"You can't combine the two unless you put some sort of control on the gimmicks, and they didn't want to."

I'm an oldschool gamer who happens to be a software consultant in real life. I messed around with modding for Q2 a bit, but didn't really get serious about it till Q3 when I finally had enough spare time to do more than just play. I did a couple of things for the original CPM mod, then led the development for CPMA and started working with Rhea on OSP (since they used the same codebase).

How did you come to relations with the Q4Max development team?

I hadn't planned on taking such an active role in Q4 really. The Max team had asked me if I'd be willing to advise them, and maybe help out with some of the more complicated things, but that was all I really had in mind.

What I hadn't considered much though was the vacuum that Rhea and I "retiring" would leave in the community, and the power grabs that certain people would try to make as a result. (See my column "The Bullshit Begins" on ESR from around that time). That would have wrecked a community that was already very fragile, and since I planned on playing Q4 I pretty much HAD to step in at that point.

For a while there were talks between Q4Max and X-Battle about a possible merger, though, there were disagreements. Were the indifferences apparent; as well as the Design complications?

Differences in philosophy as much as anything else: our focus is on providing a competition mod, and theirs is on making a "gimmicks" mod. You can't combine the two unless you put some sort of control on the gimmicks, and they didn't want to.

You can see the impact of that difference very clearly even in the first releases of the two. We produced something that was rock solid and ran in CPL Winter without a single problem. XBM wasn't even suitable "out of the box" for the one league they were supposed to be supporting. You just can't pull stunts like that and expect to be taken seriously: can you imagine how embarrassing it would be for something like that to happen at a CPL event or a season finals?

Gimmick mods are a great thing, and every game should have at least one, but they're not something to use for competitive play: the two concepts just conflict too much, so with the two teams unable to agree on which was more important there was just no way they could go forward together.

Time and time again we heard "before CPL", what happened?

Q4 is very different to earlier Quakes as far as demo compatibility goes. Any changes to almost anything, including models etc, breaks demos. The only way we could be absolutely sure that people would be able to watch the CPL Winter demos was by releasing EXACTLY that version to the public, which meant waiting until CPL was actually underway just in case there were any last minute changes.

Tell us a bit about the features in the latest Q4Max (.71)

71 addresses three key Q4 issues: basic competition support (referees, modes, votes, teamlocks, autoactions, etc) for leagues and events; performance improvements so that the game is actually playable with decent framerates (r_vertexLight, internal optimisations, etc); and a gametype that's easy for the less hardcore crowd to get into: Clan Arena. I'm very happy that we managed to get all of those done in such an early release: hopefully it'll be a shot of adrenaline for the community.

How is the relationship with the CPL?

Very good. I know there are people who like to take shots at them on fourms etc simply because they're such a visible target, but when you work with them you get to see how much they really care about the competitive community: it's a lot more than just Generic Business to them. I'll get emails from Angel and Justin (Blanchard, the Q4 Commissioner) at 6am on a Sunday to talk about spawnsystems, ways to improve things for spectators, and so on: that impresses the hell out of me.

How is the Q4 SDK? Is it going to make for an easy future, or a difficult one?

It's a very mixed bag. Frankly, the Doom3 engine is flat out not designed for multiplayer at all: it's like going back in time to pre-QW id engines. That side of things is incredibly frustrating. Then there's the other half of it, where you look at the potential inherent in it and you think "man, six months from now we're going to be doing incredible stuff with this".

Being that fnatic club is so closely related to fnatic team, what is being done to ensure influences don't find their way to production? Surely someone on a competitive level must test the modifications before release, seems like a catch-22 situation.

What do fnatic have to do with anything? As far as testing goes, we never had a hard time finding people to test OSP and it's the same now: our relationship with all the leagues and GSP's means that we get the same sort of support from the community that we give them by producing the mod in the first place.

What can we look forward to in future incarnations? Anything secretive you'd care to slip a hint on?

The next release or two will probably just be enhancing the areas we're already working on. Things will get very interesting in a month or so though when the mod's roughly on par with CPMA/OSP and we're free to work on new ideas.

Upward clock counting is a much wanted feature, though, on the Q4Max forums you stated it was not going to be included. For those that don't know, could you further explain why?

Sure, because repeating myself 50 times is absolutely the best way to spend the time that could be going into implementing MVD or better netcode instead...

Are there currently any thoughts of expansion, such as the creation of maps? To me, nothing sounds more logical than a competitive mod team behind competitive maps.

We're undecided on that ATM. The CPMA team made a point of "blessing" some of the best Q3 maps and including them with the mod, but we'll see how it goes with Q4 once auto-downloads work.

How good are the chances of a total browser overhaul in an upcoming release? Is it something the team has conceded would be better left to an individual program?

Yeah, I think there are better things to spend developer time on. If Yahoo drop the ball with ASE (which seems to be what's happening) then the community will just switch to Echelon or whatever.

Thanks for your time arQon, you're a big part of the past, present and future development of competitive Quake 4. Any last words, anything you would like to say?

Thanks. I'd definitely encourage everyone to stick with Q4 while it goes through this early rough stage. It's going to be an incredible game in a couple of months with a very bright future, and you really don't want to miss it.  :)