October 10th 2018 is the 10 year anniversary of when I started modding ioquake3. It was my third attempt at creating a Ninja Turtle fangame within a three year time period. I intend to release Spearmint 1.0 as the end result of 10 years of working on the Quake 3 engine.

On October 10th I’m planning to cease development on my projects based on the Quake 3 engine (Spearmint, Turtle Arena, Lilium Voyager, flexible HUD mod for ioq3, …) and resign from being a ioquake3 maintainer (since 2011). I’ll no longer be following ioquake3 development or providing support on the ioquake3 forum.

I don’t have a special interest in playing any of the games based on the Quake 3 engine and as of 2016 I’m no longer planning to use Spearmint for future game development. There is no actual reason for me to continue working on Spearmint and ioquake3. The main draw to continue is simply that someone should do it and I’m knowledgeable on the subject.

I’m pretty satisfied with the state of features and improvements that I’ve completed over the last 10 years. Of course there is still many things left that could be done; I just don’t care to continue working on the Quake 3 engine and I’m tired of the pressure I apply to myself to work on it.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to be doing with game/software development in the future. I may continue working at a slow pace on my new game/engine project Clover’s Toy Box which I’ve moved to private development. I may work on other art or projects instead.

If you appreciate my work on ioquake3 or Spearmint you could donate to me using PayPal via Ko-fi.com (no account required).

spearmint.pw domain name expires in a few hours. RIP 2013 – 2018.

• extraordinarybeat.xyz (Mar 11, 2016 – Mar 11, 2018) moved to clover.moe/ebx
• turtlearena.com (Mar 24, 2016 – Mar 24, 2018) moved to clover.moe/turtlearena
• spearmint.pw (Sep 19, 2013 – Sep 19, 2018) moved to clover.moe/spearmint

For reference, clover.moe was registered on March 24 2016. I probably would not have registered the others if I had an actual main domain name instead of ztm.x10host.com. Having many domain names is kind of an unnecessary expense.

The following redirects are going to be removed after March 24 2018. Might as well break all links at once.

• chat.clover.moe -> forum.clover.moe
• ztm.x10host.com/ta/ -> turtlearena.com

spearmint.pw meant Spearmint Powered. It was inspired on the Powered by Quake III logo featured on some game cases. The idea was that if someone made a game based on Spearmint, they link to Spearmint.Pw. I never got around to making a parody logo for it though. Also, Hatsune Miku on the Spearmint website since 2014 is a place holder for Clover who I have yet to actually design.

I use to refer to this release as Turtle Arena Classic. It’s mainly a refined version of Turtle Arena 0.6 that changes some content back to 0.4 and 0.2.

The Ninja Turtles no longer have tails. The non-commercial music by Neil Crowe is back. The Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory weather effects are back (GPLv3 with additional terms). The main game icon (which was intended for the original characters project, EBX) was changed back to Turtle Arena. The team icons are now Sais, Katanas, and Shuriken again. The EBX team icons featured in 0.6 (Clover, Shell, and Plus) are still available if you set g_redteam, g_blueteam, and g_neutralteam console variables.

There are some level improvements. Mainly the shrub model lighting and some content added to the upper area in Leaks (dm1). The levels are unintentionally brighter due to fixing external lightmaps not having overbright applied. Though, somewhere in-between might be nice.

The game now features multiple initial startup loading screen images. Unfortunately this is the only thing inspired by Project DIVA that has make it into the game.

But most importantly the text quality has been greatly improved.

The incomplete Main Game (co-op platform mode) has been removed from the main menu. Set ui_maingame cvar to 1 to re-enable it. Co-op is still available in the start server menu though.

The combat system is exactly the same same as Turtle Arena 0.6; with the exception of reducing the unbearable attack delay of the hammer and axe. So if you found Turtle Arena 0.6 to be a terrible game, it still is.

Turtle Arena 0.7 consist of  platform-independent Quake Virtual Machine game logic and unmodified Spearmint 0.5 client/server executables for Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS. This is the first Turtle Arena release available for macOS.

Turtle Arena running on unmodified Spearmint is also a decent technical achievement as Turtle Arena is the one of the few standalone ioquake3 games started after the quake3 engine source code was released. This resulted in Turtle Arena touching a lot of things in the engine that Quake 3 mod gone standalone game do not. Though it’s underwhelming since it’s my game and my engine.

This release establishes how to make new Turtle Arena releases so it’s more likely to be updated now. That said, I have no plan to begin serious work on it again.

My personal interest at this point is to reduce melee attacking in Player vs Player game modes to a side arm your never need to use like Quake 3’s Gauntlet with the main focus being a first-person shooter. I don’t anticipate changing Turtle Arena into a first-person shooter without replacing the characters and changing the game title though.

“There should be a new Turtle Arena 0.7 release in the near-future, hopefully next month.”

—March 30, 2013

I am planning to release Spearmint 0.5 and Turtle Arena 0.7 on Friday the 13th of October 2017.

Turtle Arena 0.7 is does not fix any issues with the melee attacking or overall design. It restores a few aspects of the game to earlier versions (before 0.5.x started changing the game for EBX), fixes some issues, and inherits many improvements from Spearmint including better compatibility with recent operating systems. It also unintentionally makes all the levels brighter because I fixed the external lightmap support… I don’t expect serious development to resume but new releases will probably be more frequent than every 5 years after this.

EBX was originally a continuation of Turtle Arena without Ninja Turtles (or any other playable characters due to lack of 3D models…). The small differences of the existing EBX code/data are being reintegrated into Turtle Arena. The EBX code/content repositories will be deleted. This will make Turtle Arena development easier as currently I work on EBX then merge the changes into Turtle Arena.

Whether EBX will be a separate game based on Spearmint or uses a new engine is unknown. Though there is a high probability EBX will never be created at all. At this point EBX is little more than a title for a game with Sonic style single player / co-op, Quake 3 like first person shooter multiplayer, hot pink blood, electronic dance music / hardcore techno, and a human character named Clover.

I’m currently working toward making a new Spearmint release and hopefully a new Turtle Arena release in the next few months.

To clarify my post from last month; My plan to rewrite/overhaul Spearmint was replaced with making a new engine. I don’t have concrete future plans for Spearmint or Turtle Arena. However that does not mean I am abandoning them.

My Toy Box engine project is planned to rewrite the engine core, add and expand upon features I’ve added to Spearmint, and add new features I’ve wanted in Spearmint for years. This is essentially my plan to “rewrite/overhaul Spearmint” but starting from scratch and dropping Quake 3 data compatibility. Though, technically it’s just a game engine aiming to have a similar feature set.

New things I develop in my Toy Box engine project may be merged into Spearmint. For example, Toy Box currently runs the unfinished Alternate UI I made for Spearmint. It’s inflexible and kind of a mess. If I made a new UI it will most likely go into both Toy Box and Spearmint.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with Toy Box and Spearmint in future. What I do know is that spending another 8 years fixing small issues in Quake 3 sounds pretty uninteresting.

There is a lot of ways that the Spearmint engine could be improved and new features that could be added. However the main issues for EBX are the lack of game assets and overall design. In particular the critical component of music. While I had found some decent music under free content licenses, they’re just not what I want for the game. If I want to make the game, I have to make the music too. It’s pretty easy to imagine spending 5 years or more on just creating the music. Though I haven’t actually created any music tracks so it’s more like guessing than imagining.

My goals for Spearmint have changed over time from it’s original 2011 goal to be a better (or alternative) base engine for standalone games [based on ioquake3] to focusing more on multi-game support and adding features from other games based on Quake 3. It was still based on the idea that I would eventually create a new game using Spearmint.

In the months leading up to the Spearmint 0.4 release I had been seriously considering ceasing to follow ioquake3 development. Having Spearmint completely branch off on its own; remove the opengl2 renderer, rewrite over half the code base, and reorganize most of the rest code base. I would probably stop contributing (as many) patches to ioquake3 due to differing code bases.

Completely separating Spearmint from ioquake3 goes against what I’ve tried to do with Turtle Arena since the beginning; contribute as much back to ioquake3 as possible so even if my project fails and I abandon it, at least it will benefit others later. Spearmint was born out of trying to make Turtle Arena code that I couldn’t include in ioquake3 be available in a more useful way.

ioquake3 was the third engine I used for creating a ninja turtle game. I don’t have any attachment to playing any of the Quake 3 based games. I switched from creating a game engine to using ioquake3 in 2008 because 1) ioquake3 is a full working game. 2) I was in over my head creating an engine.

I came to the conclusion that instead of continuing to improve or completely overhaul Spearmint for a game that I might make five years from now; I should create a new engine for EBX when I’m actually ready to make the game.

It’s been 10 months since Spearmint 0.4 was released. So far absolutely nothing has happened on the music side and just a few minor changes on the Spearmint side.

I started working on making a new engine for EBX under the title Clover’s Toy Box.[sarcasm] Yeah I’m totally not programming EBX before making the music, just look at the title. My current plans for Clover’s Toy Box are kart racing and first person shooter game modes. I’m still creating a basic engine so it’ll be a while before there is actually a playable game. I also zero commitment to actually work on it; I’ll just do it if I feel like it.

Summary

I’d like to make a new game (with music!) not using a Quake 3 based engine and I have zero commitment to it. Spearmint is more or less finished because I’m not planning to make a game using it.

I made some minor long overdue changes to the Turtle Arena website. I rewrote the front page summary and modified the features page to remove references to EBX and making any future changes. I limited the width of the page so there isn’t a huge gap on some pages when viewed in widescreen. And broke all the deep links, because .htm at the end of URLs is ugly.

Edit (June 20 2016): Added HTTPS support to the websites and added redirects for the old ztm.x10host.com/ta/*.htm deep links to new locations at turtlearena.com.

Edit (January 31 2018): Website is now at clover.moe/turtlearena, see blog post.

It will probably be `a few’ more months before I focus on game development instead of engine development.

Honestly not sure where I’d want to go with Turtle Arena at this point. I’d lean toward dropping it after EBX is released, though it will most likely just limp along. Not changing very much — staying the poor game that it is.

Honestly not sure where I’d want to go with EBX at this point. I’d like to see it completed (or playable at all). Seeing as it’s taken 7 years to get to this point, I have no idea how long it will take to complete. I’m not as motivated or excited about making a 3D platform game with robots and melee weapons as I was 7 years ago. Though, I still think it would be really neat if what I envision for EBX would be a playable game.

So I’ve started plans on a new game! kukuku

Inspired by Air Gear, Jet Set Radio, and NiGHTS into Dreams… Legendary Wings: Soaring on the Wind of Dreams is planned to be an anime-style game focused on flying using inline skates. Featuring a customizable character system, anime aesthetics, and INSERT MORE MARKETING STUFF. Did I mention anime?

After having it on my mind for a while I wrote up some initial plans on 2013-04-21 and came up with the title on 2013-08-03. It wouldn’t surprise me if I never actually start working on making this. I have lots of plans for EBX, yet I haven’t really done much.

Currently not planning to have a story mode due to the large amount of work it would be. What the game modes will be is largely undecided right now, though it’s fairly easier to draw ideas from Air Gear and Jet Set Radio. Tricks mode (score and/or time limit). Race mode. Team and free-for-all sticker and/or graffiti take over the city mode (score and/or time limit). I’m not sure about battle modes, Ringo wouldn’t like it.

I’m thinking of having NiGHTS-like rear control mode for when player is riding the Wing Road, started by high enough trick link in Tricks mode or something. Player would get wings on their feet and flies through rings to stay in Wing Road mode, with increasing difficulty. The rings in Air Gear when Ikki is riding the Wing Road makes me think of NiGHTS.

I’m planning to use Spearmint engine with modified EBX gamelogic and assets. The content will be under a creative commons license. The hardest parts will probably be the physics and content production (levels, character model(s)/accessories), but there is probably a lot of unknown problems awaiting.

Legendary Wings may be a useful base for other anime-style games as well. Plus I’ll be improving stuff for EBX. I don’t know how to only make one game anymore. So after the engine work is done I may start developing even more games on Spearmint. >_<

Notable nod to Aquarion / Aquarion EVOL, though giant mechas is outside scope of Legendary Wings: Soaring on the Wind of Dreams. That would be Legendary Wings: Mechanical Angels. Focused on not only flying, but doing so in a giant mecha. Full NiGHTS-like game? Legendary Wings: Caged Nightmare. Focused on not only flying, but escaping the nightmare of being caged.

Arrg, why does making games take so long. See you in ~10 months or so when engine and RTCW/ET stuff is done. heheh

sigh. Sometimes I wonder why I bother with game/engine development at all. It doesn’t really serve any purpose at all. I guess because I’m not really interested in doing other stuff so I just stay with it for lack of anything better to do. Anime is more entertaining to me than playing video games (that I rarely do these days). Though, not planning to ever try to make an anime because it’s crazier than trying to make a game.

P.S. Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F for PS3 gets released in the US tomorrow. :3

P.P.S. My Unexciting Cafepress Designs: Featuring EBX music note icons and a turtle

—-

Rejected game name ideas:

Winged Wheels
Wheels of Flight
Soaring Flight Wheels
Trippin’ Wings
The Kids with Wings on their Feet
Legendary Wings: On the Soaring Wind of Dreams

Gentoo Turtle Arena package info

(oh, and sorry no new Turtle Arena release this month.)

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.

EBX hasn’t been progressing much, though it is finally a separate project from Turtle Arena on github and has a few small differences. Turtle Arena is also on github now as well, following ioquake3 which moved to github in January 2013.

Interestingly the main changes made after EBX and TA were separate were to TA, which now has the pre-TA0.6 icon at loading screen (TA0.6 icon was always meant for EBX) and has katanas and sais on CTF flags similar to TA 0.2 (instead of EBX character icons). TA’s neutral CTF flag now has a shuriken on it again too. Splitting off EBX stuff will make TA a more enjoyable consistent experience.

There should be a new Turtle Arena 0.7 release in the near-future, hopefully next month. Mainly need to record some new announcer lines. After listening to the announcer lines and realizing how inconsistent they are, I’m probably going to re-record them all. I will be using a Blue Yeti USB microphone, instead of a ~15 year old Labtec AM-242 microphone as I have in the past so should be better audio quality too.

Turtle Arena now plays sounds (well, they’re missing right now) for red and blue team instead of your team and the enemy team. For example now Turtle Arena will announce when red and blue bases are under attack in the Overload game mode, instead of “your base is under attack” which was ambiguous in splitscreen with players on red and blue team. Same type of issue with team picked up the flag sounds. Announcer will now specify which local player picked up a CTF flag in splitscreen “Player [1|2|3|4] has the flag”, instead of “you have the flag” which is ambiguous. These changes were made December 14, 2012 (Turtle Arena r2022), longer ago than I thought…

With the idea of having four player splitscreen with each player being able to open a menu, it seemed worth investigated merging UI and cgame as implementing per-player menus seemed difficult in UI and cgame because of the way input is handled. (As well as idea of allowing touch screens to cause things to happen when touching HUD elements.)

Why were UI and cgame VMs separate to begin with? How did id Software handling this before and after Quake III Arena?

History

Note: I’ve only modified ioquake3 and Sonic Robo Blast 2 (a Doom-based game), the rest are purely based on reading stuff online (including some source code).

Doom had a single executable. There were DEHACKED scripts which were applied to the doom exe, so the changed could be distributed / easierly changed. Later Doom source ports supported loaded DEHACKED scripts to change the game-logic. Doom multiplayer was peer-to-peer, so the game logic was always run (no client-side prediction code iirc).

Quake has compiled QuakeC, similar to C, game logic for server. Menus and scene rendering are handled by client (and cannot be changed by mods). I’m not sure if / how cgame-like client-side prediction was done.

Quake 2 has a single game DLL that was used by server. Like Quake menus and scene rendering are handled by client and not modable. Once again, I’m not sure if / how cgame-like client-side prediction was done.

Quake 3 makes UI and client-game modifiable for the first time in id Tech history, as far as I know.

Doom 3 has game and cgame-ish client-prediction together in one game DLL, with menus/HUD handled by client using gui scripts loaded from pk4 files.

My opinion based on limited research and speculation

Quake 3 is unique for splitting the code modifiable parts up, the rest only have one (or two, if you count Doom 3 GUI scripts).

cgame is closely related to game. You should always have the matching cgame for game, as they share Pmove (main player movement function), item definitions, etc. However, making the UI separate allows it to be replaced/modified separate. This allows for UI-only mods, as mods would not need to change the UI (before Quake 3, they couldn’t [other than EXE editing, which is pretty limited]).

Game and cgame were combined in Doom 3, it simplifies changing / write some of the prediction code (somewhat just by having the code in the same place or file?). With Doom 3 they could have kept UI as a DLL (used for HUD and menus), but they went with scripts via client instead. (Hmm, actually I don’t know much about how UI gets info for HUD, must be from game DLL import API call?)

If a quake3-based engine were to follow Doom 3 engine architecture, I think it would be game-logic and client-side prediction in one DLL and HUD/UI in another DLL (which is no small task).

I don’t really know enough about Quake 3 mods to answer this but, I assume most mods either were game VM only or touched cgame and UI VMs (even if changed UI wasn’t required to play the mod). Though there are some UI-only mods, such as UIE.

Keeping game as-is, merging ui into cgame seems reasonable to me. It keeps the familiar overall architecture of the quake3 engine, uses less memory, gets rid of some annoyances, and simplify things a bit. (I never did like BG_ prefix meaning both game(s) used in all three VMs anyway!)

The only disadvantage I can think of with merging ui into cgame is no mixing UI VM only mods with cgame VM mods. I think it’s less of an issue as cgame and ui (for standalone games at least) are free and open source, whereas Quake 3 mods could be closed source using the Q3 SDK code and license.

Merge cgame/ui into game?

Ignoring where the code is located in the source files, I think merging cgame into game would benefit running local games and use more memory when connected to network servers (at least, assuming there is no dynamically allocating memory in the VMs). I think it would be more work and less useful than merging UI into cgame.