Hello,

This post is mostly aimed at DnC.

So lets get things happening. I know we need to set up that public SVN, and I suppose someone in MG is doing something about it slowly. If nothing else, we can set up a google code project.

Meanwhile, I would like you DnC guys to get over to #mercenariesguild on irc.freenode.org. That is where 90% of the development happens, and where we hold our discussions. Also, if you hang around there, we can invite you to come play on MG Development when we have our regular games.

So lets get things in motion, guys.

Mmmm... most part of DnC members are allready on#mg channel.

I don't talk for the moment because I have currently university testing.

I will nextly make a report of stuff we made on DnC svn and my opinion about their interest.

It's really difficult to play on MGdev server, because we are in EU with about ping 150 on US servers. With a so high ping, unlagged is not enough to have a real game feeling. More other, many players in french and italien community are interesting to give their opinion, so we try to collect player's feedbacks. They will not come on a US server. I think we will try to set up a server with MGdev mod on a EU server.
Posted on: January 28, 2008, 05:29:21 AM

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I made report for what we worked, and what we planed to do.

In first link, developpers have all elements to export features we made from our tremulous version, and my personnal opinion about their features. I thought about MG when I wrote it, so it probably give a good opinion about the interest of integrate their features on MGdev.

http://dnc.tremforges.net/trac/wiki/Features

In second link, I made a short report of features we plane to implement (maybe in a looong time )
Don't hesitate to give your opinion ! (wiki has a free edit, you can drop your opinion after description)
If you plane to use one of their ideas if we make it, we will be happy to push it in top todo list

http://dnc.tremforges.net/trac/wiki/FeaturesProject

since this is gonna be long, i will preface it with a summary:
NO

• Donate rewrite
  -all the dev's i've asked are strongly against adding any form of credit sharing to tremulous
• Slap
  -this is another patch that i doubt will ever make it into stock trem
• Zone Buildpoints
  -norf has decided against it
• Autodonate
  -autodonate=share=no
• flood protection
  -flood protection is outside of the scope of what norf wants to do (test balance changes and ONLY balance changes), unless there is a sudden strong need for it, it'll probably have to wait until
• vote %age
  -outside of the scope mgdev
• lucifer cannon
  -don't complain about the balance of a weapon that has long since been changed; regarding dretches: why shouldn't luci own them just as much as tyrant owns naked humans?
• granger speed
  -clicky
• basilisk
  -basi grab needs to be longer than saw range (64) by enough to keep them safe. basi grab isn't and can't be backward reconcilled because it modifies the movement of the victim too much to work as one would expect (depending on which side is favored you end up with humans appearing to walk out of grab or hpb basis making humans warp into their grasp). we tried 1x/2x regen adv basi very early on in the testing, it sucked, aliens spent the whole game camping.
• Marauder zap
  -zap is actually rather strong against bases right now, zap should never be better than claws against humans because it feels horrible (yes we did try this, it was impossible to get out of zap range and if you didn't have a bsuit on you were put on a very short clock to kill the marauder or die)
• build on corpses
  -fixed upstream (this bug was due to tjw commiting my proof of concept code)
• retribution
  -there are too many idiots who will jump in front of you the moment you try to luci a tyrant
• !ban
  -ouside of the scope of mgdev
• pk3 files
  -outside the scope of mgdev, breaks ioq3, breaks the behavior people have come to expect
• "Bugs"
  -outside the skope of mgdev

everything else i have a strong feeling won't happen, but i don't feel comfortable putting words in norf's mouth (although if i did it anyway norf, my apologies and please correct me)

The 1.2 release is supposed to be more of a "Tremulous as it was intended initially" release. There are some things that overall might happen, such as the authentication stuff. Sadly, most of your changes seem to have a differing aim.

Indeed we seem to have different aims. MGDev seems to be more about balance changes, whilst DnC is trying to improve the core of the game, adding new features and rewriting some old ones.

kevlarman: !slap is planned to be removed soon

Well, you said to not hesitate to give opinions, you may regret that!
I'm little more than someone who plays MGDev, but I am vocal, so here goes.

* No Private Message Traces - Don't give people the expectation that something said on a game server can't be monitored.  Additionally, people cheat using private messages.  Please don't try to cure stupid, it won't work.  Better to say it to players the first private message they send that it will be logged, maybe then they'll think about it.

* Players Ranking of Master Server - I have yet to see ranking ideas that make a bit of sense.  Kills don't really matter (Khalsa once said he tries to end the game with the fewest kills possible.)  You can't measure builders.  Building lots does not mean building well, not to mention that you can't determine the quality of building placement effectively.  More than once I've fed s3 humans on atcs with s1 dretches causing damage and distracting them enough for the builder to build and slowly getting kills up to s2 trappers and ultimately s3.  Sometimes feeding is really, really good and appropriate.

* Donate/Autodonate - All forms of donate should die.  Begging.  Killwhoring.  Whole teams camping while one or two good players go out to do nothing but killwhore.  Whole groups of people who improve very slowly cause they just wait to leech credits/evo's so they can have the cool stuff, never learning how to get it on their own.  Not to mention how much it throws balance all to hell.

* Climbfall - Dretching will suck with this.  Dretches constantly take damage, whats the point of wall walking if you constantly fall off?

Why does everyone want to "fix" camping and egg spamming?  This isn't a deathmatch FPS and there actually can be a fair amount of strategy involved.  Thats one of the many reasons donate and its ilk suck, it kills the strategy.  Please don't kill the expectation of using strategy and turn tremulous into a pure twitch fps, there are plenty of those and only one tremulous

It seems like a lot of what you want to fix concerning camping, etc. can be mitigated by just turning off share.

Done for now, remember, you said not to hesitate

Well you'll have to talk to the others about gameplay changes. I only do stuff that doesn't affect gameplay, here is my TODO list, most of it is on the Future Features page:
- Finish RSA identification support
- Rewrite the server admin system + client command handling
- Make server-side demos

Have a chat with peoro,garethfn, and napkin in #wraths about this.


Khalsa

What's the problem with the admin system? By default, it is clean, efficient, and easy to understand. It is kept separate from /commands because they are different things with a different purposes and restrictions.

RSA identification is now only for convenience, since server-unique GUIDs are completely secure.

There are a lot of your changes, however, that would be appreciated on the official bugzilla and some on your features list that have been already fixed. The -ffast-math thing is especially significant, in fact I will submit that myself as soon as I have confirmed it.

edit: it seems some of your listed features are bugfixes for bugs which aren't in SVN (e.g. the left the humans thing). What codebase did you start from?

double edit: http://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3533

Yes, we know. But anyway, comments are welcome.

Sure, most part of projects has no interest for MGdev mod, but MG team, like DnC team, has a very good vision of the tremulous code, their weakness, and we are very interested to know how do you think about our stuff too !


How can you compare human weapons with alien evolution ? There are too differents ! Yes tyran can kill easly all humans, but tyran need a goon+ to destroy a base against good players, event if everyone has a rifle.

If everyone is dretch, luci need no one else to destroy an alien base. Tyran is more expensive than luci (luci: less than half max points, tyran: more than half max points). Luci has a long range, tyran a short range.

Yes, my comparaisons are stupid, because it's stupid to compare their two classes.
So, I compare luci with human weapons: all human weapons has streigth and weakness. All... but luci in 1.2
Why do you want to use a chaingun when you see the power of the lucifer canon ?

With current lucifer canon, good player can easly rush alien base alone, and kill all aliens, dretch or tyran...
He need no support, no teamplay. It's a bad thing : it *must* have weakness !

When a tyran fight against rifle, rifle has time to hit tyran before to die.
Currently, you can kill all dretchs with a lucifer canon without any damages, even with a tiny charge. The only cost is some power for your luci.
With a variadic radius, you can kill dretchs, but you must have a good aim, or wait to a full charge but maybe dretch will have time to hit you.


For a "pro" balanced game on a standard slot server (max 16), I'm against share/donate too. But you know, tremulous is a pretty hard to learn. More over, strong player are very powerfull in games : they take all kills, and kill beginner very easly. So, beginner don't want to loose the few credit/evo they have, and they prefer to camp to stay alive.

With donate and autodonate, beginners has more credits/evos, and they know even if they die, good players will give nextly some money, and they take risk to attack. We tested it on high slot server, and it's work.

I know, tremulous is not made for high slots server. But many players like it, so I think we must accept opinion of their players and give them tools they like.


So it has a bad name. It's a bug to call "private message" something logged.
Cause of private messages, I saw sometime inner discussion, they though nobody saw them... Admins are not big brother, and it's idiot to talk about privacy if there is no privacy.


I agree with you, it will be probably very hard to make a real ranking. It's only a project, we don't talk about many details and it's maybe impossible to have a very balancing ranking. But it's not a reason to don't think about it


It's very uncommon to fall with a dretch, and also with a basilisk and basilisk+. The only one alien which easly climbfall is granger. The idea is maybe a bad idea for dretchs and basilisk (we currently test it), but I think it's a good idea for granger.


About camping, a game must not became boring to be strategic.

About eggspam, on big maps, humans can't win if alien team is eggspamming. I and my clan, in clan war and with VOIP, fight against an eggspamming on nexus. Even using outpost, we did not win, and we had a *big* advantage on aliens ! It's not only a strategy, it's a gameplay unbalance.


I hoped you could find just only little positive things, but... you don't like me

Thanks a lot for your opinion


Several things:

First, we think ! and / commands are not different things. It's commands, commands affect the game. I'm ok to say moderation is not administration. But in original quake3, there was only way to comunicate with game: commands.
So moderation can be a layer over administration, it's clean and more stylish than current '!' commands !

One of our ideas is to make '!' commands will become wrapper to / commands. So, all commands are / commands, but you can define in admin.dat '!' commands with same names and give their all restrictions you want.
Another idea is to drop all '!' commands and make '/' commands instead, and give a way to user to define its own '/' commands in a config file.

Second, we think admin.dat has not a good format :
In a side, it's a config file to give rights to administrators and define custom admin commands
In other side, it's a data file to store admins data and ban data.

One idea is to keep the same admin.dat for admin rightsand commands (or use lua instead, but it's an other discussion ) , and to make a real data file for real data, with, for exemple, a sqlite database. So, two servers could use same database to manage admins and bans : some servers has managed by same admin team and want to share admin datas, it's currently impossible.

Third, we think admin flags are crappy : there is not enough flags to add many admin rights, and flags are very hard to read (to understand an admin-right flags line, need to have a documentation and time to loose to translate flags), so we need to think about a better idea to manage admin rights.


As I said upper, with server-unique GUIDs it's impossible to reconize a player trough servers, so it's impossible to share admin data.
With RSA, it will be possible


Yes, you have right.
We need to take time to submit them.

We currently work on svn992. It's possible than some bugs don't come from tremulous svn but from patch we added and stuff we made. That's why we must sort them, that why it will take a long time to make pretty bug reports on tremulous bug tracker

I was thinking of having a "privilege" based system, in which you need privileges to execute a specific command, so mute would remove the privilege to use /say /say_team and /m (and possibly any others). A ban would remove the privilege to enter the server. For time-limited bans, an "event" is created, and is set to do something some time in the future, or when a certain event occurs (end of map, death of player). In the case of a ban, the event will simply give back the privilege to enter the server. Also, if Azrael07 can code it, admin commands won't be handled in the qvm, but by external lua (or some other scripting language) scripts, which use internal server functions to handle the command.

Admin commands using ! is good because it is easy to distinguish between 'privileged' commands, i.e. ones that you need to be given permission for, and player commands, which anyone can use. The only messy part is things like !time and !specme and goodness knows what else that aren't really admin commands at all. Admin flags are very efficient, very effective, and not in shortage. They are difficult to read but you only need to create an admin.dat once, really.
Separating admin.dat into several files is an idea that has arisen before. I suppose when it was created  it wasn't expected that the file would ever get that large. It is ordered by type, though, and of theoretically unlimited size, so it's hardly essential.

Azrael07: have you played since the charge time was lengthened? It's quite simple for a dretch to get at least one hit in, and frequently trying to deal with dretch swarms can cost you half your ammo if not your life. Either way, you're not going to touch that base anymore.
The projectiles are a lot faster but still fairly slow, any alien can dodge them at range, and many like the dragoon can then close that range very quickly while the player spends the 3 seconds necessary to charge a second shot. As it has always been, a skilled dragoon or tyrant need only make one good dodge and the lcannon is dead.

There are ways to address the issue of new players making money, but the truth is even on large servers, especially on large servers, there's nearly always some feeder dretches around. Share kills that, and a whole lot else too. If you want to make it easier for new players to make money, consider giving them new income sources or upping ALIEN_VALUE_MODIFIER as we have done.

Private messaging is again a convenience, not a secure protocol, and I think everyone should understand that what you send to the server will be read by the server, and if you want a private chat you can use external IM. Be aware that if you do remove the logging it is trivial for individual servers to re-add it and impossible for clients to tell.
If you want to come up with a better name, please do so.

About positivity... if it seems like we're all attacking you, that's only because we only tell you about the things we want changed. I don't think we need to tell you that your work is valuable and interesting, and we don't need to tell you what you're doing right. Don't be discouraged, and don't think we hate you, because we don't (well, I don't ) - but also don't think we won't be the first to tell you if we object to something you suggest
Criticism is helpful and valuable. Compliments, although nice, are not. Feel free to return the favour

On the lucy thing, should point out that a tyrant has regen and unlimited ammo, and lucy suit doesn't, so IMO should be able to kill dretches with ease.  If the aliens have nothing bigger than a dretch, then they lose.

IMO splitting the admin.dat is a good idea, and will probably be necessary for making a better config system.
I might look into doing that myself.  Aside from anything else it lets us share command and level blocks, and maybe even makes sharing bans easier.

PM's are never private.  Its the internet after all.  If an admin is watching the console then they're cheating and there a lot more useful info there.  You going to remove all build messages too?
I doubt such a patch will ever get into SVN anyway.

Yes, but admin flags are limited by number of available characters. We have not enough character available for current DnC. So we can't add admin features without make better flag managing.


I think I havn't, if it's MGdev modifications. We plane to setup a MGdev server in europe, it's impossible to play to MGdev on US server :/


If you do it, you give also advantage to good players. Autodonate is only a simple friendly solution to give money to friends. It unbalance the game a few, but it not affect the gameplay.

For private messages, many people I talk about think private messages must be logged, many other think they must not. I think it's only a point of view.


Oh, my message upper was a joke. I'm only a stupid french and I have big difficulties to use english, so maybe my messages seem strange :-)

I know nobody attack me, and if I ask your opinion, it's not to cry for bad critics

But I don't agree with you for a little things:

Positive criticism are good too. If you don't say anythings, maybe you like it, maybe you don't care with it. If you say you like, there is no doubt

But anyway you have right, negative criticism are the best way to come forward

that's a lot of commands.
Well, SVN isn't about to run out, anyway.

I come from Britain and unlagged compensates just fine for me, but I suppose others may not be so lucky. This is a good idea.

Share affects everyone, and affects gameplay. If you can share your whole noob team up to tyrants then how is the other noob team supposed to get any kills? Share causes the problems it tries to solve.

But the point is you can't ever guarantee that PMs are not being read (try setting the developer cvar to 1, for example)

Yeah, I picked up the non-seriousness eventually, but I thought it best to be sure
And your english is one hell of a lot better than my french