Status of Xonotic?

Antares, that's true. It is explicitly mentioned in these forums, actually. Is there a problem with that? I mean, do you really think there's a case where someone is gung-ho about doing PR for this project but that particular request stops them cold?

All I was trying to encourage was more active marketing by the people of the community. I tried to give a couple of solid examples, but I am unable to provide a full list of "approved methods of PR" for the project because that just sounds silly and authoritarian.

if that was almost the case does that mean you are going to sue someone?

I feel the suggestion done by Halogene could also contribute to making the hurdle for new players lower.
https://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=7527
Besides, I feel getting in the repository of distributions or in AppStore would really help. I got into contact with nexuiz that way, and found out only in nexuiz itself that there was also a project called xonotic. This was when nexuiz was loosing it's players. Besides, repository and appstore are the places People look around for games they can play without buying them. 
Servers are no issue, as there are plenty (maybe even too much). 


In DM/FFA/TDM mode, making the quad reusable when carrying player gets killed ( picked up by others like in quake in the old days), could bring lots of action around that item i think.
Kwakkie

All I was trying to encourage was more active marketing by the people of the community. I tried to give a couple of solid examples, but I am unable to provide a full list of "approved methods of PR" for the project because that just sounds silly and authoritarian.

The problem I personally experience with leaving marketing up to the community, is language. I've always been interested in promoting this game, but since English is not my main language I never felt comfortable actually doing any marketing. It's not a good look for a game when an article or so is written in poor English. To add to that, I don't think many Xonotic players with a better knowledge of English are interested in correcting spelling errors in an article written by a random Xonotic player. 

Other ways of marketing, like actually getting the game into the repositories of distributions, are things I wouldn't mind contacting people for, but as said before by others I also feel like this is something that the devs themself should do because it's a very official thing. This is the same with contacting people to test out the game (youtubers/streamers/...) or making official Xonotic accounts on social media.

Now obviously i'm just stating some more 'problems' but I think what we're all here for is actually finding solutions. Therefor I was wondering if it's just not possible to select a few players that don't mind spending time on marketing and actually give them permission to for example contact those youtubers/streamers when a new Xonotic release gets launched, handeling official Xonotic social media platforms, getting the game into the repository of distributions... This way the devs don't have to feel like it's all on their shoulders to spent even more time on (marketing side of) the game and this way the community doesn't have to wait on the devs to eventually do so anyway. 

Cortez666

[b]2. A Roadmap.
[/b]
A clear visable roadmap for everyone what is the goal for the next version. What is the goal for 0.9, for 1.0 and for 1.x ? I mean something easy to read and not just a suggestion "go to dev tracker".  

For example: Add feature A. Improve Feature B. Adding Maps for the DM and CTF. Fixing the following bugs. Also a detailed description or a link the bug in the dev tracker, so everyone who would likes to contribute has an idea what is expected, to get together to 1.0 and further.

The roadmap is an amazing idea and there is even a part of the forum dedicated to this idea.. but it doesn't get used. The Xonotic planning section would be an amazing place to put the roadmap and actually discuss the planned features. This way devs can also get inspiration from the community by reading the discussions.

vega

@vega - we have very few developers and even less available time. Simply stated, we can't do all of the things this community asks of us. If we cannot find a way to leverage this community's experience and reach, we are doomed. Call me selfish, but I don't want to allocate any additional time than I already do to Xonotic. If I did that I'd run the risk of burning out and wanting to leave completely.

@vega - we have very few developers and even less available time. Simply stated, we can't do all of the things this community asks of us. If we cannot find a way to leverage this community's experience and reach, we are doomed. Call me selfish, but I don't want to allocate any additional time than I already do to Xonotic. If I did that I'd run the risk of burning out and wanting to leave completely.

Yes that's what i'm saying! That's why you could give an x amount of people to do some of the 'official' marketing instead of you guys. 

Vega

Xonotic is entirely community driven, the so-called "official developers" are just regular players who contribute to the game. Anyone can do the same, and quite frankly, leaving everything to the few that have stepped up is going to doom the game, as Antibody has already stated.

If you want to help out in any way, you can! Pretty much every part of the game needs attention.

I'm very much agreeing with the original post in this thread. I myself have also been part of this community for a long time, been playing since Nexuiz 2.3 and developed an obsession during the 2.4-2.4.2 days when normal weapon grapple hook CTF was damn near making players pass out in their chairs. In my honest opinion we very much have the foundation for what could EASILY be the best fast paced shooter as it has everything that was cool about Quake and Tribes movement wise as well as most of what was cool about Unreal Tournament weapon mechanics wise. Right now I think the dev team needs to focus more on taking broken/incomplete features (such as the bots) and sweeping them under the rug out of the sight of any new player. We also need to redistribute the ammo for the weapons as well so that it's shared evenly between the weapons. Throw in a tutorial and BAM! High quality early access game that's free. Finish work on the weapon models and easily you have something more. Figure out how to make good terrain maps with vehicles and recharging jetpacks and now you have something that can go toe to toe with the likes of MidAir and Tribes Ascend. Why we have such a huge focus on the code side of things as opposed to polishing what already exists is beyond me.

Xonotic is entirely community driven, the so-called "official developers" are just regular players who contribute to the game. Anyone can do the same, and quite frankly, leaving everything to the few that have stepped up is going to doom the game, as Antibody has already stated.

If you want to help out in any way, you can! Pretty much every part of the game needs attention.

I think I'm being misunderstood here. I completely agree that Xonotic is entirely community driven, but there are some areas of marketing that people don't feel comfortable doing because some of these things are very official. This is also because there are plenty of posts  on this forum from 'official' devs that state you can't make official accounts for Xonotic. This is the only reason i suggested the possibility of selecting a few players that get 'official' permission to do these 'official' parts of marketing and e.g. get this game in the repository of distributions. It would be kinda like making an official PR team for Xonotic 

vega

Why we have such a huge focus on the code side of things as opposed to polishing what already exists is beyond me.

I know that's kinda disappointing, but most of the time, the biggest releases are not even related to the amount of new -visible- content they bring.
Because code is the base of everything. Trying to add some new stuff on clunky code is difficult and sometimes not possible. That's why they keep doing this first.

As for the assets & models... It seems to be really hard to find the right persons, if I had time I guess I'd try to open Blender, but the learning curve will be harsh, I guess. But you can try! There are plenty of tutorials.

If anyone wants to undertake some sort of PR measure that they think is "suspect" or would cause some sort of fragmentation of the community, it never hurts to just ask here or on IRC. Those types of things can (most often) be resolved via a short conversation.

Lyberta, the vast majority of the discussion in this thread was around PR and marketing. A much larger group of people can help with that.

If anyone wants to undertake some sort of PR measure that they think is "suspect" or would cause some sort of fragmentation of the community, it never hurts to just ask here or on IRC. Those types of things can (most often) be resolved via a short conversation.

I posted this already in the IRC channel, but it might be the right place here.
My PR suggestion is fairly simple. About a month before a new release there will be a thread (or something similar) to gather contacts from gaming sites , gaming youtubers and others which are useful for PR.
Everybody frequents other content depending on their preferences and also on native language. Hopefully there will be a big list of contacts from all over the world. With the release of the new version some sort of "nice" newsletter will be send to the contacts. This could be continued with every version.

Of course not everyone will react to it, but i am sure some will check it out and maybe there will be some coverage. 

@Lyberta: i tend to disagree, because people are hyped for arena shooters at the moment. New UT and new Quake. Also some other arena shooters like Reflex. They changed the gameplay and there some who doesnt like the new games. Why not giving them an alternativ with Xonotic?

Hello, I've played Xonotic a liitle bit but found this game amazing.
Two factors stops me from playing: players activity and family   .

I'm sure that most of you know UT2004 and probably remembers how singleplayer is organized there. In fact I've found this idea very cool and wondering why nobody applied this idea in some online FPS.
It was all about players, team matches and a little bit about spectators/fans.

If someone do not remember/know what I'm talking about I'll give short description:
- you start game with playing some deathmatch games to earn some money and create a team by hiring other players (obviously in case of online game you also should be hired)
- you create a team, arrange players behaviors (offence/defence and so on)
- you play with a team against other teams
- from time to time you participate in duel games against players from other teams
- if you spent all your money a spectator/fan could help you with money otherwise your team lost or you have no money left to heal yourself after match.

I've tried to implement this idea in my attempt of reviving my favorite game: Half-Life Adrenaline Gamer but I decided to use FTEQW to make a complete remake as I believed it has better netcode (besides it allows me to use a lot of game data from HL including maps).

So what I'm trying to say... maybe instead of trying to do what all other AFPS projects do (shouting "Hey, we have another quake-like shooter but the best in the universe! Come and be pwnd by some of our average players, for FREE!!!"  ), it would be better to change approach to the gaming? I think some management and re-imagination of spectators role can be a nice killer-feature, so more people could be involved even if they are not actually play the game.

What kind of money are we talking about here? In-game money, like some kind of Killing Floor or Counterstrike sort of game mechanic, or e-sports betting with real-life valuable items. The former, if there's no actual in-game use for that game money, then there's no real incentive to value it. You sort of present it as an out-of-game system, but it influences in-game e.g buying health for a team, which sounds extremely unfair.

The latter you introduce a lot of problems that occur when things are monetized e.g the introduction of Steam Market, and a real-life money market for TF2 hats, CSGO knife skins, etc caused a lot of scammers, spammers, and MMO gold farmer type businesses to pool in. You would also need a trustworthy intermediate service to handle transfer to lessen counterparty risk.

If you are really hindered by the lack of online player activity, if you haven't already, you should introduce your friends to the game or find a readily contactable pool of acquaintances (irc or discord does this)- with your friends you at least have a consensus on an agreed chat protocol. Any multiplayer game where limited socialization can take place (i.e no voip, typing in chat is infeasible in most contexts while playing) and where random players are simply brought together is going to have a tough time retaining players.

What kind of money are we talking about here? In-game money, like some kind of Killing Floor or Counterstrike sort of game mechanic, or e-sports betting with real-life valuable items. The former, if there's no actual in-game use for that game money, then there's no real incentive to value it. You sort of present it as an out-of-game system, but it influences in-game e.g buying health for a team, which sounds extremely unfair.

The latter you introduce a lot of problems that occur when things are monetized e.g the introduction of Steam Market, and a real-life money market for TF2 hats, CSGO knife skins, etc caused a lot of scammers, spammers, and MMO gold farmer type businesses to pool in. You would also need a trustworthy intermediate service to handle transfer to lessen counterparty risk.

If you are really hindered by the lack of online player activity, if you haven't already, you should introduce your friends to the game or find a readily contactable pool of acquaintances (irc or discord does this)- with your friends you at least have a consensus on an agreed chat protocol. Any multiplayer game where limited socialization can take place (i.e no voip, typing in chat is infeasible in most contexts while playing) and where random players are simply brought together is going to have a tough time retaining players.

You got me wrong. I did not suggest to monetize, though I do not reject this idea completely, because dev's/infrastructure needs money and you cannot escape from it forever.
Money I spoke about were only in-game money for building a teams, and it was just an example. I just suggest that AFPS/Tournament games should include some resources management system (in this particular case - players). Pretty much like in football (I believe  ). Player has price, participation in some tournament has its price etc, because without term of value management becomes pointless.
As for health example... it's just an example of a resource. For instance if player finishes last match with 1hp why should  he start next with 100 (I mean only first respawn, ofc)?

So, to sum up, I just suggest use in-game money to manage in-game resources (players, teams, tournaments, championships, whatever) to enable socialization: Players can set up their price, other players having enough sum of money can create a team by spending money on other players. The other ones can organize and manage entire tournaments by setting prize sums etc. Spectators can place bets  etc. There are a lot possibilities.
But as a side effect this money system can came out to the real world one day... may be. But almost every AFPS at least once had a LAN party with prizes, so this point has been crossed already

• As for health example... it's just an example of a resource. For instance if player finishes last match with 1hp why should  he start next with 100 (I mean only first respawn, ofc)?
  

Because in a match, players should start with an even amount of health. This means the start of the match is fair.

I don't think anyone uses this idea because it is either useless, and the system does not work or can be bypassed entirely. If you want to play in tournaments with prizes, they are held seasonally in the sub-forum.

I don't fully understand what you suggest here, Rvach. If it were for a single player campaign, yeah sure, that would be cool and motivating. It would require more advanced AI though to make AI players more unique in their playing style. Coding that would be quite some work, not to mention the entire single player "story" with tournaments and so on.

But if you intend to apply any of that to multiplayer, I think you are on the wrong path at least for now. Anything that would artificially prevent players from participating in tournaments would actually harm the player base at this stage. I could imagine if Xonotic had an active player base of several million regular players, with big esports events being organized and such, that then such a system could be a nice addition in order to make players "earn" tournament participation rights or so. But with the player base being so thin as it is, I would strongly oppose any system that would prevent anyone from playing whatever match he wants to.

I'm not against players putting artificial restrictions on how they want to play the game but I'm against any kind of forced restrictions. After all, that means someone would just mod those restrictions out.

UT2004 was just an example. No restrictions should be added but why game client itself does not assists in teams management / tournament making? In my opinion it should because it is 2017 and people become lazier   besides it would be much more convenient for newcomers to just click "FIND TEAM" and then "JOIN TEAM" or "FIND TOURNAMENTS" and "ADD ME TO THIS TOURNAMENT".

This are so simple and obvious things from the user experience perspective so I just scratching my head why not are they incorporated anywhere. In best case we have some poor matchmaking...

Well, servers runs different configs and there are very few people who are online at the same time so there is almost no one to match with.

That is the point, game should also assist players in finding others. Instead of going straight  into the game/ launching some game launcher you have to open IRC/<smth other> first and find if you can play with smb. Instead of joining some of the available tournaments you have to dig some forums to find out them. It takes some time and annoying.

I'm not against players putting artificial restrictions on how they want to play the game but I'm against any kind of forced restrictions. After all, that means someone would just mod those restrictions out.

UT2004 was just an example. No restrictions should be added but why game client itself does not assists in teams management / tournament making? In my opinion it should because it is 2017 and people become lazier   besides it would be much more convenient for newcomers to just click "FIND TEAM" and then "JOIN TEAM" or "FIND TOURNAMENTS" and "ADD ME TO THIS TOURNAMENT".

This are so simple and obvious things from the user experience perspective so I just scratching my head why not are they incorporated anywhere. In best case we have some poor matchmaking...

Assuming you haven't scrapped your in-game currency idea. Suppose that got incorporated and we have xonocoins or whatever to buy players, etc.
Why would I buy a player for a team game when I can just grab a friend for free?
Unless you made it a mandatory interaction to form a team.

Why would we do any of this when we can press spacebar to auto-join a team?
Unless you blocked it or removed that functionality.

That is the point, game should also assist players in finding others. Instead of going straight  into the game/ launching some game launcher you have to open IRC/<smth other> first and find if you can play with smb. Instead of joining some of the available tournaments you have to dig some forums to find out them. It takes some time and annoying.

That sounds exactly like matchmaking which most modern games will do. The thing is that it requires a large population of players otherwise you would be stuck in queue for a long time (this vs getting 2-3 of your friends to accompany you on a server of your own choice, from your chat client of choice). The developers are/were holding the ethos to finish development before publishing it and advertising. The second, maybe optional thing is not to matchmake such that someone will get stomped all the time, but this also might become an ethical thing where the matchmaking system gives gambling highs of overwhelming victory among unspectacular games, or crushing losses.

You don't need to dig through the forums for tournaments. They're largely one time events and are stickied at the front page.

Going to revive this thread because I can.
I think if Xonotic is to survive, it is necessary that it gets in more distributions. A good place to start would be building it as a Flatpak and as a Snap. That way any distribution including those will have Xonotic.
Next, it needs to be updated. Xonotic was last updated a year ago. That's a long time to wait for an update.

I am skeptical that building Flatpaks and Snaps of our distribution will make any appreciable dent in our download numbers. It seems to add unnecessary work for extremely little benefit. Let's just take Flatpak as an example. What do I have to do to install a Flatpak on a large distribution like, say, Ubuntu? Five steps by the looks of things, and one of those includes a system restart! Yikes. Let's compare that with our current distribution: a zip file. You download it (1) and extract it (2). Nothing further is needed!

Perhaps I'm being unfair to include "fixed cost" steps like installing the Flatpak system itself on the host, but I don't think so. It doesn't appear to be included out-of-the-box for many distributions, meaning people would have to go the extra mile just to have it available.

Flatpaks would be cool to have, but let's not pretend that NOT having it is causing us real damage. We've had near zero requests for them.

I am skeptical that building Flatpaks and Snaps of our distribution will make any appreciable dent in our download numbers. It seems to add unnecessary work for extremely little benefit. Let's just take Flatpak as an example. What do I have to do to install a Flatpak on a large distribution like, say, Ubuntu? Five steps by the looks of things, and one of those includes a system restart! Yikes. Let's compare that with our current distribution: a zip file. You download it (1) and extract it (2). Nothing further is needed!

Yeah, I agreee that getting it in Debian would have more impact, and that extracting a zip is more practical, but I would imagine that getting Xonotic on Flathub or the Snap store would be much easier than getting it in Debian. And that would give Xonotic free publicity. If it's the goal to get Xonotic to more people, Flatpak or Snap would be a good start, and we could simultaneously continue to work on getting it in Debian.

Getting Xon in Debian has issues...

1. The d0-blind-id crypt lib needs to be split off and packaged if the package is to be any good. think the license might need clarifying, otherwise it could end up in non-free, which would place additional restrictions on the game. Making it optional or not building against it (like Fedora seems to have done) is problematic in that no stats will work and some servers might not talk to you if they specify it's required (think I've seen this before). There's been some work on packaging it by the Debian Games team, but it stalled ages ago (last commit is 5 yrs ago - https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/unfi...0-blind-id ). Cloning that repo and merging in the changes from the current Xon branch (which has some useful bug fixes - https://gitlab.com/xonotic/d0_blind_id ) would of course be a good start.

Note: Don't just pull the 'debian' dir into master on our repo. Make it a separate repo or a 'debian package' branch on ours. Putting it in master would cause issues later if it was to be picked up by Debian, as they usually prefer full control without being mandated from upstream.

2. Debian won't update programs to major versions in stable just because a new version is out. For example: Say 0.8.2 gets into Debian. Then we release 0.9.0 which has major code changes (maybe even a new engine). That won't make it into a Debian stable release until the next release comes out. No updating what is currently in there. Debian back-port bug fixes where possible. There used to be a repo just for this (the volatile repo) but that isn't around any more. The way around this is to run your own private repo, but then you don't get all of Debian's QA work and cross-building efforts.
You might be able to get into unstable, but due to the issues around versions, you probably won't be able to get it into testing (as that's the precursor for stable). This also means it won't get into backports. As it'll only be in unstable though, unless you host a copy of the files built against stable and testing in a private repo, you're NOT going to get much coverage.

Note: Firefox, due to it's market share, is pretty much the ONLY exception to this rule that Debian allows re: Version updates in stable. Chrome got around this by making everyone install it from their own private repo.

3. Currently, apart from having to split d0-blind-id out, there's a bunch of other tools that probably need to be broken out into their own packages, or need to be improved to allow the xonotic versions to replace the default ones (eg: q3map2 and all the radiant tools, which I know has gotten a lot of love lately from dev-land in this direction). Getting these tools as the accepted upstream branches to the Debian packages (either by getting all the xon patches merged upstream or replacing the upstream) is probably the first goal of getting Xon's work into Debian. This gives the Xon devs some cred out there, which can help Re: packaging later down the line.

There's probably other issues, but they're the big 3 that stand out IMO.