Plan for Michael "Evic" Wales

I'm positive everyone remembers and has played Quake - it was truly a revolutionary title. Did you know Quake is still being played on a daily basis today? I bet you did not.

Team Fortress software, now part of the Valve team, developed a modification entitled Team Fortress that many of you may be familiar with. This is the longest running online game ever, 9 years later people still play this modification on a daily basis - although the size of the community is dwindling.

My goal is to make it easier for new players to get into Team Fortress, specifically Mega Team Fortress. As of now, it's rather difficult to get started, you have to write configurations, download a client, figure out command line parameters, and find a server. Server admins have twice as hard a time running their own server. This was normal many years ago, but these days the commerical model is quite different, and new players don't expect this torture to get started.

My goal is to standardize the server/client that is used within the community, and merge these two applications into one. There are many great client out that increase the graphical capability of Quake to today's standards, my goal is to ante up the quality of the models. Many of the UI menus are confusing and unnecessary, I will attempt to streamline these menus while offering new features as well.

A rather incomplete list of my tasks is below, that I posted on the MegaTF Community's Forums (http://quakeboards.rmcd.net/). I am currently looking for 2-3 people (coders and artists) who are interested in helping revive this community. My goal is to bring in new players, and relaunch a commercial quality MegaTF for free.

Quote:I'm talking a rebirth on a grand scale here:
- Complete rewrite of mod code, fixing the bugs and adding in the new features in a less than "patchwork" method. This would require massive communcation between the client, server, and mod programming teams.

- One server. The MegaTF community picks a server and supports it 100%, the mod won't even run on other servers. If you look at the games of today do they have dozens of confusing options all configured differently to run a server? No, they run the executable with a -dedicated parameter, end of story.

- One client. The MegaTF community picks one client and supports it 100%, you can't even play with a different client. Fuhquake is the obvious choice here, although it will need massive work on it as well.

- Merger of the client/server into one executable.

- Cleanup the filesystem making it less of a mess.

- All new, professional quality, custom designed models. Designed specifically for MegaTF.

- An identity, a common theme, throughout the game.

- A true community website, ran professionally and inviting to new players.

- Newbification of the interface. It is extremely difficult to write configs, setup your video settings, and to setup a dedicated server. We don't think so because we have been doing it for 9 years, new players won't put up with it. User Interfaces for all of it.

- Advertising revenue. We'd have to make a name for ourself and pop up in magazines.

And because it sucks not having a screenshot, here you go. This is a map entitled well6, being run on a popular client FuhQuake - which is the base of the MegaTF Rebirth client.

If you are interested in helping out, please email me: evic@gibthis.com