News

Playback.dem

Welcome to a new mini-feature on Frag-Net, where we try to have a round up of interesting news on the community along with a status report on our gaming network.

Frag-Net Status Report

And as we mentioned before we have been working on new site features, here’s a couple we’ve recently revealed!

New Games on Frag-Net

We added two new game pages, Hell Denizen and Nazi Zombies: Portable.

You may have seen these games show up on our tracker, and we wanted to provide some proper info so people could buy, support, and of course play these awesome titles.

Check them out now!

Preview of New Articles

It’s been a bit silent on Frag-Net, but that’s because things have been so busy in the background and our own lives! Don’t fret however, as we have been working on a few articles for the site! What can you expect in the next couple of months?

• Interview - Xylemon had the chance to meet in person with a living legend, we don’t want to spoil who it is yet, but let’s just say we got “demented”.

• Reflection - A look at the forgotten yet critical legacy of ThreeWave CTF, and why CTF’s past is so complicated. The flag wasn’t the only thing being stolen.

• Nobody Told Me About Visitors - Mentioned on our instance a few months back, it will be a look at how id Software’s relationship with fans grew from humble IRC chats and office visits, to full on conventions.

• Not Just Cheats - A first-hand account by eukara of what it was like to have Ultima’s Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, but for video games. All in the year of 1999. All without an internet connection.

Updates to Our Archive.org Page

For those of you who don’t know, we have an archive.org page where we try to build the ultimate upload page for a mod, like how our Scientist Hunt page has everything that was created by the authors and community (well at least what we have).

Anyway, we had a few important mods up with pages but in a Work-In-Progress state for quite some time. We decided that it was time to update these pages. Some of the highlights include:

• Complete archive of Quake THINGS!, Clan Cthulhu’s website, and the Quake Digital Trading cards!. These came from Xylemon’s cousin who created and ran Clan Cthulhu back in the day. A prominent member was Valve’s own John “Choryoth” Guthrie. You can check out Frag-Net’s own mirror of the sites here!

• Scientist Hunt, They Hunger, DMC, & Counter-Strike, Zombie Panic! and more all have community Addons and their respective official files!

• ThreeWave and other CTF mods now have descriptions and other important metadata.

• Description improvements and quality assurance on almost all uploads.

We hope you take advantage of our uploads! While they will also help power the Frag-Net network’s in-game addon backend, it’s ultimately there for the community.

Past & Manuals

Finally, we have started hosting copies of HTML versions of manuals for modifications and archived websites providing a ‘wayback machine’ layout for them (i.e. always prefix a site with https://www.frag-net.com/past/).

We also have a smiliar layout for manuals, with https://www.frag-net.com/manuals/ followed by the mod game directory (the folder for the mod).

As mentioned above, we are hosting the Clan Cthulhu / Quake THINGS! website along with Fantasy Quake’s amazing manual, check them out!

The latter is definitely a must for when you play Fantasy Quake.

Gaming News

Blue’s Stories of Note

Here’s what our favorite gaming news site, Blue’s News has listed as the top stories for March 2024 that you should be aware of, list is oldest to newest:

• STAR WARS: Dark Forces Remaster Released

• Embracer Sells Saber Interactive

• Alpha Protocol Revived

• US Files Apple Antitrust Lawsuit

• Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition Released

• Dragon’s Dogma 2 Released

Another remaster of a beloved classic arrives, Apple gets sued formally by the United States’ Department of Justice, and Embracer’s empire seems to be shrinking as fast as it was growing. What a month!

While those are some big stories, we have some more news in the gaming world worth talking about!

GDC 2024

The annual Game’s Developers Conference, Game Developers Choice Awards, and Independent Games Festival Awards happened the 18th to 22nd, here’s some highlights of the event:

• Baulder’s Gate 3 wins game of the year

• Alexey shows off a thought to be lost prototype “Tetris Reversed”.

• Venba wins the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game

• Velan Studios advocates for player control of dead live service games

• GDC survey exposes game dev views of GenAI and layoffs

Congrats to the winners of the award shows! To learn more about the GDC and related conferences, click here.

Thanks to Blue’s News and Slashdot

PAX East 2024

In addition, PAX East also had their annual event this 21st to 24th. Besides the hundreds of games showcased at the event, Games Done Quick also was there showcasing their bhoping skills!

Be sure to check out more and sign up for PAX West and next year’s PAX East!

LAN Parties - New Book on Deathmatch History

A new book called LAN Parties by Merrit K released earlier this year, but it was recently brought to our attention by some of the latest press on the book. Here’s a small blurb from the store page:

In addition to documenting the nostalgic era of LAN parties, the photographs are unique artifacts of the peculiar cultural and technological moment, when gaming was tipping over from niche hobby to mainstream obsession. They reveal not just the home decor and personal fashion styles at the turn of the millennium but also a different world, one that existed before the internet took shape and we started carrying it around with us in our pockets.

We thought it was worth mentioning here as fragging friends is one our favorite pass times, be sure to purchase a copy here.

Story sourced from CNN

Copyright Objection

Nintendo has used the legal system to shut down the popular Switch emulator, Yuzu. Alternative emulators, like Ryujinx were not affected by this.

Right away forks started appearing. First people flocked over to Suyu (which was removed by GitLab right away), others are observing the fork Sudachi. We can only wait and see to determine if any particular fork wins out or if they all diverge into their own niche.

Gaming News: Community

And of course we have to highlight what’s been going on in the community!

The Dark Mod 2.12 Releases

The Dark Mod, the famous Thief inspired fan game, has a new release! The news post on ModDB boasts of a few new important additions and fixes:

• Performance improvements
• Assets (props) fixes/additions
• Single pass shadow maps
• Uncapped FPS improvement
• Multi add-on support
• Less color banding (64-bit color depth)

Grab a copy here!

Call of Duty Mod Goes Retail, and 16 Years of Frontlines

It’s hard to believe that Call of Duty is over 20 years old now. While the rest of us are wondering where the time went, the modders and fans of the series are busy celebrating the 16th anniversary of Call of Duty Frontlines.

In addition to the milestone, a spin-off mod of Frontlines titled Call of Duty Rio is going to become a standalone game. The recently announced Commando Rio can be found here. As some of us have made the jump from modders to developers, we wish Hajas Game Studio the best of luck! Keep an eye out for more news from the team.

What Happens in CS, Stays in CS!

Fellow retrogamer and enthusiast ESCalation has put out a new video detailing the complicated history of de_vegas! Did you know that most people never got to play Vegas online when it released, or that the Sphinx used to be completely modeled out?

Check out the video here!

And for the classic port of de_vegas to Counter-Strike: Source that is mentioned in the video, you can click here.

New FreeHL Videos

Frag-Net’s own eukara did release two videos in regards to FreeHL:

• FreeHL Comparison May 2022 - March 2024
• FreeHL - Hazard Course (March 2024)

There’s more videos coming down the line, focusing on more mods, games and various internal improvements.

All in All

And that’s it! We hope you enjoyed our first entry in this new series. Writing these articles will help us document the things that are happening and select info will go right into our game event & anniversary calendars.

If you have any news you think we missed, should share on Frag-Net, suggestions, or even complaints, let us know. You know where to find us!

Happy Fragging

John Romero hosted a livestream on id Software’s 33rd Anniversary the other day, surprising fans by inviting John Carmack, Tom Hall, and David L Craddock along for the event! The stream was mirrored to YouTube by Romero and we recommend you check it out.

Long live id Software!

Early last January we were sadden to learn that former developer and activist Jennell Allyn Jaquays passed away, with her funeral concluding yesterday.

Jennell had a long career as an artist and video game developer, working on some of our favorite games such as a level designer for id Software working on Quake II & III as well as an artist on Age of Empires.

Her Dungeons & Dragon’s modules were famous, known for their pathbreaking or non-linera designs. In fact, her contributions were so influential that “Jaquaysing” has become a verb for a dungeon scenario with “myriad paths”. She was inducted into The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame in 2015.

Later in life she came out as a transgendered lesbian, spoke out about agin conversion therapy, was a freelance artist, and married other former video game developer, Burger Becky.

Along with her funeral, an obituary by the New York Times was written about her yesterday, we suggest you check it out here. Thanks to Blue’s News for the link.

We like to leave the last word to the dead, so here’s a short but fun interview with Jennell from Quakeidge back when she was working on Quake III. Her level design advice is still solid today. Rest in Peace.

Quakeidge: As we have discussed in the past about how to get started making maps for Q3a and to get ideas; is harder then it looks. At any rate, could you tell the Quake community how you start out making maps? (It helped me out a ton.)

Jennell: Start by deciding what the map will be used for. A free for all map needs to be substantially different than a Capture the Flag style team map. Draw a flow schematic of the map. This can be as complex as a Dungeons & Dragons style map on graph paper or nothing more that labeled boxes with arrows between them showing connectivity. If you have any ideas for special areas, or special relationships between areas, sketch them out and make as many notes as you can.

Next, do architectural studies. Design the look and style of the architecture and the texturing that will go on it. While you’re doing this, think how it will be illuminated and even plan for some dramatic lighting. Once you settle on an architectural style, build some sections of geometry in that style that can be fit together to make halls and doorways. Save them out a prefabs. You should build complicated structures only once and then save and reload them as needed.

Frag-Net is turning 5 years old!

To celebrate, we’ll be getting together on this Friday, at 3 PM PST/6 PM EST to play some QuakeWorld.

We’ll be playing on the QuakeWorld server at idtech.space.

See you then!

DOOM Turns 30…

This year has been full of amazing anniversaries. Still fresh off the heels of Half-Life and Thief’s big 25, we’re excited to say, HAPPY 30TH BIRTHDAY DOOM!

DOOM is a game that disrupted everything in some way, with games like Half-Life owing their entire existence to this game! It’s true that Wolfenstein 3D created the FPS as we know it, but DOOM solidified the foundation of the genre. Curvy, fully textured colorful angled rooms, excess ultra violence, refined gunplay, and not-so-subtle covers of famous metal staples was something not really seen before in a “3D” video game, especially one that did all this all blazing fast (for the time).

It was also one of the first Co-op or Deathmatch experiences many people ever had, with even ourselves having memories of playing it with our siblings, parents, etc. In addition to that, it also allowed anyone to mod it. While modding was not initially something id had planned or supported, their dedication to being open and accepting of community creations led to Quake having a proper SDK for code changes, the sanctioning and selling of community creations that helped fund the creators, and the realization within the industry how important communities are. Even I (Xylemon) started making my first levels for any video game with DOOM when I was just 11.

Like I said, it changed almost everything and everyone who was graced by it’s presence.

Looking Back

We could write paragraphs about DOOM, but it’s a game everyone has talked to death about. So instead, we’re gonna highlight some of our favorite retrospective pieces that you should check out if you haven’t seen or read them before:

• The Children of DOOM series by Chris Franklin (Errant Signal) is a wonderful indepth look at what led up to DOOM, and the influence left on the industry. He also made a standalone thought-provoking retrospective on DOOM long time ago now.
• The Doom Wiki is a great resource for not only reading the history and technical details of DOOM itself, but the community as well. Definitely bookmark this site if you haven’t before
• Masters of DOOM by David Kushner, one of the de-facto books about DOOM, but probably the most important books regarding id Software’s history. A raw and fascinating look at how id grew to obtain the legendary status they once held, and how it ripped them apart. Currently, a sequel is being written for and published online for free by David Kushner himself. Check out Masters of Disruption here!
• DOOM Guy: Life in First Person is a recently released book by John Romero detailing his personal perspective while creating the games we all love.

What the Community Says

We at Frag-Net are avid DOOM fans, but the DOOM community is huge, and they are always busy releasing interesting new projects. Here is some headlines you should know about:

Cacowards 2023

Doomworld has revealed their annual Cacowards, where the best of the DOOM Community is honored. As always, we have a heartwarming introduction, this year’s being written by @Cardboard Marty, one of the judges. The highlights of this year include:

• Lifetime Achievement award goes to Chris “@lupinx-Kassman” Kassap
• myhouse.wad
• TNT2: Devilution
• The Sunder Generation

Just to name a few of the winners and special mentions, go on ahead and read the rest for yourself

SIGIL II

John Romero has released SIGIL II, the sequel to his popular 2019 DOOM WAD, SIGIL.

This is pack of 8 levels for the original DOOM created by Romero doing what he loves and does best. It can be bought in a physical form or downloaded for free.

The good stuff:

• SIGIL II is intended as the unofficial sixth episode for DOOM, thus making SIGIL the fifth.
• It was made to match the original 1993 style, designs and methods of level design.
• If you bought the Megawad Beast Box you could have gotten “A pewter statue of John Romero’s head on a spike”.
• The website has a Q&A with the man himself talking about the design/thought process on the WAD.
• There’s a video interview with John Romero in this video by Apogee Entertainment which you might want listen to!

Check SIGIL II out here! You can also find there original SIGIL there, or alternatively over at the file archive of Doomworld /idgames.

Eviternity II

In a surprise no one saw coming, Eviternity II released! This massive 36 megawad is a sequel to the original Eviternity. With huge, beautiful, and clever level design, this is a must download. Check out the wonderful site here! Be sure you have a compatible source port installed.

Yes, you need DOOM II for this one. Shouldn’t stop you from playing it though!

Events

We are going to be playing some classic DOOM deathmatch on Odamex today. So watch out in the list for the ‘Frag-Net’ branded server.

We’ll start playing at 5 PM (PST) / 1 AM (UTC).

Hurt Me Plenty

So with all that out of the way, go on then and boot up DOOM. Whether you play it classic with Chocolate DOOM, like to go all out with GZDOOM or Zandronum, crazy/weird enough to boot it on a printer or iPod, or are a true hardcore player and have it open in DOS, it doesn’t matter as long as you slay a few demons today!