New (Improved?) FAQ

General discussion relating to the Transfusion project.

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Kazashi
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New (Improved?) FAQ

Post by Kazashi »

General


What is Transfusion?

Transfusion is a recreation of the classic Monolith game Blood using the DarkPlaces engine.


Why are you doing this?

Transfusion is intended to be the best thing next to getting the source code for Blood (see The Blood Source Release Campaign). It has become difficult to run Blood on newer systems due to the lack of DOS support, and due to the lack of support from The Powers That Be. Blood can be run to some degree with programs like DOSBox, but it is not as effective as being able to run it natively.


Will you be recreating the WHOLE game?

Eventually. The original 1.01 release, and the current beta releases, focus on just the Multiplayer part of Blood. That way we (and you) can play it quicker, while getting the majority of the single player game's functionality at the same time. When the time comes however, we will be tackling the single player levels one episode at a time, including the Plasma Pak and Cryptic Passage.


Will it be both Blood and Blood 2?

Although a number of Blood 2 maps may appear in our releases, we are working on a recreation of the original Blood. There are no plans for us to recreate Blood 2.


Is it compatible with original Blood in network play?

No, Blood and Transfusion use fundamentally different engines that use different network protocols and different ways of handling the game information.


Where is the Single Player?

We can't say exactly when it will be available, simply that we are working on it. Many SP features are functioning, such as monsters, and can be seen in the 1.1 releases, but more work on the basics is needed before people can jump in and play through the maps coherently.


What's taking so long? It's been years since a release, is the project dead?

The project is not dead, although it might appear as such. We are a team of volunteers, with real jobs and real lives and real obligations. Transfusion is done in our spare time, which is often not much, but it is being worked on. After all, Caleb was left for dead, wasn't he?


Aren't you breaking laws by using Blood's art and design?

NOPE. Monolith Productions and Atari own all intellectual property rights to the Blood franchise. Jason Hall, the former Monolith CEO, has given us his blessing and we've even received help from Matt Saettler and Nick Newhard who lead the original Blood development team.

As for Atari, who claim ownership of the Blood trademark, they have agreed to leave us alone given the non-commercial status of our project, as long as our project name doesn't refer directly to the Blood trademark. That's why the project is called "Transfusion" (you may have heard about us as "qBlood" or "BloodBath" previously). To this end they have provided a written quitclaim agreement giving the Transfusion team access to Blood's media files for the purpose of this project, and only this project.


I have a question which isn't answered in here. How can I get it answered?

First we have to be aware of the question. Posting the problem directly would be the best bet, but be aware that it could take a while to respond to the problem. There is a thread for discussing this FAQ, located here.



Technical



Do I need a copy of Blood to play?

No, you won't need a copy of Blood. Transfusion will come with everything you need.


Why are you using the DarkPlaces engine instead of Doom3 or Source or some other game engine?

One reason is freedom. The source code to the Quake engine, and by relation DarkPlaces, is free to the public under the terms of the GPL. This allows us to make a standalone game which does not require a person to own a game already. While mods for some games have been quite sophisticated, being attached to a paid game prevents them from being freely available.

Another reason is because the technology has become comfortable over the years; the engine is still supported and we have been able to request features for Transfusion to use. Although it was based on the Quake engine, DarkPlaces has been enhanced with such features as realtime lighting, relief and normal mapping, skeletal animation, Ogg Vorbis audio, Quake 3 map format, and much more. Indeed, other projects use these effects to achieve the looks of modern games.


Why don't these effects appear in Transfusion then?

Simply because they aren't needed. We are aiming to recreate the look and feel of Blood, which didn't include realtime lighting and high resolution textures. In future maybe we will make an “enhancement pack” of sorts, but the priority for such a thing is very low; we've already got plenty of work to do.

We suggest that, if you are interested in seeing Transfusion with higher detail textures and effects, you try doing it yourself first. There is nothing stopping someone from making these textures (provided they are original, NOT filtered and resized Blood textures), and submitting them to the team, with due credit to the creator.


Can I run Transfusion with another Quake engine?

With earlier releases of Transfusion (1.0 and 1.01) it may be possible to use other Quake engines, such as GLQuake, TomazQuake, ToChris, or to run the game as a mod for Quake itself. As written in the manual:

Be aware that most Quake 1 compatible engines will require the original Quake data, despite the fact that Transfusion doesn't need them. So you may also want to have the "id1" directory included next to your Transfusion data directory.

To launch Quake using Transfusion as a mod, type the following command line: "winquake -game transfusion", if your Quake engine is named "winquake" of course. You may encounter a few minor bugs (Quake engines with a software renderer have a few visual bugs, in particular), but the gameplay should be very similar to the one we intended to create.


What about later versions of Transfusion?

Recent versions of Transfusion after 1.01 e.g. 1.05 and 1.1 are designed to run only with DarkPlaces, to make use of the features available, so it may be very difficult to use any other engine in its place. The Transfusion team offers no official support for getting these releases to run with any other engine, nor are there plans to change to another one of these engines.


What operating systems does Transfusion run on?

Transfusion should run on whatever DarkPlaces supports. Currently this means Windows (32 and 64-bit), Linux (32 and 64-bit) and Mac OSX, plus BSD and Solaris. Support will vary depending on the popularity of a platform, and whether the team has access to it.


Why is it so slow? Shouldn't it have requirements like original Blood?

Transfusion will run slower than Blood for a number of reasons. Primarily because the engine uses full 3D rendering, instead of using 2D sprites and Z-axis trickery.

We don't plan on optimising the speed to make the requirements similar to Blood's. The older and slower a PC is the more likely it is to be running an older operating system that will support Blood. We would prefer to focus on computers that are too "new" to run the original game.


What do all these options in the Effects Menu mean?

For a full listing of what variables the engine has, check out the list here: http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/ ... eVariables


I tried to run Transfusion.exe but absolutely nothing happened!

Make sure that the game has been extracted from its archive properly. If there is an option to preserve the folder hierarchy make sure that it's active.



Gameplay

I can't crouch! The original game let me crouch, why can't I do it here?

Crouching was not supported in Transfusion 1.01 (as Quake did not support this feature). In recent versions this feature has been implemented.


The player moves funny, what's wrong?

Because Caleb's movement is such a part of Blood we are trying to get the physics to match as best we can. However, because it is such a part of Blood it will be quite noticeable if even little things are off.

We are constantly tweaking things like player movement, but if you would like to help out, go here: viewtopic.php?t=1159


Where is Twin Fortress (BB6)?

BB6 is a complex map, probably the most complex BB map out of the lot. It will take longer to create a fully playable bug-free version.


Why is this feature missing (e.g. burning fuses, muzzle flashes), and that bug present (bot jumping, funny doors)?

Simply because the game is a long way from being finished, and there is a lot of work to do. Features will be implemented in time, some are more important than others and will get prioritised. Bugs will hopefully be squished when we find out about them and figure out how it happens.
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