http://www.alientrap.org/devwiki/index.php?n=Nexuiz.Pro

Nexuiz Pro is currently being developed for a release in the near future. Like the wiki says, the goal of Nexuiz Pro version is to make a condensed Nexuiz release, focusing on competition style movement, weapons, level design / item placement, deathmatch, and performance speed, and therefor attract the North American pro gaming community.
It will be a seperate download, but most of the changes will be done to the main Nexuiz SVN as just options (such as the trick jumps).
Any thoughts?

hmm..
i dunno yet,, I'll ket you know ehn I've though about it.. I'm not familiar with the NA pro gaming community.. what is to be achieved by this instead of changing the defaults in nex? will these changes make the level of entry for the game higher, so that they are not smart to include in the stn version? Is that the general idea of the control changes?

swiching MG and SG? well.. MG in Nexuiz, with a lil practice is very very effective.. iirc its more dmg/sec than any other weapon.. thats a weird starting weapon.

Edit: have you thaht about the risks of splitting up an allready very small community?

I think we should have a pro mode, no question. I think the demand is there and I guess even "normal" people would welcome a change from time to time.

I'm not sure either if shipping it as a different build is the best option we have. Download size doesn't really matter IMO - I think we could live very well with an official "pro" mod that lives alongside the normal "data" dir.

tChr wrote:have you thaht about the risks of splitting up an allready very small community?

Thats a really good point that div0 also made, but I don't think this will be a problem. The point is to attract new players looking for something that isn't in the normal Nexuiz version, so I don't think it will take players away from normal Nexuiz.

And I am not sure about making it standalone. On one hand, people might not download it because of their experience with normal nexuiz. And on the other hand, there might not be as much different content to warrent a new standalone release, so I guess we will have to wait to see how much gets changed before making a decision on that.

I like this idea.

What exactly makes a game more 'pro gaming'? You could be a professional in being Klikety if you wanted and there would not suddenly be enormous demand for a pro gaming version of Klikety so why should it be for Nexuiz? I don't see how this should be a regional variation either.

"professional" just equates to handicaps and cheats. I'd say leave them at Warsow and Severity and let the fair players play the game.

Ed wrote:What exactly makes a game more 'pro gaming'? You could be a professional in being Klikety if you wanted and there would not suddenly be enormous demand for a pro gaming version of Klikety so why should it be for Nexuiz? I don't see how this should be a regional variation either.

what makes a deathmatch game more 'pro gaming' is making it more conventional. Conventional movement, weapons, and levels, so it's easy for people used to Quake3/Unreal to play it and be good at it.

It's not a regional thing, I just find that Nexuiz is not popular in North America and I think this would be a good way for it to be. If it does get released, it probably would still be more popular in Europe like normal Nexuiz, but I think we should focus on getting new players from different regions. In the past it was hard for a non-european player to start because lack of good servers, so if this is released focusing on that we could keep more players.

With Nexuiz Pro, why would anyone play vanilla Nexuiz?
Did the idea to start with the MG come from Q3?
What is the difference between a dodge and a strafe?
Will/Would Nexuiz Pro see improvements in the netcode?
What is dm_solvet?
Do we really want more North Americans playing Nexuiz? I'm just not yet convinced that Nexuiz Pro will be for the greater good of the game.

What's wrong with North American players? I'm from the US and get annoyed by how the servers with decent ping times around here are always empty.

I really don't know what all the huff is about. Epic retooled the UT franchise significantly in order to make Unreal Championship, which share common features but are aimed at different play styles. It seems like people are getting upset about something that would do nothing wrong but cater to more players who prefer a different style.

Call me crazy, but I think that this is not necessary. I just don't really see the point of a "Pro" version. (What are we, windows? ) The regular game is excellent. It's simple, and fun. If you do want to add those features like walljumps and minor things, put them in the official release. I know that you are just trying to make it appeal to a different region, but most of the time it's just the fact that nobody really knows about it. If you post something about it to a general site that most Americans go on, I'm sure it'll grab attention.

A popular site that I hate alot, but seems to work when it comes to advertising is myspace.com. I know, it's butt ugly and has bad HTML markup, but there are so many things on there. The FPSes you buy have an advantage; they have advertising, and you can see it in stores. If we get enough "friends" added to it, the word would spread. Mabie also if we try to get a review on gamespot.com, we could get some more people on.

I don't know what you mean by the "North American pro gaming community". I'm a big fan of FPSes, and I play nexuiz just as much as I play my other games. I think I sort of understand by the feel of a pro gamer game, but it's still a bit sketchy to me, pardon my misconceptions.

Oh yeah, there are some north American servers that are good. The one thing that we probably should have is one hosted in California, but I host my own here in new york.

But I do however like the extra "tricks", you should add those to the normal release.

I like the initiative. I have been waiting for it ;O
But I'd like Pro to be the Normal version... Or if the developers can fix bugs in both Pro and Normal Nexuiz at the same time it's ok I guess. But why remove so many maps?

ooh found a really nice resource for a whole bunch of tricks, if you want to really take off on it make up some extra ones that are "nexuiz exclusive"

http://www.warsow.net/wiki/index.php?title=Movement

yay warsow

also USA isn't just only pro gaming. It's also big in eastern europe too

mmmmm yeah but we have the MLG, and arena on G4, and something else on spike, then we have a whole bunch of video gaming awards shows. (you probably don't know what these channels are if you aren't in the states) I don't know if you have something similar to this/take it as offense that the US frags better (which is not what I think)

Professional gaming is very popular in Europe as well. In Sweden, Germany, etc. And its HUGE in Asia. Its sad that ping separates America, Europe and Asia. I'd like global gigabit fiber, uniting the world!!

I read through the mentioned changes on the page and I can say that I am not really fond of or convinced of what is proposed there.

What I can agree with is, that there needs to be a promode mod. However, I think am talking for the people who already actively play Nexuiz the "competitive" way @ Nexuiz ladder(s). Up to now I don't think there's any item-misplacement ... probably for SOME maps, e.g. runningman_1on1remix where armor and health are too close to each other, and some minor other issues (on other maps as well), but nothing crucial.

I think that the movement is already good enough for now. It was in a very basic shape at the beginning (Nexuiz v1.0) but has evolved to be a nice thing (it is fast, and aircontrol gives a lot of mobility to the players. What I would propose is to introduce such "progaming"-related things step by step and not so many at once as mentioned on the page.

In my opinion, what Nexuiz misses in order to be a competitive game is majorly a list of things which wouldn't even need to be separated into a mod. These are things such as a proper hud with "show ammo of all weapons", etc....all this CSQC stuff. Beside this the netcode is buggy, choppy and extremely vulnerable to small connection-problems. Things like clientside movement are a CRUCIAL thing for competitive gaming as well, but as it is a setting the ladders already set it to the correct value.

Anyway, to draw a conclusion, most of the things shouldn't be separated into a new nexuiz mod. However there should be one which could probably also alter the menu a bit to acostumize settings such as bobbing, v_pitch and all the other hidden things usual players don't know about. And btw, a point like "make weapons fire from the crosshair/center instead of the weapon's origin" would perfectly fit for such a mod, as it is really a annoying thing for "progamers".

Things that would be nice to have in vanilla nexuiz and that have to do with "promode":
- a better demo-code .. be able to create server demos (multiview demos), let demos play more fluently
- make spectating more fluently
- a better hud with more information (CSQC)
- G A M E P A S S W O R D ! ! ! ONEELEVEN
- Nexgun zoom to be clientside, not serverside
- simple items
- (colored) fullbrightskins to be done clientside. not serverside
- LOD for the playermodels
- player statistic intermission at the end of the map
- a graphical voting system for the maps or other settings
- a graphical server admin interface

The points mentioned above are all important for the game to become competitive, as most of these features are expected to exist by all the people who come from other competitive games such as Quake

Things that should be separated into a mod:
- let weapons shoot from the center/crosshair
- include a low poly enemy model to save FPS
- include colored fullbright skins for teamplay (for 1on1 there are already the green/red/orange ones I once did)

CTF fbskins should be in the main game too IMHO... and the lowpoly models... maybe too

So... Nexuiz Pro could actually be normal Nexuiz with altered defaults and another map selection... but it would be perfectly compatible with normal Nexuiz then and NOT split the community.

However, both should have a way to distinguish between each other in the server browser.

Maybe maps should then be left out of Nexuiz Pro to make it smaller - Nexuiz Pro users would then autodownload them if needed.

GreEn`mArine wrote:
Beside this the netcode is buggy, choppy and extremely vulnerable to small connection-problems.

Thanx GreEn, it really was about time somebody whose words are listened to mentioned that. In order to get more players, this one should be the most urgent thing to be fixed.

I'm already gettin' used to answers like "for me it works perfectly" wtf

First of all the developers do all this work for free, and the results are greatly appreciated. In return they should be free to take the game in whichever direction they wish.

However my experience playing the game suggests that the biggest thing holding it back is the lack of player numbers - typically less than 20 servers with decent numbers of players on them. When playing on the servers it becomes clear that the split between "good" and "less-experienced" players is around 20% : 80% - nothing unusual about this. However the game itself gives so many advantages to the "good" players:

Map knowledge
familiarity with weapons
familiarity with pickups
fluidity with aiming

Now these are the normal set of advantages that any game gives to "good" players, and that is fine. However in addition the game piles on even more for the "good" players - bunny hopping for high speed, laser jumps, insider knowledge on how to remove bobbing and other distractions, insider knowledge on tweaking visuals for best performance (in most FPS's the majority of these can be done from within the game gui, and only a smaller number of more marginal tweaks have to be done by hacking a config file), and for me the one that really counts is the 999 limit on both health and armour:
If I am in a one-to-one with a newer player, with my health plus armour adding up to 200, then he has some sort of chance of fragging me. However, since I am fairly experienced, he has 100 health and no armour, and I wander around with health+armour kept above 500 all the time - in CTF the simplest thing is to just hop past and ignore him whilst ferrying the flag around, rather than waste time fragging him. Ain't no way he can affect me.

The result: with three or four "good" players, mixed in with 10 "less-experienced" players, the server is unlikely to have two "good" players per side, and games in my experience tend to be balanced perhaps 20%-30% of the time. Newer players get stuck playing a totally different game to the "good" players, making it HARDER for them to learn, and not having a fun time. Think about the names you see in the "long tail" of results - very few hang around long enough to progress and develop, and most drift off the scene.

Now I know we can all think of many times when a new player has shotgun-spammed us to death and recovered the flag just before we capped (grr), and this forum is populated largely by more-experienced players, so I expect my appeal to REMOVE some of the advantages for experienced players to be somewhat controversial

If you want to make the game more "pro", and end up handing even more advantages to experienced players, I think you really run the risk of losing up-and-coming players at even worse rates than at present. For me the priorities would be to decay armour and health faster (particularly armour as new players never pick it up and wander around with zero armour all the time!), and sorting out problems with packet loss and those weird choppy laggy moments (never have them with other FPS's). Oh and autokicking idlers, nothing more irritating than a 16-player server with 9 playing and no-one able to join 'cos you've got seven 666'ers! Oh, and ban that sexist anti-woman guy from the server browser please. And world peace - could that be implemented in Nex 3.0 please - at least as a server-side option?

And I wish you all a peaceful and happy Xmas.

V

I am not sure what causes it that many players who play Nexuiz are so unexperienced (and hell, there are really many of those). Maybe it is because it is an open source game which attracts people to play that game (because it is free and doesn't have any impact on their purse anyway) who never played such games before (or played them very little). However, as mentioned beforehand, the game lacks the playerbase. The problem I see about the player base is a) the players for which the game runs well drop out of it because they cannot handle it, they play just "bad" and get bashed and lose interest in further playing the game (this was mentioned by Isle of View) or b) the game gives very bad performance to the people and as such they don't play it (and start playing Warsow ). I know that solving either of these problems is very hard.

The problem of solving problem a) is that there aren't any "trainers" who would introduce the new players to the game (for solving this I would appreciate if C.Brutail and the others continue to finish the tutorial maps, unless I'm misinformed that they're not finished yet) and that the good players try to show more patience when playing against less skilled players.

To solve b) ... well ... either LordHavoc comes up with a miracle-FPS-boost or ... rather not. I appreciate the work of ALL people who work on Nexuiz, but as they do it in their free time (which is limited of course) they cannot really do too much about it, and beside this the number of people who know enough about DP engine and graphics(openGL)-optimisations is very limited. So I see no hope there too soon

I'm all for it as long as i dont have to download to versions of nexuiz. The standard version should be able to join the game, it would just be a different game mode.

If it is too different, I'd say the server browser should by default only show the "same" game, but have an option to show the "other" game too.

I have an Idea, if we do have nexuiz pro (which I don't want but...) release it as a mod like instagib

divVerent wrote:If it is too different, I'd say the server browser should by default only show the "same" game, but have an option to show the "other" game too.

This is a good idea anyway. It'd be nice to have filters for gametypes (dom/rune/ctf/etc.) when browsing.

Yup, Thats 1 thing in my secret list of things for Pro version. Gamemode must show in serverbrowsers , see warsow

that again should not be in Pro only, but in regular Nexuiz too.

However, for that we need a font system - the host name field is already quite short. We want a menu system that uses screen pixels and no virtual 640x480 coordinate system (so fonts use screen pixels and don't get scaled), and variable width fonts.

while on a whole this seems like a neat idea, I really don't think it will help bring back (or bring new) north american players in any substantial amount. When nexuiz 1.0 was first released to the public there were tons of NA servers and players but they soon dwindled due to the horrid performance and the even-worse netcode. For some reason the EU nexuiz population seems to have stuck around for a while and they have seen the realization of nexuiz's true potential (with fixed netcode and real bump maps etc).
To be perfectly honest, and this coming from a north american, I think people here would rather play a game with more new elements than a rebirth with some small changes (as is what pro seems to be at the moment). I once suggested in the alientrap channel a kind of expansion pack, featuring some new weapons and game modes (like a class-based game mode even, similar to Team:Nexuiz). It's just a suggestion, but it may seem more appealing to those who already have a bad impression of the game.

I'd realy don't like it to be two separate games. Remeber, what happened to the Quake3 community, netquake3 vs. promode. Not good imho.
I'd rather see it as a mod. But low poly models, CSQC advantages (nmy model, nmy colors, configurable hud, proper and easy to use menu like vote system), these are the things Nexuiz realy lacks, and I think this is the main reason why many ppl turned away from this realy nice game.
About the noob peoples: FPS-es like Nexuiz are almost (if not totally)extinct from the market. All of them bring something new (a bit reality, objective oriented, class based, etc.), pure fun, totaly annihilating deathmatch is in a new gamer's view: old. No suprise, it's called old-school.
Maybe we in EU are not so affected by the US market of PC games.
Nexuiz could be a fucking good game for competition, maybe a resurrection to quake1, with this beautiful grapchics, better performance, and CSQC.
But this needs a little change too: now concentrate a bit less on eye candy, and a bit more on performance (I've heard all the models are gonne be remodelled, to low poly, and that's good.)