[cutterjohn]

Anyone know of any mods that makes the game less like a frenetic graphics demo and more like something fun to play?

I've tried CTF, and Q3f.

I am used to playing TFC/DOD Halflife/ I had expected Q3F to be like TFC Halflife, but all the players seem to move like they're on crack(obscenely frenetically), and everything else seems to be WAY WAY WAY offscale as well.

I have read about Weapon's Factory & Navy Seals, but so far I've been WAY less than impressed by Quake3. i.e. nifty graphics, but gameplay blows chunks. I USED to like Quake2 CTF, but Quake3... well... I think you get the point...

Are there any other games that might be more similar in play to halflife and have a mod similar to TFC?

I have UT the latest mac release, unfortunately the CD has gone missing. (Still have box + jewel case, but I can't find the damn CD.) I never played it enough to find mods, etc. and there wasn;t a macosx engine until recently...

[c3ntip3d3]

There's a UT mod that's fairly new and at least worth checking out... sort of like Counter-Strike, from what I heard about that game. It's called "Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror." It's a semi-realistic SWAT/terrorist mod.

You can download a free version of the entire game at http://yggdral.com/aotguide/
They have a great install guide on the site, too.
Forums etc., at http://forums.clanmto.com/

Or you can buy the retail version for PC, it works for Macs (you still probably want to check the install guide site).

Hope that helps, at least it's something!
JC

[Jowy]

Unreal Fortress(www.unrealfortress.com) just had their gold release lately and it's really fun, and MUCH better than Q3F. Why? Because unlike the Q3F dev team, the UnF dev team actually understands the meaning of team balance. From what I can tell so far, there isn't as much BHing in UnF (if any at all) quite contrary to Q3F where BHing had become the main mode of transport which is really stupid. You made a good choice to stay away from Q3F. All the players have become stuck up pricks who think that if you're not in a clan, then you aren't considered a "real" player. That and the pubs no longer have any semblence of team play or cooperation anymore. It's more of a bunch of 12 year olds throwing verbal insults at each other.

WFA isn't much better. Only certain classes have the grapple so those classes are favored over those who don't have it and everyone in that mod wants to use the grapple to partially BH the entire map if they can. That and the class speeds are all screwed up to the point that the cyborg just has to keep running in w/ his self-destruct activitated to blow up the entire defense. If that doesn't work all he has to do is lay plasma bombs over and over again so that even if his self destruct doesn't kick in in time his plasma bombs certainly will. And of course to top it all off you have the 12 year olds bickering back and forth.

Really it's sad that there don't seem to be any decent class based mods for Q3, as it really has the potential. If you still can, I suggest you keep on playing the HL mods if those are what you enjoyed and if you don't find UnF to be your cup of tea.

EDIT:Err, sorry for the rant. I kinda needed to let off some steam there.

[cutterjohn]

Thanks for the replies guys. I'll try searching again for my UT disk, and try out Unreal Fortress. (I usually play halflife TFC(vanilla & neo) & DOD. I'm really beginning to like DOD. Never cared for counterstrike myself.)

However my main problem with Q3 was the unreal(heh heh) speed at which players/everything moves and how WAY out of scale everything(objects & game play elements) is. Q3 makes me think that id made it primarily as a cool demo of an engine + new rendering techniques and then sort of hacked/kludged on a game to make some direct $$$, and the demo part to sell the engine to other companies. (Yeah ranting too. I just expected that Q3 was a good game from the EXTREME amount of OVERhyping that it received. What a dud.)

BTW: what is BHing?

[Jowy]

Oh sorry, it means Bunny Hopping. For ex. a soldier in Q3F aims his rocket launcher slighty between the ground and the wall fires and jumps at the same time, and then keeps on jumping to keep the momentum which in essence makes him look like he's hopping around like a bunny. It's really stupid and annoying since everyone in Q3F does it now. For me, it made Q3F feel more like a DM style game than CTF. Then again I was always a pubber.

[schep]

Have you tried Urban Terror

[cutterjohn]

yeah, now that you mention that is EXACTLY what they do. They also do it with the damn grenades just like the medics & scouts with concs in Halflife TFC.

Oh well, maybe I'll just give up on the mac as a decent gaming platform, and stick with Halflife. It'd would've also have helped if the Mac had Wizardry 8, Morrowind, M&M series, etc. oh well. I really don't understand how it gets determined which games get ported to the Mac. They mainly seem like the loser games, excepting Deus Ex & Baldur's Gate/Infinity Engine stuff & Harpoon & Alpha Centauri, or ancient games, e.g. Fallout 2.

I just hate dealing with Win2kpro's random BSODs & total system freezes. ...but I also hate waiting another year for a mac port, or having it cancelled at the last second like Halflife mac.

Urban Terror: like counterstrike no respawn until map is over. I hate these kind of mods. The only one like these I can stand are the para maps in DOD as they are quick.

[cutterjohn]

OK, found UT. Installed Fortress Gold.

WAY WAY WAY WAY better that quake3 fortress, but still not quite as good as haflife TFC/neo. (All the buildings/scenery/etc. look squashed.)

Play moves at a more normal/acceptable/playable rate. Graphics are not quite as nice as either halflife or q3. Sound effects are incredibly annoying. Map downloads are FAST(!!!).

Heavy weap guy sucks, as he can't jump while shooting and becomes a sitting duck.

Demo guy can fire grenades way way way too fast.

Pyros seem a little too powerful, and seem to have endless supplies of grenades.

Soldier(Commando) seems like the best class, and it is usually what I play in halflife TFC anyways.

engineer sg upgrades are stupid.

Overall grenades are way too powerful, and classes aren't well balanced but I guess its as close to real TFC(Halflife) that I'll ever see on a mac.

Hey and while you're reading this? Do any of you have RTCW? Does is play more acceptably than Quake3? (refer to above comments re Quake3)

[Jowy]

Originally posted by cutterjohn:
OK, found UT. Installed Fortress Gold.

WAY WAY WAY WAY better that quake3 fortress, but still not quite as good as haflife TFC/neo. (All the buildings/scenery/etc. look squashed.)

Play moves at a more normal/acceptable/playable rate. Graphics are not quite as nice as either halflife or q3. Sound effects are incredibly annoying. Map downloads are FAST(!!!).

Heavy weap guy sucks, as he can't jump while shooting and becomes a sitting duck.

Demo guy can fire grenades way way way too fast.

Pyros seem a little too powerful, and seem to have endless supplies of grenades.

Soldier(Commando) seems like the best class, and it is usually what I play in halflife TFC anyways.

engineer sg upgrades are stupid.

Overall grenades are way too powerful, and classes aren't well balanced but I guess its as close to real TFC(Halflife) that I'll ever see on a mac.

Hey and while you're reading this? Do any of you have RTCW? Does is play more acceptably than Quake3? (refer to above comments re Quake3)

I don't know, I think it actually has fewer grens than Q3F since if you have a gren primed in UnF but die before it goes off, I believe that gren just disapears, whereas in Q3F the gren drops to the ground. If you compare UnF's grens to Q3F's grens, UnF's seem definitely more balanced out and can't kill a guy who still has half or a little more than half of his life left. It also just depends on what map you're playing to see whether or not there's a large number of grens, but I find many of UnF's maps to be large enough that it doesn't really happen that often.

Haven't played HW guy so I can't really comment. I hear that he has a pretty cool rocket launger thingy though, and I've seen him used in pub games quite effectively.

I don't know, Demo seems to be good when you want to do a long distance attack on the enemy, and along w/ his claymores, he's excellent for Def. If you wanna see the Demo man crippled, try fighting against anyone in the water. His mortar can't fire if his life depended on it (which it does).

Pyro doesn't seem too bad to me at all, just annoying like his support role should be as the damage from his flame thrower doesn't do a whole lot unless you get caught up in the fire storms that some pyros try to create.

I like Commando for when I want to play Offense mostly though he makes a good Def. guy too. I find that his nail grens are an excellent way to clear out a room to allow the Offense behind me to get in w/ fewer scratches.

I acutally like the SG upgrades and the way the SG can actually be customized. It makes it a little more exciting to play an engy besides just build L1, upgrade L2, upgrade L3. That was the main reason why I stopped playing Engy in Q3F because it just got so boring and tedious and no matter where I put the SG, it would get destroyed about 10 seconds after I built it which helped contribute to the almost annoyingness of playing Engy in Q3F.

Sorry I don't have RTCW so I can't help you there.

Overall, it's your choice on what mod you like most. Yours seems to be TFC. Mine UnF. I did have to give UnF some time before I really started liking it. That and the recent threads over at the Q3F forum insulted me as a pub player w/ comments like "If you haven't played in a clan, then you can't speak for how Q3F works". It was stuff like that that made me stop playing Q3F, and I'm considering deleting Q3 alltogether just because there isn't any gametype that I enjoy playing on it. Although I admit I have never played TFC so I don't know how it plays at all. Though I'd love to try it out someday. Ah I guess I'll just have to dream about my gaming PC someday

[gthyb]

i have RTCW. it plays much differently than Q3. its a great game. it doesn't have the quake 3 feel to it (where you're kinda just floating off the ground).

[cutterjohn]

ahhh... decided to snip everything...

also found out medics are quite useless as they are not really much faster than anyone other than HWs & Soldiers (Commados).

Pyros are also annoying because their stupid fire effects seems to suck alot of processing power in UnF.

Actually, I prefer NeoTFC to plain TFC, but there aren't many good NeoTFC servers. And actually I like lo grav TFC too, so I usually play on Frenchy's server. I prefer Neo's regular engy upgradable sgs & the special guns finished or modified by various classes. The spy tesla coil is the best...

...but all that being said I really started to get hooked on Day of Defeat, but it's a pain in the rear to swap my audio & video cables just to play a stupid game for a little while. (It's all I use the PC for any more... and there is no way I'm spring for a $150 KVM.)

Now when you do spring for cheap gaming PC toy(one of those $299 Wal-mart PCs would probably do, or a cheap Dell, you know you REALLY don't need the latest & greatest as not even today's games fully tax the CPU much any more unless they're crappily written. Hell, you could even build your own with a little higher specs for a little less than what the Dell would cost... Actually I have the PC mainly for Halflife, Wizardry 8, M&M series, etc. i.e. GREAT games that, unfortunately, will NEVER be ported to anything other than windoze, along with all the future similar games.)

Alright, in the end now, I've given up totally on a decent Mac FPS and have gone back to halflife DoD/TFC, but mainly Day of Defeat(Hate the Axis sniper scope... the FG42(?) is pretty awesome though... heh heh heh...) TFC grenade spam gets to be incredibly annoying, and (a poke to the below poster) strafing snipers are equally annoying (i.e. what I call twitch gamers or little kiddies with WAY too much sugar & caffeine in their bloodstreams or something...)

[rampant]

Originally posted by Jowy:
Oh sorry, it means Bunny Hopping. For ex. a soldier in Q3F aims his rocket launcher slighty between the ground and the wall fires and jumps at the same time, and then keeps on jumping to keep the momentum which in essence makes him look like he's hopping around like a bunny. It's really stupid and annoying since everyone in Q3F does it now. For me, it made Q3F feel more like a DM style game than CTF. Then again I was always a pubber.

Never insult strafe-jumping or rocket-jumping, they are the most important FPS online gaming heritage we have, sir!