I've entertained the idea of creating this thread in Team Liquid several times in the past, and finally decided to go ahead with making it now that Quake Live has a new gametype called Race, similar to the gametype in Warsow and other games. There was an old thread from 2004 on Team Liquid that was buried, so I'm creating this thread in the hopes that people will discover and appreciate the history of this aspect of Quake, falling back to the glorious speedruns of Quake, Quake 2, and Doom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_done_Quick), and culminating in the achievements of Quake 3 Defrag.
Quake 3 Defrag has a long and rich history, filled with stories of success, and hard work resulting in perfection, as well as some intense drama.
It is a game mod created in the fall of 2000, within the open-sourced game -- Quake 3 Arena. This mod was designed for a new kind of competition in its day, based on timed runs, based on out-of-box maps from the original games, but custom built and tested maps created by the Defrag community. These runs usually have checkpoints and demand unique skills to complete certain if not all parts.
The mod's fast movement is based on the exploitation of the game physics glitch in the Quake engine code, which allows higher acceleration of speed based upon a manipulation called strafe-jumping, as well as the use of weapons as tools to increase speed and aid with direction. In other words, Quake Defrag has been described as "parkour/free-running for nerds", and has been paralleled with Mirrors Edge, and other fast-moving games of the spontaneous and less restricting variety.
But enough of the talk, here are 4 of my favorite videos, so you can see this for yourself. Enjoy!
Celestia - 2009 video featuring runs by Arcaon (my personal favorite defrag video)
F33l & W3sp - Videos from 2008-2009 featuring W3sp, a legendary person in the defrag community. (The castle free-run at the end of F33l at 12:45 is one of the greatest free-style runs that I've seen.)
Event Horizon 2 - Team Trick-jumping/Freestyling video from 2006 (old one so the video quality isn't great, but the content won't disappoint)
The Quake 3 Defrag scene is still very much alive, and there are many active servers. There have been plenty of competitions these past 13 years (http://www.breakdown-hq.com/), the most recent major one being Defrag World Cup 2012. (They have a World Cup every 2 years and the top runs are all over youtube.) Here are the compilations of the best runs for the three most recent ones:
There was also Quake 2 Jump which was phenomenal. Nothing does compare to the old school defrag movies though. Another unreal tricking video that you didn't post is Live to Fly..
By the way, own-age.com has been down for me for probably 2 years now. It's great to see it back up again now? :D
Never knew how this mod was called but it is simply:
BEAUTIFUL!
I love me some great strafe, the maps are esthetically very pleasing and the relaxing music in the background. Gosh! I always had mad respect towards Quake, sick game!
On July 12 2013 20:24 SheLovesMe wrote: There was also Quake 2 Jump which was phenomenal. Nothing does compare to the old school defrag movies though. Another unreal tricking video that you didn't post is Live to Fly..
I have to say, while there have been numerous games that tried to include elements of parkour, nothing has ever come even remotely close to what you can accomplish on the Quake engine. And above all stands the most inspiring, exciting and absolutely astonishing of all, DeFRaG. Although I would like to give honourable mention to Warsow Race because I'm a sucker for being able to boost yourself off walls and do double jumps (as a UT fan ^^).
I really wish this got the attention it rightfully deserves, because as far as I'm concerned, DeFRaG really is the pinnacle of movement mechanics in video games.
Oh and the castle freestyle in f33l blows my mind every single time holy shit.
Damn... Although at times the movie gets a bit confusing/tiring (between the color changes, the blur effects and stuff appearing/disappearing) this is a fantastic run. Absolutely phenomenal!
On July 12 2013 20:26 Abominous wrote: I love me some great strafe, the maps are esthetically very pleasing and the relaxing music in the background. Gosh! I always had mad respect towards Quake, sick game!
Same here. Been one of my favorite game for a while. Most demanding shooter I've played that's for sure. Just learning how to strafe-jump was hard, it took me a while to get the hang of it. I still have some problems with it sometimes and doing some defrag maps really help. Some can be pretty hard too. I'm not really good in defrag tho haha.
On August 27 2013 16:11 MasterOfPuppets wrote: Damn... Although at times the movie gets a bit confusing/tiring (between the color changes, the blur effects and stuff appearing/disappearing) this is a fantastic run. Absolutely phenomenal!
Thank you for posting this!
No problem, gald you enjoyed it!
and yeah, just for those who aren't familiar with the map, the disappearing pads aren't an effect, they are part of the map. This run was done in vq3 physics, similar to vanilla quake live physics.
He did a 27 hour stream of practicing practicing that map a couple.months ago, and talked about various aspects of the maps on chat. Watching the practice gives you a good sense of the difficulty level.
Loved xcm trick 2 btw, I did the jump pads and other practice, and spent many hours racing friends on the long stretches and doing freestyle.
DPK, defrag (cpm and vq3) helped me immensly with mastering the quake physics, I took the longest time to get side and air strafing down, and my circle jump is still pretty mediocre. its great that they made a couple defrag and training/freestyle maps for people playing quake live, just need to download them and open up a practice match and load map.
I play defrag most nights <3 We even had a small thread about Defrag some years ago. Fucking love this shit. Celestia is god damn mind blowing. Honestly though, quake 3/defrag has ruined just about every fps for me since. Just can't enjoy it if i can't jump around at 1000mph :D
Edit: Pretty funny seeing that video about Shio above. When me and my mate Pulseh first started defrag, Shio started giving us shit for no reason, Pulseh challenged him to 1v1s in rocket arena and raped him so hard that they were mates ever since haha. Just cos you can defrag, doesn't mean you can play good
I used to play Defrag too. I miss the ultra steep learning curve that came with it. Hopefully we'll see some super-fast paced FPS like quake enter e-sports again soon :-)
i've tried this some with the new race mode but I'm completely newbie and cannot seem to improve. it's very frustrating for me to not know how to improve at a 'game' from newbie to somewhat reasonable. i need like step by step instructions on how to do a proper circle jump, and i dont even know what to explain how to learn things like how to fire at the right angle when rocket boosting yourself forward, or how to use the straight-down rocket jump to give you a forward speed increase (while already moving)
On August 28 2013 02:51 Zelniq wrote: i've tried this some with the new race mode but I'm completely newbie and cannot seem to improve. it's very frustrating for me to not know how to improve at a 'game' from newbie to somewhat reasonable. i need like step by step instructions on how to do a proper circle jump, and i dont even know what to explain how to learn things like how to fire at the right angle when rocket boosting yourself forward, or how to use the straight-down rocket jump to give you a forward speed increase (while already moving)
On August 28 2013 02:51 Zelniq wrote: i've tried this some with the new race mode but I'm completely newbie and cannot seem to improve. it's very frustrating for me to not know how to improve at a 'game' from newbie to somewhat reasonable. i need like step by step instructions on how to do a proper circle jump, and i dont even know what to explain how to learn things like how to fire at the right angle when rocket boosting yourself forward, or how to use the straight-down rocket jump to give you a forward speed increase (while already moving)
If you want too, feel free to add me on quake live: TerribleTrioJon. It's a little bit harder to learn in QL rather than in Q3 without having an option to see keypresses on the HUD, but I can probably help a bit.
Yes, culter! Cetus is legendary. Love his DM6 freestyle run as well.
FFW_Rude, I'll add something to OP about the different physics. Nice sig, Miaaw!
And good stuff, Nebula. It's true that the mastering the movement as a "defragger" doesn't translate into being a good all-around quake player or CPMA pro but it sure does help!
On August 28 2013 02:51 Zelniq wrote: i've tried this some with the new race mode but I'm completely newbie and cannot seem to improve. it's very frustrating for me to not know how to improve at a 'game' from newbie to somewhat reasonable. i need like step by step instructions on how to do a proper circle jump, and i dont even know what to explain how to learn things like how to fire at the right angle when rocket boosting yourself forward, or how to use the straight-down rocket jump to give you a forward speed increase (while already moving)
If you want too, feel free to add me on quake live: TerribleTrioJon. It's a little bit harder to learn in QL rather than in Q3 without having an option to see keypresses on the HUD, but I can probably help a bit.
Yes, culter! Cetus is legendary. Love his DM6 freestyle run as well.
FFW_Rude, I'll add something to OP about the different physics. Nice sig, Miaaw!
And good stuff, Nebula. It's true that the mastering the movement as a "defragger" doesn't translate into being a good all-around quake player or CPMA pro but it sure does help!
I think it could help people that still want to play this
EPT
. 
