News

Playback.dem

Another month has passed, and another playback is here. To be unusually frank with all of you, it has been an incredibly busy and deeply challenging year. Despite it all, we are powering through and strive to provide our fraggers with a unique and polished Gaming Epicenter as always.

Frag-Net Status Update

Downtime

We appologize for the recent outage that occured the other day. The problem was a bit tricky, but our clever sys admin jumped on the issue instantly, and was able to track it down. It seems our empire has grown considerable, and instances like our Forgejo needed some additional tweaking to prevent overloading our system and so far everything seems to be running better.

As always we appreciate your patience and want to thank you for using Frag-Net or idtech.space as a provider for your services.

20 Lines About Two Half-Life 2’s

We have been endlessly at work trying to get a public beta build of Rad-Therapy 2 (FreeHL2) out and playable. It’s not an exaggeration to say this is the first, full, free and open-source implementation of Half-Life 2’s physics simulation layer for open-source id Tech, and that has been an immense challenge. eukara no doubt has a lot to say on the matter when he finishes. We were aiming for a release on the big 20th anniversary, but instead Valve Time got in the way again… In the meantime, you can grab a beta build here that we did get out in time but please, READ INSTRUCTIONS FIRST!

Rad-Therapy 2 Tech Demo

1. Grab the latest FTE for your platform.
2. Place the FTE binaries into your Half-Life 2: Deathmatch directory. See Notes for help.
3. Place RT2’s package_hl2.pk3 to Half-Life 2: Deathmatch/hl2/package_hl2.pk3.
4. Place the (temporary) hl2.fmf to Half-Life 2: Deathmatch/hl2.fmf.

You can then launch FTE as-is (it should give you a game selection), or run it with:

fteqw -manifest hl2.fmf

…to have it start into Rad-Therapy 2 right away.

Notes: You can right-click the game entry of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch in your Steam Client to figure out the install location, under Manage >.

Singleplayer is not supported, but feel free to try and see what works! This is a tech demo, but as it’s running a regular release binary of FTEQW you can mix it with other supported content. Try running around Quake levels, by copying them into your hl2/maps directory! Seriously, go nuts and explore to your hearts content. Source code and a dedicated page will be live very soon.

If you’re wondering about the maps above: dm_7hour, dm_pooltime, dm_greenhouse, and the classic milleniumtower map.

Calendars

With the recent big stuff happening to Rad-Therapy, we have been rethinking about our Calendars section. It’s no secret we haven’t been updating it as much as we would like to. Yes, busy schedule has been part of the reason, but we haven’t found a real thoughtful way of integrating it into Frag-Net… until now.

At this moment, we are broadcasting a Message of the Day prompt that is loaded by games with our Frag-Net menu (it can also be implemented for other games). It will give you a cute little notice with an anniversary or two for now, but it will be the way to get a quick update on Frag-Net, Game Events, and more.

We will also be enhancing this system to actually post events, not just here but on our social media. We see it as being a great way to spread awareness for events not just we host but the communities at large do as well. See it in action… perhaps next post?

Game News

RIP Frazer “fraze” Hockley

The Quake community suffered another tragic loss, this time from the Australian e-sports scene.

ESReality reports that long time QuakeLive and Quake Champions player, Frazer “Fraze” Hockley, has passed away. We recommend you read the post, for it’s a touching goodbye that does a better job than we could ever do.

In Diabotical, Fraze was part of some of the game’s most unforgettable moments, whether it was his streams, his tournament matches, or his interviews. His gameplay was a perfect blend of high-level competition and entertainment. Similarly, in Quake Champions, he remained an absolute beast, quickly improving with his grit and grind approach and then consistently defeating top-tier players, and ultimately coming in 1st place in AQL4.

On a personal note, every time I faced Fraze in a match, you could feel his determination in game. Yet, no matter how intense the competition, he always took the time afterward to share some words about what he enjoyed about the game and have a laugh. His grit and relentless pursuit of excellence were qualities I think we all admired.

Fraze’s legacy goes beyond his accolades and achievements. I think I speak for all of the community when I say he was a beacon of inspiration, a mentor, and a friend to many. His contributions have left an ever-lasting mark on our community, and his absence will be deeply felt.

Our heartfelt condolences go out to his family and loved ones during this difficult time. Rest in peace, Fraze. Thank you for the memories, you will be missed, but never forgotten.

20 Years Of Half-Life 2

Wow, it’s been two decades since Half-Life 2 launched on Steam. Not only did we at Frag-Net celebrate, but so did Valve! A lot of us (even in the know) were just expecting a nice Quality of Life patch for Half-Life 2 and possibly Deathmatch (sadly the multiplayer part of the update did not happen… yet). Yet, Valve finally gave the fans a true gift, they gave us another documentary and revealed not publicly seen development footage that will inspire the community for quite some time!

Uploaded on YouTube the day before the anniversary, Valve kicked off the weekend with a feature length documentary featuring many of the original developers who crafted this great game. But that’s not all, Valve also showed off the famous 2000 version of the game only shown to press and developers.

That’s not all, the engine update is not only optimized, it brings in the Workshop support, along with commentary tracks by many of the original developers.

Fortress Frever v3.0 Alpha Patches

Fortress Forever has seen some updates in the 2013 branch! Here are the highlights of said branch:

• Based on 2013’s Source SDK
• Native Linux Port!
• Ambient Occlusion and HDR Lighting
• New viewmodel animations by Raptor Dan

Uberfest happened, TF2Maps.net JAM UPCOMING!

Uberfest happened in Germany this November, as well as finals for AsiaFortress.

If you’d like to participate in something smaller and upcoming, we’ll use this space to make you aware of TF2Maps.net 72 Hour Jam which begins on December 13:

As the year winds down, TF2Maps.net is proud to announce the return of their beloved 72 Hour Jam!

They’re supporting their friends over at Gamers Outreach once again. Anyone who donates $5 or more to the drive before December 31 is eligible to receive this year’s in-game charity medal.

Additionally, you’re able to earn a medal for sharing your creativity! Starting Friday, December 13, at 5:00pm UTC, you have 72 hours to make whatever Team Fortress 2 creation you can think of! Whether it be a map, asset, cosmetic, artwork — or even another game entirely — anything goes as long as it’s Team Fortress 2 related!

For more information, check out the thread on TF2Maps.net.

Rogue Point announced

Rogue Point has been announced. This game is being developed by the creators of Black Mesa, the famous remake of Half-Life on Valve’s Source Engine. It is to be published by Team 17 of Worms fame, which has in recent years become a publishing titan of its own. We wish them the best of luck, and we will report more as the game is going to be released sometime in 2025!

Stalker 2

The long awaited Stalker 2 finally released later last month. Everyones has been waiting years for this moment and we hope it’s everything you and the developers wished for and more. People seem to be enjoying it a lot!

BioWare unleashes a new Dragon Age

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been released last month! Is a new era of role-playing games heading our way? Let us know what you think in the Chat. As you can see, we had 0 time to play any of them. Arf! Arf!

Hell Freezes Over: Red Dead Redemption on PC

Nuff said.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 released

Treyarch and Raven have released the new entry in the spy slash action thriller series called Black Ops. We like these games and bet you do too. It is on Steam and you can watch the PC Trailer on YouTube.

Tech News

AMD releases AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D to rave reviews

If you’re looking to buy a GPU, you may wanna check out this mighty fine card, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Blue has a line-up for reviews for you to chew through. Buy one for you and your loved ones this christmas, so you can finally play Quake II with colored lig- err… I mean ray-tracing.

Arch Linux now provides a license for package sources

Arch Linux will now put a license on package sources. This is something other distributions have previously also done. It’s under a permissive license as well, so good on Arch!

Wayland support enabled in Wine 9.22

Wine 9.22 will be built with the Wayland driver included. Slow and steady, the migration is ongoing.

Over & out

This is the last Playback to be written in the year of 2024. We will return next year, with a new entry. We will try this experiment for at least a year and see what else we can improve about it. It may still end up becoming something else, so stay tuned.

Allow us some time to play the new game by MachineGames, of which we will no doubt have a lot to say next Playback…

Today (albeit with some debate) marks the 25th Anniversary of Quake III Arena, and the 20th Anniversary very first Half-Life 2 mod, JBMod which soon after lead to Garry’s Mod of course. This is freshly off the heels of the anniversary of Half-Life 2 and even DOOM 3 (which we haven’t mentioned yet, forgive us!).

To be honest with you all, we are overcome with a mixture of emotions: One of joy / disbelief our favorite games are so retro now, and concern over their future.

In advance, we are sorry for a news post like this instead of some cool event, there was quite a few reasons for this. Both personal, and later we’ll get to the well, technical… of sorts.

What’s With Games Like Quake III Arena?

Quake III’s lack of intergration with modern gaming social services and recognition from it’s own company makes getting the community together a difficult one.

It was already fragmented years before with Quake Live, before that game found itself in an identity crisis.

The community has done an amazing job at making these games open, ioQuake3 is the way to play Quake III on modern systems, no old hacks or bad code! Yet… you would think a game with an open stable engine with stable community master servers would have a stable sizeable playerbase, and perhaps they do. But, the current online session for new users goes like this:

1. Join a seemingly occupied Quake 3 server
2. Notice that your fellow “players” are acting strange
3. Recieve no feedback, yet the “bots” frag away
4. Half the other players are in spectator
5. Leave confused and or uncomfortable

The oddest thing about these “ghost” servers is their purpose, all we can think of is they must have been around to bad-faith-boost player stats on really antique trackers like GameSpy or more maliciously, boost e-sports stats.
Perhaps it is just some mistake and someone has left a number of broken servers running they have forgotten about. Regardless, it doesn’t matter, these servers SUCK and the experience is bad, it leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth where people think this is all Q3 is now. It’s kind of ironic too considering the game came built in with bot support, and it was great too.

There also isn’t a great way to browse and play the 25 years worth of maps and custom content within the game itself. Quake has QuakeInjector, Half-Life 2 now has Workshop, yet there is no built in downloader for services like LvLworld, one of the greatest and oldest surviving Quake III map archives. Managing custom content for open source games is still somewhat of a problem. How do you expect a newbie to understand that they just need to go LvLworld and install the PK3 without any introduction the base concept itself?

We could list off more issues here, but this isn’t meant to be a wall of shame and blame, it’s more about a realization or a wake up call if you will.

There are a few other ways of addressing this - projects like ioQuake3 should be complemented with a side that’ll make it more accessible. Selecting widescreen resolutions still isn’t a thing because no engine port wants to touch the default menu. There are problems worth solving there on both social and technical levels. We may not have all the answers yet, but maybe we can all have a discussion about building some sort of Community Edition which seems to work for some other games.

Will a remaster attempt to address these things? Maybe, but if it’s anything like the last efforts the community will no doubt still need to “do it’s own thing”, and do it well as that will always outlive any closed solution by a corporation. Speaking of corporations doing closed source remasters…

20 Years Of A “Half Life”

Half-Life 2 turned 20 years old last month. That is scary to us. That stupid old expression, “feels like yesterday” is only too true. Some of us here remember getting the limited edition for Christmas with big box and hat with t-shirt to boot. One of us personally wore that for years till it disappeared under mysterious circumstances…

Point is, we at Frag-Net are die hard fans. These games were our lives in a way. We built entire friendships, lovers, enemies, and even marriages (some still persist today) from these silly online entertainment products. We aren’t alone either, the amount of videos and content we and graciously others have archived documents countless communities and lives of players.

In a sad and deeply troubled world, games have always been a way to provide expression, understanding of problems, and even exchange ideas, much like the art and entertainment before it, just in a much much more impactful and direct way.

What Now?

The last ten years for the Source community, if we had to describe it, had also been one of self-realization about preservation and legacy.

Half-Life 2 has seen so many updates, being one of the first auto-updated games. From day one players were kind of forced to “move forward”. For the most part, this was actually a welcomed change believe it or not…

…because back then, installing patches was a pain. You needed to manually go online and grab installer files or wait for an update disc, and some games such as the first Half-Life had a separate tool that assisted you through the main menu. But the experience was always a bit messy. Steam really changed all that.

Recently we worked on our own video to highlight the past twenty years of mods that were created, and it was a chore to install and get running most mods, if they even do. The number of problems and pre-setup are extensive, ranging from installing different versions of not so small sized Source SDK, to running specific versions of Proton on Linux, to mods not loading due to some Steam API breakage (and we have a fix thanks to bt and mv). Still, hacks upon hacks with tons of wasted space with almost every source mod on steam containing an entire copy of Half-Life 2’s content! This is not sustainable for much of a playerbase, especially not for multiplayer mods, and it impacts users on all platforms to boot.

Thankfully, people have been having a go at converting mods, whether it is their own or mods they were fond of. Of course, the quality tends to be of varying degree, especially as Valve keeps updating their game default behaviour changes, it’s hard for hobbyists/tinkerers to keep up, and who can blame them? It’s not their fault.

A good addition to Half-Life 2 has been the Workshop, although it’s still a very messy affair of re-uploads. Time will tell if it becomes the desired destination for addons over places like GameBanana. We definitely appreciate it, as Valve has a good track record with hosting this sort of content.

Going forward though it would appear obvious that the path is Free and Open Source if we want any chance of Half-Life 2’s historic content surviving into the long future. With the year 2038 approaching rapidly and causing more issues with 32-bit programs, it will become less desirable to run the original binaries on raw hardware.

As no doubt you can tell, we will try to solve some of the problems mentioned above in our way, but this is something we can all contribute to. Even if you’re simply archiving files and/or organizing them on archive.org, or documenting games and mods while they still work - you’re all doing an important part in keeping some of our history alive.

Let us know what you think in the Chat.

It’s Out There

On October 29, the folks at OldUnreal posted on their Discord that they’d obtained permission to link to full versions Unreal and Unreal Tournament on their website.

They followed up on November 13 with a post adding that they’d obtained permission to link to the Unreal Gold disc from Totally Unreal. That way you can get the Return to Na Pali expansion.

GamingOnLinux reached out to Epic Games and a spokesperson confirmed that everyone is allowed to link to the versions hosted on the Internet Archive:

We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions.

For posterity, here are the Internet Archive links that have been vetted and will be used by the OldUnreal installers:

• Unreal, released May 22, 1998
• Unreal Gold, released January 21, 2000
• Unreal Tournament: Game Of The Year Edition - Disc 1, released October 27, 2000

What About Disc 2?

We had worried about Disc 2 of Unreal Tournament and have reached out to several parties for clarification if the above links are the only official, approved ones. Given the statement that Epic Games has made, and the above uploads were done by random individuals that does not appear to be the case. We want to highlight the statement Epic Games has already made. Contrary to what some folks might say in the chats, there isn’t any specific upload that you have to use. Feel free to download redump quality dumps. They effectively do not care.

For those wondering, Disc 2 contains the modification ChaosUT, some user maps and a copy of WONSwap:

• Unreal Tournament: Game Of The Year Edition - Bonus Disc

Checksums

We have generated SHA-256 checksums for these URLs, so you can verify they will not have been tampered with in the future:

Unreal.iso:

155dc73d515ec8c7982d11389bb22c95f115bddd4fb73598ef551aa296c97fbc

UNREAL_GOLD.ISO:

7e360d0cc9e5533f38859819fd3cbfea7c475ecd428f9f433b5f8e1d5742cbca

UT_GOTY_CD1.iso:

e184984ca88f001c5ddd52035d76cd64e266e26c74975161b5ed72366c74704f

UT_GOTY_CD2.iso:

d95d8ee1cf95562ee023fd54035ec8813d4275f63d1847423220986edc8d00d8  

What’s Next?

frag-net.com’s staff says:
GO PLAY SOME UNREAL, OR UNREAL TOURNAMENT!

The community needs more players to survive, that’s why the games have been made free.

Seriously go play it, and go make some maps and mutators while you’re at it!

Overall, the release has been incredible news, and many thanks go out to Epic Games and the people at OldUnreal who were able to negotiate this deal. Thanks to Dark1 for helping us with this story.

OldUnreal is going to provide installers for Linux and MacOS over the coming days/weeks as well. Soon it will be easier than ever to play these fine classics.

We’ll be updating our site to incorporate all this new info over the coming days.

Watch out for more files coming soon, too!

This November 16th all of us will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2!

We’ll be joining the community over at LambdaGeneration who have announced they’re running an event playing Half-Life 2: Deathmatch.

Check the announcement post for updated information. For your convenience, you can join by clicking/copying the following address:

51.195.213.30:28060

And they’ll be playing at around 8PM GMT / 9PM CET / 3PM ET / 12PM PT.

You can also search LambdaGeneration.com on the server browser within the game, or the Steam client’s built-in server browser.

See you then!

Playback.dem

In Memoriam

Tronyn, a fellow Quake level designer and community member, has passed away unexpectedly at the age of 42.

He was around since the beginning, and encouraged different generations of people getting into Quake to pursue their creativity within the community - all while being a master of the medium itself. Something a lot of us can only look up to.

Play some Quake in his honor, he will be missed by many.

RIP Dustin ‘Tronyn’ Geeraert

Frag-Net Status Report

We hope you enjoyed the Halloween theme, as always. The Halloween event should have been announced sooner - a few people couldn’t make time for it last minute - but we weren’t sure if it was going to happen because one of us had surgery and that complicated things. All is well now, in case you’re worried. We all had a good time in the end.

Gaming News

Yet Another New Half-Life Beta Build Found & Released

Last month gave us Net Test 2, now we go back one step further to Net Test 1. Besides some higher-res textures on some of the models and early menu prototypes being visible in the files the real highlight is the insight into the original Xen Campaign that got changed quite a bit for the final release.

Play As Doomguy, But In Quake

Longtime acquaintance in the Half-Life community Magic Nipples has released Duake, which allows you to play through Quake as ‘Doomguy’. In short, like DOOM its weaponry, HUD and so on? It looks pretty authentic. Check it out.

Tetris Rebirthing

Turns out that you can play Tetris forever. It was commonly believed that an overflow would be fatal, but a teenager proved otherwise. Thanks Ars Technica.

American Wasteland, reTHAWed

Here at Frag-Net, we are big connoisseur of skating games and skating culture. We hope you are, too. Get your latest Tony Hawk fix with reTHAWed, which updates the PC version of Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland to include comprehensive amounts of fixes and additional content. It’s got improved MULTIPLAYER also, so you know that gets us excited.

The trailer can be found here!

QuakeWorld Hub

Recently the QuakeWorld Hub went live. It’s powered by FTEQW its FTEQTV application and a web build of the client, which allows you to view the game through a proxy - in your web browser. You no longer need to start up the game to spectate games. This is a great collaboration between the engine-dev and competitive-play parts of the Quake community and deserves mad respect!

New DOOM 2 WAD, 11 years in the making

A new type of mega WAD is out there and it took a real long time to make. It names itself DOOM 3 because it attempts to be a direct sequel to DOOM 2.

Here’s what the author has to say about it:

This mod let’s you get back into the fight against evil and it’s gameplay is modernized while still playing very much the way Doom and Doom II did.

Fight your way through 2 Chapters of new levels, SinglePlayer or Coop. Play as Doom Guy, Doom Gal, or one of the other selectable characters.

Customize your difficulty by chosing your Character, Skill and Save-Point amount. Alongside the well known Doom monsters, there are also many additional monsters, as well as new items, weapons and power-ups to help you fight back the demons.

PS: Difficulty is on the hard side, so I recommend playing it first time at difficulty 0.9 or 0.75 to have some room with the ammo.

Codemaster’s Micro Machines

Read The Making Of Micro Machine by Keith Stuart to learn about how the original developers managed to get their vision out there and how their very own Game Genie peripheral came in use to prevent a major disaster during production of the cartridges.

Tech News

Internet Archive Hack

The Internet Archive got hacked into and prompted an immediate shutdown for all services. Game emulation only went back online around yesterday at the time of this writing.

We had intended to update our game pages to incorporate some files that fellow Quake community member Jason Brownlee tracked down for us (more on that soon), and coincidentially the whole infrastructure went down at the same time.

x86 Getting More Obsolete

What? You can’t switch away from PC x86 because you’re afraid you won’t be able to host servers for games and stuff? Well, if you can use Box64 to host x86 servers on a Raspberry Pi then that might no longer be a problem.

Thanks Interfacting Linux for this report!

I know what you’re wondering: Dedicated Servers? How About Games?!

You’re right, who said you couldn’t use the same power of Linux and open-source to play AAA games on Apple’s RISC machines at pretty good framerates? And it’s going through at least 3 layers. FEX, to emulate x86 on Arm, trusty old Wine and the wonderful combination of DXVK coupled with vkd3d-proton.

Well, I guess that settles it then! Cheap Anti-Cheat solutions will still be a thorn in your eye - but that it is regardless of architecture.

Disclaimer: We don’t tolerate game cheats on Frag-Net, except if they’re playful ones planted by the game designers themselves. But we are strongly against kernel-level backdoors and rootkits.

Intel Isn’t Doing Well (Hot Take Warning)

As we’ve alluded to in our previous posts, Intel hasn’t been doing well for a while.
The platform they created, x86, is kind of their bread and butter. If you disagree, well - ask yourself why your phone isn’t powered by Intel Atom or something.
It has been struggling to push the dying x86 platform forward in any meaningful way in a long time, while other architectures have had pivotal breakthroughs.

This long hasn’t interested the PC community, but the thing is that PC customers don’t get to decide much at all these days. It doesn’t help that PC gamers are very resistant to change themselves, that’s why they’re all stuck on Windows still and dealing with predominantly 32-bit software. It’s all about legacy compat, baby!

Well, if you don’t innovate you simply will be left behind. We hope they recover, because we need diversity in the PC hardware space - and they still have some leverage there. Sadly the only innovations we’ve seen in the past decade concerning the broader PC hardware space, besides growing GPU workloads (gee, wonder why), are the different varieties of RGB lighting. Wooooow…

• AMD Outselling Intel In Datacenters
• Will Collapsing Intel Stock Get Kicked Out Of The DOW?
• Intel Kicked Out Of DOW, Replaced By NVIDIA

Misc News

Dreamcast Prototype Fundraiser

You can help Laurent Comby, a long time Dreamcast preservationist who is known for running this wonderful website, to acquire more prototypes for several Dreamcast games in order to preserve them.

Without him, we would not have the opportunity to study several builds of important and/or cancelled games for our favorite game console - including Half-Life.

We hope you can contribute!

That BattleZone 98 Reviewer

PC Gamer recently interviewed Scott Smith, who is really big into Battlezone 98. Why does this matter? Because it highlights multiple problems with keeping games alive and game preservation in general. How a bad re-release can even cause damage to a community by fragmenting it, forcing it to deal with new bugs and changes in the game design that objectively make the game worse.

If you’re a developer working on a re-release, bringing a classic back to life - it also highlights what you might want to avoid doing altogether. Who do you wanna work with to prevent this sort of mess? The community. Or maybe just give them the damn source code and let them handle it. Worked damn fine for id Software…

All in All

That’s it. If you think we’ve forgotten commentary on last month’s news that’d be important to include, be sure to let us know.