FortressOne: Quake Team Fortress (1996) mod still under active development

Once the head of Tech Support from Boulder showed up during lunch hour and saw me playing, and says "You guys play too?!" - so then we each shifted lunch hour by half an hour and had cross site fun.

I will say that it was by far the best and most effective social engagement thing that existed cross organization on each site, and between sites. Well that and the free bagels and espresso machine.

It's easy to think that TF2 "streamlined" the experience by removing bunny hopping and grenades, but honestly, whenever I try to go back to it, grenades are just annoying. They render much of the well-tuned class distinctions obsolete when even the medic can blow you up

Action Quake 2 and CS through 1.6 offered similar opportunities to make good friends, but TF was the advent of that for me.

Every time you gibbed someone you could pick up their head, and run around with it attached to to you until you 'dropped' on a specific spawn point to score. You could run around with up to 6 heads attached to you in a 'chain' - if someone gibbed you, they could then pick up all your heads.

Very tactical, and lots of fun!

Miss TFC/Unreal Tournament style CTF communities, but I'm not sure there's anything left aside from obscure discord communities that occasionally throw together a few matches.

What I miss the most are rocketjumping maps. I spent so many hours on those servers but it seems most of the maps are gone from the historical record.

Yes, it's nostalgia too, but it was fun to have a sense of shared culture. Fragmentation has its downsides. I'm not sure how to have the cookie and eat it.

I never got into team fortress from quake days, but I did get into team fortress classic.

One of the best frag videos for tfc is Last Dinosaur 2:

Apart from the final rendered quality (not exactly a 4k video) I think it still holds up, really good frag video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPZsL6R0uq0

1. I downloaded the game and unpacked it. It would not start. Debugging reveals a dependency upon libpcre.so.3. This is not packaged (obsoleted by libpcre2). I hacked around the problem by making a link to libpcre.so.1. Imagine someone who is not a programmer, would he be able to figure that out?

2. I ran the game and go into the options menu. The text is so small it is almost unreadable and there is no way to make it bigger. We Quake players are all old farts now who more often than not have deteriorated vision.

3. I got the server list and attempted to join an empty server with low ping in the neighbouring country so I could experiment a bit. The game proceeds to download lots of files at 7 kB/s with no indication of overall progress. After four minutes of waiting I cancel out.

4. I find the menu to host a local server. Running it errors out in the console: something something DM4 not found.

5. I decide to write up what happened to HN. I quit the game. Gamma settings for the desktop environment are messed up.

Of course, people didn't have to wait from 1996 to 2020 to actually play it.