We have players, we have weapons, we have maps and many sorts of gametypes but there's still one thing I think the game is missing; Vehicles. I decided to make this topic specifically for the discussion of vehicles in Nexuiz and anything related to implementing such a thing and how they might / can / should or should not be.

In other games there are many gametypes which have vehicles and are loved for that, making the match much more fun and complex. We already have Onslaught which I believe would require vehicles to be considered complete, then there could be Vehicle CTF which many people played in other parts, and of course some could be useful for the Race gametype too and many others types where vehicles would be welcome. I also believe vehicles would raise many peoples interest in Nexuiz and help the game be more popular and look more "complete" and more at the quality and complexity of commercial games (don't get me wrong, Nexuiz is totally awesome and of a splendid quality so far, but there's always room for better and many features which could be welcome).

The first types of vehicles I'd like to see and go with personally would be an ATV-like vehicle which would be fast and good on terrain but small and more vulnerable to attacks. Would be the best vehicle to start and test the game with to see how it handles, works, etc. On the esthetical side, something like a real life ATV would look good (also similar to the one in ut2k4, or if not something like the car in Half-Life 2 that you get in the Sandtrap episode). Then there might be a tank in next, which like all tanks would be big solid powerful but slow, and afterward a flying vehicle like a spaceship or aircraft / hovercraft that could allow people to fly throughout the map.

I'm curious how far the idea of vehicles in Nexuiz is at this point. Do any intend to be implemented officially in the game anytime soon? Also has anyone made any vehicle mods by theirselves yet?

There were some topics on vehicles.
But afaik it's pretty hard to make a convincing physics engine to fit them.
And Nexuiz doesn't have many large outdoor maps where you could drive around, except for that single Onslaught map maybe.
Imo there's stuff to do, which is more important at the moment. Player models for example...

HarryButt wrote:There were some topics on vehicles.
But afaik it's pretty hard to make a convincing physics engine to fit them.
And Nexuiz doesn't have many large outdoor maps where you could drive around, except for that single Onslaught map maybe.
Imo there's stuff to do, which is more important at the moment. Player models for example...

People are making huge terrain/outdoor maps like there's no tomorrow nowadays since the release of SavageX's excellent terrain-img-to-map program. Heck, I even made one recently .

There definitly are maps bigenough for vehicles, and there will be more to come.
I suggest just doing netonian physics first I guess... we don't have maps big enough to need anything else yet .

Make buildings in map-A. Make terrain with the converter, make that mapB, copypaste your buildings from map A allover your terrain map, customize abit, done.

It's great!

There are indeed no maps large enough for vehicles so far, but if vehicles would be implemented maps to use them would of course be also made. As for the physics engine, that is indeed a point. Nexuiz does seem to have a pretty good physics engine so far and know how everything falls, bounces, rolls, etc. Grenades bounce pretty well... gibs also move correctly if you shoot them so maybe there would be little to be changed there overall.

nothing rolls in nexuiz

Morphed wrote:nothing rolls in nexuiz

Gibs do I think... I noticed the camera leans when your head gets gibbed and falls but your camera still sticks to it so there is likely some rotation in different cases. Grenades thrown with the Mortar may rotate a little too though I'm not sure.

Morphed wrote:nothing rolls in nexuiz

Wrong pic z



PLEASE MAKE VEHICLES ESPECIALLY FLYING ONES

MirceaKitsune wrote:There are indeed no maps large enough for vehicles so far, but if vehicles would be implemented maps to use them would of course be also made. As for the physics engine, that is indeed a point. Nexuiz does seem to have a pretty good physics engine so far and know how everything falls, bounces, rolls, etc. Grenades bounce pretty well... gibs also move correctly if you shoot them so maybe there would be little to be changed there overall.

That's abit of lie . There are many big enough for vehicles:
Ons_reborn.
Anything I make.

SavageX's terrain gen makes making huge maps more time-economical (except for compile time). Wonderful tool.

I've been thinking of making a map 4x bigger than spirecontrol. A map of a ocean and islands similar to the MYST islands. I'd need good tree and pine tree models though.
And LOD for them probably. Maybe someday .

mikeusa has EPIC GREAT large maps.

alpha wrote:mikeusa has EPIC GREAT large maps.

If those are EPIC GREAT maps, I don't want to see the bad ones... *cringe*

I saw this playermodel here:
http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.php?t=3548

And I thought it might be interesting if Nexuiz had a "kart" style mod as an offshoot of the race mod.

kozak6 wrote:I saw this playermodel here:
http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.php?t=3548

And I thought it might be interesting if Nexuiz had a "kart" style mod as an offshoot of the race mod.

That's certainly something interesting... though yeah it's just a model so I'm guessing there's no physics or anything of that sort yet.

And yes ONS-Reborn is currently the only map where vehicles can work, it is large enough but from the stock maps it's the only one so far. There would of course be more with time if this did come in... I still keep thinking about the first VCTF game

Arahia, a DOM Map from Morphed, is very good for testing vehicles! It's very big.

I have searched around in your online portfolie Morphed, and I have found very impressive works (I hope I can post them here?)

1. a tank model, Idk if it's for nexuiz, but it looks good!



2. this "aircraft" (I hope it's the right name for it?)



It's already in ONS-reborn, isn't it?

I really like the idea of a new gamemode (or ons) with vehicles, but it would be difficult to code. I am looking forward to this idea and to the ideas of the creative people here

These models look beautiful, Fisume!. Now if they could only be in and work like vehicles...

MirceaKitsune wrote:

Morphed wrote:nothing rolls in nexuiz

Gibs do I think... I noticed the camera leans when your head gets gibbed and falls but your camera still sticks to it so there is likely some rotation in different cases. Grenades thrown with the Mortar may rotate a little too though I'm not sure.

Only the drawmodel rotates, the bounding box does not.

The "physics" can only handle translation of grid-aligned rectangular bounding boxes.

First one to integrate Bullet/ODE/whatever gets a free cookie!

Taiyo.uk wrote:Only the drawmodel rotates, the bounding box does not.

The "physics" can only handle translation of grid-aligned rectangular bounding boxes.

First one to integrate Bullet/ODE/whatever gets a free cookie!

That does sound a bit of a problem... hope someone can integrate one soon. I played with some physics engines on another 3D platform and the one I'd recommend most is ODE (the Open Dynamics Engine) because it's the most realistic one and causes less bugs and issues then BulletX and worked amazingly well, at least where I tested them and had many physics engines to play with.

Anyway, if a physics engine cannot be gotten to work... what if we could have only the model rotating for vehicles too when they flip over or steer? As in, each vehicle has the same non-rotating collision box and if you flip or spin only the model of the vehicle rotates (probably the same system as collisions between players). It's not the best way I know, but it would probably not be noticed much if a collision is a bit out of bounds over the model and not so precise (in this case I'd find a cylinder or sphere collision plane more suitable rather then a box, if such a thing is possible in the engine). Just wondering if it could go like that at least temporarily, if fully spinning collision planes cannot work yet. I guess it would be -something- though of course I'm also much more up for a real physics engine

there is a simple way

Motorbike
this is to suit the size of maps
change weapons power to *2 when the player enters the vehicle
Now lets have vehicle as an item a player may pick up and its a tenth weapon with only one bullet (charge) when it is executed the player's model changes into player on motorbike with different textures mapped onto the top part (body of the player) depending on what model he is normally (so nexus would have a different set of textures from pyria)
the speed would be set to 30km/h with an algorithm to up it by 10 every second until it reaches 240km/h.
Now there would be a hard coding part with the fact that if you crash into the wall at more than 50 km/h it takes life away (so it could be achieved not by detecting colision but by detecting a sudden stop or drop in speed).
The weapons on a bike would be more powerful and would be displayed on top of the front wheel.
the player would exit the motorbike by pressing some key and he would leave the "pickup item motor bike" for other players.
The idea is nice because it could be a suitcase bike, that you can drop and pick up again if you have to go through a building and unfold it at the other end.

I'm afraid you don't see the real problems here DeVsh. How to set the model and such is relativity easy. so is detecting sudden speed changes.

What is hard is making it act like a bike. Player models get away with not orienting to the surface because ppl tend to stand upright, even on slopes surfaces, bikes do not. Quake physics don't deal with rotations. So if this bike stand with 1mm left of its bbox on a ledge the rest of it will happily hang out over the edge, perfectly level.

Next problem is speed. Not that its hard to do, but you'd need new maps. again. 240kmph is nothing in Nexuiz. players without vehicles can already can reach supersonic speed (!).

And there's also the problem with prediction / client side movement. Unless you let the bike be rules by precisely the same rules (meaning speed, friction, acceleration, the works). cl_movement breaks. This is probably the biggest show stopper for vehicles and other things modifying player movement at the moment.

Now with that said, id also want to point out that i think it would be a fun and cool thing to do in nexuiz, but threes allot of work to be done to make it happen.

i havent thought about that, it truly would need a whole set of physics to it.

Without having a good understanding of the underlying engine/code that governs Nexuiz, as a programmer I'm a big advocate of creative kludges for limited purposes. It may be that the Quake engine would allow for vehicle "physics" using the underlying gameplay mechanisms. Limiting the scope of gameplay using vehicles should be faster (development/resource-wise) and easier than incorporating a dedicated physics library, and provide maybe a whole new level of gameplay at minimal cost.

I have a few questions though, hopefully helping to spawn some ideas about how this could be accomplished. If client/server checks were suspended for physics routines, could additional "hypothetical" next frame calculations be made per frame when in a vehicle (five samples @ 30 fps) to project the angle at which the model should be represented? If so, the average of the orientation vectors for the next five or so frames could provide a vector for the currently displayed orientation. That would take away the "binary" orientation and give some measure of smoothness to flying over hills.

That leads me to my next question: Is it possible, while only translating players' positions, to control the visual orientation of the player models? If so, then the previously-projected orientation vector could be applied to the visual representation of the player model to simulate smooth orientational changes due to terrain, etc. I recommend avoiding complex crash/damage calculations, even at first for landing up-side down.

Finally (as this is the heart of limited physics for vehicles) is it possible to give a greater preference to inertia in calculating the next position of a player than to left or right movement? When playing Nexuiz I know my model doesn't stop immediately, meaning there is code that controls inertia with respect to player position. The forward momentum would need to be made much stronger than left/right movements. There should be an inversely-proportional relationship between forward momentum/inertia and left/right movement strength. Pressing the down arrow would need to work against the player's inertia at a fixed rate, and left and right would need to be reversed when the player was moving backward (pressing down while the player's position is moving backward [has negative inertia/momentum]).

Of course, this is a creative kludge like I was saying, but if possible would be a hell of a mod were the proper vehicle models available. Guess my point is, if this is a Quake mod, it should really take its root code to its limits.

As an aside, does anyone know of any code like Mediawiki that allows easily posting and categorizing code, images, audio, and other binary data? I'm trying to build a wiki/database of FOSS game data.

Sorry, but changing player movement in such a way is clearly out of the question, unless it is optional. Nexuiz is not meant to have realistic player physics.

For vehicles, the movement physics may be arbitrary of course.

Sorry, but changing player movement in such a way is clearly out of the question, unless it is optional. Nexuiz is not meant to have realistic player physics.

For vehicles, the movement physics may be arbitrary of course.

Is the Nexuiz code bound to the original projects, or have they been made static with modifications added? Just wondering why some additional modifiers can't be made to the variables controlling player position and visual orientation. But really, can visual model orientation be controlled at all?

Also, what do you mean "unless it is optional"? I'm talking about poor excuses for physics, definitely not anything more robust like a physics library or major code change.

I kept thinking more about this in the last days and this is what I came with; For vehicles to work there will indeed be a lot of things needed which are hard to implement but 99% necessary, mainly Physics and probably a lot of code as discussed. However, what I'm mainly seeing now is that if anyone wants us to have vehicles at all we need to start from somewhere and do what we can using what we currently have, otherwise we'll just be waiting for more and get nowhere or get where we want very slowly. We need to start doing something about this at all and from what I currently investigated, this in my opinion is the way to get started on the right foot using what Nexuiz -currently- supports:

First thing to start with is implementing an entity which can be placed on the map like a weapon that a player can approach, and when getting close enough to it and pressing the Action button (a keybind which would need to be implemented too) the player would then get stuck to that entity / model while playing a sit animation and be able to move around the map stuck to it like that. So the first thing that must be possible is for the player to go to an entity on the map, click a button near it to sit on it then move around the map while the player model and that entity's model (which in a more advanced phase will be a vehicle mesh) are stuck to one another in a certain position. Then when pressing the action button again, that entity and the player model would separate from one another in the location the button was pressed at and everything would get back to normal until the player would re-board that entity from where it left it. This would be the first alpha phase of any usable vehicle system and the first thing that would need implementation whatever physics engine or further code would be to come.

Once that is done and working, the second thing to do would be to change the handling, speed, acceleration and friction of the player while the entity is being sat on and the player walks 'stuck' to it, as well as make the player take less damage while in the vehicle (at least in an alpha phase until vehicles will have their own health). Also collisions should be different and make the player stop differently in walls... and let's not forget the different collision plane for the player which shall now be bigger (although that is set with the model when that will be done). A lot of this will indeed require a physics engine to be in, I'm only referring to what is possible with the current simulated physics that Nexuiz has or nothing more (at least the maximum speed and acceleration of the player can be set, as well as the gravity as proved by the Low Gravity mutator).

Third thing to accomplish once the first two are done (although this can be done before the second one above of course) is to make the player have different firing types while riding the entity. As it's the case in most sci-fi shooter games like ut2k4 or Halo, vehicles have their own primary fire and secondary fire while being sat in. So while the player is riding such a vehicle the firing types of his/her weapon must be changed to that vehicle type's and only return to normal once the player exits the vehicle.

The fourth thing then would be the eye-candy stuff... mainly making an ambient engine sound that would emanate from the player / entity while it's being used as well as the collision sounds and of course a vehicle model. Also don't forget that when riding a vehicle the player must be in 3rd person mode, not 1st person. This will further on be a preference of course but by default the user must have a 3rd person camera while riding vehicles so that's another thing quite high on the list.

So yeah, until physics engines and the heavier code can be implemented in the game this is something that can be worked on so far... at least part of it. If we get these things ready first, when a physics engine will come we will be ready with all other systems for vehicles and things will be linked together and implemented in no time. Until then of course they won't really work that well, mainly in the fact vehicles wouldn't orient correctly over hills and ramps and other things wouldn't be as realistic but still, -most- of what vehicles will need can be done currently. So I for one suggest we start working on implementing what I listed above at least the first point which is essential anytime someone is willing to try, so we can even have the smallest hope of implementing vehicles.

Today I've given further thought to this and thought to continue the post above and what I have been thinking about and noticed. Note that I may be 'pointing the obvious' in some ways so if I'm mentioning something too easy to find or figure out please don't mind that... I'm just curious on how this can be done the best way over the current system really. So yeah, this is what I found;

Regarding the system of making an entity that sticks to the player and changes its speed / acceleration / health, etc; After looking a little through stuff I was surprised to see that such a system is already implemented and right under our nose. The entities in Nexuiz that stick to the players and change their characteristics are the runes in the Rune gametype. The player starts out normally then when finding a rune and walking into it, the rune sticks to that player and makes him/her slower but with a stronger attack, faster but more vulnerable, etc. So to make a vehicle, the code in one of these runes could be partially re-used. Technically, the vehicle would be a lot like a rune since it would stick to the player while changing handling and health in different ways. So yeah that's a code already in the game which can be taken and re-used for this.

Second thing, related to the problem of how the vehicle would handle over non-straight surfaces... I think this could be at least a temporary system though I believe it would be the best one to go with all the way; Each vehicle could have 4 sensors placed on it's bottom on all four corners of the vehicle model. Every time the vehicle would move / change its position then, these sensors would rotate and reposition the vehicle model so that each of them tries to be exactly at the level of the surface the vehicle is sitting on (in the case of a 4 wheel vehicle the best position for such sensors is right on the bottom-middle of each wheel). Only difficulty here is what would be done when the vehicle sits on 3 wheels and one is in the air, in which case it would normally try to lean towards the side it doesn't touch depending on its center of weight, and also what would be done when a ground vehicle is thrown above in the air (a temporary way would be to position it still over the ground... that wouldn't be pretty noticeable unless the vehicle jumps way too high up).

This is probably the way it's done for many vehicles so I hope me posting this wasn't stupid.. just wanted to bring up this idea if anyone is willing to try and play with the technology of a model that tries to always face the position of the ground based on 4 corner sensors. So yeah, if that gives any more inspiration in any way I hope that helps

I think the devs haven't made this clear enough, so let me echo it a bit.

Nexuiz does not in any way support any of the components of vehicular motion. Nexuiz supports collision detection of vertical boxes. The boxes do not pitch. The boxes do not affect the animation except by translating it. There is no concept of forces, and only a limited implementation of inertia.

Sure, you could put a bike in the current code, it wouldn't be that hard. The problem isn't adding the bike, allowing the player to mount the bike, or making the bike move, the problem is that the bike could only travel over flat surfaces while maintaining a barely plausible appearance, and the animation wouldn't sync to the speed of the bike.
The bike would be perfectly stiff, there would be no suspension action, there would be no movement at all, and it would be so unrealistic that it would look just as good as a player standing on a crate that's flying across the landscape.

If you added vertical rotation of the box, you would have to rework what little physics the entire game has, and while gameplay wouldn't be severely affected, it would be a pain to code... for what? It would still look like a player sitting on a box, but the box could tilt up and down unrealistically as well as moving unrealistically.

Adding full physics would change feel of the game entirely, so no one really wants to rework such a huge codebase for no assured reward. Time would be better spent writing an engine from scratch that had full physics than trying to rework Nexuiz to support the same thing. The whole structure of the code would have to change, and it's not going to happen any time soon.

To sum it up:
Nexuiz handles vertical boxes. There just happen to be animations in the boxes. Vehicles could be put into such boxes, but they would be so unrealistic that it would, in the view of many people, make the game worse rather than better. There would be no realism; there would be no action and reaction; there would just be a static model that moved back and forth, turned, and (with significant effort and a significant restructuring of the code) pitched. There would be no roll. There could be some sort of flight, I guess, but when the model hit the ground again, once again, there would be no action reaction, no realistic movement, nothing. Just a perfectly solid box hitting the ground. If pitch code was added, the box could roll over backwards, but it would look like a bike floating upside down, most likely not touching the ground.

I hate to shatter dreams like this, but you haven't been grasping the concept. Vehicle physics require a whole new level of physics that anything based on Quake 1 simply will not attain without becoming something entirely unlike Quake 1. It's a good thought, but not anywhere close to a realistic one.

All physics is inside qc code. Darkplaces allows you to have whatever physics you like. No need to rewrite the engine.

Be that as it may, the addition of any new physics techniques would require the old code to be restructured or things would break in strange ways. What I've said still applies. A major overhaul is just not feasible, or such is my view. I don't know the details of the Nexuiz though; this is my speculation based on my knowledge of Quake.

Pretty vague and optimistic of you Alien, considering Urre's struggle with physics in QuakeC.

Yeah, pretty optimistic considering this: http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/index2.html