Pippijn van Steenhoven

I doubt, therefore I might be

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Quake 3

I've started hacking on the ioquake3 sources, adding a Perl interface to a small number of C functions and a few callbacks from C/QVM to Perl functions. This allowed me to add an IRC logging backend and a client hack for weapon selection.

IRC Logging

The IRC logging captures game events and produces a message to be sent to IRC. The current implementation uses Net::IRC3 but this is soon going to change to AnyEvent::IRC.

The PerlQuake3 server is running on q3a.xinutec.org and events are written to the channel #q3a on irc.xinutec.org.

The following events are transferred to IRC:

• Player connected

  12:49 < q3a> Jules_Vernes connected

• Player disconnected

  13:20 < q3a> Jules_Vernes disconnected

• Player was killed

  12:54 < q3a> Jules_Vernes was squished
      13:00 < q3a> LucY was railed by Jules_Vernes
      13:18 < q3a> Jules_Vernes was in the wrong place

• Round finished

  22:16 < q3a> Round finished:
      22:16 < q3a> 1. LucY score: 20  ping 33
      22:16 < q3a> 2. peter lustich score: 3  ping 61
      22:16 < q3a> 3. Jules_Vernes score: -2  ping 91

• Player said something

  22:17 < q3a> <peter lustich> lol

IRC users can chat back into the game and it will look like it origined from irc/user where user is the nickname of the person on IRC. Quake colours are converted to IRC colours and vice versa.

Furthermore, the IRC bot has the following commands:

• !clients

  Show all players currently in the game.

• !verbosity [level]

  If no level is given, this shows the current IRC verbosity. Currently, there are four verbosity bits that can be set: CHAT, KILL, JOIN and STAT. If level is given in the form !verbosity +chat -kill +join, the respective bits are set or unset.

• !help [command]

  Shows help on command or a list of commands if command is omitted.

• !reload

  Reloads all Quake3:: modules except for the Quake3 module itself.

Client-Perl

The Quake 3 client has been enhanced to allow for prioritising weapon selection on pickup. That means, if cg_autoswitch is on, weapons are only selected if their priority is higher or equal to the priority of the current weapon.

Currently, these priorities are not user-definable, but that will soon be implemented. The code for this is absolutely trivial and can be found in Quake3.pm:

my %prefs = (
   Quake3::WP_GRAPPLING_HOOK    => 0,
   Quake3::WP_NONE              => 0,

   Quake3::WP_GAUNTLET          => 0,
   Quake3::WP_GRENADE_LAUNCHER  => 0,
   Quake3::WP_MACHINEGUN        => 1,
   Quake3::WP_RAILGUN           => 1,
   Quake3::WP_SHOTGUN           => 2,
   Quake3::WP_LIGHTNING         => 2,
   Quake3::WP_PLASMAGUN         => 2,
   Quake3::WP_ROCKET_LAUNCHER   => 3,
   Quake3::WP_BFG               => 4,
);

sub item_pickup {
   my ($curweap, $newweap) = @_;
   $prefs{$newweap} >= $prefs{$curweap} ? 1 : 0
}

Future

The current implementation and API design is below all standards (except for maybe the irssiperl one) and requires some real thinking. This interface was written in a few minutes (after needing an hour to figure out how the QVM and callbacks to C work). In the future, the API will undergo some serious changes and probably be rewritten entirely from scratch.