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Name: Rick Johnson
Email: rjohnson@ravensoft.com
Description: Lead Programmer
Project: Quake 4
Nickname: Superfly
Web Page: Rick's Web Site TurtleCam! mEATwagon Cult
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2/4/2003
We are in the process of switching DNS entries for the SoF2 Master Server. You may experience a disruption
for a few days until the DNS changes propagate. Here's a link to an explanation.
1/15/2003
*** ATTENTION MOD MAKERS ***
Based on feedback we received at the mod maker round table sessions at QuakeCon, we created a private
forum for mod makers. This forum is a place for all mod makers of all engines / games (not just Raven
games) to come and discuss any issues associated with mod making, such as programming, scripting, mapping,
modeling, textures, sounds, etc. This forum is only open to people actively involved in making content.
If you wish to join, create an account on our forums and then email me with your account name
and I’ll give you access. There is also a small website associated with this whole endeavor.
Again, this is for all people making mods for all games / engines.
12/30/2002
There's now a Black Crypt Website I'll update with some news, screenshots, little tid bits
about the game, etc. Look for a release "soon"...
12/18/2002
Well, after a few years of a break, I started to re-port Black Crypt (Raven's original game on the Amiga)
over to the PC again rendering it with GL. I'm hoping to have it mostly finished by the end of the
Holiday Season. I was going to try to convince *someone* to create a little web site for it, so that I can
put up progress shots, etc. Here's an initial picture of its current state.
Remember that it is still in a very rough state, which is why there are a lot of mixed up things.
12/7/2002
Just wanted to make a quick update in saying that there has been a recent flood of fake Quake4 movies
and trailers. Everything on the internet is fake and nothing Quake4 related has ever been released,
except for the one piece of concept art released at the initial announcement of the project.
In answer to the trivia question below, it was The Transformers: The Movie
12/3/2002
So I was watching this movie last night and saw something interesting in the credits, and figured this would
make a good trivia question. Name the movie which had both Leonard Nimoy and Weird Al Yankovic listed in
the ending credits! No cheating by using the internet!
11/26/2002
For those Osbournes fans, SoF2 should make a very brief appearance on The Osbournes tonight on MTV.
Check your local listings, but the show should start at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT.
10/1/2002
Who else was completely annoyed last night watching Monday Night Football and hearing
that one noise maker in the audience being blown constantly? Argh!
9/18/2002
Matt Morton, the producer for SoF2, has posted a list of some of the fixes/changes for the
upcoming SoF2 patch. This list does not include some new stuff that we are also adding.
5/23/2002
As promised, you can now get the SoF2 MP SDK Here!
We'll have a forum set up shortly for support, once I get the new server configured.
The SDK includes game code, editors (radiant, fx, modeling, etc), tools (bsp, modeling, etc), documentation
on various file formats, and some samples (skin files, map, etc). The SDK is mainly MP specific, though
there are some things which apply to the SP that are included.
Enjoy!
5/8/2002
*** MASTER SERVER DOWNTIME ***
We will be upgrading some internal hardware at Raven during the morning of Saturday,
May 11th. The master servers for Elite Force, Jedi Knight 2, and the SoF2 MP Test
will be unavailable from around 9:00am Central Time to early early afternoon, given
that everything goes smoothly.
5/3/2002
Bryan Dube, who is the other programmer on SoF2 MP, now has a finger account. You
may want to check out his latest .plan update, as that has a list of all of the
items we've adjusted / changed / fixed, based upon the feedback we received from
the public test of SoF2MP.
4/22/2002
We've put together a quick summary of useful cvars / commands for server operators
and clients. This document includes information on how to change movement speed, changing weapon availability,
and various other items.
4/18/2002
If you are playing SoF2 MP Test and can't connect to any servers because of an
invalid game version, you are playing with leaked version. You must download
the official version that was released today!
4/15/2002
Tax Day, yeah!
We've been getting a lot of emails to the SoF2 MP test feedback account for people
wishing to sign up to participate in the SoF2 MP Test this Thursday. This test
will be available to the general public. You do NOT need to sign up for it.
4/11/2002
Based upon this article, I'm hereby announcing
Rick Johnson's Quake 4 hehe
In all seriousness, I'm usually not one to try and get fame or take too much credit in this industry. So
I just wanted to make sure and let everyone know that the whole MP and SP portions of SoF2 are done as
a team effort. We all make various contributions to the project.
SOF2 RMG MP came about as a "challenge" over Thanksgiving weekend. We had never planned on putting it
in MP, purely from a time point of view, but I had always felt that it would be something very cool.
Bryan Dube and I both had nothing to do over Thanksgiving, so I came up with the foolish idea that we
would try to get the core technology of the SP RMG over to MP. So we worked on this over the four day
holiday, not telling anyone (didn't want to get their hopes up, expectations, etc). We were able to
get it mostly in and working by the end of that time and conducted our first test early the following
week.
I've been hosting a private beta test of portions of SoF2 MP for the last month. We've had RMG games up to
50 people. One of the most fascinating things about the RMG is that when you first enter the map, you'll
see it up on the automap, and your first reaction is, "There's no way this map will be fun". But then,
then it does. It is interesting to watch how various tactics develop based upon each unique map.
I wanted to publicly thank the beta testers who helped us find bugs, give game play feedback, etc. They
were a tremendous help in improving the overall quality of MP, as you'll soon see.
3/25/2002
"Due to the increased costs of running the EverQuest game service, and constantly
adding new and challenging content, we will be increasing our subscription rates
in April. Effective April 25, the new monthly subscription rate will be $12.95/month.
[SNIP]You don’t have to do a thing; ; you will automatically be migrated to the
new billing structure[SNIP]"
Thank goodness they got one automatic thing working! I always love paying more!
So now I have to go home tonight, download the huge patch, just so that I can cancel
my account! Who's with me???!!!
2/27/2002
Anyone else getting this spam email "Bill Jones for California Governor" ? I've gotten 4 today!
He's certainly not getting my vote!!!!
Spam is getting bad enough, especially with the government really not doing anything about it. And
now I'm getting spam email for people running for government. If he gets elected (if it is a legit
thing and not some internet hoax), you really think he would do anything to limit spam. Some one
needs to do something about all of this junk!
Just a little update - been really busy working on JK2 MP and SoF2 MP. We've been tracking down some
legacy Q3A bugs, including the famous "invisible player bug". That was a nasty one to track down;
took 3-4 days of solid work looking over network code, gathering information, running tests, etc.
1/24/2002
I’ve been waiting to do this announcement in order to get a few decent screen shots, but I seem to
have the artistic talent of taking nothing but boring shots, so I’ll do this without them for now.
We’ve been busy working on the SoF2 MP and so I’ll announce a few features, which haven’t been
announced until now. The first big one is that the Random Mission Generator will be included
with MP. This includes both the dynamic terrain generation technology and the BSP instantiation
(buildings, walls, other pre-fab stuff). MOD makers will be able to easily create their own
generation parameters in the external files, add in unique instances, etc. There’re a few
other surprises in this area that I’ll hold off announcing.
The next technology that we’ve added to MP is a flexible game-type creation system. You create a
simple script which defines the entire parameters of the game type. Maps, with a few minor
changes, can easily support new game types. For example, we have CTF implement via this system,
as well as two other game types, all of which will ship with the game. One interesting feature
that has been added is the ability to purchase weapons during each mission phase. The designer
places “buy” areas inside the map, and while the player (on the right team) is inside this area,
you’ll be able to go to a menu to purchase weapons, ammo, armor, etc. The script can then reward
money to the player based upon the various outcomes that are defined.
Both of these two core technologies can be combined, as we do have randomly generated CTF going.
In all, this should add some unique flavor to SoF2 MP that hasn’t been seen before, as well
as make life a little easier for MOD makers.
Non-Raven news. A year ago, I worked on a GameBoy Color game in my spare time, just as a side project
and to have a little fun. I never finished it, and so I decided that I'll be placing the source
code out for the public. I'm not sure when I'll get around to doing this, as my spare time is in
short supply. I'll update my .plan file at some point in the future once I've put out all the files.
1/8/2002
I've been following a few mailing lists of people doing some work with programmable
logic devices (one person is attempting to make an updated version of the Commodore
64). I was thinking of just trying to fiddle around with doing something like this,
only on a much simpler scale, as a hobby in a way. But I'm not sure where to begin.
So if anyone out there has any experience with these sort of devices and would be
willing to point me in the right direction on what I would need to purchase to get going,
that would be most appreciated.
Sometime shortly, I'll also have a pretty cool announcement about SoF2 MP.
12/2/2001
Be aware, there is a Virus going around pretending to be a Quake4 demo.
Of course there is no Quake4 demo!
9/21/2001
Here's a quick way to do a small (free) donation to help hunger in general: Chunky Soup
8/15/2001
Well, I’m back from QuakeCon, still trying to catch up on my sleep. Just wanted
to say Hi to everyone that I met – had a blast down there, especially announcing
Quake 4. Met up with a bunch of people from Ritual, Nerve, and even George
Broussard himself. I heard that he was giving away free copies of Max Payne - pretty cool!
Also wanted to say thanks to id Software for putting on this event for their fans.
I held two sessions on “What do you want in Quake 4” as well as attended the JK2
presentations and a group discussion with mod people. It was interesting
listening to the mod people, their concerns and gripes. Hopefully I’ll be
back next year to participate even more in these discussions to help shape Quake 4.
7/9/2001
Well, unfortunately, the SoF 1.07 patch that was released on Friday had a crash bug
in it. You should download the 1.07f Beta patch. You will need
to re-install 1.06 first, then apply this patch. From all of the reports that I've
read on our message board, this clears up all issues. Make sure that when you are in
the main menu, that the version in the lower right says 1.07f
There were several reasons why QA didn't catch this bug, even though it was blatant when
the patch was released to the public. It is one of those bugs which is difficult to find
in QA, given that they don't have the dynamics of people on the internet nor the sheer
amount of people. I do apologize for this incident, and hopefully we'll find a better
approach in the future, such as a limited beta release.
6/13/2001
Wednesday the 13th!
As you may have read, we will be releasing a patch for SoF which will be adding
direct GameSpy support. We've also addressed a few minor deathmatch issues.
The patch is going through QA and should be out "soon". Around that time, I will
also release a new SDK for SoF which will contain the SoF Gold Game source.
5/7/2001
Some of our web sites, sof.ravensoft.com, eliteforce.ravensoft.com,
www2.ravensoft.com will be down for a short period of time as we are moving
them over to a new web server. Thank you, please drive through...
5/2/2001
We were going to release pictures of Raven staff actually working on a demo
of SoF2 for E3, but instead, I have this little anecdote for you.
On our Cub Foods run, several members of the late night Raven Posse were
heading back, and Brian Raffel was talking about his fixation of doughnuts,
"You know, the great thing about doughnuts is that you can only have one
or two of them, before you start to get sick." And so I ask, "Hey Brian,
how many did you buy?" "Three... I couldn't resist, they were only
$0.25 each", was his reply.
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