So...How dead is this game?

Xonotic's problem is that it tries to be everything to everybody

Those are very good points, but no one will listen to you, I and some other people have been saying that for a while and well, everything is and will continue being the same.

I won't try to do anything, such as maps, textures and models, until this game reaches 1.0
1.0 is the only hope for this game, if it dies midway then so be it, a big project that was turned into something bigger to end up as nothing.

How about an integrated IRC chat so that people see that there are other idlers and can ask them to join a match?

Xonotic's problem is that it tries to be everything to everybody this is a problem with a lot of "Forked" projects this stems from people being a bunch of eger beavers and Copy-N-Pasting stuff from other games in a attempt to drive player count up by offering every Option under the sun but in reality all you get is a bunch of brokenness that either fragments the community or nobody wants to touch it

Everything is a "eger beavers and Copy-N-Pasting" of something, willingly / knowingly or not - completely irrelevant. Most of the things in Xonotic is there since some developer/s was interested in trying/doing it, not to drive player count up.

1.vehicles don't belong in Xonotic you Aren't Battlefield or unreal and you will never be stop trying I am sorry and i know people will throw the old "if you don't like vehicles don't play on servers that have them enabled) that doesn't work for a variety of reasons that I will not go into here

Why? you're not XYZ is as pointless of an argument is the beavers one, and apparently you cannot be arsed to explain that mystical other reason of badness. Really, some ppl like it and a few would likely leave the game altogether if removed. Is that you're answer to underpopulation of vanilla; drive everyone else away?

2.virtually endless configuration (fifteen servers all of them running modify ed configs and all of them Horrible and done only for the creators own amusement and offer nothing to the community
these things are EXTREMELY Bad for a game thats trying to gain ground as it fragments the player-base

Please to enlighten us as in what way such variety is bad, in a little more detail then "its bad". Do you consider Xonotic'c GPL a special flavour meaning "You are free to do anything you like as long as you do precisely what I want."

Get it into your head that this, like you say, is NOT Battlefield or Unreal. Its a open source project originating in a mod of frekking quake 1. Modding things and playing around with ideas is how the whole damn thing came to be. If some of those things happen to get popular then maybe, just maybe they are doing something right and one may even be as bold as to say that instead of trying to stomp them out it may be a better idea to identify and incorporate the best parts into vanilla when possible.

Advertisement is basically non-existent outside of "FOSS" circles (slashdot/phoronix,Desura) most people that would be interested in a game like xonotic don't know it even exists

"official" servers should be a permanent existence and run `vanilla configs and they should be the first thing you see on the server list and there needs to be one in every region NA/SA/UK/JP at least
Xonotic tries to cover its basis and offers a plethora of game options and modes when all it really needs is a Solid Core set of modes TDM,Survivor,CTF,FFA nothing wrong with exploring other game possibilitys but is it to much to ask to get your core-game right before venturing off into becoming the next Unreal clone

Fair point regarding publicity, i gather the official standpoint is "don't make too much noise before 1.0" - which does have its point too. As for need solid jada blah - this is the same old fail argument. If this was a commercial game with a hired team going in fifty eleven directions despite the boss's plan; then it would apply. But its not. Most of the things you spew bile over are ppl loosely or not at all connected to the official dev team trying some idea they have or doing that mode / mod / whatever they always wanted to try. Take that away and you kill the game permanently.

TL;DR - Stop blaming variety for inability of Vanilla.

I was gonna write a giant wall of text picking apart every single choice the team has made over the last 2 years but ill keep it short
tl;DR you need guys F.O.C.U.S that's (follow one course until successful)
this means you really need to kind of drive the point home about what you want this game to be even if that means limiting "player choice" for the sake of polishNshine because lets face it if you give a group of people a box of crayons and some scrap paper they will draw a bunch of random shit, if you give them a handed picked selection and some tracing paper and they will create art (so long as they color within the lines)



1.rip the support for any and all "nexuiz" assets outs code in some breakage if you must but they have GOT2GO they absolutely kill what little polish you do have and frankly getting voted into these maps just makes me wanna ./quit and lets face it some of them are pretty fucking ugly

2.server settings that deviate to much from the vanilla setup need to be isolated into there own server list thats out-of-site unless the player goes and LOOKS for them

3.Again Focus if its not for the sake of making this game THE BEST Arena/shooter anybody has ever played you rip it out and crush it under your foot with extreme prejudices

4.
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Get on steam,Send Review Code to Sites like RockPaperShotgun,PcGamer take to Reddit and spam the fuck out of it

Getting rid of Nexuiz assets and doing PR are part of the plan for 1.0. Point 2 is in the works as well, although I don't see the need to be as radical as hiding minsta/race/keyhunt/what-have-you servers away from view unless people know about them. If people might like an alternative game mode better, give them a chance to discover it. That is not incompatible with bringing forth "vanilla" gameplay.

Getting rid of Nexuiz assets and doing PR are part of the plan for 1.0. Point 2 is in the works as well, although I don't see the need to be as radical as hiding minsta/race/keyhunt/what-have-you servers away from view unless people know about them. If people might like an alternative game mode better, give them a chance to discover it. That is not incompatible with bringing forth "vanilla" gameplay.

if this was a game that had a stable player-base of ~150 I would't even bring it up but its a case of a To many Options and To Little Focus the problem I see is that the player-base is divided due to everybody doing there own thing while there is nothing innately wrong with that its bad for a game that's trying to gain ground I know it sounds strange but CHOICE is bad for a game you need to make the players just PLAY-IT intends of tempting them with 50 different game-modes from the get-go especially when the core-mechanics are still in-flux.going back to my (Crude)crayon Analogy
while people may have a lot of fun just doodling random shit with a entire box of crayons and a endless supply of paper

if you take the same group of people and set some limits down(ie give them color by numbers or tracing paper and a set of 4 crayons suddenly you will have people pushing the limits of what they are "allowed" todo and guss what that is the BEST way to improve anything is having people PUSH beyond the limits.
without it being given to them it keeps it interesting so instead of O hey I suck at DM I am go waste 7 hours playing minsta-hook-CTF. its Dam I better buckle down and figure this out how granted their will always be people that say FUCK it this is to hard for me I am going play something else but the people that stick it out are gonna be like GOLD to you.

Nexuiz's greatest strength was it did one thing very very well and that was be a competitive-Arena shooter it never tried to be Unreal, it didn't have a complicated set of mutilators that everybody pounded on like a untrained monkey set in front of a bunch of shiny buttons it just _worked_ and it was gravy.
imagine if 8 years ago Nexuiz launched with 15 game modes 40 different ways the weapons could be made to behave. do you think it would have ever become what it was.
I don't what would have happened is what happened here the people that tried it would have been thrown into chaos and a complete lack of structure played a few rounds and then went and found something else todo

Are you aware that punctuation helps structuring sentences? Your lack of care to create a readable text makes it very hard to follow your argumentation (which fortunately isn't too complex). Unfortunately, at least for me it also reduces the willingness to accept whatever you say, since in order to understand you _I_ have to spend the effort that _YOU_ didn't care to put into your text in order to make it comprehensible. Why should I do that? It's you who wants to be understood, or why else would you post here.

On the topic - I also like vanilla gameplay a lot more than any mod, including the most popular ones Overkill and Minsta. BUT it is inherent to a FOSS GPL game that anyone is able to modify it, and I think it is great that there apparently is quite some interest in modifying the game. This way people can test new interesting ideas, and some of them might prove even so good they make it into the core gameplay (mutation -> selection - this is how evolution works!). I agree that it can be confusing to new players to identify what is actually a vanilla server and what is a modified one. But the new server browser that uses categories per default is a very good step into the right direction: transparency. People need to be able to easily identify what is vanilla gameplay and what is modified. If they find modified servers more fun, then fine.

As for your crayon analogy - if you'd give me crayons and paper, I'd make you a paper jet. If you give people freedom, you'll get a lot of variety. Many ideas will not make it to the runway (or even explode right in the hangar), but some of them might literally take off and fly. It's those ideas I'd be hunting - and you won't get them if you force people to draw along the lines.

Another rather important point to make wrt to "al dat evil modz" thinking is this: If you make the game so that it punish modders to a point where their work get zero attention, you're making it more reasonable for creative ppl to create outright competing games / forks rather than at least contributing in spirit under the same roof, so to speak.

Nexuiz's greatest strength was it did one thing very very well and that was be a competitive-Arena shooter it never tried to be Unreal, it didn't have a complicated set of mutilators that everybody pounded on like a untrained monkey set in front of a bunch of shiny buttons it just _worked_ and it was gravy.

Actually, one of the greatest strengths of Nexuiz was sheer variety that Quake, Unreal, and Tribes wouldn't even attempt. My favorite variation was grapplehook capture the flag with normal weapons and most of my favorite maps were Quake conversions as well as open terrain maps. There was also some Tribes-styled fun to be had with jetpacks and open maps (jetpacks on CTF Evergreen was friggin' awesome).

Actually, one of the greatest strengths of Nexuiz was sheer variety that Quake, Unreal, and Tribes wouldn't even attempt. My favorite variation was grapplehook capture the flag with normal weapons and most of my favorite maps were Quake conversions as well as open terrain maps. There was also some Tribes-styled fun to be had with jetpacks and open maps (jetpacks on CTF Evergreen was friggin' awesome).

Right. The greatest strength of a game usually isn't something you dislike about it, as this contrast of opinions shows.

Default resolution

It doesn't seem to automatically detect resolution, at least here on Linux.

Weapon switching

The biggest problem. The game is very fast, so you can't just hide in the corner and switch weapons, you have to juggle weapons fast in the heat of combat without stopping moving, or you'll get killed quickly. What makes it worse is that weapons reload independently: people with custom weapon keys rapidly switch between powerful, but slow to reload weapons and deal lots of damage. Unfortunately, the two weapons that benefit most from weapon switching (nex and rocket launcher) are very far away from the movement keys.

People have been saying that 1-9 keys are best for discoverability, but then, the keys 1 to 5 are quite easily reachable, maybe put the weapons with long reload times there?

1 - laser
2 - nex
3 - rocket launcher
4 - mortar
5 - crylink
6 - electro
7 - hagar
8 - machine gun
9 - shotgun

Mouse sensitivity and acceleration

The default mouse sensitivity is usually too slow for normal gameplay. It's impossible, as far I know, to detect mouse DPI and adjust the sensitivity accordingly, but people who have high-DPI mice are usually already gamers anyway and won't be driven away by the need to change some settings, so the default settings should tailor the users of standard-issue 800 DPI mice.

Well-done, smooth mouse acceleration can make it possible for users of low-sensitivity mice to play effectively. The problem is that the OS built-in mouse acceleration isn't smooth: if the base speed is below a certain threshold, the cursor moves with the base speed, but if the speed is higher, it suddenly starts moving several times faster. This is very bad, because it makes it much harder to learn to aim. Currently, to fix this, you need to change your mouse settings outside the game, affecting your workflow in non-game applications. What do you think most people will do: change their OS mouse settings to play Xonotic and take time to re-learn how to use the mouse in their non-game computer activities, or leave Xonotic? If you think the first one is the answer, you're out of touch with the truth. "Disable OS mouse acceleration" show work everywhere and be default, and built-in mouse acceleration should be smooth, adjustable and its default settings, together with the default value of mouse sensitivity, should allow the users of 800 DPI mice to play as effectively as possible without changing any settings.

Default field of view

The default 90 doesn't provide good awareness, and, in my opinion, feels like if you're looking through a telescope on wide-screen monitors which most people use now. Red Eclipse has 110 and no one complains.

Lack of landmarks in maps

I think the default maps are too uniform and lack major land-marks, so it's quite hard to learn them and map knowledge is very important.



People play Vehicles because vehicles are big and ungainly so you don't need good mouse settings to actually hit them, weapon switching isn't an issue because most combat happens between vehicles that only have up to 3 firing modes (helicopter has bombs and useless flares, crabs has useful guided rocket mode, useful fire-all-rockets-at-once mode, and mostly useless artillery mode), and it's impossible to bind them to keys, so all players are equal in this regard, maps are simple and easy to learn.

Minstagib has only one weapon and is usually played on open simple open maps.

Overkill has few weapons and the role of switching weapons is reduced, it also has an advantage over minstagib that it has weapons that don't require perfect aim.


Xonotic developers, please acknowledge that you have been brainwashed by the ONEist Global Government! Just try to reset your settings and play without changing anything for a while, and you'll see.

AFAIK, resolution and FOV have already been addressed for the next release.

A big problem is that the overkill/minsta/vehicle servers are overly populated most of the time, so people go to those first, and judge the game based on the gameplay there... Which is obviously not normative (if that's the correct wording for it).

I think a solution would be to make separate windows in the serverlist, the one ontop with servers that have official settings, and the ones below with modded (overkill/minsta/vehicle/cts/etc) servers (both windows should have easily visible titles stating that).


In others words: Servers offering official Xonotic gameplay should be promoted.

+1 For that idea. But I usually don't have the patience or time to find a Vanilla game to get going. Plus I'm debating or not I should redownload Xonotic. Last time I played was over a year ago. But, I might be interested again, cause I'm getting tired of Killzone. Especially with all these noobs ruining the game.

No need to redownload if you kept the old version. There's an update script in Xonotic/misc/tools/rsync-updater that you can use to update to either current release or autobuild.