New Item Pick-up Code

How do you pick up weapons?

The item pick-up range has been increased 20%, and the "silent" item pick-up bug has been eliminated. In version 1.05, you had to run almost directly through an item in order to pick it up. Now the pick-up range is close to the range we're used to from Quake I and II, but it's still possible to completely miss items by jumping over them.

The silent pick-up bug occurred when you were sitting on an item waiting for it to respawn. If an item spawned under your player, you would pick the item up, but you wouldn't hear the pick-up sound. Most of us use the item sound cues to inform us we picked up an item, but the silent item pick-up bug made us check our status bar constantly to see if the item we were waiting for spawned under the player.

Framerate Cap

There is now a 100fps framerate cap. Apparently, very fast framerates caused some strange physics bugs. We weren't sure if the cap was applied just to solve gameplay issues, or to also "level the playing field." We were somewhat concerned over the hard limit at 100, especially with the 3dfx and Nvidia next generation video cards just around the corner. We asked John Carmack about the cap and here's what he said:

There are some physics anomalies with very high framerates, and it is possible to flood slower modems on the outgoing side even with packet collapsing if you generate enough frames.

He also mentioned that you should be able to change the cap value, but it's still cheat protected in the current version. Personally, I'm ambivalent towards idea either way, as 100fps is fine for competitive play, especially if everyone else has the same maximum. One advantage of the cap is the possibility of using higher detail settings with next-generation hardware, without worrying about highly fluctuating numbers during intense action and scenes.

Dual Processor Support

How pimp is this? We can tweak Q3test up to 130fps on our dual celeron 550 machine with r_smp enabled. It falls to 102fps when we disable it. More likely than not, if you're thinking "Why would I care about a 100fps cap, I only get 35," smp probably won't be any more enticing. However, for crazy techies or super-competitive types (no comment), the ability to tweak your game with more system processors is damned sweet. This is especially so since it acts more on smoothing out low framerates in highly processor intensive Crusher-like situations. I imagine if Q3 teams catches on, it'll be a huge boost with 8-16 players in a game.