The big XPM / competitive gaming thread

Oh, sure...

What the total clueless one sees: ultra.cfg + everything else maxed out:


What the casual gamer (like me) sees: normal.cfg


What you can actually achieve without any console magics:


What the self respecting competitive player sees, with more knowledge on the game:


What the evil 1337 prö player sees, who not even tweaks the settings even further with the console, but replaces content too:


Edit:
Oh, asyyy pointed out a thing: the normal and ultra are a bit spoiled, because if the enemy under the crosshair uses forced models against me, he should look like the green blob anyway.

I'm not saying that those who know more about the game are needed to be punished by any means. No, that's really far from my intentions. But as you can see, some knowledge can lead you to truly unfair advantages against your opponent ingame.

FUCK YEAH KINDERGARDEN!!!!!!!!11

HONESTLY, YOU GUYS BEHAVE LIKE LITTLE KIDS!! BE MATURE!!
If some people want a competitive mode for duels and tdm, so what? As long its only on servers dedicated to competitive its alright. When there are people who abuse weak spots in the game, there always be a solution for that. Nobody forces you to play the competitive mode. As long its separated from the normal game everything is alright.
Why is this what is xonotic about stuff such a big topic now? It's just annoying. First the "problem" with the cts server, then the overkill "problem" and now this. JUST LIKE NEXUIZ, XONOTIC IS JUST ABOUT FREEDOM. YOU CAN MODIFY IT AS YOU WANT. IT WILL ALWAYS STAY XONOTIC. MODIFYING STUFF IS THE REASON WHY XONOTIC IS WHAT IS NOW.
a mixture of good stuff from several arena shooters.

LOL, is playing @ultra settings sign of cluelessness now? I like my games how I like my women: vibrant, good-looking and free.

Arguing about this is pretty pointless and heres why.

Most "serious" competetive teams allready have impecable timing, thus making it all about who has the better weapons and positioning anyway.
Heres the kicker, if your timing items your most likely are ALOT better then your opponent (who isnt timing), making the item timing debate pointless as you 9/10 times would likely kill the other team anyway (if they take the item somehow...)

Also heres a pro for having the waypoints. They will make "low skill" games alot more even and would pretty much teach players how to respond and react and make teamplay "work itself out"
If they are just jumping around ignoring stuff anyway then i really doubt it would make any difference..

As for gl_picmip and other settings the whole argument is moot.
We have allread been through this with q1,q2,q3,q4,pk,wsw and hell even CS had its time.
All in all, it made absolutely no difference to gameplay and competition.
Hell, one could argue that shadows are cheats because you can see them coming around the corner... -_-


Tho i agree with checksum and keeping the server/clients pure. Stick models are a pain in the ass and where abused to death in q2 and cs.

I give my config to anyone who wants it btw, it's even linked in the OP. Anyone who is interested in competitive gaming will end up on irc or on the forums at some point anyway. Those who don't have a clue about the game yet wont be able to challenge an experienced player no matter if they use picmip or not. When my exams are done I might set up a short config guide, with the most important stuff for competitive gaming. But now let's get back on topic please.

asy7um IF you do that config guide, I would like to include it in the manual. PM me when you've got something, ok? Good luck with your exams.

You know something which really annoys me? A lot of the requested features/"fixes" in this thread require a decent amount of coding or other such work... and none of the people suggesting these things submit a patch or even contributes any further part to the idea.

Someone poked me earlier complaining that I didn't check out this thread and haven't implemented any of the features here -- Sincerely, my signature.

(To everyone else who is being polite though, you're fine and I appreciate the input.)


I will be fixing some of the bugs pointed out here though, however: I am upset that they weren't posted onto the bug tracker -- we don't see the bugs unless they're actually where they should be posted. http://dev.xonotic.org/

The main purpose of this thread was to put those ideas and "fixes" up for discussion before finally submitting them to the devs / bug tracker. But can't post a single thing here without the "informed" forum crowd flaming it which makes this thread kind-of useless now.

Looking for info regarding server setup for competitive duels (XPM).

I would like to add a U.S. ping to the 'Competitive' section in the servers listing as of 2022 going into 2023.  I know this thread is old, but I would like some input on server setup if things have changed since 2012.  Also, this thread is listed as "The big XPM" thread, so maybe it should be kept up to date?

Where do I find the ruleset config files?

I am not seeing this info online or in the forums, please provide some working links which could be shared with me and the community if possible.

Thanks!

Looking for info regarding server setup for competitive duels (XPM).

I would like to add a U.S. ping to the 'Competitive' section in the servers listing as of 2022 going into 2023.  I know this thread is old, but I would like some input on server setup if things have changed since 2012.  Also, this thread is listed as "The big XPM" thread, so maybe it should be kept up to date?

Where do I find the ruleset config files?

I am not seeing this info online or in the forums, please provide some working links which could be shared with me and the community if possible.

Thanks!

Thank you to trashman, kch, and x86_64 for answering some of my questions while gaming.

All the ruleset/balance files are located in the pk3 for the version which is being run (there are also available rulesets from the community, but you have to download them and add them to the pk3 file yourself).  XPM has a few different files, so you need to read through them to understand their hierarchy for loading order.  I added the ruleset for XPM to the config file for the server in .xonotic/data which worked great to load the necessary files I needed for the competitive server.  It still did not load duel, but I realized that the server-config file from the pk3 listing overwrote data from the config file.  I ended up changing the name of the server in in the server-config and I also added gametype duel to the server-config file.  Great! Seems to be working.  Please inform me if there are supposed to be any other changes to the server which I am missing for duel purposes.

( I also found this great document online to assist with ideas on how to manage servers well. You can search it in a browser with "Welcome to Xonotic Server Management Suite’s documentation!" https://xonotic-server-management-suite....en/latest/ )

Indeed, adding exec ruleset-XPM.cfg to your server config is the way to go.

Other relevant settings for an XPM duel server are:

• g_powerups 0 (having strength enabled in duels is weird imo)
  
• g_superspectate 1 (it enables advanced spectator features, useful for streamers)
  
• timelimit_overtimes 999 (the default is 0, it means there won't be any overtime if the two players have the same score when the game ends).
  
• timelimit_override 10 and fraglimit_override 0 (feel free to change these values), it sets the game duration and an unlimited frag limit, even if some map specifies it otherwise in its mapinfo. timelimit and fraglimit also work, but some maps may override these settings.
  
• sv_timeout 1 can also be useful, it allows a player to call a timeout (if he's interrupted IRL, for instance). The game will resume automatically after 120 seconds by default.
  

See https://xonotic.org/tools/cacs/#0a/0/ for the complete list of cvars.

I'd like to know how to get into XPM on Linux. I wouldn't mind playing in some tournaments soon (I specialize in Instagib 1v1).

I don't think flat colours and textures are needed, I think players can play comp games without them.

Also heres a pro for  having the waypoints. They will make "low skill" games alot more even and would pretty much teach players how to respond and react and make teamplay "work itself out"
If they are just jumping around ignoring stuff anyway then i really doubt it would make any difference..

This is a great point, I think it is useful to look at the success of design elements in modern competitive shooters like Apex Legends and Battlefield that guide players into making competitive choices and adopting competitive strategies naturally. Of course in the case of the games I mentioned, they are team games, and so the systems to encourage players to play competitively all center around encouraging teamwork and communication but it is easy to abstract the essence of these quality of life additions into a general context. In Apex Legends things like being able to ping items so they show up on teammates screen, automatic call outs from characters when they see an enemy so that players don't have to actively be voice chatting the entire time  (which is a different ask in a battle royale game someone is grinding ranks in than a competitive arena shooter with short intense rounds) help elevate the general competitiveness of gameplay immensely. In Battlefield when someone goes down the game gives visual indications and encouragement for people playing the medic class to go heal their teammates. Battlefield doesn't rely on medic players just having the ultimate game sense to realize their teammate needs healing (though one could argue that is part of the "skill" of being a medic *sigh*), it prompts players to do what is best for themselves through UI and game elements and as a result raises the quality of competition for everybody.

Now of course, I am not arguing Xonotic should be more like those games, Xonotic is it's own beautiful weird beast and so are arena shooters. I am simply pointing out that there is wisdom to be found in how these games experienced long term success in large part by putting important competitive information front and center to new players. People focus way too much on how **difficult** a game's learning curve is and not enough on how natural and intuitive it is for players to take each step along the way to becoming a competitive player.

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Maybe a compromise could be that as soon as a player makes line of sight contact with an important item spawn location that has been taken, the game starts a timer that assumes the enemy player took that item only a moment ago and begins counting down towards when the item should spawn again based on that assumption. The timer visually indicates this is an approximation with a less-than-symbol and a question mark so something like "<20? seconds" on the timer.

The only information that would have to be "unfairly" revealed with this system is if:

1. player 1 passes by an item spawn that has been taken by player 2 

2. player 1's item timer starts

3. the item respawns again

4. player 2 takes that item *again* before player 1 gets LOS to see the item has respawned

I think it is reasonable though to simply make it public information (when in LOS) how many times an item has been taken (but not when), and the game could automatically reset player 1's timer when they get LOS with the item spawner in the above example (the game repeating the assumption that this second instance of player 2 taking the item happened just a moment ago), indicating to player 1 that the item has been taken before they saw it spawn again. I don't think this is a big compromise for competitive players opposed to item timers to make, if a player is letting up the pressure enough that they lose track of how many times another player has taken an important item like a megahealth, they aren't going to win anyways.

One could argue this timer solution would just be confusing, but I think it could potentially nudge players in the direction of trying to get rid of the question marks on their UI. When a player is moving slowly and not covering much of the map like a new player might (who is inclined to play the game like call of duty or something), their item timers will count down past the full time it takes for the items to respawn and then just become blank question marks. As a player learns to circulate quickly around the map they could visually see how their timers for important items were updating more frequently (and they weren't getting any timeouts into question marks from not passing by items soon enough). Arguably I think this would lead to newer players naturally gravitating towards efficiently updating their item clocks so they didn't have blank question marks on their HUD, which naturally leads players into focusing on the importance of getting those items, which naturally leads to newer players moving up the intimidating learning curve of arena shooters like Xonotic faster.

Personally, I don't think having to memorize things is fun. I don't think having to try to act like a human egg timer is fun. You can argue for the merits of any particular element of a game being considered fun or not in a competitive way and while it is always going to be subjective I think it can be said that for the majority of people these kinds of skills are not *fun* to master in recreational contexts, and are at best a minor annoyance along the way to developing a competitive playstyle. No judgement if *you* in particular find it fun, seriously be into whatever kind of game mechanics you want!!....but I find it very hard to believe that the majority of people find it fun (in this niche of gaming or in general).

It would also give an interesting perspective to quantify how good players are at item coverage as the difference between a player's item timers and the game's actual item timers could be calculated over the length of the match. For higher level players who don't contest an item spawn because they know the other player already has it locked down, there could be a hotkey for players to manually reset an item timer when they think the enemy player is taking the item they can't see (and this would be taken into account for the above "item timer accuracy" calculations).