Hi everyone,
Are there any plans for a Split Screen Mode?
The icculus.org/quake3 will soon have it, so why not Nexuiz?
What do you think of the idea?
Greetings,
moHiJ

Why would you need splitscreen in an FPS game?

HAHAAHHAA

Ed wrote:Why would you need splitscreen in an FPS game?

Up to four people can play on one Computer.
Examples for this are Serious Sam tfe/tse/2, icculus.org/quake3, Halo 1/2, and a lot more. And I think it has some charm for itself.
So what do you think?
moHiJ

It sounds like fun but which computers have two keyboards and mice? Yeah its possible to have but its NOT typical and i really doubt many people would use it..

Hmm will you only play games with split screen? Seening you also asked in some other games forum

You don't need two keyboards (is that even possible?), but it is no problem that two play on one. And there are still gamepads (like X-Box, PS2, Gamecube, PS3, X-Box 360, Dreamcast, .....).

esteel wrote:Seening you also asked in some other games forum Smile

So you are also a Warsower.

Why shouldn't many people use it, when you only need an old serial mouse, instead of an entire second computer? And Nexuiz is this type of game you can also play for shorter periods of time and it is also fun, so switch on the PC play, have fun, without needing a second computer. It is just this console principle...

I like to be informed about other games especialy after an big update but Nexuiz is still THE game of choice for me I just fell in love with it a year ago..

But back to the topic. For once i'm not sure that one keyboard will work that well with a shooter. I admit i have never tried with two players at one keyboard but MANY MANY keyboard have problems with several keys pressed. For example i can't run forward, strafe left and switch to nexgun (U forward, H left, I Nexgun) it does work on some keyboards but then i have problems with foward, right, rocketlauncher (U, K right, Y rocketlauncher). So i suppose with two players the problems are even worse.

And then i have no idea if the engine (DarkPlaces) does support several input devices at once. I suppose not yet

It is possible to have multiple keyboards and mice but getting them to work properly is a complete nightmare. Not worth it.

There is a limit to how many keys you can press on a keyboard because of teh connection speed and the software, some keyboards themselves would also have limits. Nexuiz is a mouse+keyboard game, everyone will tell you that keyboard only, joysticks and gamepads (steering wheels?) do not make good FPS control sets.

Nexuiz is not the sort of game for multiple people on one computer. That may work well for consoles but does Doom 3 support splitscreen? In fact does HL2, Quake 3, UT2003/2004, FEAR or Far-Cry support splitscreen? No.

The client would need to be completely redesigned.

If you want to see if the inputs work without you losing your sanity, start up 2 clients in window mode (running different mod directories to avoid key setup confusion), stick them next to each other, set up the keys on each, get a 2nd person and see how it's not actually going to be that good control wise. Who gets the mouse?

Quake3 soon will support Split Screen!

I played a lot in Split Screen (Serious Sam1+2 entirely through twice together with a friend), and it was fun. And playing with a gamepad works too. I played half of Serious Sam 1 through with 3 friends, two on mice+keyboard and two with gamepads and it was still fun.

Keyboards have a limit of max buttons pressed, yes, but this is based on regions, so when one plays on the arrow keys and the other one with wasd it shouldn't be a problem. And if one key makes a problem change it.
But that is only my experience.

I also don't know if the engine supports several view ports, but that is a thing the devs can argue about.

Mohij wrote:Quake3 soon will support Split Screen!

I played a lot in Split Screen (Serious Sam1+2 entirely through twice together with a friend), and it was fun. And playing with a gamepad works too. I played half of Serious Sam 1 through with 3 friends, two on mice+keyboard and two with gamepads and it was still fun.

Keyboards have a limit of max buttons pressed, yes, but this is based on regions, so when one plays on the arrow keys and the other one with wasd it shouldn't be a problem. And if one key makes a problem change it.
But that is only my experience.

I also don't know if the engine supports several view ports, but that is a thing the devs can argue about.

i want the feature !!!

I actually had fun playing Serious Sam in cooperative splitscreen mode...
But if it should require that much of an effort, it's not worth it. In Serious Sam it was a nice feature though.

the engine DOES support multiple views i got informed (CSQC), and after introducing myselft to proper programming i have thought that i might crack on with this one.

it is understandable why the nexuiz developement team doesnt want to do split screen, because they have only 5 members and making split screen is like making version 3.0 of nex (so heck of a lot of work).

Me and my two friends (one is to be doubted, because he cant get his head around some things, so maybe i will have him redesign the menu) are going to try and mod the source code. We will log down every single MSN convo about this and every single code change (with references to file and the line number) on a forum in the main sticky thread. There will be a new thread where the non-developers can post their ideas about code (im talking about code changes not ideas like here which are useless).
WE HAVENT LOOKED INTO THE SOURCE CODE IN VERY MUCH DETAIL YET.


NOW onto THE TOPIC. We have sorted our priorities for version 0.1.0 in this order.

A] Understanding how processes take place for all things listed in point B e.g. trajectory of a bullet and bind the view with position of mouse and position of character.

B]
1) managing to produce 2 views one above other (this will give us some hard core CSQC learning time)
2) editing the networking client code so it is able to connect to a non modded server. We will achieve this by locating 2ce as much ports to the client and forward the packets around and making the client add a bit of data to a packet (or label them), so data sent to player one does not affect player 2. The second problem is to cut out (for player 2) only the part of the packet which applies to itself, so the client doesnt get the positions of other players twice and mess up the whole positioning (due to lags). Mapping of values sent by the server to (what it sees as two clients running on same IP) values of player and player2 on the client side.
3)Finding out if the engine supports joystick AXIS (i know joysticks are supported) and if not add axis support & deadzone , threshold.
4) Binding the view to the position of player2 and joystick (RX and RY) and separating inputs (so if you move the joystick it does not affect both views).
5) Redoing/Renaming values so player2 gets his sets of values for health and stuff
6) Sort out .cfg files
7) Making 2 crosshairs, 2 scoreboards independent of each other, "You Fragged" and "You have been fragged by" appear accordingly in the right place and in the right time, Bonus Flash relocated to appear either in top part of screen or bottom (engine modification i think) and loads others
Aiming support for Gamepads/Joysticks, I have a few ideas but i need to figure out how to make targetting sticky. Make two crosshairs one (dummy) dependant on Rotational joystick in the center of the view and one moving within 50 pixels (or whatever measuring unit in XYZ) of the position of the mouse trying to line up with a hostile target (i need to think how to script the detection of the target and how to make it line up). The basic flow is that there is a constant line drawn between targets in sight and the player on the joystick (lets say the crosshair is X away from player). Now if a point that is X away from the player on one of the lines (that i was talking about previously) is 50 pixels or less (or N away in a straight line or less) from the dummycrosshair's (Rotational joystick's) position then it moves away from the center of the screen to be in line with the target. After target no longer in the boundary the croshair moves back in line with the other one. I know there are going to be two main problems "what if two targets are in the boundary" the closest to the 'false' crosshair will be chosen. Number 2 is obviously aiming rockets, because you need to aim them a bit infront of a running target. Thats why we are going to add a button bind with a variable that will either enable "smart_target" or disable. For example you might map it to button 9 on the xbox controller (which is the left thumbstick pressed down) so you can toggle the targeting with it. This will be hard and probably will require engine modifications OR nexuiz code remake in big style (maybe using some bot AI code). However this is not the top priority and if it will be playable split screen then we crack on with this, but if this takes too long to develop it will be released in version 0.1.1 with all toggling options like multiple keyboard and mice support and enabling the user to switch views(top/bottom) or input devices between player1 and player2.

In later releases we will be cleaning up bugs and code, also we would like to take advantage of stereo sound and map all sounds for player1 to right speaker and all sounds for player 2 will be played through the right speaker, while the music is played through both.

THIS IS HOW THE DOUBLE CROSSHAIR IS GOING TO LOOK (note its a cut out from a 2ce as big picture.

I'm pretty sure i missed out on some other bits that would make the game impossible to play or buggy like one player press left mouse button and both players shoot, and feel free to add to the list of things that need to be done.