Tremulous Traditions: Why release content on Thursdays?

Post date: Jul 12, 2017 2:41:21 PM

Note: Information may be incorrect. I'm doing this from the top of my head, feel free to comment below for any information corrections

If you came here you must have googled something around the topic of Tremulous and Thursday.

In a nutshellf, Tremulous 1.2 was promised (unofficially) to be released on a Thursday without specificially stating when or which thursday it will be released on, often with hints that it will come "S00N™" (with the 'O's in SOON stylised occasionally with the Zero symbol, TM for Trademark sometimes stylised with the actual symbol or bracketed as S00N(TM) or similar.)

Funnily enough, the Gaijin Entertainment community managers of War Thunder also more or less trolled with their community by using their forum's function to auto-correct errors (which were applied after submitting a post or edit) when anyone typed the word 'soon' it would be suffixed, whether or not it already has one, a TM symbol. If you quoted the same quote several times you get "soon™™™™™")

Like most memes, it was probably not intended to spawn a fad, but just somehow, it became a tradition to say that Tremulous related content shall be released on a Thursday.

Example:

[A] Newbie#3: lol the official tremulous.net website and wikipedia still states its latest release is 2009

[A] Newbie#3: When will tremulous 1/2 come out? It's been 6 years since the last update! info plox?

[S] SomeoneElse: 1.2 will come on Thursday. Better yet, 1.3's almost guaranteed to be released before 1.2 lmao

Tremulous 1.2 was actually never released. Some sound assets were produced (due to the vagueness of sound licensing credits), animations and even the animations got lots of people excited only to find out that the project was more or less stalled years later with repetition stating that 1.2 would be released on a Thursday soon.

In mid to late 2011 however there was community announcements about a new successor to Tremulous called TremZ. TremZ ran on the OpenWolf engine and was at first, just tremulous 1.2 GPP gamelogic code transferred onto the new engine. It was released around november I think that year. It made use of the unused content that was to be rleeased in Tremulous 1.2 including the marauder zap animations. I'm not sure about the teenager's battlesuit voice though, that was fuckin' terrible no offense.

However Volt, the project leader of TremZ made fatal mistakes of well, basically copy pasting content from things like Halo for forum "badges" (badges were a big thing for the XserverX.com and BlogWTF, which hosted the T/F/W/Z/X servers) and some other hud like content resembled commericlal projects. A lot of hate stired the atmosphere, and volt took a beating, HermzXIV (or he was called something like that) was said to be a pupett moderator or something. Developres that apposed the decisions were sometimes warned, others instantly permanently banned from the project. TremZ's source code was closed from the public at the time until around February the next year.

Eventually the boycotting of the project led to the forking and developement of Unvanquished. Unvanquished was released on something like the 1st of Feb 2012, I can't really rmemeber the exact date but I think it was a Thursday. You can verify the info yourself on unvanquished.net but I'm lazy. Unvanquished ran on the fork of the openwolf engine, called Daemon. Today apparently the daemon engine impressed the Xonotic dev team to the point that they want to give it a shot at migrating their game code into the new engine.

A few years later after the Unanquished excitement died down (the game changed so much and a lot of poeple did not like GPP style gamelogic, but it attracted a lot of linux fans and media). Unvanquished eventually reached an average of less than 1 player at any random time (in fact it is rare to see anyone on the serverlist these days),. Unvanquished developement stalled and now the developers only seem to pay atention on the game engine improvements.

In 2016, GrangerHub, primarily led by Cron and dGr8LookinSparky, with the assistance of DevHC (/dev/humancontroller, you're bound to find him on the tremulous forums since he helped a lot with tremulous code and has a notorious attitude for correcting people's mistakes and "don't use the 'n' word" which spawned my idea to create this thread for war thunder) created a special tolernace for game servers and client qvms to tolerate multiple protocols. For your information, Quake 3 uses protocol 68, Tremulous 1.1 uses 69, 1.2 GameplayPreview 70, GPP (as in the "true" 1.2 which was never released and is avialable on github under darklegion) 71. It came with theuir project to create an ultimate version "1.3" that would more or less solve the distinctive gap between 1.1 and GPP's though well, it really isn't working so well.

However the multiprotocol code was perhaps the most successful part of the project, which allows all tremulous clients protocol 69, 70 and 71 (except quake 3 arena) to connect to the servers that run the special system. GrangerHub hosts three publically avialable servers, GrangerPub, for public games, GrangerClub, for scrims and fun stuff like mission maps, and test7341 for the 1.3 project gameplay testing. On the other hand, there are two other server groups that host their servers also under the multiprotocol system, that being DretchStorm, hosted by Oblivion (D*S is a clan with a long history, like my KoR clan, Knights of Reason, but even older, they may have been the first to invent the Extreme Sudden Death system via Dretch*Tsunami sunday servers back in 2007ish.) D*S doesn't really have a community forum unlike the GrangerHub and DerBunker. The last server group, DerBunker, primarily managed by Redman, as in the same guy that made the paint maps and the cuboid mod for acidtu.be which used to be (in my eyes, but not cron's nor sparky's) the predecessor of GrangerHub. Due to unsatisfactory administration, lack of improvements upon the default 1.1 code itself other than the multiprotocol system and various issues on dealing with trolls, the currently (July, 2017) most populated servers of Tremulous is actually the 1.1 servers with multiprotocol, DerBunker's Trench/Arena servers and Dretch*Storm and not GrangerPub/Club. Both the D*S and DerBunker servers feature slight gameplay changes such as nerfed 1.1 Tyrant claw range and fundmaental healing rates yet without effective the actual usage of the 1.1 Tyrant that much (DerBunker).

GrangerHub's 1.3 project to create several gameplay modes, "Swirl" "Vanilla" and "Chocolate" representing mixed, 1.1 and 1.2 style gameplay choices, are being tested on the test7341 server. It includes new sound assets, a few new weapons and models, including the 1.2 assets such as the marauder swipe animation above. There's more history to acidtu.be but I won't talk about that since this page is about Thursday.

Anyway GrangerHub's 1.3 project finally publically released their multiprotocol 1.3 client on a Thursday, the 18th of Feburary 2017, which was more or less a modified 1.2 (protocol 71) client with the assistance of several people. I think blowfish is the main person who is working on that. It isn't considered a complete project yet and still has quite an umber of bugs and issues. Like unvanquished, it isn't necessarily efficient to run on Windows XP/Intel Integrated systems. It supports the old ioquake3 renderer of the oriignal quake 3 arena which tremulous 1.1 used, but it's primary feature is its OpenGL 2.1 renderer (which isn't supported on Windows XP afaik). The client is actually what gave me the awesome sexy A.T.C.S. sunset screenshot which I used as a cover for my A.T.C.S. recreation project for Natural Selection 2. In my honest opinion, the defualt settings o fthe GL 2.1 rendering client is shit, SSAO is shit but with the right settings you can make it look really pretty. I recommend turning of HDR (high dynamic range), SSAO (screen space ambience occlusion), it makes playing the game a little too hard. It has proper dynamic lighting (which the oriigna quake used osme weird circular shader wihch had practiclaly infinite vertical range) and dynamic shadows although unfortuantely it is incompatible with cg_shadows 2 (which is used for dynamic shadows which you may see in my videos where I record with my preferred client, Tremfusion). Some of my recommended settings cane be seen in this youtube video (though not intended for it)

Anyway I'm not sure what else I can talk about. There's much more to the story on how Tremulous got its tradition to release content on a Thursday but most of the reasons actually come from the tremulous.net forums.