What nexuiz needs to work on

[Roanoke]

Since the first step to solving a problem is admitting the problem, I decided to delineate where and why nexuiz needs work.

1. Player Models and Textures - The models are woefully unattractive. The textures are low quality, and the models too. If somebody starts making lots of good quality and good texture models (*cough*oblivion*cough*), they should make sure that they have plenty of fullbright areas. Then, these models may be added to HO servers and the BC's, and probably other servers using only fullbright models. Also, somebody should rig Oblivion's fullbright model/s, since atm he seems like the best modeler we have.


2. Fonts - I heard there was talk about integrating TTF support into nexuiz. This would be much better, as then we could write whatever we want in whatever size we want. We could also ditch the images and allow for use of different fonts.


3. Developers - The current developers (div0, samual, etc) have made invaluable contributions. However, they can't support a community aching for 2.5.3. We need to recruit more developers, and most importantly, use redmine to assign tickets to the person who is most qualified for the job.


4. Formal Government - There's a mac mail app somewhere that has an interesting development process. First, a president is elected by the community. The goal of that president is to push the program to the next version. There, he will either be reelected or voted out of office. I think such a system would be beneficial to nexuiz.


5. Officially Sanctioned Stuff - As a seal of quality, it could be a good idea to have certain servers, models, maps and maybe even menu skins officially sanctioned by a certain group. Such objects could put [OS] in their names/server list entries. This would make sure the players know where the game is played as it's meant to be played or meet a certain standard of quality. Nexican would not get such a stamp of approval.


6. Greater Transparency - Throughout the history of nexuiz, many actions have been taken that have meet with widespread backlash. Invariably, they've been taken without consent of the community (or even many devs). For example, the illfonic affair, the jetpack, and the fireball. If more people had been consulted, there would have been much less of a problem with the community. It's important to draw conclusions from these things and not let it happen again. Nexuiz belongs to the community as much as it does to the devs.

These are all just ideas. What do you think about them?

[Flying Steel]

[*]Formal Government - There's a mac mail app somewhere that has an interesting development process. First, a president is elected by the community. The goal of that president is to push the program to the next version. There, he will either be reelected or voted out of office. I think such a system would be beneficial to nexuiz.[/*]

Not fair. The folks who get to make the big decisions are those who do the work. If folks who make none or fewer contributions don't like the direction of those making the most, they can make a fork or a mod and elect someone to manage that. Or learn C or Blender or netradiant and start peddling.

Otherwise you are doing something about on par with this recent licensing of the nexuiz name and site. Making decisions for a game we (collectively minor or non-contributors) didn't make.

Simply put, not everyone in the community deserves equal power, not by a long shot.

[*]Officially Sanctioned Stuff -
. . .
Nexican would not get such a stamp of approval.[/*]
. . .
[*]Greater Transparency - Throughout the history of nexuiz, many actions have been taken that have meet with widespread backlash. Invariably, they've been taken without consent of the community (or even many devs). For example, the illfonic affair, the jetpack, and the fireball.

The jetpack and fireball are official mutators. They ship with the game. What makes Nexican more "unofficial" than the numerous Minstagib servers? Who says the jetpack or fireball are more imbalanced than the minstanex?

[Roanoke]

Not fair. The folks who get to make the big decisions are those who do the work. If folks who make none or fewer contributions don't like the direction of those making the most, they can make a fork or a mod and elect someone to manage that. Or learn C or Blender or netradiant and start peddling.

Otherwise you are doing something about on par with this recent licensing of the nexuiz name and site. Making decisions for a game we (collectively minor or non-contributors) didn't make.

Simply put, not everyone in the community deserves equal power, not by a long shot.

Point taken.

The jetpack and fireball are official mutators. They ship with the game. What makes Nexican more "unofficial" than the numerous Minstagib servers? Who says the jetpack or fireball are more imbalanced than the minstanex?

The fireball is NOT a mutator. It, along with the jetpack, were added into the game, affecting the balance, without the community knowing (why? were the devs afraid they would be rejected?). With minstanex, everybody is on the same level. You can frag in one shot, but so can they. It's balanced in the same respect that weapon arena is balanced. On nexican, the way the game is played is skewed out of recognition. The balance settings are indecent. Some of the allowed models are impossible to hit. The MG is replaced by the rifle on all maps. This is certainly different than the minstagib servers.

[cortez]

The fireball is NOT a mutator. It, along with the jetpack, were added into the game, affecting the balance, without the community knowing (why? were the devs afraid they would be rejected?). With minstanex, everybody is on the same level. You can frag in one shot, but so can they. It's balanced in the same respect that weapon arena is balanced. On nexican, the way the game is played is skewed out of recognition. The balance settings are indecent. Some of the allowed models are impossible to hit. The MG is replaced by the rifle on all maps. This is certainly different than the minstagib servers.

you mix there something up. you need to add the fireball on maps and the only map where its done is my downward map. If you get the fireball on maps, where the fireball isnt the standart weapon its done by the server settings. same goes for the halc and rifle AND there where threads about it. The minstanex is only avaible in the minstamutator.

And while are you talking about the models and textures. try to find someone who redoes all the models and textures. They are hard to find!

[Lee_Stricklin]

Since the first step to solving a problem is admitting the problem, I decided to delineate where and why nexuiz needs work.

1. Player Models and Textures - The models are woefully unattractive. The textures are low quality, and the models too. If somebody starts making lots of good quality and good texture models (*cough*oblivion*cough*), they should make sure that they have plenty of fullbright areas. Then, these models may be added to HO servers and the BC's, and probably other servers using only fullbright models. Also, somebody should rig Oblivion's fullbright model/s, since atm he seems like the best modeler we have.


2. Fonts - I heard there was talk about integrating TTF support into nexuiz. This would be much better, as then we could write whatever we want in whatever size we want. We could also ditch the images and allow for use of different fonts.


3. Developers - The current developers (div0, samual, etc) have made invaluable contributions. However, they can't support a community aching for 2.5.3. We need to recruit more developers, and most importantly, use redmine to assign tickets to the person who is most qualified for the job.


4. Formal Government - There's a mac mail app somewhere that has an interesting development process. First, a president is elected by the community. The goal of that president is to push the program to the next version. There, he will either be reelected or voted out of office. I think such a system would be beneficial to nexuiz.


5. Officially Sanctioned Stuff - As a seal of quality, it could be a good idea to have certain servers, models, maps and maybe even menu skins officially sanctioned by a certain group. Such objects could put [OS] in their names/server list entries. This would make sure the players know where the game is played as it's meant to be played or meet a certain standard of quality. Nexican would not get such a stamp of approval.


6. Greater Transparency - Throughout the history of nexuiz, many actions have been taken that have meet with widespread backlash. Invariably, they've been taken without consent of the community (or even many devs). For example, the illfonic affair, the jetpack, and the fireball. If more people had been consulted, there would have been much less of a problem with the community. It's important to draw conclusions from these things and not let it happen again. Nexuiz belongs to the community as much as it does to the devs.

These are all just ideas. What do you think about them?

Thank you for volunteering XD THE biggest fix needed right now is weapon balance (@#$#N' MACHINE GUN!) followed by a fix for the shader glitch, then character animations (can't tell what direction an enemy is aiming at right now), then character models, then textures (most of them are really good in my opinion, but there's a few that need work), and finally some engine optimisations so that you don't need a 10 grand system (I'm using a 3GHZ Phenom II X4 black edition and 1gig big 256 bit Geforce 9800GTX and can't max the game at a frame rate higher than 46) to max the game. Remember that this is a FOSS project, if your up to it you can make optimisations where you see fit, but you would be doing that on your own free time. If I was capable of it, I would help out. Actually now that I think about it, if I were to re-do some textures, would it be possible for someone to get them to load into the game? I tried a simple up-rez just to see if the game would load them correctly, but I screwed up my copy of the game trying it.

[Flying Steel]

The jetpack and fireball are official mutators. They ship with the game. What makes Nexican more "unofficial" than the numerous Minstagib servers? Who says the jetpack or fireball are more imbalanced than the minstanex?

The fireball is NOT a mutator. It, along with the jetpack, were added into the game, affecting the balance, without the community knowing (why? were the devs afraid they would be rejected?). With minstanex, everybody is on the same level. You can frag in one shot, but so can they. It's balanced in the same respect that weapon arena is balanced. On nexican, the way the game is played is skewed out of recognition. The balance settings are indecent. Some of the allowed models are impossible to hit. The MG is replaced by the rifle on all maps. This is certainly different than the minstagib servers.

The fireball and jetpack appear no where in default nexuiz. You have to turn them on in the mutators menu. Thus they are mutators, and don't affect default balance.

The minstanex is given to all players when it is toggled on in the mutators menu. The jetpack is given to all players when it is toggled on in the mutators menu. There is no difference.

The graphical player models do not affect the collision geometry. All targets are the same size, as far as their hit-boxes. Granted, smaller, darkly colored player models are harder to see-- that's something that might need fixing in default.

The current default weapon balance is considered worse than indecent by most in the community, specifically because of the MG.

[parasti]

character animations (can't tell what direction an enemy is aiming at right now)

Word. How about we extend this list a bit:

• Model aiming direction
• Simultaneous run and fire animations
• Sideways crouching
• Swimming animations?

From what I can tell, this is not only a job for an animator but actually needs changes in QC (hopefully none in the engine), so it would have to be a coordinated effort between somebody who knows the code and somebody who can do animations.

[Roanoke]

you mix there something up. you need to add the fireball on maps and the only map where its done is my downward map. If you get the fireball on maps, where the fireball isnt the standart weapon its done by the server settings. same goes for the halc and rifle AND there where threads about it. The minstanex is only avaible in the minstamutator.

Sorry, I don't understand.

Thank you for volunteering XD THE biggest fix needed right now is weapon balance (@#$#N' MACHINE GUN!) followed by a fix for the shader glitch, then character animations (can't tell what direction an enemy is aiming at right now), then character models, then textures (most of them are really good in my opinion, but there's a few that need work), and finally some engine optimisations so that you don't need a 10 grand system (I'm using a 3GHZ Phenom II X4 black edition and 1gig big 256 bit Geforce 9800GTX and can't max the game at a frame rate higher than 46) to max the game. Remember that this is a FOSS project, if your up to it you can make optimisations where you see fit, but you would be doing that on your own free time. If I was capable of it, I would help out. Actually now that I think about it, if I were to re-do some textures, would it be possible for someone to get them to load into the game? I tried a simple up-rez just to see if the game would load them correctly, but I screwed up my copy of the game trying it.

I agree, weapon balance is definitely lacking. So is performance.

The fireball and jetpack appear no where in default nexuiz. You have to turn them on in the mutators menu. Thus they are mutators, and don't affect default balance.

So you're saying that if I made a map with fireball and tried to play it, I would have to turn on a mutator to use fireball?

The graphical player models do not affect the collision geometry. All targets are the same size, as far as their hit-boxes. Granted, smaller, darkly colored player models are harder to see-- that's something that might need fixing in default.

I understand that. However, what's harder to notice and hit - a small model, or Mulder? The code doesn't matter, humans can only shoot at what they see. Unless you're using DSN, in which case it's all fine because models are blocks.

The current default weapon balance is considered worse than indecent by most in the community, specifically because of the MG.

Let's put it this way: for current balance b, nexican balance function is f(b)=b-|5b|. Nexican doesn't solve any problems. It's not better than default balance by any means.

[Flying Steel]

So you're saying that if I made a map with fireball and tried to play it, I would have to turn on a mutator to use fireball?

I don't think so, but then you have gone a step or two further and made user-created content in the form of that map, which isn't an official part of the game. Either way, the fireball is at this moment, slated to be removed from either from the arsenal CFG file or maybe the game entirely (like the tag seeker was). I believe the same goes for the HLAC. Ask Samual, he's doing the next official weapon balance for Nexuiz.

I understand that. However, what's harder to notice and hit - a small model, or Mulder? The code doesn't matter, humans can only shoot at what they see. Unless you're using DSN, in which case it's all fine because models are blocks.

Correct, but like I said, that's a problem with official Nexuiz's content, individual servers shouldn't be penalized with a lower rating for using the game out of the box. That's a problem with the game, not the server settings.

Let's put it this way: for current balance b, nexican balance function is f(b)=b-|5b|. Nexican doesn't solve any problems. It's not better than default balance by any means.

But it isn't worse than minsta, as far as breaking the game, last I checked. IIRC the main difference is it has jetpack enabled.


One last thing about jetpack and fireball (as well as hook and HLAC) though. Feature-wise, there's nothing wrong with these things from any perspective. They are just balanced to be too strong. The jetpack and grapple hook wouldn't break default if they were not more effective than the laser- because maps are already balanced for laser movement. Fireball's 'burn' effect isn't anything special in a game with so many splash damage weapons in the first place. The problem with the fireball is it is just way too powerful when it finally hits a wall. Huge radius spews lethal damage all 'round.

[Roanoke]

I understand that. However, what's harder to notice and hit - a small model, or Mulder? The code doesn't matter, humans can only shoot at what they see. Unless you're using DSN, in which case it's all fine because models are blocks.

Correct, but like I said, that's a problem with official Nexuiz's content, individual servers shouldn't be penalized with a lower rating for using the game out of the box. That's a problem with the game, not the server settings.

You don't understand. Nexican allows *custom models* that are smaller than shipped models.

But it isn't worse than minsta, as far as breaking the game, last I checked. IIRC the main difference is it has jetpack enabled.

It is worse than minsta, because in minsta everybody is equipped identically.

One last thing about jetpack and fireball (as well as hook and HLAC) though. Feature-wise, there's nothing wrong with these things from any perspective. They are just balanced to be too strong. The jetpack and grapple hook wouldn't break default if they were not more effective than the laser- because maps are already balanced for laser movement. Fireball's 'burn' effect isn't anything special in a game with so many splash damage weapons in the first place. The problem with the fireball is it is just way too powerful when it finally hits a wall. Huge radius spews lethal damage all 'round.

That's exactly the problem. Weapon balancing is not done correctly.