The Qubism CTF mappack (52MB) is up, collecting the entrants in their mapping contest. There are six maps in the pack, including Lukin's latest, Clint Eastwood. Judging should be finished by the end of the week.

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4K's Zaccubus has been replaced by Purri after failing to turn up for his first two matches, leaving Purri with games to play against Frexuz, Cooller and draven. Draven himself trounced frexuz 2-0 yesterday, as did ooze to ortho. On the UK front, HELL had trouble with impulse, while GaRpY pulled off a solid win over az1d. The little group tables are showing Garpy as topping group G, dozo as mid table in group F, and HELL taking up the bottom slot of group A - though with only a few games played there's a long way to go yet.

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The 0.74a Q4Max patch did fulfill it's stated aim of fixing slowdowns in the mod. Unfortunately, it also crashed servers, so we now have a patch for the patch, 0.74b. It's another drop in, so you'll need 0.74 and 0.74a already installed. There are a few tweaks and bugfixes in on the client side as well, so it's worth the download.

• jolt
• levi
• TrueCarnage

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There's a new version of Gametype Revolution up for downloading, and a video showing off some of it's features. These include a new midair map, Q4W physics, a defrag esque training mode, and various fixes and gameplay tweeks. Kleeks on jolt points out that you'll need the creative commons mappack if you don't have it already.You can download the mod (7.15MB) from:

• Jolt
• PlanetQuake4.net
• Quake Oldies

There's also a note on the site saying: "Next things to add are FreezeTag and a fully featured menu, completely rewritten from scratch". Yay for FT \o/

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The Q4Max team have released a small patch for version 0.74 of their mod, which addresses some fps and slowdown issues. You can grab the patch from levi, jolt or planetquake4. It's only a small patch (3.6MB), and you just need to add the pk4 to your Q4Max directory.

Also out from the Maxxers is a new version of the MaxScores score bot, for Q4Max and XBM.

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The RA4 team have released the final beta before a full release of the mod. It's 1.2 compatible, and comes with stacks of fixes over the previous versions. Jolt are running a server at 213.208.119.120:28007, and you can grab the torrent, or download it from:

• Jolt
• PlanetQuake4.net
• Levi
• Filefront

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The two competition mods have both released new versions, sort of. X-Battle has been updated to the 1.2 compatible 0.23, but unfortunately ended up including enemy sound from Q3. Until they've sorted this, the X-Battle team have asked everyone to wait for a hotfix to the patch, which should be fortcoming.

Q4Max has hit version 0.74, again mostly a compatability fix, but includes some new features, particularly spec lock and "Coach Mode (Includes an option to send voice commands to whoever the coach is spectating)". You can download it from levi, PlanetQuake4.net or jolt.

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All of the above have been expressing their opinion on the interweb this week. Nate Borland, director of competitions at QuakeCon, answered some questions over on PlanetRTCW on running quakecon's tournaments, and choosing which games will be played. Carmac has been spouting off (presumably as part of some spouting contract with the GGL) about Q4's lack of new players, and a possible solution:

But if they do, for whichever reason (and I can name a couple of valid ones), the only way to save the game is to release it anew. Do exactly the same thing they did with Enemy Territory: give the people a free, downloadable multiplayer-only game that has improved gameplay, good maps and the features it needs.

Finally, cha0ticz laments the lack of a GTV in Quake 4, and calls out to the community for someone to implement it, even going so far as to get some suggestions from arQon on how it could be done:

The trick could be to not use the netcode of Q4 like Q3’s version of GTV did, but to use the OS-level calls that are now exposed and useable within the Q4 code. Using these you could create a generic stream to push packets to a client’s machine.

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The 1.2 point release is out now, fixing the widescreen bug from the 1.1 patch. There isn't much else in the way of changes, bar a couple of other bugfixes (thanks kleeks):

• The Screen Size setting will only display resolutions supported by Windows and your hardware
• Shotgun reload animation will now play correctly.
• Muted icons now display properly on the scoreboard tab of the End-Game Summary window.

Hopefully we should see 1.2 compatible versions of the mods (other than GTR) soon, and the servers getting updated. The patch is available as a (much smaller) upgrade from 1.1, or the full patch with all the maps and whatnot from 1.1 included. There are torrents available, or direct links below.

1.1 -> 1.2 Windows (21MB)

• id
• levi
• jolt
• PlanetQuake4.net

1.2 Full Windows (117MB)

• id
• levi
• jolt
• PlanetQuake4.net

1.2 Full Linux (114MB)

• id
• levi
• jolt

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An update to the multi gametype (though CTF focused) Expert Quake 4 mod is available now, and you can download it from the expertctf site. Here, nicked from the forum post, are some new features (well mod features, I think they're the same as the previous version otherwise):

• Silky smooth off-hand hook for true 3-dimensional combat
• Balanced Weapon damage
• All weapons given upon spawn (no scavenging around picking up weapons when you could be fighting!)
• Ammo and Health regen (no scavenging around picking up ammo and health when you could be fighting!)
• All-new Q2-style hand grenade primer weaponv
• Triple rail shot
• Balanced scoring bonuses that award team play in CTF mode
• Timed flag runs
• Increased movement speed over Q4 defaults (who wants to play as if they're wading in knee-deep water?)
• 2-bounce Grenade-launcher (no more laying minefields of spam)
• Increased visibility skins

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