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Introduction & Installation - SinglePlayer & The Story so far... - MultiPlayer & Maplist

Development History - Bonus Material - Hints - Credits & Disclaimer

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Part IV: Development History

What follows is a brief summary of how Soul Of Evil was conceived and how this concept was brought into realization.

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In the spring of 2000, Dustin 'Tronyn' Geeraert had just released two Quake episodes; namely Phantasmal Garrison and Coven Of Ebony. With the success of this work he decided to try and go further, and create a fully-fledged conversion. This sounds to most like a strange thing to try, especially for a game that was nearly five years old then. However, there were two other large scale projects on at the time - the ridiculously large and amazing Nehahra Project and the somewhat more compact Operation Urth Majik. These conversions assured him that such a project was possible.

That decided, Tronyn booked a PlanetQuake 'Pic of the Day' in order to attract help for the project. Much help was offered - much more than he even knew existed. The original project was only supposed to be slightly larger than either Coven Of Ebony or Phantasmal Garrison by themselves, but with the amount of help available it was expanded to be larger than both combined, and include deathmatch maps as well, and all-new character classes and weapons.

It remained to see how much of this was realistic as the project went through staff like a fast food resteraunt. Several faithful team members joined up, while all-talk-and-no-action fellows were weeded out in the first few months, over the summer and during the fall of 2000. Soul of Evil had a base team of approximately ten people at any given time, half of which, at any given time, were not active.

The lead coder resigned and the prospect of a lot of the new QuakeC stuff looked grim. Another coder, who had volunteered initially but been overlooked was contacted to replace the first coder. He gladly agreed, got the 'To Do' list from the old coder, and prompty dissapeared from the face of the planet.

To add to the development troubles, a couple of mapmakers then disappeared. But the final nail in the coffin of the idea of new character classes and weapons was when the weapons coder and modeler left the project. Things were looking really, really bad.

But the project leader wasn't about to let the hard work of the mappers go to waste, and devised a plan to release the project in three parts: Episode one, which would use the custom entities from Phantasmal Garrison, Episode Two, which would use the custom entities from Coven Of Ebony, and the Deathmatch maps, which would be released in a pack.

Then came Fat Controller. Fat Controller saved the project's ass. Soul Of Evil, the Quake Fantasy Project, posessed an ass that was hanging over the lava pit in e1m7 (the House of Chthon) and was about to get fried. However, due to his reliability and excellence in coding, Fat Controller managed to do most of what SoE had originally planned as far as QuakeC went. Then two mapmakers returned. Then it looked like everything that was originally planned for SoE was going to be included, except for the new weapons.

Then, a most reputable chap and an innovative guy, Aardappel, released a little mod called DMSP. This was to form the basis of SoE's arena mod (Tronyn and Fat Controller had been wrestling with monsters in deathmatch, respawning monsters, respawning monsters in coop, and other gripes, for quite a while - DMSP did it beautifully and simply). And while other mappers finished their maps, Tronyn created an additional two deathmatch maps for the sake of symetry - 5 maps in episode one, 5 maps in episode two, and 5 deathmatch maps. Plus three secret maps.

And so it turned out that the project, while way behind schedule, still turned out alright, and it was a big lesson to everyone involved. Namely don't depend on people with bad grammar and don't bite off more than you can chew.

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