QSmack Quake Admin

  • Quake (not QuakeWorld) server administration tool
  • final version 3.0 & source code released April 2000
  • blast from the past

A link to "get stuff" is at the bottom of this page, but I need to set the context first.

As mentioned in the Attic section, I spent some time as the admin of a high-traffic Quake server. After a few too many incidents with misbehavers, a friend and I developed QSmack to address the lack of administrative tools available for monitoring a Quake server and laying down the law. It provided a way to observe and interact with the server chat, to preserve logs of all chat and game events, and to ban players by their IP, subnet, name, or colors. It even had a GUI client, written in Tcl/Tk of all things:

QSmack was the brainchild of Jeff "Ahnuld" Solomon, my classmate and C9FOS clanmate. He wrote the QSmack server and GUI. I contributed the docs/website and the Quake-server-side code in Quake C (and evangelized getting those changes into various mods). Our friends in the Stanford Graphics Quake Project, particularly Kekoa Proudfoot, contributed a library for working with the Quake network protocol.

The end product turned out great — a very useful tool — but I don't imagine that there would be any demand for using it these days, even among the remaining NetQuake multiplayer community. (Although I guess I could be surprised!) The QSmack docs and downloads are still hanging around the web, but I'm archiving them here too for completeness and nostalgia. QSmack might also be interesting as an early implementation of a Quake network protocol client.

If you want to dig into the archived QSmack site through the link below, keep in mind that there are a lot of broken links in the archive: email addresses, almost all external links, and some internal links to files that I couldn't find. But the documentation and main downloads are intact.

Final caveats: Some of the archived instructions about using Tcl/Tk may no longer apply with the most recent version of that language & toolkit. And I don't know for sure that the QSmack server will be able to talk to modern Quake engines. And QSmack definitely won't be able to perform admin actions with any Quake mod that is in use these days unless and until that mod is customized as described in the docs. Other than that it should work like a charm!


 
>>> Enter the QSmack site archive. <<<