Many people complain about campers. I personally don't have a problem with them. Even though I don't typically camp any more, I consider it a skill to find a quality spot where you can successfully camp and not be too vulnerable while still being effective.

So, please don't complain about campers. it's part of the game. Instead, here are some tips for dealing with them...

Campers are predictable. This is pretty much the main thing that you need to know in order to stop complaining about them and, instead, defeat them. Your approach toward taking out a camper is based on this issue of predictability.

Let's say a camper has found a great sit spot where they can only be attacked from one angle, they aren't very visible, they are near a populated area, and they somehow have access to some ammo/health/armor.

Here's what I do.
Usually camp spots don't allow a lot of movement. This makes them a prime target for being nexed (sniped). If, for some reason, I can't successfully nex them, then I will use a weapon with splash damage and slowly drop their health. If their health drops enough, they will at least have to get up to get health. They are vulnerable while doing that. You can possibly rush them. Or you can get you and another teammate to attack them at once.

In fact, rushing up on a camper is generally a good tactic, especially if they are using the Nex because they will be zoomed in a lot and might not see you. Come in from above. Sit on their head and shoot down.

For act two... you camp the camper. You utilize predictability again. You know that they will probably come back to this excellent camping spot. You watch the camp spot and kill them when they arrive. Do this a couple times and they will usually leave the spot alone.

Those are my thoughts on campers. There is a reason why I don't camp very often anymore. It takes way too much skill (and lucky map design) to apply camping against good players.

Many years ago, I had a friend who was awesome at finding good camping spots. It is definitely a skill.

Dokujisan wrote:So, please don't complain about campers. it's part of the game. Instead, here are some tips for dealing with them...

Campers are predictable. This is pretty much the main thing that you need to know in order to stop complaining about them and, instead, defeat them. Your approach toward taking out a camper is based on this issue of predictability.

100% Agreed!

I don't camp. There are very few situations in-game where camping would be advantagous. In general, if you're not moving, you're going to get fragged. However, I've been accused of camping (like it's a crime) many, many times. It's just something unskilled, ill-tempered players spout when you frag them (sometimes, even if you frag them in-motion). They just don't know any better.

And the predictability factor is the main reason why camping is generally a poor strategy. If a stationary player frags me with the nex, that's all I need to know. I know from this where he is, what his area of fire is, and that he will probably remain in that same spot for a little while longer. If you know all of that, and you still can't frag 'em, you just need to practice.

Camping is not a great strategy, and certainly doesn't give anyone an unfair advantage.

Overall, standing still in nexuiz gives you a huge disadcvantage..

however what is annoying is when people in a outnumbering team takes great advantage and camps. Like on Facing , i've experienced playing 3 agains 7, and the team of 7 had 3 or 4 people camping on top of the towers.. that not much fun, especially as the were also spawn-raping.

Any particular place in a map where you have an enormous amount of advantage in camping can be rectified to remove the camping spot. This I would consider a good idea as it makes the game more fun for everyone.

None of the current Nexuiz levels have any point on them that immediately strikes me as needing fixing to avoid constant camping but there are some 3rd party levels that could be modified to stop camping. Facing Worlds is one that comes to mind. Although I like it as a map in general, there are some times when some players forget that CTF means 'Capture The Flag' and instead thing it's better to just increase their personal scores by crouching on top of the towers and Nexing people who have only just spawned. Some of them even run through the enemy base, past the flag and teleport to the roof to shoot back towards their base. This results in a really crap form of stalemate which isn't fun. I normally leave games that get like that.

What I would do to improve gameplay is make it more like the UT2003 version when there is a pyramid on the middle. This would block the entrance to the each tower from the top of the opposite tower. The UT2003 version also had a few palm trees to break up the line of sight and had jumppads to the centre allowing a faster advance. I could have a go at modding it to make an anti-camper version.

I still say that I've yet to see a game controlled (or even slightly perturbed) by a "camper". Usually, they get one or two frags, then someone frags them. And in CTF, camping is never going to get you anywhere near as many points as actually capturing the flag. In fact, I think it would take a very remarkable player to get a high score (above 100) in CTF without capturing the flag.

Honestly, I think it's easier to aim in Nexuiz if your moving, not standing still. When your moving, it's like you have double control over your aim. You're controlling both the view direction (mouse) and the position of the view point (keypad, I'm assuming). When standing still, you just have control over the view direction. That's how I look at it anyway.

Campers aren't really much of a problem.

If the map allows it, my favorite thing to do is to bounce them off into space with the laser.

Don't really see it as a problem as a few people have said. However, respawn camping is annoying on those maps where it happens like facing worlds. Maybe alter the respawn sites in front of the tower?

Apart from anything else what's the point of the nex and it's zoom if you don't use it. Might as well scrap it on that basis.

I use zoom sometimes.. but not too often as the hit position on enemies and the crosshair while zoomed in is way off. Take this for example, when aiming at a guy on Greatwalls, or whatever that map name is , zoomed in and his in that little bunker, unless you aim very high up on his head you won't hit him, might be because you are zoomed in but I also know it's because every shot is aimed at the same position on the hitbox with the nex. Happens to me constantly..

ai wrote:I use zoom sometimes.. but not too often as the hit position on enemies and the crosshair while zoomed in is way off. Take this for example, when aiming at a guy on Greatwalls, or whatever that map name is , zoomed in and his in that little bunker, unless you aim very high up on his head you won't hit him, might be because you are zoomed in but I also know it's because every shot is aimed at the same position on the hit box with the Nex. Happens to me constantly..

Exactly! But it has nothing todo with zoom.
Thats the aim bug I always talk about. Since the beam is coming from the gun. So the greater the distance the more likely it is for the beam to to hit a wall or something. And the funny part is that Nexuiz is the only game that I know of that shoots from the gun. All other games shoots from the eye, but the effects comes from the gun. I have been nagging the developers to fix this since 1.2.1 or something I don't know why it's not fixed. Sure sometimes it will looks like the beam goes through a wall, but who cares?

I'm sure this is being fixed for Nexuiz v3.0 where we can have some more promode-alike features

We just need to continue nagging!

morfar wrote:Thats the aim bug I always talk about. Since the beam is coming from the gun. So the greater the distance the more likely it is for the beam to to hit a wall or something. And the funny part is that Nexuiz is the only game that I know of that shoots from the gun. All other games shoots from the eye, but the effects comes from the gun. I have been nagging the developers to fix this since 1.2.1 or something I don't know why it's not fixed. Sure sometimes it will looks like the beam goes through a wall, but who cares?

This is no bug and won't ever get "fixed". Nexuiz once was that way, but then people complained about Nex shots passing through walls. That was then the reason to change the behaviour so the VISIBLE shot is actually the real thing. I doubt it will ever get changed back.

What ai was describing, however, has nothing to do with shoot out of the gun vs out of the player. It's antilag's doing. On greatwall, if you are in the bunker, a direct hit still hits you, BUT: an antilagged shot will go to your center. There, it will miss, because the center of the body is hidden behind the walls of the bunker. So inside the bunker, only non-antilagged shots "succeed". Shots that hit at the time of clicking but miss according to the view of the server gets changed so that they hit the enemy's center, but that does not work on greatwall. Try setting g_antilag 0 and see: it won't happen again, but then there's no antilag either.

The only way to REALLY fix that would be introducing a MUCH more complicated antilag system. And that's anything but a small change. Maybe for Nexuiz 3.0 when we will rewrite major parts anyway.

This is no bug and won't ever get "fixed". Nexuiz once was that way, but then people complained about Nex shots passing through walls.

Which Nexuiz version? I don't recall Nexuiz have proper aiming ever.

There, it will miss, because the center of the body is hidden behind the walls of the bunker.

omg now I hate antilag, thanks for clearing that out. Because I can notice sometimes that when I shoot a player that the beam gets redirected to the center of the player. I do not like that.

morfar wrote:omg now I hate antilag, thanks for clearing that out. Because I can notice sometimes that when I shoot a player that the beam gets redirected to the center of the player. I do not like that.

No you got it wrong.. i guess..
When you would have hit without antilag (meaning you aimed at were the person is in THE SERVERS WORLD) you will hit him no matter if the antilag feature is on or off because then your shot goes to were you have aimed.
However if antilag is on and you shot at the wrong spot (IN THE SERVERS WORLD), but ARE AIMING at the player then antilag kicks in and redirects your hit at the players center. So this is a very special situation were you would have missed without antilag anyway so there is no reason to complain about missing him with antilag. If he would be in a more free environment you would have hit. That might be confusing but simple fact is you have missed and are granted a little correction because you were at least aiming at the player. But as you have missed your shot HAS to be redirected.. well bad luck there was an obstacle...
The only way to change this is to change the antilag feature to keep timestamped copies of the 'servers world' and use time stamps send by your client to determine if you hit or not. This is done in other games but it also has its share of problems. Also you will have to try to convince LH to implement this.

the funniest is when you shoot someone exactly as they go throh a teleporter and the antliag compensates by shootings traight left or something to the new target location. ofcource hitting a wall or something

esteel wrote:

morfar wrote:omg now I hate antilag, thanks for clearing that out. Because I can notice sometimes that when I shoot a player that the beam gets redirected to the center of the player. I do not like that.

No you got it wrong.. i guess..
When you would have hit without antilag (meaning you aimed at were the person is in THE SERVERS WORLD) you will hit him no matter if the antilag feature is on or off because then your shot goes to were you have aimed.
However if antilag is on and you shot at the wrong spot (IN THE SERVERS WORLD), but ARE AIMING at the player then antilag kicks in and redirects your hit at the players center. So this is a very special situation were you would have missed without antilag anyway so there is no reason to complain about missing him with antilag. If he would be in a more free environment you would have hit. That might be confusing but simple fact is you have missed and are granted a little correction because you were at least aiming at the player. But as you have missed your shot HAS to be redirected.. well bad luck there was an obstacle...
The only way to change this is to change the antilag feature to keep timestamped copies of the 'servers world' and use time stamps send by your client to determine if you hit or not. This is done in other games but it also has its share of problems. Also you will have to try to convince LH to implement this.

Ahh, thanks for that explanation. I understand now.

Now this thread has gone off topic

Well... there HAS been a bug that antilagged too many shots, but even that bug (it was in 2.1 and fixed in 2.2.1, or maybe it was in 2.0 and fixed in 2.1) would not have caused misses as usual on greatwall.

Yes, g_antilag looks stupid and should get fixed, but that would need quite a large code change (especially given how bad the QC compiler is with respect to arrays). One important part would be redirecting the shot to the right spot on the player - but I have no idea how to do that.

The game code receives cursor_trace_ent (entity ID being hit), cursor_trace_endpos (the exact hit location) and cursor_trace_start (location of the player at the time of the hit). These values do not suffice to find out WHICH part of the player has been hit, so the shot can't be redirected to the right place. If we at least could get the time of the hit (MAYBE, but I am not sure, player.ping / cvar("sys_ticrate") returns the number of frames the hit is "old"), and if we find a way for QC to remember the previous locations of the player, we could get an actual hit offset (that is, we would then move the shot endpoint by the difference of previous and current position of the player). Even then it could still happen that an antilagged shot misses because of a door or rotating brush getting in the way.

Now, how to really fix this?

• Damage cursor_trace_ent anyway, no matter how far away he is - even if that means the Nex beam goes through a wall. Will make even more people complain about "cheaters" who shoot through walls. Also, it will make some really evil cheats possible - imagine a client always reporting cursor_trace_ent == SOME_PLAYER.
• Don't fix. Then an antilagged shot will use the right offset to the player. In theory this should mean the antilagged shot goes through the hitbox of the player, but even then, there can be an obstacle in between that causes the shot to miss.
• If an antilagged shot misses, adjust it so it actually hits the enemy. Sounds nice, but impossible to do in QC and extremely hard to do in the engine. It could for example use portal culling to find out which shot angles would have hit the enemy, and choosing one that's close to the actual shot.
• |Pull the enemy back to the original location, and hurt him there. Not really an option...

Currently we are at "Don't fix", but once we wrote a new antilag system (that possibly does not make any use of cursor_trace_ent any more and just uses the ping of the player to find the previous location of the enemy), we will perhaps go with the "adjust" solution, but only approximately - for example, we could try four hit locations: the one originally being hit, that one rotated by 120 degrees, by 240 degrees around the z axis, and the origin of the player. If the obstacle is horizontal like on greatwall, this is very likely to succeed. But a player who is originally hit by the shot but then disappears behind a corner won't be hurt when using that method, because any (and really ANY, no matter how it's done) antilagged shot would try to pass through the wall. And I do not want shots to pass through a wall...

BTW, antilag has another bug by concept - first the location the server knows is used to test the shot, and if it misses, the client's collision test is accepted. So that means that a running player has a larger hitbox for "ping challenged" players. Technically this would be a bug, but given that Nexuiz degrades quite much at a ping of 150ms, it isn't THAT much of a problem... but it does explain why some players CAN use the Nex with a high ping and still hit stuff. I doubt they get an advantage over a ping 0 player that way, but it certainly does compensate their laggy motion and weapon hits a bit.

The new "thought of" method of remembering the original positions of the players could also fix that issue, but I am not sure if we should fix it since it does level the playfield a bit - we certainly will fix it if we catch anyone abusing this as a cheat, even if it means penalizing people who have a high ping.