If they are completely new to the game, it may be a good idea to provide them a few hints (printing them?) about base settings, etc.
Trying to quickly sum up (a sort of "OA settings quickstart"):
- Setting controls (SETUP -> CONTROLS).
-- Setting mouse speed ("look" section), you may want to make it a bit higher than default.
-- "Misc" controls settings section, setting a key for "chat-team" feature (example: "y" key).
-- Note: GUI allows to"bind" a certain control up to two different keys.
-- Setup -> Controls -> Shoot: you may want to disable "autoswitch weapons" feature.
- Setup - > Game options: enable "unlag hitscan"
- Setup -> System -> Graphics: you can change your screen resolution. Console command "/cg_drawfps 1" shows your framerate.
- Setup -> Game options: enabling "draw team overlay" table may help a little team cooperation during team-based modes.
- "/cg_drawspeed 1" command allows to see your horizontal speed. You can gain extra speed by "strafe-jumping", continously jumping while running, moving forward and laterally strafing, and moving the mouse in the meanwhile.
- You can customize your name from "Setup -> Player settings" menu. From there, you can also choose your "model" (character). Note: from that menu, setting an "handicap" different than "none" will cause your character to be WEAKER!
- Setup -> System -> Networking, set "data rate" to "Lan/Cable/xDSL".
- While playing, ESCAPE (ESC) key opens in-game menu. "TAB" key opens score table. To open command console, the key varies depending from your system keyboard language (e.g. ~ or \)... Commands must begin with "/", otherwise they will be sent as text messages to everyone.
- A voting procedure can be invoked from ESC menu of with /callvote command. You can vote "yes" or "no" with F1 or F2.
For more infos, you can refer to (
DO NOT LINK) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Manual
Note for you (admin): In case you add some extra stuff (maps, mods) to the server and wish them to automatically download it, you need to set "/sv_allowdownload 1", and they need to enable "automatic download" (setup -> game options)... however, download speed is currently limited to 25 KB/s (may be even lower, depending from "rate" and "sv_maxrate" settings), unless admin correctly setting up an http or ftp service for "http download" (fast download). See
DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Automatic_download]Automatic download for infos. Future OA versions may change this, due to a new ioquake3 variable. In the meanwhile, considering it's a LAN, you may prefer to manually copy required extra stuff into those computers, using windows shares or similar means.
For you, for infos about running your server, you can refer to
DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Manual/Multiplayer]Manual/Multiplayer and
DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Servers]Servers pages. Set "/g_delaghitscan 1". Set /sv_maxrate to 25000 (maybe also to 0 works the same? Probably, but I'm not sure), and set /sv_maxclients to at least 12 (e.g. 16), otherwise some of your 12 players would not be allowed to join the server (if you start the server from the GUI, just open enough "slots" by clicking on them); considering you're in a LAN, you should not have bandwidth problems. Dedicated server console (oa_ded) does not require "/" before commands.