DM Maps

[Zeppelin]

there  is a mymap for no weapon stay already!
-ws

[|iR|Focalor]

when quake2 first came out, the setup on most deathmatch servers (the ones back in dialup days) was dm1 through to 8.

Not really. It was usually nothing but Q2DM1. In the earliest days of it, MPlayer.com was kinda the official place to play it I think, which is where I always played. You'd have a text and voice chat client where you could browse different types of lobbies for pure chat, lobbies for games that MPlayer featured like poker, backgammon, yahtzee, etc, lobbies for webcam chat (which barely anyone used except for the "adult" ones), and lobbies for a few retail PC games that MPlayer supported. If you wanted to start a game, you'd create a room, tweak the deathmatch flags, and launch the game directly from the MPlayer client. Other people could wander in if the game was in progress and launch from inside the room and join the game. From what I remember, the maps never rotated. You'd play to a fraglimit and either the map would start over, or it would kick everyone back to the lobby.

You could always try to start a game with Dm2 through Dm8, but nobody would ever fucking join you. Everybody was all about DM1 24/7.

[quadz]

In the earliest days of it, MPlayer.com was kinda the official place to play it I think, which is where I always played. You'd have a text and voice chat client where you could browse different types of lobbies for pure chat, lobbies for games that MPlayer featured like poker, backgammon, yahtzee, etc, lobbies for webcam chat (which barely anyone used except for the "adult" ones), and lobbies for a few retail PC games that MPlayer supported. If you wanted to start a game, you'd create a room, tweak the deathmatch flags, and launch the game directly from the MPlayer client. Other people could wander in if the game was in progress and launch from inside the room and join the game. From what I remember, the maps never rotated. You'd play to a fraglimit and either the map would start over, or it would kick everyone back to the lobby.

Interesting. Never tried a service like MPlayer. Just connected directly to servers using a browser like GameSpy (i.e. the desktop equivalent of q2servers.com, except you can sort servers by ping.)

Initially it was just Q2 servers rotating through the single player maps.

When dm1-8 maps debuted in the 3.12 point release in February '98, massive numbers of servers switched over to the dm1-8 rotation. Without a service like MPlayer allowing you to spawn a server with a custom config, dm1-8 is just the easiest possible default rotation. (No need to specify a map list, just start the server on map q2dm1 and it will rotate automatically through 1-8.)

I suspect it's a safe bet a ton of servers stayed with dm1-8 rotation because zero administrative effort was involved. (And, in-game map downloading wasn't even added until 3.15, which didn't appear until almost June '98.)

And even then, Q2's in-game map downloading--while super slow for even broadband users--was glacially slow for dialup users. (The higher your ping, the slower the download goes. This is because the built-in Q2 download protocol doesn't do any write-ahead pipelining. The server literally sends a packet, then waits for an acknowledgement from the client before sending the next. It's terribly inefficient, but, it's easy to code.)

  *  *  *

Fast-forward to today, and we have some players who are nostalgic-to-the-level-of-autism for a map rotation which was prevalent back in the day largely due to configuration complexity and technical limitations.

But, no accounting for taste...

[|iR|Focalor]

In the earliest days of it, MPlayer.com .....

Interesting. Never tried a service like MPlayer.

I was actually already ON MPlayer before Q2 came out. I had a regular group of friends that I'd hang with on there every night and all night into the early morning hours on the weekends. Usually we'd play poker, but every now and then we'd harass the shit out folks in the Christian bible study rooms, lol. I managed to get ahold of a few MPlayer hacks, one in particular being a "ghosting" hack that would allow you to become invisible inside a chat room to prevent the room moderator from kicking/banning you and muting you. Had lots of fun with that one, haha!

I think if you still have a copy of the original Q2 game CD, there's a little link somewhere in one of the folders that would take you to the MPlayer site where you'd download the "gizmo" client. For some reason, MPlayer shut down sometime around 2000 or 2001 I think. Dunno why.

It sucked though, me and my friends did pretty well scamming and sharking people out of all their money playing poker. We had several accounts to choose from, our main one, then several for trolling religious rooms, some for trolling the AlAnon and NarcAnon meeting rooms, etc etc. We'd have one account with a basic starter sum of poker cash, lure some guy in with a fuckton of money, play him and make him bet up huge, then take him for all he had and split up the winnings to our main accounts later. We each built up MILLIONS chumping 5 and 10 guys a night doing that.

PS. This is precisely why you don't play online poker with real people for real money, kids.