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QW-Mod: Tactical Assault is dead

19.07.2008 : 00:33
Well, it pains me to say it, but: QWTA is dead.

1. I haven't played ETQW in around 6 months. Sorry, much fun as it might be to play the game - Despite the Enemy Territory: Wolfensten influences, and the "pro gamer" influences - there's only so much enjoyment one can squeeze out of the same 12 maps over that sort've timeframe. Maybe if Splash Damage had ever bothered to release anything new to the game but gameplay nerfs and bugfixes... (Like a mappack? tbh it would have been time better spent in my books than providing modding tech support for the game.)

2. I'm an SVN noob apparently, and I've been quite frustrated with trying to teach myself how to do branches and merges properly to keep up with ETQW's SDK patches.

3. I despise working with ETQW's code and scripting. It's just plain not fun. Modding something shouldn't require one to:

a) Search through 15 different folders to find the correct 3 files to edit.

b) Discover that because of inheritance scripting you have to look again to find the file that has the right data in it because even though it's NAMED logically it actually doesn't have what you want in it.

c) Play hide and seek with 50 different dependency files for the scripting of the game, all of which will crash the game if you forget to include one evne though they have nothing whatsoever to do with your mod.

d) Compile the game code 2 different ways, one of which is optional. And lament the third way of compiling your scripts that Splash Damage - even though they use it themselves - tells everyone else not to use.

e) Discover that a typo in one of the script files of the game causes crashes when its executed, because the game doesn't check its script files on load, no... It waits until you're in the middle of the game and the code is needed, before trying it. Good luck debugging what's wrong when you have to debug through the game's script parser. This is why compiled code is good and scripting is bad.

Bottom line? I'm not having fun making QWTA, and from the ...zero servers who I've ever seen run it, the ETQW community has little interest in it either, which, while not a driving force behind my decision, doesn't give much incentive to bother if I don't feel like it. Maybe I'll pick up QWTA again at some point in the future, but I doubt it. ETQW's just too annoying to mod. I'd rather mod something I can have fun with, rather than treat as a chore.
The QWTA site will stay up a while, and then be taken down.

~Jason "Azuvector" HuttonTactical Assault Website