I have taken a couple of days off work and I have got most of the work done in order to bring AQ back to Windows. Non developers can probably stop reading about now; just wanted you to know that this is being worked on and progress is finally being made. The ultimate goal is to have AQ and LDL work as native Windows apps, with no dependency on Python and a simple setup routine. Developers, read on for information of a technical nature on what's been going on and how to build it. Please note that I know the documentation is lacking; I've been keeping notes on how to compile both the Mac OS X and Windows stuff from scratch, so I will update the docs when I've finally got the build process working. It's long-winded at the moment, but we can work on streamlining it when we've got the thing working :-).
So far, I have done the following:
1. Got it to compile on Windows, using Visual Studio Express.
2. Tweaked the launcher script to work on both Windows and Mac OS X.
3. Begun work on making .exe files from all the Python code, so that the user doesn't need to have Python installed in order to use AQ (this will make setup a lot simpler in future).
There's still some way to go on the python-to-executable front, as it's not quite working yet, but it's getting there and I hope to complete it soon. When that's done, I will need to make a new Windows installer (iether an MSI file or a more classical setup.exe).
The repo on GitHub contains all the code that fulfils 1 and 2 above. Please note, however, that the way to build a Windows release currently relies on the Mac OS X build process. You need to make the .app bundle on a Mac, and then use that as the basis of a working install on Windows. The build process on the Mac automatically downloads all required support files, such as demos, maps, skins and the mindgrid:audio hi-fi sounds. It also compiles the vital AQ QuakeC gamecode using the zqcc QuakeC compiler, which currently doesn't build or run on Windows. It's not possible to do this easily on Windows, as it lacks a decent shell scripting environment and I already had written the Mac build system to do all of the above. When we've got a working Windows build process, we can work on making it depend less on the Mac side of things.
For now, once you have got the .app from the Mac side of things (by running the build script called 'build'), you need to go into the AudioQuake.app/Contents/MacOS folder and get that MacOS folder over into Windows. This includes all the sounds, maps and compiled QuakeC gamecode required to make the game work. You then use Visual Studio Express to compile the ZQuake engine for Windows, drop the executable into that MacOS folder, and the launcher, AudioQuake.py will pick it up and (mostly) work. Currently the launcher is not engaging the tutorial mode properly, but the game runs and the console works with Text-To-Speech output, so it is usable.
Right, it's getting late here and I'm back to work tomorrow. Sorry if this is a bit stream-of-consciousness, but I wanted to get something maybe useful written down for you.