I have many suggestions

[GlitchMaster]

I know a little about programming and the various different types of shaders and rendering effects, but I have several ideas that might help nexuiz look or perform much better. Yes, I do have way too much time on my hands. I was bored when I made these.

- Realtime world lighting should be handled like unified lighting and shadowing; the static lights (lights that don't move/flicker/whatever) that affect static objects (Objects that don't move. Floors, walls, etc) should be rendered using lightmaps (which should always be on). Only the models and dynamic objects (moving objects) should be
affected by this setting. This will speed nexuiz up quite a bit with RWL on. What would be even better is if the lightmaps could be raytraced, much like the source engine (the 4 year old engine that still looks good because of this!). The problem with these ideas is the fact that, although it speeds the game up, how would you handle normal mapping, offset mapping, and relief mapping? I guess if you can use those settings without RWL on, it would be possible, but then again that leads me to my second point.

- Relief mapping is an alternative, but more expensive, shader to offset mapping. Relief mapping Has the ability to let objects shadow themselves. This is just a suggestion, but why doesn't the darkplaces engine let relief mapping do this? When I turn on relief mapping, the textures look only slightly less deep than they were with offset mapping on by itself. No extra shadows. Nothing.
- Every texture for the stock maps should make use of the different types of mapping nexuiz provides. This is just sad that the developers, or even anybody who knows how to do it won't do the last few textures. I haven't been with the nexuiz community long, so I have no idea how you handle your development, but please finish the job.

- Water. The main problem I have with the darkplace engine's water is the fact that you can only turn on refraction and surface animation when you turn on reflection. Please make them seperate.

- I don't know whether or not the engine can already handle it and you just choose not to use it, but 3d skyboxes would be nice to have. This way you can build it using brushes, and not have to learn how to texture it. And then there's the fact that the orientation of the skybox wouldn't be static. And it would make it seem more realistic. For optimization purposes, you should be able to turn this off and have it replaced with a 2d skybox.

There are also several bugs that I have found, although you probably already know them.

- In ruiner, if you stand in the water and look down, you can see your feet in the water. I don't mean your reflection, but you can actually see your feet. This is most likely has to be a bug with the refraction.

- Dynamic lighting can also become buggy in several situations. When you use a weapon like the laser, sometimes the lights will only light up the polygon it hit, and not carry over into the other ones surrounding it well. Especially when a wall curves this can be very apparant.

- Another bug has to do with the decals. When you rocket the edge of a wall, sometimes a piece of the decal will hang off. Decals also, like the lights, only decal a single polygon when the decal is larger than that polygon.

Now for gameplay changes.

- The Crylink's sound should be changed. Although it fits perfectly with the weapon, it sounds really weak. This, along with the fact that the crylink pushes enemies too much to get more than two or three shots into someone, I believe are the main reasons that people don't use the Crylink. In general it just doesn't have a good feel. (but the sound should help a lot depending on what you give it.) Just please don't abandon the idea of the crylink.

- Silver City is my favorite map, and I liked Silver City a lot more when It didn't have any fog. It actually looked silver. I know that fog is supposed to improve your performance, but it in reality it only is meant to disguise a short draw distance. The only other suggestion I can give for this map is if the skybox was changed to a futuristic city, but the level itself would be floating in the air, or something. Mountains don't work well with this level. It just doesn't go with the color scheme. If you can, A 3d skybox would be nice.

I know that I have just given the team a lot of things to do (if they choose to do it) and asking them to do it all would be impossible. However the first, third, and fourth suggestions I believe are the most important, besides the bugs.

[C.Brutail]

"skybox was changed to a futuristic city"

FWY Silvercity had a totally black sky in Nexuiz 1.0 ...

Missing shader

[GlitchMaster]

Well I guess that mountains are better than nothing at all

[KillaGrunt]

I agree with you glitchmaster,about silvercity ofcourse! i Love it!!!!!