Weapons Factory
Encyclopedia
Capture the flag
Capture the Flag is a traditional outdoor sport generally played by children, where two teams each have a flag and the objective is to capture the other team's flag, located at the team's "base," and bring it safely back to their own base...
class-based mods
Mod (computer gaming)
Mod or modification is a term generally applied to personal computer games , especially first-person shooters, role-playing games and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public or a developer, and can be entirely new games in themselves, but mods are not standalone software and...
, originally created for Quake II
Quake II
Quake II, released on December 9, 1997, is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Id Software and distributed by Activision. It is not a sequel to Quake; it merely uses the name of the former game due to Id's difficulties in coming up with alternative names.The soundtrack for Quake II...
by brothers Tom "Tumorhead" and Gregg "Headache". It since has had several incarnations (six plus three currently in development) on most of the predominant FPS games released since 1998 (in the Quake
Quake (series)
The Quake series is a line of first-person shooter video games produced by id Software.-Overview:The Quake series is somewhat unusual in that its focus changes frequently; the story of Quake II has nothing to do with Quake, and Quake III Arena has little to do with either of its predecessors...
, Unreal, Half-Life and Tribes series).
The Weapons Factory is partly based on the Team Fortress
Team Fortress
Team Fortress is a team- and class-based online multiplayer video game mod based on id Software's Quake. Team Fortress was designed and written by Robin Walker, John Cook and Ian Caughley in 1996. The mod's gameplay has caught on with a large following of fans, which has spurred many developers to...
mod for QuakeWorld
QuakeWorld
QuakeWorld is an update to id Software's seminal multiplayer deathmatch game, Quake, that enhances the game's multiplayer features to allow people with dial-up modems to achieve greatly improved responsiveness when playing on Internet game servers...
. Its idea sprung when Quake II was announced but the Team Fortress development team decided to join Valve Software and work on a Half-Life sequel to the mod instead of a Quake II one. It consists of two teams of six players each who can choose between seven to ten classes of combatants (depending on the incarnation of WF) each having their own specificities and special abilities, amongst which is a grappling hook
Grappling hook
A grappling hook is an anchor with multiple hooks , attached to a rope; it is thrown, dropped, sunk, projected, or fastened directly by hand to where at least one hook may catch and hold. Generally, grappling hooks are used to temporarily secure one end of a rope. They may also be used to dredge...
(Weapons Factorys signature).
History
Gregg started programming Weapons Factory (WF or Q2WF) as an experiment to learn how to create a Quake 2 mod while his brother started looking at how to build mapsLevel (computer and video games)
A level, map, area, or world in a video game is the total space available to the player during the course of completing a discrete objective...
. Weapons Factory was the first CTF-type mod to be released (on March 6, 1998), only two days after Zoid's Q2 CTF source was published and as such got some press and early success. They soon decided to merge with another mod, Star Troopers by John "Cryect" Rittenhouse on May 1, 1998, which had a vast arsenal of weapons that WF lacked. The initial versions of WF featuring only three classes (notably version 2.1b, the "merger" one), they had to bring this number up to six (final beta version 2.2) and then nine (version 3.0) simply to have somebody to give the weapons to. In that configuration, it fulfilled their goal of creating something close to a Team Fortress for Quake II.
Along with the Weapons Factory, Gregg introduced a new technology for mod makers, the Mod Construction Kit (also abbreviated as the MOCK) released with WF version 3.0. The MOCK is a user-friendly tool that lets one modify the number of classes and their attributes (such as health
Health
Health is the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living being. In humans, it is the general condition of a person's mind, body and spirit, usually meaning to be free from illness, injury or pain...
, armor, weapons...) from the original WF.
Later in the development of the mod, the project of a tenth class was considered. The original idea was of a powerful class that would spawn
Spawning (computer gaming)
In video games, spawning is the live creation of a character or item. Respawning is the recreation of an entity after its death or destruction....
only in the losing team. Later this last bit was dropped but the Mercenary class indeed saw light with WF version 4.0 released on January 19, 1999.
The last version developed by the original Development team, Weapons Factory version 4.25, was released on September 27, 1999.
Competition
Most of the competition in Weapons Factory took place in the OGL (Online Gaming League) WF ladder. The internet connections at the time and network code flexibilities of Quake II allowed for North American and European players and clans
Clan (computer gaming)
In computer and video gaming, a clan or guild is an organised group of players that regularly play together in a particular multiplayer games. These games range from groups of a few friends to 1000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members. The lifespan of a clan...
to play in the same competition against each other (which hasn't been possible since). The rest of the competition happened in the DEF-CON league which was a tournament format. Late in the mod's life, a European league (WFEL) was created. A couple of smaller scale tourneys were also organised, like Solicitor's Invite Yourself Weapons Factory Tournament or the Relentless Assault Invitational Tournament.
History
Since the release of Q3Test (in May 1999), the Weapons Factory Development team was considering a port of the mod to Quake IIs sequel Quake III Arena. However, when the game is released on December 2, 1999 and work on Weapons Factory Arena (WFA) really starts, Tumorhead drops from the team soon followed by his brother Headache. Harvi "Acrid" Kiiski then takes the lead of the project. The first beta of the mod is released on May 20, 2000, featuring eight classes, the nurse being implemented later in the development process. WFA version 1.0 was officially released online on July 26, 2000.The next version focused on graphical enhancement. The WFA Development team pushed the boundaries of the four years old Quake III engine to bring it up on par with more recent technologies and added new visual effects such as sky portals or bump mapping
Bump mapping
Bump mapping is a technique in computer graphics for simulating bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object. This is achieved by perturbing the surface normals of the object and using the perturbed normal during lighting calculations. The result is an apparently bumpy surface rather than a...
. The team also worked in close collaboration with Randy "Ydnar" Reddig, creator of the Q3MAP2 technology, a tool notably used to enhance the lighting compilation in maps.
It resulted in versions 3.5 and then 3.5b, released on January 15, 2003 which is the last official version of Weapons Factory Arena.
Weapons Factory Revolution (Quake IV)
When Doom 3Doom 3
Doom 3 is a science fiction horror video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. An example of the first-person shooter genre, Doom 3 was first released for Microsoft Windows on August 3, 2004. The game was later adapted for Linux, as well as being ported by Aspyr Media for Mac...
was released Static decided to port WF to the latest id Software
Id Software
Id Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack...
platform. The WFA Development team was reunited along with the help of some old time players to work on a new incarnation of WF, Weapons Factory Revolution (WFR). However as time went by, it became more and more obvious that Doom 3 wasn't the suitable platform the team initially thought it would be. The game was obviously directed towards single player
Single player
A Single-player video game is a video game where input from only one player is expected throughout the course of the gaming session. "Single-player game" usually implies a game that can only be played by one person, while "single-player mode" usually refers to a game mode for a single player, where...
and wasn't optimized at all for multiplayer. The poor network code and per-poly collision detection
Collision detection
Collision detection typically refers to the computational problem of detecting the intersection of two or more objects. While the topic is most often associated with its use in video games and other physical simulations, it also has applications in robotics...
of weapon hits didn't allow for enjoyable online playing experience (besides the fact Weapons Factory is already pretty demanding in terms of network traffic).
The team then decided to switch games and work on the Quake 4
Quake 4
Quake 4 is the fourth title in the series of Quake first-person shooter computer games. The game was developed by Raven Software and published by Activision. Raven Software has collaborated with id Software, the creators and historical developers of preceding Quake games...
platform (due late 2005), which focuses a lot more on the multiplayer aspect of the game.
In the Half-Life Series
The last release of WF2 was v5.2 (alpha).Weapons Factory Unreal Tournament
Around the same time Weapons Factory was ported to Quake III ArenaQuake III Arena
Quake III Arena , is a multiplayer first-person shooter video game released on December 2, 1999. The game was developed by id Software and featured music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly...
, another team (headed by spoon) did their own unique conversion of WF on the Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...
engine which was rising in popularity. Weapons Factory Unreal Tournament (WFUT) took the classes and weapons from the Quake II version and adapted them to the Unreal style of gameplay, in addition to being inspired by MegaTF.
There were several major changes to the Unreal Tournament version that helped make it unique from the other WF mods. The grappling hook was replaced with a translocator that used limited ammo and was given to all the classes. The standard Quake II weapons were replaced by Unreal Tournament versions with the custom WF weapons now having alt-fire modes. The grenades were thrown "offhand" in the same manner as in MegaTF instead of being used as weapons. In addition, while the classes suffered only minor changes to their weapon loadout and special abilities, the major change was the Mercenary class being replaced by the Demoman class.