Thilo Schulz, the developer of ioEF, contacted me and pointed out that only the kickchat.com domain name expired and the ioEF files that were at http://thilo.kickchat.com/efport-progress/ (link to archive.org) are still available at http://thilo.tjps.eu/efport-progress/.

The six engine patches that were incomplete on archive.org are now found and integrated into my ioef-archive repository with easy to checkout git branches. I’ve also updated various links on this website and my code repositories to link to thilo.tjps.eu.

Things have turned out well with nothing lost. Thanks Thilo Schulz for getting in touch.

This is what I did to move from Ubuntu 11.10 host with quassel-core 0.7.3 to Debian 7 host with quassel-core 0.8.0. (April 3 2016: This also worked for moving from Debian 7 to Debian 8.)

Install quassel-core on the new host.

newhost ~$ sudo apt-get install quassel-core

Quassel will auto-start, let’s stop it.

newhost ~$ sudo service quasselcore stop

Before copying chat log to new host, let’s shutdown quassel.

oldhost ~$ sudo service quasselcore stop

Copy the config and chat log to new host. On Ubuntu and Debian the config and chat log was stored in /var/lib/quassel/quasselcore.conf and /var/lib/quassel/quassel-storage.sqlite

You do not want to copy /var/lib/quassel/quasselCert.pem to the new host. It’s created at install time and copying it over made SSL stop working.

Because we need to copy the files as root on both hosts, copy to an intermediate location on the new host.

oldhost ~$ sudo scp /var/lib/quassel/quasselcore.conf /var/lib/quassel/quassel-storage.sqlite user@newhost:/home/user/

(The above is one command)

Remove the default conf and copy the new files into place. Removing the conf seems bad, but without replacing it quassel will ask you to create a new user. (I didn’t check what happens if create a new user.)

newhost ~$ sudo rm /var/lib/quassel/quasselcore.conf
newhost ~$ sudo mv quasselcore.conf /var/lib/quassel/
newhost ~$ sudo mv quassel-storage.sqlite /var/lib/quassel/

Now fix the owner/group.

newhost ~$ sudo chown quasselcore:quassel /var/lib/quassel/quasselcore.conf
newhost ~$ sudo chown quasselcore:quassel /var/lib/quassel/quassel-storage.sqlite

(The above is two commands.)

Now you can start quassel again.

newhost ~$ sudo service quasselcore start

Time to connect and make sure it works! After it seems to work you’ll probably want to remove quassel from the old host, so it doesn’t get started after a reboot.

oldhost ~$ sudo apt-get remove quassel-core

Done.

I wouldn’t want to make a clone of it or a similar game, there is nothing I want to add to it. I do wish it had some older Hatsune Miku songs in it, but not something I could really fix by making a clone or similar game. It’s possible to use any MP3 in-game and make your own music video / gameplay button track. Though I’m not motivated enough to attempt it, it seems pretty crazy complicated. The songs I want are in the previous games that were only released in Japan (for PSP) so I could buy a PSP and import the games.

The easy difficult, is easy. I was able to beat all the songs on the first try (getting the lowest grade level on most of them though). Although, I did play the demo the day before. It’s hard to say how good I did in the demo because the first 10 times or so I tried I was pressing X instead O. I wasn’t really prepared when the game started and it said “cool” in red when I pressed the button. I was almost sure that controller was broken or that I was completely missing something. Then I looked down at the buttons. Oooh. XD

I had already read about how this was the first game in the series to not count wrong button as “awful” (or “bad”, I can’t remember) and I was confused with so many counting as “safe” so it made sense quickly…

Normal is more difficult… but the gameplay is still simple and controllable enough that I don’t blame the game for me losing. Non-irritating games are nice. Though the fact that I get “diva points” each time to use to buy stuff in the game (and there is a lot of stuff..) helps not be annoyed doing the same thing over and over. The music and videos help with that as well. I don’t mind playing it over and over if I lose, or if I win.

I haven’t beat any song on hard yet. I think it will be amusing to see the extreme difficulty, it seems like it would be crazy and I would do awful. It’s going to take awhile to beat all songs on all difficulties. Seems like it should be repetitive but it doesn’t bother me.

The challenges you can opt-in to for each song are a nice addition to game. More difficult, more diva points. More diva points, more vegetable juice I can buy and give to Miku. heh The virtual interaction “Diva Room” feels a bit strange. It’s kind of like a pet simulator, but with people. Redecorate the room, give them gifts, rub their head, and watched them walk around, dance, sleep. The characters are cute so that makes up for everything though, right? mm, just needs a chat AI simulator then it would be perfect.

I’m really impressed by how many loading screen background images there are. And I’ve only unlocked 89% of them so far. There must be like a 100 images or so. Though this is probably because too much time is spent looking at loading screen, but it doesn’t really bother me.

It’s nice to play a game and not think “they designed it wrong, I could do better.” Well, there is one thing. There are menus right next to each other called “Options 1” and “Options 2”. I want to rename to “Game Options” and “TV Options”. That is all.

gameplay video:

no gameplay video:

May be less complex, but still pretty amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eZHe7S55To

Google Code

See all downloads

Zip (windows and Linux) (all TA releases) : 117+397+159+110+14+24+116+28+6+20+5+39+161=1196, 13 releases with average of 92 per-release
Windows Installer (TA 0.2, 0.4.x, 0.6.x): 182+1253+14+31+15+15+3+12=1525, 8 releases with average of 190.625 per-release
Linux Installer (TA 0.4.x only): 9+39+9+2=59, 4 releases with average of 14.75 per-release

Total downloads from Google Code: 2,780

Turtle Arena Ubuntu PPA

Downloads by Ubuntu release: (client and server refer to Turtle Arena client and server packages)

* quantal 24 (client), 24 (server)
* precise 121 (client), 118 (server)
* oneiric 61 (client), 63 (server)
* natty 50 (client), 35 (server)
* maverick 31 (client), 21 (server)
* lucid 30 (client), 29 (server)

Total client downloads from PPA: 317
Total server downloads from PPA: 290 (ignored in total count, Google Code has client and server in same download)

File Hosting sites

Found these via Google, I don’t know anything else about them.

http://games.softpedia.com/get/Freeware-Games/Turtle-Arena.shtml
Just points to file at Google Code, so already counted: 169 downloads (Windows Installer)

http://www.gamearena.com.au/downloads/details.php/turtle-arena-v060-for-windows
200 downloads (Windows Installers)

http://www.atomicgamer.com/files/96923/turtle-arena-v0-6-for-linuxwindows-free-game
7 downloads (Zip, Windows/Linux)

http://www.atomicgamer.com/files/96922/turtle-arena-v0-6-for-windows-free-game
4 downloads (Windows Installer)

http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/64736
9 downloads (Windows Installer)

Total Mirror Downloads: 227

Conclusion

Total Known Turtle Arena downloads: 3,324

Known Unknown downloads: people can get the game from git and Mageia 2 package repo (though probably few downloads from these).

First available for download December 2009. Average 75.5 downloads per month (44 months). Average 2.5 per-day (44 months * 30 days). It’s higher than I expected, though it’s low when compared other more-complete games.

Thanks Juan Luis Baptiste for packaging it.

I am now creating ioq3ztm as a separate project, by porting things from Turtle Arena back to a clean ioq3 source. It will contain fixes and features that don’t fit in ioq3 for one reason or another. This is an effort to make a better base engine for standalone ioq3 games and to clean up the Turtle Arena source code. ioq3ztm, unlike Turtle Arena, does not add “#ifdef”s around new code, this results in cleaner code. ioq3ztm is not planned to change q3 gameplay, only to fix things and add features to enhance to standalone games.

Turtle Arena’s four player splitscreen will be ported to ioq3ztm.

ioq3ztm is not compatible with quake3 qvms, this means q3 mods can’t be used with it. I don’t see this as being an issue, people can still create new mods using ioq3ztm source code. Might be considered an issue if a standalone ioq3 game wanted to switch to ioq3ztm (and wanted existing mods to work).

ioq3ztm is planned to not add an additional data requirements, so that it will work with q3 data or q3 replacement data (such as q3min or OpenArena?). I will probably create a full q3 data replacement based on Turtle Arena data someday, “baseioq3ztm” or something, which would be included in a playable ioq3ztm download.

Turtle Arena will now be based on ioq3ztm, instead of ioq3 directly.  I will probably port some of the changes to ioq3 (but only ones that fit in of course). I may port ogg theora video playback to ioq3, which is originally from XreaL, World of Padman.

It should be possible to port standalone ioq3 games (Q3Rally, Smokin’ Guns, OpenArena, World of Padman, etc) to ioq3ztm and use ioq3ztm as a single engine for multiple games. Though merging features like four player splitscreen wouldn’t be easy.

In short; I’m porting features from Turtle Arena to a new ioq3 fork, ioq3ztm, and merging the changes into Turtle Arena/ioq3ztm “properly”.