- 7 - Weapons & Quads : Here comes one of my favourites. In this mode, all players start with an
axe. However, each time you touch a quad, you upgrade to a more powerful
weapon
(shotgun-supershotgun-nailgun-supernailgun-grenadelaucnher-rocketlauncher-lightning).
If someone manages to grab the 8 quads, he/she's given Quad damage for a few
seconds and all quads are respawned, which means other players can try to upgrade
their weapons, too. The frag system works as follow: the more powerful the weapon
is, the less frags you get for killing someone and the more powerful your
victim's weapon is, the more frags you'll get for killing him/her. For example, if
you kill a poor chap holding an axe with the lightning, you'll get one frag. If
he kills you, however, he'll get 8 frags. If he had had a rocket launcher,
then he would have got only 2. The fun part of this game-mode is that you
have to calculate whether or not you are ready to take "risks".
Upgrading to a more powerful weapon might make it easier for you to kill people but
you have to know that access to health items is denied in this mode so that,
at one time or another, you are bound to be killed and that, if you had a
powerful weapon, your opponent might get loads of frags. It's hilarious to
see people with lightning being killed by bots with axes and, believe me,
scores can change very quickly in this mode.
-
- 8 - Runic Wars (added in version 1.2)
: This fun game mode mixes elements of "runes" games and classic
UQC. To make it simple, I'd say Runic Wars is about giving the various Quads
you have to grab extra, runic powers. Those powers given to the player who
grabs them are of the "excessive" kind, which means playing this
mode is usually more violent, fast and furious than "just" classic
UQC. Here is a description of the various runic powers and the quads
attached to them :
-
-
- Rune of HEART-BEAT (attached to the blue quad) : This rune will increase
your health on a regular basis
-
- Rune of PROTECTION (attached to the red quad) : This rune will increase your
armor on a regular basis
-
- Rune of HELLISH FLAMES (attached to the orange quad) : This rune will make a trail a fire
follow you everywhere, hurting your opponents
-
- Rune of DECEPTION (attached to the green quad ) : This rune enables you to drop fake
colored quads on a regular basis
-
- Rune of FIRE-POWER (attached to the pink quad) : This rune makes you fire weapons much
faster than usual
-
- Rune of INVINCIBILTY (attached to the purple quad) : This rune makes you invinsible on a
regular basis
-
- Rune of QUAD POWER (attached to the yellow quad) : This rune gives you quad powers on a
regular basis
-
- Rune of TRANSLOCATION (attached to the brown quad) : This rune enables you, on a regular
basis, to translocate yourself if you're in trouble
-
- Rune of EPIDEMIC (attached to the white quad) : Each player that you kill
will respawn with an illness gradualy taking their health down.
-
- Except if you tweak options (e.g : enable one quad
-grabbing at a time only), runes are cumulative. Also notice that most of
them only work "on a regular basis", which means they are not
effective all the time, but only in particular cycles of time, for example,
every 10,20 or 30 seconds.
-

-
- 9 - Skull Collector (added in version 1.2)
: This game-mode could be described as a mix of HeadHunters, UQC and
Quake3's Overload. Here players can only grab one quad at a time and they
can only capture that quad (by walking through the arch) if they also picked
up one (or more) enemy skull(s). Skulls are dropped on the floor each time
someone is killed. Besides, the arch is given a particular amount of points
(300, to be precise) and points are taking off it each time a player
walks through it with quads and skulls (the number of points taken off depends on the
number of carried skulls). At a particular point in the game, players will
hear a siren sound in the level, which means the number of points of the arch is
very low and close to zero and the arch is thus close to being destroyed.
The player who manages to walk through the arch and make its points go below
zero is given extra frags and the game ends. Notice that, if you use an
engine supporting transparency (TomazQuake, for example), you will be able
to see how low the arch's points are. The more transparent the arch is, the
higher its points are, the more visible, the closer you are to the end of
the game.
- Alright ... I know it sounds complicated, but it's
not, believe me. I advise you to reread the paragraph above and have a try
at the game, it will all be clearer then :-)
- You are free to grab as many heads as you want but
you always need at least one enemy head to capture your quad. Walking through the arch
with only skulls or only a quad will not do anything. Notice also that you
can pick up your own skull and so "save" it from being picked up
from another player. To capture a quad, however, you need to carry an enemy
skull, not your own. In team-play, teammates can "save" skulls
from each other.
-
-
- Well ... I think that's all you need to know.
- Don't worry if you see that you are being denied
access to some features of the menu after you chose a particular alternative
game-mode. This is logical stuff, really. For example, quads are respawned
in the Quad Hunt mode, so this option is automaticaly toggled to non-default
(2) ... etc. If you see a particular option becomes unavailable after you
chose a game-mode, don't insist, it probably has a purpose.
-
- TEAM-PLAY IN
UQC (added in version 1.2 - demo5.dem)
-
- One addition found in version 1.2 of UQC is the
support of team-play for some game-modes. In order to toggle team-play
on/off, you simply need to press the number corresponding to the game-mode
in the game-modes menu several times. You will see the menu then cycling
through "Norm" (normal) or "Coop" (teamplay). Simply
leave it to what you want. If you throw bots in, they will automatically
join one team, then the other. Same thing goes for human players. To make it
simple, players bearing odd numbers automatically join the blue team, while
players bearing uneven numbers join the red team. I will work at a more
customized way to join team in the next version of UQC. I just thought it
wasn't really necessary right now.
- So far, the game-modes supporting team play are :
UQC Classic, Runic Wars and Skull Collector. Two of the five secret game
modes (see below) also support it.
- It seems obvious that other game modes, like Holy
Quad (which is already coop, somehow), Quad Asshole or Weapons and Quads,
weren't compatible with coop rules.
-
- All in all, bots play team-play fairly well. FBX
bots have good team-play built-in functions that make them quite enjoyable
to play. I will probably work on leader commands (like in UT) for
the next versions of UQC, which should make the whole thing even more fun
:-)
-
-
- THE SECRET
GAME-MODES (added in version 1.2)
-
- As in those old good console games, UQC comes with
hidden, secret goodies.These goodies are 5 new game-modes, which you'll be
able to play provided you can "unlock" them. Basically, you'll always need to do something
special in UQC in order for one (or more) of these hidden game-modes to be
unlocked. Usually, it demands you playing very well, reaching a very high
score or doing something special and spectacular. Also note that playing
with less than 5 opponents will make impossible for you to unlock any of
them.
- Once you have done that "task", a text box
appears on the screen with information about the game-mode you have unlocked
and how to be able to play it. Usually, unlocking the game-mode will require
playing around with several cvars and impulses, so it's pretty useless
trying to cheat. Several anti-cheat tricks have been implemented that make
it almost impossible to unlock the messages without doing the right things
:-)
-
- Now, I bet you wonder what these "tasks"
and these "hidden game-modes" are about. In order to know more,
you'll either have to play a lot by yourself and hope to be lucky (and good)
enough to unlock a game-mode, or you'll have to visit my site every week
during the 5 weeks after the release of the mod to get hints on which tasks are
required and which hidden game-modes are going to be unlocked.
- Each time secret information will be unveiled about
these game-modes, these pages will be updated :
-
-
- SECRET
ONE - One week
after the release
-
- SECRET
TWO - Two weeks
after the release
-
- SECRET
THREE - Three
weeks after the release
-
- SECRET
FOUR - Four
weeks after the release
-
- SECRET
FIVE - Five
weeks after the release
-
- STATISTICS
-
- You can access statistics about the game at
any time by pressing the "s" key and checking the console (this
feature has been added in version 1.2). These stats give you information on
the game and its players, a myriad of fun little facts about quads and, of
course, players.
- Note that the stats are also called at the end of maps
which do not automatically switch to other maps when completed.
-
- HOW DO UQC MAPS LOOK LIKE ?
-
- There are no "specific" map for UQC. Well,
not yet, anyway. However, you have to be aware that UQC DOES need particular
entities in order to run properly. For this release, you have two
possibilities: either use maps with hard-coded flagpoints or maps with
map-coded flagpoints.
-
- Hard-coded flagpoints - UQC will look for
these by default (temp1 = 0). In this case, this means the location of the
flags, quads and arch has been coded into progs.dat. In other words,
all you need to do is launch UQC, load the map and that's it.
So far, 35 maps are supported. You can get a list of them by typing
"impulse 110" in the console while playing.
-
- Supported maps in this release (1.2) are
:
- - alk08dm.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - alkdm04.bsp (Fileplanet)
(3ddownloads)
(or
here)
- - argonaut.bsp (FilePlanet)
(or
here)
- - bsdm4.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - bsdm11.bsp (Here)
(or
here)
- - crdm2.bsp (Get
all the download info here)
- - croctear.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - damaul7.bsp (Fileplanet)
(or
here)
- - dm7.bsp (Fileplanet)
(or
here) (or
here)
- - dmcloud.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - efdm10.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - gmdm1.bsp (Here)
- - gs1dm1.bsp (Fileplanet)
(or
here)
- - gs1dm2.bsp (Here)
- - gomdm4.bsp (Fileplanet)
(or
here)
- - gomdm5.bsp (Here)
- - jaj1dm1.bsp (Fileplanet)
(or
here)
- - jndm6.bsp (or
here)
- - kdmf.bsp (or
here) (or
here)
- - kikdm5.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - klzinsanity.bsp (Here)
(or
here)
- - lacrima.bsp (or
here) (or
here) (or
here)
- - lilith.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - mgdm2.bsp (3ddownloads)
- - misdm8.bsp (Here)
(or
here)
- - north.bsp (or
here) (or
here)
- - persdm1.bsp (Here)
- - pope5.bsp (Here)
- - pope7.bsp (Here)
- - q1edge.bsp (Here)
- - sthdm3.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - territory.bsp (Here)
- - trw.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - v2dc.bsp (Fileplanet)
- - xntrick.bsp (here)
(or
here)
-
- More will come in the future. I plan to
release "updated" progs.dat files with support for more maps as
often as I can. I'll add my own "flagpoints" and of course those
people will send to me (I'll explain below how to do that). Note that it
is highly recommended (almost required, in fact) to build a FrikBot waypoint file together with the
"flagpoints". If bots move around the level better, it probably
means that they'll also play UQC better. In these waypoints files, you
should also make sure that you take flags and arch locations into
account.
-
-
- Map-coded flagpoints - UQC will NOT
look for these by default. You'll have to type "temp1 1" in the
console before loading the map for these to be taken into account. In this
case, this means that the flag, quad and arch locations are contained in
the map, not the code. The advantage is here that you don't need to wait
for a UQC update to play on any map you want, since you can add the needed
entities yourself to maps.
-
- The entities are the following:
- For the flags : quad_flag1, quad_flag2,
quad_flag3, quad_flag4, quad_flag5, quad_flag6, quad_flag7, quad_flag8,
quad_flag9
- For the quads : quad1_spot, quad2_spot,
quad3_spot, quad4_spot, quad5_spot, quad6_spot, quad7_spot, quad8_spot,
quad9_spot
- For the arch : arch
-
- Add these to any map you want, and you should be
able to play UQC after setting "temp1" to 1. I decided not to include
any of them in the UQC release because I didn't want to go to the trouble
of asking all mappers for authorization, however, I did zip a UQC and
non-UQC version of strafin5.bsp as well as elfdm4 for QExpo 2001 to give you guys examples. You can
download them if you want from my booth, on QExpo's
site. (Version 1.2 addition : be aware
that I haven't (yet) waypointed these maps, which means they will run so
and so with this version. If you're a mapper and want to hard-code flag,
arch and quad location into your UQC map, be sure to include a FBX
waypoint with your map)
-
- HOW DO WE BUILD FLAGPOINTS ?
(See Demo4.dem)
-
- Ultimate Quad Capture comes with a built-in
flagpoints editor which makes the flagpointing business a piece of cake.
- Note that there are two ways to use it. Either you
are a mapper and you can keep the log file resulting from using the editor
to simply add the UQC entities to your maps (via a program like Quark, for
example) or you are not willing to map-code the entities and will send me
the log file so that I can hard-code the flag/quad/arch locations.
- Well ... anyway ... I'm gonna show you know how to
use the editor.
-
- First of all, load up Quake with the
"-condebug" command.
- After launching Quake, you need to set
"temp1" to "2". So, before loading the map you want to
flagpoint, type "temp1 2" in the console, then load it.
- Once you have spawned, you'll see a menu.
-
-
- This
menu gives you info on the important keys of the editor. Let's start with
the following, first:
-
- [F5] - This will spawn a flag where you are and
print its location info in the console.
- [F6] - This will spawn a quad where you are and
print its location info in the console
- [F7] - This adds 22.5 degree to the angle of the next
flag you are going to spawn.
- [F8] - This sets the angle of the next flag
back to zero.
- [G] - Sends you to the next spawnpoint.
-
- As you can see, you can spawn as many flags/quads
as you want, it doesn't matter. They all dissapear after a few seconds.
They are intended as "previews", if you want.
-
- You have to follow the part of the menu that is
under the keys description. So, for example, when you start, it tells you
that the BLUE FLAG is the first entity you should find a location for. So,
move around, find a good location, press [F5] a few times and [F7]/[F8] to
set the right angle. When the last flag you spawned looks ok to you, press
[F10] as asked. This will print a message in the console log and make the
editor move to the next entity, the BLUE QUAD.
- Do with the blue quad what you have done for the
blue flag, except that you have to use [F6] and not care about angles. You
last flag should still be there (hurry before it dissapears), so stand
close to it, try a few locations by typing [F6] and, once you're happy
with the last blue quad location, press [F10].
- You'll then see that the editor moves to the RED
FLAG ... well ... just find another location for that one and follows the
exact same steps as above, not forgetting to press [F10] when
you're satisfied with the position and angle (in the case of flags) of the
entity.
- When you finally come to setting up the
"arch" location, act as if you were setting up the location of a
quad ([F6]). You'll get a message when you're done.
-
- Then, close Quake and check the qconsole.log file
in your UQC directory. You'll see that you can now spot all needed
locations very easily.
- If you're a mapper, just print these and add the
entities to your map via a program like Quark.
- If you're not, paste the log into a mail window
and send it over to me. Do NOT send me the log. COPY-PASTE
it. Any mail with attached logs will be automatically thrown in the bin.
Sorry about that ... this is my paranoïd side. One other thing: send a
FBX waypoint file together with it, please (same thing, copy paste it into
the mail window) and be sure that that waypoint file takes the quad and
arch locations into account. You have way more chance to see your map
being supported in the next version of UQC if you send me that waypoint
file.
- I'll do the best I can to include support for
newer maps in the next versions of UQC and sending me your logs and
waypoints could help
me doing just that, so don't hesitate!
- No need to say that if you are a mapper and if
you're working on a UQC map, I'd love to hear about you, too ... :-)
-
-
- Here are some tips you should try to follow to
build the best and most efficient flagpoints out there.
-
- 1- Make sure that you put the arch in an
obvious location, preferably one that has free space around it and which
people can access easily. This is mainly for bot games. Bots have a harder
time to navigate through levels and if you put the arch in an area that
they have difficulties to reach, this will turn botmatches very unfair and
eventualy boring for you.
- 2 - Place the white Quad far from the arch but not
too far. This is again with bots in mind. If you put the arch at
one end of the level and the white quad at the other end of that level,
chances are that bots will have a harder time to take it and bring it to the arch
on their own. Of course there are other ways to pick up quads (e.g killing
someone), but still. On the other hand, you shouldn't put it too close to
the arch so that it is not too easy for you to pick it up and
capture it.
- 3 - Try not to place quads really too close to the
arch. You have to keep in mind that in UQCC, captured quads are respawned.
If you put a quad next to an arch, it could be easy for anyone to pick up
and capture quads several times on a row in a couple of seconds. You don't
want that to happen.
-
- IN-GAME QUICK-GAME EDITOR ... Wh00t
! (See Demo2.dem)
-
- Hehe ... this is the "secret" feature I
was teasing q1dom developers over on #qexpo and you'll see that, while
it's really, really simple, it is very effective and very cool.
-
- So what is this thing, mmm ?
- Well, the quick-game editor, as the name suggests,
enables players to quickly set up a UQC game (or any of the alternative
game-modes) on ANY map they want, even if they are neither hard-
nor map-coded. That means you don't have to worry about anything, just
load the map, do a few things and you are set.
-
-
- Here is how it works :
-
- First, you need to tell UQC you are going to
switch to that mode. So, in the console, type "temp1 3" and then
load the map you want to play.
- You are going to see a menu on the screen telling
you to press [F10] to set the BLUE FLAG location.
- Go to a good place, where you think that point
would look good, stand still and press [F10]. You are then going to be
asked to do the same thing for all the other points (red, yellow, pink,
purple, orange, green, brown and white) and at last, the arch. When you're
done with setting the position for the arch, bang!, you're respawned and
all flags, quads and arch are there ... you're ready to play. Yehaaaa!
-
- That's it ... explaining what the in-game editor
is was like coding it: both darn simple and darn effective :-) ...
-
- One last note, though: it's a good idea to use
this editor before you submit log files with flagpoints to me. I mean,
play around with it, experiment different locations, see how bots react
and then get the info for the best locations in the flagpoint editor
("temp1 2").
- Also note, of course, that, while the in-game
editor enables you to quickly play UQC on any map you want, it doesn't
save anything. All location information will be lost as soon as you exit
the map. So, think about building a proper flagpoint log file (as
explained above) if you're playing the same map over and over again and
submit it to me, so that it can make it to an updated progs.dat release.
-
- Update : Version 1.2 of UQC has brought some
changes to the way bots move around maps and, while these changes are for
the better on "officially supported" maps, they mean slightly
less effectiveness on maps flagpointed via the quick-game in-game editor.
It's not that it won't be fun, though ... it simply won't be as fun as it
should. A good tip if you want to make the best of it: use a map you have
a waypoint file for (check Quest's FrikBot
Waypoint Depot or FrikBot
Ressource Depot), check how the bots
navigate using the bot camera (impulse 103) and then choose locations
which bots obviously walk in frequently.
-
-
- Known Bugs
-
- However "cool" UQC is (or well ... looks
to me ;-)) ... I have to admit it's a coding disaster. As I like to say,
I'm sure FrikaC would get a heart-attack looking just at 5% of its code.
If there were tutorials to show newbies how NOT to code, then I'm
sure I could write a lot of them.
- I'm not a great coder, but I do try hard to
achieve the effects I want to achieve. Unfortunately, the price to pay is
often very "heavy" or redundant code and - yes, I have to say it
- loads of very, very ugly hacks. That's one of the reasons why I
scrambled the code ... because any other modder looking at it would banish
me from his/her view afterwards.
- On the whole, though, I must say I have been
pretty careful in not trying to overload the mod with features, tracking
bugs and correcting them the best I could. I have succeeded, I think ...
with some rare exceptions ...
-
- - First of all, you might notice some problems in
newer engines with quad glows, sometimes. They flicker, at times. This is
a result of a hack I HAD to implement. I'll try to look into the
problem, but don't expect it to be solved very soon, because it would
imply re-writing an important part of the quad-related code. Anyway, it's
not that bad, really and it doesn't happen with all the quads.
Things will be fine in GLQuake and Winquake, of course, since these don't
have colored glows (doh).
- - Quads sometimes fall out of the level when the
person holding them is fragged. This usually happens when the killed
player is very close to a wall and the dropping quad is thrown far away.
The reason why this happens is that I pushed the dropping curb a bit too
far. Oh well ... the Quad will respawn correctly, don't worry.
- - Alternative game-modes can get strangely
mixed-up if you do not make sure that you come back to the main menu when
you're using the in-game options. If this happens, restart the game and it
should be fine.
-
- Plans
-
- I'm pretty satisfied of UQC as a base. I'm also
satisfied about the addition made for this 1.2 version. I mean, as
far as my tests could tell, this is a pretty stable mod. However, I'm
still gonna be VERY
careful when I'll be adding new features to it, because I don't want to
screw it all up. Four of the five goals listed in the older help file of
UQC have been more or less reached : support for additional maps,
additional game-modes, fbx support and, with some tweaks, glowing and
transparency effects.
-
- But the story of UQC is not over yet, and there
are still a couple of things I would like to look into :
-
- 1 - Add support for more maps. Nothing to
add here.
- 2 - Add game-modes. I'll be looking at two
directions here. First, the "usual", toggable game-modes like
the ones UQC currently has. The advantage of those is that they are
playable on every map. Finding truly fresh ideas of game modes using the
UQC entities will probably slowly become hard, though and I don't want to bore
players with variations of the same old stuff again and again. Only expect
that adddition if I find a truly good idea, thus. Then, I would really
like to work on various map-specific game-modes. What I have in mind in
particular is the use of some single-player map for assault-like
game-modes using the UQC entities and the use of TF (Quake1 and
Half-Life (via TomazQuake)) maps for team-fortress-inspired game-modes
using the UQC entities as well. These game modes will be toggled on automatically at launch start and will be, I hope, quite exciting to play.
- 3 - Tweak team AI. This will of course be
needed for the game-modes described above. Some additions, however, will
probably also be usable in the "regular" team-play modes (UQCC
coop, Runic Wars coop, Skull Collector coop and hidden game-modes coop)
- 4 - Triers. Like in Quake3, UT or what
version 3.1 of Quakability should have been. Go from map to map in a
ladder system and fight increasingly difficult matches. Maybe.
- 5 - UMLQuake Implementation. It might as
well be used for something, right ?
- 6 - UQC engine. Not excluded, but it's not
a priority for the moment.
-
-
- Here is a list of the people I'd like to thank :
- - Myself ... Muahahahahaaaa ... I mean ... come on
... I have worked hard on this thing and, quite frankly, I do deserve a
"thank you" for the time spent on it :-)
- - Akuma for providing me with secret information
on the q1dom mod.
- - FrikaC for FBX. Great bot ... there is
nothing you can say against it, it's simply the best plug-in bot out
there.
- - FrikaC (again) for being so helpful on #qc.
Thank you for helping me fix a couple of bugs and make my life easier.
- - Electro for also being helpful on #qc.
Hopefuly his scheduled team-play mods won't crush UQC down :-P
- - Tomaz for TomazQuake. Without it, you'd have no
nice glowing and transparency effects in UQC. Your engine is the best out there, Tomaz, and
I hope you'll keep the good work going!
- - Tomaz (again) for coding help and suggestions
... I can't really remember what he told me that helped me with my
UQC qc code, but I do remember he helped, so thanks, Tomaz.
- - All the various mappers who made the maps now
and soon supported by UQC. I mean, I chose the easy way by making
flagpoints hardcoded and using external maps rather than maps I did on my
own ... All the credits for these maps of course go to the original
mappers. Keep on rocking, guys!
- - Quest and the all the FrikBot waypointers. While
the UQC bot now has his own waypoints, other waypoints can still be used
for games using the quick-game in-game editor
- - The saint skin is not mine, so credits go to the
original skinner.
- - Golgotha for the track01 music of the
introduction demo.
- - By the way, I was just kidding about Akuma
providing me with q1dom secrets ... I did tried, but he remained silent as
a tomb :-)