Quake Expo 2011 is now closed. What's left is a bunch of enforcers and fiends cleaning up the booths. Dust will settle and silence will cover everything. Unless a slipgate will start buzzing and humming.

Thanks everyone for being, yet again, a part of Quake history.

Quake Expo is a community event for developers, players and enthusiasts of Quake 1, 2 and 3, held to celebrate the games, present projects to the general public, organize multiplayer events, speedmodding contests or writing fan fiction.

Quake Expo 2011 was held during June 19-25, 2011!
Quake 1 was released on June 22, 1996!

The official IRC channel for Quake Expo 2011 was #qexpo. Also try these channels, too, #qc and #darkplaces.
» Either try this link - http://www.inside3d.com/irc.php - or use Mibbit.com - the server is irc.anynet.org.

Quake Expo 2011. An interesting experience for me, the first QExpo I've organized and the first QExpo to have a booth. An incomplete one, showcasing my tiny project. I did it because I cared. I did it because I love Quake. Not for exposure - I'm quite a shy person - not for advertisement.

I never took part in a QExpo before so I didn't know much about the involvement of the community. In this case, in the months and weeks prior to the opening, support was a bit weak, and everyone wanted to do something, like a movie, or a logo or some marketing materials.

Moon[Drunk] did the logo, which I'd like to have as a 3D model so I can put it inside a map and make it a special item. Thank you Moon[Drunk]. His booth showcased a new texture pack for Scourge of Armagon mission pack. gothiccandy did two movies and uploaded them to Youtube. Great job there.

Indeed, I have to agree with some of the recent comments, the QExpo site engine was a bit rushed, some bugs crept in, some functionality was missing and I wasn't there the whole time. RL stuff. Not rocket launcher, but real life. I decided not to have a full-blown forum engine or comments for booths, as I wanted the diferrent communities to have special Expo threads that could continue after the event was over. I sure like to see some of the QExpo released mods and maps developed further. These booths include, in random order, delor's Quakery - would love to see more, FrikaC's Nepenthe - also available here, Asaki's Cabin of the Exhibition of the Bump - with his great Bloqs mod, Berntsen's Filtration Facility - get some lights and shadows in that map, CocoT's stuff - Transloquake, Incas vs. Pharaohs - great concepts, Tronyn's booth - unfortunately the map was not ready, VorteX's Blood Omnicide - loved the editor, the grass, the rocks, Trickle and Orion's Dodgeball - must be fun playing multiplayer.

Lots of booths stayed empty until closing, and that's a shame. Some of them had promises of great content, but hours passed and the week ended, and the expo closed. Don't disappoint me! Make up for the missing booths!

I'll move on with more interesting booths, and I'll mention Ajay's Earthquake map - in development for a long time now, soon to be a mod, seanstar's efforts to create a Doomish atmosphere inside Darkplaces Quake, Entar's Canyon Terrain Editor - I'll soon be using it to add some terrain to one of my maps, motorsep's Steel Storm: Episode 1 - a great top-down game based on Darkplaces engine modification, Dirty Dick's Depraved Den of Dwarves a very fun Quake mod, madfox's rich booth of wonders - some great maps and models there, Happy Friar's invading aliens - a Quake 2 based shooter, ijed's (and many others beind the scenes) ReMake Quake - I'm really looking forward to see more of this, gb's Rune of Earth Magic - love the RMQ maps and how he tries to push the limits and forces MH to further develop the engine, RickyT23 has a great map - resembles a map from Jedi Outcast 2 or... could be just me and my imagination. negke had a mapping booth and showcased some nice maps from negke himself, Lunaran, Spirit, ShadoW, Vondur, Tyrann and R.P.G.

I also want to play necros' ne_ruins map. The screenshot looks intriguing.

The engine scene is represented by only 5 booths: DirectQ - an ongoing, actively developed Direct3D engine, FTE QuakeWorld - a new release just in time for QExpo, Vengeance r2 - an eye candy engine, Qrack engine - again enhanced graphics and functionality.

qbism super8 engine is a jacked-up 8-bit software engine with additional changes such as 24-bit TGA skymap loading and converting, physics and movement fixes for a smoother experience, cool effects like scorch marks, transparent water and particles, and skymaps. A must see for traditional Quake players.

LordHavoc didn't manage to have a dedicated booth, but showcased a new engine release on his site.

Baker (where are you?) didn't manage, either, to have his own ProQuake booth, but some new features are in store soon.

I also want to thanks Spirit for hosting lots of files over at Quaddicted. I'm looking forward to see the paginated browsing feature of his site. Also, sorry for the booth incident.

I noticed several Quake 2 booths, but no Quake 3. I guess QExpo remains faithful to Quake 1 fans. By the way, great job with your screencasts and podcasts, Tastyspleen!

Last, but not least, the other booths featured Youtube movies, Quake servers, upcoming mods and maps.

Did I miss any special booth? I checked all of them and I'm sure everyone did the same. Here's the full booths index, and here's the member's list - 123 members. Too bad not all had booths.

The Quake Expo ended the way it opened. Silently. There was plenty of activity during June 19-25. Statistics show it.

Here's a breakdown of the QExpo week.

Interesting facts

It seems that negke's booth was the most visited one.

idSoftware tweeted about Quake Expo 2011 (thanks Spirit).

June 22th received less visits than any other QExpo day. I guess everyone was celebrating.

More interesting facts

A short note from John Carmack:

"I could write an awful lot about Quake, but since we are in the final crunch for Rage right now, I'll have to settle for just a few random thoughts.

I have a bit more subdued memory of Quake than many of our other projects, because the development was so tough. It was the first project where I really had to grapple with my personal limitations; I had bitten off a little more than I could chew with all the big steps at once – full 3D world, 3D characters, light maps, PVS calculations, game scripting, client / server networking, etc. No matter how hard I worked, things just weren't getting done when we wanted them to.

My defining memory of the game was fairly early in development, when I no-clipped up into a ceiling corner and looked down as a Shambler walked through the world with its feet firmly planted on the ground. This looked like nothing I had ever seen before; it really did seem like I had a window into another world. Of course, as soon as he had to turn, the feet started to slide around because we didn't have pivot points and individual joint modifications back then, but it was still pretty magical.

It seems silly now, but at the time we were very concerned that people wouldn't be able to deal with free look mouse control, and we had lots of options to restrict pitch changes and auto-center when you started moving.

The internet gaming aspect was almost an accident. I had moved from Doom's peer-to-peer networking to client/server primarily to allow late game entry, and UDP was supported because I was still doing a lot of the development on NEXTSEP unix workstations. The idea of playing over the internet was always there, but I didn't think it would be practical for many people due to the long latencies and variable performance of typical connections. When it turned out that people were doing it despite the low quality, it gave me the incentive to develop the alternative QuakeWorld executable with the various latency reduction mechanisms.

The other important alternative executable was glQuake, which played a significant role in the early days of 3D accelerators. 3DFX was the gold standard back then – Nvidia's RIVA128 had poor subpixel precision and didn't handle all the blend modes properly. In fact, almost everyone was under the incorrect assumption that blending was only good for alpha transparency, even companies like 3DLabs that should have known better.

Competitive deathmatch had gotten started with Doom, but the Red Annihilation Quake tournament was a high point, where I gave my first turbo Ferrari away to Thresh for his dominating tournament win.

I look back at Quake as the golden age of game modding, before the standards rose so high that it required almost a full time commitment to do something relevant. I am very proud that many of today's industry greats trace their start back to working with Quake.

The most important thing about quake for me was that I met my wife when she organized the first all-female Quake tournament. She still thinks Quake was the seminal achievement of Id, and she glowers at me whenever I bemoan how random the design was. :)"

That was Quake Expo for me. An experiment first of all, and a community exercise. Be it any of these two, Quake still exists, people developing it still exists, and mods and maps will go on. I'm sure this year's expo sparked more interest in Quake development, and many interesting creations will see the light of day this year.