Transfusion

Introduction

Transfusion is our initial project, using the Quake 1 engine. Originally called just "qBlood", it has been renamed to "BloodBath" when we decided to switch to the Quake 2 engine in december 2001 and to make our Quake 1 game multiplayer-only. The game name has changed a second time to "Transfusion" after we talked with Infogrames (now Atari) about the Blood trademark and copyrights.
Transfusion is a standalone game, but it can also be played as a Quake 1 / QW mod until version 1.01 included. If you have one of these old versions and want to do so, please take a look at the manual provided with each release for the detailed instructions.

The game code

Quake 1 uses "progs.dat" as the bytecode for storing the game behaviour. This file is created thanks to BQCC and our source code, which can be found in the "progs" directory. The code is composed of plain text files with a ".qc" or ".qh" suffix. The whole source is indented at 4 columns with spaces (no tabs, in theory) and quite well commented.
It incorporates code from FrikBotX. You can disable bot support at compile time with the NO_FRIKBOT preprocessor define (add "-d NO_FRIKBOT" at the BQCC command line). If you want a bot-free game code for some reason, you can rebuild it very easily.

BQCC (Bloody QuakeC Compiler)

BQCC is our own QuakeC compiler. Its source code is based on MrElusive's QuakeC Compiler v1.4. We choosed MEQCC because of its C-style preprocessor which allowed us to build both our NQ game code and our QW game code from the same source files. Transfusion no longer supports QW, but this feature has survived. By default, BQCC compiles for NQ, but the command line switch "-qw" makes it compile for QW, using "qwprogs.src". For more details and the list of the other features, take a look at the files "readme.txt" and "meqcc.txt" in the bqcc directory.
There aren't many more things to say about it. It works fine for us, so we almost only work on it when there is a bug to fix. Sometimes, an additional feature makes it into the code, but it's unusal. As you can imagine, the BQCC code is not updated very often. This doesn't mean that BQCC code is perfect of course, and so if someone wants to take the time to work seriously on it, to do some optimizations or add some nice new features, let us know.
BQCC is known to compile and run on Win32 systems, Linux and OpenBSD. In fact, it should work on most operating systems, either as-is or with very few changes.

The engine

As mentioned above, Transfusion supported any Quake 1 / QuakeWorld compatible engine, up to version 1.01. We have now decided to focus on what a lot of people consider to be the best Quake1-based engine out there: DarkPlaces.
LordHavoc, its creator, offered us to merge the necessary changes for Transfusion into DarkPlaces main code, and we accepted. Its source code is maintained on the Project Twilight CVS repository at icculus.org, although DarkPlaces has its own home page at this address. Binaries of the Transfusion version can be found in the snapshots directory in "qblood-bin-*" ZIP files. Darkplaces compiles and runs on at least Win32 systems and Linux.
So far, we have absolutely no intention to get the DarkPlaces source code into our own SVN tree to maintain our own engine. We don't say it will never happen, but it's extremely unlikely.

Acknowledgments:
Blood is a trademark of Atari (formerly Infogrames).
This page is generously hosted by: