History of AQ2 to AQtion - Summary
Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2025 10:01 pm
To catch everyone up from the developments of AQtion since the ye olde times of Axshun/Edition to current day, I'll summarize the progress from the best of my knowledge:
After the original early releases and Axshun, AQ2 progressed into two 'major' distinct but shared game libraries, not counting all of the minor mods such as Heroes, Dirty, jmod, and spinoffs like CGF/LTK (bot additions), SPAQ and others, which were Edition/ETE (Espionage Tournament Edition, a la AQDT) and TNG (The Next Generation).
Without having direct access to the ETE codebase, I can only assume the split occurred during the Edition version development (CTB/TP2 being coded, eventually into what we know as Espionage now), while TNG branched into its own version. The base game is essentially identical between the two versions; ETE focused on Espionage, Arena and Tournament Edition modes, TNG added Tourney (essentially the same as Arena) and Matchmode (essentially the same as Tournament Edition), 3-Team and Darkmatch.
Once 4.7 was released, ETE development halted. I've only been able to find specific releases, but I have kept the 4.7 gamelib archived. TNG development, however, continued through the early aughts and eventually migrated to Github. The scene slowly decayed in North America after '02 or so, those familiar with playing on ETE servers generally, but the international community rallied around the development of TNG, generally players in South America and Europe, as well as Australia. AQ2World became a central hub for the scene, including leagues, tournaments, communication streams such as IRC and forums, and other supporting sites.
Around 2007 to 2009 or so, the international scene began to weaken as well. Fewer forum posts, fewer leagues and clans, people starting growing up and growing older without fresh members joining the game, after this is what I consider to be the 'dark ages' of AQ2. The memories of the game and a handful of stragglers kept the scene alive, a handful of maps published, but the drive to play and be involved in the community dwindled. There was a small spark in 2010/2011 but it wasn't enough to rekindle what once was. Minor development continued by the new maintainers Raptor007, hifi and occasional contributors. The pickup scene utilizing tools like z0rbot and Pubobot played regularly, but organizing was sometimes a hassle.
In that 2010/2011 time span, I reached out to Den, who still owned the aq2world.com domain and its original forum database. I wanted to re-host it personally as a project, if nothing else than to keep a historical record of the game online. I received the domain from him as well as the forums, which are now accessible at https://classicforums.aq2world.com/. I wasn't involved much at all with the scene other than hosting the site.
In 2022, FragBait reached out to me because the site would occasionally go down and he asked if there were some improvements we could make to it, since it was extremely simple and didn't have much content. We chatted about some improvements, a wiki, recreating a forum of some sort, making AQ2World a hub of content again. I was interested in helping out, so I reached out to some other AQ2 folks who were still active in the scene and joined a couple of Discord servers to get to know people. I discovered that there were a lot of different AQ2 Discord servers around, some were scene-specific, some just had a handful of people. We quickly came to a consensus that if we wanted any sort of hope of a revival, would be to ensure that we consolidated the communications between those that still played and those still in the scene into a single Discord server and tied it to AQ2World, and this server was born.
Once the server was established, the newly developed "AQ2World Team" considered plans on how to revive the game. There were countless attempts to create an installable version of AQ2, including hifi's https://q2online.net/action version, which did a lot of heavy lifting, but it still used an older version of the game binary and gamelib. We decided that we needed to break the pattern of people having different 'versions' of the game and reduce the friction of getting new players in. After some research, we decided that Steam would be the best way to distribute the game.
After a lot of testing and development, we achieved our goal of launching AQ2 on Steam, rebranded as 'AQtion' to avoid copyright or litigation, on Jun 1st, 2022. This was a turnkey install, Windows, Linux and Mac compatible, utilizing Q2Pro under the GPLv2 license, and the latest forked version of aq2-tng from Raptor007's repository.
The launch was relatively successful; many servers were populated with fresh blood and the popularity was increasing. Eventually, the numbers died down and the pickup scene played the game the most, just like before the launch. This continues to be the case today.
Since the launch, there have been several IRL events, such as AQ2Opens https://www.aq2open.com/ and adhoc meetups. Development has continued, merging Q2Pro and AQ2TNG into one repository, linking the two codebases together to bring a modern AQ2 experience in the form of AQtion. Notable enhancements in the game have been a brand new bot system that is still in development (creds mostly to @ReKTeK, one of the original developers of the TNG crew back in the day), enhanced HUD options, antilag, cvarsync additions and continuous adhoc assistance by @Reki, Espionage ETV and ATL reverse-engineered ports by me, countless bugfixes and minor enhancements by the team at large, dozens of new maps, a strong pickup scene over at the AQ2 Competitive Discord https://comp.aq2world.com/, and continuous improvements and releases are ongoing. You may notice that some of the assets in AQtion are different than in the retail game, such as the hurt/death sounds and textures -- this is because those were original retail assets that are still owned by Bethesda/id Software and cannot be distributed via Steam, since they are unlicensed. If you do own the retail game, you can override them with the original assets via pak/pkz files.
That about sums it up for now, there's a good amount of detail I didn't go into on each talking point, but that should catch everyone up!
Check out the old websites of the days of yore in the Site Links to the left or check out https://archives.aq2world.com/
After the original early releases and Axshun, AQ2 progressed into two 'major' distinct but shared game libraries, not counting all of the minor mods such as Heroes, Dirty, jmod, and spinoffs like CGF/LTK (bot additions), SPAQ and others, which were Edition/ETE (Espionage Tournament Edition, a la AQDT) and TNG (The Next Generation).
Without having direct access to the ETE codebase, I can only assume the split occurred during the Edition version development (CTB/TP2 being coded, eventually into what we know as Espionage now), while TNG branched into its own version. The base game is essentially identical between the two versions; ETE focused on Espionage, Arena and Tournament Edition modes, TNG added Tourney (essentially the same as Arena) and Matchmode (essentially the same as Tournament Edition), 3-Team and Darkmatch.
Once 4.7 was released, ETE development halted. I've only been able to find specific releases, but I have kept the 4.7 gamelib archived. TNG development, however, continued through the early aughts and eventually migrated to Github. The scene slowly decayed in North America after '02 or so, those familiar with playing on ETE servers generally, but the international community rallied around the development of TNG, generally players in South America and Europe, as well as Australia. AQ2World became a central hub for the scene, including leagues, tournaments, communication streams such as IRC and forums, and other supporting sites.
Around 2007 to 2009 or so, the international scene began to weaken as well. Fewer forum posts, fewer leagues and clans, people starting growing up and growing older without fresh members joining the game, after this is what I consider to be the 'dark ages' of AQ2. The memories of the game and a handful of stragglers kept the scene alive, a handful of maps published, but the drive to play and be involved in the community dwindled. There was a small spark in 2010/2011 but it wasn't enough to rekindle what once was. Minor development continued by the new maintainers Raptor007, hifi and occasional contributors. The pickup scene utilizing tools like z0rbot and Pubobot played regularly, but organizing was sometimes a hassle.
In that 2010/2011 time span, I reached out to Den, who still owned the aq2world.com domain and its original forum database. I wanted to re-host it personally as a project, if nothing else than to keep a historical record of the game online. I received the domain from him as well as the forums, which are now accessible at https://classicforums.aq2world.com/. I wasn't involved much at all with the scene other than hosting the site.
In 2022, FragBait reached out to me because the site would occasionally go down and he asked if there were some improvements we could make to it, since it was extremely simple and didn't have much content. We chatted about some improvements, a wiki, recreating a forum of some sort, making AQ2World a hub of content again. I was interested in helping out, so I reached out to some other AQ2 folks who were still active in the scene and joined a couple of Discord servers to get to know people. I discovered that there were a lot of different AQ2 Discord servers around, some were scene-specific, some just had a handful of people. We quickly came to a consensus that if we wanted any sort of hope of a revival, would be to ensure that we consolidated the communications between those that still played and those still in the scene into a single Discord server and tied it to AQ2World, and this server was born.
Once the server was established, the newly developed "AQ2World Team" considered plans on how to revive the game. There were countless attempts to create an installable version of AQ2, including hifi's https://q2online.net/action version, which did a lot of heavy lifting, but it still used an older version of the game binary and gamelib. We decided that we needed to break the pattern of people having different 'versions' of the game and reduce the friction of getting new players in. After some research, we decided that Steam would be the best way to distribute the game.
After a lot of testing and development, we achieved our goal of launching AQ2 on Steam, rebranded as 'AQtion' to avoid copyright or litigation, on Jun 1st, 2022. This was a turnkey install, Windows, Linux and Mac compatible, utilizing Q2Pro under the GPLv2 license, and the latest forked version of aq2-tng from Raptor007's repository.
The launch was relatively successful; many servers were populated with fresh blood and the popularity was increasing. Eventually, the numbers died down and the pickup scene played the game the most, just like before the launch. This continues to be the case today.
Since the launch, there have been several IRL events, such as AQ2Opens https://www.aq2open.com/ and adhoc meetups. Development has continued, merging Q2Pro and AQ2TNG into one repository, linking the two codebases together to bring a modern AQ2 experience in the form of AQtion. Notable enhancements in the game have been a brand new bot system that is still in development (creds mostly to @ReKTeK, one of the original developers of the TNG crew back in the day), enhanced HUD options, antilag, cvarsync additions and continuous adhoc assistance by @Reki, Espionage ETV and ATL reverse-engineered ports by me, countless bugfixes and minor enhancements by the team at large, dozens of new maps, a strong pickup scene over at the AQ2 Competitive Discord https://comp.aq2world.com/, and continuous improvements and releases are ongoing. You may notice that some of the assets in AQtion are different than in the retail game, such as the hurt/death sounds and textures -- this is because those were original retail assets that are still owned by Bethesda/id Software and cannot be distributed via Steam, since they are unlicensed. If you do own the retail game, you can override them with the original assets via pak/pkz files.
That about sums it up for now, there's a good amount of detail I didn't go into on each talking point, but that should catch everyone up!
Check out the old websites of the days of yore in the Site Links to the left or check out https://archives.aq2world.com/