Quake Expo 2008 Memoirs

[[BTF]Jehar]

Ah, what a year. That's all I'm going to say for now, but more will come later. In the meantime, feel free to fill this thread up with your own experiences, mishaps, ponderations, flames, whatever.

[motorsep]

It was my first QExpo ever and it was cool experience. I didn't do everything I planned, but I hope what I managed to do will serve Quake community well. I am happy to see that there are still a lot of enthusiasts of modding and that Quake community is alive and seems to be doing well. A lot of projects were simply bad ass and it's really awesome!
Big huge "thank you" to Quadz, Jehar. Willis and other folks who made it happen!!  and !!

[Chocobo Joe]

Well, where do I start... First it was the introduction to Quake2XP, and a bunch of useless mapping booths, some which barely had any maps until the later in the expo. Not to say that there weren't any good map booths, but there were a few which had strange, unattractive maps (some only had one map ). I though Arcade Quake was cool, and I can't wait for Deluxe Quake Also, there were some weird group gathering groups which were for minorities of players. Ex. The Norweigen Quake group, I mean seriously, who would really check that out except Norweigens I was also disappointed with some of the incomplete booths on display. Oh well, lets cut the shit and get to the good stuff. I loved the DarkPlaces, Nexuiz, Prophecy, and other Quake series engine conversions. Quake2world was okay, but I had too many installation issues to love it all that much. I wonder when they just quit the dumb auto updater and just use simple zips and binaries? Also, I liked the presentation of the entire expo, and I think it attracted a lot of Quake fans. The amount of newbies coming to TS was way above average, which was sorta annoying. Anyway, great year, great expo, what can I say?

[Irritant]

It's been great seeing that this Qexpo was the biggest and most active of any I've participated in(which would be all but the first, I believe). 

Overall though, I cannot lie, I've been fairly disappointed in a few things, in regards to my game and the tournament I arranged.  The tournament involved prizes with a value of 500 dollars, something vastly larger than any other organized for Qexpo.  I've done this tournament every year, for the last three Qexpos, and there was *always* a good amount of participation from the Qexpo community.  This year, we expanded things, because a) we felt that with the large amount of prizes, people would be climbing over themselves to sign up, and b) we felt that the game had improved *vastly* since last year and would be a more fun experience for all involved.  Sadly, not *single* person from Qexpo signed up. 

Because of this, and because despite the number of very signifigant updates made to Alien Arena during Qexpo, Alien Arena seemed to garner precious little attention, I've been wondering if it's really worth me doing a booth or this tournament in the future.  I know I haven't been chatty in the channel, mostly because I've been spending every free moment working on the game, but I have at least been fairly active in updating my booth and talking in the forums, yet for the most part, I've felt that Alien Arena is a game that has just never been very accepted by the old Quake community, and probably never will, no matter how much I improve it.  The fact that nobody from here entered the tournament convinces me of that. 

On a positive side, I was very impressed with a number of projects.  Berzerker's Quake II engine is very impressive, despite having the code all lumped into one giant, long file, LOL, and I loved the Warsow comics.  I liked seeing projects like Arcade Quake, and Mauvibib's Sagdoll(don't think I won't try to do something like that in AA now ).  Overall it seems like the Quake community is still very much alive, and there appears to be no end in sight.  It seems like alot of the old guard is still around, and there are new bloods keeping it fresh.  Some of you know, and probably a few don't, I've been around a long time.  As the originator of Alien Quake, and founder of Team Reaction, I've pretty much seen it all, and I've never left.  Quake, well, it's been in my blood since Qtest came out, just like Doom was previous to that, and it always will be

[peewee_RotA]

Qexpo was awesome. I asked early on for people to create booths better than my simple little one, and I was not disapointed.

Originally the concept of an online expo seemed silly, but I think it was a complete success. In general independant games are more fun, and even better polished, than professional games. In an independant game there are not deadlines, and in professional games, the distributing entity sets an arbatrary deadline, most likely in complete contrast with the development schedule. Qexpo gave a whole host of independant games a relative deadline and incentive to put out a release, even if just a test or tech demo.

It really gave all the teams a chance at the best of both worlds.

...

Keeping with the current flow of the thread, my 2 pieces of constructive criticism are that the events could have been better organized, maybe all decided and finalized before qexpo started. Secondly, a daily news guy unrelated to Jehar would have been nice.

I understand that Jehar put this all together soon after QCon and in the frey of things. Great work. Thanks Jehar, and thanks quadz.

EDIT: and a special thanks to R.R. for letting Jehar take all his attention away from her for a few weeks. We kno he's going to have to make up for that later.

[The Happy Friar]

Secondly, a daily news guy unrelated to Jehar would have been nice.

out of curiosity, for what?  I kept an eye on planetquake & pappy seemed to sum up everything daily happenings @ the expo every day on pq.

I thought  it was pretty cool.  I'd like to have each year archived so you can look through & see what was done in previous years incase some things fall off the face of the earth (ie quake 10 year).

[peewee_RotA]

out of curiosity, for what?  I kept an eye on planetquake & pappy seemed to sum up everything daily happenings @ the expo every day on pq.

Someone dedicated to searching and parsing through the daily booth updates. Some updates consisted of spell checking or small comments being added. I think if someone worked more as an anchorman/commentator dedicated to this specific event, it would help to tie the whole thing together. Maybe I could volunteer for that next year.

I'm not saying anything bad about any kind of coverage this year. I'm just looking towards the future for adding a streak shine to the brand new red mustang convertible that was this years Qexpo.

[sielwolf]

Jehar rules for his awesome coverage, Quadz rules for hosting, and the Quake community (1/2/3) will rule forever.

Thanks guys, it was a wild ride 

[madfox]

Happy boothing 2008!

 

[Pr0c3550r]

Chill site you have there 

[Jay Dolan]

Quake2world was okay, but I had too many installation issues to love it all that much. I wonder when they just quit the dumb auto updater and just use simple zips and binaries?

Not anytime soon, that's for sure.  The game is in a public alpha state.  It changes almost daily; binaries and zips make zero sense, as players (and maintainers) would spend all of their time packaging and transfering zip files.  The rsync delivery method works great, and doesn't bog people down with large downloads -- tho admittedly we did have some outages during QExpo.

[Th0m@s29]

Ah the EPIC 2008 Memoirs CLASSIC BABY FUCK CHEA!

[Arm0r]

obligatory.