Ok I have not played Nexuiz in a while and I just downloaded the latest version (2.2.2). I like what I see. I like it a lot. The last version I played, was 1.x, I think. I have noticed that the performance is much better even with all the detail and effects on max. And the graphics are nicer to boot.

However some things that I think deserve a new thread. Nexuiz supports offset mapping, and it has an option for deluxe maps. But it doesn't look like the maps have been made with deluxe maps, and it would make a huge visual improvement if they were. Another thing I noticed is relatively unchanged. There are still very few static meshes, the maps are all mainly complex bsp. Not only do static meshes look better but they are easier on the GPU. I think they should be used a lot more. If they aren't being used because of an engine limitation, it would defiantly be worth it to work on the engine. I love the realtime lighting, and I think it would be sweet if there could be an option and support to enable soft shadows if you wanted. They look a lot better especially if you have the hardware needed to run them well.

Also I am not sure if there is already support for it, but if not there should DEFIANTLY be support for http redirect, so servers running on a pipe big enough to host a server but not big enough to push custom content could still use custom content.

Now so far I have mainly been suggesting things for graphical improvement. This is all good but there are still two major gameplay issues.

1. The movement of your character feels "jumpy", at first I thought it was because my FPS was to low, but when I enabled displaying of the FPS I saw that it was 80-90. Then I thought it was because the server I was on didn't have a high enough client speed, so I played in instant action and it was the same. This really needs to be worked on for Nexuiz to gain more widespread popularity.

The other issue is that I find it pretty easy to get "stuck" on more detailed bsp sections, such as stairs with decorations on them, etc... That is pretty annoying and should be looked at.

And finally. I don't know if Nexuiz uses DirectInput, but if not, it really should. It is a LOT better than the old input methods and it pretty much eliminates things like negative acceleration, input delay and lag, ect...

Also is there some kind of option in the ini file to change the mouse sampling time, so for example if you have your mouse at 500Hz or 1000Hz polling you could set nexuiz to actually take advantage of it?

Anyway GREAT WORK on nexuiz, it really has progressed since I last played and I hope to see it continue to do so.

Maps are compiled with deluxe mapping. Don't know if every 3rd party map is compiled with them as not everyone will have their radiant and q3map2 set up for it by I'm pretty sure most will do.

As for the input problems, are you using the SDL or GLX binary? The SDL version may help.

I am just using nexuiz.exe. What as the difference between glx and sdl? Oh, two more suggestions. The ingame menus really need to be able to be clicked and dragged, and also work with the scroll wheel as well. Also, it would be sweet if nexiuz had some kind of super weapon, as most games do. I think a nuke would be really sweet, with the mushroom cloud and all. It would look really spiffy with the particle engine combined with bloom and hdr. As for most stock maps having deluxe maps, it sure dosnt look like it. I really only see the offset mapping when the weapon effects light up the textures.

003 wrote:However some things that I think deserve a new thread. Nexuiz supports offset mapping, and it has an option for deluxe maps. But it doesn't look like the maps have been made with deluxe maps, and it would make a huge visual improvement if they were.

All official maps are compiled with deluxe mapping, otherwise there wouldn't be any bumpmaps without realtime lights. But if you have realtime lights enabled, the difference is only visible in areas without realtime lights...

Also I am not sure if there is already support for it, but if not there should DEFIANTLY be support for http redirect, so servers running on a pipe big enough to host a server but not big enough to push custom content could still use custom content.

Nexuiz only supports http downloads. There is no serverside support for sending pk3s.

And finally. I don't know if Nexuiz uses DirectInput, but if not, it really should. It is a LOT better than the old input methods and it pretty much eliminates things like negative acceleration, input delay and lag, ect...

That depends on which binary you are using. I guess SDL uses direct input by default, the WGL binary doesn't as it seems... If you feel like your mouse is lagging, try "gl_finish 1" (that should compensate for crappy drivers at the cost of a few fps)

Apart from that a few other parameters that might be usefull for you:

darkplaces readme wrote:Windows GDI Input: -noforcemaccel disables setting of mouse acceleration (not used with -dinput, windows only)
Windows GDI Input: -noforcemparms disables setting of mouse parameters (not used with -dinput, windows only)
Windows GDI Input: -noforcemspd disables setting of mouse speed (not used with -dinput, windows only)
Windows Input: -dinput enables DirectInput for mouse/joystick input

Also is there some kind of option in the ini file to change the mouse sampling time, so for example if you have your mouse at 500Hz or 1000Hz polling you could set nexuiz to actually take advantage of it?

The mouse polling rate is a driver option. No game what-so-ever should be allowed to mess with those settings.
And from a programmers point of view: overclocking your mouse is pretty useless, since Nexuiz only updates input once per frame, so with an averge of 60-100fps the default 125Hz (USB) are more than enough.

Hmm if there really are deluxe maps on the stock maps then I think offset mapping is not the the best way to implement 3d textures. Maybe try normal mapping? Because I really only see the 3d effect when the weapon explosions. And I have all the effects enabled, and I know my video card supports them all (nvidia 7800GT)

I think static meshes are hard to come by because it's not easy to find modellers willing to release their work under the GPL (the team has wanted to get new player models for a while, but there's just very few people to make them). I think there's also engine limitation with collision or something. I don't remembet the exact limitation, but the only workaround is to put a boxy player clip around the model, which could make it awkward sometimes.

As for another weapon, while being another valid idea, it's an engine limitation. It's been discussed elsewhere that the engine only properly supports 9 weapons unless an ugly workaround is used.

Hmm well the engine itself is open source, right? Why cant you modify the engine to overcome these limitations? It's kind of strange looking when you have a game with hdr, bloom, offset and deluxe mapping, but no static meshes. Also, has the idea of implementing a physics engine ever been brought up? I don't see why finding static meshes is so hard, for example in UT2004 people make their own static meshes all the time and put them in their levels. Usually they aren't GPL but if you e-mail and ask the authors they will generally let you use them. Maybe you could implement static meshes and have them not GPL but the rest of the game would be.

003 wrote:However some things that I think deserve a new thread. Nexuiz supports offset mapping, and it has an option for deluxe maps. But it doesn't look like the maps have been made with deluxe maps, and it would make a huge visual improvement if they were.

Another thing I noticed is relatively unchanged. There are still very few static meshes

I love the realtime lighting, and I think it would be sweet if there could be an option and support to enable soft shadows if you wanted.

Also I am not sure if there is already support for it, but if not there should DEFIANTLY be support for http redirect, so servers running on a pipe big enough to host a server but not big enough to push custom content could still use custom content.

1. The movement of your character feels "jumpy", at first I thought it was because my FPS was to low, but when I enabled displaying of the FPS I saw that it was 80-90.
The other issue is that I find it pretty easy to get "stuck" on more detailed bsp sections, such as stairs with decorations on them, etc... That is pretty annoying and should be looked at.

And finally. I don't know if Nexuiz uses DirectInput, but if not, it really should. It is a LOT better than the old input methods and it pretty much eliminates things like negative acceleration, input delay and lag, ect...

Well as said Nexuiz does use deluxemapping to show bumpmapping on all areas not just those with real time lights. Maybe you just want to make the effect more obvious. Unless i'm mistaken (its late ) the variable r_shadow_bumpscale_basetexture will make it more obvious. also for REAL powerful computers there is also relief mapping r_glsl_offsetmapping_reliefmapping 1 but i doubt its very playable unless you have a GF8800gtx or something like that.

I'm not sure about meshes, i'm no mapper

The next version of Nexuiz will have:
added r_shadows cvar which renders Quake3 cg_shadows 2 style stencil shadows from models.
I"m not sure in what context you mean soft shadows.

There is already http redirect support for the downloading stuff. The server can be setup to give you a download address which is then downloaded with libcurl which understands redirects. Its planned to use this to create map filebase but work on this has not yet started. but the downloads already work. But its not a inbound download, it uses external http/ftp servers or what ever libcurl can use.

Well its still not totaly sure what causes those laggy behavior but part of it seems to be mispredictions by cl_movement which the engine developer knows about and we wait for him to fix it. along with other stuff

And yeah kadaverjack already told you about that directx stuff and r_finish.

003 wrote:Usually they aren't GPL but if you e-mail and ask the authors they will generally let you use them. Maybe you could implement static meshes and have them not GPL but the rest of the game would be.

Thats a route we do not want to take, Nexuiz will ever be 100% GPL. I think some other maps (like that facing worlds remix) do that but as i'm still no mapper i can't tell for sure what kind of meshes are used there.

When I say soft shadows, I mean like FEAR has (they are disabled by default though) and like UT2007 is going to have. I can promise you that anything quake 3 has is NOT soft shadows.

KadaverJack wrote:

003 wrote:Also I am not sure if there is already support for it, but if not there should DEFIANTLY be support for http redirect, so servers running on a pipe big enough to host a server but not big enough to push custom content could still use custom content.

Nexuiz only supports http downloads. There is no serverside support for sending pk3s.

Nexuiz ises libcurl iirc, so http redirects shuold be fully supported.

--
btd

003 wrote:When I say soft shadows, I mean like FEAR has (they are disabled by default though) and like UT2007 is going to have. I can promise you that anything quake 3 has is NOT soft shadows.

Well its not like Nexuiz shadows are just black like this screenshot shows (its not that great otherwise and its too big to include with img tags..)
http://esteel.planetnexuiz.de/nexuiz/sc ... 000576.jpg
http://esteel.planetnexuiz.de/nexuiz/sc ... 000635.jpg
http://esteel.planetnexuiz.de/nexuiz/sc ... 000689.jpg
But i guess you want better shadows

No thats not what I mean. Here is a good comparison:



top: soft shadows

bottom: hard shadows (like nexuiz)

Oh yeah, two other things that I totally forgot to mention.

1. Currently water looks really bad in Nexuiz. It's a flat sheet with a transparent low res texture on it, if you get lucky it might be panning. There are absolutely no physics on fluid surfaces and no degree of reflection what so ever. Nexuiz uses OpenGL 2.0, correct? Surely there can be a simple way to get the water to look a LITTLE nicer, preferably it should have realtime reflections such as in Half Life 2 and FEAR. If physics is impossible because of the engine thats fine, possibly some shader/particle effects could make up for that. If realtime reflection can't be done, then AT LEAST, can't cube maps be used? Or even a generic reflective cube map? Anything would look better than what is currently done for water.

2. It would be killer to implement a graphical map voting system, which could be accessed from the GUI and would pop up by default at the end of rounds so the players could vote for the map they want. And it should be able to called ingame as well. If the admin would like, they could disable it and have a basic rotation instead.

Both are, again, engine limitations.

I remember discussing nicer water textures before and I think it was a shader issue. Though really the current water texture is just really poor. I'm pretty sure that the water in WoW doesn't use any crazy special effects beyond being an animated texture with a reflection map and it looks a lot better than Nex's.

The GUI map voting has to do with the lack of CSQC support, I believe. The whole menu system could use an overhaul, really.

Ok I have dropped a bunch of my suggestions and added one or two. Let me sum up everything I have so far. I am only including critical ones:

-The jumpy movement needs to be worked on.

-You can get "stuck" on more complex bsp pretty easily. Not sure if this is the fault of the bsp, or the fault of the game but either way it should be addressed somehow.

-The ingame menus should be able to be clicked and dragged, and work with scroll wheel as well. It has been said that this is an engine limitation and the whole gui system needs a makeover. Whatever it takes, I say. This would make life a lot easier and it's something I always hated about the quake games.

-Improve the water in any ways possible. Anything is better than how it is now.

-There should be a graphical voting system. This probably falls into the category of redoing the gui system. Whatever it takes because it would help a lot of players (me included).

-player models need to be optimized. I just noticed this. Let me elaborate. So far I had only played on servers with only 3-4 people, or on maps where not everybody was visible at once. However I just played a few rounds where a lot of player models were visible and boy it was like somebody tied lead bricks on the fps. I think optimizing them would be a lot of work so it cant be done all at once. My suggestion would be to try and get the default model optimized, and then slowly work on the others. I say you don't have to worry about adding new models, nexuiz has plenty. There are far more popular retail games that have less models than nexuiz.

003 wrote:-The jumpy movement needs to be worked on.

-You can get "stuck" on more complex bsp pretty easily. Not sure if this is the fault of the bsp, or the fault of the game but either way it should be addressed somehow.

-The ingame menus should be able to be clicked and dragged, and work with scroll wheel as well. It has been said that this is an engine limitation and the whole gui system needs a makeover. Whatever it takes, I say. This would make life a lot easier and it's something I always hated about the quake games.

-Improve the water in any ways possible. Anything is better than how it is now.

-There should be a graphical voting system. This probably falls into the category of redoing the gui system. Whatever it takes because it would help a lot of players (me included).

-player models need to be optimized. I just noticed this. Let me elaborate. So far I had only played on servers with only 3-4 people, or on maps where not everybody was visible at once. However I just played a few rounds where a lot of player models were visible and boy it was like somebody tied lead bricks on the fps. I think optimizing them would be a lot of work so it cant be done all at once. My suggestion would be to try and get the default model optimized, and then slowly work on the others. I say you don't have to worry about adding new models, nexuiz has plenty. There are far more popular retail games that have less models than nexuiz.

You've pretty much summed up all accepted weaknesses of Nexuiz. IIRC redesigning the menu system from scratch was suggested a few months ago and someone is doing it. New player models are a nice target and if you're handy with Blender or know someone who is and is willing to GPL their models, it would be a great help.

The soft shadows in FEAR are incomparable with those in UT2007, the FEAR ones are a bit of a hack really whereas the UT2007 ones are done very well. I see it as being something that will be accomplished sometime but right now most peoples machines won't even run all of the current effects.

I've got another suggestion for optimizing the models. If you can get the default one optimized, then you could add a feature to force the game to only display one model of your choice, so you could force the optimized one.

It's funny, but in that soft shadow example, I think the hard shadows look better and more like what you see in real life. In fact, Darkplaces shadows are very well done, they look very realistic and don't sap performance too badly.

Yeah forget I ever suggested that. Soft shadows when done correctly (see UT2007) look really, really good but nexuiz is already pretty demanding with everything enabled, and hard shadows look fine.

But ANOTHER suggestion. I think the things I pointed out in my last two posts are very important and contribute to the fact that nexuiz dosn't have tons of players despite it's free. I think gameplay is great the way it is in 2.2.2 and I think the nature of those issues are such that it would be worth it to postpone other work on nexuiz and only concentrate on those until they are all fixed. I am really serious, nexuiz would really be the best DM game I have ever played if those were fixed.

I really wish I could help with fixing them instead of barking out what needs to be done, but I can't program or model. I am a very experienced beta tester however and I will weed everything out with my nit-picking

003 wrote:I've got another suggestion for optimizing the models. If you can get the default one optimized, then you could add a feature to force the game to only display one model of your choice, so you could force the optimized one.

This is what CSQC is for, but it's buggy yet

I mean like FEAR has (they are disabled by default though) and like UT2007 is going to have.
preferably it should have realtime reflections such as in Half Life 2 and FEAR.
Soft shadows when done correctly (see UT2007) look really

man, how i "love" when nexuiz is compared to million dollars games

I also love how they tell us to see unreleased games too, because it's "correct"

Well, to be fair we just have to live with comparisons - no matter what our budget is and what is our competitor's.

People will always compare to decide what they should spend their time with. Why should they care for "it's free", "it's done in our spare time" etc. if they can spend their time with something they feel is better (if they don't care to pay - or don't care to care for copyright law).

Just because something is free it doesn't sudden become worthy to spend your time with. The product has to stand on its own feet.

(and I tend to think that Nexuiz does stand on its own feet albeit some maps *do* look really bad and overall visuals aren't as good as what nowadays blockbusters deliver)