Nexuiz in a school environment

[thomaswp]

It is my job to stop the students at my school from playing games. Sorry. I win sometimes, they win sometimes, it is a good game, but not as much fun as a good FPS.

But I want to offset this by having a "fight club" at lunch times, leading in to cooperation on new level designs etc. But to get this one past the rather conservative parents in my area I am going to have to tweak out things like gore and blood and make sure all the characters are non-human etc.

I was hoping that a simple config file would do the business, but cannot find that with a fair bit of looking. I know that gore can be switched off manually in the multi-player setup but I would like to have it unselectable and firmly *off*. I guess I could compile my own version but where to start? I am pretty techy, but I am not keen to go that far.

My aim is to distribute DVDs of the game to the students (we are very rural and bandwidth is narrow and expensive) so if I can get my own settings in to the game so much the better.

I know that the students will *want* gore and blood, but we have to get passed that since one parent kicking up a fuss will kill this stone dead before it gets started. In this area, with these parents this is risky enough as it is. I am likely to get fragged. Any help gratefully accepted.

[FruitieX]

The console variable (cvar) you are looking for is cl_gentle. Setting this to 1 disables all gore effects, and forcing it should be a simple thing from the CSQC (clientside quake C) code. Just search the code for the cvar name and you should find the part where it is written, and from there replace the cvar() check with just a constant. Then compile the clientside code with fteqcc and place it back into the data*.pk3 of course

However this will only work on a server that has this same CSQC code (csprogs.dat, compile with fteqcc from qclib). If the students join an online game with different csprogs, this csprogs will be sent to them and used while they play on the server. If they don't know the cl_gentle cvar, you can just remove the 'disable gore effects' option from the menu, compile menu code and find the line in defaultNexuiz.cfg (inside of the data*.pk3) that probably reads something like: "seta cl_gentle 0" and replace this with "set cl_gentle 1". That means it won't save the option, and it is reset to 0 each time Nexuiz starts.

Just to be sure you can also remove all gib models, and gore textures (browse the models/ and textures/ directories inside of the data pk3, which is just a renamed zip file)



Oh by the way, Nexuiz is pretty much dead. If you wait a month or two there might be a release of the fork, "Xonotic". The community has pretty much moved on to www.xonotic.org now, see you there

[thomaswp]

Thanks. I'll have a think. My plan is to now let the kids decide the game within my criteria. They may have other ideas. I'll keep an eye on your fork too.

[Tei]

Better than removing models, Xonotic will be more happy if you replace the models by a "null.mdl" or something like that. Google for a quake null.mdl.

That way, the game will not get angry at not finding the file, and will not download it again.

[thomaswp]

Thanks. They won't be able to get out to servers since the external proxy blocks anything I have checked. No doubt there will be ways around it though.

Anyway, had a play tonight and after reading the (very short!) FAQ found how easy it was to compile my changes to the code. I can now run nexiuz without gore. I can make a DVD to distribute to the kids now should they want to go down this path.