Quake Arena Arcade for QL [WIP]

[themuffinman]

Hi All!

Some years back I somehow extracted and reverse engineered a (slightly buggy) QAA asset pack. It has been sitting in limbo until recently when I decided to finally polish off the maps and release 'em. I haven't quite reached a final product for these just yet (almost there!), but my lack of free time and/or energy to do so is stalling progress. I thought someone might be interested in seeing the current state and find some enjoyment out of them in the meantime. I welcome any feedback!

Long story short, here are the 12 missing maps from QAA. The lighting has been redone; the clipping, vis culling and texture alignment has all been tweaked and for the most part improved; support for domination and TA gametypes has been added.

To-do:
catalyst: fix rl pad shadowing
forlorn: improve lighting, replace wall torches with bigger ones used in original
intrusion: improve vis/portalling in central area, ad banners
roidrage: fix buggy geometry on large roids, fix rotating roid coordinates/rotational origins, lighting tweaks, ad banners, grate shader sorting fix
plastered: ad banners, lighting tweaks
warped: ad banners

Download link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/a8hzjh9jgvgvj ... t.pk3?dl=0

Map list:
catalyst
citadels
crossedoff
forlorn
gantry
hazmat
intrusion
plastered
roidrage
symmetry
theankh
warped

[Infernis]

I will certainly take a look later. I had to Google though, because I never heard of Quake Arena Arcade.

Quake Arena Arcade is a multiplayer-focused first-person shooter released on December 15, 2010. It's a port of Quake III Arena for the Xbox Live Arcade, and a joint effort between Id Software and Pi Studios.

[themuffinman]

Here's a bit of reference:
[youtube]xZp_bXqa9HA[/youtube]
[youtube]u3G8etF7910[/youtube]
[youtube]pyvskPkJKWU[/youtube]

[Eraser]

I remember that the new maps for Quake Arena Arcade were really poorly made. Not sure if I remember correctly.

[Foo]

Very cool to see 'new' content pop up. Nice job on the conversions, they loaded up pretty well in Wolfcam for a look around

Only saw one big missing texture on roidrage and I think you have that in your 'todo' already. The ad banners thing is interesting - Wasn't the need for these removed from QL when it moved over to steam (or when it moved away from the f2p model)?

I'm guessing you can't (or won't) push these to the Steam Workshop since the rights stuff is a bit tricky. Would it be possible to also compile a pack for regular ol' Quake 3?

Again, very nice. Thank you for the preview!

[Foo]

I remember that the new maps for Quake Arena Arcade were really poorly made. Not sure if I remember correctly.

They don't appear to be poorly made although that might be down to the good quality of op's conversion and fixes.

[themuffinman]

I wouldn't hold them to the standards of a competitive map, more to the level of the majority of the official Q3A maps. It's a bit of Quake history for anyone who's curious.

[Foo]

I wouldn't hold them to the standards of a competitive map, more to the level of the majority of the official Q3A maps. It's a bit of Quake history for anyone who's curious.

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole today thanks to your post and managed to reverse-engineer the maps for Quake III Revolution (PS2) and Quake Arena Arcade. Really interesting to see how they were put together and changed from the PC versions!

[Foo]

Hi All!

Some years back I somehow extracted and reverse engineered a (slightly buggy) QAA asset pack.

Did you manage to extract the assets with file and folder structures intact? Extracting with quickbms produced a flat list with generic file names and extensions. Locating the BSPs wasn't hard, but it'd be amazing to have the original folder structure and names to identify stuff like textures. Any memory you have of how you extracted the info would be handy to know!

Also if you're curious, here's a sheet showing which levels came with which games. This was put together by extracting assets from each and comparing.

https://imgur.com/X1r8XiR

[themuffinman]

Hi All!

Some years back I somehow extracted and reverse engineered a (slightly buggy) QAA asset pack.

Did you manage to extract the assets with file and folder structures intact? Extracting with quickbms produced a flat list with generic file names and extensions. Locating the BSPs wasn't hard, but it'd be amazing to have the original folder structure and names to identify stuff like textures. Any memory you have of how you extracted the info would be handy to know!

Also if you're curious, here's a sheet showing which levels came with which games. This was put together by extracting assets from each and comparing.

https://imgur.com/X1r8XiR

i definitely used quickbms. folder structure was lost, as were file names (all seem to be listed like hex addresses). lightmaps and audio files were bugged. hunting down a couple of new textures wasn't too difficult, and the shader file helped with naming.

[Foo]

Nice, I'm pretty much re-treading your steps then. I wonder if the path information is even in these xbox archive files. I searched for path strings through everything and couldn't find them (except, as you mention, in the shader files).