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| Issue 3: Quake On-line Tutorial | |||||||||||
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| Thomas Hurst joins the on-line gaming revoloution. |
Quake has caused a revolution in gaming, not only for it's excellent graphics and sound, but for it's ability to have many players fight it out at the same time, either over a Local Area Network (LAN), or over the Internet.
Online Quake is massive, and the chances are that your ISP has it's own Quake server you can log on to and play with very low response times.
The basics of joining a net game are in fact very simple - ensure you are online, fire up Quake, bring up the console (by pressing tilde (~)), and type "connect name.of.server". If you want to automate this, just run quake with the argument "+connect name.of.server", e.g, to connect to the server quake.clara.net, just cd to your Quake directory and type:
Quake +connect quake.clara.net
After a short period of time, you should find yourself in a deathmatch map, and this is where the fun begins...
For your first couple of games you'll probably find yourself getting thrashed, but don't get disheartened - this is quite normal. The best thing you can do to get around it is to practice loads, and considering how fun net Quake can be this shouldn't be a problem... at least until the phone bill arrives.
But all is not lost if you can only afford a few hours a week - you can get special add ons to Quake called "Bots" that act as other players in deathmatches, but work when you are offline. By far the best Quake bot is the popular Reaper Bot. They change their behaviour according to how well you play, and they learn levels as they go along. Just do a web search and you're sure to find the latest version. Don't worry if it all seems very PC specific - Amiga Quake is practically identical to PC Quake.
Normal Quake is only the tip of the iceberg - many Quake add-on packs and Total Conversions (TC's) are capable of net play as well, and these bring new dimensions to Quake, and many surpass it easily. The likes of Malice, Air Quake, Quake Rally and hundreds of others are available. Instructions on how to play them online should come with the packages.
My favourite is easily Team Fortress - a team play game where up to 16 players fight it to to capture the flag from the enemies fortress and take it back to their own. With many different "skins" for players, ranging from Engineers who build gun emplacements and repair armour to spies who disguise themselves to infiltrate the enemy base. Take a look at the Clan Risen home page and see how you can join in the fun...
Although you don't need to be in a clan to have fun, the really big fragfests tend to be when two clans arrange a time to meet. It's no fun with just two or three people running around a huge level, especially with the likes of Team Fortress and CTF, but when the big matches with up to 16 players on at once, you really begin to see what online Quake is about.
Quake +listen 5
To connect to you, others will need your IP address or hostname. You can get this by typing "echo $host" into a shell. Others can then connect to the address that yields as they would any other server, you can load up your favourite map, and you can fight it out.
But all is not lost. The source code to Quake and Quake World are scheduled for public release at the end of the year, so around January we can expect to see Amiga 68k, PPC and Warp3D versions of Quake and Quake World!
Happy fragging...
