Old News


Clanring CRMod++ version 5.0 and above written by J.P. Grossman
Earlier versions written by J.P. Grossman and Paul Baker
Send bug reports to crbug@mpog.com

Monday, November 27, 2000

I finally got around to looking at the broken servers page. I couldn't see any way to fix it, so I reverted back to the old manual list.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Wednesday, May 10, 2000

I don't know how it happened.. a single line of code got erased when I was putting together CRMod++ 6.0. It went unnoticed for a long time, but it unfortunately introduced a bug which could crash servers. I am therefore releasing a very minor upgrade to fix this bug. There are only three changes in CRMod++ 6.1:

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Friday, February 11, 2000

CRMod++ 6.0 has been released! Head on over to downloads to pick up your very own copy. There are a limited number of "tin box" editions available.. only the first 50 downloads will receive one! So act now!!

The servers page has been updated with a growing list.. send me email if you want your server added. If you run a server, you should consider switching to ProQuake which is fully compatible with crmod++ 6.0 and has some nice server-side features.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Saturday, February 5, 2000

CRMod++ 6.0 is now in beta - some of you may have already caught it in action at elohim.ai.mit.edu ports 26000 and 27000. Those of you who know QuakeC will understand the significance of the new features, all of which were impossible before qccx unleashed the true power of the quake virtual machine. There is a long running joke at the end of the crmod manual about erasing a hard drive from QuakeC. Well it turns out.. I'm almost positive about this.. that you can. It would be horrendously difficult, and may only work on 25% of machines, but I'm pretty sure I know how to do it. What can I say? If some 16 year old Belgian linux hacker sends you a progs.dat and says that you have to try it, maybe you shouldn't.

Some of the features are things I have always wished I could do but couldn't, like hiding player IPs to prevent nuking and qkicking. It's a crying shame that it is only now, in the twilight of Quake's reign on this planet, that CRMod++ 6.0 arrives. I truly believe it is The Right Thing. Here are some of the changes:

If all goes well with beta testing, CRMod++ 6.0 should be available for download sometime next week. Concurrent with CRMod development, I have been spending time working on ProQuake which is also in beta testing. ProQuake is a new quake client/server based on the WinQuake source release. Among other things, it contains special support for some new CRMod features which allow you to view team scores and the match timer in your status bar, and player pings in the scoreboard. For a complete description of ProQuake's features, check out the ProQuake Homepage.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Friday, January 21, 2000

I just finished going through the crmod code making various optimizations enabled by qccx. The size of the progs.dat has now dropped to 397680.. definitely the leanest, meanest crmod progs.dat that has ever existed. I haven't added any new features yet, but some old ones have been patched up. For example, the observer heads-up display (for the few of you that use it instead of the status bar) now shows *exact* player armour and health, and the sping console command now shows exact player pings. The Elohim servers will be running the alpha versions of 6.0; let me know if you encounter any bugs!

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Wednesday, January 19, 2000

I thought that 5.1 might be the last version of crmod, but John Carmack released the quake source code over christmas, and now all that has changed! No, I'm not thinking of integrating crmod into the quake executable. But by looking at the quake source code I was able to figure out exactly how the virtual machine (which interprets QuakeC) works. It turns out that there's a lot of potential power that was previously untapped by QuakeC, so the first order of business was to rewrite the compiler. I now have qccx, the world's only optimizing QuakeC compiler with support for integers, pointers, arrays and string manipulation. Without making any changes to the crmod source code, I recompiled it with qccx and the size dropped from 550560 bytes to 419616 bytes! The next step will be to add features to crmod that I previously thought were impossible from QuakeC alone. Here is a small preview of what you will see in CRMod++ 6.0:

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Friday, December 10, 1999

CRMod++ 5.1 has been released! Head over to the download page to grab it. I've also added a small list of servers that are running crmod.. let me know if you have a server that you would like me to add to the list.

Included with version 5.1 is DeQuake, a utility for converting files with quake characters to normal text files. This lets you take full advantage of the improved dedicated server console logging features; DeQuake will convert the console log to text so that you can actually read the player names.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Saturday, December 4, 1999

CRMod++ 5.1 is now in beta. It is currently running on shreddies.ai.mit.edu:27000 and should be up shortly on 209.163.146.87:26001. The following features are new to version 5.1:

Additionally, I finally squashed the can't jump/shoot/change leves bug! This elusive bug has been around since version 4.0. I finally tracked it down to a subtle problem with the level-changing code combined with John Carmack's flaky changlevel() routine. Specifically, if changelevel() is called with "" as an argument, then ALL FUTHER calls to changelevel will fail, so that the only way to change levels is from the server console. I therefore replaced the supplied changelevel routine with some quakeC code that does some sanity checks and then uses localcmd to change levels.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Friday, December 3, 1999

CRMod++ 5.1 is coming along nicely and should be in beta by tomorrow. There are a few new features after all, including multiple admin codes, so that when someone leaks the admin you can figure out who it was! This is one of many "Damn, I should have thought of that before!" features that have been suggested to me by Izra'il over the course of CRMod++ development.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Sunday, November 28, 1999

What!?!? An update to the crmod home page? What can this mean??

It means that Paul Baker finally gave me access to these html files, and that I finally got around to changing them. All I've done for now is write this message and add a modest FAQ. It also means that, despite the fact that quake 1 is nearly dead, I will be releasing crmod++ 5.1 shortly. Version 5.1 will mainly contain minor bug fixes and incremental improvements. I don't plan to add any major new features as the current feature set has been quite successful, so it doesn't seem worth the effort to put in something new. I'll be doing things like adding messages to the server console and making voting messages easier to see. If there is something that you would desperately like to see included in version 5.1, or if you are interested in beta testing version 5.1, send me email.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Wednesday, March 17, 1999 -- Version 5.00

Version 5.0 has been released! Lots of new stuff so download it now! Make sure to read the readme.txt and manual.txt. If you have problems check the FAQ. Any other questions email crbug@mpog.com. Put "I have read the readme.txt and manual.txt" in the subject line or you most likely will not get a reply.

NOTE: A minor bug has been found which sets the maximum number of teams to 0 when a listen server is started in match mode. This problem can be corrected by adding the following lines to the start of crmod.cfg:

skill 2
maxteams

Please see the manual for an explanation of what these two lines do.