top 10 things that would make nexuiz complete.

[rufsketch1]

Nexuiz a freaking wonderfully advanced game, especially the parallax mapping. it's a true representation of what free software is capable of in the right hands. however, it's strong in places and weak in places at the same time, it can sort of ruin the experience. this is a list of things that i think would make nexuiz an even more graphically advanced game than it is now, as well as attract more artists to work on the game. i realize that what i'm suggesting is no easy task, but maybe a good goal for nexuiz 2.5?

1.reflection and refraction. for a game so technically advanced, it's a little sad to see such disappointing water effects. and i'm sure many of the weapons would look much better if they had some ability to reflect their surroundings.

2. animated textures. not just for the water effects, they'd make for some great explosion and smoke trail effects as well. because you would no longer have to rotate particles to make the smoke seem dynamic, you can make the bottom of particle texture darker than the top, to give a a great illusion of thickness. as shown below in an image i created using anim8or (free 3d animation program).

. that is made of one rocket object, and a particle trail of flat transparency maps.

3. radiosity. this is something extremely expensive to compute. however, i thought of a great method to fake it quickly and inexpensively. i'm surprised it's never been used before.. if you can incorporate reflections, you can blur the reflection a huge amount, and get a radiosity effect. for those who don't know, radiosity simulates light bouncing off of surfaces and onto other surfaces, thus if you put a whit ball ear a green wall, the white part facing the wall takes on a greenish color.

obviously this isn't top priority, but it would look pretty freakingsweet, you'll be hearing alot about it in other games soon enough.

4. Relative physics (inertia). this shouldn't be too hard to incorporate at all. i can see how the development team might be iffy about this one, so many people are used to playing nexuiz without it, you cant just change the behavior of the game. well, i think it would be fair to allow the user to choose if they prefer to play with or without inertia, it's not like one player will have the edge over another for having inertia, it just lets people be more comfortable with the game environment.

5. dynamic bloom (aka fake hdrl). this shouldn't be too difficult, have the bloom intensity adjust according to how bright the overall environment is, cheap inexpensive way to simulate hdrl.

6. more widely used model format. i'd love to help devlop for this game (i'm an artist as well as a 3D animator), but i the very thought of having to install and learn 9 different programs to create and animate a character model terrifies me, and god knows this game needs new character models. maybe make it more compatible with blender. my dream would be to make it more compatible with anim8or, but you dont have too large a userbase there. haha.

7. motion blur. alright not at all important, but still cool .

8. fullbright off! for gods sake, let it be up to the player if they want to turn full bright off on a server that has fullbright on by default. fullbright looks unbelievably ugly, especially with bloom enabled, it's really inconsiderate to mandate fullbright to those of us who are graphics junkies.

9. support for voice chat?

10. a better way to zoom, the current way seems to keep the mouse at the same sensitivity as if it weren't zoomed. this turns a mouse acceleration of 2 pixels into a mouse accelertion of 10 pixels when zoomed, absolutely terrible for using the nex unless you have an uber dpi mouse (i do, but not everyone else does).

[ai]

10. a better way to zoom, the current way seems to keep the mouse at the same sensitivity as if it weren't zoomed. this turns a mouse acceleration of 2 pixels into a mouse accelertion of 10 pixels when zoomed, absolutely terrible for using the nex unless you have an uber dpi mouse (i do, but not everyone else does).

Here's a script that Morfar wrote:

Code: Select all

// zoom script
set fov_orginal $fov
set fov_zoomvalue 50
set fov_sensorginal $sensitivity
set fov_sens 1.2
alias "+fov_zoom" "fov $fov_zoomvalue ; sensitivity $fov_sens"
alias "-fov_zoom" "fov $fov_orginal ; sensitivity $fov_sensorginal"

alias zoom_toggle "zoom_on"
alias zoom_on "fov $fov_zoomvalue ; sensitivity $fov_sens ; alias zoom_toggle zoom_off"
alias zoom_off "fov $fov_orginal ; sensitivity $fov_sensorginal ; alias zoom_toggle zoom_on"

bind mouse3 "+fov_zoom" // zoom while pressing
bind x "zoom_toggle" // zoom toggle

That zooms and changes the sensitivity. But yeah, I agree that it should be customizable from the meny, or already implemented somehow. Though this zoom script does not apply to the secondary fire, it's a seperate zoom thingie. Put it in autoexec.cfg.

And now I'm not a game developer so I cannot say what you're suggesting is good or not But nice to see someone taking interest in this.

[Vermeulen]

1.reflection and refraction. for a game so technically advanced, it's a little sad to see such disappointing water effects. and i'm sure many of the weapons would look much better if they had some ability to reflect their surroundings.

What would be the point? I think there might be a single level with water, thats it. Maybe better slime/lava effects would be good, but even then it's so rare ingame it doesn't make sense to focus on it.

4. Relative physics (inertia). this shouldn't be too hard to incorporate at all. i can see how the development team might be iffy about this one, so many people are used to playing nexuiz without it, you cant just change the behavior of the game. well, i think it would be fair to allow the user to choose if they prefer to play with or without inertia, it's not like one player will have the edge over another for having inertia, it just lets people be more comfortable with the game environment.

It's actually not easy to do. IF you mean ragdoll and IK and such, it requires client side gamecode done, and we can't use any of the librarys out there

5. dynamic bloom (aka fake hdrl). this shouldn't be too difficult, have the bloom intensity adjust according to how bright the overall environment is, cheap inexpensive way to simulate hdrl.

Don't we already have that?

6. more widely used model format. i'd love to help devlop for this game (i'm an artist as well as a 3D animator), but i the very thought of having to install and learn 9 different programs to create and animate a character model terrifies me, and god knows this game needs new character models. maybe make it more compatible with blender. my dream would be to make it more compatible with anim8or, but you dont have too large a userbase there. haha.

Yeah this a major problem, it uses way too many different model formats (zym, md3, mdl).
Zym, the main format, has a horrible compiling process and uses SMD files, most artists hate dealing with it. For Zymotic uses md3, or we might switch to md5

9. support for voice chat?

We wouldn't be able to use any librarys or anything like that, because it needs to be GPL. So I don't think we could ever get voice chat working

[tChr]

4. Relative physics (inertia). this shouldn't be too hard to incorporate at all. i can see how the development team might be iffy about this one, so many people are used to playing nexuiz without it, you cant just change the behavior of the game. well, i think it would be fair to allow the user to choose if they prefer to play with or without inertia, it's not like one player will have the edge over another for having inertia, it just lets people be more comfortable with the game environment.

If you are thinking about newtonian behavior.. I've also thought about this. It would be awesome if i.e the rocket speed was calculated from the player speed, not relative to the ground. But it would change the gameplay a lot Especially on like greatwall, but i think it would be for the better. should be tested.

[rufsketch1]

1.reflection and refraction. for a game so technically advanced, it's a little sad to see such disappointing water effects. and i'm sure many of the weapons would look much better if they had some ability to reflect their surroundings.

What would be the point? I think there might be a single level with water, thats it. Maybe better slime/lava effects would be good, but even then it's so rare ingame it doesn't make sense to focus on it.

i think you're looking at it backwards. if water effects were more advanced, then there would be more levels created that wouldn't be afraid of using it (no one wants to bring their level down a notch because something looks lame). and lets face it, water can create for some pretty interesting game strategies.

4. Relative physics (inertia). this shouldn't be too hard to incorporate at all. i can see how the development team might be iffy about this one, so many people are used to playing nexuiz without it, you cant just change the behavior of the game. well, i think it would be fair to allow the user to choose if they prefer to play with or without inertia, it's not like one player will have the edge over another for having inertia, it just lets people be more comfortable with the game environment.

It's actually not easy to do. IF you mean ragdoll and IK and such, it requires client side gamecode done, and we can't use any of the librarys out there

no no. first of all i don't see how IK would ever be useful in a first person shooter, and ragdoll would look cool, but that isn't what i mean. the guy below you understood what i meant, sorry if i wasn't being clear. but basically, imagine you're launched off of a speed thingy, and you shoot a rocket at an enemy in the meantime. currently, nexuiz is set so that you actually outrun your rocket, and this isn't physically accurate. it's a simple featur to incorporate because you simply take the force in each direction of the rocket, and add the forces in each direction of the player to it, and you have relative physics.

5. dynamic bloom (aka fake hdrl). this shouldn't be too difficult, have the bloom intensity adjust according to how bright the overall environment is, cheap inexpensive way to simulate hdrl.

Don't we already have that?

no, all you have is bloom i think. i haven't been able to find a dynamic bloom option anywhere, one that simulates how the eye adjusts to light.

6. more widely used model format. i'd love to help devlop for this game (i'm an artist as well as a 3D animator), but i the very thought of having to install and learn 9 different programs to create and animate a character model terrifies me, and god knows this game needs new character models. maybe make it more compatible with blender. my dream would be to make it more compatible with anim8or, but you dont have too large a userbase there. haha.

Yeah this a major problem, it uses way too many different model formats (zym, md3, mdl).
Zym, the main format, has a horrible compiling process and uses SMD files, most artists hate dealing with it. For Zymotic uses md3, or we might switch to md5

well, something certainly needs to be done about the nexuiz format. a comprehensive howto would certainly be nice. it's a shame to see a program with such graphical potential and nowhere near enough artists to make use of it.

9. support for voice chat?

We wouldn't be able to use any librarys or anything like that, because it needs to be GPL. So I don't think we could ever get voice chat working

ummm, you can't make your own code?? i'm a very novice programmer, but shouldn't it be as simple as using some sound libraries to save the sound in RAM, transfer the sound file and play it on someone else's machine? obviously there would be faster ways for streaming the sound, but that might be more difficult to incorporate, where as with this method you could treat the sound in the same manner you would treat the sound of a weapon firing.

[tChr]

ummm, you can't make your own code?? i'm a very novice programmer, but shouldn't it be as simple as using some sound libraries to save the sound in RAM, transfer the sound file and play it on someone else's machine? obviously there would be faster ways for streaming the sound, but that might be more difficult to incorporate, where as with this method you could treat the sound in the same manner you would treat the sound of a weapon firing.

Most of that kind of handling is done server side, forone, and secondly.. your idea, although.. interesitng would be waaaaaay laggy. Easier to use third-part voice chat systems Introducing a way for the game to transfer data directly from one client to another also has security issues.

[Psychcf]

9. support for voice chat?

We wouldn't be able to use any librarys or anything like that, because it needs to be GPL. So I don't think we could ever get voice chat working

ummm, you can't make your own code?? i'm a very novice programmer, but shouldn't it be as simple as using some sound libraries to save the sound in RAM, transfer the sound file and play it on someone else's machine? obviously there would be faster ways for streaming the sound, but that might be more difficult to incorporate, where as with this method you could treat the sound in the same manner you would treat the sound of a weapon firing.

I'm sure there's an open source push to chat program somewhere out there that we can use. Not that hard (by voice chat I'm thinking like the voice chat in quake 4)

[rufsketch1]

well, vocie chat is 3rd lowest priority (next to radiosity and motion blur). top of the list is animated textures, reflection/refraction, and Newtonian physics. and of course a definitive change for the easier to the model format, and a definite documented how to. with plenty of pictures and diagrams, artists <3 those .

[divVerent]

I'm against true Newtonian physics for weapons because it's just too hard to control. A major element is shooting while strafing - which would get pratically lost then.

However, jumping should use inertia (does it already? Need to try that on space-fun).

As for weapons, I had the idea of making weapon speed relative to the player, but adding an "auto adjustment" that makes the rocket still fly to the crosshair (so basically the speed is relative to the player, but the direction is absolute). However, that's not always possible to do, so in extreme cases, I'd give priority to the direction and use a wrong speed then. But it would certainly fix shooting rockets downwards while on the bluesky jump pad, or shooting rockets while running around fast on greatwall.

If you want to try "more realistic" projectile inertial, try playing Tribes 2. It's a bit less severe there because Tribes 2 has much slower players relative to the projectiles.

[rufsketch1]

I'm against true Newtonian physics for weapons because it's just too hard to control. A major element is shooting while strafing - which would get pratically lost then.

However, jumping should use inertia (does it already? Need to try that on space-fun).

As for weapons, I had the idea of making weapon speed relative to the player, but adding an "auto adjustment" that makes the rocket still fly to the crosshair (so basically the speed is relative to the player, but the direction is absolute). However, that's not always possible to do, so in extreme cases, I'd give priority to the direction and use a wrong speed then. But it would certainly fix shooting rockets downwards while on the bluesky jump pad, or shooting rockets while running around fast on greatwall.

If you want to try "more realistic" projectile inertial, try playing Tribes 2. It's a bit less severe there because Tribes 2 has much slower players relative to the projectiles.

well, my whole idea about this was to let the player choose which they're more comfortable with. i personally dont like the fact that i can't shoot someone in midair while we're both faling without having to point downwards, it's just unrealistic.