Xonotic Balance Test Release

Hey everyone,

Today, something rather special is happening. We are releasing an unofficial development build of Xonotic primarily for balance testing and as a special event to renew interest in the game.

There have been a lot of improvements since our last release, and we strived to listen to your suggestions and input for the directions we should take on the game. Most importantly we are attempting to make the actual configuration of weapons and physics something enjoyable by as many people as possible, from newcomers to experienced players.

Since this is only a development release, we can't guarantee stability or that it is bug free. Although we took about a week off from potentially unstable commits, dedicating ourselves to fixing bugs, there is still a chance a bug could sneak in. If you find one, please report it here.

Balance Testing
What we essentially want you to focus on are two weapon balance configurations, that are defined on the files balanceSamual.cfg and balanceXonotic.cfg.

Right now, balanceXonotic.cfg (previously maintained by developer FruitieX and more recently shell clan with other collaboration) remains default until we come up with a decision. The current standing proposal balanceSamual.cfg (maintained by developer Samual with collaboration of other developers and players) will be reviewed along side it. If one balance isn't specifically preferred over another or there is some lingering issue, then a compromise will be made to work around it.

You can switch between the balance configurations on local servers using temporary keybinds created for this release: F7 for Samuals balance, and F8 for FruitieXs balance. For multiplayer you will have to search around for a server with the proper configuration you want.

Other weapon upgrades/removals are pending until after the balance is chosen. Other things simply aren't finished yet and would be too buggy for this release, for example the lightning gun is being recoded into a new separate weapon (potentially called the Arc Cannon) which will definitely be there in a later release. This means that for now the lightning gun is absent from balanceSamual.cfg as it does something else with the electro, but it will be included in the future.

Weekend In Testing
The second part to this release however is the announcement of an upcoming event for testing... *drum roll*: Xonotic Weekend In Testing (hereby known as XWIT) will take place between Friday April 29th and Sunday May 1st where the goal is to gather as many people as possible who can play on new servers with updated clients. We intentionally chose a date 2 weeks away so that people can have time to download the development release, and so that players have the ability to plan it out and make time to play.

By all means we want you to play before (and after) the event as well, just make sure you can get as many people together as possible on the weekend.

Another useful thing about this event is that we are going to use it to test the backend of our statistics system and actually generate a good amount of data for it.

Servers
We will already have quite a few official servers, both EU and NA, setup and ready to go. Some will be private and competitive, but most will be public spreading across multiple game modes. These official ones are mainly going to be hosted by Samual, divVerent, and Antibody with the support of edong23 and merlijn. Note: These servers can't be expected to be 100% set up until the XWIT event, it generally will take time so be patient.

We encourage Nexuiz server owners to get involved here as well and direct traffic from their Nexuiz servers just to give Xonotic a shot. Several have already agreed to this (such as HOCTF: The largest public American CTF server in Nexuiz - or DCC: A European based community) Before and during the XWIT event, they will be directing people to download Xonotic from here. Who knows about afterwards, but it is possible some other servers (DCC for example already wants to do this) will stick with only Xonotic and never go back to Nexuiz.

If you want to host a server, please keep in mind the whole purpose is to focus upon the balance configs, so if you are playing with other physics or such modifications then please do it with a private server. We don't want to confuse players who are looking for a chance to try the current default settings and the newer proposed settings. There is a config provided (annoy_balance.cfg) which allows you to notify the player which balance is being used by sending them an info message - It can also switch between the balance at every single end of a match to keep testing time fair between the two... That CAN be disabled however to dedicate the server just to one balance by a simple modification to the file. If you wish to do balance testing, we strongly recommend you use this script so people know exactly which config they're using.

Outcome of the event
Shortly after XWIT, we will create a public balance survey where you can give feedback about the two balances and other such stuff which were tested. We want to finally settle the balance debate once and for all. With this survey we will decide upon the direction of balance in Xonotic, and stick with it. Once we have finished with that and other such decisions, we generally plan on creating a full beta release in the near future. ;-)

Basically this development release will be the single pivoting point on moving forward with Xonotic, it will give us the information we need to progress and continue producing on something you all have been wanting.

Downloads
The packages linked below contain binaries (32 and 64 bits) for Windows, Linux, and OS X. You are free to mirror these and your link will be added to the list of mirrors.
Note: We changed how the textures are stored since the preview, so even though we added more art content the file size is actually much smaller. "

Development build .Torrent - 4/14/2011
Contains both Xonotic + map pack

Development build mirrors - 807mb - 4/14/2011
md5sum: 350c215223d6673ad464c0160e679400
http://samual.nexuizninjaz.com/xonotic-20110414.zip (NA/USA mirror 1)
http://nullgaming.com/xonotic/mirror/xon...110414.zip (NA/USA mirror 2)
http://projects.designxenon.com/xonotic-20110414.zip (Germany)

Along with the development release we created an unofficial map pack which would allow for easy addition of maps to your server/client It would also help with getting feedback for these maps and potentially getting them to be official Xonotic maps. Quite a few of the maps are still work in progress, so again feedback is welcomed.

Map pack - 332mb - 30 maps - 4/12/2011
md5sum: 74f1cd7af5c10969813840df9d06c46a
http://samual.nexuizninjaz.com/Xonotic%2...2-2011.zip (NA/USA mirror 1)
http://nullgaming.com/xonotic/mirror/Xon...2-2011.zip (NA/USA mirror 2)
http://projects.designxenon.com/Xonotic%...2-2011.zip (Germany)

Note: It is recommended to set up a curl site for the individual maps, or else your players will lack maps if they don't have the map pack.

Enjoy!

83% downloaded... looking forward to this.

I will download it, and play tomorrow.

3 different downloads confuse me a bit. I am from NL, so I will download just the NL/EU one, but what is the difference?

(I do already have loads of maps, can I copy them into this new build, or will I be able to play on them automatically? That was what happened when I got the git, all my maps, keybinds and name layout were still there )

Spread it around everyone -- Make sure to talk about the XWIT event.

The more players the better.

Also: There is a readme inside the map pack -- just copy the .pk3 files to your user data directory (NOT the one where Xonotic actually is) and they should be loaded.

Go baby go!

I'd help if this wasn't over the time of my degree exams

Good luck!

BalanceSamual already gets my vote, I can tell before I even take it online that his is a better direction. There's only ONE thing that would be nice to have (the constant jumping to dodge, saving bunnyhops for travelling and equal emphasis on fighting on the ground and in the air that was present in my buggy file) in his config that also doesn't exist in the other, but in it's current state I wouldn't touch it, as it's pretty damn good as it is and tweaking it to bring in what I'm thinking of would screw some of the weapons up severely. Overall his is THE best balance and physics set for the game from what I've seen (better than the default and better than my buggy mess I have), it's borderline flawless. I'm going to assume that some of the weapons (needle-based if I have to take a guess, I noticed the machinegun needed to reload) will need to be reloaded just like what was originally intended in the original Unreal Tournament (beta actually had reloads on almost all of the weapons actually including the plasmagun), THINKING of it made it seem like a bad idea, SEEING it in-game however changed my mind. I like the idea of a handful of guns needing to be reloaded.


The other configs in spite a bit of clean up is still a mess in my opinion and a bad direction for the game to go, it's still plagued with just about everything that got me to create my own actually. Think I might get back to work on mine after screwing around with that, it's too close to copying Quake III minus it's wierder physics. The health system especially destroys it.

mepper, these are mirrors. You only need one + mappack.

After playing with BalanceSamual for some weeks now, I can honestly say basically nothing in it needs changing, there is no major flaw or problem with the weapons damage or functionality and the weapons follow very closely from nexuiz but the randomness has been fixed and everything works out nicely, only half problem that has been mentioned is the lock-down when hit with the machinegun when your in the air as some CTF pickup player's say that they can't move whilst I don't see it as a huge problem it could probably do with seeing if it can be reduced a bit (but not fully removed!), so I will write that in the survery!

P.S Aren't the physics exactly the same anyway for both?

Other then that, it is great work and anyone who complains should be stoned.


I will give my vote for this balance to go as default, no one complains on the game's I've played (majority pickup), we just get on and play and I hope in the future people will just play also. At the end of the day let's get this in place, let the developer's decide on it like it should have been from the beginning with the help of a few, and leave it be for once and for all, and let them spend time getting other bit's of the project that need doing so the game can finally reach a 1.0 and be released

I will be away for the weekend, but not like I need to be there anyway already been playing with the balanceSamual stuff now for weeks anyway, but have fun everyone else.

Alright so apparently the dev build is missing textures for some reason... We'll work it out and get a new build up as quickly as possible. For now hold off with downloading as you may have to redownload. (Or maybe we'll just make a small patch pk3 for those with the broken download)

Alright so apparently the dev build is missing textures for some reason... We'll work it out and get a new build up as quickly as possible. For now hold off with downloading as you may have to redownload. (Or maybe we'll just make a small patch pk3 for those with the broken download)

Was wondering why my download was so FUBAR...

Yes I had this problem and came here to report it and saw your post...

Will re-download once you give the OK.

Textures I noticed missing: Shotgun and Cell ammo, playermodels.

This release is a good idea, especially assigning the balances to the F-keys. I will introduce my new recruits to Samual's balance.

P.S Aren't the physics exactly the same anyway for both?

EDIT: FAIL, the physics are in fact the same. btw I will be trying to tweak the bugs out of my physics as I think those would make a good alternative (not necessarily default) to the current physics. Balance I'm not even going to mess with, Samual's balance absolutely kicks the crap out of everything else I've seen and turned out far better than what I was aiming for, it's probably perfect as is and shockingly works well my physics too.

P.S Aren't the physics exactly the same anyway for both?

Yes, same physics for both balances, just a typo on the announcement Thanks for pointing that out

Alright, we figured out what was wrong with the build -- It was my fault, I messed something up when packing it. Sorry everyone ^_^ We're all allowed our one mistake, right? riiight? To be fair, it DOES say "we can't guarantee stability or that it is bug free"

Here's a newer mirror of a build done earlier today: http://samual.nexuizninjaz.com/xonotic-20110414.zip

mand1nga: Make sure to update the link with this, thanks.

What's with this weekend? I mean, what's soo special about it? I don't get it. First my job put an obligatory event on that very weekend. Then my family decided to place a once-in-a-lifetime celebration there, too. THEN some friends I haven't seen in TWO YEARS because they life quite far away from me announced they'd be around my place that weekend and asked if we maybe could meet.

And now you. What's the deal?! I mean, what's the point of picking exactly THAT weekend?

This is really annoying me. Heck, maybe I just cancel everything and just play Xonotic the entire weekend. I feel really tempted. Only I don't really have the choice...

Heh, I've had the very same rant yesterday, but I've realised now Easter is at next weekend, not 29-1

@Halogene: at any problem, a solution: quit: your family, your job, your friends. Then buy trifocal glasses.
See, problem solved.

Thanks CB for updating the links, cheers!

@Rage against the Washing Machine: oh, I haven't thought about buying trifocal glasses. Thanks for the tip!

To be honest I would remove the old URLs. I'm sure there are enough EU guys who would download from the EU mirror and get a broken game then.

Anyway, if you want to know which maps are official or which come with the Map Pack:
http://dev.xonotic.org/projects/xonotic/wiki/Maps

Halogene, nothing really new for you to try to be honest since you already play with the latest changes unless you just wanted a lot of people to play against on that weekend

47 %

@Halogene: at any problem, a solution: quit: your family, your job, your friends. Then buy trifocal glasses.

Anyway, cya at the weekend

[German Mirrors 100Mbps] - Release - Map Pack

Release will be up soon, will update when ready.

UPDATE: Done.