Quake Advent Calendar 2013 - Part 3

Welcome to a Quake-themed Advent Calendar. On 24 days 24 people will showcase something about Quake. Something old, something new, something obscure, something you should check out. Monitor the list on the frontpage to see new posts every day. This is part 3 for the 13th to 18th December. See quake_advent_calendar_2013 for the previous posts.

13th December - CocoT

Believe it or not, when I first stumbled upon Coffee's AI Cafe, I was actually looking for information on bot coding in the hope to develop my own Hexen2 bot. At the time, bots were the rage and, as Hexen2 coding tutorials were few and far between, it made sense to use Quake tutorials to get a sense of QuakeC/HexenC's workings. Long story short, I never wrote a single line of Hexen2 bot code and got sucked in, thanks to Coffee's AI Cafe and the wonderful community I found there, into the world of Quake modding.

In the world of Quake bots, Coffee's bot holds a special place in my heart because of its extreme user-friendliness and because of the way, week after week, Coffee learned, together with his readers, about how to make it better and he shared his discoveries in the form of tutorials, which you can still read here. In all likelihood, there will never be a new coding tutorial written by Coffee for Quake. However, more than a decade later, I still believe these tutorials are a great way to start coding for Quake. They are humorous and highly informative. They teach you the basics (and then some), without ever sounding condescending or too complicated. I would advise, however, not to burn through them too quickly, but enjoy them one by one, slowly. Experiment with them in creative ways before moving on to the next – they are the chocolate and wine (or fancy bratwurst and beer, if you prefer) of a beginner's Quake modding life.

Coffee's Bot is a worthy Quake opponent, and its plugability – at a time when Frikbot was in the making – meant it appeared in several Quake mods (including some of my own). It was also a direct influence on FrikaC's famous FrikBot, which of course says a lot about it. Coffee released, next to his bot, numerous mods. The most striking to me was released at the end of his Quake modding career, when, and after a long absence, Coffee surprised us all by releasing for QExpo 2003 the fantastic Team Fortress Bots (read all about it here). It remains, to this day, the best, most stable and enjoyable teamplay modification for this father of all Quake mods.