I have been meaning to make a mod of Nexuiz for a long time and i think it's time i got started. The mod will probably be called "Ancients" and will be based on the vastly popular "Defense of the Ancients" A.K.A. DOTA mod for Warcraft 3, which, by the way, is seen as the forerunner to World of Warcraft.

I have no quake C skill at all which is why I'll be needing a lot of support from you the beloved Nexuiz community if this is to become a reality.

Gameplay
The map will be divided into 2 bases (like CTF) and players divided into 2 teams (like CTF).
Each base will be guarded by stationary, destructible turrets. At the heart of each base is the team's ancient which the team must defend.
To assist each team, bots automatically spawn at their ancient and mindlessly runs towed the enemy ancient, attempting to destroy all resistance. These bots would typically be killed quite quickly.
As bots die they drop money and increase the level of enemy players.
As players level increase their hitpoints, damage, healing rate and movement speed improve.
Each character has a different model and starting weapon set based on selected class and level. Other weapons and items can be bought with accumulated money. Various Items will be available to improve hitpoints, damage, healing rate, movement speed, provide temporary invisibility, or modify purchased weapons into superweapons.

The gameplay will be considerably slowed as compared to Nexuiz Deathmatch. The focus should shift from getting lots of kills to surviving and leveling up.

The game ends when one team's base is overwhelmed and their ancient destroyed.

Plan
The mod is quite a significant coding undertaking so i have broken up the task into some simple, achievable goals which will be discussed in subsequent posts as this one is already pretty long.

This seems like it'd be very doable, and fun at that The Nex-Life mod from way back showed that a currency reward system can work in game. Maybe you should see if you can track down the source to that for a little help in the coding process?

I don't think that would help much, since the last nexlife version i'm aware of was for 1.2.1 (and the source was never made public afaik). Imho the buying system is one the easier tasks, so even if you could get the source: merging it with the current code base would propably take as much time as starting from scratch.

that would take a while to code my good friend. break out the mountain dew and caffeine goodies, we're pulling an all nighter!

I don't expect this to be done in a weekend but each of the project goals will be kept as simple as possible.

Goal 1: basic team and class system
Modify CTF code so that each player has different amounts of hitpoints, movement speed and starting weapon based on player skin. I.E. selected skin defines player class.

I'll be getting started as soon as i find the tutorial on making nexuiz mods

You know what would be awsome? A starcraft-esque total conversion of Nexuiz.

In other news, that mod sounds like alot of fun. Would such a game be contained in a single game match, or will a person be able to continue where they left off, status wise, after they left a game?

Need model help? - Contact me im a trained Animator at university of Copenhagen.

Already hit my first snag. I can't find the qcc2.exe which shipped with earlier versions of nex. i'm following the clearly outdated tutorial by Mauvebib http://tutorials.moddb.com/77/learning-qc-for-nexuiz-part-1/. If i need another compiler please say.

cyan wrote:Need model help? - Contact me im a trained Animator at university of Copenhagen.

Seeing that DOTA has more than 60 unique characters lots of models will be needed.

In other news, that mod sounds like alot of fun. Would such a game be contained in a single game match, or will a person be able to continue where they left off, status wise, after they left a game? Razz

Single rounds. Most of the DOTA fun is in leveling way up and becoming a walking god. As it is a normal part of a match it doesn't frustrate 'noobs' because the king-of-the-hill tends to change from game to game instead of persisting like in MMORPGs.

sounds like a cool idea. I've played DOTA once or twice (never really got into it). I could lend a hand with the coding if you want. I started a class/objective-based nexuiz mod eons ago (Team:Nexuiz) so I have a little experience with coding mods for it. Contact me on irc (same name) or on my msn if you want.

ihsan wrote:Already hit my first snag. I can't find the qcc2.exe which shipped with earlier versions of nex. i'm following the clearly outdated tutorial by Mauvebib http://tutorials.moddb.com/77/learning-qc-for-nexuiz-part-1/. If i need another compiler please say.

it says where you can get qcc in the FAQ... You just drop it in whatever dir of the game source you need compiled (/menu/, for example) and exec it right there. then go up a level and you have your compiled code.

Turns out nexuiz is compiled by FTEqcc. I successfully renamed the weapons as a simple test.

Yesterday i stumbled upon Darsana. I was so impressed that i signed up on their forum and made this post:

Hello all.
I have been member of the Nexuiz community for more than a year now but yesterday stumbled upon darsana.
Nexuiz is another FPS which uses the same engine and is clearly more mature (in it's development cycle).

I have always wanted to make a mod of Nexuiz which takes the gameplay elements of the wildly popular warcraft 3 dota mod into a first person shooter. To my pleasant surprise that is exactly what Darsana seems to be IMHO. Destroy the God mode seems inspired by DOTA. In fact i found Darsana while doing research for the nexuiz-dota mod.

Darsana looks great but my main concern is that Darsana seems petty closed compared to Nexuiz's fully GPL policy. Is this so?

Nexuiz is definitely Darsana's scifi older brother. I think the communities should be closer together. Both projects have a lot to benefit.
I'll probably make a Darsana map for just that reason.

About me:
I can map in GTKRadiant, I am a Photoshop pro and I 3d model in blender as a hobby. I don't know quake c but i can program.

Darsana's destroy the god mode will give you a pretty good idea of what the mod should be like. It's worth checking out.
http://darsana-game.com/

I think someone got banned at their forum for requesting the game sources. They apparently took offense at him asking for it under the terms of the GPL because they said their code didn't have to fall under it or something like that. I've followed Darsana since last summer and it's an interesting game, but I'm pretty sure they're in violation of GPL, unless there's some loophole that allows them to distribute DP as part of the game without having to release the source of their game code.

Shoe wrote:I think someone got banned at their forum for requesting the game sources. They apparently took offense at him asking for it under the terms of the GPL because they said their code didn't have to fall under it or something like that. I've followed Darsana since last summer and it's an interesting game, but I'm pretty sure they're in violation of GPL, unless there's some loophole that allows them to distribute DP as part of the game without having to release the source of their game code.

I don't know anything about a ban, since i don't read their forum, but ppl were asking Chris for engine sources a while ago (around the time the beta was published) and he did post a link.

It's this thread:
http://ru1337.com/darsana//forum/viewtopic.php?t=144

It doesn't look like the guy got banned, I guess.

ihsan wrote:Goal 1: basic team and class system
Modify CTF code so that each player has different amounts of hitpoints, movement speed and starting weapon based on player skin. I.E. selected skin defines player class.

This was easier than I expected. All I had to do was paste in 3 blocks of code for this proof-of-concept (1 each for hitpoints, movement speed and starting weapon). The blocks were all very similar to this:

Code: Select all

/*-------------------------------Ancient mod-------------------------------------*/
      if (self.model == "models/player/marine.zym")
      {
         self.items = self.items | IT_HAGAR;
         self.switchweapon = WEP_HAGAR;
         self.ammo_rockets = 100;
      }
/*-------------------------------Ancient mod-------------------------------------*/

So far I only touched cl_client.qc and cl_physics.qc
This method unfortunately affects all game modes so this doesn't really feel like a mod.
Worse yet, I haven't got tortoise svn working properly yet so I'm basically hacking my outdated copy of nex .


=========================================
Anyways, it worx so I can go on to the next Goal.
Goal 2: Different weapon behaviour based on player class

sounds like a pretty decent mod so far. Are you going to throw in objectives?

If you want it in "compatible mod" style rather then changing the default behavior you would need to so something like:

Code: Select all

      if ((self.model == "models/player/marine.zym") && cvar("g_mymod"))
      {
         self.items = self.items | IT_HAGAR;
         self.switchweapon = WEP_HAGAR;
         self.ammo_rockets = 100;
      }


And then add "set g_mymod 0" in default.cfg.

You would proly also whanna have a look into teamplay.qc and hakk in the appropriate team checks and so on. Proly some other places that needs tweaking too =)

[TSA] Psychiccyberfreak wrote:sounds like a pretty decent mod so far. Are you going to throw in objectives?

No real quests or side-missions. There will be a few bosses (bots) you can take on for some extra cash but the focus of the game must be the enemy base.
One thing i like about Chess is that the objective is single and clear: Checkmate the enemy king. The weird thing about chess is players have to spend most of the game taking control of the board before they can move on to the ultimate goal, so when some one actually "swoops in for the kill" there is a certain element of surprise. Better yet, when a player thinks he is in control of the board he tends to become careless and many games are won assassination style.
DOTA has a similar game mechanic where one team is focusing so hard on getting kills and money that they loose as the "loosing" side makes a suicide push for their "ancient".
I don't want to dilute that by having to many strays.

Thats a very very nice idea hope you will do i will play it

Once again the real world is pulling me away from nex for about a week. If any of you quake C gurus have the time please paste in little bits of code which may be helpful. Here are my early goals (you don't have to take them in order):

Goal 2: Different weapon behaviour and weapon skin based on player class. This is just a proof-of concept so just enable laser guided rockets for marine only.

Goal 3: New resource: Magic. Magic is regenerated slowly and required for some weapons. It may be easier to just replace one of the existing ammo types. Different HUD icon.

Goal 4: New resource: Divinity (Money). When anything dies they drop a few glowing orbs which can be used to upgrade weapons at the base. Purchases will occur either by menu or by touching runes (whichever is easier).

Goal 5: New weapon (magic): Healing Wave. No projectile or laser. A light from above shines down on a targeted ally and heals 200 (or whatever) hitpoints. Will not fire if enemy or world is targeted. Right click to heal self. Can't be used again for a 30 seconds (or whatever). Implement however possible.

Goal 6: Magic shield. Left click to activate, Right click to deactivate. When attacked magic is used to protect the bearer so 75% of attack damage is subtracted form the magic reserve and only 25% from the bearer's hitpoints. Shield deactivates when magic is depleted (of course). It remains active even when weapons switch.

Goal 7: Boots of speed. Run faster, jump a little higher.

Goal 8: Paralyzing Bolt (Magic). Will not fire if ally or world is targeted. Enemy is completely disabled and cannot move or fire for 2 seconds. Can't be used again for a 12 seconds (or whatever).

The idea is that there will be a LOT of cool and wacky weapons to add to the fun. I DO have a storyline for all of this which will change as time and ideas go by. If you have any ideas for weapons just post or code them. The more the merrier.

May pop in for a bit but i guess i'll see you guys next week

goal 2: is done in team: nexuiz, we had classes and they used diferent weapons
goal 5: iirc last thing that was coded for t:n was healing for medic
you have examples how to use menu system to make nice ingame menus to chose classes inside t:n code too

goal 7: EVEN FASTER ? 0.o

Team nexuiz has a lot of good code in there which i'm not sure how to re-integrate so if anybody can put some tips that will help, please do.
Secondly, how difficult is it to use a md2 player model instead of a zym?

so if anybody can put some tips that will help, please do.

intrest team nexuiz coder in your mod

how difficult is it to use a md2 player model instead of a zym?

from the modeler point of view, harder
from the coder point of view, harder (you will need to rewrite whole animatons code )
if md2 exporting is similar to md3 then animatior will have harder life too