My Thoughts on Sauerbraten

by dchauvette on 03/17/2008 20:14, 60 messages, last message: 05/01/2008 10:31, 31334 views, last view: 05/05/2024 02:15

Disclaimer: I appreciate that sauer is open source and I do much appreciate the work that people put into it. This is not a bitchy moan, this is just some constructive criticism.

So, graphically, Sauerbraten looks fantastic. Or at least, with shaders on. Problem is, looking fantastic at 5 frames per second makes gameplay a little difficult. Therein lies my first point: go for some major graphical speedup to make things faster, because at the moment, even using the old fixed-function pipeline, the slowness does my head in on some maps (skycastle jumps to mind, yes, I know it's a complex map). Consider using things like dynamic VBOs, more culling on models, things like that.

Okay, second point is on attention to detail everywhere. Sauer has great graphics, but the sounds seem a little hackish, the physics is simplistic and the music is, if you'll pardon my saying so, apalling. It pains me to say it, because I'd love to think Sauerbraten could take on the big boys FPS-wise, but those really, really need to be cleaned up.

Third point: single player. The AI, while fun for a time, can be downright idiotic - jumping off into space springs to mind, little to no pathfinding, and (one that always confused me) a complete inability to use the springboard thing with which the players get to fly around.

Again, this is just constructive criticism, not a whine - I love sauer, it's good fun to play and of course open source. But it still needs work.

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#41: ..

by IllvilJa on 04/01/2008 00:49

CoD4? What's the matter with ppl?

Of course SANE ppl would pick to request sauerbraten to become a clone of the Battlefield series. Now THATS a game to imitate! ;-)

And we are partly there! We already got capture mode :-D!

(CoD4 on the other hand... well...)

(Yes, of COURSE I'm dignifying my Preferences. Anything wrong with that?)

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#42: ..

by IllvilJa on 04/01/2008 00:55

Ah another twist on the theme 'get Sauerbraten to look like paid-for FPS X'...

Sometimes paid-for FPS X got most things right, except for a handful of screwed up things which are out of reach of modders to correct due to hardcoded stupidities in 'FPS X'.

So, letting Sauerbraten be the basis for a opensourced version of 'FPS X' has the very nice option of hacking away the least favourite design flaws of the original 'FPS X' game. Geting those broken things right can at times be worth the price of spending time hacking and sacrificing some features from the original 'FPS X' game (because an open source copy of 'FPS X' ARE most likely to need to skip some features to save developer time...).

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#43: ..

by James007 on 04/01/2008 01:13

I dont really care for Sauerbratens game play, but i think it is a very unique game engine and can make some pretty cool stuff.

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#44: Re: ..

by yetanotherdemosthenescomputer on 04/01/2008 02:57, refers to #41

2142 is a great horrible game.

I love playing it, but EA/DICE have managed it terribly. Quite fun, except that they overpowered the shotgun in the latest patch, and one of the air transports' gunner seats doesn't work at all (bulletless tracer rounds).

Oh, and CoD4 is fine in hardcore mode. :P

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#45: Re: ..

by SheeEttin on 04/01/2008 05:01, refers to #42

cf. the ET:CE mod by ezombie & co.

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#46: ..

by IllvilJa on 04/01/2008 10:12

ezombie and friends are doing fantastic things, but they have decided to not pursue the option of including player driven vehicles.

And you CAN'T substitute the BF series with a game without vehicles for the players. Ok. Not quite true, there are some BF players out there who hates vehicles with a passion, players who probably would enjoy ET:CE. But for some of us BF-addicts, the vehicles on the battlefield are half of the fun.

Ok. Back to more important stuff (way to fun discussing on this forum ;-) )

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#47: Convert

by dfjkhsdjkfhdsconorfhdsjk on 04/01/2008 15:40

I converted a CVS map to the last release when it was still new.


There is a line or two of code in sauer that checks the map version, and wont open it if it is newer, I just took that out then you can /savecurrentmap. That converted it, it came out find, and since I had not used any lava in the map (Which wasn't in release, but was in CVS) so it was ok.

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#48: Bots/AI

by Quin on 04/04/2008 04:41

People may not remember, so I put here a little reminder.. Even though I discontinued SauerMod in favour of taking up the BloodFrontier project, the code is readily available in the vault:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=198419&package_id=246945&release_id=542083

If you're serious about wanting bots, etc. feel free to use the code there.

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#49: Re: It never ceases to amaze...

by Megagun_0 on 04/04/2008 16:38, refers to #39

So, is there anything BAD with that?

Is including new gamemodes to Sauerbraten that are innovative (such as UT2004's Mutant, Assault and the new modified Domination mode, or perhaps Onslaught (but without vehicles perhaps?) not something to pursue, since it'd make Sauerbraten that more fun?

Why are you putting down an idea someone has with the statement that that idea comes from another game, when instead you could put it down (somewhat) by saying that vehicles aren't easilly implemented (physics!)..

Other games are something to learn (and 'steal') from, not something to completely avoid. Other games can be seen as 'betatests' of certain features, which you can then also implement in your own game..

Now, if you want to counter this post by claiming that Sauerbraten is meant as a game engine that other people are meant to work on: Why isn't the game conent licensed under something that encourages modding, then?

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#50: Re: It never ceases to amaze...

by JadeMatrix on 04/04/2008 17:17, refers to #49

Author prerogative. Or author ignorance.

It's the code that would need changing, though, and that's "strictly regulated" even though it's open source... all you can do is suggest stuff, unless you can code in C++. Then, if it fits the style of the rest of the code, it _might_ get implemented.

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#51: Re: It never ceases to amaze...

by demosthenes on 04/04/2008 19:42, refers to #49

One question at a time.

Yes.

No, but that's not what I was referring to.

The idea was to make the game "life-like", which is much harder than I think the poster realized. It looked like how-not-to-start-a-mod, only they were looking to change the development direction of the entire engine.

Not in this case, as the whole structure and type of FPS would have to change (from quakey to life-like), as well as needing new art assets.

The game content is not licensed by the same people as the game engine, and not all of the creators of said content wish it to be modified, or included in other works.

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#52: Re: It never ceases to amaze...

by a`baby`rabbit on 04/04/2008 23:55, refers to #39

Same old cycle of events, there hasn't been a Sauer release for a while and so the 'I want' generation is getting twitchy...

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#53: Re: most of it is bull

by CC_machine[yeahiclearmycookiesalot] on 04/10/2008 13:02, refers to #33

there is no software occlusion. there was in cube. meh, it would be hard to implement for a fully 3D engine anyway.

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#54: Re: most of it is bull

by Hirato Kirata on 04/10/2008 16:36, refers to #53

what're you on, there IS software occlusion. a PVS (Potential Visibility Set) system was implemented in january I believe, so there is software occlusion culling for those with enough patience to calculate the data. though most maps should already have this data.

~Hirato Kirata

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#55: ..

by IllvilJa on 04/10/2008 16:45

I got Sauerbraten running on a bunch of PCs with various kinds of GPUs. One of them seem to have support for occlusion queries (a desktop having a fairly modern GPU) whilst the remaining ones seem to be lacking occlusion support in their GPUs (laptops that either are old, like from 1998, 2002 etc or more modern hardware with low-performance GPUs).

So software occlusion in sauerbraten could turn out to be valuable for those boxes.

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#56: ..

by IllvilJa on 04/10/2008 17:02

Sorry for double posting, but we then have the topic of "network occlusion". If an entity is completely out of sight for a player, then the server really should not have to forward any information regarding that entity to that player, should it?

If the server had some knowledge about what parts of the map being visible from what other parts of the maps (an octree structure could be used for this, with leaves being octrees describing what is occluded/visible from the current cube) it can then decide what network packages it does NOT have to forward to certain players, minimizing the network load (and thus making the game more scalable from a network perspective, yay!).

Sure, on maps shaped like a football field such a change would be worth nothing, as everyone can see everything on the map. But for maps with quite a lot of visible obstacles, tunnels, etc. there might be a gain.

Downsides are that this requires changes to the code (the HORROR, the HORROR!! ;-) and also, there is a requirement to upgrade the server from being a glorified forwarder to something that actually knows SOMETHING about the world geometry. The latter knowledge, being stored in a octree (and read from a separate server version of the map which only contains that coarse occlusion data) need to be small enough to ensure that it does not delay the forwarding of packets between players, but fine grained enough to ensure that not too many unnecessary packets are forwarded. The server also is required to actually understand where entities are in the world, something I'm not certain it is required to do today.

Whether or not this gain in network scalability motivates the overall costs of this feature is hard to tell. For some maps (like a football field), definitely not. For some other maps, maybe. There is really only one way to find out (Experiments are the core of science!)...

The "network occlusion octree" would, as said, be generated once and then stored in the map file (or a separate file which the server optionally might load if network occlusion is wanted), pretty much like lightmaps are calculated just once for a map and then stored with it.

Of course, we got the technical challenge of figuring out exactly HOW to determine that "a part of this cube can see a part of that cube...".

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#57: ..

by smartalco on 04/11/2008 06:36

@OP: your problem is in your graphics card, its ancient, seriously, I'm surprised you can run sauer at all, and sauer, as light as its minimum requirements are, is still a very heavy gpu use game, as opposed to a game like tremulous which does cpu based rendering (or at least so i have been told, being based on the ancient ioq3 engine)
UT'04 may do something similar, relying on the cpu to do part of the render work, which would explain why it can run so much better on your machine with 2 cpu's and crap for graphics (other then what has been mentioned above, high budget graphics teams getting the best detail out of there 100 poly count models)

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#58: ..

by dz0004455 on 04/12/2008 18:03

I love the music. I think that Marc A Pullen is an excellent music composer, and I have all of his music, he made the sauer music, on my sansa! Just an opinion tho!

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#59: ...

by everybody on 04/15/2008 02:59

2 - 5fps? If you expect to be getting 60fps frame-rates with the great graphics on a Geforce 2, it's about time you tried to run any other new game. Graphics-Performance wise, Sauerbraten is fine.

1 -
I agree with the music & sounds.
I can agree with the physics system, but implementing better physics would be an extreme pain, and nobody has time to take on tasks like that anymore.

3 - I agree, the AI could be better without too much trouble. The AI has about the intelligence of a beetle, only 6 times the President's.

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#60: i agree

by IR ravemixer on 04/29/2008 03:47

it could use work but i still like it

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