Some bad things I noticed about nexuiz and some suggestions.

[esteel]

When I say soft shadows, I mean like FEAR has (they are disabled by default though) and like UT2007 is going to have. I can promise you that anything quake 3 has is NOT soft shadows.

Well its not like Nexuiz shadows are just black like this screenshot shows (its not that great otherwise and its too big to include with img tags..)
http://esteel.planetnexuiz.de/nexuiz/sc ... 000576.jpg
http://esteel.planetnexuiz.de/nexuiz/sc ... 000635.jpg
http://esteel.planetnexuiz.de/nexuiz/sc ... 000689.jpg
But i guess you want better shadows

[003]

No thats not what I mean. Here is a good comparison:



top: soft shadows

bottom: hard shadows (like nexuiz)

[003]

Oh yeah, two other things that I totally forgot to mention.

1. Currently water looks really bad in Nexuiz. It's a flat sheet with a transparent low res texture on it, if you get lucky it might be panning. There are absolutely no physics on fluid surfaces and no degree of reflection what so ever. Nexuiz uses OpenGL 2.0, correct? Surely there can be a simple way to get the water to look a LITTLE nicer, preferably it should have realtime reflections such as in Half Life 2 and FEAR. If physics is impossible because of the engine thats fine, possibly some shader/particle effects could make up for that. If realtime reflection can't be done, then AT LEAST, can't cube maps be used? Or even a generic reflective cube map? Anything would look better than what is currently done for water.

2. It would be killer to implement a graphical map voting system, which could be accessed from the GUI and would pop up by default at the end of rounds so the players could vote for the map they want. And it should be able to called ingame as well. If the admin would like, they could disable it and have a basic rotation instead.

[Shoe]

Both are, again, engine limitations.

I remember discussing nicer water textures before and I think it was a shader issue. Though really the current water texture is just really poor. I'm pretty sure that the water in WoW doesn't use any crazy special effects beyond being an animated texture with a reflection map and it looks a lot better than Nex's.

The GUI map voting has to do with the lack of CSQC support, I believe. The whole menu system could use an overhaul, really.

[003]

Ok I have dropped a bunch of my suggestions and added one or two. Let me sum up everything I have so far. I am only including critical ones:

-The jumpy movement needs to be worked on.

-You can get "stuck" on more complex bsp pretty easily. Not sure if this is the fault of the bsp, or the fault of the game but either way it should be addressed somehow.

-The ingame menus should be able to be clicked and dragged, and work with scroll wheel as well. It has been said that this is an engine limitation and the whole gui system needs a makeover. Whatever it takes, I say. This would make life a lot easier and it's something I always hated about the quake games.

-Improve the water in any ways possible. Anything is better than how it is now.

-There should be a graphical voting system. This probably falls into the category of redoing the gui system. Whatever it takes because it would help a lot of players (me included).

-player models need to be optimized. I just noticed this. Let me elaborate. So far I had only played on servers with only 3-4 people, or on maps where not everybody was visible at once. However I just played a few rounds where a lot of player models were visible and boy it was like somebody tied lead bricks on the fps. I think optimizing them would be a lot of work so it cant be done all at once. My suggestion would be to try and get the default model optimized, and then slowly work on the others. I say you don't have to worry about adding new models, nexuiz has plenty. There are far more popular retail games that have less models than nexuiz.

[Ed]

-The jumpy movement needs to be worked on.

-You can get "stuck" on more complex bsp pretty easily. Not sure if this is the fault of the bsp, or the fault of the game but either way it should be addressed somehow.

-The ingame menus should be able to be clicked and dragged, and work with scroll wheel as well. It has been said that this is an engine limitation and the whole gui system needs a makeover. Whatever it takes, I say. This would make life a lot easier and it's something I always hated about the quake games.

-Improve the water in any ways possible. Anything is better than how it is now.

-There should be a graphical voting system. This probably falls into the category of redoing the gui system. Whatever it takes because it would help a lot of players (me included).

-player models need to be optimized. I just noticed this. Let me elaborate. So far I had only played on servers with only 3-4 people, or on maps where not everybody was visible at once. However I just played a few rounds where a lot of player models were visible and boy it was like somebody tied lead bricks on the fps. I think optimizing them would be a lot of work so it cant be done all at once. My suggestion would be to try and get the default model optimized, and then slowly work on the others. I say you don't have to worry about adding new models, nexuiz has plenty. There are far more popular retail games that have less models than nexuiz.

You've pretty much summed up all accepted weaknesses of Nexuiz. IIRC redesigning the menu system from scratch was suggested a few months ago and someone is doing it. New player models are a nice target and if you're handy with Blender or know someone who is and is willing to GPL their models, it would be a great help.

The soft shadows in FEAR are incomparable with those in UT2007, the FEAR ones are a bit of a hack really whereas the UT2007 ones are done very well. I see it as being something that will be accomplished sometime but right now most peoples machines won't even run all of the current effects.

[003]

I've got another suggestion for optimizing the models. If you can get the default one optimized, then you could add a feature to force the game to only display one model of your choice, so you could force the optimized one.

[Irritant]

It's funny, but in that soft shadow example, I think the hard shadows look better and more like what you see in real life. In fact, Darkplaces shadows are very well done, they look very realistic and don't sap performance too badly.

[003]

Yeah forget I ever suggested that. Soft shadows when done correctly (see UT2007) look really, really good but nexuiz is already pretty demanding with everything enabled, and hard shadows look fine.

But ANOTHER suggestion. I think the things I pointed out in my last two posts are very important and contribute to the fact that nexuiz dosn't have tons of players despite it's free. I think gameplay is great the way it is in 2.2.2 and I think the nature of those issues are such that it would be worth it to postpone other work on nexuiz and only concentrate on those until they are all fixed. I am really serious, nexuiz would really be the best DM game I have ever played if those were fixed.

I really wish I could help with fixing them instead of barking out what needs to be done, but I can't program or model. I am a very experienced beta tester however and I will weed everything out with my nit-picking

[C.Brutail]

I've got another suggestion for optimizing the models. If you can get the default one optimized, then you could add a feature to force the game to only display one model of your choice, so you could force the optimized one.

This is what CSQC is for, but it's buggy yet