The last update started with the reassurance that we're not dead yet. Well, last week some of us had the opportunity of checking that we're indeed alive and real persons. :) In other words, after years of being an online group some of us finally met at Speedcon, a fairly large gathering of the Quake speedrunning community. Once again, a heart-felt "thank you" to Ilkka for organising everything. The happenings at Speedcon are described on the Speedcon pages, here we'll just summarise the most important results with respect to QdQ.

We have added another utility to our Downloads section. Dzip is a tool that compresses Quake demo files approximately twice as good as Zip does. We will use it to offer smaller download sizes in the future, but I'm sure that it will be useful outside the speedrunning community, too. Check the Dzip page for more details.

Speaking of the future, there should be not one, but two new QdQ releases real soon now. All the demos have been done, we just need to wrap everything up.

In non-Speedcon-related news, Grob has improved his Unreal done Quick run by approximately three minutes. Notice that the UdQ pages have moved to a new location. Quake redone Quick by Ingmar Pörner has also moved to a new location, the links in the previous news update have been fixed.

We start with the regular reassurance that we're not dead yet. :)

Machinima.com are currently featuring our golden oldie Quake done Quicker as a showcased film.

If you already know and love QdQr, the showcase article may be interesting reading. If you've never seen it (perhaps because you don't even own Quake1!) then you now have the chance courtesy of some RealMovie versions: [links now correct - Anthony]

• Intro + Ep1, Dimension of the Zoomed,
• Ep2, The Realm of Track Magic,
• Ep3, The Go-Hell-For-Leatherworld
• Ep4, The Elder Whirled + Finale, Shub-Niggurath Sprint

The low framerate and tiny screen suck compared to seeing the real thing play back in the Quake engine, of course, but you take what you can get, right? Enjoy!

While we're still working on our next projects, it is high time to report on some of the speed-running activities which are going on elsewhere:

First of all, some months ago newcomer Ingmar Pörner finished a run of Quake on Nightmare skill all by himself. Using some new tricks and running techniques he was able to finish his run more than two minutes faster than our own Quake done Quicker. Ingmar's homepage is accessible here. Currently, Ingmar and a group of other fine speed-runners are assembling a proper successor to QdQr. Until this sequel becomes available, enjoy Quake redone Quick.

We are often asked whether we will try to run some of the newer games that have appeared during the last two years; titles like Sin, Half-Life, or Unreal. Unfortunately, all of these have certain shortcomings with regard to speed-running, and so no speed-running community has yet emerged for the more recent games. In my personal opinion, of the titles mentioned above Unreal is best-suited for speed-running, but there is no timer, and Unreal's demo recording/playback leaves a lot to be desired.

Still, Unreal offers a great variety of tricks and opportunities for shortcuts (see, for example, the survey here). And so it is with pleasure that we can announce the first complete speed-run of Unreal: another fine one-man effort, this time by Grob. Unreal done Quick completes the game in a time of 56:58, i.e. in just under one hour. While this may seem slow in comparison to the times needed in id's games, the run contains lots of tricks (and a great variety at that), and much strategic planning. As indicated by the previous comments, the run does suffer somewhat from Unreal's poor demo playback, but it's still very worthwhile watching. Moreover, there is some chance that said problems can be solved using a new recording technique. Hopefully, this run serves to encourage other Unreal fans to get into speed-running.

In more general speed-running news, the Speed Demos Archive has re-opened its doors after a lengthy downtime and accepts again all sorts of demos for Quake and Quake 2. Even now, Quake still attracts new players some of whom have recently turned in some impressive efforts. The oldest speed-demos site of all, however, is Compet-N for Doom/Doom2 which is still as busy as ever.

It always seem to happen - we have no public news for months and then everything happens at once. machinima.com, a center for the new cinematic medium that is slowly evolving out of Quake Movies, has launched. QdQ have a small presence on it in the form of a baby sister site to this one, QdQ films. It's simply a place for new material particularly related to the new artform; everything you are used to seeing on the main QdQ site here at PlanetQuake will continue as normal. But even if you can't bear reading some wordy articles by yours truly, I encourage you to check out the rest of the machinima scene

Santa Claus didn't make it to QdQ for Christmas this time, but now we can present you with the first QdQ release of the new year: Quake done 100% Quicker, a run that completes Quake will all the kills and secrets on Nightmare skill in a time of 59:31. It is a complete overhaul of the older run which we released two years ago - every single demo was improved. Several people helped out with this run, but most of the credit is due to Justin Fleck and Marlo Galinski who recorded the lion's share of the demos in this release. We hope to release several more projects this year.