how to get more people playing OA

[diizy]

hi guys,

i know this game is under development but we need to really find a way to get more users playing online, in this thread we should brainstorm ways of getting others to join this community. i would be glad to help anyway i can, but we must remember spam is not the answer ;]

[fromhell]

A good slashdotting or a newsforging.

Another round on Fileplanet's front page.

News on freeware/independent games sites (not just Free Software)

Sex appeal! heh, it worked for Dead or Alive Xtreme whatever

[diizy]

Sex appeal! heh, it worked for Dead or Alive Xtreme whatever

haha, can we script some physics into some of the female models boobs? bounce bounce?


but really, i will try messing around with a few ways too. and i will keep you updated on the results.

[fromhell]

could just make a softbodies target for them in Blender though we don't have any "sexy" models yet.

maybe a hunter-ish in that ideas page?

oh i forgot, maybe a promotional video trailer would work out too

[kirk]

What about the dangergirl bot. I don't know if it's gpl or not. Can't seem to find it on the net right now. I do have the file though. I've posted it here:

http://upload2.net/page/download/YtEUrqUP3V2jDFj/md3-dangergirl.pk3.gz.html

[fromhell]

Dangergirl isn't compatible

1. not gpl licensed
2. no sources
3. registered trademark
4. copyrighted artwork

[dmn_clown]

i know this game is under development but we need to really find a way to get more users playing online, in this thread we should brainstorm ways of getting others to join this community.

How about we advertise a date with a Victoria's Secret model with every third download?  The ladies can be promised a date with the Chippendale dancer of their choice

[HanClinto]

Coming from a guy who likes to play multiplayer CTF games with his wife and the kids at youth group, I for one was actually pretty happy to finally find a game that didn't have half-naked women all over the place.

Perhaps (probably) I'm in the minority, but I was pretty pleased with the way things are. In my mind, it helps OpenArena stand out in a positive way where not many other games do.

Ah well.

--clint

[white haired boy]

hello,

hanclinto makes an interesting point about the family friendly nature of openarena. i don't personally have a problem with scantily clad female models, but a lot of people do and it's worth considering whether such models should be included in the game.

i know quite a few people who work in youth groups and i've suggested lan parties as a possible activity to them. the fact that it's free, run's on slower machines and doesn't have women with huge breasts makes openarena an obvious choice for such an event.

on the subject of family friendlyness, it would be really nice if there was a clickable option to turn off the blood and guts.

white haired boy.

[fromhell]

It's not clickable but it's there. It's "/com_blood 0".

Seeing as OA is freely modifiable, you can open the players pk3 and delete the offending model yourself though I do understand about that youth thing, though 0.6.0 isn't really family friendly with those insulting and suggestive chat lines .

[white haired boy]

leileilol,

good point, if there were models that might offend then it wouldn't be too hard to remove them. i'm not a christian, but a lot of the youth leaders i mentioned are. i'd probably have to remove the gargoyle character if they were going to use it in a church. shame really, because it's a lovely model.

thanks for the com_blood 0 command. is there a command that turns off the chat? if i was going to make a custom version for church lanparties, where could i put the commands in the openarena folder so that they were default on every computer it was installed on?

thanks for your help.

white haired boy.

[fromhell]

for bots there's "/bot_nochat 1"

oh and it should be noted there are inverted crosses in kaos. Quake had alot of them (which probably messed up my memory), but Q3A's cross textures that were used weren't inverted but centered so i've gotta fix that gaffe since it doesn't match the original texture anyway.

[white haired boy]

lovely. thanks.

white haired boy.

[HanClinto]

Wow, you guys rock.

If you're interested in one church youth leader's opinion (mine), then everything that White Haired Boy said is pretty much right on the money.

It might surprise you, but I doubt anyone at church would have that big of a problem with the gargoyle. I think it's a fantastic character, and I really don't have any problem with it -- it didn't even cause a hiccup in my mind when I was reviewing OA for use at church. Realism, sexual objectification and blatant occultic influences is a little more of the problem with most parents that I've talked to about this issue -- the whole obvious/light-hearted fantasy (which I feel the gargoyle fits into) goes over surprisingly well. Perhaps it helps that I go to a church that doesn't follow Dobson to the letter, but many of the kids at church are into RPGs and play plenty of computer games -- parents there are more interested in making sure it's a healthy diet of entertainment rather than doing something like banning anything that isn't explicitly labeled "Christian" (as was all too common in the 90's).

I'm planning on using OpenArena or Nexiuz as the primary game at a LAN party made up mostly of church kids tomorrow night (would rather use OpenArena, only thing left to do is get a good selection of CTF maps and then it totally beats Nexiuz for tomorrow). Thanks for the info about turning off the taunt texts (or is there just a text file I can modify? I'd love to keep them in there, but change them to funny things for this youth's birthday party), as well as how to turn down the gore.

Is there any feedback in specific that you would be interested in hearing about how 0.60 goes over at a primarily-churched LAN party?

Kids who play games like this are getting younger and younger, and I think it's wise for game developers to keep family-friendliness in mind when developing such games. I appreciate your guys' awareness of this issue.

Thanks!

Respectfully,
clint

[kit89]

You could send an e-mail to Bart telling him about OpenArena seeing how it uses Blender he would have an excuse to put it on his website. www.blendernation.com

You could get the entire Blender community playing.

Theres abit on the website at the top that says submit news.

[Stephan123]

I would like to help, im uploading Open Arena to rapidshare, any other ideas?

[HanClinto]

I would like to help, im uploading Open Arena to rapidshare, any other ideas?

For one, the Wikipedia entry in the list of Free First Person Shooters could seriously use a better update. That's how I've found many games for my LAN parties, and I know other people use that list a lot as well.

good point, if there were models that might offend then it wouldn't be too hard to remove them.

Thinking more about this, would it be possible to have content packs that add this sort of content in rather than it coming in by default? It seems like it would be easier to add this sort of thing in rather than remove it by hand / script.

Looking at it another way, consider the target audiences. Younger and family-oriented culture generally isn't as technically savvy, and if the "family friendly" instructions tell them to open up .pk3 files and start line-item deleting things, you're going to lose them. However, the "older" audience is generally a little more technically literate, and drag-dropping a new .pk3 into their mod folder to get busty babes would be almost too trivial.


I think the worst experience I ever had with this was when I first started hosting LAN parties for my church. At the first one, we just played the Unreal Tournament demo, and everyone liked it so much that I bought 16 copies of it for the next LAN party, and each kid who came paid for it as part of the cover charge and got to take it home.

I found out afterwards that the "getting started" tutorial has a stained glass window art of a very topless female angel. Not quite full frontal, but that's only because her bare leg is in the way.

Needless to say, I issued several letters of apology along with CD-Rs of a patch that my wife and I cobbled together to replace the texture with a more appropriate stained glass "angel".


I'm just glad I'm still allowed to host parties for the kids -- they really seem to enjoy it.


So coming from a background like that, you may be able to understand why I feel catering to a family-friendly market is an underdeveloped aspect of the FPS genre that could be a huge hit with church (and other non-religious youth group) LAN parties.

</rant>. Thanks for listening.

my $0.02,
clint

[kirk]

I'm probably telling you somthing you already know, but the bot file I posted called dangergirl is different than the one that I find on the web now. This one has bots named lauren, unpretty, etc. I'll see if I can find the original download that had a readme file with it.

EDIT: here's the readme file:


2002 Jan 26

================================================================

Model Name              : dangergirl

installation directory  : baseef/efmdl_dangergirl.pk3

EF Converter      : Eric2534

Author                  : FRAG COW

Skins                   : Scott Ruggels, MoP, Malcolm, Demon Princess

Email Address           : fish_dsc@yahoo.com.uk

Website URL      : http://www.websamba.com/davidcoen

Model description       : Danger Girl model, J.Scott Campbell concept.



Other info              : Scott Ruggels, MoP, Malcolm, Demon Princess textures. N8 assistance on UV unwrap.



Additional Credits to   : gundam@btinternet.com for tutorial at http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/resources/quake3/tutorials/MAX-to-quack lord fiveta/md3quack lord fiveta.shtml



Thanks to               : JK

================================================================

* Play Information *



New Sounds              : YES

CTF Skins               : YES

LODS         : YES





* Construction *

Poly Count              : 2799

     lod 1              : 1527

     lod 2              : 886

Vert Count              : 1556

     lod 1              : 865

     lod 2              : 469



Skin Count              : 3 (default malcolm, blue MoP, red FragCow, Kelly Scott, Lauren Scott, unpretty demonprincess)

Base info               : -



Software used             :  LightWave Modeler 5.5, 3D Studio Max 4, Photoshop, Interchange, quack lord fiveta, quake3, goldwave



Known Bugs              : ph33r my bugz

Build/Animation time    : bit over a week spread over 3 months =_=;





* How to use this model *



unzip and place md3-dangergirl.pk3 into your baseq3 folder



* Copyright / Permissions *



QUAKE(R) and QUAKE II(R) and QUAKE III(R) are registered trademarks of

id Software, Inc.

'Danger Girl' property of J.Scott Campbell



not for profit, please keep intact

[fromhell]

Needless to say, I issued several letters of apology along with CD-Rs of a patch that my wife and I cobbled together to replace the texture with a more appropriate stained glass "angel".

Heh I know what you mean. There's also some sort of triple-breast angel in the texture packs as well but it's rarely seen in any UT map.

We don't plan on going that far with OA though the gargoyle model did once have a penis.... but that was a long long time ago when the mesh was first made for a dead project

[baconfish]

kit89: totally OT, but is he not B@rt anymore?? Or is this someone else?

Either way, that's an awesome idea.

[kit89]

Yeah it is B@rt but I couldn't be bothered typing the @ .

[dmn_clown]

oh and it should be noted there are inverted crosses in kaos. Quake had alot of them (which probably messed up my memory), but Q3A's cross textures that were used weren't inverted but centered so i've gotta fix that gaffe since it doesn't match the original texture anyway.

And it should be noted that the inverted cross was actually an early Christian symbol used by those that sought to protest the orthodoxy in Rome and by those that followed the Gnostic teachings.  Unfortunately it has come to be associated with something entirely different, much like the swastika.

[kit89]

I submitted OpenArena as news to BlenderNation.com hopefully it will spark some interest in the game and start creating a lot of new and original models for OA.

[fromhell]

I guess it's time for me to start a Player model creation guide for Blender. I'm not good at explaining stuff I learned by trial and error, though, but enki knows how to create players too

[kit89]

I've started working on a model for this game maybe I could create the tutorial for you?