[SUGGESTION] My Xonotic suggestions!

Hi guys,

I've been playing Xonotic for many months now so I thought I should share my thoughts on how the game could be improved.

Click here for my Bot suggestions.

Click here for my team-balance suggestions.

UPDATE: Animations have been moved to CSQC and many improvments are being made. Compare this to this, for example.

1. Idea:
When people are playing on dark maps, their weapons should have torches attached them. The faster you go, the more the torch light should move about.
Reason:
I noticed that quite a few maps could do with better lighting and adding a torch would add atmosphere and (obviously) spice up the gameplay.

Outcome of idea No.1: There's an interesting forum post about a game mode called Darkmatch. I think it would work if we made a torch model, ensured no one cheated and we made it available on the right maps (Claustrophobia is a good example). Still, many still think that it would be easy to cheat and that having a torch would give your position away.

2. Idea:
Players should stand still when game is over.
Reason:
At the moment, running on the spot when the match is over looks a bit silly.

Outcome of idea No.2: Some people like it, while others hate it. I'm not alone in thinking there should be an option to turn it off! (look at the poll on this page)

3. Idea:
Players’ bodies should move about when flying through the air.
Reason:
This would make the game more realistic and it would be fun to see people flail about helplessly through the air!

Outcome of idea No.3: It's theoretically possible but it might cause many issues and it's very difficult to achieve. Also, moving the animations to CSQC would be a good idea. UPDATE: animations have now been moved to CSQC.

4. Idea:
A GLSL pre-cache should be made[/url] to fix the stuttering.
Reason:
Stuttering is annoying and can make the game unplayable at times.

Outcome of idea No.4: We need a team of people to work on this, but I'd be happy to help.

5. Idea:
Maps that aren’t properly optimized for certain settings should come with a config file that automatically disables the settings that cause issues.
Reason:
Some maps (especially old Nexuiz maps) are allergic to Dynamic Lighting or Bloom and look like crap/make the game run way too slow these settings are enabled.

Outcome of idea No.5: The best solution at the moment is to allow players to bind graphics settings to buttons on the keyboard and let them fix the problems themselves (without the servers changing the settings for you). It's also worth mentioning that a lot of these maps are old or not properly maintained by mappers (some are being remade, however). It's more important for the maps that will feature in the stable release to have optimisations.

6. Idea:
Players should be able to enter a third person view at the click of a button.
Reason:
It would make operating vehicles a lot easier and add an extra element to the gameplay.

Outcome of idea No.6: Like No.5, the best solution is to allow players to bind the camera angles to keys on the keyboard.

New ideas as of 10th October 2011:

7. Idea:
The map pictures that are displayed on the voting menus should be at a much higher resolution. Each map could have 3 or 4 pictures so you get a good idea of what the map looks like.
Reason:
It would make the game voting menu look a lot slicker.

Outcome of Idea No.7: Having to download more high-res pics will take too long. Also, if you have a map in your 'data' folder or 'dl-cache', then the picture in the voting menu will become high-res anyway.

8. Idea:
The ability to switch firing modes (manual, semi-automatic and auto) on the machine gun, hagar and various other guns.
Reason:
It would spice-up the gameplay and would add variety.

Outcome of Idea No.8: It might be useful on certain Race/CTS maps (where multiple weapons are used) but it would make deathmatches too confusing and people would rarely use firing modes that weren't suitable for a certain weapon.

9. Idea:
The ability to bind the action of firing the laser weapon to a button on the keyboard.
Reason:
This would make jumping up high and increasing your speed while bunny hopping a lot easier, without the need to manually select the weapon and press fire.

Outcome of Idea No.9: Like Idea No.8, it might be useful on certain Race/CTS maps (again, where multiple weapons are used), but the laser's a damn good weapon in the right hands and would make killing people too easy in normal deathmatches.

Note: Ideas 10 and 11 fall under the 'animations' category. I know it's hard to create animations, but they're only ideas! That said, animations have been moved to CSQC, so these things could be implemented in the future.

10. Idea:
Players should move their legs when turning on the spot.
Reason:
It looks a bit silly when players turn on the spot without moving their legs.

11. Idea:
The ability to melee with weapons other than the shotgun OR the ability to melee with the shotgun by pressing a single button.
Reason:
It will make hitting opponents round the head a lot easier.

Outcome of Idea No.11: It will take the skill out of the melee and won't fit with the style of gameplay.

12. Idea:
Xonotic could have kill-cams (taking advantage of Xonotic's recording function.
Reason:
It could be used to show players what they're doing wrong or it could be used at the end of matches to show off players' best kills (the server could calculate the biggest combo or long range kill for instance).

Outcome of Idea No.12: Gameplay is too fast for this feature. It would be wiser to display the person that's just killed you, instead of how they killed you. Some things like 'longest shot of the match' or 'fastest cap' could be shown at the end, however.

13. Idea:
Xonotic could have achievements or awards that are given to players at the end of each round. Crysis 2 has this system.
Reason:
It would makes players realise what they're doing right/wrong and it could even add humour to the game.

Outcome of Idea No.13: Achievements are most probably going to be integrated into Xonstat which will prevent any spamming during gameplay. More info here.

14. Idea: Info about a map could appear whenever someone puts their mouse over a picture of it in the voting menu.
Reason:
Makes it easier for people to select a map they might like/one that they're better suited to and it might trigger peoples' memories.Here is another good idea that's similar but to do with a preview of a map that will appear in-game.

New ideas as of 10th December 2011:

15. Idea: A 'variables menu' should be made (similar to the one in Red Eclipse).
Reason:
It will allow people to change things about the game without having to manually input code.

Outcome of Idea No.15: I'm starting work on documenting Cvars. The 'advanced settings' menu could also be improved to make it easier to use, but this might be controversial.

16. Idea: When demos are recorded, you can view the scoring menu and switch between 1st and 3rd person views, but you can't see things through other peoples'/bots' eyes.
Reason:
It will allow people to see what others were doing at the time when something happened to you (getting fragged for instance), and it would be a much better idea than kill cams.

IIRC the player anims looping at the end were voted to be too awesome and silly to be worth fixing. But maybe opinions have changed since that. I still like them.

1 That sounds like it would give a player's position away in addition to causing others (me in particular because I have EXTREMELY sensitive vision) to drastically lower their brightness settings causing even more visibility problems.

2 I believe this a bug that's been in Nexuiz and Xonotic since the very beginning. It has no impact on gameplay though, so at the moment it's not worth fixing as it would be a pain to do and there's other more important things to worry about. Not only that, Mr. Bougo has stated that they look bad ass anyways, so there's no real reason to want them removed lol

3 Would be cool, though animation is a pain in the ass to do, especially for this game.

4 In my opinion this needs to be done. While I primarily only see stutter when the game is starting up and for whatever reason I'm guaranteed to see it when I enable decals on models, I also get it when I zoom in and that is VERY annoying.

5 Would be nice, in particular Box Gardens and a few snow covered maps will nearly blind me if I try to play with bloom enabled.

6 lol third person. There's actually a handful of cvars you can tweak in the advanced settings if you want a better camera angle and I'm pretty sure you can make a custom bind to a single key if you want it.

I think the player's moving at the end of a match looks ridiculous to be honest. If someone could fix it in the future would be better.

Thanks for the replies.

I know creating animations must be difficult (no. 2 and no. 3 were only minor niggles anyway), but is it possible to implement Ragdoll physics in Xonotic?

From Cam

PS I'm glad we agree that no. 5 and no. 4 need to be sorted, as they're the most important things.

I know creating animations must be difficult (no. 2 and no. 3 were only minor niggles anyway)

the answer is simple there are no animators in the xonotic community

but is it possible to implement Ragdoll physics in Xonotic?

there is a search function (i highly recommend to use it before making suggestion)
yes, they are possible but it would slow down then game and there is no one who implements/optimizes them

about your 'issue no.5' :
here you have to divide between official maps and custom maps.
the official maps have high standards and the team optimizes them if possible.
for the custom maps the problem is every mapper does it the way he want. if you want to optimize the maps with adding extra cfgs go ahead but its a shitload of work. It would help if you name maps

Not bad ass, Lee, rather charming.

For no.5, I think it would be a good idea to assign settings that don't require Xonotic to restart (as this would interrupt gameplay) to certain buttons, e.g.pressing F8 to turn bloom on or off. This means it will be easier to find which setting is causing an issue in a particular map.

Another idea would be to get the community members who have found unoptimised maps to edit a simple config template and post it in a particular section of the forum, e.g. 'Map Optimisation Requests', along with the name of the map that wasn't properly optimised.

After that, we could get the main servers to force clients to download the custom configs when they join a match.

I know that no.5 is quite a problem because I've had to restart the game on many occasions in order to find the setting that was causing a problem in a certain map.

As for no.3, I did a bit of research about using Ragdoll Physics in Xonotic.

I discovered:
That it's theoretically possible; that it might cause many issues and it's very difficult to achieve and finally, that moving the animations to CSQC would be a good idea.

Short urls, really? I'll fix your post.

If bloom is broken on a map, fix the map or bloom. Don't mess with the user's settings, let them change at will and bind the setting to a key if they wish.

Cheers.

Yeah, I suppose that would be the easiest option.

#1
This is a map issue, mappers should make their maps balance as far as light goes. Also realtime lighting is an option that can be turned off in settings.

#2
This is just a looks problem, personally I like it, just a matter of taste. Doesn't effect gameplay.

#3
Alive players should still be using their normal anims in the air, however if we could find a way to play a different death anim while the body is in the air, that would be great.

#4
Apparently this not an issolated issue. I have not had it, but if it is widespread, an alternative should be found.

#5
Then we shouldn't be playing old nexuiz maps. Anyhow, as a player I would rather have control over my own settings.

#6
I haven't tried it, but this should already be possible by toggling chase_active

In general you seem to like the idea of binding stuff to keys. This is a great thing to do except that there are limited keys, and most players already have spare keys bound to messages and other stuff. The more free keys we leave the less they work players will have to go through to make a custom keybinds to their own preferences.

In general you seem to like the idea of binding stuff to keys. This is a great thing to do except that there are limited keys, and most players already have spare keys bound to messages and other stuff. The more free keys we leave the less they work players will have to go through to make a custom keybinds to their own preferences.

You can bind a keys that rebind keys for different needs and make them toggle key using different config files:
ex:
bind c exec chatconfig.cfg (c here is a toggle key)

chatconfig.cfg
===============
bind a say "hello"
bind b say "good one"
...
...
bind c exec normalconfig.cfg

normalconfig.cfg
==============
bind a r_ambiant 100
bind b r_ambient 10
bind s exec identity-one.cfg
bind w exec cts.cfg
bind 5 exec vcall.cfg
...
...
bind c exec chatconfig.cfg

cts.cfg
===========
bind MOUSE6 kill
cl_allow_vidtracking
cl_allow_vid2name
bind c exec normalconfig.cfg



and so on, you can have hundreds command binded this way just avoid to be lost in your logical when writing your config files.

Outcome of idea No.5: The best solution at the moment is to allow players to bind settings to keys on the keyboard and let them fix the problems within the maps themselves.

Why don't you check this: http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=1997

You can bind that menu to one key. And every config of the menu will change whatever settings you want.

As for some btn to toggle bloom or chase:
in your autoexec or config .cfg add:

Code:

bind X "toggle r_gloom"
bind Y "toggle r_glsl_offsetmapping"
bind Z "toggle chase_active"
bind V "toggle chase_back 100 200 300 400 500"

I've added a couple of new ideas and outcomes.

As for idea 7:

the map pics are normally quite good resolution, but as we can show up to 9 maps, there is no space for multiple screenshots per map.

The pics appear as low res though if you do not have the map yet. Then it is quickly transmitted from server to client, and THAT part is low res.

Ok, that makes sense. Would it be possible to send different res pictures over depending on your connection speeds?

Server connection speed is capped to 20k/sec and really shouldn't allow more. The cap is settable on the server though.

However, seeing totally new maps is not the usual case. Once you have played on the map once, it will show the high res picture from your download cache.

8. Idea:
The ability to switch firing modes (manual, semi-automatic and auto) on the machine gun, hagar and various other guns.
Reason:
It would spice-up the gameplay and would add variety.

Actually I am not sure this would benefit the gameplay. We have primary fire and secondary fire for each weapon, if we start adding manual/semi-automatic/automatic fire modes to weapons those would end up with six fire modes (primary and secondary each in 3 different versions...). I don't know about anyone else, but if I would be new to this game and would be looking for fast paced arcade style action, it would be far too complicated to me if I'd see I can fire one of many weapons in six different ways.

Apart from that, adding those fire modes would need some justification for their existence, some characteristic strength in a particular situation. It cannot be that one firemode is the best and is always used. What would be the point for the other ones then? So we'd have to really really carefully work out a balance for those fire modes, that in turn needs to be balanced against the other weapons.

Last but not least we'd have to have one button for each fire mode, as cycling through the fire modes would be too slow for this game imho. I wouldn't even have enough space around my fingers anymore...

9. Idea:
The possibility to bind the action of firing the laser weapon to a button on the keyboard.
Reason:
This would make jumping up high and increasing your speed while bunny hopping a lot easier, without the need to manually select the weapon and press fire.

Interesting idea, but that would make the laser an off-hand weapon that could be used always, even together with other weapons. That way it would completely change the current weapon balance, as the laser actually still is a weapon by itself that can kill a player (trust me ). A solution might be to turn of the laser impact on other players if used off-hand, but then it would start to get confusing again...

And again, we already have to be careful about additional keys to be used, since you need to bind your weapons to keys and this already takes up a lot of space on the keyboard.

---

I don't mean to bash at those two ideas, I only try to elaborately outline my concerns about their impact on the gameplay. I think you're presenting your ideas and outcomes in a very good way and would appreciate if you'd keep them coming, don't let me discourage you :o)

About the other ideas you had I am personally rather indifferent, some things would sure be nice to have (like better or multiple map pictures for the voting screen) but nothing I am really missing from the game.

Edit: coming to think of it we could have multiple pictures for each map in the voting screen that change depending on the position of the mouse over the picture - like if you have it on the left area of the picture you see pic1, if you move the mouse to the center of the picture, you see pic2, and if you move it to the right area of the picture you see pic3. But again this would be a cool gimmick that would be nice to have but nothing I'd really miss from the game.

Yeah, the laser isn't just used for bouncing into the air, it's actually a damn good weapon in the right hands that's possibly more capable of kiling than the shotgun depending on what types of weapons your better with. It actually hits fairly hard and has a splash to it that allows you to cause some damage if you can properly track your target and hit with it.

I've added a couple of new ideas and outcomes.

13. Idea:
Xonotic could have achievements or awards that are given to players at the end of each round. Crysis 2 has this system.
Reason:
It would makes players realise what they're doing right/wrong and it could even add humour to the game.

i personally hate this achievement bullshit.

Anyway back on topic. Many people already came up with the idea of achievements. Use the SEARCH FUNCTION, before you make a suggestion!
Achievements after every match or even during the match would properly get way to spammy, but some general achievements are planned. The first step in that direction is the new stats system, once it's finished achievements can be integrated.

Thanks for the reply. I just read the article (using the dreaded search funtion ). I agree that it could get too spammy, but I like the fact that it might be integrated into Xonstat - that would be the best place for it.

I'll keep the poll going for a few more days, but judging by the results, I think we should have the option to disable the animations at the end of matches...

Hey, I just voted for "You should have the option to disable it.", but I'd like to add, that it should be disabled by default. Nowadays, there's an ever increasing tendency to make games look "stylish" and most potential players have no experience with games from the 1990s. Therefore, the natural reaction to player models hovering in the air while looping some movement animation is something like "That looks shitty, can't they do better?". Additionally, I think that any poll of this kind is non-representative, because 95% of the potential players would consider this to be a substantial flaw in richness of detail. Polls of this kind should be available to non-registered users on the xonotic page once it has been decided that the poll's worth the effort in the forum.