QuakeOne.com Launced

QuakeOne.com is a resource for Quake as an online multiplayer game. They provide information on the various mods, server information and provide a place for the community to discuss all things related to Quake.

QuakeOne.com

Quake Shareware

The people over at Quakeone.com have been working on a project to sharewarize some of the mods available for Quake. This involves making changes so that they only use maps and files from the id Software pak0.pak, the pak file included in shareware Quake. The idea being that somebody could download Quake shareware, install one of the better, modern executables (ProQuake, JoeQuake, etc), connect to a sharewarized server and start playing for free. Hopefully this will attract a few more people to Quake and of course, once they realize how great this ground breaking game is they will buy the full version. A worthy goal. I have agreed to put up a sharewarized Threewave CTF server which is now running at xctf.clan-rum.org. pak0.pak doesn't have all the runes so some substitutions were made, orge head for regen for example. If you don't have Quake and want to give it a try click on the "Game Servers" menu option to the left and look for the shareware CTF server for links to the files you need and instructions. Of course registered Quake will work here too so give it a try sometime.

Free Quake

Network Issues

The Rum server moved to a new data center on March 28. Same ISP, just a new facility. Of course that introduces all sorts of other changes as well and in our case we started getting a lot of packet loss after the move. That sort of thing is most noticeable with interactive types of connections, like Quake. I don't play that much Quake nowdays however, but did notice the packet loss in network tests that I run hourly. Something I learned to do long ago in order to keep the network clean for our Quake servers. Complaints about network problems don't carry much weight unless you can articulate what the problem is and provide logs to back it up. I had been slack about following up on the packet loss this time because the Rum servers just don't get much use nowdays. But then one of our IHOC players, Mindz, mentioned all the pack loss he was getting so I asked my ISP to take some action. They started working on it July 1 and kept tweaking things and coming back asking if it was any better and it wasn't. Finally they got it right on July 22. My tests starting showing no packet loss and Mindz confirms that he's not getting any while playing either. Whatever tweaks they did before they finally did the one that fixed it, hopefully all those help a little too. So yeh it's fixed.