I just got the email from Facebook, referring to our page (https://www.facebook.com/xonotic)

Xonotic
New Likes: 570
(The number of unique people who "like" our page. Whatever we post on our page will probably show up in their facebook main page. Aka "how many people are interested in our status updates).

Total likes: 1835 (+78,33% compared to last week)

Talking About This: 639 (+5225,0% compared to last week)
(Aka whenever somebody "likes" us or shares any of our pictures, writes something about us linking back to our page).

Weekly Total Reach: 113019 (+32946,5% compared to last week)
(Aka exactly how much people saw anything that happened on our Facebook timeline).

A small note: before Gronkh and Sarazar Let's Play Together, we reached 1000 followers in two years!

Hey guys, i'm just doing this quick post to talk about updates to the Capture The Flag game mode which have just been merged into the stable branch of the game. As some of you may know, i've been working on re-writing the code myself, which includes cleaning up the codebase as well as adding many new features and fixing old problems with the game mode. Let me just go over the changelog of sorts right now:

• Moved all of the CTF code to the mutator system (cleaning up code base a lot, including: entirely re-wrote ctf code, moved scores and bot roles into mutator gamemode files, separated configuration into its own file (gamemodes.cfg), improved how spawnfuncs for CTF are handled, etc)
  
• Flags float on water (to help with gameplay on aquatic maps)
  
• Flags auto-return if they fall somewhere they can't be gotten (like into Lava, or Slime, or a triggerhurt)
  
• Flags properly follow through teleporters and on jump pads like you would expect
  
• Dropped flags show up to both teams, so if you die get it back quickly -- otherwise the enemy knows where you lost the flag.
  
• Dropped flags return themselves if they fell on their own base spawnpoint
  
• You can now throw flags-- dropping a flag now "throws" it just like throwing a weapon
  
• If you have strength, you throw flags twice as hard (just for fun ^_^)
  
• Thrown flags can be captured by base flags (points awarded to the person who last had the flag)
  
• Implemented a flag passing system (so you can pass a flag to team mates without dropping/throwing it, promotes gameplay).. NOTE: Currently disabled by default due to broken support for warpzones. Once warpzone support is fixed, this will be enabled by default.
  
• Flag passing and flag throwing are done with the +use bind, MAKE SURE TO ADD THIS BIND TO YOUR CONFIG, IT IS NOW IMPORTANT
  
• You can request people to pass you the flag (it sends them a centerprint) by pressing the +use bind as well
  
• Better bot team support-- If you request the flag from a bot, it will automatically pass it to you.
  
• All new particle effects for captures/pickups/returns/passes/drops/etc
  
• New sounds for touching a flag and passing flags
  
• "Stalemate" system which shows the location of both flag carriers on the radar if they have both had the flag for an extended period of time (fights against camping with the flag)
  
• "Help me" waypoint system which automatically adds "FLAG CARRIER NEEDING HELP" to their waypoint when they're low on health
  
• Integrated real vehicle support, including new mutator hooks and the ability for players to interact with the flag without even leaving the vehicle (i.e., touch the flag with the vehicle and you still pick it up)
  
• Much better handling of intermission (stop flags from moving, reset game mode entities, don't do announcements anymore)
  
• Added ability for dropped flags to take damage-- meaning you can return them faster by shooting them/hurting them
  
• Added "healthbars" for dropped flags to show how long they have left before they return
  
• Improved centerprints and notifications of events in the game mode
  
• Added "captime" score field so that you can track your fastest capture times for each map (yes, that means XonStat can display cap times for matches too)
  
• Updated support for capture shield (idea by Morphed to help prevent bad players from taking the flag haha)
  
• Implemented better speedrun system
  
• New scoring system (and configs), added "capture assist" points- score awarded to whoever had the flag previously to the current flag carrier who captures.
  

On behalf of Team Xonotic and the entire Xonotic community I'd like to give a big thank you to Gronkh! Today he helped show thousands of live-stream viewers just how fun (and silly) Xonotic can be. We appreciate it, and we look forward to seeing you out on the servers soon, Gronkh! In the mean time the rest of the development team and I will continue to work hard on improving this game we love. Thanks again, and happy fragging!

P.S. - Our servers still love you even though you gave them a slight bump

Note: this is a guest post by Halogene

Hello everyone that's new to Xonotic and maybe even new to fast-paced first person shooters in general! In this very first chapter of my newbie tips I'll be showing you an important movement technique called “bunny hopping.“

You may have noticed that players race around the maps at insane speeds, making them hard to hit and also hard to tell from which direction they'll come next, should you survive an attack. You can do that too, and this post will tell you how.

In Xonotic you have a lot of movement control while you are in the air, and to a great extent you'll accelerate when pressing the forward button while flying. When you just walk around, though, your feet are in constant contact with the ground, so the friction is slowing you down a lot. One of the keys to gain high speeds in Xonotic is therefore to touch the ground as little as possible. By constantly jumping you can keep ground contact to a minimum. The good thing is that you only need to keep the jump button pressed and you will jump again once you hit the ground (unless of course you disabled that in Settings → User). If you press the forward button while holding the jump button, you'll continuously get faster until you hit the acceleration limit.

This is quite easy and there's nothing really to master about plain forward bunny hopping. You'll face complications if you now try to turn once you gained some speed, however. If you continue to press the forward key and simply turn the mouse, you'll hardly manage to make a sharp turn (unless you stop jumping, which slows you down a lot). Online you'll meet a lot of players doing sharp turns at high speeds, and here's the secret how to do it:

Before the turn, while still bunny hopping, release the forward key (yes, really release it - it doesn't slow you down that much). Once you've released the forward key and while still keeping the jump key pressed, hold down the strafe key in the direction you want to turn (for sharp right turn: strafe right). Now hold the jump key and the strafe key and smoothly turn your mouse in the strafe direction (in my example, right). It's vital to move the mouse smoothly, because any abrupt sudden movements will slow you down. I can't stress this aspect enough - a lot of newcomers that I told this technique basically got all the key pressing part right but fail at moving the mouse smoothly. Slowly accelerate and decelerate the mouse turn and maintain a steady turn speed in between. The movement needs to be fluent and soft to get the full benefit. Also note that releasing the forward key while you've already pressed the strafe key will slow you down too, so be sure to use the right order. You'll notice that if you do it right, you actually don't lose speed in turns, but rather start to accelerate!

Once you're done turning, you can release the strafe key and press forward key again or even directly switch to the other direction. A good way to practice this is to use forward only for inital acceleration, and then to do turns left and right running in an number eight-shaped figure (I recommend the main room in the map “afterslime” for that).

It takes a while to get used to, but if you practice it it goes into your cerebellum sooner or later (depending on your age, mostly) and then you'll never think about it again! At that point you'll be bunny hopping all over the place at high speed. Mastering this technique is very rewarding, since running around a map at high speed is a bunch of fun.

That's it for now, practice and enjoy!

It has been about two weeks since I talked initially about our Elo ranking system. How time flies! As that time has passed, I've collected lots of valuable feedback both from players as well as my fellow developers, and I'm very excited to tell you about some further tweaks I've made to the algorithm. There are two relatively big changes: one dealing with non-duel game modes, and another dealing with how S is calculated in the original formula. I'll talk about the ranking changes to the various game modes first.

Duels Versus...Everything Else

Let me start by saying duel is largely unaffected. Phew! It is naturally the most competitive game mode, thus it deserves a more pure, winner-take-all algorithm. It's a good match for the implementation I discussed in my last post.

Team games are a different animal, however. With team games we see win-switchers (switching right before the end to be on the winning team), stackers (loading up the talent on one team only), and quitters. While we really can't do anything about the latter, we can do something about the former two. The change I made to counteract those is to rank-compare every player in the game to everyone else regardless of team. The points gained or lost against each opponent are then summed to formulate the final net gain/loss. This means that you have to hold your own against everyone else to gain points instead of relying on just being on the winning team. Imagine that! This also means that you can still lose points when you win if you don't score equal to or higher than expected.

The Scorefactor

Wait, did you say score? Yes, I said score. In order to make individual comparisons work, I had to use the individual's score as a means of comparison in lieu of just win or loss (1 or 0 for the S value). Each player's score is first converted into score per second, which takes his or her alivetime in the game into account. The scores for two players A and B are then compared with the following formula to obtain the scorefactor, S:






This formula yields a value between 0 and 1, which tells us the “winner” in the comparison. A value less than 0.5 means player A won, a value greater than 0.5 mean player B won, and a value of exactly 0.5 represents a draw. Note that the sum total of A and B's scorefactor here is 1, so B's scorefactor is simply 1-Sa.

The resulting S value is plugged into the original formula I covered in my initial post, which is then used to calculate the final points gained or lost. For the sake of completeness, I'll relist it here:





The big change here is that S can now take on a range of values between 0 and 1. It's that range that allows players to get an accurate points value for their contribution to the game, no matter the team they're on. It's a big improvement over the black and white algorithm that we had before.

In Conclusion

So what we have now for non-duel games is something that scales the points gained or lost according to how well you score versus everyone else in the game. For duel games, the initial algorithm remains in place. The end result is a ranking system that I think everyone can find fair, albeit imperfect. That being said, I suggest that you take all of the ranks and scores with a grain of salt: there is no number that is a true indicator of what you bring to the table as a player. Get in the game and focus on what is truly important: having fun! Happy fragging, and I'll see you out there!

A couple of days ago Apple has presented their latest version of Mac OS X: Mountain Lion (10.8). This latest release adds quite a few security measures, which can affect the use of Xonotic. In this post I'd like to address these issue and how they can easily be solved.

For users downloading a fresh copy of Xonotic from our website, they will get an error when trying to start the game for the first time. The error looks like this:

<a href="http://www.xonotic.org/2012/07/heads-up-for-osx-mountain-lion-users/screen-shot-2012-07-29-at-7-21-43-pm/" rel="attachment wp-att-2866"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2866" title="Mountain Lion Gatekeeper" src="http://www.xonotic.org/m/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Shot-2012-07-29-at-7.21.43-PM.png" alt="" width="418" height="202" /></a>

This is the new Gatekeeper verifying downloads when starting them for the <strong>first time</strong>. The simple solution is to right-click the Xonotic application, and select 'Open' - you will now be presented with a window where you can choose to specifically trust the Xonotic application (yes, you can trust us ;-). After doing this once, you can simply start the application the next time by clicking it directly.

The alternative is to disable Gatekeeper altogether, which can be done under the Privacy &amp; Security tab in the System Settings. We however do not encourage you to do this, as the workaround to whitelist specific applications is pretty easy.

For users running from git, we are still working out the kinks in order to be able to properly download and compile in Mountain Lion. Please get in touch with us on IRC if you have specific issue and we can look into it.

Hey everyone,

As many of you know, I've been steadily working on a new theme for our main website, xonotic.org. As of just about two minutes ago, it's live! I hope you like it, and I welcome your feedback. You probably don't need the URL, but I'll put it here anyway: it can be found here.

One thing to note is that I'm not done. I realize that the media page (videos/pics) isn't what it should be right now, and the same goes for some of the older pages. I'll be getting to those in time! Thank you everyone for your support - you are all fantastic!

Team Xonotic would like to wish the best of luck to fellow developer FruitieX, who will tomorrow join the Finnish Defence Forces for a year of training.

Take care mate, and have fun with the new toys, but remember: there's no respawn in real life! Try not to overabuse rocketjumping with the RPG

ZeRoQL released a small teaser for his incoming fragmovie titled Killing X-Zone, which will be 20min long and full of frag epicness!



You can download the teaser from one the following links:
Mirror #1: Hetzner Online (Germany)
Mirror #2: Maverickservers (California)