Plans for an Article on Transfusion

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BEAST
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Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by BEAST »

I've just taken a Grad class called Topics in Non-Fiction Writing, and I've been given freedom to write articles on anything I want. I'm working on my first article on the 2013 giant squid, but I want to do my second article on the history of the Transfusion project. It think the development history of this project would make a fun article, and I was wondering if any of the Fanatics and Cultists in charge can contribute any information that would be useful for my project. I'm still working on my first assignment, so I have plenty of time at the moment to receive any submitted material. Who are most knowledgeable here of the history and process of Transfusion? I must write them upon the scrolls, so they will be claimed again by Caleb the Bloodthirsty!

Any input from the Cabal would be much appreciated.

BEAST out.
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BEAST
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by BEAST »

It's always awkward when I'm the only person with a post on my own thread...

I've read the Blood wiki's account of Transfusion, including things I did not know about, but where can I learn more?
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by dosgamer000 »

BEAST wrote:It's always awkward when I'm the only person with a post on my own thread...

I've read the Blood wiki's account of Transfusion, including things I did not know about, but where can I learn more?
The Blood Wiki is a sound idea but asking someone who worked on it personally should help. I believe I Live...AGAIN was apart of the development if I am not mistaken. Maybe they'll have some knowledge not yet shared. Sorry if this wasn't much of a help as I hadn't a hand in the game.
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by I Live...AGAIN »

If you have any particular questions I would be glad to answer them as best I can.
Mathieu (Elric) also lurks the forums here and he is a founding father. More of an expert than I.

Also, another good resource for the history of the game would be The Internet Archive site:

http://web.archive.org/web/200106010000 ... com/qblood

Some of the best information can be found in the "Chat Logs" section.
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by Tchernobog »

dosgamer000 wrote:The Blood Wiki is a sound idea
I'm flattered. :P
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by dosgamer000 »

Tchernobog wrote:
dosgamer000 wrote:The Blood Wiki is a sound idea
I'm flattered. :P

:wink:
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

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To Everyone Who Offered to Help, I Apologize for Being So Late!

I did direct the questions first as a PM to my lord, IL...A!, but I realized that I need input from the community as well. Also, I'm kind of pressed for time for the week (It's my fault! I'm sorry!), so here you go. My writing instructor thought that using Transfusion as the topic for my next article was inspired (it's also a good thing she understands game speak). Any input is greatly appreciated. Thanks again. :)

1. In the thread “Reviving Transfusion... somehow,” zZaRDoZz explains to Blood of Nightmares some of the difficulties of getting new members for Transfusion:

“We may have some new volunteers, some old ones, or the community may have to think in terms of a paid coder.

Also keep in mind that QuakeC is a somewhat difficult coding language and is looked down upon by some within the C family of programmers.”

How difficult is it to program with QuakeC? Has recent progress in computer technology make it any easier to bypass QuakeC's difficulties?

Is Transfusion still thinking about hiring a programmer? If so, which programmers are the team considering at the moment?


2. In the same thread, you discussed the problems with coding:

“The biggest obstacle TF has to overcome is coding. We have had several wonderfully talented coders in the past and present, but a combination of real life and the daunting task of this project has made it hard for them. Willis has posted recently about having some time coming up in a few months which was awesome news.'

Has Willis returned to help out with the programming? Who were the other programmers? What programming challenges still need to be completed?

3.After the Blood source campaign died out, who came up with the idea for recreating Blood 1 on the Quake 1 engine? What inspired the leader/leaders to use the Quake 1 engine to recreate Blood? Was the Quake 1 engine open source at that point? According to the Wayback archive of Qblood's first site, the project's original leaders were Tim Hale, Mathieu "Elric" Olivier, and Greg "\frightfan/" Enright. Were they a part of the Blood source campaign as well? Are are they still with Transfusion today?

4.According to Tchernobog's article on Blood wiki, longtime member Christopher Steele (a.k.a. DustyStyx) shut down the main site in 2010 after he left. Why did he leave? Why was he worried that no one was interested in Transfusion anymore? Are other team members using Blender like he did for Transfusion's models?

5.How many of Transfusion's team members are Linux users? Why was it important for the team to make Transfusion accessible for the Linux community?

6. How many people have worked on the Transfusion project since it first began? How many have joined since the Transfusion 1.0/1.01 and 1.05 beta 2 release?

7.Which version of the Quake 1 source code did the Transfusion originally use before opting for Dark Places? When did the team decide to use Dark Places to develop Transfusion?

8.Out of the many, many members of your forum, how many have volunteered to help out in the project?

9.Your aim is to recreate all the effects and nuances of Blood 1 into Dark Places. What work needs to be made on the engine code in order to make Dark Places recreate Blood 1 effectively?

10. Is the programming for Transfusion done differently from how other freeware Quake engine games have been programmed?

11. How and when did Monolith become aware of the Qblood project? What inspired the replacement title for Qblood, Transfusion?

12.Why did the Transfusion team originally want to develop the Multiplayer and Singleplayer of Blood 1 into two different Quake engines? When did they finally settle to recreate all of Blood 1 for just the Quake 1 engine? What progress had been done on the Quake 2 engine?

13.I noticed that Blood 2 maps have been successfully recreated for Transfusion. Once the Transfusion's engine is perfected, is it likely that Blood 2 could be remade on it?

14. I recall a plan to recreate Blood 2 on the Quake 3 engine once Transfusion is completed. Would Q3 have to be worked upon extensively as Transfusion's engine if Transfusion 2's development begins?

15.What's become of DustyStyx's plan for a prequel for Transfusion, where Caleb is at odds with a Colonel with ties to the occult? Has he left a design document for the planned expansion for the team?

16.What progress has been made recently for Transfusion?
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by I Live...AGAIN »

I'm sorry I didn't see your PM sooner Beast. I've had a busy week. I'll go through your questions one by one as best I can sometime this weekend.
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by BEAST »

Don't worry about it, IL...A. I was late in posting the questions anyway. I'm really glad that you saw my questions, and I'm glad you're willing to help me. Thanks again, Master. :wink:
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by Elric »

Joe hasn't responded yet apparently, or did you get your answers by PM maybe?

I must admit that my initial intents was to shamelessly let Joe do all the work. :D But since your questions made me dig into my mails and IRC logs archives anyway, I guess I might as well help, if you still need information.

For the record, you can find the archives of the project mailing list on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/foru ... lood-devel. The interface isn't very nice, but you can definitely retrieve useful information from there. Also, back in the early days of the project, we used the Gamespy forums. They're offline now, but the Internet Archive has backups going back to a couple of months after the beginning of the project: http://web.archive.org/web/200105030149 ... rce/forum/.
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

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Joe is IL...A!'s name? I never knew. I guess I wasn't thorough enough on the... Wait a moment.. YOU'RE ELRIC, ONE OF THE PROGRAM LEADERS OF TRANSFUSION SINCE THE QBLOOD DAYS! Well, I've encountered you before when I was a bumbling Board Guest I think. You always had a cool choice of avatar.

No, High Priest Joe hasn't answered yet. I hold no grudge, because I know that he has a more busy life than I do. I did check if he'd PM'd me, but not yet. I've checked some of the archives, though the Wayback Machine can get infuriating sometimes when some, or most, of the links on the site are dead, or lead me to a damnable IGN site... Oh, how I wish GameSpy did not decline. Maybe Trestkon of TNM is to blame? :) Thank you as well for taking an interest in helping me out. I have written a really basic draft of the project, but it needs more project history details and less exposition..

But tell me, Elric, how did your team first contact Jace Hall, and get permission by him to do this project? Which kinds of coders do you need to stabilize the current engine's code?
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by Elric »

BEAST wrote:Wait a moment.. YOU'RE ELRIC, ONE OF THE PROGRAM LEADERS OF TRANSFUSION SINCE THE QBLOOD DAYS! Well, I've encountered you before when I was a bumbling Board Guest I think. You always had a cool choice of avatar.
:D Yep, that's me. Thanks for the avatar.
BEAST wrote:how did your team first contact Jace Hall, and get permission by him to do this project?
It's Timothy Hale who apparently sent him an email, got an answer shortly after, and posted the news in the qBlood forums the same day:
From the man himself

Posted by - Timothy on February 14, 2001 at 11:13:05(PST)

Feel free to go ahead.

The only people that my be concerned about it is Infogrammes (who bought GT
Interactive), but I doubt it.

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy Hale
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 10:41 AM
To: Jason Hall
Subject: Old school Blood

Mr. Hall,

I was asked to speak to you on a matter concerning blood 1. It seems that some
fellow blood fans wish to recreate blood based on a up to date engine. We're
tossing around ideas as to which one now, but it looks like quake since there's
a huge knowledge base there.

The reason I bring this to your attention is our group is concerned that
monolith might not agree if we work on this project while blood 3 is rumored to
be one of your next projects. We're concerned about your feelings on this topic.
We don't want to step on anybodies toes, we just want keep blood alive as long
as we can.

Timothy Hale

Aiea, Hawaii
So the contact was very brief but nice. That being said, he didn't really gave us permission to do this project, since this permission wasn't his to give (Infogrames was the owner of the Blood franchise at that time).

To answer your question 11:
11. How and when did Monolith become aware of the Qblood project? What inspired the replacement title for Qblood, Transfusion?
It's Joseph Carter, a Debian and Quake engines developper, that got us a deal with Infogrames. You can find his email to our mailling list when he got the answer here. Unfortunately it's embedded HTML, but you can see the text in Chris' reply, and the origin of the Transfusion name in my own reply.
BEAST wrote:Which kinds of coders do you need to stabilize the current engine's code?
The engine code is stable and fine (it's DarkPlaces, a well known Quake engine). The problem is the game code, written in QuakeC.

I'll try to answer more of your questions in the next days, but it will take some time because I have to do a bit of research for most of them: it's been quite a long time now, and I want to be sure that my memories match the actual facts. :P I hope you're not in too much of a hurry.
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

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BEAST wrote:4.According to Tchernobog's article on Blood wiki, longtime member Christopher Steele (a.k.a. DustyStyx) shut down the main site in 2010 after he left. Why did he leave? Why was he worried that no one was interested in Transfusion anymore?
The Blood wiki is pretty explicit about that, and it's accurate as far as I know. From what I understood, Chris thought he was the only remaining person in the room and so he shut the door behind him as he was leaving. And he was right: no one has worked on Transfusion since then I think. But the problem with closing the website was of course that it was also closing the forums, the only part of it that was still active. So, Willis put things back into place the next day.
BEAST wrote:Are other team members using Blender like he did for Transfusion's models?
I don't know that, sorry.
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by Elric »

BEAST wrote:7.Which version of the Quake 1 source code did the Transfusion originally use before opting for Dark Places?
We used a lesser known Quake 1 engine called Twilight. I chose it at the time because it was an active project whose goal was to create and maintain a modern, lean and clean version of the Quake 1 engine. Also, I had good contacts with its programmers, which obviously help.
BEAST wrote:When did the team decide to use Dark Places to develop Transfusion?
Unfortunately Twilight's development slowed down gradually, and we started testing DarkPlaces as a possible replacement in March 2002, and then officially switched to it a week later.
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Re: Plans for an Article on Transfusion

Post by Elric »

BEAST wrote:16.What progress has been made recently for Transfusion?
If by "recently" you mean less than 5 years ago, then the answer is: none.

As you can see from our code repository, the latest code change dates back to July 6 2008 (revision 646).
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