Project History

Well before Quake III: Team Arena was complete, we tossed around the idea of putting out some additional maps for it. Free maps. Our internal resources were still heavily committed to finishing the expansion pack and anxious to be getting onto Doom production. So, we looked to the creative talent of the Quake community. Although the team style maps were not as numerous as free for all and tournament style, we had quite a number to choose from. Using sites like ..::LvL and Z-Axis and Spankenstein’s Reliquary as referral sources, it didn’t take long to find, play, and winnow our way through the most popular team play maps out there. In this regard, a debt of thanks is owed specifically to Tigger-oN and his brief reviews on his website, ..::LvL and the Quake III Arena fans who downloaded the maps and rated them for play quality. That sort of ranking made our lives just that much easier. Maps that looked good, that were balanced, that embodied a design philosophy in keeping with Quake III Arena (as opposed to earlier id CTF style games), that had a layout adaptable to the Q3: TA game types, and that were enjoyable play experiences against bots made the first cut. Before Team Arena was even on the shelves we had a selection of maps that would suit our needs.

The selected maps were winnowed down through “live” play test to a double handful. We approached the designers of those maps and invited them to participate in the project. The response was unanimous.

At this point some folks outside of id got involved on the production side. AstroCreep, a map maker and moderator of a number of forums at Quake3World, including the Level Editing forum and the Team Arena forum worked with me to evaluate and critique each of the maps, suggesting changes to layout, architecture, entity placement, and texture decoration. Drunken Boxer, another mapmaker who moderates the CTF and Team Arena forums at Quake3World provided additional input and counsel. The last step was to run each map past MrElusive, to fine tune the maps for bot play. Finally, AstroCreep provided the html format Readme, and Eric Webb of id created the server batch file scripts based on the ones used for id’s own servers.

And yes, there is a Team Arena Map Pack 2 in the works. As with this map pack, announcement of its contents will come at the time of release. Please note that we are not and will not be asking for additional map submissions.

Paul Jaquays

Designer

id Software

NOTE: This is release version 1.1. The initial release of An Iteration of Hell (hal9000_ta.bsp) has been replaced by hal9000_b_ta.bsp, correcting an error in the map file. The config scripts for running these maps have been updated to reflect the file change information.

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