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Rewritten Rune tutorial with source code!

This site provides ongoing detailed technical information and an in-depth look at the software engineering involved in bringing a mod to completion.

About SCTF
SCTF is an existing Capture The Flag mod with a rich set of rune powers that all work together for a fun gaming experience.  The roots of SCTF run deep, all the way to the early days of Quake 1 mods.   The inventor, creative force and Rune Master of SCTF is Inferno.  In fact the original website which launched SCTF is still available for viewing.  In 1998, the source code for SCTF was acquired by Clan of the Camper.  The code was massively reworked for stability and enhanced features and finally released as open-source with version 7.0.  Today the Quake1 SCTF official website actively supports this mod.

History
With the erosion of Quake1 servers to Quake2 and Half-Life, the days of SCTF seemed numbered indeed.  But the recent release of HL-DMC, with its Quake1 style of gameplay and maps, was recognized as an opportunity to breathe new life into this venerable mod.  For a programmer, moving from QuakeC and the Quake1 engine to HLSDK2 and the Half-Life engine is like going from flying a Cessna SkyHawk to flying a Gulfstream Jet.   The Quake1 implementation of SCTF was 'dirty' in the sense that many bugs had to be coded around or accepted in the game, and many possible features had to be avoided due to code overhead and limitations of the quakeC language.   One of the advantages of porting an existing, athough little-known mod is that all of the conceptual work of designing the goals, balance, and feel of the game has already been done.  This just leaves the job of writing and testing well designed code, hence the technical focus of this website.  And there is a lot of code to write! In addition to teamplay, CTF and extended weapons, SCTF has no less than 126 rune powers that will have to be written.  Some of these powers will make their way into tutorials on this site.

Because of its origins in the days when broadband access was not widespread, SCTF was designed to be a server side mod.   This means that no client download is necessary; anyone with the basic game software can connect and play immediately.  This same design will be carried forward into HL-SCTF.

Although this mod is targeted to HL-DMC, initial coding will proceed on HL, and the code described in the tutorial should work correctly with either game.

The Team
Most of the HL-SCTF team members are members of Clan of the Camper:

Neophyte : Project Manager
Dataspel: Software Architect
Fox Mulder: Test Manager
Warf: Software Developer
Professor Chow: Models
Red Baron: Software Developer
Krazy Dave: Models
Rico: Tester
Terror: Tester
 

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Contact : Dataspel