OpenArena Message Boards

Hello, I've been wondering how active OA project is because no news posted for ages. Is OA totally abandoned?

Fromhell is developing OA3 almost on her own. I feel bad for not being able to help on what's really needed. =(

I've also lost my motivation to map after OACMPv1 was released and problems kept on appearing (the non free texture slipping through was the final hit; we had a year and a half of development but every true problem started to surface either in the final stages or after release). I have tons of things to do, but everytime I open the editor I close it immediately. I'm burned out, I guess.

[Rant]
Not to mention that the people who keep on complaining about OA's quality and throwing shit at us in a regular basis don't appear when we need it. Fortunately, I guess, they aren't around anymore.
[/Rant]

Well, I think OA is great game. I understand the fact that people developing games during their free time and for free doesn't have same resources behind 'em as big big companies do. And about those problems, it's always possible something wrong slips in despite being so careful as possible and I understand it as well.  :)

OA aged badly and is in a sorry state where it's functionally 'finished' with no motivation to contribute further.   Freedoom/BZFlag-syndrome, or something like that.   It only took nearly a decade that Freedoom got a very active monster sprite contributor recently.  Maybe Freedoom will finally hit 1.0 this year, but it will sitll have the problem of having a mixed bag of quality like OA0 is.

And then, there's the lack of interest because the renderer is old (as in doesn't do normal mapping perpixel deferred rendering).  Many misinformed suggestions to switch engines etc.  Dropping support for the legacy is not on the table.  I am not slapping a glossy shadowmapped coat on OA0 and calling it new and creep in required support for later APIs to force obsolence of hardware id Tech3 nicely supports.

A lot of OA's end result is a lost cause to fix and maintain, which is why I'm redoing it in a new art direction with strict technical control.   and a fresh improved engine (https://github.com/OpenArena/engine) that adds a bunch of fixes and niceties OA should have had for years (and were in fact things i've been requesting for years, that were never done until I implemented them myself).



It was not until very recently (last month) that a talented artist found interest in OA3 (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=5112.0), bringing a lot of concepts that are actually good and motivates me to model and work on OA3 a lot more now.


I don't post much about OA3 to the public because it's deemed 'pointless' by some communities (like OpenGameArt and FreeGamer, which is heavily biased for Xonotic and Terminal Overload) so trying to engage for feedback usually leaves me disappointed that i'm not satisfying their bumpmap entitlement or something.

also my player animations still suck, so not many good screenshots or videos can be done right now

Don't feel bad. You've contributed plenty already.

I've been playing OA on and off for years. I feel bad for not learning C (something I've been procrastinating on for many years now) and not having any artistic skills.

Donating is the most significant way I could contribute. Has anyone thought about setting up some sort of donation or tip system on the website? Paypal/other payment service links for contributors on the forum would work. (Here's a statement made by fromhell many years ago. (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=2094.msg16586#msg16586) Is that accurate still?)

OA is pretty good even in its current state, really. It has a community and regular players despite the project's slow pace of development and any other deficiencies. From my perspective, that's a testament to its quality. Don't let the trolls get ya down. :)

Yes, there are some glaring problems. But when you're involved in an intense match online against good players, those go out the window, at least for me. I simply don't notice things such as Tony's poor animations. And Merman... OMFG. The hilarious sounds that model makes make me forget about everything else. Make people laugh and have fun and you don't need to worry too much. :D

Fromhell, what I understood... is OA abandoning id Tech 3 engine? To me OA looks pretty good. And Capsaicin is right,  making laugh and have fun is the thing what matters, not best looking graphics.

No, it is still idtech 3, but with many improvements.

Is Ioquake3 but with new features implemented by fromhell, that improves the game feel.

About development of OA3, there is an "OA3" section of the forum, which is only visible to registered users, but not for them all... I suppose it becomes visible after the user has got "n" posts, but I don't know how much that "n" is.

I don't know why but most FPS evolve slower and slower.

They tend to start with frequent releases, with change that often are minor, then there is more and more time between two releases.

An easy way to explain this is more complex changes (bug fixes, new features,...). However, the time between release often become so long this reason  isn't longer enough to explain it, and this is what I don't understand.

Open Arena, AssaultCube, Sauerbraten, AssaultCube Reloaded and Red Eclipse evolve that way, and it probably also the case several other FPS.

OpenArena evolved really fast when I bounced work between 2 artists including myself

That ended in 2008 when enkithan had to commit to real-life(tm) stuff

Regardless what you say: OA still is the best FPS around :)
Fast and furious.

Even if the graphics is some kind of 90s stuff, i still like the gameplay and always come back for a quick frag.

Unfortunately there are no updates on the program. As a wise guy said: update often to get a community.
Even if there is "just" a new map pack to distribute.

Anyway: i am still here and will wait for some "big news" as long as you do not modify the game play :)

Although I don't have much time to commit to playing OpenArena, I can assure you that the community would greatly increase if people were to help fromhell out. It seems that the forums are way more active than the actual game, even devoting sometime to appear in a game would cause others to see that this game is indeed somewhat active and would increase activity in action, and production.

Never saw fromhell on a public :D
What about lurking @ a server and just be present?
If somebody tries to talk to you, you are still able to blame him, quit or just answer as neat as we know you :giggity:

I am sure, that GeYm will give you some cookies and (if neccesary) kick some of those ugly guys ;D

The github repositories for the updated code (https://github.com/OpenArena) never had much testing or feedback even after a year of updates.

Files "ready-to-download-and-try" in engine and OAX threads (possibly, mentioning "what's new and should be tested") would be easier to use...  :)
http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1933.0
http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1908.0

I don't think periodical windows-compiled win32 builds from me would be that useful.

There's free Linux, Windows and sometimes even OS X CI.

I don't require them to be scheduled at specific times, or that you should be the one to make them (for oa 0.8.x, IIRC Sago prepared them... couldn't he do the same now?).

I just say that coders are coders and testers are testers. It's more easy for a coder to also act as a tester than vice-versa.

It would be not not very comfortable if every tester would have to compile the game (engine/gamecode) by his own.
I have never tried myself, but I have seen here various threads from various people who had major problems while trying to compile the game on their own... some of them at the end were successful, while others may have abandoned their tries, after days of strange errors from compilers.
Also, one person should prepare and share one specific package (with an unique identifier) to have all testers work on the same version... otherwise different compiling options may cause different results, which may trigger different bugs (making the problem difficult to reproduce and identify!).

I have little spare time... but if I find a post which says "Hey, here's the new OAX BXX version. What's new: X,Y,Z.", I can give a look to it, quickly try those new features/fixes and comment them. Otherwise, I feel I cannot be very helpful.

"CI"? What's a "CI"?

Note: for compiling gamecode, there are some instructions here: (DO NOT LINK) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/OpenArena_eXpanded... for engine, I don't know.

CI is "continous integration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration)".

In the case of OA, one could just take a look at upstream's Travis CI builds (https://travis-ci.org/ioquake/ioq3/) (both Linux and crosscompiled for Windows) (build config (https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/blob/master/.travis.yml)) and releases (http://ioquake3.org/files/jenkins/latest/gcc/no_options/).
There's also Circle CI (https://circleci.com/) (Linux, iOS, Android) AppVeyor (http://www.appveyor.com/) (Windows) and probably a dozen other free services (the difficult part finding someone to build on OS X). If you don't have a place to host your builds, then you can just attach them as GitHub releases (https://help.github.com/articles/creating-releases/).
What this means is that you can have your code/assets (engine, gamecode, or even packaged game assets) built/tested upon pushing them to e.g. GitHub, then see your test results and upload the build artifacts (openarena.exe, pak0.pk3 etc.) somewhere, all fully automated. There's free services to do this, you "just" need to set it up.
If you can not automate your build, then users will fail to build it on their own as well, so the last point shouldn't be a a real problem.

I'm here if you need me, very big things happened in these month, and i've not touch the editor for many reasons.

After OACMP Volume 1 i've thinked to work for OACPM Volume 2, if the project is still up.

(http://i.imgur.com/iFHjMZW.gif)

I'm still interested in OACMP, but in this period real life does not allow me to work on it....

I've partially lost my interest in OA, since Android version is on a stable decline - 3977 active installs with 65000 total installs. Probably having only one Android server on my home internet connection in Ukraine has something to do with this - the most installs, 23%, are from US. I even considered buying 3 years of Amazon t2.micro server instance located in US for $150 (4 years if you consider a free promotional year), however I am absolutely not sure if it will provide stable enough ping for playing. I'm not monitoring my own servers, so I don't even know how many players visit them (one per week is a good guess).
There is currently another server currently hosted in Germany, but those community servers typically come and go in a short time.

I can spend 1-2 hours per week testing maps, as usual, although Gig is far better than me at finding misaligned textures and holes in walls.
I hope this time we will set up our process beforehand, like all other software projects do:

1. One version of build tools for everyone.
Every mapper needs to have q3map2 used in a final build, so lighting won't get screwed, and bspc which actually works.
This could be as simple as a .zip package with tools precompiled for Windows, GTKRadiant/NetRadiant included, and their sources for Linux-y people like myself.
Would be really nice to have one build script, which will download, compile, and install q3map2, bspc, GTKRadiant, and all required textures into the directory of your choosing, although I'm not sure how to do that on Windows - Cygwin is meh, so probably one huge zipfile with precompiled everything, but Gig and Akom are on limited internet and hate downloading huge zipfiles.

2. Continuous build.
You modify your map, upload it somewhere, and get the new version of the whole mappack in 2 hours. Could be automated, could be done by asking someone on forum.

About Android version "decline", consider up to two days ago there was that annoying bug of change weapon button not working (which required alwaysweaponbar as workaround)...
Also, some comments on google play say that "game is great but controls aren't precise"... I don't know if they refer to that jump button bug we discussed today or something else.

Please continue supporting it...

I'll keep supporting it for the sole reason of having better controls than other mobile 3D shooter games.
And 'bad controls' is said about just every mobile game except for four-button platformers and one-touch endless runners, but users very rarely tell the specific problem.