- Quake III Arena UnFreeZe Client 2020.4 edition: ioq3v6-unfreeze-client-v20.4.zip
ok, so in short, what's new about this package compared to the previous 19.2 one? beside the usual minor patches and the 2020 updated production environment, which are already on their own important things, mostly two things, support for the inside masters server and it now comes with a collection of the best custom maps ever, included.
with the first now this makes the inside masters server kind of (quasi) "mainstream" and this client, from now on wards, actually the "recommended" and only supported one here to play there. not that is by any means perfect but compared with the legacy one it's definitely an immense improvement. now this sever should show up at the in-game browser as a "ufcomp" type of server (check attached screen) so now you can connect to it from there just like you do to any of the other ones. in addition notice that I replaced the original punk buster field with one showing up the location of the route so now there will be no more confusion when picking up one of the servers. that was tremendously important with the previous "low-latency" routes where they were located relatively far from each other and there was a major difference when picking one or another. now with the new shorted infrastructure is probably not that important, though is always something good to know. the routes are named n1 and n2 in-game, their "canonical" names are nbg1 and nbg2 and they correspond with the ".de" and ".eu" respectively routes (both ipv4 and ipv6, you have them resolved almost "everywhere"). the generic advice is typically go for n1 unless there's issues with it and/or n2 provides better connectivity (and the sames goes for ipv6 over ipv4 btw) however like I've just said, even if you mess it up now it shouldn't be much of a problem.
another important change introduced by this has been that now I defaulted the models to forced as they are kind of "critical" for the duels and this also means the introduction of the enemy_model and enemy_headmodel client variables to control it so this is a change to the previous behavior (where I had re-used the model/headmodel variables for the enemy, they are now taken on duels, anyways in reality is even simpler this way). in addition about the models I also make a now stupidly visible skin mod in tune with that of other custom well know UnFreeZe mods and dropped the openarena mature pack just for fun. if someone just prefer the things stock or is put off by these visuals you can simply get back to normal by removing the accordingly named pk3 files inside the package.
now the package contains the full collection of well know custom maps that run on some of the extra servers here pre-installed and in addition I made them into a (almost entire) single player campaign. to even the number of tiers I dropped pro-nodm9 in addition to all the already known ones. I personally think that it turned pretty good and I must even say that I had lot of fun with it. I believe that it added great value to the package and it even bring a great element of re-play-ability to the game beside it should serve to introduce people to the maps. anyways as with the models if someone wants to get back the standard single players all he has to do is simply delete the accordingly named pk3 file. ok, for reference the added tiers now looks like this:
- the basics tier: ospdm6 ospdm2 ospdm1 ospdm8
- the classics tier: mrcq3t4 pro-q3tourney7 overkill hub3tourney1
- the "quakelive" tier: phantq3dm1_rev pro-dcmap7 focal_p132 hektik_b3
- the "masters" (a.k.a. duels) tier: hub3aeroq3 qxtourney1 pukka3tourney2 ztn3tourney1
- the remix tier: 7++ 6++ bloodcovenant pro-nodm9
for the rest, like I said, just the usual minor fixes/changes here and there, probably nothing worth discussing about it. the only thing of significance is mention that in order to prevent issues with other installations (either of other mods/engines or even of previous official UnFreeZe ones) I renamed the standard "q3config.cfg" as "ufconfig-2004.cfg" as cfg/settings collisions has been a recurrent issue, for so long. this should ensure that now everybody get a fresh start and not that they launch the game and it crashes (or simply works sub-par) due wrong settings so keep that name change in mind when updating your cfg. there's also added "com_framelimiter" client variable now to limit your frame rate for those with lesser computers but that's probably less important for the general public.
and that's it, I still have to update the server clean database with these new files but I won't probably look up into that until tomorrow or so (meaning by now you'll get unclean status, no big deal I guess) when this has been tested a bit more. for the rest it should be done so just go and grab it and let me know if something doesn't work as it should.
have fun
