Dec 04 2008
The evolution of 2Fort
2Fort! The very name brings back memories of snipers, medics, scouts, and sentry guns. For those of you that do not feel like reading all of this – long story short, 2Fort went from a 32 – 64 player map to a 12 player map. If your still interested, keep reading.
Back in the days of Quakeworld, 2Fort went through several changes and there were several versions released. On any given server there were sometimes 2 versions of 2Fort – 2Fort and 2FortR. Back then, the maps were big, by todays standards they were huge. The standard server usually had 16 player slots – 8 players per team. Even though the standard server ran 16 slots, there were servers that had 24 and 32 players slots – 12 and 16 players per team. At one time there was talk of 64 player servers.
One of the major reasons why these 64 player servers never became popular, was due to the system resources the server required. Back in the mid to late 1990s, memory and processors were not cheap. And just how expensive was the memory? Around $3 a meg, and up. Each player that connected to the server required around 1.5 megs of memory (if I remember right), then add the amount of memory required by the servers operating system. For a 64 player server you would have to have at least 96 megs of memory just for the players, then add another 100+ megs for the operating system – lets just round that up to 1 stick of 256 megs to be on the safe side. Just for the memory, the server owner would have to spend about $768. Leasing a server at that time was not an option. If you wanted a server, you had to know someone with access to a T1 or better.
Even though there were plans for 64 player servers, they never became popular mainly due to the technology limitations at the time.
2Fort was the map of the day. There were other popular maps, but 2Fort was the one that just about every server owner had in the rotation. Maybe one reason why it is so popular is because of how simple the map is. Unlike a lot of maps at the time, 2Fort was simple – there is the enemy now go shoot them. New players figured out the map pretty quick. Maybe that is why 2Fort gained so much popularity? The truth is, its a combination of a lot of features that makes this map so popular.