Outlook and ideas for 2019

[PAD]Community forum

World of Padman will remain active also in the year 2019, as long as there is a community left playing our game! 2018 has been a good year, because we were able to re-establish the [PAD]DAY and to restore a stable player base, at least once a month. Unfortunately, it is still not enough to shorten the interval to a weekly basis like it used to be years ago. Of course we recognized the enthusiasm and engagement of single members of the community, providing servers and creating impressive videos. Please, keep on the good work! Also getting listed again in IndieDB’s Top 100 Indie Games of the Year 2018, after not being present there for a couple of years, gave us a push and some extra motivation. So, there are some rough plans and ideas for the the year 2019 we would like share with you.

First, we need a place for the community to exchange, to get in contact with each other and to help and to support each other. Unfortunately no one of the development team has access to any backup of the old PadForum, so, at least we never had a possibility to restore it, even though it would be outdated by now. So, we recommend to you to use the existing infrastructure, which we have available on ModDB since the year 2008 now, the [PAD]Community group. There you have and always had the possibility to add articles, media, and files. You can also find all the files of our advent special hosted there. You can organize events and take part in them as they happen. Recently we took the time to extend and to update the structure of the forum there, hopefully to your needs. We also added all links of the group here in the main menu of our website. All you need to do is to log in or to register there.

Join the [PAD]Community!

Join the [PAD]Community!

Second, we already started to bring back online some of the mapping tutorials for World of Padman, which were available under this domain some time ago. The goal now is also to continue to provide the full content of Kai’s Mapping Tutorial in German and English, which was released back in 2007, but was lacking some of the English translation. At the moment there are the catalogs available and updated for World of Padman 1.6, including the one, containing information about more then 400 map objects. We would like to bring back the rest of the tutorials, also from other PadMembers until 1st of April 2019, but that’s quite some work and we cannot promise to hold the date, but we will try. That’s why we started a poll in the editing section of the forum to find out, what is most important for you and what we should focus on first. Also the world was not standing still in the meantime and there are new versions of the GtkRadiant editor and the Q3Map2 compiler out there, which we need to consider. Probably there is going to be new WoP mapping packs.

Third, maybe we can bring back the WoP Community Mapping Contest, which was established and extended back in 2012, but was never finished. Originally the purpose of the contest was to motivate and to encourage all mappers to refresh and to update their custom maps for World of Padman 1.6. A lot of maps were not updated for WoP 1.5 and 1.6 back in the days and left the people downloading outdated content, which was not working properly with the last release of World of Padman. That was the reason, why some of the content was deleted from the mirrors back in the days. Of course we would like to see it back online, but updated!

Community Mapping Contest 2012

Community Mapping Contest 2012

Fourth, servers! At the moment we are working on bringing back the official PadWorld server, providing the default World of Padman maps and game types 24/7. This also should be then the server to hold the [PAD]DAYs, so the IP may change in the upcoming months. Hectic is supporting us, but also wants to provide his FunServer to focus more on custom maps, which has our full support. We recommend to join this server always with enabled ‘Auto Download’ option to be able to play all the custom maps. He also provides a simple server browser, where you can see who is playing online, and some Padday statistics. Another idea is to bring back one exclusive server to dive into World of Padman’s history, the PadHouse server, which was established by Magnacus from the German EntenClan back in the days. This server will be a clean Quake 3 Arena server on the basis of ioquake3, providing all the old PadMaps, the Padman player model and the associated custom skins for you to play. For keeping an overview about the servers, you can use for example the Monster Browser by torhus, which is supporting World of Padman and several other Quake 3 based games.

Monster Browser

Monster Browser

That’s it for the moment. Please add you comments, suggestions and ideas regarding WoP in 2019 here in this thread.