Playback.dem SPECIAL

This special issue of Playback.dem is focused all around what we’ve been doing the past month.

For the first time since the beginning of this year, you will get to see some new official screenshots of Rad-Therapy II and updates to our project Tactical-Retreat.

It’s been a while since our projects had new stable binaries. This is because of a huge undertaking behind the scenes to future-proof the projects by moving most of the game specific data into immutable dictionaries of key value pairs. In short, we made it so games have to be updated a whole lot less for when changes in the Nuclide SDK occur. You’ve probably read it before, as these things tend to take time.

Over the years, that was easily the biggest challenge for us - keeping all the games stable and in-sync with the latest changes in Nuclide. We ended up finding design solutions in Doom 3 its development environment. That’s where the idea of adopting their ‘decl’ conventions came from.

After restructuring most of the code base to be more modular, we had to give every game an evaluation to see what kind of APIs needed to be provided for something like a stand-alone CS gamerule module to work. Until this point, gamerules were strictly baked into the server game and often tightly integrated with other parts of the code. Tackling each of those was a little project of its own, and inspiration was taken from what Infinity Ward had done on Call of Duty with their GSC scripting conventions, as well as Garry’s Mod and Ritual’s UberTools. Once again, we try to avoid reinventing the wheel as much as possible. We try to find commonality between different id Technology based games and to combine them into one melting pot.

In pretty much all cases you can clone the latest repos and even get binaries from them to experience the latest betas. There’s no need to build the source code yourself anymore, we want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to check out. Just grab an FTE binary and follow the instructions on the respective game repos.

Tactical-Retreat (formerly FreeCS/OpenCS)

This game started it all for us, as for without it there wouldn’t be a Rad-Therapy either.

It’s been getting cleaned up and pampered with shiny new features. Let’s go over some of them.

There’s also a new gametype built right into every version of the game: GunGame. The iconic mode made popular by cagemonkey also has configurable kills-per-level set up. Plays fine with bots too.

And here the grand reveal: Tactical-Retreat: Novo is the port of CS:S. All it has is some custom code for the HUD. The client and server game are built from the sources of the regular Tactical-Retreat.

The rest of the differences are handled externally, so people can edit text files to add new classes, add/change weapons and make them available via the buymenu. The same applies for the port of Condition Zero, named Tactical-Retreat: Covert Ops.

If you’re wondering about the namechanges in general, we want to ensure there’s no confusion with Valve’s games. We have the upmost respect for their trademarks.

Rad-Therapy II

In Rad-Therapy II, we now have the deathmatch part playable without a physics simulator. Yes, you can still pick up crates with a gravity gun and throw it at a wall. Yes, it will still realistically break apart into separate models - but the physics for any movement will be primitive.

Since FTE QuakeWorld still lacks support for the environment map lump for Source Engine levels - and because we wanted to try something interesting - there’s a new setting which will replace what would be cubemaps with a spherical environment updated in real-time from the players point of view. The results are nonetheless dazzling and will work especially when playing on maps that have no concept of cubemaps. Since we like playing on levels from other games, this integrates the Source Engine content in a cool way.

It also provides a simple example of how to deal with render targets, and manipulating them inside pixel shaders.

We have also incorporated a Sandbox gamemode into Rad-Therapy II which allows you to select regular player models you may use in Half-Life. That way you can keep using your well-worn avatars into other environments. For that, setinfo hlmodel santa will currently request that the server set the model models/player/santa/santa.mdl from the Holiday Pack - if the server happens to have that installed in Half-Life 2 of all things. You tinkerers know what to do!

Check out some more screenshots from our fellow tester Xylemon, in good old fashioned 640x480..

When Do We Get To ‘Play’ All This Stuff?

When we stop calling it beta we’ll put up nicer pages promoting these things more. We want to make sure it’s truly great before we open the floodgates so to speak. In the meantime, we aren’t sitting on much. We tend to share all the code and stuff and you can clone beta builds with complete source code while you wait for a shiny installer.

Qreate v1.1

This update to Qreate was spearheaded by Xylemon and even got some last-minute stuff in by eukara. Got completed and released on eukara’s birthday. Qreate generally has had very smooth update cycles. The previous release v1.0 was meant to be the last, but over the years we’ve received several pieces of e-mail over it with different wishlists of changes. There was a lot of overlap, and so we’ve decided to for one very last time assemble a fanservice update tackling a few. We even finished up things that were left on the cutting room floor.

It’s best to read the post over on ModDatabase to inject the fluff into your veins.

We also announced that this is the end to maintaining this mod - and to modding Quake for us in general. It’s over!

We’ll probably target LibreQuake instead, and make it so you can play it on there, as well as vanilla Quake. We’ll keep away from the id Software Quake data and do our own things.

Upcoming Event: ioQuake3’s 20th Anniversary

Everyone’s heard of it, everyones used it and it turns 20 years old this 25th of August.

Happy birthday ioQuake3, in advance!

Join us and every other Quake III Arena gladiator on this once-in-a-lifetime event.

Read the News Post detailing the Event on ioquake3.org to find out the up-to-date time and place.

As of this writing the plan is as follows:

On August 25th, 2025, please join me live to celebrate 20 years of ioquake3 on Twitch and play on our game server then and any time by typing /connect xaero.ioquake3.org in the ioquake3 console. People will be on the server all day on the 25th. Get started setting up ioquake3 now with the Player’s Guide. Ask questions on our Discourse and I hope to frag you on the 25th.

If you own Quake III Arena on Steam and happen to use Luxtorpeda you can play with ioQuake3 by using it as a compatibility tool.

]I[ SEE YOU IN THE ARENA ]I[

Charity: Dallas Pets Alive and id Software

Between now and August 21st you can order two shirts from id Software that’ll benefit animal welfare in Dallas. 100% of the net proceeds go to Dallas Pets Alive. What a great cause!