Wednesday, 14 February 2001 -
Impressions of the first CH Smackdown Season 3 comments
It's a bit late; the second season of Challenge Smackdown is already well underway in most divisions, but here is my little review of its first incarnation.

After having played in Villains II and a Clanbase QW league, I was looking for some more action for my team. Villains II actually seemed dead at that moment (it took a few months before the finals were played).
In order of appearance the people I talked to about setting up a QuakeWorls league on Challenge would have been Hoony, JP, Griff, Gacel, Wart and Porto, Ego and Andy, ZzJohnzZ, Apollyon and Tekai. When I contacted them, Gacel had just finished a season of the LEQW (Spanish QW league) and on CHAU I had just seen that the Autralians were looking to set something up. Ego and Andy joined in after they did bring Villains II to a succesful conclusion afterall. I knew ZzJonhzZ a bit from some source code projects coverage I did at that time. When Ego had to go to the army, Apo came in as his replacement and brought his teammate Tekai with him.
After plenty of meetings discussing the rules and the general organisation of the league, on May 28 we announced our little project to the public. Registrations went quite well and the amount of teams entering almost exactly matched our expectations. Although this was just the first season, most European top teams registered, new teams were formed in North America and Australians proved very keen to participate. Expectations were rather high for both players and admins although the start was 'pretty rough' with the disagreements about the Australian division and the lack of a complete system to track games and results.

At the start of the season, many games were played but in general enthousiasm dropped a bit from August on. However, the finals were a huge success in all four divisions.

Looking back on the first season, I think Challenge Smackdown achieved a few nice results.

As already noted, plenty of teams registered. The North American QuakeWorld scene revived, the European had something new to look out to after Villains and Australia had one of it's first online team deathmatch leagues. At the moment everyone was still wondering if Q3 could ever become the next big thing (now a moot point, it seems), we showed QW is was not dead, not even close.
We managed to run an online league with a global scope. As far as I know this is the first time this was done and we proved it was feasible. We play the same game with the same settings everywhere allowing us to compare the results in the different divisions, even be it indireclty at this moment.
In the end, everyone was able to cope with the much debated rules. In fact in the meanwhile, the same rules have been addopted by a few other leagues in part or in full. This seems to be a good thing to me, not because these rules are the only way to play QW or are the best guidlines ever to run a league (they are, in my humble opinion, pretty good though), but because it allows players to more easily go from one league to the next.

Obviously, quite a few things could have been done better

Many games remained unplayed. Although this is a problem in most online leagues, in our first season the absenteism was particularly high. I think this is mainly due to either the 'resurrection' of teams which didn't really do anything beyond enlisting or the next point.
The first season lasted too long. Six months is a long time in which players can loose their internet connections or whole clans can become inactive. Three to four months seems to be a more reasonable timeframe to keep interest going.
Many teams were unprepared for games (mostly with proxy-related problems), leading to long delays before games could start which can be a great nuisance to both admins and players that have everything ready according to the rules. Hopefully this situation will resolve itself with teams gaining experience in the league. We can only provide so many guides and FAQ's.
Some rules turned out to be difficult to deal with. Most notably the ban on any team changes during the season probably caused some teams to become inactive while they could still be saved by a small injection of fresh blood. The strict 4-4 only rule turned out to lead to far too many default wins as well.
The website was seriously lacking; for example rankings weren't available throughout the season. DethKultur programmed us a basic back-office on short notice, but he got too busy with other tasks for Challenge. The moves of the network didn't help to alleviate his workload either and were, for example, perfectly timed to coincide with the finals for Europe and America.

With this experience in mind for the second season, we don't necesseraly want to make Challenge Smackdown any bigger, but we certainly want to make it better. We now have a site with a functional design tailored to our leagues needs. We expected to have a complete backoffice by now, but due to circumstances this will take some more time (not too much though, at the current rate of progress). We have tweaked some rules to reduce the amount of default losses as well as to drastically cut back on time admins waste waiting for players that never show up. A LAN final didn't happen in the first season and at this moment it is unlikely to take place for the second season as well. The reason is not that we think its not feasible, but simply because everyone is already too busy with 'simply' running the league. We are still looking for opportunities though.

In conclusion, considering it was the first season and many of the admins, even the people leading the divisions, didn't have any experience with running an online competition, I hope I can say we managed pretty well. Not without the help of many people however.
The players pushed the game we all love to its limits and far beyond, providing everyone with exiting demos once again. All game admins everywhere made their game reports fun reading and their dedication to making the games run smooth while adhering to the strict rules was simply beyond expectation. DethKultur, Hoony and Greyseer provided us with continued support with the backoffice and the sites in general.
I would like to specially thank the people in the Challenge Smackdown team for their countless hours spent in attending meetings, refining rules, adminning games, helping out each other and in the meanwhile, trying to be nice to players. Thanks to Appolyon, Gacel, Wart and ZzJohnzZ for taking up the responsability of running a division, to Andy for being the super game admin in europe (I think he singlehandedly adminned half of the games), to Tekai for designing logos and being helpfull wherever possible and to Ego for starting the North European division and providing the Villains rules as a firm basis to build and improve on. Be it because they suddenly lost their connection, because they had a major fight on their hands between teams, because they made a silly mistake sometime and had convinced themselves they lost all credibility; at one point or another all of the main admins, including me, were about to quit. Somehow, with the help of many players and supporters, we always managed to convince each other to carry on and in the end I hope everyone is now hapy we did.

And now back to Season 2 again.

Wednesday, 10 January 2001 -
SD client compatibility/security 6 comments
It has taken a while for me to complete this update; much longer then I intended anyway. It's been on my hard drive for about 3 weeks although it has continuesly been updated and revised. The subject is compatibility of the Smackdown client/server with existing official (id) QW versions and cheat protection.
I've included ideas from the interesting discussion following my previous update and from some IRC discussions I've had in the meanwhile (other Smackdown admins, ZQuake and MoreQW people and arQon). Am I now, after last times discussion, still convinced we should go ahead with this project? Obviously, or wouldn't be updating at all :)

In my mind, compatibility can be seperated into three main areas:

- Quake C mods,
- existing server and clients,
- the 'feel' of QW.

Quake C
I think some improvements and/or bug fixes to the Quake C interpreter will be unavoidable. The problem here is that many cool mods aren't updated anymore so if the code needs to be altered, it won't be possible.
On the other hand, the amount of currently popular mods is very limited. I think KTeams and derrivatives for deathmatch, TeamFortress, some CTF mod and a FFA mod would probably cover 95% or more of the current online QW activity. KTeams is being maintained so we could possible get help there anyway. CTF and FFA mods are fairly simple and limited in scope, so I dont really expect a problem there either. TeamFortress is a different matter however. Although I believe the source code is available, the mod is extremely complex and really pushes Quake C to its limits. Any changes to the Quake C engine would most likely break it in one way or another, quite possibly beyond repair. Then again, how much are the TF and the deathmatch scenes intermixed and how much do we, as team deathmatch crowd care about it anyway?
Still, I would like to see compatibility for mods maintained. At least it would save mod authors from having to create custom versions for each new QW project.

Existing servers and clients
Since we couldn't hope to replace all QW servers around the world with the Smackdown server, the best would be to maintain compatibility with the current networking code. Actually, ideally I think we should have two seperate modes for clients and servers alike: regular and competition mode.

In regular mode, the client would be able to connect to a standard 2.3+ server. besides the improved graphics, the advantage of this mode would be limited to the fact that no external proxy would be required for teamplay messages. Other then fixing some exploits, the server may be able to incorporate some very basic additional cheat protection like running something like the f_modified checks automatically and kicking clients or refusing their connections accordingly. I suspect any such checks in this mode would be very easy to get around with the source available and hence not worth the effort. Spectators would behave in the same way as in regular QW. People connecting to the server would receive a message suggesting them to 'upgrade' the improved client.

In competition mode, the server only accepts connections from a Smackdown client, at least for the players. The network code is fully optimized and teammessages are treated different from regular chat. (How this could work and the advantage of this approach, I've explained here a while ago.) Cheat protection is fundamental in the design of the communication between server and client in this mode. (How this is going to be handled is far from clear at this moment, but thats not my problem now.)
Furthermore the server would have some features specifically designed for adminning matches. For example, it could accept a configuration file from the designated admin (player or spectator) so all match parameters are set automatically (may be possible for some mods already). The admin could be able to set players rates, kick players, request screenshots, adjust settings for spectators.
Even in this mode, the server could still accept regular QW clients as spectators. The transmission of the game towards them would be delayed by a settable time to deal with the possibility of players having someone speccing an enemy in the same room. In this mode, the server should also be able to record a server side demo and transmit it to the admin or another spectator designated by him.

As far as I can tell, both modes would require vastly different networking code. It might therefore not be possible to combine them into one server/client. Still, in my ideal world it would be, and its well within my rights to wish for it :)

The QW 'feel'
The specific 'feel' of QW or any other FPS is evidentely a very subjective notion, impossible to quantify and hence neigh impossible to tweak/adjust/improve. To me it's quite obvious however that this 'feel' should be maintained at all cost, or any support from hardcore players for the project will be lost.
The suggestion of making a Q3 mod for QW beyond posing me in the difficult position of having to buy Q3 to exlusively play a mod has the major problem that this feel of QW would have to be recreated from scratch. The same problem would exist when starting from completely different engines as well.
Furthermore I'm afraid the 'feel' would not only depend on the in-game physics but also for example on how the client and the server interact (e.g. the shaft in Q3 and that in QW).
Of all problems facing a Smackdown coding project, this could possibly be the worst and most difficult to overcome and it is in this area specifically where the feedback of (top)players would be most needed.

These were my current thoughts about compatibilty and necessary cheat protection and how they could be handeled in a Smackdown project.

I am still profoundly convinced that with the backing of our team deathmatch league has a reasonable chance at success. is willing to start and coordinate the necessary dialogue between players, admins and programmers and once we have our new site, we will set up a seperate section for it.
As always, any suggestions welcome!

P.S.:
some interesting links: Darkplaces, a new graphics engine
Quakeforge, general coding
OpenQuartz, a (very incomplete) replacement pak file
There are plenty more projects; when I gathered them last April I had about 20 or 25. When the new Smackdown site is up, I'll upload this info again.

Wednesday, 13 December 2000 -
A Smackdown QW project (?) 23 comments
Ever since the inception of the Challenge Smackdown team deatmatch league, sometime around March or April, the people involved have been discussing the possibilty of making use of the available Quake(World) source code to create an improved version especially for Smackdown or for online leagues more generally. Nothing ever really came of this but almost every other of our meetings ends in a brainstroming session about how great this would be. On one of our latest encounters we have actually decided that we should probably set up a project like the Pro-Mode on the new Smackdown website.

I have my very own (and quite elaborate) ideas about what could and should be done with the QuakeWorld source. I plan to share these with you over a few updates in the comming days. As everything here, these will be my own opinions and preferences, not necessarily all or any of the other people behind the Smackdown scene agree with them.

But first, let me explain why I think we need a 'Smackdown client/sever' (just to give it a name). For convenience I'll assume throughout you agree with me that QuakeWorld is a great game and by itself already an outstanding platform for competitive gaming.

For one, and in prinicple at least, due to the release of the source code, QuakeWorld is currently very suceptible to cheating. Even though this has mainly only been a marginal problem with online QuakeWorld leagues, it needs to be adressed urgently. The reason is very simply that if the game was to pick up in popularity, the incidences of cheating, even in well regulated competitions, would rise accordingly.
To make QuakeWorld really viable for pro-gaming (again) it indeed needs to attract a broader audience. I see two parallel ways of accomplishing this. One prerequisit is to increase the appeal the game has to the 'average gamer'. Capturing their attention can be acomplished by a plethora of improvements to the engine, ranging from an upgraded user interface over enhanced visual effects to extended spectator options.
The other avenue is to make the game completely free for download. Partially this can already be acomplished since the engine code was released under GPL by id and can thus be freely altered and distributed. But while the game physics have also been made available by id, the other game data (sounds, models, textures and maps) to my understanding are not. (In other words, for the somewhat technically inclined, all but the qwprogs.dat in the .pak files can not be distributed.) This means that in order to use an improved game version, the user has to buy the original Quake from id. And although 'buying something from id' is not necessarily a bad thing, I think this step should be avoided by inlcuding freely distributable artwork with the Smackdown client.
Having a free game also would have the added benefit of severing the ties of the gamers and competition organisers to a software company and instead put the development and the evolution of the platform in the hands of the players themselves. (A while ago, I made a rather extensive update about this issue here).
Most of the projects currently going on with the QuakeWorld source code promise to deliver on some of these issues, but, as far as I can tell, none will cover everything. Also, most of the developement is being done from the perspective of the respected TeamFortress community, and not from that of the deathmatch (one-on-one or team) crowd. I think this makes a Smackdown project with the QuakeWorld source code desirable. Actually, I think that such a project would have a fair chance of succeeding because of the way Smackdown is set up as a whole. It's not unfair or presumptuous to say the first season of the league gathered most of the best and respected teams and players in the current QuakeWorld scene, I hope. Because of this situation, I think a Smackdown client, in which these players obviously also could give their input, and if it's any good, would have a good shot at being accepted as a new standard.

I hope I managed to convince you of the necessity of setting up a project with the QuakeWorld source code to aid online leagues and QuakeWorld as a lasting gaming platform in general. In my next update I intend to take a look at some cheat prevention options.

Monday, 04 December 2000 -
Pop Quiz 1 comment
Which software company

removes features which were popular in previous versions of their applications to improve usability for novice users, only to put them back in in a later version and than claim innovative design ? (see here or here )

unleashes new versions of its software on the public while it is very well aware of major bugs ... (see here )
... while other anoying and well documented shortcomings are downplayed and left alone for months ? (see here )
calls design flaws features ? (see here )
uses fancy words or obfuscating terms to mean 'patch' or 'bug-fix', ... (see here )
... which, due to poor internal quality control, need further fixing about once a week ? (see here, here, here, here or here )
releases incremental improvements of the software platform and than charges for them too ? (see here )
relies critically on third parties to supply add-ins that are later embraced in the true spirit of innovation ? (see here and here, here or here )
implements crappy 'security' measures that do nothing but infring on the first sale right of the consumer and than blames the same user for it not working properly ? (see here, here, here or here )

Congratulations, you got it right!
Like me, every gamer now instantly thought of Microsoft, no?

Friday, 28 April 2000 -
Develloping a Pro Platform comment
Recently there have been some rumours floating around about a game under devellopement by the CPL and some currently unidentified game producing company (e.g. see GameCenter, EuroGamer or Sirex Column). If there is some truth in this, I wonder how exactly the gaming platform will be made available. That's what I'll take a look at in this update.

Of course, the first question we need to ask is: "Do (FPS-)gamers need to take charge of their own affairs and design a game themselves?" Answering this isn't obvious, as the whole discussion about the Pro-Mode for example clearly proves. (In my opinion, the most intelligent threads on this topic can be found below some of Revelations recent columns.)
As I see it, the advantages of getting an 'gamers organisation' (if such a thing can be formed in the first place) involved in the game developement are:

more steadfast rules (i.e. no major change in physics, ballance... , for the better or worse, every two years because a company needs to sell something new),
the possibility to force some minor changes, improvements and additions to keep things interesting (e.g. new maps, new weapons, incremental engine improvements),
the opinion of gamers and competition-organisers might actually be heard and taken to heart.

Now, if, for the sake of the argument, we assume that the gamers do want to create their own platform, how do they go about producing the game? And I don't mean gameplay wise but more from an economical point of view. i.e. who develops the game and how is it distributed? Do the gamers get in touch with an established game developement company, or a general software producer or are their other options?
Considering the competitive gamer is probably mostly (only) interested in a multiplayer game that can not only be played over LAN but also playable over the internet, the server-client setup, introduced with Quake, is probably the way to go for the foreseable future. Keeping this in mind, which approaches are possible?

The gaming platform is develloped by a software company under supervision of the gamers association and is distributed on a regular software license: each player pays for his/her own copy. Maybe dedicated severs can be exempt, as is the case for some current games, since it helps promoting the platform through the availability of many servers. Their is very little to be gained by the gamers from this approach however unless the association can get a royalty on the copies sold. Afterall the use of a title in major competitions can be used as a marketing advantage.
Same as the above but instead of the players paying for their individual licenses of the softwareclients, the people wanting to set up servers are required to pay a fee. Of course this would drastically cut back on the number of servers although the player base might actually increase. From the gamers and their associations point of view, this scenario has the advantage of having easier control over the servers, thus possibly reducing the number of variations (MODS) of the game (assuming that uniformity isn't already hard-code in the game).
A company develops the platform for the gamers association, but distribution and usage of the server and client are free. That is, free for recreational purposes. Licensing would still be required for non-private LANs and tournaments or for tournaments in which prizes are at stake. This would actually resemble the royalties system we have for music played at parties (at least in Belgium): private parties, with invitations and not charging substantial entrance fees, are exempt. Following this route would result in a possible abundance of public servers and recreational players (the spectators of the competitive scene). A serious drawback however would be the absolute power it gives to the association and/or software company: they can basically decide at will who can get a license and who cant, possibly resulting in a monopoly for a certain event organiser in the long run.
Same as the above, but even use for tournaments is free. This approach doesn't have any of the problems mentioned earlier but which company will want to spend time and money producing a product that nobody is expected to pay for in the end? A possible source of revenue would probably be in some advertising scheme, but still the risk is very high. The risk is high for the gamers too: if the software company stops supporting and improving the platform after a few months due too losing interest or insufficient funds, they are stuck in a dead end.
Instead of working with a company, the gamers organisation could opt for an open source and free distribution route. Not only would this guarantee popularity if the game is half decent (since it's free), it would mean continued support by a wide base of programmers, many of which are avid gamers themselves. Prevent unecessary branching in the code and subsequent fragmentation of the community. Prevening cheating on internet servers would still require some serious thinking though.

By the way, the above types of game developement aren't restricted to shooters of course. The same applies to real time strategy games and whatever else is played on a LAN or over the internet in a competitive way.
In all but the last scenario the gamers dependence on a software company really remains. Moreover, in these cases, a serious possibility of the athletes organisation turning into a money making bussiness itself exists; not only by selling the gaming platform but by controlling and restricting the organisation of events too. Which basically puts the gamers back in the same situation as with a software vendor, or worse.
Remember, what got me started on this topic were the rumours about CPL but to be honest, I don't really have an opinion on which role the CPL has yet. Are they a gamers association, or a tournament/lan organizing crew? And are its goals the promotion of gaming as a sport in a general way or the promotion of its own events (and financial situation)?

As you can probably tell I'm a big fan of the Open Source route. And the nice thing about that is that it can actually be tested in a realistic scenario already. So, although I would love to see QuakeWorld source code devellopment result in the next big gaming platform, I think the processes involved can serve a much larger purpose in the future of professional gaming too.

Friday, 07 January 2000 -
Q3A-Pro vs. QW Source comment
When Hoony first announced his plans to make a 'Professional gamers Mod' for Q3 I was quite happy about the idea. His intentention is to make a version of Q3 suitable for competitive play as compared to the out-of-the-box gameplay which is according to many, more or less newbie-oriented and lacks depth. Hoony had been considering such a mod even before the official release of the game, from the point where it became evident that some gameplay aspects weren´t going to be altered by id (e.g. footsteps, weapon switch time, rocket speed, splash damage).
Q3 is now available and it seems the coordination of work for the mod is well underway. Meanwhile, the source code of the original quake and its derivatives (the ever popular QW in particular) has been released by id as well.

Now I am starting to have second thoughts about the necessity of the Pro-mod however. Let's look at the current situation again: on the one hand there is Q3 with quite a few gameplay issues many people aren´t too happy about and on the other hand there is a source code available of a game a great number of people are still enjoying after several years of intense play. And somehow, more by accident than anything else, the latter game does´t suffer these gameplay problems.
Given this situation, and knowing we want to have a game that can be used for entertainment and competitive play, what seems to be the more sensible thing to do? Either reverse-design Q3A to put the gameplay on par with QW or take QW and add some new features?
I would opt for the second one for several reasons:

The complex gameplay is present in QW already; if compatibility with QuakeC can be maintained, all the physics of the game will be preserved. That would include the hard to master quirks like air movement, strafejumping and so on.
Weapon balancing, switch times, explosion ranges and such can be kept identical (see previous).
The graphics are good. Not great by todays standards but good nonetheless. Sufficient for some imersion and to allow for rather complex level design anyway.
The game runs fine on most ´modern´ PC´s. A Pentium 166 will do, a PII 400 is great and anything over that is overkill. At this point in time a game based on the QW engine will not give great advantages to players with unlimited budgets anymore.
Although most hardcore players by now have PII 450 + machines, casual players or spectators can still enjoy the game with much lesser specced systems.
If FPS gaming is to evolve towards a real sport, I guess its better that there won´t be any direct links to companies holding trademarks and the like. For the moment these companies don´t mind us using their registered names to advertise lans and other events, but what will happen once real money starts to get involved.
Likewise, it seems more approriate for a non-profit organisation to set rules for official games and tournaments than for a company whose main intend is (and should be) changing these rules every so often just to sell newer software titles.

By comparing these points to any popular pass-time annex sports I guess you can see their validity. Football (soccer for Americans) is basically a very simple game, yet by training you can get better at it and learn more advanced techniques (retro shots for example): it has some depth. Professionals will play in specialised stadiums, use special shoes and can be picky about the color of the ball yet it can be played almost anywhere by anyone as long as a few square metres of free floorspace and a spherical object are available. Spectators only need their eyes and maybe a cheap television to watch and enjoy the game. The international federation (maybe not the best example of a non-profit organisation) decides on rule changes and doesn´t need to worry about royalties for the inventor of the game. Take basketball and you´ll find similar parallels.
(Before anyone starts getting wrong ideas and thinks I like football: I don´t.)
And for the complex gameplay scaring off new or casual players? Look at chess with it´s long list of movement rules: of course a ´newbie´ will have to be sufficiently eager to learn the rules and he won´t beat a grandmaster in his first game, but that does hardly bother friends playing the game amongst themselves, having small competitions or joining clubs. Maybe it takes a bit of perseverence and some give up early; others continue and become good at it.

Of course not all is great about QW just yet and some features can and should be added to make it a future pro-gaming platform:

Advanced teamplay options such as position and status reporting: they are already available through the use of proxies for QW but could be made cleaner and easier to use by integrating them in the gameclient. In game real-time voice communication would be a nice extra, for example.
Some more maps: most people are growing tired of good old dm2/4/6 although great quality custom maps are available. If the release of the improved client could include some of these maps in the installation file, a whole new set of ´standard´ environments could be introduced.

In conlusion, I think that for a game or sport to get mass-appeal and suitable for competitions, it needs to have depth and complexity, it needs to be accesible to casual players and it needs to be independent of money-making businesses.
Furthermore I believe a concerted effort with the released Quake source code would be more succesfull at attaining these goals than a Pro-mod for brand new Q3.

Friday, 17 December 1999 -
The Bot Plot comment
What do jumppads, footsteps and grapple-less CTF have in common?

Jumppads
Jumpads are used to overcome height differences or horizontal gaps in first person shooters . Much in the way platforms and elevators are used in most of them really. Actually, in q3 jumppads have all but completely replaced these platforms and elevators.

Moving elements, whether triggered by some sort of button or not, don´t pose problems to any except the daftest of people. To bots however, they can be a great challenge. For a bot (and its AI), figuring out which trigger provokes what to move (and to what purpose!) is exceedingly difficult. Even worse, bots have a hard time determining when the ride is over once they actually do manage to get onto any moving piece of furniture. Typically they will bail out before the final destination is reached, mostly jumping back to the spot they came from in the first place. In fact, platforms and elevators can make complete portions of maps (and thus certain items) inaccessible to bots.

Enter jumppads. Jumppads are much easier to understand and use for computer brained opponents than platforms or elevators. They don´t need triggering, have one way in (or on) and one way out. no rocket science needed to create a bot that can perform well on these.
Or they could be in q3 because it ´speeds up´ gameplay, as some have stated.

Footsteps
Nobody likes footsteps it seems. Everyone told id nobody wanted footsteps in q3. I haven´t seen one single argument in favor of footsteps. Still, footsteps are in q3.

People are good at prediction: they can guess the opponents position based on other noises (item pickup, jumps), based on timing or based on the understanding of the oppositions present needs (e.g. for a weapon or for armor). Footsteps are quite unecesarry for a human to acomplish this as anyone who ever played a game of quake (no numeral) can testify.

Bots however -to put it mildly- suck at prediction. Prediction involves a great deal of decision making and AI much more complicated than required for the route planning and inventory management.
On the other hand, by definition, (server side) bots always know where their opponents, both human and computer controlled hang out. they know the exact location, they know which items are being carried, they know the health and armor status of each of their adversaries. It´s more difficult to program a bot that misses convincingly than one that has a 100% hit efficiency.

Enter footsteps. Footsteps give away positions at a medium range; at the range where prediction shots are important. For humans and bots alike they aren´t particullary necesarry for the reasons stated above. Yet, footsteps are a great excuse for a bot, that doesn´t understand anything about (human) tactics, to hit you head on with a rocket when you´r turning a blind corner. Basically, footsteps can somewhat hide the lack of decent prediction AI.
Or they could be in q3 because it makes the game more ´realistic´, as some claim.

Grapple Gone
The grappling hook has been a part of capture the flag mods since the very begining. So when id started working on CTF for q3, they logically build the models and included the fysics for a hook. Yet at some point, all of a sudden, the grappling hook is kicked out as being a design flaw that only interferes with the true nature of the game. Odd to say the least.

Somewhat experienced human players don't have much problems in using the grappling hook. It´s just a means to get somewhere important fast.

For bots however, navigation over land is difficult enough. Still, to get from point A to point B not too many routes are available. Navigation in water adds the tird dimension to the movement albeit typically in rather limited portions of the map. Travelling around with a hook however opens up the third dimension completely and a whole lot of new routes become available. Not many existing bots use the grappling hook convincingly.

Enter grapple-less CTF. No more difficult navigation decissions that are only used by the bots in a small portion of the game (the CTF mode) of the game anyway. Of course, custom maps can still include the grapple. But since it´s not in the official version of the game, nobody can reasonably expect this to be supported by the computer controlled opponents.
Or it could be out of q3 because it would ruin ´teamplay´, as some have implied.

So, what do jumppads, footsteps and grapple-less CTF have in common?
Maybe these changes/additions/omissions of very basic gameplay features have to accomodate mediocre bot performance.
Or they could just be great ways of improving the gaming experience.

-------------------
PS: I haven´t actually played against any q3 bots. I don´t even actually have q3 anymore (first test was the last one for me). I don´t really care either if the bots aren´t worth their salt; I´ll most probably never play them anyway even in the unlikely event that I would actually decide to give q3 another try. I am seriously bothered however by cover-up tactics and fluffy speech by some game designers. It´s not a design flaw, it´s a feature!