QuakeCon 2002

Friday, August 16

It was a very early Friday, as I was up and awake by 0630, stumbling around our suite getting ready for the day. I left Bryan, Chris and Ryan sleeping as I made my way to the TsN setup in the vendor's hall by 700am. Of course upon arriving no one was there and matches were scheduled to begin at 800am. So, this gave me time to hop on IRC and the forums to catch up on some of the happenings and give out some information and a quick update from Quakecon.

One thing I have regretted the past two years was saying we were going to give daily updates, but never coming through. You really get caught up in the days events and rarely did we return to out fifth floor (damn, one short of the sixth) suite, as it took 10-15 minute to there and back.

Today we were scheduled to present our Urban Terror Conference at 1300 until 1400. After filling the tummies of some of the hungry SID members, we organized about 30 minutes early in the Pelham Room to go over what were going to discuss. Actually CrazyButcher and I did some work prior that morning to include links to a short html presentation we had created. As it approached 1300, we were worried no one was going to show up.

As we were just hanging out, pondering our next move if no one attended, CB was showing off some different computer generated animations. By about 5 minutes until one, the room was nearly packed. I would guess there were 40+ gamers who came to hear our discussion, including RogeR from Planetquake3.net, who was able to record about 45 minutes of the talk, before cutting away to set up for the Doom 3, John Carmack presentation across the hall. So CB loaded up some Halo jump demos that were just hilarious as the last few people filtered in. Once that was over, it was time to start.

I started the conference off with a general welcome to everyone and introduced the team, but forgot to introduce myself. Hahaha...oops. I discussed a bit of the outline that we were going to follow (which will be posted after this document is complete), from a short team history, our plans for Beta 3, a discussion of animations from Christoph, player models from Christoph and Maureen and finally level design and game mode additions with Matt. Meaty and Thaddeus were also at the table, but really did not want to interject much. We also had our resident heckler in the crowd, Apoxol.

Thanks to Gee on Drugs, we started off the Bulletproof II movie, which some had seen, but this was mainly used as an icebreaker for the team and gamers who attended. It got some "ooohs and aaahs" from the crowd and really worked well, before we got into our actually talk. At 15 minutes, it did not leave us much time to complete our discussion.

The community was quite impressed with our work on the new models. We introduced the new Maruzen 870-pump action shotgun, which was modeled by Meaty and skinned by Bladekiller, no animations were available. We also showed off each weapon, with their new model and animation file, as CB filled the community in on some of the detail. I do think he was a bit nervous at first to be speaking a second language to a crowd, but he did very well and was quite informative.

We also dropped the "bomb" on the community by telling them SID was going to replace the Beretta 92F with a Para-Ordinance 16-40 and the Colt M4 with a ZM LR300ML, while changing none of their attributes. Since many realism games and mods use these weapons we wanted to move away from the ordinary and create something different. Some excellent work on the models, especially the assaults rifle!

Christoph transitioned from weapons and animations into player models, by showing a avi he created of himself, walking, running and jumping, in order to give some realistic characteristics to our models once animated. It drew some laughs from all, seeing this body dart back and forth across the screen.