Most Wanted Feature

by Aardappel on 01/05/2002 03:14, 4192 messages, last message: 04/30/2008 20:02, 2708788 views, last view: 12/09/2021 04:21, closed on 04/30/2008 20:09

Hello all... this thread is for discussing features you would like to see in cube, and in particular those that you find most urgent. If lots of people have the same urgent requests, I may give it priority to be implemented.

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#1641: ..

by tentus on 03/11/2005 13:31

This is something of an odd idea/request, but here goes.

Notice how, in the old 2D games, weather effects like snow and rain were made by pushing transparent GIFs across the screen, in a downwards motion? I saw a console game (forgot it's name) which very effectively used the same trick. This led me to believe that, with some tile-able PNGs and a script for pushing them across the HUD, cube could emulate weather like rain and snow with very little performance loss. It wouldn't be the prettiest effect, but i think it'd be effective.

So, would it be possible to have a command which goes something along the lines of "weather <name> #1 #2". The name would be pretty self explainatory, for example tentus/rain. #1 could be a value saying how fast the image moves vertically (negative change which direction it goes?), #2 indicate how fast and far it goes horizontally.

So there's my weird idea-request. Sorry about the length, it takes more space to explain the idea than it would to include it in renderextras :) I could see this being a great way to help set the mood for levels, at little expense to the player or to the person hosting the images to be downloaded.

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#1642: Auto client map download

by Axel on 03/11/2005 17:41

Hello,

it's a rather old feature, but it can save a lot of trouble. Could the client be enabled to donwload a new map or other resource off of the server automatically?

Best Regards,
Axel
Munich

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#1643: Cube www functionality

by Axel on 03/11/2005 17:49

Hello,

how about a new menu comand for Cube. It'd lauch your browser and automatically load the central webiste(s) for documentation, additional maps and other resources.

Further it'd would be a good idea to focus all Cube resources to one or two main servers, to prevent fragmentation and gain critica mass soon.

If driven further, this idea could brind Cube to realls show it's shine: Once someone has finshed editing an new map, it'd be uploaded to one resource automatically.

Just think about major support webistes as planetquake gave to the games. Attention, enthusiasm and support focussed.

Take care,
Axel
Munich

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#1644: Re: Cube www functionality

by tentus on 03/12/2005 01:05, refers to #1643

that's what quadropolis is trying to do: act as a unifying server for extra cube stuff. same goes for vectorx, in a slightly different manner.

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#1645: The more I play it...

by Axel on 03/13/2005 17:40

...the more I love Cube. It's quite powerful in some regards and quite oldfashioned in departments where it's cool to be that way. ;) <Connect ip> did the trick for me. It's running as smooth as can be :)

Earnest, I converted a few songs into .ogg and tested all multiplayer maps. And it was *major* fun :)

So I thought it might do some benefit to provide all feature wishes I can. So I hope you don't me just putting a small list of my suggestions online.

1. Coop mode. A lot of people like to play together against the monsters. So this is the same mode avainlable in Q1, Q2, Doom1 and Doom2.

(DMSP is going into the same direction, it's fun as well. But it's not the same nice progressing game style.)

Would it be possible?

2. Moving or turning skybox. To give the impression of movement. This would be useless for ordinary maps, but impressive for floating platforms or spacemaps. The skybox would slowly rotate around it's vertical axis and hence give the impression of rotation/movement. It could be defined by the map or via concole command.

3. Daytime (Night, Noon). The map would define the gammavalue. 0,6 for a dark map and 1,2 for a full noon. It would even be posisble to shift the value realistically for some realistic night/dawn/day/noon progress. I don't know if it would be possible to use something different or to still let the lights illuminate the map.

4. Vertical/horizontal moving objects. This way elevators, bridges and doors could be created.

Cube is using complex objects (e.g. the arches), but in a static way. Now what about creating e.g. platforms, that will shift their vertical or horizontal position once the player get's an item or hit's them?

This would immensly benefit gameplay and hopefully not collide with Cube's engine's limits.

5. Crouching. Maybe I'm just to dumb to find it, but besides jumping, most games use crouching to get the player to search for tiny passages.

6. mdl2 support. Cube is right now limited to one player model, so it's sometimes hard to distinguish a bot from a player. mdl2 is stoneage, but there are lot's and lot's of existing models which would enhance gameplay even without visible weapons.

7. Adjustable water alpha. I recognized I can change gamma and fog, but not water alpha. Is it possible?

All right,
this is longer list. But since you helped me so thouroughly and fast with my little client connection prob, I thought you might even like feature suggestions.

Please keep on the good work. I'm convinced Cube and Sauerbraten will play an important role for all GPL and Linux gamers. I will even convert a few mainstreem gamers (as myself) :)

Take care,
Axel
Munich

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#1646: ..

by Rick-Ubuntu on 03/13/2005 17:53

1. If you like bots, wait for my new version and you can play coop with them on sp maps :)
4. I don't think this would be much of a problem in cube.
5. I don't think crouching is really usefull in fast paced games like cube, this would fit more in cs like games IMO.

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#1647: ..

by makkE on 03/13/2005 18:17

Most of your requests do unfortunately collide with the engines limitations:

1. Moving skys, floating platforms, space maps. This is not possible, because you canīt have floating platforms using ordinary cubes.
Thereīs also no way to make space hurt, so there arenīt any space maps possible.
Being pretty open, those kinds of maps would be a bad idea anyways, because cube needs solids to have a good performance. Most maps have to be more indoors thus.
Though moving skys would be possible, I doubt Aardappel would consider them neccesairy.

You might want to take a look at a "space" map I once experimented with, itīs subtitled "This doesnīt really make sense" and runs like crap ;)

http://cube.snieb.com/node/9

3. daytime/night/noon, this should be left to the mapper. Just changing gamma values would be cheap, and look quite ugly. If you have a night setting, you need some lamps to show the contrast and add the night feeling. Just lowering gamma would only make the map "too dark". Thereīs also no such thing as "sunlight" like other engines have.

This map has a nice nightime feel, but as you can see, itīs got more to it than just lowered light intensity..

http://cube.snieb.com/node/6

4. There are bridge map models. Elevators and moving stuff is not supported by the engine, and I doubt it would add much. Jumppads are there, elevators would slow down stuff...

5. Crouching is simply unnecesairy in cube, imho. Also note that the player is already quite tiny (he fits through 4x3 holes) making him crouch through 2 cubes high passages would look very odd.
Crouching is of no use in a fast paced game anyways. Have you ever seen any q3 player crouch, for example?

6. Okay itīs true, but it isnīt that bad imho. Iīd like to see more of the original ogro skins used though.
Youīll find out, after a while you can simply distinguish players by their style...

7. Might be possible, but I doubt itīd be clever, everyone would just make it transparent to see players better...

This represents just my own opinions on the features you have requested, many people have simillar requests, but after all itīs up to Aardappel which of the features he will decide to implement in a future release..

So thanks for your suggestions anyways, hope you like cube instead of that. Itīs just meant to be as simple as possible.;)

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#1648: Re: The more I play it...

by tentus on 03/13/2005 18:32, refers to #1645

2. Rotating skyboxes isn't a bad idea actually. It would also allow for the impression of moving clouds and such (see some olf N64 games for good examples of this.)

3. Why not just change the lighting manually? it's easy enough to bind a key to a specific-brightness light entity.

4. I've suggested this before, but apparently there's an issue with making the bounding box move with the model. I still think it's doable though.

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#1649: Re: ..

by tentus on 03/13/2005 19:04, refers to #1647

about your space map: you covered the whole floor with water and teleports. if you removed the water and all the teleport it would run sooooo much better. not only that, but space maps can have lots of indoor areas. look at Cronos for a fantasic example of this (and i think cronos was the first real space map made for cube, you may want to change the description on quadropolis)

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#1650: ..

by makkE on 03/13/2005 20:34

As said, it was just an experiment.
If I removed the teleports, that
wouldnīt be what I had tried to do.
and it doesnīt really run better without em either.

Also, there was a question mark on quadropolis. But Iīll change.
Do you have a dl-link to that cronos map, or could you send it via email? Iīd like to see it.

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#1651: ..

by makkE on 03/13/2005 20:56

nvm, tentus, I found it.

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#1652: ..

by makkE on 03/13/2005 21:10

Hmm, itīs surely some impressive mapping , but itīs only got a space skybox. What I was trying was something that had a void to fall in.. well, nevermind.

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#1653: Re: ..

by Axel on 03/13/2005 23:29, refers to #1647

4. There are bridge map models. Elevators and moving stuff is not supported by the engine, and I doubt it would add much. Jumppads are there, elevators would slow down stuff...

Hi,

we're talking about that in single player. No single player without this stuff.
:) Yes, some people actually play that :)

And of course I like Cube for it's simplycicity. :)

Keep on that excellent work :)

Best Regards, Axel

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#1654: Player models / names

by Axel on 03/15/2005 15:36

Hi,

having played a bit on the public servers I noticed three things:

1. No beeing able to distinguish between those other players isn't fun. Best would be different player models. (NO, I'm not talking about just replacing the ogro with a different one permanently :)

If that's isn't possible, it would slightly help to see a players name on your screen if standing in front of you.

2. Although a lot of Cubes players are DM centered thinking, Coop (singleplayer maps / more than one human player) IS great fun and would benefit Cube :)

3. Having two pc's locally I have tried to connect both of them to the official masterserver. Works if it's included in the cube.bat.

If I just want to create a local server and connect the second pc to it, the cube bat has to be changed m192.168.0.2/ for it. Otherwise Cube completly freezes.

My suggestions on this:
Some ppl like command line interfaces, and configuration files, especially if coming from an *NIX background.
This can be a bit of an obstacle to ordinary users.

Furthermore I'd suggest to put an timeout into the network code, if Cube can't find the masterserver, it will prevent it from freezing.

Thanks so much for listening to my thoughs...
Axel ;)
Munich

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#1655: ..

by makkE on 03/15/2005 18:12

did u run -l ?
run it with -d -mlocalhost (not looking up masterserver)

You should have no problems, if you let one machine run a dedicated server, and run a client on both machines and just connect to the server machineīs ip.

your opponentīs name is being displayed in the lower left corner of the screen, just above the health..

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#1656: Re: ..

by tentus on 03/15/2005 18:47, refers to #1655

perhaps if it was a bit bigger text? a lot of people fail to notice it. maybe if it was centered up the crosshair...

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#1657: ..

by makkE on 03/15/2005 19:20

It should be configurable, then, because
itīd distract me.
Or just allowing to use diffrent skins for the ogro would be fine. the original package has about 10 diffrent skins..

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#1658: ..

by XhyldazhK on 03/15/2005 22:49

In order to make player/monster models downloadable by demand as map are right now, it's needed to change the model format, because MD2 is a keymapped format, that stores individually each vertex position of each frame of each animation and thus MD2 models are quite large, of the order of several MegaBytes.

The new format should be skeletal animated, and in order to make detailed models with relatively few geometric data, I propose the new format should be based in variable-crease Catmull-Clark smoothed subdivision surfaces, so it will carry almost the same amount of info as a low polygon model (think by example of any average WarCraft III model) but it will look smoothed, being rendered with enough polygons on the screen.

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#1659: ..

by makkE on 03/16/2005 00:57

Low poly md2īs aint "several megabytes" in size.. look at the ogro.. any more polys would be far to much...

Downloading models on demand is a bad idea, who wants that anyways?

more models/skins to choose from , ok. I can understand that, but that high poly modeling technique youīre talking about doesnīt apply to real time 3d applications anyways...

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#1660: ..

by makkE on 03/16/2005 01:11

furthermore, in order to achieve "more detailed models" with reasonable polycount, modern engines use bumpmapping... not some poly raising subdivision... but cube ainīt a modern engine, it rather aims at being enjoyable on older systems aswell..

sorry for the double post...

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