The OpenArena topic

[leilei]

Why does it suck?


I'd like to solve this bug. I know this bug exists, but I can't seem to reproduce it myself.

Be brutally honest. The reason why i'm asking here, and not my board is for less pro/competitive-gaming bias, and more on the casual enthusiast view.

OpenArena's existence is intended to fill the GPL data gap for the GPL Q3 source like FreeDOOM and OpenQuartz do for Doom and Quake sources respectively. It doesn't exist for being just another FPS game out there, though that is an intended side-effect.

No Free Q2 data project exists and I am not interested in making one due to the poor MD2 export pipelines.

Thanks!

[curaga]

One thing is that the Bloom option defaults to on, causing less-than-1-fps with the free radeon drivers. Gives a badly coded impression if one doesn't know to turn that off.
Yeah, a driver bug really, but manifests with OA.

[kraftman]

One thing is that the Bloom option defaults to on, causing less-than-1-fps with the free radeon drivers. Gives a badly coded impression if one doesn't know to turn that off.
Yeah, a driver bug really, but manifests with OA.

That's true, but the most annoying thing (which OA devs claim it's not their fault) is shooting latency. I tried ioQuake3 engine and everything is fine, so problem is in OA...

[curaga]

The download size is a bit big. Just by optimizing all PNG and JPEG images, losslessly, about 30mb came off. Advzip on the zip after that takes about 4mb more. Converting all sounds to vorbis would drop nearly 50mb.

edit: IIRC that image-optimization phase also included converting all possible tiffs to png.

[xav1r]

In my opinion, it doesnt suck that much. From a casual view, for me, coming from playing quake3 casually too, the execution of the game playing exp is not so good. Sounds like the weapon/item pickup sound weak, like a noise a toy would make. Some weapons just look not good, like the lighting and the rail guns. The lightning gun doesnt look like one, doesnt seem that much like a gun to me, and the railgun i didnt know it was a railgun from the firing sound it makes. I thought railguns were supposed to make this quick load high pitched noise when firing the rail. The shotgun doesnt have much of a reloading animation, i know the original q3 shotgun didnt either, but it looked more shinier. :P I remember playing with the old OA machinegun, and the current one looks much much better. Better than the original q3a machinegun probably.

Im not much of a coder so i can't comment on technical aspects of it. It'd be cool to have some sort of newbie friendly group of .bat files which the player can run and enable for them all the eyecandy effects.
Are you using the latest revision of ioquake3?

[L33F3R]

its better then anything i could have done. My brain restricts me to basic hello world type programs. Or is that the narcotics?

OA is an old title. It was made to bring a free quake3 type game using the q3 source code.

[xav1r]

its better then anything i could have done. My brain restricts me to basic hello world type programs. Or is that the narcotics?

OA is an old title. It was made to bring a free quake3 type game using the q3 source code.

Well, you know, OA is mostly about artwork/graphics/sounds/etc. Most if not all of the code is still q3a or ioq3.

[leilei]

One thing is that the Bloom option defaults to on, causing less-than-1-fps with the free radeon drivers. Gives a badly coded impression if one doesn't know to turn that off.
Yeah, a driver bug really, but manifests with OA.

I thought it was default off? I know bloom also kills performance of any PowerVR based hardware too.

That's true, but the most annoying thing (which OA devs claim it's not their fault) is shooting latency. I tried ioQuake3 engine and everything is fine, so problem is in OA...

Have you checked 'unlagged hitscan' in the options?

The download size is a bit big. Just by optimizing all PNG and JPEG images, losslessly, about 30mb came off. Advzip on the zip after that takes about 4mb more. Converting all sounds to vorbis would drop nearly 50mb.

edit: IIRC that image-optimization phase also included converting all possible tiffs to png.

Do you have a script for that? And are your alpha channels perfectly intact?I originally hesitated to use PNG due to decoding time and incompatibility with vanilla Q3 sources. I remember arguments over the lack of benefit of compressing/loading a PNG in a zip vs a TGA too. :S and Imagemagick broke the alphas and the pixels that use alphas when I tried that also.

I do run zipdistiller to take the zip's size down. I have to use infozip to initially pack it since 7zip gave me a mysterious player model selection bug (no icons showing up)

The sounds aren't Vorbis since there's a bug in the playback code for OGG sounds at the time, which would cut off the sound just 78% through or so. Not good for announcers. ("You have lost the lee")

In my opinion, it doesnt suck that much. From a casual view, for me, coming from playing quake3 casually too, the execution of the game playing exp is not so good.

I am missing a complete intro video and RoQs to bridge any suddenness like Quake3 though.. maybe that puts the game a bit at fault. I also need to drop this red/black default scheme for the menus. It's very qliche.

Sounds like the weapon/item pickup sound weak, like a noise a toy would make.

I'm trying to de-hollow the feel of the noises myself too. There's new noises in trial, but so far negative reception is something I constantly get when I change something that they're used to. (Especially the gauntlet sound, which i've ultimately started using despite the anti-demand)

In my opinion, it doesnt suck that much. From a casual view, for me, coming from playing quake3 casually too, the execution of the game playing exp is not so good. Sounds like the weapon/item pickup sound weak, like a noise a toy would make. Some weapons just look not good, like the lighting and the rail guns. The lightning gun doesnt look like one, doesnt seem that much like a gun to me,

The lightning gun was an early 2005 design that was never changed. It was going to be even lamer, like a tesla ball on a rod, but this unreal1-ish design was used instead. Could use a better skin though.

and the railgun i didnt know it was a railgun from the firing sound it makes. I thought railguns were supposed to make this quick load high pitched noise when firing the rail.

A big huge short barrel with tubes almost equals 'railgun' to me. Did you play Quake2? :O

The shotgun doesnt have much of a reloading animation, i know the original q3 shotgun didnt either, but it looked more shinier. :P

The way Q3 handles animation by default is on the player model frames, I only get 8 frames of animation to play with for the weapon. That includes the draw/holster animations.

I remember playing with the old OA machinegun, and the current one looks much much better. Better than the original q3a machinegun probably.

Good, because I desperately am trying for less derivative designs.

Im not much of a coder so i can't comment on technical aspects of it. It'd be cool to have some sort of newbie friendly group of .bat files which the player can run and enable for them all the eyecandy effects.

Talk of .bat files on a linux forum!? :O
a .cfg file for 'absolute maximum' would suffice probably. There's 16x anisotropy filter and extreme inverse of lodbias the menu can't cover.

Are you using the latest revision of ioquake3?

The latest revision would dump OpenAL, which is a feature I like and do not want to lose (for positional 48khz audio).

[L33F3R]

Well, you know, OA is mostly about artwork/graphics/sounds/etc. Most if not all of the code is still q3a or ioq3.

i was going to say that, but i feared insulting the programming base. If i myself was a programmer I wouldn't hesitate but sense im not, I dont have the experience to back up such claims.

[curaga]

Do you have a script for that? And are your alpha channels perfectly intact?

for i in `find -name "*.png"`;do
pngcrush -brute -rem gAMA -rem cHRM -rem sRGB -rem iCCP $i ${i}.tmp
mv ${i}.tmp $i
advdef -z4 $i
done

for i in `find -name "*.jpeg"`;do
jpegtran -optimize $i > ${i}.tmp
mv ${i}.tmp $i
done

It's been a long while since I did that, but IIRC alpha survived ok in tiff -> png. It could only be done for those tiffs interpreted by the engine, since those needed by models don't have the fallback logic.