RR2DO2 and I hitched up with the others and we headed for Bobotheseal's workshop on Team Arena Heads. A misnamed workshop really, as it covered the whole process of concept art, modelling, unwrapping and skinning so was much more general than we thought it was going to be. For next year perhaps he'll call it "Modelling and Skinning" - Some people I spoke to later thought it really was just going to be relevant to Team Arena and gave it a miss. I'm sure they'd have loved it if they'd realised.

As it is I expanded my knowledge further, and while I still don't posses the patience to move either vertices or pixels around, I'm still always glad to understand a technology or application. Watching Bobotheseal certainly makes me feel like studying harder. I decided I'd definitely be back for Part 2 the following day.

Thinking our presentation was due to start 30 minutes after Bobotheseal's, we rushed out as soon as it ended, only to discover that it had been rescheduled! No lost old lady or blind dog! Woop! Now we were going to be presenting at 3pm, leaving us ample time to both attend Urban Terror's presentation and promote our own.

We dived over to the BYOC hall and located Nas who'd been inflicting Q3F demos on anyone who dared pass his workstation for most of the day :) Nas I must say was one of the most level headed present and certainly a stable force on our otherwise tornado approach to organisation.

Panoramic view of the BYOC hall

After giving Nas an update on the schedule we flew back over to Urban Terror for their presentation - literally arriving just as it had started. They did a great job too - their recent map releases looked spiffing, and you could certainly see the HUGE progress that had been made between Beta 1 and their more recent Beta 2 series of releases. Each of their team members got a chance to talk about their sections of the mod, while Oswald ran around the map shooting at bots (BOTS! Crap! I knew I forgot something for Q3F Beta 2!! Someone get me RR2DO2! :). At the end they threw up a very professional looking animated logo and directed to the floor for questions. All in all we were very impressed. A truly slick project with a fantastic following - certainly something their team deserved after such a long slog throughout last year. It takes a lot of gumption to keep working no matter how small the following during your early days, but these guys have proved it can be worth it.

So our time was upon us. Fluffy ran back to the BYOC hall to start organising the presentation machine and try to get an announcement over the PA system to let people know about our new time. I started camping our designated room, and on entry I was sure they'd been a mistake - this room had a huge raised stage and was in fact, the rear half of the hall they'd used for both the id press conference and Jedi Knight II's demonstration - how on earth were we gonna fill it?!

Worse still they had this big stage, currently occupied by Paul Jaquays and co, winding up their seminar on avoiding getting Foxed. One thing I'd learnt (having been to every Paul Jaquays seminar so far) was that he always said "we'll keep going till they kick us out" at the end of his workshops, and there's no way on earth I had the guts to kick him out, so instead we waited patiently at the back of the hall until everything had died down. Besides we had a bigger concern - there was no projector in the room!

Almost as soon as Fluffy, Shuriken and Nas got back from the BYOC hall with the PC and speakers, I immediately sent them back out to try and locate a projector:

"Where the hell am I going to get a projector?" exclaimed Fluffy.
"Don't they have one next door?" I suggested in my "Why the fuck are you asking me?" tone, smiling warmly.
"That's Activision! They're about to demo Jedi Knight II again!" Fluffy pointed out...
"Well do they need it as bad as us?" I retorted...
Fluffy gave me one of his looks.
"They've shown it once already - they won't mind"I smiled

Well feck me if Fluffy didn't turn up 2 minutes later with the biggest projector on earth :)))). It even had it's own trolley!!

We had some problems hooking it up, but luckily a passing EvilJohn stopped by to see if everything was ok, and lent a hand to get everything rolling.

During this time I'd spent so much time worrying about the lost old lady and blind dog, that I hadn't noticed our hall fill up. Quite a surprise really I was obviously deep in thought because I had looked before and it was pretty much empty, and then suddenly a full house. OK so now I wasn't worried about getting an audience, I was worried that we had one! Easy solution... if in doubt, dim the lights and show a movie :).

Lights, camera action... a minute later I was relaxing and getting in to the movie too - I promised myself that if I ever meet n2y in real life, I'll buy him not one, but several pints of beer as gratitude. If it weren't for him making 'The Clip', we wouldn't have an audience currently wooping, cheering and even occasionally applauding the elite exploits of n2y's friends and associates pulling off tricks, jumps and superbly accurate kills in Q3F like absolute demons.

The movie ended, and as if it had been rehearsed (it hadn't) someone raised the lights again - a big round of applause... What the hell our presentation was going well!

The next time I looked at my watch we were 2 minutes from the end of presentation. We'd put in a couple of things that we knew people would like... crowd pleasers I guess - the flaming skulls was always going to go down well, some of the sections went a bit slowly, but I did feel like we'd done Beta 2 justice - and I knew we weren't preaching to the converted. More than one person mentioned at the end that they'd either not played Q3F before, or they'd seen it but had completely the wrong end of the stick about our direction and production values.

I took a couple of digs about not updating the website enough - that was to be expected :)

We also got to meet several great people - all Q3F players too, the two that I remember the most were Zapped Again and his daughter Weasel_Girl. Meeting anybody that plays your game is always nice for the ego, but I was honestly humbled by the interest shown by Zapped and Weasel - both of them had a sincere interest in the future of Q3F, and a real concern about the future of game-play - it made me think of things in a different way.

In a sense we're just guardians of an established game-play genre on a completely new engine, and while we like to embellish things, polish, make stuff glow, the bare skeleton of what we're doing belongs to the community now not us. In the strangest sense, it's almost as if we have no right to make sweeping changes. Not because of some born-of-morality decision-making process, but just because of a sense of responsibility. What we've implemented in the past and not adjusted has become the standard, and so in many areas of game-play, people have invested considerable time in perfecting certain skills for use in our game. When we change something, especially where we're trying to address balancing issues, we need to be especially careful not to nullify these skills which represent such an investment on the part of the player. We might own the intellectual rights to our game - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't respect the evolving game-play and skill-set legacy for those remaining die-hard fans of Beta 1.

We have to balance this against our wish to keep the project fresh, compelling, intriguing and that's the crux I guess. We should have moved through Betas quickly and arrived at a final some time ago - perhaps then we'd now be working on Q3F version 2, not Beta 2 but I doubt that it would have made a great deal of difference - worse still, we have a moral responsibility to advise people that something is crashworthy, and until we've nailed all the major bugs and got our original and planned features in, we're clearly still in Beta.

Perhaps then I should have named all the Beta with sequential numbers - by now we'd be on Beta 9 or something, much like another well known mod, and let's face it, it' hasn't done them any harm.

The real mistake then was really just one of perception - I purposely hyped Beta 2, and then failed to call Beta 1E, 1F, 1H - any of those Beta 2 - I could have at any time, but we wanted player models in so we stuck to our guns. To be honest I think we should be respected for that - the pressure from the community to buckle at times and do yet another feature-release has been almost unbearable, but we've kept our integrity. It's not that we expect something to be perfect, or that we're busy coding in features to make up for any delay - we just had a simple production list of stuff we wanted to put in before we considered if a justifiable MAJOR update - a jump worthy of an entire sequential numeral - like jumping from version 1 to version 2 on anything else worthy of your respect. That's what we wanted and that's what we're doing and may we burn in hell for it :).

Q3F and UT head out to Fridays for food.

Q3F and UT head out to Fridays for food, again.

After a brief jolt to Fridays for a final session of food and beer with the Urban Terror guys, we headed back to QuakeCon for id Software's party. The highlight of this short trip was that with Shuriken over at Chris's for a Bar-B-Q, we only had the one car and that was a pickup-truck with three seats! Guess who DIDN'T ride in the back :)

RR2DO2, Fluffy and BirdDawg in the back of vorriks pickup truck

One word SkweeG - pronounced "Squee-Gee", a hard rock band capable of the most surprising thrash metal renditions - the first of which that I witnessed was John Williams Imperial March. Hard to judge - I played in a thrash/rock band myself for quite some time in my early twenties, and I think back then bands had a more progressive stance - Nirvana might have pretended to write lots of three-chord songs, but in truth many of them were acoustic masterpieces, and somehow even Quake 3's soundtrack played live doesn't compare. Am I getting old? Bite me :).

Locki gets ready to attack SkweeG with an Nvidia stress-ball in retaliation for their thrash metal rendition of The Imperial March.

So with id Software's party kicking off in the background, RR2DO2, BirdDawg and 3-Demon settled down to a session of ProBall - Fluffy and I headed over to the BYOC hall to get a few photos of the case mods and Shuriken popped over to Nas's house for a Bar-B-Q. Saturday night, things were winding down.

BirdDawg kicks arse at Proball!

Nas formerly of clan Braveheart, Saviour of the Q3F Team's presentation

Then we found Vorrik again :)

Case collage

Vorrik's a great guy - I don't remember a single moment when I was bored in his company, and for that I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Last year we were like lost puppies - eating every night at the Trail Dust (the bar right next to the event) and breakfast and lunch at the Truck Stop, this year things had been very different. Excluding Fridays, which became a natural choice for beer and snacks, I don't think we ate in the same establishment twice - all of which at Vorrik's recommendation. Happily too he shared a common interest in our origins, so endless conversations along the lines of "So what do you guys do in England?" and "Yeah, and you do blah blah blah here in the States?" etc etc. It was a great learning exercise and for a man like me that likes to ask questions, a positive fountain of endless information and opinions.

Vorrik insisted that we crash the VIP lounge - after all we'd had VIP passes the whole week, and still hadn't even found the lounge, let alone made decent use of it.

A few minutes later we found Polecat (a WFA guy and conveniently head of security for QuakeCon) guarding the door to the VIP lounge - in we went and immediately started on their beer. We also met possibly the most interesting new face (to us at least) of the whole thing - a guy called Greg Goodrich; Executive Producer at Gray Matter and veteran developer of Redneck Rampage, Deer Hunter, King Pin and now Wolfenstein. Also, thankfully, not the least bit arrogant, as had been our experience of most other people in his position in our 'quest-for-enlightenment' so far. In fact that's not true... except Graham Devine (who coincidentally, had worked with Greg in the past) we hadn't met anyone at all that had that many hits under their belt, and funnily enough Graeme Devine is equally friendly and not the least bit arrogant either. Perhaps real success in the games industry, measured not by the $$$ you make right now, but the influence you've had on the industry does not require arrogance. Perhaps like most other industries, it's the flash-in-the-pans, it's the upstarts that think they're the mutts nuts, the dogs doodads, the goats gonads, you get the idea.

I probably learnt more from Greg Goodrich in 20 minutes of conversation than I would if I spent a whole evening surfing gamasutra.com.