Nexuiz Pro

[Vendor]

First of all the developers do all this work for free, and the results are greatly appreciated. In return they should be free to take the game in whichever direction they wish.

However my experience playing the game suggests that the biggest thing holding it back is the lack of player numbers - typically less than 20 servers with decent numbers of players on them. When playing on the servers it becomes clear that the split between "good" and "less-experienced" players is around 20% : 80% - nothing unusual about this. However the game itself gives so many advantages to the "good" players:

Map knowledge
familiarity with weapons
familiarity with pickups
fluidity with aiming

Now these are the normal set of advantages that any game gives to "good" players, and that is fine. However in addition the game piles on even more for the "good" players - bunny hopping for high speed, laser jumps, insider knowledge on how to remove bobbing and other distractions, insider knowledge on tweaking visuals for best performance (in most FPS's the majority of these can be done from within the game gui, and only a smaller number of more marginal tweaks have to be done by hacking a config file), and for me the one that really counts is the 999 limit on both health and armour:
If I am in a one-to-one with a newer player, with my health plus armour adding up to 200, then he has some sort of chance of fragging me. However, since I am fairly experienced, he has 100 health and no armour, and I wander around with health+armour kept above 500 all the time - in CTF the simplest thing is to just hop past and ignore him whilst ferrying the flag around, rather than waste time fragging him. Ain't no way he can affect me.

The result: with three or four "good" players, mixed in with 10 "less-experienced" players, the server is unlikely to have two "good" players per side, and games in my experience tend to be balanced perhaps 20%-30% of the time. Newer players get stuck playing a totally different game to the "good" players, making it HARDER for them to learn, and not having a fun time. Think about the names you see in the "long tail" of results - very few hang around long enough to progress and develop, and most drift off the scene.

Now I know we can all think of many times when a new player has shotgun-spammed us to death and recovered the flag just before we capped (grr), and this forum is populated largely by more-experienced players, so I expect my appeal to REMOVE some of the advantages for experienced players to be somewhat controversial

If you want to make the game more "pro", and end up handing even more advantages to experienced players, I think you really run the risk of losing up-and-coming players at even worse rates than at present. For me the priorities would be to decay armour and health faster (particularly armour as new players never pick it up and wander around with zero armour all the time!), and sorting out problems with packet loss and those weird choppy laggy moments (never have them with other FPS's). Oh and autokicking idlers, nothing more irritating than a 16-player server with 9 playing and no-one able to join 'cos you've got seven 666'ers! Oh, and ban that sexist anti-woman guy from the server browser please. And world peace - could that be implemented in Nex 3.0 please - at least as a server-side option?

And I wish you all a peaceful and happy Xmas.

V

[GreEn`mArine]

I am not sure what causes it that many players who play Nexuiz are so unexperienced (and hell, there are really many of those). Maybe it is because it is an open source game which attracts people to play that game (because it is free and doesn't have any impact on their purse anyway) who never played such games before (or played them very little). However, as mentioned beforehand, the game lacks the playerbase. The problem I see about the player base is a) the players for which the game runs well drop out of it because they cannot handle it, they play just "bad" and get bashed and lose interest in further playing the game (this was mentioned by Isle of View) or b) the game gives very bad performance to the people and as such they don't play it (and start playing Warsow ). I know that solving either of these problems is very hard.

The problem of solving problem a) is that there aren't any "trainers" who would introduce the new players to the game (for solving this I would appreciate if C.Brutail and the others continue to finish the tutorial maps, unless I'm misinformed that they're not finished yet) and that the good players try to show more patience when playing against less skilled players.

To solve b) ... well ... either LordHavoc comes up with a miracle-FPS-boost or ... rather not. I appreciate the work of ALL people who work on Nexuiz, but as they do it in their free time (which is limited of course) they cannot really do too much about it, and beside this the number of people who know enough about DP engine and graphics(openGL)-optimisations is very limited. So I see no hope there too soon

[Asraniel]

I'm all for it as long as i dont have to download to versions of nexuiz. The standard version should be able to join the game, it would just be a different game mode.

[divVerent]

If it is too different, I'd say the server browser should by default only show the "same" game, but have an option to show the "other" game too.

[Psychcf]

I have an Idea, if we do have nexuiz pro (which I don't want but...) release it as a mod like instagib

[Shoe]

If it is too different, I'd say the server browser should by default only show the "same" game, but have an option to show the "other" game too.

This is a good idea anyway. It'd be nice to have filters for gametypes (dom/rune/ctf/etc.) when browsing.

[morfar]

Yup, Thats 1 thing in my secret list of things for Pro version. Gamemode must show in serverbrowsers , see warsow

[divVerent]

that again should not be in Pro only, but in regular Nexuiz too.

However, for that we need a font system - the host name field is already quite short. We want a menu system that uses screen pixels and no virtual 640x480 coordinate system (so fonts use screen pixels and don't get scaled), and variable width fonts.

[avirox]

while on a whole this seems like a neat idea, I really don't think it will help bring back (or bring new) north american players in any substantial amount. When nexuiz 1.0 was first released to the public there were tons of NA servers and players but they soon dwindled due to the horrid performance and the even-worse netcode. For some reason the EU nexuiz population seems to have stuck around for a while and they have seen the realization of nexuiz's true potential (with fixed netcode and real bump maps etc).
To be perfectly honest, and this coming from a north american, I think people here would rather play a game with more new elements than a rebirth with some small changes (as is what pro seems to be at the moment). I once suggested in the alientrap channel a kind of expansion pack, featuring some new weapons and game modes (like a class-based game mode even, similar to Team:Nexuiz). It's just a suggestion, but it may seem more appealing to those who already have a bad impression of the game.

[C.Brutail]

I'd realy don't like it to be two separate games. Remeber, what happened to the Quake3 community, netquake3 vs. promode. Not good imho.
I'd rather see it as a mod. But low poly models, CSQC advantages (nmy model, nmy colors, configurable hud, proper and easy to use menu like vote system), these are the things Nexuiz realy lacks, and I think this is the main reason why many ppl turned away from this realy nice game.
About the noob peoples: FPS-es like Nexuiz are almost (if not totally)extinct from the market. All of them bring something new (a bit reality, objective oriented, class based, etc.), pure fun, totaly annihilating deathmatch is in a new gamer's view: old. No suprise, it's called old-school.
Maybe we in EU are not so affected by the US market of PC games.
Nexuiz could be a fucking good game for competition, maybe a resurrection to quake1, with this beautiful grapchics, better performance, and CSQC.
But this needs a little change too: now concentrate a bit less on eye candy, and a bit more on performance (I've heard all the models are gonne be remodelled, to low poly, and that's good.)