OpenArena Message Boards

Before I go on, I want to stress that this is -NOT- a complaint thread, and I want to discourage anyone from letting the discussion degrade into such talk because it accomplishes nothing. The way I see it, when it comes to free software we haven't paid for the right to complain. Whining and moaning will only discourage future development, and that helps no one. What I aim to accomplish here is a productive dialogue on the direction of OA. If you aren't capable of that, there's a little X at the corner of this window. I suggest you use it.

I began playing OA when 0.8.1 was the current version, and having never played Q2 or Q3 as a basis for comparison I decided that OpenArena was a fantastic game in its own right. It wasn't until I met and talked with Q3 veterans that I learned how good of a Q3 remake it actually was. I'm not against changes, updates or adding of new features, but when something is taken away.. the community response is people stop playing. I've seen the vast ocean of North American players dry up to a puddle of devout holdouts in ciggaweed, but the european side is faring better. Yes, Quake Live is to blame and the timing shows it, but is it possible it now offers a more Q3-like experience?

My decision to keep 0.8.1 instead of upgrading to 0.8.5 initially came from the removal of the black color. I know 0.8.8 restored it but at the time our entire clan used a green-yellow-black naming style and the reason for its removal was vague and had something to do with a potential cheat. At the time I'd never even seen an aimbotter in the servers, and had never used the evil r_intensity "hack". All I knew was that a part of the game I liked had been excised. Also, and maybe it was just psychological, but I felt as if the 0.8.5 engine performed more poorly than the lightweight-feeling of 0.8.1. I'm no programmer so I can't say for sure. I don't mean a FPS issue, more in the area of input response.

--- The section of evil cvars ---

I began to use r_intensity 1.3 because of an issue my previous (ATI) video card had with transparency. I saw no chameleon effect from stealthed players, they were completely invisible and I was unaware that this was abnormal for months until a friend told me about the intensity variable. I was also told to try vertex lighting but I didn't like the flat generic look it produced so I never explored the question of why it was removed. Yes, I rail and gauntlet the stealthed players blatantly because I'm willing to share the cvar since my belief is that any cvar carried over from vanilla Q3 cannot be a cheat. I feel that it's only unfair if it's not shared freely, and that server admins should decide to block it or not. And the same goes for vertex lighting. It's a mistake to remove Q3 features because they are not needed, because some players want it regardless.

--- The section of enhanced maps ---

I love to see new map design, when it doesn't override the maps we've all come to love and hate for varying reasons. And revamping the textures of existing maps can be a great thing too. But altering the bsp, perhaps in the interest of discouraging campers (and I hate campers) or changing the weapon locations to discourage clustering of players changes a fundamental aspect that good and bad players alike have come to enjoy. Campers love to camp, people like me enjoy blasting them out of their obvious hidey-holes. Choke points make good places to litter with grenades, etc. I feel that new maps should be the responsibility of the community, and shouldn't be cheap alterations of existing maps, much less replacing the originals.

--- The Blame Game ---

I think fromhell has done an amazing job with the ioq3 engine, evidenced by the fact that players still enjoy this game many years after the initial releases, but I fear the community is failing the game by selfishly requesting changes that are bad for the OA community as a whole. Requesting things in the name of fairness and balance to favor a type of gameplay they like. The problem is that a good part of the community are casual players looking for some bloody unrealistic fun. And I fear that as this game continues to mature, more and more fun will be sucked out until we're left with a grey, sterile game completely unlike the game I fell in love with and still love to this day.

--- The Solution? ---

First, trust in the server admins to police their own servers. Remove no functionality that existed in quake3, and focus on an enjoyable game that people can be naughty or nice with (even campers are essential), and leave any limitations in the hands of server admins. Then you will see the player base start to migrate back from QL and we the people of OA can once again commence with our mission to take over the world, legion of doom style. Who's with me?

Despite being a long-period Q3 player, I don't remember if I ever tried tweaking r_intensity variable. I've heard of "overbrightbits" cheat problems, but I haven't tested them (could please someone post comparative screenshots? Thanks in advance.).
I can only say that just before the release of 0.8.8, Udi had to tweak the shaders of powerups effects (and health bonus items) because the old ones had become almost invisible due to some changes in the game (to the engine or gamelogic, I don't know)... you can take a look to the posts around this (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4356.msg41270#msg41270): the fix made them visible again, although not very elegant (due to them being more thick).

For the "vertex lightning" thing, server admins can decide to allow it on their server, changing "DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Videoflags]videoflags (http://([b)" value.

For the "updated" maps, in 0.8.8 some of them were added to the previous 0.8.5 ones, although their old versions were cut off arenas.txt due to lack of space in that file (IIRC, arenas.txt size is limited), hence accessible through console only. I remember am_galmevish2 is one of these, but I don't know exactly how many maps have been updated this way and how many have been simply overridden. I think oa_ctf4ish has been overridden by 0.8.8 version, but the change there was very little (added the ability to shoot through the grates, like in the original Q3 map).

By the way, some time ago Neon_Knight started a project for making old maps (e.g from 0.7.x) available again (as separate downloads)... I don't know how much things are progressing in that way, however I think at least a couple of old maps have been loaded to MapRaider site...
Thread: http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4693.0 (however I think he applied some small fixes to them, they are not just copy-pasted).

r_intensity is a Quake2 holdover that shouldn't even be in the engine. It was used to simulate gamma without changing the gamma itself (since carmack didn't figure out a way back in 97 that would work on everything, as 3d acceleration was still mostly first generation with little to no support for OpenGL extensions). r_intensity breaks shaders that multiply and modulate because the gray color (invisible) gets shifted into white....  when r_intensity was written, Quake2 didn't have any effect that did anything different than alpha blend so this wasn't forseen.  The newer OA version changes the invisibility shader to an additive texture with a dark rgbGen const value to work against r_intensity cheaters.

r_overbrightBits is different. Higher values shift opacity and intensity of colors down to compensate for the higher screen brightness so the lightmap can have more volume. Lower values compensate less but shift and clamp the lightmap intensity (like GLQuake and Quake2).  There is no need for any r_overbrightBits greater than 1.  There is also a visible loss of color precision.  Unlike textures, the lightmaps for the BSPs are designed for having overbrights, and it has been that way ever since Quake 1.00 added them, resulting in BSP29 (July 1996)

Also, the invisibility effect should be perfectly visible on ATI cards.  OA is DESIGNED with using AMD / ATI hardware. It should even be visible on 3dfx Voodoo hardware too, since it's a blend function that can do.

I don't understand why r_intensity, overbrightbits, and vertexlight are considered cheats while brightskins and forcemodels are so popular. It's a visual aid. Not everyone has 20-20 vision. And my video card was a Radeon 2600xt and regardless of what should have happened, I never saw a pixel of a stealthed player (though i could still aim for the muzzle flash). It was awful openGL drivers which I struggled with on that card for years before finally getting an nvidia card and since then the stealth effect looks correct.

About brightskins, personal tweaks and enemymodels, OA has a clear stance: (DO NOT LINK) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/NOTTODO

I've read that before and I liked how clear the things not to ask for were outlined. Unfair advantages are wrong, and I can live without r_intensity. But what makes an advantage unfair? The pro-level (and im no pro by far) OA players rarely share their configs with newbies who have no idea that other beneficial cvars (rate,snaps for ping tweaking for example) exist. Some players can't jump to higher platforms because their hardware prevents them from getting 76 or 125 fps. Aimbots and Wallhacks are cheats, and I feel that advantageous cvar values shouldn't be in the same category. But as I said before the choice of restriction should be in the hands of admins, and default values set by the devs' perception of what is fair and what isn't so that newbie admins don't have problems out of the box, so to speak.

In general, I would say the developers are optimizing the engine (ioquake3?) and the game itself. So you should actually have more fps after a release if something is actually optimized.
If not, then it often probably is set as an option so you can still render as the previous version of OA (at least, that would be logical).

I do want to make my content more optimal while also more detailed at the same time, but it's kind of hard to do that when ioq3 doesnt' even start up on older Nvidia hardware, and by older I mean everything released between 1997 and 2005...which makes absolutely no sense to do in a source port for a 1999 game that is intended to have bare bones OpenGL 1.1 compatibility.

Between 1997 and 2005? Really? How much support for anything was cut'd up since 1.32b was released?

After a lot of thinking, I've decided to reply to this post.

Past threads with the same thematic ended in flamewars because they refused to understand what OA is about, and instead wanted us to cater to their wishes using the overused fallacy "listen to your community". This kind of threads attract drama, and frankly, we're tired of catering to people who want us to elitize the game so only can be enjoyable by they and those who are like them. There was such a fork, it was called q3min, it was promoted as "what OA should have been2 and had a pretty anti-OA promotion. Nowadays, it's way deader than dead. OpenArena has been around for 8 years, and at least in the last 5 of them people were wishing announcing the death of OA because it isn't a game designed only for X people. So far, what died instead were the self proclaimed "what OA should have been" forks for their extremely narrowed scope.

Also, other people want us to turn OA into another "serious/grimdark/brown/gritty/demonic/cyberpunk" FPS (or, directly, imitate Q3 in any way as possible (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3512.0)) and dislike the style of the game precisely because it isn't. I take it that visibility of models/skins in maps IS a problem, and we're going to hit this one as hard as possible in DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/OA3]OA3 (http://([b). But OA didn't lasted this much time for just being one more FPS of the bunch which used those overused and extremely overdone thematics. In fact, we want to steer away from them to further distinguish OA from the rest of the FPS.

So far, if you've been following development or have read the Wiki, forum aside, you should have noticed that not a single option was taken away. Some options may have been clamped for security issues. Instead, server admins have now WAY MORE POWER than before, since aside of the default options they have a lot more to choose. In fact, it's possible to play 0.8.1 style OA with the current maps with the adequate settings set, such as physics and the like. But... serveradmins have to configure their servers for that.

About older versions of maps, we want to get rid of everything which makes OA ugly (that's the point behind OA3: better performance, better visibility, better look, all with the classic Q3 gameplay) and, in consecquence, gaming's favourite punching bag. So if players love the ugly versions, we're sorry, but we have been the laughing stock for a long time. It's time to stop being that, and in this case we won't accept a NO for an answer. And, like Gig has posted before, they have the older versions in that thread.

Forum aside, r_intensity has been kept in all versions. Perhaps the server you might frecquent had the "videoflags (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1908.msg25566#msg25566)" cvar set to 7 instead of, say, 0? That's a tool that was left to serveradmins to decide. Hell, even the players got something with "cg_autovertex" 0/1.

FTR, initially it was called fairflags, but turned out into videoflags later. The functionality still remains the same.

Oh, and 0.8.8 introduced a dmflag which will make those players which picked up the Invisibility item completely invisible, and DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Special_game_options]it can be disabled as well (http://([b).

Same as above, we're tired of being FOSS gaming's punchbag. If you don't like the better graphics/better gameplay options, you have the older versions (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4693.0) for download and play. We're not going backwards.

Yes, I admit I was one of those who commited THAT mistake as a mapper back in the day, when I was more worried about pleasing the people.

Server admins not only are trusted, but have now way MORE power than before for their servers. It's not our fault that they don't read the DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/]Wiki (http://([b), where Gig has done an excellent job, he has almost three years on this 8-year old forum and has done already way more for OA from his place than a lot of the self-proclaimed "OA saviours/templars".

Anyway, I don't think people will migrate from Quake Live unless something serious happen, and we are already focusing resources on OA3.

DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Special_game_options]There are server-side physics options to emulate 125hz physics and 76hz physics (http://([b). They were introduced in OA 0.8.5 and an extra option for more accuracy in this emulation was introduced in OA 0.8.8.

Well, about DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Game_physics]game physics (http://([b), IIRC "fixed-framerate emulation" option is there since Q3A (well, not since first version, but added later with some Q3 DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Q3A/PointRelease]PointRelease (http://([b), I think)... while the "accurate" option (added by OA) was introduced with 0.8.5 (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3548.msg30774#msg30774).  ;) Of course, the kind of physics to use is choice of server admin.

By the way, reading 0.8.5 changelog in the post linked above, I noticed this:
Considering some recent threads, this may be interesting for someone.

I was talking about the 91hz and 125hz emulation options from the Server Menu (IICR pmove_float), and g_gravityModifier. Those two were set as just examples. It is not our fault (and it won't EVER be) that serveradmins are lazy to configure their own servers.

Wow that's definitely a good addition in 085, that way players dont need tweaked configs to do the high jumps. I certainly didn't know that but admittedly my experience with new versions is low. Most of my points came from complaints I've heard over the years. I thought I'd do a public service by bringing them out of the shadows in an unbiased manner. Thanks for the input Neon Knight, I didn't realize OA criticism had such a troubled history and I hope you continue to keep producing great work for the OA community. Since you're the author of the galmevish.. can I have your autograph?  ;D

I give up on openarena

C++ do you have a valid point here or do you just want to argue mindlessly over out of context quotes? If the latter is the case there are already several threads for that. And as for being selfish.. I don't think I've made any suggestions, recommendations or demands. Just putting a single opinion out there.

I give up on openarena

Jakash, I've just got a (silly?) idea:
Considering you are capable to do it, why don't you prepare a gamecode "diff" to add a new cvar that would make the railgun weaker than normal? I suppose that variable should however be DISABLED by default (considering that OA aims to keep original gameplay as much as possible... see also DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/NOTTODO#Stuff_we_won.27t_do_and_never_will]HERE (http://([b)). Something like g_weakrail <0 or 1>, or g_railweaker? I think some mods already have a such option (DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Mods/AfterShock]Aftershock (http://([b) maybe? Or maybe DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Mods/Excessive_Plus]ExcessivePlus (http://([b)? I don't remember. Maybe you may take a look to the variable name they chose, to have an idea about it).
Then asking Sago007 to integrate it into OAX (I don't know if for gamecode changes you have to also post them into SVN Commits (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1945.0) thread, like with other assets as maps and textures), to have it in the next OA release (well, there will be some time to wait before a new release, however it would be there).

You disagree with everything I said because you don't like me. This limits your objectivity.

I give up on openarena

IMHO, changing that value with a different constant one would be surely against NOTTODO... but making a CVAR may be legit, as long as it would follow Q3 original behavior by default. However, the final word about what's NOTTODO and what's not is up to Fromhell. One might just ask Fromhell opinion.

Jackash, in this thread, you're asking for the drama. Until you stepped in, this was an interesting conversation.

Personally, I can understand some of the original post's points and maybe it'd be cool if we could have a tribute/attic/retro mappack with old looks and placements on some maps. (this always reminds me of that dm4ish resize which well... didn't went well).

Honestly, the black color is annoying IMO on space maps. You go with an only-black name and NOONE could read it. Seen such already. I would have accepted it if black would be 32,32,32 or around, but whatever.

Particularly, I never felt differences between 0.7.1 (which I started on) and 0.8.5 in gamespeed. And what OP asked about does exist already except the attic mappack.

The real problem with the Railgun is on the maps. Maps with plenty of areas as cover, and the Railgun placed in a very dangerous place, etc. make the Railgun feasible regardless of damage. Changing the damage really means changing the gameplay. With a weaker Railgun, there's no reason to go to it's area. Also, there's a reason of why Team Arena limited the Railgun's range effectiveness, a change carried into OA by way of the Missionpack features added to the game.

Take, for example, my experiments on czest1tourney (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=553.0). The Railgun is placed in a button-based deathtrap. This button is placed outside of the Railgun's FOV. There's also another cover-based trap which blocks the Railgun's fire in concurred areas. And, finally, the BFG (one of the most hated weapons in the game) is in a place pretty exposed towards the Railgun, and from the player's part, it requires a bit of thinking to get there. The BFG ammo is also on the Railgun's FOV. The idea is to limit the overpowerness of the weapons without changing the properties, and that comes from the mapper's part.

Wait wait wait... this sounds very interesting (although maybe not strictly related to the topic).
Do you have precise data about this (e.g. links to previous posts or comments in game source, etc)?

http://bit7.org/quake/mirrors/documentation/quake3/teamarena/manual/

It's in the Team Arena manual. Sago may have a better explanation of what it does.

I think we have talked about it earlier. The range was reduced to 1/4 then Team Arena was released. The change affected both the vq3 and TA. This happened before the source was freed (1.32b). The source that was freed had no mention that the range have been different in an earlier point release.

If players get stuck where they shouldn't (deco or something stopping players to reach the deathpits/void, for example) then that's an issue and should be reported. Also, you're not considering people who doesn't play online for different reasons. Not everyone wants to play OA online.

Well, that's an issue... which never was reported because oa_ctf4ish is mainly a CTF map. And we had tons of time before 0.8.8 to receive issue reports. It's incredible how we receive reports AFTER the releases instead of before.

I had heard that Railgun has got a shorter range than machinegun, but I had no idea that in origin its range was longer, then TA made it shorter and that change was than "backported" to baseoa by idSoftware at some point (and hence, also to OA).

I'm not a fan of the railgun, it doesn't suit my style of play as well as the explosives do but even still, i think that the railgun should have virtually unlimited range. That said, I hate being railed the instant I spawn (in oa_spirit3 in particular there are no spawn points safe from camper nests). Having 125hp to start usually works so it doesn't bother me. I guess it just depends on the map and players who play them. Anything can be subject to abuse and I don't think it's worthwhile to bother the devs with this sort of thing. Same goes for the ongoing hatred of killbinding. These aren't legitimate issues with the game, just the players who misuse them.

I disagree. The problem with the Q3 weapons aren't really the weapons per se (they're OK as they are), but their abuseness (?). It's the core gameplay, the map gameplay should act in such way that they limit the overpowerness of the weapon. Hell, with the right placement there's even no need to limit the weapons themselves as the map itself already limits them. It's one of the rules of good map design: the "Risk vs. Reward" concept. Dangerous or overpowered weapons should be in dangerous places.

Just for completeness, a server admin may rise g_spawnprotect value from its default 500 ms, to give longer DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Spawn_protection]spawn protection (http://([b).

Of course, this does not mean that placing all spawnpoints in the middle of a square with two railgun spawns at its borders is a good idea...

Oh, yeah, spawnpoints shouldn't be too exposed as well.

There are many things players can do to annoy me but I don't blame the weapons and don't see any real problems with the rail at all. I've debated with others in private about my perception of the rockets being slower in a subtle way than they are in the q3 demos ive seen floating around youtube. Every time I made the point I was told by mod authors that the speed value for the rockets is identical to the q3 value and my opinion was dismissed outright. I just feel like there's something missing from their physics. It almost seems like there's aquatic drag on them, or some aspect of their acceleration was missing. I'd like to experiment with this to find the truth of it sometime but it probably belongs in another thread. Having learned rockets with no q3 experience i enjoy them just fine as they are, and changing it now may be a bad idea anyway.

Just thought I'd throw that out there. A long time ago I used the OATMEAL modding toolkit to bump up the rocket speed and acceleration and it was a blast.

Well, OA aims to change nothing from Q3's core gameplay. So if anything worked in Q3, expect the same functionality in OA.

Still, Youtube isn't a good way of judging a game's mechanics. You could also play the original Q3 (retail, 1.32c, ioquake3) to check for yourself regarding OA.

That's part of the experiment I've been wanting to do for some time. Once I get a test outside of observations of demos, if I still think there's an issue I'll post about it.

Oh for christ's sake, spawnprotect is hugely annoying as it is. In instantgib ctf (especially 1v1) I've had numerous times where I hit someone, but he just got pushed back and then killed me instead. Fair? Well yeah spawnprotect might be something to prevent accidental killing, but the current implementation is a gameplay changer for people with working reflexes that are already aiming at a potential spawn point. I've even had times where I reflex-killed someone while not already aiming at the spawnpoint, so it's really a limit on what you can do instead of a protection from... what anyway? Accidentally getting killed, is that it?

To this somebody always says "but yeah during spawnprotect they also can't shoot so it's fair" well no they can kill me after I shot them because I waste 1.5s reloading while they can shoot me after 100ms or something.

Also like someone remarked above, server admins are generally evil. However s/he failed to notice that most admins are also lazy as fuck and that you can not expect them to configure things like the spawnprotect delay (or physics, or videoflags, or anything else beyond the server name and map cycle). The default settings should be the correct ones. I mean seriously, do you feel like spending multiple days reading through and testing every single option? Especially now that, like neon_knight said, you have way more options as an admin? Because that's how long it takes if you haven't developed and betatested the features. Not everyone has or wants to spend time on this. And from my personal experience, software developers (like the oa devs) are much more patient with reading and testing documentation than sysadmins are anyway. Many of them (again, in my personal experience) are just lazy.

OATMEAL's server-side only mod was really great fun to play around with. Felt like turning a racing game into grand theft auto vice city :P. I contacted the creator later because the site was down, but he only had a server+client version of the mod (not server-only anymore). I still have that last version around somewhere if you want to check it out. Includes source code too I think.

One of the annoying things in Aftershock is that you have 7 lg damage and 80 rg damage, while in OA it's still 8 and 100. I'm used to either one or the other, but switching between the two makes me pick the wrong weapons all the time.
I'd be ok with making the rg damage optional 95-99 instead of 100, just to disable these (nowadays much easier than in the original q3 days) one-shot kills on full health. But beyond that, I'm not sure changing it is a great idea under any circumstance when sv_cheat is 0 because some servers will have different gameplay than others.

So true. I don't know if you made it or not, but that's why I don't like the new version of oasago2: the railgun is placed somewhere so that everyone uses it, but besides the 25 hp spawn bonus there is only one yellow armor on the map to protect you from an entire enemy team of railers. That makes the entire map broken. The platform camping issue was less bad because it was simply prohibited in league games.

Also about that platform in the new oasago2: what do you get when you spawn there? You can almost always better kill yourself, the only exception being when the person that stole your flag happens to have low hp and you think you can kill him with machinegun or well-placed plasma spam. The other weapon on the platform is sg, which is not going to get you very far either... Meanwhile enemies that are running around do have a railgun to kill you from a distance (or lightning when you get closer, though still not close enough to do significant damage with any of the weapons you can get on the platform), and you end up getting killed anyway.

I've kept the structure of oasago2 as much as possible, so there's no new platforms. And yeah, I've tried to respect the weapon placement as well, except for that one change nothing else was changed.

And... we had time to test that stuff before and get feedback from it (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4412.0). Hell, we even had a plethora of 0.8.8 test releases (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?board=73.0) And guess what? Feedback always comes after the releases have been released.

Only recently (this year, to be exact) I've learnt that instead of "the community", I should have listened to what the big guys (http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/719216/how-to-build-the-best-multiplayer-fps-maps-part-one/) who make a living from creating levels (http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/719253/how-to-build-the-best-multiplayer-fps-maps-part-two/) have to say (http://www.moddb.com/tutorials/gameplay-basics-and-multiplayer-floorplan-introduction). =)

Some things simply go unnoticed until you've tested them in production for a while.
In the other news, why not take RMF's criticism as a plain bug report for improvement in the next (test) release? The tone and attitude in that post of yours dont't help anyone.

Well, yeah, I might have been a bit rude, but I'm not the only one feeling mad because we're getting slammed because OA isn't a 100% perfect product.

In the time between 0.8.1 and 0.8.5 we had 18 months, one and a half year, for reception of bug reports and everything. From 0.8.5 to 0.8.8 we had two full years, and it was a final version. Isn't that enough time for testing?

We are now focusing everything on OA3, because the 0.x branch is now considered done, and we're recreating from scratch almost everything regarding the game's assets.

I just had a nifty idea. RMF is right about server admins being too lazy to read a giant config file or they could just be ignorant of what all the cvars do. Maybe adding a server launcher in the game's main menu with [?] buttons nearby the values with brief descriptions on the functions of each cvar. Map list generation would also be really nice too.

We are on our way for doing that. (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4780.0) The functionality is there (IICR servers have that feature since 0.8.5), but maintaining the current 0.X GUI is difficult because it's hard-coded, so we're moving on to the TA menu system, which is more flexible and allows us to integrate newer commands easily.

Please note that dedicated servers often have no graphics card, they're being run from a terminal.
A map rotation or config creation tool would be great, I'm thinking of a GUI to write plain .cfg files. This'd have to be part of the regular game download, though, and should not require additional dependencies like Java etc.

You could generate the config file from the copy you run at home and upload it right over.

Yes, I meant the two that were also there in the previous version.

No offense taken anyway, and I don't think my post was too polite either. Things in the game irritate me and that's what I express. I'm not saying OpenArena in general isn't great - in fact I've been around here for how long now, four or five years? And all this time I've been playing openarena at least once a month, at peak at least once a day, and I still like it. Every game has things that annoy me, and I will always mention them to developers when I think it's any use. If it's no use and things never change, I'll stop playing the game. That's not the case (black in names in 088 for example), so that's great ;)

I have to admit that it is partially my own fault if there are things in openarena that I don't like. But most complaints are from players that never tested things, and most players aren't aware that there is anything to test.

I was about to suggest hosting a server with the latest and greatest beta, but then I remembered something, checked, and yup there seems to be one running already... I don't think even 1% of the players knows about this. Hosting regular (once a month? Every other month?) evenings where people can join and try out new things (could be new maps, could be some new cvar, could be a model) might be a way to actively involve players in the development and get direct feedback.

I was actually more thinking of questions that you can answer to generate a config -- but even then I don't think most admins would bother answering hundreds ifnot thousands of questions. I'm going to keep saying that the defaults should contain the correct values.

Hmm, didn't this exist? By thedimi or something?

Edit: http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=2956.0
Edit2: Mirror of tool http://lucb1e.com/oa/maprotgen.php

This is getting somewhat off-topic, but the immediate issues I see with that script are;

• not hosted on the official website
• requires hoster to run PHP, while it could be implemented clientside using JavaScript and the resulting html+js even works offline
• requires the user to know the exact map .bsp filenames
• blank lines (e.g. at the end of a copied list from some file) produce non-working script lines

Discussion comes from this topic (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=5033.0).

Retrogamers want to play older versions of OA maps inside newer versions? There's a thread (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4693.0) for those requests.
Retrogamers want to play older versions of OA itself? Then they should search them and download them. OA3 is about going forward, not backwards for nostalgic reasons.

So far, all the arguments against 0.8.8 and pro-older versions I saw and read were pretty weak.