Hey.. I have a suggestion on how to make the spectator mode more efficient, or at least more appealing.

It has bugged me now for a long time that when you spectate there's stupid text right in front of you and you can't see well at all. And if you want to, say for example, record a demo to for whatever reason you would need to go inside the player to get rid of it, but that might not be what the "director" is looking for. And also even when you're inside a player there's text bugging you.

My suggestion would be something like you press a button, say Tab, and then the text would be visible, but when just flying around and having fun nothing would show, not even the scores. Everything would be shown when a button is pressed.
I have brought this up in the IRC channel of alientrap, but maybe my timing wasn't good, got no responses whatsoever So now I post it here instead.

Also another suggestion would be another color for the spectator mode. For example in CTF before you join a team your color is red and sometimes when there's a couple of red and blue players playing it can be hard to actually see how many are on the red team. So another color (black as an example) or if it's a step below the playing players or something like that would be good I think.

Its fully possible to display nothing at all when you are recording. Take a look at my autoexec.cfg, wich is stolen from esteels, maybe wirth some modifications:

Code: Select all

bind "kp_end" "slowmo 0.1"
bind "kp_downarrow" "slowmo 0.2"
bind "kp_pgdn" "slowmo 0.3"
bind "kp_leftarrow" "slowmo 0.5"
bind "kp_5" "slowmo 1"
bind "kp_rightarrow" "slowmo 2"
bind "kp_home" "slowmo 3"
bind "kp_uparrow" "slowmo 5"
bind "kp_pgup" "slowmo 10"
bind "kp_ins" "pausedemo"
bind "kp_del" "stopdemo"
bind "kp_enter" "capturevideo"
bind "kp_plus" "capturevideosound"
bind "kp_minus" "demoview"
bind "kp_multiply" "thirdperson"

alias "+demoview" "set viewsize_backup $viewsize; set viewsize 120; set crosshair_backup $crosshair; set crosshair 0; set con_notify_backup $con_notify; set con_notify 0; set r_drawviewmodel_backup $r_drawviewmodel; set r_drawviewmodel 0; alias demoview -demoview"
alias "-demoview" "set viewsize $viewsize_backup; set crosshair $crosshair_backup; set con_notify $con_notify_backup; set r_drawviewmodel $r_drawviewmodel_backup; alias demoview +demoview"
alias "demoview" "+demoview"

alias "+capturevideo" "set cl_capturevideo 1; alias capturevideo -capturevideo"
alias "-capturevideo" "set cl_capturevideo 0; alias capturevideo +capturevideo"
alias "capturevideo" "+capturevideo"

alias "+capturevideosound" "set cl_capturevideo 1; set cl_capturevideo_sound 1; alias capturevideosound -capturevideosound"
alias "-capturevideosound" "set cl_capturevideo 0; set cl_capturevideo_sound 0; alias capturevideosound +capturevideosound"
alias "capturevideosound" "+capturevideosound"

alias "+thirdperson" "set chase_active 1; alias thirdperson -thirdperson"
alias "-thirdperson" "set chase_active 0; alias thirdperson +thirdperson"
alias "thirdperson" "+thirdperson"


Note the "demoview" section

Okey that might work, I'm totaly fine by that (thanks ^_^), but if one isn't smart enough to create ones own cfg like that or can't find one somewhere there should still be a good way how that works. For a future development, and also, I think that would save a lot of trouble and time for people like you. Imagine helping hundreds of people with the same problem And we know how stupid some people are, creating a new thread for the same thing all the time instead of searching for one existing ^_^
It would help us all ^_^

Cause I believe, once there has come some nexuiz movies more people would want to create some too. It will spread like fire

*ahem*: http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.ph ... aspec#7536

lol

Well such stuff might be subject to change for Nexuiz 3.0 when finaly CSQC is working in all its glory For example then team-menu can't be supressed right now when watching a demo and other stuff like nogibs is just bad like its done right now. Let alone stuff like forced skins..

And for those too laze to create their own config i created the "Tips and Tricks" sticky thread

I tried posting this in the thread 4m mentionned but for some reason when I hit "Reply" I get thrown back to forum index. Might as well simply post it here. I know I mentionned this somewhere, but thought I could explain myself better. I'm also talking about this again because I keep wondering why so few people play this game.

Is a "maxspectators" type command being considered? For example, setting a duel server up with maxplayers to 2 and making some spots for spectator too, who cant join the game unless someboby leaves. Pressing F5 could open the same kind of menu as right now, but have buttons that make join the game if it's not a teamgame, select a team to join if its a team game or select spectator mode (if you are not already spectating).

I know there is IRC, but still. Would be nice to join a server and spectate a duel and then when match is finished, ask if you can play. One player goes spectator and you can then get in and get the spot (or get a teamgame going if more spectators join !!). Yes, you can do that on servers that have maxplayers set higher, however that means anybody can join the server and start playing mid-game, messing things up.

Also, that way ladder-servers wouldnt need to be private. Believe me, some newbie joining a server and spectating a duel between k0jak and Morfar is gonna be a lot more impressed by the game then by joining a ffa server filled with newbies who have no idea what they're doing. I'm quite sure this would get Nexuiz more activity and make it more addictive because then newbies would see what kind of skill you can get to if you keep playing more and more. It will make them want to progress and get as good as those players. And what better way to learn than by watching?

Right now Nexuiz kinda has this "underground" feel. Like you can join most public servers (one of the 3 servers that actually have people on it and not bots) and pretty much finish first all maps easily because they're filled with newbies. At the same time you keep hearing about some players who are awesome but you never actually see them play. It's easy to think "anybody can be good at this, it's way too newbie friendly". How many of those people who installed the game actually got as far as to go on IRC and ask good players to play? Unless you get your ass on irc where those good players hang out and ask them for a duel (get your ass kicked 50-0 ), you'll never know what is possible with this game.

That's pretty much what happened to me. I installed the game last week but didnt like it (almost hated it actually). Then I was bored and wondered what a duel would look like in this "newbie" game. When I played k0jak I suddenly got out of boredom.

I don't know, I just beleive that Nexuiz has the potential to be the type of game where there is no limit at the skill level you can get at. I mean jesus, a lot of people still play Quakeworld after 10 years because of this very reason. Skill level is now like 50 times higher than it was 5 years ago. Wouldnt it be great if people still played Nexuiz in 10 years and were still getting better and better at it and still discovered new things all the time?

Try that link: http://www.forums.alientrap.local/viewtopi ... aspec#7536

When you are using www.alientrap.org to sign in there is cookie saved which can not be read when using a link without the www. And as the forum itself seems to use the www. variant one should also use links with www ..

nifrek wrote:Also, that way ladder-servers wouldnt need to be private. Believe me, some newbie joining a server and spectating a duel between k0jak and Morfar is gonna be a lot more impressed by the game then by joining a ffa server filled with newbies who have no idea what they're doing. I'm quite sure this would get Nexuiz more activity and make it more addictive because then newbies would see what kind of skill you can get to if you keep playing more and more. It will make them want to progress and get as good as those players. And what better way to learn than by watching?

Ladder rules don't allow spectators for a reason: someone could use another client to "spy" on his opponent. So ladder servers should always have maxplayers set to 2, regardless of how many spectators/players are allowed...
And if you wanna have duells with spectators, the arena gamemode is more fun imho

Yes it makes sense. I understand for offical matches. But I wasnt talking about ladder-matches in particular, but any matches played for fun, and not games where people can join mid-game.

Anyway my point wasnt about me having more fun with having specs watching games, but that Nexuiz needs to be more open about stuff like this because it would help grow a bigger fanbase, get newbies and people that come from other games to keep playing Nexuiz. They need to be impressed by more than just good graphics. Letting spectators watch games with good players would help.

Someone making a website with demos would also help a lot. I could design a site if anyone can host it. However I can't do php or any programming to make the site self-updating, if anyone wants to help that'd be great. But I guess I could update it by hand for a while until it gets bigger. Talk to me on irc if interested.

Someone making good fragmovies and posting them on own-age.com would also help.

It would be fun to have GTV for nexuiz too. I think everybody knows, what's a GTV, but if not, I can explain in a few words.

A GTV is a special spectator, usually the referee spawns and controls them in the game. The GTV client usually spectates one of the players view. Now here comes the trick: the GTV client "broadcasts" it's view to other spectators, but with a certain delay - about 5 seconds. So a spectator can connect to the GTV spectator, to see what the GTV sees, but with a 5 seconds of delay, so none of the spectators can help the players eg. on TeamSpeak, becouse spectators see the happenings always 5 seconds later.

nifrek wrote:I know there is IRC, but still. Would be nice to join a server and spectate a duel and then when match is finished, ask if you can play. One player goes spectator and you can then get in and get the spot (or get a teamgame going if more spectators join !!). Yes, you can do that on servers that have maxplayers set higher, however that means anybody can join the server and start playing mid-game, messing things up.

Also, that way ladder-servers wouldnt need to be private. Believe me, some newbie joining a server and spectating a duel between k0jak and Morfar is gonna be a lot more impressed by the game then by joining a ffa server filled with newbies who have no idea what they're doing. I'm quite sure this would get Nexuiz more activity and make it more addictive because then newbies would see what kind of skill you can get to if you keep playing more and more. It will make them want to progress and get as good as those players. And what better way to learn than by watching?

Right now Nexuiz kinda has this "underground" feel. Like you can join most public servers (one of the 3 servers that actually have people on it and not bots) and pretty much finish first all maps easily because they're filled with newbies. At the same time you keep hearing about some players who are awesome but you never actually see them play. It's easy to think "anybody can be good at this, it's way too newbie friendly". How many of those people who installed the game actually got as far as to go on IRC and ask good players to play? Unless you get your ass on irc where those good players hang out and ask them for a duel (get your ass kicked 50-0 ), you'll never know what is possible with this game.

That's pretty much what happened to me. I installed the game last week but didnt like it (almost hated it actually). Then I was bored and wondered what a duel would look like in this "newbie" game. When I played k0jak I suddenly got out of boredom.

KadaverJack wrote:Ladder rules don't allow spectators for a reason: someone could use another client to "spy" on his opponent. So ladder servers should always have maxplayers set to 2, regardless of how many spectators/players are allowed...
And if you wanna have duells with spectators, the arena gamemode is more fun imho

Hi, sorry about bringing up an old thread. I actually don't remember posting this. This was last year, I played Nexuiz about 3 weeks then stopped for various reasons, including this one probably. Strangely, almost exactly 1 year later I installed the game again. Gotta say I did'nt remember anything other than one map so I had to relearn everything.

Anyway, I'd like to bring this up again, I was gonna post the exact same thing I did last year and I reread the thread and thought about ideas how this could work. First, read what I've quoted in my post before if you skipped it (which explains why I'm suggesting this) and then this:

A way this could work could be to have a setting on the server (accessible by vote) that enables or disables spectators. So for official matches, player could simply disable them.

I guess it might be complicated on the programming side although I know nothing about it, maybe it would be easier to code it not by changing the maxplayers settings but by making spectators "blind" or something like that. So if you join an official game you won't be able to see anything other than a blank screen with death messages and chat talk. If you join a duel played for fun you could watch (but not join, of course).

Every time I mention on various public servers that "I wish I could spectate duels" plenty of other players repsond by "me too".

And no, demos don't do the trick (and there's no real place to get them), real-time is the real deal.

Seems to me this could work. Any opinions?


...
And to add even more to this, just think how cool it would be if when you came back home from work or whatever and check on irc and see that some people talked minutes earlier about dueling, you could join the server and watch them play, smoke a cigarette and comment on the match with other spectators and maybe challenge the winner when they're done playing. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that kinda thing help the community and get newbies to start playing seriously and not just "hide and snipe"?

Okay nevermind then.

I already suggested this. No interest on the developers side because developers don't play 1on1s. Forget it, it won't come, unless you do it yourself. I've asked for this a dozen times. If I had time I would learn and do it, but I don't have any more free time to spend on Nexuiz.

I want Arena mode changed. Simply by changing the rules to timelimit 15 instead of "first frag wins". This makes Arena mode more like Duel mode. It allready allows spectators and a queue system.

If someone can code a NexTV proxy thats cool too

That would be boring, because it'd only make sense if the server runs always on the same map. 15 minutes per arena ROUND... no thanks. Would make a full arena game where everyone had his chance take a day.

GreEn`mArine wrote:I already suggested this. No interest on the developers side because developers don't play 1on1s. Forget it, it won't come, unless you do it yourself. I've asked for this a dozen times. If I had time I would learn and do it, but I don't have any more free time to spend on Nexuiz.

Exactly. First of all, "disabling spectators", how is that going to work. What to do with connections that are neither players nor spectators? Impossible.

What you MEAN would be the following: a way to change maxplayers on the fly, and a QC mod to only let two players actually play. But even that would be annoying, if after a map change the wrong one joined the game. So forget that too. What we would REALLY need for that is a second listening port on the server, one with maxplayers 2, one with maybe maxplayers 14, and the QC code could find out which port someone came from.

If we hadn't more important things to do, this would be a possibility - IIRC the engine can already open up multiple listening ports (one local:1, and one UDP port), so adding a second UDP port would be easy to do, and it shouldn't be hard to also add a field to the QC code so it knows which port a player connected to. Maybe someone else can take up this idea. I propose it like this:

maxplayers 16
ports "0.0.0.0:26000 2 0.0.0.0:26001 13 127.0.0.1:26002 1"

That would mean: 16 player slots total. From "any ethernet card" 26000, 2 can come (the duelers). From "any ethernet card" 26001, 13 can come (the spectators). From localhost port 26002, one can always join (the admin). QC should then be able to see a string that indicates which of these sockets was used, like, player.netaddress_local, which would either contain one of 0.0.0.0:26000, 0.0.0.0:26001, 127.0.0.1:26002.

Note that the numbers do not need to add up to maxplayers - for example, you can allow a total of 16, but only 12 to join per port, so the other 4 have to come in through the other port.

Also, it would be cool to make it possible that the different ports get different hostnames. But no idea how to store that, so sorry - someone else has to find a working way for that and implement it.

I've taken a look at the code (even tho I don't really understand) I can see a lot of the same functions are used in most modes and some have unique ones like arena_roundbased and such, so I "suppose" that making a new mode could be pretty easy (as in "not take 100 hours of work") to do by using bits of code from here and there. Then compile a new progs.dat and voilà?

Actually, goddammit, I would be willing to donate 50$USD using paypal to anyone that will do this:

Create a new mode (no idea what it could be called, maybe Tournament or something like that). In this mode, it would work like this: Teamplay needs to be enabled. When people join the server they can join a team or stay observer, like on any server with ongoing games. At first the server is in "warmup mode", which is what duel servers use right now (you can frag each other and stuff until all players are "ready" and then map restarts). So when all players that want to play have joined a team and are "ready", the map restarts. Server is now in "match mode". Observers and people who connect after the game has started have to stay observers until timelimit is reached. Then the map restarts and it's warmup time again, people can go back to observer or join a team again.

That way, the same server could be used for duel, 2on2, 3on3, 4on4, etc. without random people joining mid-game and ruin everything by unbalancing the teams. It would be nice to play REAL TEAMPLAY without having to join a clan.

Does that make sens? My english is not so good so if it's clear I can try to explain better.

Anyone interested?

//EDIT: I didn't see your post, divVerent. Yes that would definatly work. Actually I believe that's how Quakeworld works which is a modified Quake client/server that is also open-source. Maybe it would be possible/easier for someone to adapt that code?

divVerent wrote:That would be boring, because it'd only make sense if the server runs always on the same map. 15 minutes per arena ROUND... no thanks. Would make a full arena game where everyone had his chance take a day.

A "public" 1on1 mode with ladder rules and queue system would be nice Why not call it Duel Mode.. sure it can be tiresome to sit and watch someone else play but some might learn stuff.

nifreK : i posted exactly the same in january 2007 already.

http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.php?t=1151

morfar wrote:

divVerent wrote:That would be boring, because it'd only make sense if the server runs always on the same map. 15 minutes per arena ROUND... no thanks. Would make a full arena game where everyone had his chance take a day.

A "public" 1on1 mode with ladder rules and queue system would be nice Why not call it Duel Mode.. sure it can be tiresome to sit and watch someone else play but some might learn stuff.

If a round takes 15 minutes and many people can join, wouldn't it mean it takes hours till it's your turn? Who would want THAT?

No, that's not going to happen. What's more likely is multiple ports, and different "access rights" and player counts on them, so there could be a "private" port number for the duelers, and a "public" port number for the crowd to spectate from. So, for example:

connect 1.2.3.4:5678 = duelist (max 2)
connect 1.2.3.4:26000 = spectator (max 13)
connect 127.0.0.1:26001 = admin (max: 1)

It probably wouldn't be hard to add THAT - it will however be hard to register them all to the master server. Just registering the spectator port should be easy however.

Sorry GreEn`mArine, didn't come up when I searched for posts related to spectator mode or I didn't see it.

But anyway, maybe if we ask about it once in a while, somebody will make it happen someday.

Most of the things I described are things that are already there in the game in some way I think, but used in other modes, so maybe it would be easier to those bits and modify them than making it from scratch.

The arena mode can't be compared to that... anyway, one of the 1on1 players should code the features the 1on1 players want. Patches will be looked at and are likely to be committed, if they don't break general gameplay.

ai wrote:It has bugged me now for a long time that when you spectate there's stupid text right in front of you and you can't see well at all.

You can disable the center print with "scr_centertime 0".

Yes, I'm planning on asking about it once a week.

So I trying to think of simple way of doing this.

How about a command called "match", unrelated to game mode (could be used for duels, teamplay, ctf, but useless for others) when people press f4 (ready) the match command is set to "1" and map resets (items and players), there is a countdown and spectators cannot join anymore. Then map ends, people vote for next map and when new map loads the command is set back to "0" (loop to infinity). If something goes wrong during match (a player disconnects, or whatever), people can vote timelimit -1 and command is back to "0" on next map. And also, people are not forced to use the "match" thing, they can still play as usual unless everyone decide to start a real "match".

That way we could play pickup games, that is, get people on a server, decide who should be on what team and stuff. If number of players in uneven, someone "sits" and can observe while eating some popcorn then take someone's spot next game. It works for other games, I don't see why it wouldn't for Nexuiz. I'm sure it would be very easy to get some 2on2s going all night, switching teams and players.