Mr Speaker, esteemed guests, his Holiness the Pope, Ladies and Gentelmen. I stand before you today to tell you that the state of Epic is the Strongest it has ever been.
:applause:
The Past
Epic was started as a reaction project to the constant hassle of rocketeers and mg spammers in the otherwise astonishingly amazing modification Excessive. Since Excessive had been released no other mod had succeeded in so readily mimicking the style of it but at the same time allowing admins what they so desperatly wanted: The ability to control the weapons. I, with no knowledge of quake programming whatsoever, set out to remedy this situation and improve the community by solving this debilitating problem. I taught myself, harrassed the boys in quake3world forums,
spent countless hours pouring over documents on the net, reading through pages upon pages of forum posts, and enlisted the aid of the creator of Q3Devel Bandit-TTK to come out with the answer to the excessive brand's problems.I released Epic and got prepared for the wave of joy that would flow through the community as people discovered they didn't have to put up with the spam anymore. And then.........nothing. I had created Epic as a gift to the community, with no strings attached, and they promptly asked for the reciept and returned it. I couldn't figure out why? Every Excessive server I went to all I heard was complaints about the rockets, people everywhere were looking for relief from the rockets but when someone finally gave it to them, they didn't want it.
I'll admit I was very discouraged after the release of Epic 1.0 I now know I made a lot of mistakes back then, I went about it all wrong. People took it as I was trying to replace Excessive and get all the glory for being the guy who did it. Nothing could be further from the truth, all I wanted was to help the community. But people basically told me to go cram it with walnuts and that was that. I gave up, knowing in my heart how great Epic could be, but discouraged.
Months later I recieved an email from a gent at Cal-Tech who told me a vast majority of the players there on the local LAN servers were playing Epic and loving it. This was the first step to rebuilding my confidence, as the greatest minds in the world were palying and loving my mod. the second was the support of the boys in my clan 923, and the third step that finally propelled me over the top and back into it was the boys in McNutty clan, the first ever external Epic clan. When I joined them on their message board and their server they treated me like royalty because I had solved their rocket problem. That was never what I wanted out of Epic but I must say it did make me feel good to see that someone was enjoying it.
I then set out to solve the problems I had had in the first release, the two biggest of which being the lack of a gauntlet and the lack of Lightning Gun knockback. I solved these problems and after a conversation with the boys at McNutty decided to release Epic 2.0
The Present
The present is currently going very well, as you can see I've been offered hosting, and a message board. I've gotten about 300 hits on the epic site in the last 4 days, and the boys @ n923 and McNutty are spreading the word. I've been plugging Epic everywhere I could think of and am currently working on a new cleaner looking site for when I move in to my new digs here at my host. I've got the www.epicmod.com domain name in the process of being registered and soon it will be the home for Epic. The hosting is the biggest step though, because not only do I join up with a great gaming community here but I also now have a stable place to store my files making it possible for anyone who wants Epic to get it with no worries about popups or broken links.
I'm currently working on some other projects to help broaden the appeal of epic such as:
- All seeing eye and Gamespy filter files
- An updated Server.cfg file for download
- A New server setup pack complete with tutorial for easy set up of Epic
- And a new demo for Epic Version 2.0
Right now the future looks bright for Epic. I'm going to promote it for a while, start working on some custom Epic maps to broaden it's horizons and get to work on my wish list to evolve Epic past it's Excessive roots. With Mr. Pants retired and Doom 3 on the horizon perhaps I could even create a version of Epic for Doom 3. I'll have to take a programming class for that one though.
