OpenArena Message Boards

I get an error when I try to access the OA3 section of the forums through the wiki. I am curious as to why this is. Any reason?

OA3 is unreleased development stuff -- it doesn't need any wider exposure just yet.

If the forum is linked on the wiki, the link should be removed.

Uhm... there are various links to specific threads there, that can be useful for us....
I just added a note in the DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/OA3]OA3 wiki page (http://([b) mentioning that some of the links in that page may link to the "OA3" section of the forum, which currently is for registered users only.  :)

define registered user. Technically I'm "registered" and yet I can't access that forum. That's why I made this thread in the first place.

Perhaps you need a specific amount of posts in order to read that forum? Fromhell has raised the restrictions for the OA3 forum after an incident with a racist hater infiltrating the forums.

I can no longer see it either even though I started trying to contribute. ( Though I have done next to nothing do to lack of motive and laziness)

Works perfectly for me?

Works for me too -- probably a post count check as Neon_Knight said.

It is sad that some persistent losers out there keep coming here to attack people, and a very unfortunatel consequence is that it has become harder for potential contributors to participate in OA development.

Well what is the post limit then? I cannot access it either.

I’d be curious to know as well.
I’ve been playing OA for a few years now, and I found out about OA3 on the wiki.
I’d love to see how it’s going, perhaps contribute some code, but even after registering an account, I can’t access it.

It’d unfortunate to have to make posts I don’t feel are useful in the forum just to access the OA3 forum, but even then, knowing the required post count would be nice.
Or at *least* have read-only access with a registered account, if spam’s that much of a problem.

I think the post count is actually a good thing to have, saying that only for restricted parts of the forum. Like said, someone with a registered account started posting negative things. A post limit for the forums would stop people from creating accounts after being banished from forums such as OA3.

Just from me guessing, the post limit for OA3 is probably "100" posts.

I totally agree, DILZNIK. In fact, I wonder why they would stop at such a low number as 100?

I think a 5,000 or so post limit would go much farther in stifling unnecessary criticism for an awesome project like OA3, which I believe will probably be perfect as it is. There’s no need for a bunch of haters with negative things to say gumming up the works and slowing down progress.

To me, it’s abundantly clear that the only people with an interest in OA’s future are those that live on the forums anyway, so doing it any other way just seems silly.

I have no idea about what's the minimum post limit Fromhell placed for that... but I can guess something like 5000 would be absolutely impractical (if you check Members list, Fromhell is the only one with more than 4000 posts!).

IIRC (but I may be wrong), at least in one case Fromhell granted access to OA3 section to a person who did have few posts, but had proposed interesting stuff (character design maybe? I don't remember) in other "Development" sections. So, if you guys have something interesting to show (characters, maps, gamecode/engine enhancements, etc.), post them in the other sections of the forum... they may be used for OA3 as well and may help you access the OA3 forum section.

I'm not even sure if there is a minimum post limit which automatically grants access to that section, or if the access to the OA3 section is only related to an user list manually managed by Fromhell....

Your sarcasm detector must be broken ;)

Phrases like "will probably be perfect as it is" should have hammered the sarcasm home.

Sarcasm detector showed a yellow warning, but I always (+ or -) try to be as kind as possible when replying to people...  :)

Considering the whole post (the 5k note was just a small part of it), I was not only replying EvilDrBrain, but also to DILZNIK.

Diligent as always, Gig. Thanks for the fair response.  ;)

My aim isn’t to be rude, of course. It just seems a bit self-defeating to first ask people to contribute and then prohibit 99% of them from doing so.

And like Carado said, after playing OA for a few years, just seeing how its development is coming along would be nice.

I'm working on a level and it's a ship.  I'm happy with the layout and am beginning to produce the hull mesh.  This may be my first real map that's not a blocky piece of crap. (oa_bases series are all prototypical for gametype functionality)

I am revamping Sorceress for like the 7th time, after coming up with a  new anime basemesh right in Arne's topic.  All sorts of leg problems will finally be eliminated and should look reasonably presentable  (read: not as embarrassing) for public screenshots and video soon.

I uploaded UI code, though so far no pulls to it nor pulls for the engine or game code either.


Most of the OA3 board is older concepts, references and my random WIPs anyway, with a bunch of other post saying "i wish i had time" by various people.  noneoftheless i'm definitely moving forward with this anime style.  It's still a fresh thing for the arena FPS genre, with many games still settling in scifi UT3gears genertech, a CPMA successor going steampunk, etc

It's honestly a lot faster to work on this stuff in private, if the Sonic 2 HD project's troubled past is anything to go by. God help us all, some fans managed to argue for 50 pages over a single tree. Don't even get me started on the color of the sky in Emerald Hill Zone.

I'm excited OA3 is finally on its rails, it's a long time coming. I know it'll be a long wait, but from what you've been talking about, fromhell, it sounds promising. Anything worth playing takes time to create, and I can't wait to see the new Sorceress too, once she's ready for a public reveal.

OA's easily the only shooter of its kind I care about, and has characters I actually like, (Not to mention a few shreds of lore to explain the game mechanics, like Quake III. Do other Arena Shooters even have that?) so OA3 will be refreshing in the midst of all these boring look-alike shooters that you could swap HUDS around with and not tell the difference.

And I have to say, OA 0.8.8 still looks good with more settings turned on. (And even when I load Quake III up, I'm always using Neko.) It was more or less the consistency of the art that threw me off sometimes. For instance, one character looking amazing and well rigged, while another was desperate need of more texture, most likely from the lack of time; so I can see why you're rebooting the project altogether, especially with the perks of the MDR format.

Any reason it's called 3 instead of 2? Not that I'm complaining, 3 has a nice ring to it.

Quoth the wiki:  

Since I can't post directly in the OA3 subforum, I'll post a suggestion here.
How will pk3's be organized. I think they should be as standalone as possible:

pak0-base.pk3 (contains just the basic stuff needed for open arena to load. Nothing in this pk3 should be needed for compatibility purposes by any other game.
pak1-textures-q3.pk3 (Contains all needed scripts, textures, etc for quake 3 compatibility. Should be built in such a way that it can be used by other free games, like xonotic)
pak1-textures-oalegacy.pk3 (Contains all needed scripts, textures, etc for legacy openarena support, much like how the nexuiz compatibility pack for xonotic works. Optional)
pak2-maps-oa3.pk3 (Contains all needed scripts, textures, etc for the new open arena 3 maps, as well as both the maps themselves and their source. Notice that I don't give oa3 it's own textures pk3.)
pak2-maps-qtribute.pk3 (Contains all needed scripts, textures, etc for the quake tribute maps, as well as both the maps themselves and their source. Optional)
pak2-maps-oalegacy.pk3 (Contains all needed scripts, etc for what are considered the best official legacy openarena maps, as well as both the maps themselves and their source. Optional)
pak3-models-oa3.pk3 (Contains models like health and players that won't be used in other games. None of the player models should share quake 3 names, unless the textures are compatible with q3 custom player mods that use q3 player textures.)
.....

You could probably figure out the rest yourselves. What I posted is an idea that is just a start.

OA3 will not include anything from 0.x ("OA legacy").

it's just going to be pak0.pk3.   Building a bunch of separate PK3s at once is a very complicated (and slow!) task even for a batch file, and part of OA3's point is to shed off the legacy crap and keep bloat minimal.  I got so sick of specifying paths, which takes even more time to add files

Originally OA had that seperate pak stuff for people to base new standalone games from and it's already accomplished that mission with some (rather dishonorable) forks, and I don't think I have to do that anymore given how old id Tech 3 is and how there's UDK/UE4/Unity etc

Right now my batch file just processes baseoa directly to a zip file excluding the source files, "copy" files, and other potential bloaty leftover files not essential for playing.


Mature PK3 is no longer necessary, as there is a _safe/_lewd assets loading system renderer-side determined by cvar, so in theory, content could be permanently blocked by some distro packagers recompiling just the engine/renderer forcing _safe loading without sacrificing pure PK3 checksum parity with online players.

Okay, forget the legacy stuff. I still think you should organize things in such a way that they could easily be played in other games, especially the quake 3 compatibility stuff.

edit: You don't need as many pk3's as I suggested earlier, but you should at least have

pak0-base.pk3
pak1-textures-q3.pk3
pak2-maps-oa3.pk3
...and possibly pak2-maps-qtribute.pk3

After about 10 years of playing openarena I enjoyed coming here and looking at how was going the oa3 development, sad it was restricted to people who writes a lot in here.

Another question about OA3. If you have something like a safe/lewd switch, can you also provide free versions of commonly used third-party textures and then override the pk3s which include said textures? Just to be a step freer?

Our plans in this case are only limited to the official Q3/TA textures and shaders. That also may cause problems with maps (there are already "problems" with the maps which already use evillair's texture packages, the ones also found in Nexuiz).

Applying a similar functioning switch whole pak wide would be a huge hit to loading times so no.  The safe/lewd only applies to models/players

Pity. I had a homemade censorship pk3 which removed the pentagrams and toned down other dark imagery, which obviously got ignored by most servers due to "sv_pure 1". Such a thing will become obsoleted by OA3 obviously, but considering that some people have sensetive parents, and considering you are going as your safe/lewd system for models, even if it obviously won't happen, it would have been interesting if it did.

While that is out of the question, do you think servers with "com_blood 0" could have Quake Live style sparks in OA3?

edit: one more question. For the sake of linux distros like debian, do you think that, along with LCC, you could implement a truly free VM as a compilation option? This link is relevant: https://github.com/zturtleman/spearmint/issues/128

Incidental decorative pentagrams in maps won't get children into worshipping satan.  If it did, Doom and Lemmings would have already taken over a generation.

also I believe this has drifted far away from the whole topic of the OA3 board access, i'd like to focus more time on art production and less on fulfilling debian politics.  Priorities. if LCC is a huge problem then we'd compile native anyway since it'd benefit in performance for the low end and with that new particle system...

You didn't answer my second question, which (kind of) has to do with art :P