
FortressOne: Quake Team Fortress (1996) mod still under active development - drzel
https://www.fortressone.org
======
drzel
This game is a beautiful piece of living internet history. We still play
competitively, the emergent gameplay continues to evolve. Most of the
community have been playing for over 20 years, and a huge percentage of the
players are contributing to code, art etc.

~~~
twistt
Hey Zel! Congrats to you and all involved for keeping this historic game
alive.

~~~
windsok
Is this twisted of QWTF Done Extreme fame? ;)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA3xBAe5nPs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA3xBAe5nPs)

~~~
windsok
If so, greetings from Baalz :D

~~~
twistt
Sup baalz! Yes it's me. I read this site daily but never expected to see a
post related to QWTF on it.

~~~
windsok
Same, I was actually randomly thinking about QWTF just the other night, and
then stumbled across this post today!

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pugworthy
I worked for Rogue Wave Software years ago, and we used to play this on the
corporate LAN at lunch time. IT guys were in on it too, and would quietly
upgrade all the players to be on the "good LAN" for better connectivity.

Once the head of Tech Support from Boulder showed up during lunch hour and saw
me playing, and says "You guys play too?!" \- so then we each shifted lunch
hour by half an hour and had cross site fun.

I will say that it was by far the best and most effective social engagement
thing that existed cross organization on each site, and between sites. Well
that and the free bagels and espresso machine.

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bberrry
Oh wow, QWTF was my absolute first contact with online gaming and it is so
dear to my heart. They were such innocent times. People asking strangers on
servers to join their clan and I remember cherishing my clan tag so much. I
was on dialup and didn't start using the mouse for a least a couple of months,
but like I did, innocent times and no one was whining or rude.

~~~
Svperstar
My internet was so bad I couldn't even really play. I joined the games lagged
around and died.

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wgerard
There's also Fortress Forever, for anyone who misses TFC:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/253530/Fortress_Forever/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/253530/Fortress_Forever/)

~~~
catblast
This was always cool. Wasn’t it released shortly before TF2 and pretty much
steamrolled into obscurity after that?

~~~
sitzkrieg
yep, it had a decent community for a few years but is mostly skeleton crew
pickups at this point

~~~
Hydraulix989
I actually like this FF aesthetic art style better than TF2.

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AdmiralAsshat
I played TFC a little bit back in the day (missed its heyday, unfortunately,
but the TFC Gold servers continued to be active on Steam long after TF2 was
released).

It's easy to think that TF2 "streamlined" the experience by removing bunny
hopping and grenades, but honestly, whenever I try to go back to it, grenades
are just annoying. They render much of the well-tuned class distinctions
obsolete when even the medic can blow you up

~~~
wgerard
The medic in TFC was really an offensive assault class, MUCH more analogous to
TF2s scout than TF2s medic.

The scout class itself was actually rarely used because the medic was
significantly more dangerous!

~~~
mietek
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is the real sequel to TFC. The medic in ET is a
force of nature; a dual-wielding adrenaline junkie.

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partisan
I had nothing but good times playing TF in 1997/1998\. I joined clans and made
friends online in a way that seems almost impossible to do nowadays.

Action Quake 2 and CS through 1.6 offered similar opportunities to make good
friends, but TF was the advent of that for me.

~~~
RileyJames
Same story, although I landed on aq2. Unfortunately there isn’t much an AQ2
community left. I was recently in ca/us and loved being able to jump on q2 dm
servers and actually play! But still aq2 wasn’t very active.

If anyone has in Australia wants some aq2 /q2 action, I’m in.

~~~
topdeck
Hey mate, AQ2 in Aus is still kicking. Funnily enough we've had 8v8 games this
past week in Aus. The adu community is still active and i've been trying to
migrate people from the FB to the discord. Which is ... Slow.

[https://discord.gg/TbG3tzt](https://discord.gg/TbG3tzt)

Come say hi, the new AQ2PRO client is really quite good.

topdeck

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Jaruzel
The best and most fun Quakeworld mod was 'Capture the head' (or maybe it was
called 'Headhunters' I'm not sure).

Every time you gibbed someone you could pick up their head, and run around
with it attached to to you until you 'dropped' on a specific spawn point to
score. You could run around with up to 6 heads attached to you in a 'chain' \-
if someone gibbed you, they could then pick up all your heads.

Very tactical, and lots of fun!

~~~
_bxg1
Sounds kind of like the "Oddball" mode in Halo. Wonder if that's where they
got the idea

~~~
mietek
The “Oddball” mode in Halo references the “Kill the guy with the ball” mode in
Marathon 2, one of Bungie’s earlier games.

> _Objective is to possess the ball (which is actually a skull) for the
> longest amount of time._

[http://marathon.bungie.org/story/manuals/Marathon-2-Manual.p...](http://marathon.bungie.org/story/manuals/Marathon-2-Manual.pdf)

(page 18)

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xvf22
I remember playing team fortress on my IBM Aptiva with the awful
modem/soundcard combo which meant I could either play online or with sound but
not both. Given the abundance in time inside all of a sudden I think I'll give
this a try. Thanks for sharing!

~~~
drzel
Hey - please do! Discord is the best place to connect:
[https://discord.fortressone.org](https://discord.fortressone.org)

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rhexs
Speaking of older games, are there any (other) active communities these days
that still play competitive capture-the-flag style games? CTF seemingly died
years and years ago and most games these days are sort of regressing to
various spins on deathmatch style modes.

Miss TFC/Unreal Tournament style CTF communities, but I'm not sure there's
anything left aside from obscure discord communities that occasionally throw
together a few matches.

~~~
mellow2020
There is Enemy Territory, the multiplayer successor to Return to Castle
Wolfenstein:

[https://www.etlegacy.com/](https://www.etlegacy.com/)

ETF (Enemy Team Fortress) also has a discord and people who seem to be
developing/porting things, but I can't find a webpage :/

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTJKcdUsAgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTJKcdUsAgs)

~~~
flumpcakes
I spent many hours in the early 2000s playing RTCW:ET, I haven't played in 15
years and didn't know about ET Legacy. Downloading that now and going to see
if there's a server about!

Thanks :)

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yesimahuman
This brings back so many memories. What got me into servers and programming in
the first place was setting up quakeworld servers and modding them.

What I miss the most are rocketjumping maps. I spent so many hours on those
servers but it seems most of the maps are gone from the historical record.

~~~
wgerard
And concjumping maps from TFC! Those were a ton of fun.

~~~
bsagdiyev
I wonder if there is an interest or place to dump these old maps. I have a
ridiculous amount of TFC, CS 1.5, etc maps I've scoured the internet for and
mirrored locally just because I'm worried they'll disappear forever at some
point.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Maybe you can put these on Archive.org?

~~~
bsagdiyev
I think I'll do that! I just need to clean up, run em through resgen and
probably zip them up to keep the clutter down.

Actually looks like I already have about 32k of them zipped from one of my
mirror runs. Roughly 195GB, with most of it being CS 1.5 maps. I'll get that
upload started. I've got somewhere around 1TB total though that I need to
eventually get uploaded.

~~~
flumpcakes
I have a few burnt CDs from the early 2000s (found them when my dad passed
late last year and I had to clear out his place) full of TFC maps.

There might be an overlap with what you have. I could see what I have and
release it out there if others will find it useful.

I remember with skulltag/doom there was an auto-wad downloader that would find
the map for you if you didn't have it. I wonder if there is a want for
something similar or a searchable database for all of these old maps for
twenty year old game mods.

Perhaps 99% of people are content with fornite/etc. and don't want to bother
spinning up old games no one cares about.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Like classical artwork and music, this is culturally relevant content that
needs to be preserved. Thousands of hours went into creating it, even though
it is not for the masses.

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andywelsh17
An outstanding mod with a lot of work going in to improve game play still till
this day. Tournaments are being ran and the game is actually starting re-
growth from all the hard work the development team is putting in. I think this
game should definitely be on valve's steam 'free to play' option. I think the
majority of gamers would enjoy getting into a game like this, especially the
older lads.

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b0rsuk
Long ago when the number of games was much lower, you could count on people to
know or hear about all the major games. There was a sense of community, of
shared culture. Just like the first years after communism officially ended in
Poland - there were 3 TV stations and there were cartoons at 19:00 every
single day, with especially good ones on sunday. You could walk up to a random
kid in class and start a conversation about his favorite bedtime cartoon. Or
there was very limited choice in common household appliances and furniture, so
countless people had the same models.

Yes, it's nostalgia too, but it was fun to have a sense of shared culture.
Fragmentation has its downsides. I'm not sure how to have the cookie and eat
it.

~~~
hombre_fatal
People are only playing a tiny subset of all games. Kids who follows gaming in
2020 are familiar with most of these games:
[https://www.twitch.tv/directory](https://www.twitch.tv/directory)

You're assuming things have changed when they really haven't. In fact, there's
even more of a shared culture around gaming these days because gaming is
mainstream and ubiquitous.

Go to r/gaming and you'll see people talking about the same popular games.

Besides, when I was a kid, odds were nobody knew what games I was playing
because nobody but a tiny minority played games. I just learned to not talk
about gaming. Gamers have it much better now.

~~~
_bxg1
Yeah, I'm sure today's middle-school conversations about Fortnite are every
bit as prevalent as the GP's conversations about cartoons were

------
Svperstar
One of the first mods I ever got into was the original TF. Too bad I pinged
like 200 m/s from the majority of the servers so at best I could log in and
spam grenades before I died. lol.

~~~
drzel
Our nightly games are played on local servers with 13ms pings, but we still
have international matches played on midpoint servers, with most players
pinging between 150-200ms. Holds up very well.

~~~
kovek
What if servers always enforced a minimum ping on the users! Never thought of
this. Then, I might have had better luck playing shooters games when I was
younger.

~~~
drzel
We do exactly this for example, for Australia vs USA matches, hosted in
California. With minping, all players ping around 160ms.

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flumpcakes
I saw a frag video posted (Team Fortress Done Extreme 2).

I never got into team fortress from quake days, but I did get into team
fortress classic.

One of the best frag videos for tfc is Last Dinosaur 2:

Apart from the final rendered quality (not exactly a 4k video) I think it
still holds up, really good frag video.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPZsL6R0uq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPZsL6R0uq0)

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bmn__
The user experience is from the past millennium.

1\. I downloaded the game and unpacked it. It would not start. Debugging
reveals a dependency upon libpcre.so.3. This is not packaged (obsoleted by
libpcre2). I hacked around the problem by making a link to libpcre.so.1.
Imagine someone who is not a programmer, would he be able to figure that out?

2\. I ran the game and go into the options menu. The text is so small it is
almost unreadable and there is no way to make it bigger. We Quake players are
all old farts now who more often than not have deteriorated vision.

3\. I got the server list and attempted to join an empty server with low ping
in the neighbouring country so I could experiment a bit. The game proceeds to
download lots of files at 7 kB/s with no indication of overall progress. After
four minutes of waiting I cancel out.

4\. I find the menu to host a local server. Running it errors out in the
console: something something DM4 not found.

5\. I decide to write up what happened to HN. I quit the game. Gamma settings
for the desktop environment are messed up.

~~~
drzel
Hey thank you for the feedback - you're not wrong. We haven't exaclty given
Linux the focus it deserves. We're aware of these issues and working on fixing
them.

As for the server, we run servers around the world including FortressOne in
the title. These should work well, there are a couple of older community
servers which... Literally are from the last millenium.

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strbean
I wish the Q2 mod Gloom had the same longevity :( last I heard there were just
a couple dozen people still playing, mostly in Europe.

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bladespirit
Same awsome game updated to 2020 standards !

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CM30
For anyone who wants to know how impressive this sort of development
time/commitment is, keep in mind that Duke Nukem Forever started development a
year after this mod did.

Of course, people didn't have to wait from 1996 to 2020 to actually play it.

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jaequery
TF was good but I miss Rocket Arena more

~~~
evanmoran
Couldn't agree more. For those wondering, Rocket Arena was an amazing team
game (last team alive gets a point, or optionally CTF rules) where each player
starts with ALL of the weapons, armor and ammo in the game. Since everyone had
a rocket launcher, railgun, grenade launcher, shotgun, etc, this focused the
game on team strategy / communication and shooting accuracy rather than on
timing the weapon / player health spawns. This would have been awesome by
itself, but Rocket Area also made it so that rockets didn't do damage to your
health (though they did hurt your armor!) so you could freely move with rocket
jumping. This created unbelievable mobility and many beautiful custom maps
were made; just imagine huge castles where your skill at rocket jumping
allowed you to soar from turret to turret.

Here's a good video showing the mobility and skill involved in using all the
weapons at once:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhzK5fL1mj0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhzK5fL1mj0)

Here's some of the maps that were common:
[http://www.bosskey.net/q3a/maps/standard.html](http://www.bosskey.net/q3a/maps/standard.html)

~~~
tomc1985
This reminds me of Instagib mode in UT ... same gameplay twist: since everyone
is on an even playing field with a hitscan instakill gun, accuracy and agility
were much more important

~~~
flumpcakes
Instagib was my favorite mode back in UT2003/2004\. Really forced you to hone
your twitch muscles. When you and your opponent were both missing each other,
it only upped the frantic tension until one of you bursts into giblets!

