 added a teammate, and 101 added an enemy player. Though it is Quake Soccer, there is no combat, or even jumping, rather jump is used to boost the speed of your run. Its a bit rudimentary at present, but there is a simple enjoyment to be had with the mod.

Improvements that could be made to flesh it out would be a form of stamina, which decreases when you use the speed boost and slowly regenerates, and better physics for both player collision, and the ball itself. In fact it would be interesting to see players be able to sort of 'push through' one another if they're going significantly faster than whoever they are colliding with. It could also use to auto-spawn a small even team scenario for you, and perhaps default to having a Goalie Bot, who sticks close to the goal and mostly attempts to keep the ball far away from it. Further enhancement could be had by re-enabling jump, but making it taking the player higher than usual, with a hard landing, so its good for high blocks with the body, and more interesting angles to knock the ball, while leaving speed to the stamina system.

Couple these with a bigger map, and a few more details, and this could be quite the great time, but as it is, its already quite enjoyable. Cool work by Orion indeed! Check out the thread here and download it at Quaketastic here!

The latest speedmodding session has come to a close as of 11:59 PM -8 GMT last night, with a theme of Underwater. Anything that involves being underwater was the only requirement, and though we had only two entries, they both made quite the splash!

• Supa - "Brainwash" - Brainwash takes the bloody work of Headhunters, takes it to singleplayer and cleans it up a bit. Single player maps now end when a timelimit or fraglimit is hit, but you can only gain frags via taking the severed head of a monster and submerging it in water. The easy side is that all monsters lose their head upon death. The difficult side is submerging the heads spawns a Fiend on the spot, and transforms the corpse into a more powerful monster. This really changes how you would approach any map, and also makes you rethink that grunt in the corner.
  
• Improvements - Though quite polished, this speedmod could've used a more graceful handling of hitting the timelimit, such as a five second delay with messaging as to what happened, before resetting the map.

Download - Inside3d - Quaketastic

• sp4x0r - "Depth Charge" - Where Supa went with a uniform approach, sp4x0r takes a specialized approach, bringing a custom weapon and a new map to demonstrate the mod. You are given a grenade launcher, which detonates only in water, at a pre-determined depth. This depth is set by you, with an impulse to increase, and an impulse to decrease (sp4x0r recommends binding this to the mousewheel and I agree). Rocket grunts and Scrags spawn in a well, and swim up towards you, attacking, while you recalibrate the depth for your explosives, so it will detonate near them. Grenades don't detonate on impact, so they will definitely test your depth perception, while dodging those rockets!
  
• Improvements - Different charge types, more monsters, and a reason to go into the water would be nice. This could be turned into a full blown mod with these motivators and some variety, and could make for a very different Quake map indeed!

Download - Inside3d - Quaketastic

Excellent contributions from both, I hope to see them expand on their work here, and to return, with friends of course, for the next speedmodding session! Now go download them, give them a play and leave feedback on the Speedmodding Thread!