Challenge Mode on/off -> /challengemode "1/0"

[[uM]Cyberdemon]

i saw the discussions about features that would improve the aspects of gameplay people, who don't want to spend time with graphics, would very appreciate.

features that take focus on possibilies to make tournaments more comfortable:

first of all i like to take regard for people like fromhell who want to play the game with gfx power, which is definately a disadvantage to people who play with low gfx settings to improve their field of view.

so there are at least 2 groups: the ones who like to use the game's gfxs features and the one's who dont want to linger over gfxs, they've seen and admired a thousand times they played the map ...e.g. a cool light, a waterfall: wow, nice! looks wonderful.
if you are no more interested in the power of the gfxs features of this game there is only one main aspect left, which keeps the people playing this game: the gameplay itself! the physics, the weapon balancing, all the different possibilites you can combine in 20 mins of a game and get every time another game/event which makes fun! teamplay etc.

this game includes so much more than gfxs only. it seems people are too much blinded by their gfx to forget about what makes fun and not what looks ONLY good.


but yes fromhell: it's unfair when you play with high quality gfx against a player with high quality effectiveness!


to find a consent for those two groups of gamers i thought about the challenge mode which could make gaming fairer:

all features that make the game look ugly, because it is still available from q3a times (like fast sky, simple items, ...) or r_dipstick "16" r_texturemode "gl_nearest", etc.
get deactivated for default OA.

that would be /challengemode "0" (server side  !!!!!!!) default setting when you start OA, like autodownload "0" etc.

but what about to let the people decide wether to play with these fair, limited to high quality gfx settings or WITH the possibility to have free access to those features PLUS some more ones which are missing but would definately fit to people who want to make a fair timelimited tournament to compete, with all its problems : like player got disconnected :/ - timeout?


ok here some features that are only activated to /challengemode "1":

1.) /timeout                    teamleader can timeout a game with this command: every active player gets freezed in his action until the teamleader uses:
2.) /timein                      a countdown of about 5 secs appears. the game can continue after the countdown hits the limit.

timeout is the most important feature in tournament games. people get disconnected, pc crashes etc. so the game doesnt get hurt!

3.) there where many discussions about brightskins and enemymodels/teammodel (also force playermodel)

just activated those 3 settings for challenge mode "1". for a value of "0" they are not active so people cannot "cheat" on a "0"-server: everything is kept fair!
but it would be a great favor for tournaments, for 8 people who want to play this game not to watch textures, lights and shaders they have seen a 1000 times. at a certain point the behavior and the gameplay of human players is much more interesting than this. so people dont want to linger over settings that slow this gameplay.


4.) /cg_thirdperson "1" should be cheat protected when challengemode is "1". people can switch between these two views (thirdperson/firstperson) to see around corners (especially in 1on1 or elimination this can be unfair)


5.) it seems to me that sounds from incoming railgun slugs or lightnings (lightning gun) etc. don't make a real sound when they hit you. you cannot locate your enemy when you got hit.

i dont know how this feature sticks to the core/engine of this game. and if it is easy to give this hitevent a sound in challengemode "1" and no sound when it's "0".

6.) stats: a way to show the individual stats of the server's players. you could see stats by /stats in your console. would be an interesting  feature, people can look at during game or when game is finished. stats like:

- accuracy of all weapons by all players on the server. with highlights on best players
- damage/frags/deaths
- selfkills
- funny stats like: maniac: most "pummels", or best voidjumper "was in the wrong place" ... there is an endless list of various stats

7.) more in-game awards by tournament moderator like "impressive", thinking of UT classic ones for example:

- first blood
- killing spree (after 5 frags), - domination, - rampage, etc.
- MULTIKILL ULTRA KILL after one excellent ...keep excellents as they are at the moment. but perhaps: 4 excellents are a MONSTERKILL , too (without an extra symbol like excellent but you hear the voice of the moderator and a text appears perhaps)


8.) Scoreboard (could also be set as general scoreboard):

- scoreboard could be scaled down a bit so that long nicknames can find room to present themselves. and for elimination reasons:
- elimination: people who are "dead" are marked as dead after the nickname: so people only can see if people are dead when their nickname has a low lettercount.
- suggestion: mark dead players by setting them to bottom of team table on scoreboard, with somekind of greyer background perhaps.
- include DAMAGE count (1 Damage=100 hitpoints=1railshot/direct hit rocket e.g.) and death count (how many times you died: got killed+selfkills): would especially make sense @ elimination gametype where frags only don't explain much about the effectivity of each player.

9.) challengemode "1" -  elimination teamspeclock:  especially for elimination gametype it would make sense to lock dead players who enter specatormode when they died. dead people now can spectate enemy members and tell teammates via teamchat or voicetools (mumble/teamspeak, etc.) the position and health status of the enemy: unfair! only general real specators can watch all people, so a referee in a tournament game can observe people for aimbots e.g.). active players should only be able to spectate their own team mates. when challengemode is "0" speclock can be disabled. so on public servers for example people can nethertheless watch other peoples, even if they are in enemy team (watching certain players by interest, friends, etc, using aimbot?)

10.) elimination gametype: when challengemode "0": a message, which includes remaining hitpoints and armor of the enemy, who killed you should appear in console after you got killed: so for example: [uM]Cyberdemon almost dodged [uM]SirBSOD's rocket. [uM]SirBSOD had 40 health and 53 armor left.
in cases like: [uM]SirBSOD had 1 health and 0 armor left, it is a funny feeling, because you were so close to your own victory ...
of course, for challengemode "1" this feature has do be disabled.

11.) vertex lightning enabled on challengemode "1".
for challengemode "0" it's cheat protected. for "1" it's not.

OA is not from 1999 but in 2009 this feature still makes its purpose for many players. OA is "still" a first person shooter? it's not coridor 7 from 1994!.......
why making a game for only one group of players. why not making it for both groups. for the one's who focus their fun on gfx and those who dont care about gfxs but so many other aspects of this game just like its quite balanced gameplay (which is not perfect but very nice).


added:  []

[

12.) a cvar to disable weapons on maps; to force them not to spawn! in some 3wave q3a maps TA weapons spawn at same location of other items ... would be helpful with other (q3a) maps, too. or for some oa_ctf4ish rail suckers!!

]



every feature mentioned above for example can be taken out of challenge mode by setting them cheatprotected when challengemode "0" is set. they are only enabled and NOT cheat protected when server is set to /challengemode "1". people also can vote this mode as they like to. so there can be servers with "1" or "0" for every kind of player. people who just have begun playing this game and people who have played this game for years.
moreover these settings are defined as cheats in threads like OA 0.8.0 ROADMAP or vertex lightning discussions, brightskins, etc.

[PopeJo]

this looks very well cyd.

you shold talk to TMM, he programms a mod at the moment - implementing many of your suggested features. I won't tell any details, as I'm not a programmer, I will most likely mix things up. but go talk to him. he develops what you suggest here for the next oa-tournament.

[pulchr]

i think that many of these points make sense and would be great to implement. but sadly i don't see these things getting implemented in standard openarena. the caretaker of this project does not even play online

but i would gladly be wrong

[fromhell]

oa486 is my lazy 'stop having fun guys' audience fork.  I believe in the theory of this audience being only a very vocal minority that wants to get their way to be at the top of the scoreboard at all costs of intended representation of the game and when they do the audience will reduce it to just them, leaving the casuals out of any chance of fair human play, leaving them with bad playing experiences which are bad. This is prevalent in arena shooters. (See: Quakeworld, Quake2, Quake3, Quake4)

Unfortunately there's no development in the md3s and such on that one. Who knows when it'll come out.

[MIOW]

first of all i like to take regard for people like fromhell who want to play the game with gfx power, which is definately a disadvantage to people who play with low gfx settings to improve their field of view.

I think there are better games for those who love gfx power, e.g. crysis. For id Tech 3 fans there is XreaL (and EvolutionQ3). OA is nowhere compare to them.
For people who play OA in the office instead of solitaire, QuakeLive defenitely will be better alternative.

but yes fromhell: it's unfair when you play with high quality gfx against a player with high quality effectiveness!


to find a consent for those two groups of gamers i thought about the challenge mode which could make gaming fairer:

all features that make the game look ugly, because it is still available from q3a times (like fast sky, simple items, ...) or r_dipstick "16" r_texturemode "gl_nearest", etc.
get deactivated for default OA.

that would be /challengemode "0" (server side  !!!!!!!) default setting when you start OA, like autodownload "0" etc.

Forcing all players to have the same graphics is a wrong way to make game fair. Then will benefit those, who have better hardware. It will be even less fair than it is already. Note, that the only way to make game fair in this case is fps independent phisics.

My opinion (and i hope that not only mine) that after 10 years we need modern Q3, not a game just to say that after 10 years Open Source became enough powerfull to create the same (and even not from scratch).
After 10 years we need improved Q3, the evolution of Q3 (including improvements into engine). The possibility to make improvements into engine is one of the main advantages of OA as standalone game over Q3 and its mods. It's possible to clean bugs (of course not those bugs, which are already features), which are kept in ioQ3 for compatibility with Q3, to add features which impossible to add into current ioQ3 for the same reason.
Remember that CPMA developers had an idea of making CPMA Standalone... But CPMA devs always have to work on tons of things which different parts of CPMA community expect from them, OA could do much less, but do it good.
Such game should be oriented only on competitive gameplay (casual players already have many better alternatives, some of them i mentioned above, but finally casual players will only benefit from improvements for competitive gameplay).
It should include features for competitions, which listed above and others. Look at what have been done for it in 10 years of Q3. I'll also write down some of features which it needs, listed by qrealka: built-in mechanisms of broadcasting and recording (server-side demos),  mechanisms for organisation of tournaments ( tournament grid, maintaining and keeping statistics on server), mechanism of protection against cheats...

Such game shoudn't care about compatibility with Q3 mods (because Q3 mods are already compatible with Q3), it should be game worth itself instead. And if it will be game worth itself, then some of those mods will be ported to it in the future.
And still the game with the same vanilla Q3 gameplay (with maybe a few improvements,... some improvements are added to it in QL, and you can see that they haven't ruined popularity of QL), and maybe some voteable game modes, as variations around VQ3... http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1681527
Also about gfx. I think it's not reasonable to remove some already existing features as vertex, and not to give new. It only will make OA worse in this case than Q3.
Yes, vertex is outdated. So it will be fair to remove vertex when you will improve engine enough to give outstanding perfomance with lightmap or something else.
Graphical perfomance should be increased by other ways than making game looks worse, because Q3 engine was made 10 years ago, i think that other hardware is more common nowadays and there should be a huge room for optimization. But still perfomance is more important than looks. It's just a different kind of game from those which oriented on nice gfx.  In ideal, tools for tweaking gfx in game should be presented in such way, that players will choose settings only considering how they want game to looks instead of to gain better perfomance.
Also won't the project involve more developers if it will have better goal?
Again, that's just my thoughts, i even don't hope to see them alive some day...

oa486 is my lazy 'stop having fun guys' audience fork.  I believe in the theory of this audience being only a very vocal minority that wants to get their way to be at the top of the scoreboard at all costs of intended representation of the game and when they do the audience will reduce it to just them, leaving the casuals out of any chance of fair human play, leaving them with bad playing experiences which are bad. This is prevalent in arena shooters. (See: Quakeworld, Quake2, Quake3, Quake4)

competitive != stop having fun
Just people want to have more challenging games, more interesting and compex. They like game which gives them possibility to learn and get better, not simply to win or to call someone a noob. e.g., many of them have ability to get 333 fps, but noone does it, guess why. Such kind of players often share their knowledge with less skilled players. I doubt that there are a lot among them who enjoying "pwning noobs" on crowded OA pub servers, vice versa. And that "very vocal minority" is the most active part of OA community which keeps it alive

[kick52]

Well, I have to play with vertex lighting, my card is horrible, and lightmaps cause z-fighting on almost every surface :S

[MIOW]

me too, my current gfx card is intel gma

I just was reffering to this:

Vertex lighting is there to help greatly performance of single-TMU cards (Voodoo1/Banshee, most integrated chipsets in the 90s)

and this:

"modern systems?" Give me a break, a Voodoo2 can handle the game without vertex light. Vertex light option is designed for the earlier, 96/97 gen cards that did not have multitexturing which every card since 1998 pretty much had. Multitexturing speeds things up and makes very little difference in performance when switching from vertex and versa. Vertex lighting doesn't even improve performance on 486 or Pentium machines with a Voodoo2.
Your REAL performance issues come from r_detailTextures, since unlike Q3A, OA takes advantage of this cvar to put some extra detail layers on some shaders.

And i've already stated that removing Vertex (and I mean REMOVING) is final. There will be no amount of persuasion to make me think otherwise.

Unleash your Godwin's Law now.

My expirience, and not only mine makes me think that vertex gives noticeable better perfomance even on not very old nVidia cards. And if it's so outdated, it will be reasonable to remove vertex only when OA will give better perfomance for more modern gfx cards with something else, than it already gives with vertex

[fromhell]

Intel GMA are PowerVR based which have 8 texture units so vertex wouldn't help that, either

[[uM]Cyberdemon]

why doesnt the forum like r_p.i.c.mip and takes r_dipstick for it...even if i change it!!


taking vertex out and adding nothing else is no evolution ... it's degeneration!!!

too much has been removed!!

[fromhell]

taking vertex out and adding nothing else is no evolution ... it's degeneration!!!

remember when wolfenstein: enemy territory  removed vertex light? Jeez it reduced it to a pile of rubble no one plays now! you're right. no one has the right to take away our professional cheatvantages!

[[uM]Cyberdemon]

   
THE justification for removing Vertex Lighting thread.

i mentioned so many things that would improve this game's gameplay and you morrons are wasting time with threads like that ... OK we GOT IT...!!!! vertex lightning will be removed, just wanted to mention it because it fitted to the features the very vocal minority was discussing about !! our little dictator fromhell squawked it very clearly!!

what about the other things. i really like to convince you that [uM] and other clans are playing and testing the maps and the gameplay (at least what the masters of this game have left over) and we do know about things, people, who play 1 time a week on public instagib CTF server never are able to tell you.


I just want you not to take this as a attack on you.
because it always seems that fromhell and his friends are feeling cheated and some kind of forced of "not having fun at this."


i dont want to make your game bad. i just want to help you to improve it. such things like damage counter dont make this game unfair... it just gives a better overview... so lets please do no more linger arround with vertex lightning ...

the codemaster think it's crap so we as THEIR customers do have to rely on their mature and flawless discernment. because they do not only spend their time with coding this game, they even play it at least 4 times a week 3 hours a day and test every detailed feature in their eteneral divinity!!!! so everything we write here they seem already to know about and to have THOUGHT about it !!!

[SharpestTool]

Cyberdemon...just to clear some things up here buddy...

Those were my thoughts on the vertex-lighting matter--it's been around the forums a lot--so I figured I'd put together a solid argument and start it's own thread.  It was not aimed at you.  I am sorry that I wasn't clear about that and it probably did not help that I quoted you from this thread.  I quoted your's and fromhell's posts to just illustrate a recent instance of this conversation thats been going around for about a year now.

Second, in all honesty the disagreement that's going on here is really a discussion about gameplay.   It's a classic "brains" versus "brawns" discussion, in this case "tactics" versus "hand-eye coordination."  Some people are brilliant tacticians and poor shots, others are Wicked Sick shots, but really poor tacticians, while still some have got it all.   I won't get into that here since enough fur has flown.

Also, fromhell's a girl/woman.
 
And last but not least, going down your list, you got some good ideas...and many are being worked on.   See stuff about OAX, and try playing a little bit with  "MissionPack." (Currently a WIP though). 

[Graion Dilach]

Simple question:
Why could people take this vertex lighting too seriously? If I see it correctly (and I tested it just for this post), this vertex makes the lamps look worse. Then what is good in it?

[schlorri]

Simple question:
Why could people take this vertex lighting too seriously? If I see it correctly (and I tested it just for this post), this vertex makes the lamps look worse. Then what is good in it?

Performance... my fps are unstable using vertextlight 0(and then play Sago...). (Debian squeeze with Radeon 9700...not the best, should work)

[MIOW]

taking vertex out and adding nothing else is no evolution ... it's degeneration!!!

remember when wolfenstein: enemy territory  removed vertex light? Jeez it reduced it to a pile of rubble no one plays now! you're right. no one has the right to take away our professional cheatvantages!

W: ET is far away from Q3, people play it because it's unique game, it's not like Q3 with cutted features.
I wonder why comparison with W: ET took place, why not QL. QuakeLive keeps vertex.

[SharpestTool]

Not to sound like a do-gooder, but i did start a thread specifically dedicated to all the arguing about vertexlighting...

PLEASE DONT BE JERKS, PLACE ALL POSTS FOR THE HEATED VERTEXLIGHTING DISCUSSION IN THE LINK BELOW!
http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3072.0

[jessicaRA]

3, 4 and 12 taken care of in oa++ so far, more to come after unlagged projectiles is tweaked more(too many complain of warping projectiles, i think its the new cg_autonudge malfunctioning, if you play it set it to 0).  thinking why not a mod for oa which defaults to those 'cheatvantage' settings for new people to get the same advantage along with other stuff like cpm physics which is already in there as an option.  btw in baseoa you can disable entity spawns already like for rail/bfg etc.

[[uM]Cyberdemon]

sorry sharpesttool for my aggressive way of writing when i began wirting my yesterday's post.

it was not a good day for me, yesterday......
i am sorry for my behavior.

it is good that you seperated vertex lightning to a special topic, i see that there is still enough to discuss about.


ok lets start again and continue with discussing the gameplay.

vertex is the other topic



shapresttool:
i will try out what you recommended to me

and I also agree with MIOW.
he has nice thoughs about opensource, this game and its future in general.


cool, jessica, thank you. didnt know that.

but in general i think dividing these features to a special mod is not useful since this could be included in ONE package to make it more comfortable and accessible

[jessicaRA]

sorry sharpesttool for my aggressive way of writing when i began wirting my yesterday's post.

it was not a good day for me, yesterday......
i am sorry for my behavior.

it is good that you seperated vertex lightning to a special topic, i see that there is still enough to discuss about.


ok lets start again and continue with discussing the gameplay.

vertex is the other topic



shapresttool:
i will try out what you recommended to me

and I also agree with MIOW.
he has nice thoughs about opensource, this game and its future in general.


cool, jessica, thank you. didnt know that.

but in general i think dividing these features to a special mod is not useful since this could be included in ONE package to make it more comfortable and accessible

once the projectile delag is sorted out i'll definatly post the changes to the code for it.  not sure if they want enemymodel, friendlymodel, cpm and painkiller physics though..  projectile delag up to 100(the default can be changed server side with g_delagprojectiles, 0 for old behavior, 1 for new nudge and higher for the msec to compensate for) ping is definatly a game balancer though not effecting the high detail stuff because either way it seems to balance the window of oppertunity for evasion between high and low ping some.  well i'll ask now, fromhell sago etc do you want any of those changes?  i doubt you will want painkiller physics, its another game and more an experiment of ioq3 engines unlagged etc with the physics many still love of pk.  is a new pk to be released though so it will be useless if they don't mess this one's demo and spectator system up.

[cosmo]

I love painkiller physics too.

[jessicaRA]

I love painkiller physics too.

would be nice to have a dm_sacred and dm_psycho version in oa wouldnt it.

[feidi]

I love painkiller physics too.

+1. CPM physics are also more interesting than the vanilla q3 ones, but for me the physics I prefer depends mostly on the map being played (there are some funny things you can do on oasago2 with CPM physics, and it would probably make playing the map ridiculous )

[sago007]

added:  []
[
12.) a cvar to disable weapons on maps; to force them not to spawn! in some 3wave q3a maps TA weapons spawn at same location of other items ... would be helpful with other (q3a) maps, too. or for some oa_ctf4ish rail suckers!!
]

Has always been available even in VQ3:
set disable_weapon_railgun "1"
replace the 'weapon_railgun' part with anything you like to disable. These CVARs is not registered and therefore does not auto complete they are checked on weapon spawn using a trap function.

Some of the ideas for a more tournament mode are good. The development version already uses an alternate ways to tell number of lives/elimination status.

I don't have much though though about locking settings but really believe it is a workaround for another problem (why does decreasing the graphics make things easier to see??? I can see that it does but it is counter intuitive). Is it just me or is sergie harder to spot than any other skin?

Players usually go though an evolution.
If the game cannot be played by a beginner then none can evolve beyond that. A player plays the game to have fun. If the player learns more about the game and gets better at it that is good but it is not the goal.

When a player has learned a lot he might want new challenges or more strategy in the game and this is where the tournament function can come in handy.