AC 1.3 or AC 2, Your Expectations and Estimations

[Vanquish]

^Vanquish and I, TKTF urban :D

♥

I don't care the least about eye-candy - and at least all those AC players who use gamma 200, texreduce and brightskins do neither.

Again this shows you're out of touch with sauer's competitive scene. Even the more casually competitive players (in sauer) play on texreduce and use brightskins (not like AC's watered down version with the filter). It's the same in other games like quake and battlefield and so on, people lower their settings simply to have less optical distraction when they're aiming. It has nothing to do with the engine or the type of game. Of course not everybody does it, but most people who play competitively will not care about eye candy at all.

I'm not saying we should turn AC into sauer, because that would be stupid. I'm not even saying we should shift AC to the cube2 engine (that wouldn't be stupid, but in my opinion it isn't necessary either). But there's a difference between incorporating elements of other games that have proven to be successful in a variety of scenarios, and actually turning one game into a carbon copy of another. Re-read my original post, the only two features I want that Sauer (and a lot of other games) have are the ability to pause your game and the ability to use brightskins. I don't think that you personally feeling as though they don't fit in with AC's gameplay are a reason to completely dismiss their merits, or the merits of others' suggestions.

[Nightmare]

A simple ability to vote /pause and it going through like a normal vote, then the /unpause/ vote ability would be sweet.

Most players don't jump into inters/intras/cm's if they don't plan to play the game without distractions. If someone pauses and disappears too long, too often, people won't play with them. Things like 'Vanquish has to go to jamz's house and pick up sugar for the apple pie he is making and pauses the game for 10 minutes' are not reasons to reject the idea.

[Vanquish]

'Vanquish has to go to jamz's house and pick up sugar for the apple pie he is making and pauses the game for 10 minutes'

I have a car and (provisional) driving license now, so it wouldn't take that long :p
Anyway I agree with what you said about the pause feature. If devs are so adamant not to include it, they could at least have /timeout (60 second pause before automatically resuming) and /timein (after 5 seconds, resumes the game) commands like in quake. Similar feature but it's different than the way it works in Sauer, as that seems to be hated around here.
I also think that there's a bit of a mislead opinion here about why pausing is bad. That in itself isn't what annoys anyone or disrupts someone's enjoyment, what causes the irritation is the fact that a certain player has to go or has disconnected or lagged out or something in the first place which can disrupt the flow a player or team has midgame, in extreme cases perhaps influencing the outcome of a game - and there's nothing that can be done to preserve the score and game scenario as it was and stop the countdown. It's almost like a rite of passage that when someone disconnects, people always moan and then someone says "why is there no pause feature?".
It would be much less irritating if there was a pause feature of some sort implemented, to prepare for the eventuality that something does go wrong.

I just don't understand why people are opposed to this. Make it an admin-only feature if necessary (it's fairly common nowadays for at least 1 in 6 players in a competitive game to have an admin password on a major match server), but just don't sweep the issue under the rug again.

[SrPER$IAN]

First of all, Thanks to all the people who have participated the survey so far.

Second, I have to repeat it again that the main goal of is thread is only helping AC to better by running some kind of a brainstorm and all the ideas are respectable at their own place.
Ofcourse any discussion about any ideas mentioned above is surely acceptable, but it will lead to a useful result only by making a thread individually for them one by one.

Third, although I really try to avoid being offtopic here, but I have to clarify some points about some statements about this survey :

Luc@s, you probably misunderstand the purpose of this thread ;)
It is to tell devs, how they have to spend their time...

Like I said, it's just a brainstorm process and there is no "have to". I really hoped one of the devs at least would participate it. We (the players and the developers) just try to know about eachother's opinions and expectations about the game to help the process of AC develop.

Instead, completely irrelevant nonsense is discussed (version numbers)

It might seem as only a simple number to your eyes but, the "Version numbers" are surely one of the most important questions in this thread, why? Because it clarifies everything about the future and the "Long-term" and "short-term" strategy of AC developing.
It's really good to see two of the developers responding to this threat, but I'm wondering why none of them decided to answer to the questions of the survey, and instead they both leaded the thread to offtopic(intentionally or not)?. Is it something else but the fact that you have no exact answers, and there is "the lack of coherent schedule and strategy in the AC Developing Project"? Correct me if I'm wrong by referring to any link which shows any schedule and assigned the defined work to the members, and also the time estimations for any of the works and the whole project.

btw (on the "1.3 vs. 2" topic): AC will move to the cube2-engine, as soon as the current engine stops working. Also: that will be the end of AC, because the cube2-engine will kill everything that is "AC". If you don't believe that: name /one/ good ctf map in sauer...

My friend, I might have the least knowledge about coding in the whole community, but I'm sure the process of moving to cube2 is not a "1day project". This is exactly what I'm talking about the lack of "long-term strategy" in the developing area.
"when does the current engine stop working?", by having a strategy, You ,as a developer, must have the idea about the exact time when the current engine stops working and you and your partners would start working on moving to cube2 years before the current engine dies, in order to finish your job on time.

I think, it is quite interesting, how this thread manages to completely ignore actual current problems of AC.

Most ideas given here are good, but as far as i know, nobody is willing to spend so much time working on AC right now.

Let me open up the eyes of you and everyone here by showing this, I guess a picture talks more than thousands words:



The statistics don't lie. AC has lost about 90% of its downloaders over the past 4 years. Please clarify your program to save AC, because it seems none of the solutions would have sensibly worked at all during the last 4 yours.

Please don't take my words as a personal attack or something. I'm just caring about AC just like you and all the people who are leaving their comments here and there. The fact is that I don't own AC, nor you or any of the other individual players or the developers. Actually something that makes AC special is that anybody who is involved with AC(as a player, or mapper or modder, or a developer), they all have the feeling that they own this game. AC is obviously at a very complicated situation right now and surely it needs all of us to help. But if we all don't want to get untied to save AC, sadly I'd personally rather to see the whole game down just tomorrow, because watching it drowning deeper and deeper in its grave day by day is the bigger torture.

[EndGame]

That image :-(

Why is it so hard to improve this game?! Ok, Who wants to help improving the game?
Ingame name:
why do you want to help?
What can you do?:
availability:

That looks so easy but we are not taken into account

[Undead]

tyvm for posting that graph srpersian, and addressing the core issues of AC in a succinct fashion.

[Cemer]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/, are what i am assuming assaultcube uses, if im wrong please correct me. i too would like to understand the proper licensing ac undergoes so i do not make any false assumptions

i dont see how undead is wrong; if so, could you please explain why he is wrong so others will not make the same mistake? many of the common ac population assume its 100% free and open source, so if there is something that refutes that, shouldnt we all know what it is about?

Edit by stef:
You are wrong. AC does not use zlib license. The license for all parts of the source code is in the file source/README_CUBEENGINE.txt and it is /based/ on zlib. One difference is, that it does not allow changing the license. The license does NOT allow the code to be relicensed under GPL. If you do, you violate the original license and therefore you are violating the copyright.
The media files have many different licensing schemes. Some of them are /only/ covered by the general AC packaging license, which can be found in docs/license.html, section "The entire AssaultCube package". It states clearly, that it only allows the distribution of the UNMODIFIED package. So, if you distribute a mod, and include all files of the original package without getting explicit permission for each and every file, you are violating copyright.

[Huntsman]

Most ideas given here are good, but as far as i know, nobody is willing to spend so much time working on AC right now.

the best thing for AC would be if a new team of developers attempted to develop AC 2.

Undead raises a good point. If the developers do not have the time or are willing to put in the time to work on AC, wouldn't a new team, that can just as easily work with the support of older developers, be beneficial?

And no, a "pause" button does not fit the game...

i'm going to leave this here for emphasis. yes, people of AC, your eyes are not deceiving you, stef actually said that.

Yes, pause should be an option. Not for public games, but definitely for match/private games. If, what I am assuming everyone has agreed that it is necessary in this thread, besides stef, why is it not being discussed as an option? Put it to a vote?

[Orynge]

Why would five players have to wait, just because one has to answer his phone? Or where would you draw the line, what kind of interruptions would warrant a pause?

The players can decide that for you with a vote. We usually stop play when someone says "STOP I have to answer the phone" or something along those lines, and then we waste 3 minutes of game time while they do that. The devs have never decided any rules for competitive (what the standard comp maps are etc.), so why are you suddenly doing that now?
You're also assuming teams can have at least 4 players on at all times. Most clans will be lucky to have 3 players online at the same time, and now you're suggesting that we need 4 to play a clan match? Not everyone can have subs at all times.

[ExodusS]

the best thing for AC would be if a new team of developers attempted to develop AC 2.

Undead raises a good point. If the developers do not have the time or are willing to put in the time to work on AC, wouldn't a new team, that can just as easily work with the support of older developers, be beneficial?

It all depends of what the new team want to do, if they want to improve the engine or if they try to push the game on the Cube2 engine, I just think Cube2 engine is a bit more difficult to handle because it's a 3D one.

If people are needed to re-create maps on another engine, then I'd help of course, except if the NSA and stef will try to stop me.

[Felix-The-Ghost]

AC doesn't need a new engine :/

[stef]

If pause is such a huge problem that almost every solution would be welcomed - how come, no one even tried to check out ACs built-in feature to avoid pauses in matches? It's been a feature since the first AC 1.1

Also, if you want to get involved in the development (and help the next release to get out) - how about you set yourself up for testing? Get a git client and a compiler set and fetch the current master from the repository...

You may find, that there have been a lot of changes since 1.2.0.2 - and there are a lot of protocol changes in the queue, which require a lot of test players to test multiplayer features.

If you don't know, what to test: ask me, I'll point you to an experimental regression test management, where you can check, what others have already tested.

And if this is too easy for you, and you really want to help the game - read yourself into the topic of debian package creation. We've been a year without a proper debian package. If you own a Mac, even better: grab yourself a debugger and get started (if you run out of bugs to catch, just start a thread here, and ask other mac users).

If you're no coder, how about searching for visual errors in maps? How about creating a new set of textures (for example, for all parts of a building)? But you also may want to grab a git client and fetch the latest version - there have been quite a few additions, especially for mappers...

But of course: chatting in the forum about the importance of version numbers is much easier... :)

[ExodusS]

how about searching for visual errors in maps?

Please, go slap RandomKiwi, I tried to report many bugs as a few mappers did on this forum, 95% of the reports were denied by RK because it was he said: "mapper's intentions".

http://forum.cubers.net/thread-6036.html

Read the post #21: "intentional glitches".

Who the fuck wants to add "intentional glitches" in an official map? Isn't it forbidden by the official documentation anyway?

[stef]

Unfortunately, the links in that thread no longer work, so I can't check, what kind of errors you are talking about.

However, if they are, as randum suggested, caused by the "map save" function, it would be worth looking into them again - because i fixed savemap a few months ago.

Maybe you can catch me on IRC and show me a screenshot of a bug.

PS: I had to suspend Undead to give him more time to read up on some stuff. It's a long file (source/README_CUBEENGINE.txt), so it may take a while.

[ExodusS]

It's not even a question of "map-save" bug since I was already able to deal with it by myself before you fixed it.

And it was not always those issues, most of those bugs are from mappers who didn't pay enough attention to the floor heighfields and sometimes the slope isn't reaching the floor or there is this kind of bug, it's ugly, it's not intentional and sorry but only an idiot could say ac_desert's mapper wanted it to looks like this. You just have to scroll up by 1 the middle of the heighfield to fix it, but also pray that makkE won't sue AssaultCube™ because of this radical gameplay change.

There is also something that could be made on ac_douze as Luc@s stated a while ago, a simple /mapshrink could be applied but it would show two small bugs (bugs I was able to fix in a few seconds). Since ac_douze is one of the most laggy maps, even small changes should be applied, even if I doubt RK would allow those changes.

---

Suspending Undead was the only one thing he wanted you to do.

[stef]

/mapshrink doesn't speed up the rendering (but it may shave a few bits from network traffic). I made a corrected version of douze several months ago, which actually improved rendering speed. As it was never committed, I instead wrote an automatic optimiser (/mapmrproper) who fixes that kind of bug in all maps with every save ;) Actually, mapmrproper has now replaced the old broken optimiser that used to mess up maps during saves.

[Marti]

If pause is such a huge problem that almost every solution would be welcomed - how come, no one even tried to check out ACs built-in feature to avoid pauses in matches? It's been a feature since the first AC 1.1

Exactly what feature are we talking about here?

[ExodusS]

/mapshrink doesn't speed up the rendering (but it may shave a few bits from network traffic). I made a corrected version of douze several months ago, which actually improved rendering speed. As it was never committed, I instead wrote an automatic optimiser (/mapmrproper) who fixes that kind of bug in all maps with every save ;) Actually, mapmrproper has now replaced the old broken optimiser that used to mess up maps during saves.

Okey, and what about this?

And it was not always those issues, most of those bugs are from mappers who didn't pay enough attention to the floor heighfields and sometimes the slope isn't reaching the floor or there is this kind of bug, it's ugly, it's not intentional and sorry but only an idiot could say ac_desert's mapper wanted it to looks like this. You just have to scroll up by 1 the middle of the heighfield to fix it, but also pray that makkE won't sue AssaultCube™ because of this radical gameplay change.

[stef]

@marti: Telling the server to automatically keep the desired number of players active. All you need to do, is to go to match mode, set the number of active players per team and have a sufficient amount of players on the bench. As soon as someone drops out, or chooses to pause ;) by typing /benchme, the server will automatically allow someone else to go active.

It is certainly not the same as a pause function and also won't help you much in a duel - but it's been around for almost five years, so I'd expect at least someone may have tried it out. It is modelled after real-life games, where you have a few players sitting on the bench, ready to be swapped in as soon as an active player has a problem - or if the situation calls for a different kind of players. IIRC, it is even possible for players to disconnect and only connect back, if an active player calls for help (on mumble, for example), to be swapped out.

As I said, it's not a pause - but it was designed to avoid the need for pauses at all cost and instead keep the game going without any interruptions. In fact, "match mode" only exists because of this function. It is the only reason, why the server supports five different teams.

It was also one of the two functions that I "illegally" committed, and got kicked from the dev team because of it.

[Cemer]

It was also one of the two functions that I "illegally" committed, and got kicked from the dev team because of it.

i will defend you here; that seems very odd and unfair for your work

your idea is very applicable to matches that have subs; but there are often scenarios where you cannot have subs; what should people do then? this is the idea of a pause function, to account for when there is no one else available

[Marti]

your idea is very applicable to matches that have subs; but there are often scenarios where you cannot have subs; what should people do then? this is the idea of a pause function, to account for when there is no one else available

exactly.

in these times it is very difficult to have a sub in a game, hence why we would love the /pause function.

[Alien]

Pausing game is so minor problem, it is healthy to eat pizza and drink beer during match. Once i had AC in the bathroom. And you didn't recognize it. I think the missing server with ac_complex and ac_mines is the problem and that i cannot play some old sexy maps. And stef should stop us forcing to do something because i am the fucking "USER" and i enjoy it after long day.

[Felix-The-Ghost]

It's not even a question of "map-save" bug

What was the bug?

[stef]

During saving, hidden textures get optimised as part of the compression algorithm. Only sometimes, the textures were not really hidden. Also, sometimes even hidden textures matter.

[ExodusS]

The video (the link) was also showing well the bug. Even if sometimes it was impossible to deal with it, it was still possible in most of the cases. Now I'd like to see if ac_trapped-cube still works well since you fixed this bug, it may affect the map. :p

[G1gantuan]

i haven't read the whole thread but i don't quite understand why a "pause function" would be so daunting to implement. if it would satisfy a group of competitive players, then such a feature shouldn't be given any doubt in its practicality; especially when its implementation wouldn't require much time and effort to manifest. minor issues and big issues share this main difference; they are flaws no matter what context they are heeded in. a perfect product might perhaps be an impossibility, but flawed ones can always give off the notion of lackluster design to a minority, a majority, or whatever. be what it may, i would daresay that a game like AC should always be approachable in the structure of its gameplay; it must be built upon unquestionably, whether or not a slight effort or a drastic transition.

so make a pause function already FAGS. cigarettes are cool

[Felix-The-Ghost]

I added some exceptions to the optimization two years ago that fixed all my cases of textures changing. Probably could have added more exceptions rather than removing optimization entirely.

Also, I don't think stef would actively deny a complete, ready to ship pause feature, just he isn't in a hurry to code it himself since he personally doesn't see the value of it.

[G1gantuan]

wouldn't that mean he would rather approach the game in the benefit of his own viewpoint instead of improving the game for everyone else? if he wasn't willing to actively deny such a feature, instead of replying to all of the inquirers with his opinion on the subject or trying to suggest half-assed alternatives, he would instead be at the couch watching TV; laziness as you implied.

[Felix-The-Ghost]

It's called prioritizing, e.g. there are more important things than the pause feature right now.

[ExodusS]

if he wasn't willing to actively deny such a feature, instead of replying to all of the inquirers with his opinion on the subject or ...

He answered to half of my post, then dodged the second part because it was probably easier to dodge, even if I re-asked it by quoting myself and asked him personally to answer it, he just dodged.