Q4Max

Description
It’s been a while since our last public release, but we are now ready and proud to present Q4Max v0.72. Since our last release, the team have been working hard on a number of key features and of course bugfixes.

This release is for Quake 4 1.0.x, and is not compatible with Quake 4 version 1.1. We will release a version compatible with this release as soon as it is ready. As there are substantial changes in 1.1 we do not wish to rush the release and introduce problems, nor do we wish to delay this release any further.

The first main feature is the addition of pause. When we released version 0.71, we said that pauses were too hard to include in the first release because of the time required to add them. One of the base assumptions that the original developers made in all their code is that “time won’t stop”, so going back and adding in the option to freeze time has a very wide ranging effect on the code. It’s not been easy, but pauses are in.

One of the areas where pauses really weren’t compatible is the original Tourney mode. With multiple games running concurrently, having pauses causes both technical and gameplay issues: if one arena takes longer to complete, the rest of the server is left waiting; likewise getting those independent arenas to pause separately would require delving very deep into the spider-web of code that is the current tourney system. We came to the conclusion that this simply wasn’t viable, so we’ve added a classic “Duel” mode �" a single 1v1 match with winner-stays-on player rotation. The Raven Tourney mode still exists, but pauses are not an option here. Duel is certainly our recommended option for any serious tournament using Q4Max, though we’ll be interested to see whether the public duel community stays with the bracketed tourney mode or shifts to the old-school duel style.

Another addition to the mod is CTFS �" Capture the Flag Strike �" a hybrid of Clan Arena and CTF that places one team on offence trying to steal and return the flag from the defending team, who must eliminate the attackers. CTFS can be a lot of fun, and we hope you enjoy it.

The final main addition is the dumping of the end of game statistics as XML files. These can be used by third party tools to produce summary statistics of how you play over time. The statistics can be generated either by clients, or on the servers. We have produced a PHP script which can be installed by server administrators to provide a summary of all games played on the server. This is just the beginning though - hopefully third party tools will also be produced to summarise the data in different ways, both for clients and servers.

There are many more minor features included in the release, which you can read about in the changelog.