Weapon Factory Revolution Quake 4 Mod Post-mortem

Arne Olav Hallingstad
9th April 2009
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Introduction

Here is a post-mortem of a mod for Quake 4 called Weapons Factory Revolution I was part of for over a year around 2006. Unfortunately the mod died in spite of many public beta tests.

The Weapons Factory Revolution Mod was a mod for Doom 3 and later Quake 4 (although i only joined after it had started on Quake 4) which was started by old Quake 2 Weapons Factory Fans. I played quite a lot of Weapons Factory for Quake 2 and thought it sounded interesting to join this team as a programmer. Already on the team were Zitheral/Static (project leader), Infernal (lead programmer) and Shea (web designer) if i remember correctly.

I was part of the weapons factory revolution mod for over a year, from mid 2005 and into 2006.

Thoughts

The project failed for several reasons. The community was relatively small and the progress was slow throughout the team. Zitheral left rather abruptly after about a year.

Here's the reason for the project failure according to Zitherals himself:

There were quite a few reasons that it failed.
The small player base was definitely one of the main reasons.
But it was also the difficulty in getting new game assets in to the game... especially animated meshes.
Working with freelance model makers about drove me insane. A project leader's job is never easy but... I must have worked with over 30 modelers and animators
And still never managed to get an animated model ingame
It isn't easy working with an all-volunteer workforce
Ultimate that is what sapped my enthusiasm... I was working SO hard to get game assets in (I had several completed character models for instance) and I just couldn't make any progress
That is tough though with a mod
When you are basically recruiting blind

A few notes from Zitheral:

The mod was pretty much feature complete from a coding standpoint.
Several people working on Weapon Factory mods have gotten a job in the industry. A Quake 2 Weapons Factory artist is working in the indsutry. The guy that did the Cyborg and all other concepts is in the industry. The guy that did the Cyborg model below is working in the industry. I'm working in the industry.

And both Infernal and Zitheral have enough experience to be in the games industry if they wanted to themselves.

For some more information about Weaopns Factory see the Wiki page.

As game engines have evolved, games are now prettier and more complex than ever. The expectations for modifications seems to have increased likewise. It effectively requires industry talent to make modifications on the latest engines.

Looking back at the project I've come to the conclusion that if you want to do a game modification you must be absolutely sure you can develop the mod into an acceptable state yourself so that it can be released, or have some trustworthy friends on board from the start that will do what you cannot do yourself.

TODO: Latest WFR Beta release, more screenshots I've got laying around, design documents and web site screenshots..

Development Screenshtos

Cyborg Concept - Final

All classes were implemented and feature complete. This is the Cyborg concept

Cyborg Model

Cyborg modeled.

2006-12-19

Final HUD pretty much, it looks pretty cool doesn't it? This is the last screenshot I've got from project development. The HUD was my main responsibility and is what I've got the most screenshots of. There was only me and Infernal on the programming team.

Explaning the HUD:

At the top we have the score, number of flag captures for the blue and red team, and a time limit in the center.
There's a radar in the top right corner where you could see friendly players and the enemy flag carrier (there was a flag icon for that),
In the bottom right there was an ammo count for every weapon you could have.
Along the bottom is your currently selected weapon and its title. "Combat drug injector" sound like a lot of fun to use! This weapon along with most others were functional if i remember correctly.
In the bottom left is the player's health and armor values
I don't fully remember, but I'll give it a try. Above the armor values vere categories of effects the player could have, the player could have only one ability in each category active at one time.
Similarly sketchy memory, you'd see all currently active effects on the player, some were temporary, like acid effect making you take damage over time the next 5 seconds. Others were permanent. The Healing Aura shown here were permanent for you as the medic, any friendly players would get the Healing Aura if they stayed close by you.
In the center there was a UI you could enable with a keyboard bind while you had the injector equipped. You'd select what type of effect to load the injector with.

2006-12-17

For WFR Infernal had full water physics and projectile bubble effects when firing under water. Infernal wanted help with testing view effects. The idea was that the view would zoom in slightly, creating a slight blur, and alternate between stretching/shrinking the width and height of the player's view. Pretty much the most basic view effect, but effective enough. It think it's actually pretty much is what was used in Quake 3.