The fate of Xonotic development

Why so few player?
The reasons are easy to find:

1) I have already found some serious bugs that need fixing and posted them here, such as this
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=5034
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=5095
But nobody pays any attention. How can a game be improved with such an attitude?

2) The game is constrained in tiny indoor dark places, and lacks sunny outdoor maps (like Solarium). Will these tiny indoor dark maps attract players?

The types of map we need:

Tribes-like outdoor huge sunny maps for jetpacking and skiing (yes there are some, but the are all unpolished with ugly textures. We need more polished maps like Solarium!);

Realism theme map (insdead of SF theme maps all over the place. We need to learn from unreal tournament. We can start by mimicing COD maps.)

3) All PVP servers, no COOP servers (it can be realized with ClanArena). New players get fragged so easily by experienced players and they will quickly lose interest to play online.

4) If possible, some single player missions will be awesome for deeper immersion with the game. I have already some original ideas but again, nobody gives a shit:
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=4901
How can a game be improved with such an attitude?

5) If you want to probagand your game, you need to know what makes your game unique. I am pretty sure there are a lot of players who are bored with endless CQB (COD style, CS-Source style...). Fast moving with jetpacking will be an excellent alternative.

I am supprised nobody has made a video to show off Xonotic's jetpack high speed skiing and aerial combat feature. That's how Xonotic stands out of other shooter games. So I made one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V3_12e-...e=youtu.be

Stop keeping making frag movies forever, OK?

The reasons are easy to find:

1) I have already found some serious bugs that need fixing and posted them here, such as this
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=5034
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=5095
But nobody pays any attention. How can a game be improved with such an attitude?

2) The game is constrained in tiny indoor dark places, and lacks sunny outdoor maps (like Solarium). Will these tiny indoor dark maps attract players?

The types of map we need:

Tribes-like outdoor huge sunny maps for jetpacking and skiing (yes there are some, but the are all unpolished with ugly textures. We need more polished maps like Solarium!);

Realism theme map (insdead of SF theme maps all over the place. We need to learn from unreal tournament. We can start by mimicing COD maps.)

3) All PVP servers, no COOP servers (it can be realized with ClanArena). New players get fragged so easily by experienced players and they will quickly lose interest to play online.

4) If possible, some single player missions will be awesome for deeper immersion with the game. I have already some original ideas but again, nobody gives a shit:
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=4901
How can a game be improved with such an attitude?

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If you want to probagand your game, you need to know what makes your game unique. I am pretty sure there are a lot of players who are bored with endless CQB (COD style, CS-Source style...). Fast moving with jetpacking will be an excellent alternative.

I am supprised nobody has made a video to show off Xonotic's jetpack high speed skiing and aerial combat feature. That's how Xonotic stands out of other shooter games. So I made one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V3_12e-...e=youtu.be

I belive large outdoor maps in Darkplaces have a limitation and need to be desinged certain way othe wise the game come to a crawl as it tries to draw too much of the map terrain. Yes we need morre sunny maps like Solarium.

1) I have already found some serious bugs that need fixing and posted them here, such as this
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=5034
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=5095
But nobody pays any attention. How can a game be improved with such an attitude?

First of all, the forum is not a channel for bug reporting. But even if it were, it's been a long time since we've had developers capable and willing to work on the bot system. It is quite broken, and a mere "fix" as you are suggesting would not change anything to that. It does not need to be patched up, but reworked as a whole. And we don't have volunteers for that currently.

Also, in any case, you will probably be told that singleplayer or bots are not our main focus -- multiplayer is. Ideally, we would have no bots at all in this game.

2) The game is constrained in tiny indoor dark places, and lacks sunny outdoor maps (like Solarium). Will these tiny indoor dark maps attract players?

The types of map we need:

Tribes-like outdoor huge sunny maps for jetpacking and skiing (yes there are some, but the are all unpolished with ugly textures. We need more polished maps like Solarium!);

Realism theme map (insdead of SF theme maps all over the place. We need to learn from unreal tournament. We can start by mimicing COD maps.)

Types of maps we need, or types of map you need? What I'm trying to say is that a single person's taste in maps is usually not representative of the average. Look at the mapping forum and you'll see what kind of maps people are into.

3) All PVP servers, no COOP servers (it can be realized with ClanArena). New players get fragged so easily by experienced players and they will quickly lose interest to play online.

What's COOP to you? Team-based games? CTF enjoys some popularity, so I don't know what you're talking about.

4) If possible, some single player missions will be awesome for deeper immersion with the game. I have already some original ideas but again, nobody gives a shit:
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=4901
How can a game be improved with such an attitude?

Look at the history of threads in this forum, and you'll notice that DOZENS of users have had "brilliant" ideas for a storyline or a campaign mode. Thanks for your idea, but I think at this point, it's just one of those threads. As I said above, the focus is on multiplayer. If someone approaches the devs to work on a singleplayer campaign, they will probably be welcome to try, but as it stands this is not something worth working on.

5) If you want to probagand your game, you need to know what makes your game unique. I am pretty sure there are a lot of players who are bored with endless CQB (COD style, CS-Source style...). Fast moving with jetpacking will be an excellent alternative.

I am supprised nobody has made a video to show off Xonotic's jetpack high speed skiing and aerial combat feature. That's how Xonotic stands out of other shooter games. So I made one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V3_12e-...e=youtu.be

Stop keeping making frag movies forever, OK?

I know that for some people, Xonotic is all about grappling hook / jetpack / vehicles. But I don't think the team really considers it to be part of our "core" gameplay. Also, I think it's stupid to want to lose our identity just to become popular, which is pretty much what would happen if we were to center our gameplay around the jetpack. You don't throw out your player base to replace it with a bigger one. The community is part of what's keeping me here.

Anyway, those frag movies you're talking about are from the community. And people making and watching these are more into deathmatch and this sort of thing. If you aren't, that's fine, but don't ask those players to stop liking what they do and instead be original and like something more unique. You don't seem to be accepting that people like different things than you do.

I think there's a conceptual misunderstanding about the project Xonotic when complaining about the "attitude" here: people work on this on their spare time because they like to do so. No one is ever obliged to contribute, and, as a consequence, no one is ever "entitled to" any sort of reaction on behalf of the dev team. It comes across very demanding to question the "attitude" of the people working on this immediately when a forum post remains unanswered - and especially so if you make another post with similar contents and start complaining half an hour later (!) that "no body pays any attention". If you had searched the forums you would have found out that the bot navigation problem is something that we are aware of but we (a) lack the developers capable to improve it and (b) focus rather on online multiplayer gameplay so the bots' ai is of secondary importance anyway (see amongst others the following threads: "A.I", "bots", "xonotic bots").

As for your second point, I also like solarium's style a lot and would welcome more sunny and/or realistic maps - but I can't map myself so I can't make any, and there's no one that would be "responsible" for mapping so I'm happy and thankful about any good new maps that get made for Xonotic no matter what style.

I believe with "Co-op" mode you're meaning humans vs bots? This will not really make sense unless the bots' ai gets improved vastly, see my first point.

With regard to the single player missions, we encounter the same problem as Mr. Bougo mentioned - we simply lack someone that can or is willing to code it. Just having the idea of what to do is not enough, we need people that actually IMPLEMENT the stuff. And with Xonotic's focus on online multiplayer gameplay, all these single player issues remain of secondary importance.

As for concentrating on what makes Xonotic unique, you're the first person I encounter that says jetpack and skiing is what sets Xonotic apart. But I hear a lot of different things that are supposed to set Xonotic apart from various people, which is a good sign imho because that means Xonotic offers quite some gameplay mechanics that cannot be found elsewhere and that get appreciated. This of course does not mean we should not refine our gameplay (disclaimer in before unqualified comment).

Oh... I complained about the lack of diverse map themes so many times that it's not even funny As I always said, everything is a dark metal facility. We have no medieval maps (though suited for a scifi shooter, like UT did), no outdoor maps with terrain, and much else. I'm working on a Xonotic mod which adds improved art and new maps, but even that will have limited abilities.

As for DP not being able to handle outdoor maps well, I heard about that too. One way to fix this in the engine is to allow patches (for terrain created directly in netRadiant) to create vis fields... currently this might work when using the "patchmeta" option.

Otherwise I wish netRadiant and Darkplaces supported real heightmap terrain... which could be terraformed and painted dynamically. But that's an even more distant and impossible wish

I don't understand why going all over the place in terms of design (medieval maps, terrain maps, dark metal facilities) is considered better than the opposite. Please give some arguments, instead of stating "we only have A, which is bad, therefore we also need B". Again, it seems as if you're tring to pack every possible variation on the FPS theme into Xonotic. Let's aim for consistency instead, don't you think?

I do think darkplaces can handle outdoor maps pretty well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7Usnj80PhU

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"we only have A, which is bad, therefore we also need B"
this is wrong. What we argue is that
"we only have A, which is repetitive and boring, therefore we also need B as alternative"

- This video is showing a rather simple outdoor map so it has decent performance. The problem is not the size but the polygon count. Big terrains consist of lots of polygons most of the time. It´s a trade-off between performance and detail you have to make when creating such maps. Solarium has very bad performance exactly because it uses tons of polygons for the terrain-parts which could easily be optimised. So yes it is possible to create large outdoor maps but you should take care of not using to much detail.
- Sure it would be nice to create maps with different themes. Now there are some issues making this difficult: There are not enough suitable texture-sets and level-design is no simple task! Again it should be emphasised that Xonotic is developed by people who do this in their free-time and nobody gets paid for the work he/she does. If you have an idea for a map then start mapping yourself or ask some level-designer kindly whether this could be a next project. But do not expect anything! Just sitting there and complaining about things you want to have will lead us nowhere. Start doing something!

I do think darkplaces can handle outdoor maps pretty well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7Usnj80PhU

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"we only have A, which is bad, therefore we also need B"
this is wrong. What we argue is that
"we only have A, which is repetitive and boring, therefore we also need B as alternative"

Try adding in structures and you'll see how fast it comes to a crawl. I've leartn that the hard way making maps for my vehicle server. If you look at Unsealedtrial or the other out door maps each part around the base is seperate by mountains so the game doesn't draw too much of the terrain BUT add in several players into the area and you can see the slow down.

There are some outdoor maps here www.killer.xxx/maps

I do think darkplaces can handle outdoor maps pretty well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7Usnj80PhU

Not that it would be of significance in argumentation, but did you notice that the FPS counter is around 10 to 15 all the time?

So, when will there be the 0.8 release? /troll mode

Given the overall trickling development, it would maybe make sense to call the next release 1.0 (the game is sufficiently playable for that) and see where it leads us from that? It might give an influx of new players and subsequently maybe also developers.