Assaultcube developpement? AC is it dead?

[(aCKa)Deathstar]

Hi Guys!
I will like to know how is the AC statement?
I don't see any update of the game since 2013.

The dev' team is out?
There are some people working on developement?

Some people said me the old dev' team abandoned the game and gave it to some old players. That's true?

I heared it was almost an E3 pro game but happened some problems in the presentation in Paris then we lost the chance to be a pro-game... what about that?

I heared than AC lost a big part of his community because of the hard map restriction and the new weapons damaged: players bored about the update and leave. what do you think?

No more AKIMBO website, Quadropolis is impossible to connect... what is happening with the game comunity?

AC is a simple oldschool game but I still love the game ambience. AC have is own world!!!
Maybe we can try to give life to the game again? re-think about some restriction and new way to attract players to get back a real community... it's sad to see that game statement: almost dead.

Then i'm waiting your opinions guys! cya ;) peace

[Mr.Floppy]

Hi Deathstar,

as far as I know there is no active development at the moment and I'm afraid there's nobody around to take up on things again and continue working on the code base. However, seems most of the community is gathering somewhere in Discord, so I may have missed out on what might be happening behind the curtains.

I don't know when you left the game, but it has become pretty popular at some point and unfortunately that's when things went downhill. The 0.93 spirit suddenly was gone, there were too many players with too many different ideas in which direction the game should be taken. The veterans, including me, tried to preserve the original concept of the game and when the situation got more and more heated and personal, a lot of good people who have contributed tons to the game in the past left, responsibilities changed hands rather frequently and eventually some bad decisions where made.

The map restrictions were implemented in order to reinstall a certain quality and style of maps. By the time that idea came up AC saw some of the worst custom maps ever made, rotating 24/7 on most servers. You would search hard for private matches in order to experience a proper round of AC those days. On the other side of the discussion people argued, that if those maps are that popular, why not follow the trend. So the question was, let things happen and watch AC become a silly fool's party, or trying to get rid off of the weirdest crap and somewhat forcing people into taking AC's core gameplay more seriously. Well, a lot of people didn't like being forced and left for Minecraft and other games.

Personally, I still enjoy AC a lot and really hoped to see the new version stef had been working on to be released.

However, at the moment I don't see things to be changed for the better. The latest Windows and Nvidia updates already start fucking with my installation, causing the game to perform terribly and functions like /gamma aren't supported anymore. I'll try and find out what I can do about that, but when AC won't run out of the box on modern machines anymore, I'm afraid the game will die off rather quickly.

[Elite]

Mr.Floppy,

is there a list of 'planned/desired' features available for a possible next release? Moreover, what particular issues need to be resolved apart from that gamma problem?

Best regards
Elite

[(aCKa)Deathstar]

hey guys happy of your fast answering :D ! very happy to talk with the great Mr.Floppy again!

I left AC around 2010/2011 seriously. sometimes i installed AC again quickly, but i was bored.
I travel a lot this past years and I became father then my life changed. I like videogames but sometimes real life is better you know :D But till today I keep my AC love inside me. for me AC is more than a video game is almost as a 2nd world (quantic physic? ahahah)

Then I understand what you mean about the map restriction. I don't like shitty minecraft maps or bad mapped ones, and it have to get some limits. But me too i did a lot of funny maps before who was not so good to be played on AC, or a little bit larger to be allowed on multiplayer and i think this is sad.

Maybe it had be better to create a restriction but let the choice of admin's server to allow the restriction or let open to shitty maps... lol Like on CS for example there are a lot of traditional maps servers and some "freestyle servers". I heared about people against Gemma maps too. I don't like the shitty multicolors gemma map but i saw some incredible gemma maps, better than some official maps: looks like singleplayer level (remember cube).
Maybe allowing a gemma mode (like in warsow or UT) resolve the problem of crappy servers and crappy map.

This is just my opinion, but I think there are more important things to do on AC before that.
I don't have so much time like before but I let you Know if you need my help to do something great for the futur of AC: I'm here stronger than ever :D !

Ps: I was an idiot teenager before, now a day a start to understand better the AC engine for mapping, I will like to create some official maps for exemple. I'm working on a crazy subway one for now, stay connected coming soon it will be available to download ;)

Let's keep in contact dude, cya peace

[Mr.Floppy]

Hey Elite,

the features I was looking forward to the most are pretty much all bundled up in the mapediting branch:

• advanced editor with on-screen menus (rendered previews) providing all resources installed
  
• on-the-fly map config generation while editing, no need to pre-configure the settings
  
• tilted clips
  
• full high resolution textures support
  
• shadow entity, like a negative light entity
  

I guess I forgot about some more features offered by that branch, but all in all it was mainly about mapping and rendering.

Do you know if there's someone still working on something?

[Elite]

No, unfortunately not, at least not on mapping issues.

[xemi]

Its a shame what happened to ac. I feel like if the devs who started the game don't have any ambition to really further update ac, they should have at least made a effort to pass it on to players who do/did. I think it is important to fix a lot of the bugs that make the game less enjoyable first, mainly in the competitive side of the game. I don't know how to code however, it doesn't seem too difficult to fix. I would be open to starting a patreon or something designed for the dev team. I am sure others would be open to donating what they could if they knew work was being put in. A decent amount have players have came back since covid and it might be interesting to see if we could get this game back on its feet!

[HoeHunter]

Xemi if you give me money I will fix AC

[AlliuM]

I agree with xemi.
i never understood why this game was never released on steam.

[Mr.Floppy]

[...] I feel like if the devs who started the game don't have any ambition to really further update ac, they should have at least made a effort to pass it on to players who do/did. [...]

Actually, the first dev-team, which can be called as such (namely: eihrul, driAn, FlowTron aka MeatRome, stef and makkE) did pass the responsibilities onto the next generation a lot of years ago, and those second gen devs have passed it on to the next and so on for another few times. However, ever since this first team had retired you couldn't even talk about 'the devs' anymore, as the people taking up on the work were rather a lose collection of more or less (latter includes myself) skilled enthusiasts from the community trying to keep things afloat.

By the way, if this wasn't the case the masterserver and homepage wouldn't still be up and running to this day, right?

The last person who had the required skills and engine-knowledge to further develop AC's code base was indeed stef, who as far as I know, eventually has given up with basically nobody left to pass the stuff onto next. As far as commits on Github go, it seems there's currently only grenadier left maintaining compatibility with modern OS versions (see here). That's it.

At this point, a big 'thank you' to all those who haven't already given up and still devote their spare time for us to play a 15(?) years old open source game!

Thing is, even if we were to source the money to pay someone to work on the game, you still need to find that someone. The notion of 'the devs' pretty much sums up the entire misconception here, as it always has been 'the community' where devs sparked out of and there's not much community left today. Let alone capable people who are willing to dump hours worth a half-time job into an - let's be honest - outdated game.

I don't want to paint it all black and hopeless, but pointing fingers at 'the devs' 5 years ago showed how little people understood the game's development process, doing it today is just a completely pointless act.

As for the Steam discussion. I did vote against putting it up back in the day, as the game and the infrastructure around wasn't fit for a broader audience and huge player counts, in my opinion. Today I would even vote against it twice, for this might very well be the final nail in the coffin considering the game's current state. Just have a look at how even professional indie studios, with actual dev teams, can't keep their heads above the surface when not meeting players' expectations.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see things changing direction and development kicking in again, but the kind of miracle required seems too big of a magnitude to ever become reality...

[R4zor]

Just wanted to say I really have fond memories of this game and still come back to the forums to relive the glory days every now and then. Had some of the best times growing up and I wish others could experience the same!

[xemi]

Yeah I hear you, I am really not trying to send any hate towards the dev team and appreciate the explanation of the history because I really never followed that and it makes more sense how why the game went downhill the way it did. I've always really enjoyed ac's unique gameplay and movement and have yet to see it anywhere else. If ac cant get further developed than maybe a new game thats similar to ac will get created. *hint hint* to any game developers out there

[Marti]

The last person who had the required skills and engine-knowledge to further develop AC's code base was indeed stef, who as far as I know, eventually has given up with basically nobody left to pass the stuff onto next.

Thing is, even if we were to source the money to pay someone to work on the game, you still need to find that someone. The notion of 'the devs' pretty much sums up the entire misconception here, as it always has been 'the community' where devs sparked out of and there's not much community left today. Let alone capable people who are willing to dump hours worth a half-time job into an - let's be honest - outdated game.

I can honestly name a few people (even from the few that are still around) that could very well contribute to developing AC's code base.  Just look at Brutalsystem's post: https://forum.cubers.net/thread-9052.html

I don't want to paint it all black and hopeless, but pointing fingers at 'the devs' 5 years ago showed how little people understood the game's development process, doing it today is just a completely pointless act.

if any suggestions from the playerbase (whether it be competitive or not) are pretty much blatantly ignored because some devs like to push their own agenda of what they feel is best for the game, it shows how silly the game's development process was. Making suggestions has felt pointless for years, also because none of 'the devs' actually plays/played competitive, so they had no clue what a large part of the active playerbase was interested in.

Even suggesting very simple QoL things were just ignored, you make a post suggesting something, and you didn't even get a reply like "oh hey thanks for suggesting this, we will look into it" to at least make the players feel heard.

I'm sure there's more to the development process than meets the eye, but a lot of (older) competitive players share or have shared similar frustrations, hope you can see where that is coming from as well.


As for the steam thing, what seems to be so bad about it? how much worse than the current state can it possibly get, i.e. what is there to lose? :)

Love the optimism

[Mr.Floppy]

Marti, I understand your frustration and I agree, even if you didn't say it out loud yourself, that stef was quite a stubborn person at times.

I still remember when 'put up or shut up' became the obligatory final comment to pretty much any feature discussion. Even though this phrase probably best describes what AC's cooperative nature has been about from the get-go (read starting at line 83: cube engine readme), it didn't do no good, but to further escalate the situation.

However, I still can't blame stef. After all, he's been pretty much the last one around, who willingly put his time into getting the game back on track. He prioritized fixing bugs that got introduced when he wasn't in charge and to push out a stable release with some additions on the mapping side of things. Anything beyond that scope was put back, that is, set to be discussed later, when the main goal was reached.

It still makes sense to me, not to take in all suggestions at once, in order to keep things manageable. Sure, all that wasn't properly communicated and the discussions got heated and personal most of the time. But, that's what happens when there's no real dev team (with emphasis on team), but only few individuals, who need to fit into all sorts of roles required to run a game. In hindsight, it was bound to fail...

Anyway, all this is history. What's more interesting now, is how to get the people you said could contribute to actually work on the game?

[Marti]

Oh I'm not fully blaming stef, I think everyone knows we had issues, but he did work on the game for a long time and I appreciate that.


As I linked in my post BrutalSystem has been working on something. I know Fatso was working on a type of ACWC client, and had a beta released to a few individuals. Furthermore I know zero and undead have been in talks about some AC related development.

That's already 4 individuals capable of working on things, that are discussing development!

[Brutal System]

As I linked in my post BrutalSystem has been working on something.

I'm working on something, but what's in my post is nothing of mine, just from the AC developer team, I don't deserve credit or anything, I just compiled it for those who want to try it out.

Just clarifying to have no confusion.
:)

[Alien]

The fight itself did the community great. Doesn't matter if the fight was about "like" button on forum, about some map restriction or about what is or what isn't cheat, people got involved. There could be external reasons, everybody finished their universities and started to make children or just everybody started to play heartstone. But for sure there were also many internal reasons.

- huge IP list of blacklists for players (some countries could not connect to some servers)
- server blacklist (based on map restriction or just personal fights)
- map restrictions (newbie needed some shit maps where only newbies play)
- weapon balancing (this change was pretty brutal, poor snipers ...)
- missing moderator mode from 0.93 (fucking democracy in voting)
- competitive scene in this game was mostly about who is better hacker.

This game is unique for me:
- it is fast, quake style, simple maps, limited combination how to play, so very quick learning curve
- it is multinational game, you can play with Brazil kid, fat US guy and German pervert on one server
- it is small and simple, so you can host your own server on your computer and make your own kingdom
- the map editor is so simple, you can create map during few hours, you can create your own school as map and train shooting there
- it is open source, so everyone can contribute and change the game
- clan/game community was small, so you were recognizable

so let's fight why the game is dead and make alive again :D

[Bukz]

I am willing to help where I can of course, but my coding knowledge is very limited. I certainly don't want to see the project die as it holds a lot of sentimental value to me. I'm always available on the AC discord and on Steam if anybody needs to reach me directly. If IRC is still the best way to communicate I can get back on there as well.

I have an idea of how to attract some new players that I would like to share with someone before going through with it, maybe it could be improved.

I'll start today by getting a dev environment setup on this machine and grab the latest repo. But after being away for so many years I really have no idea what is a priority or what isn't beyond basic bugfixing.