Any chance of re-vitalizing Tremulous?

Tremulous
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I mean, what selling points does it have?

  • Graphics is horribly outdated. Totally eclipsed by PRO(!)prietary Natural Selection 2 and even Unvanquished.
  • Wall-walking? I don’t play PRO(!)prietary games, but I don’t think it’s that uncommon now, and it doesn’t help that only the two weakest classes are capable of wallwalking.
  • Aliens don’t live up to their promise of being highly mobile and base-independent: regeneration rate is painfully slow, and so are build times.
  • Building system is boring and low default BP settings don’t help either.
  • No proper hitbox, you can miss a dragoon / human’s head completely yet it still counts as a hit.
  • IMO RCZ building (most of the map filled with stuff with only a thin frontline) was the best, but big bases = horrible lags.
  • Boring, static maps / deaths / etc. because there’s no physics.

PRO(!)per collision detection:

PRO(!)per physics:

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While it may not obtain the graphical standards of Natural Selection 2 nor of Unvanquished, Tremulous’ Graphics can be improved to some degree with the latest updates to ioquake3. “Higher end” graphics requirement does have a downside, however, of putting strain on or even excluding “lower end” machines. For the most part, we are not expecting players to play Tremulous for its graphics, the classic games such as Ms. Pacman, Pong, Tetris, Super Mario Brothers, checkers, and chess are certainly not played for their graphics.

All three of those things can be improved upon in Tremulous.

How have successful relevant games (PROprietary and otherwise) addressed the building of large bases.

There are still very few games that have an overall fundamental similarity to Tremulous. So Tremulous still has an opportunity for a unique place in gaming.

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Probably with better netcode containing cutting-edge PRO(!)prietary algorithms?

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The example images you have given of versions of chess and Tetris are basically eye candy meant to give people a reason to play their version rather another version with the same gameplay, and still those graphics are not the reasons for the continued success of chess and Tetris.

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1 thing that MUST be done is fixing the 1vs1 gameplay. Right now you can’t build and defend at the same time, so 1vs1 gameplay is stupid, and that is how all games start. Unless there’s many active servers and 1vs1 games grow quickly enough, this just drives players away from the game.

Unvanquished developers explicitly refused to fix 1vs1: http://forums.unvanquished.net/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=1770&p=15620&hilit=1vs1#p15620

I think that they hope that advertising creates a large enough player base, but I don’t think that Tremulous has much advertising potential, outdated graphics and all.

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I fully agree with this and advocate that this is mission critical. Every game (that might potentially happen, on otherwise usually empty servers) starts with just a couple of people, so the initial players must stick around (until more players join) and be able to have fun.

IF more people show up, cool, otherwise alter the game’s behavior to make it playable and fun in-lieu of a ‘real’ round (with larger teams). Solving this will help prevent the situation where people generally only join servers with a lot of players, which ends up being just one of the ‘popular’ ones (even if it kinda sucks).

Maybe the game could auto-assign ‘designated builder’ status to both players, and then alter play to cater to them (perhaps allow devolve to Granger, and for humans do ‘dual-carry’ with Ckit as a ‘side arm’, etc…). If more people join, the game-play would revert back its ‘regular’ behavior.

Additionally, providing new mechanisms for placing units and requiring new strategies for gaining map control, like DEPLOYABLES might possibly help here too…

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Also there’s the issue of the stupid dretch floor head bite CHEAT that has somehow been enshrined into a “skill element”. New players have little chance of learning about this CHEAT unless they read the wiki, etc., and thus they can’t get any evos when they play aliens and give up. I suggest removing floor head bite and leg damage, so that dretch can kill a human with 3 normal bites or 1 head bite (which will be harder to pull off now).

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Another mission-critical thing to fix is the armory: it should show every upgrade you can buy and automatically sell the conflicting upgrades (eg. sell backpacks when buying a battlesuit, sell the current weapon when buying another weapon).

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This thread from the old forums is relevant: UI mockups.

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Actually, the way menus are displayed on Tremulous is actually quite bad. When you press Q your whole client freezes (i.e. player cant move in the game environment) and this is how most newbies get killed until they learn to use binds and autoexec.cfg scripts.

IMO, pressing Q should show the menu but should not block movement. Each item on the menu should be labelled with a key (other than WASD) such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 … and so on. Pressing said key should sell your current weapon/armor and buy the new one automatically as you suggested or in the case of Aliens, evolve you into the class you want. Eliminate the need for using mouse to navigate those menus altogether (and on the same note eliminate the need for making bind scripts).

Something like that but with keys labelled on each choice. Press Q->1 to sell ckit and buy rifle, or Q->2 to sell rifle and buy shotty, and so on, etc.

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Many keys (eg. the numbers >= 6) are hard or impossible to reach without taking your hands off the main controls, and this limits the upgrades you’re able to purchase without stopping. The armory currently has 16 items, that’s 0-9 and F1-F6. It’ll still be kinda hard to dodge aliens with your screen filled with the menu all while looking up the item codes at the same time… This system also precludes showing the descriptions of the items on mouse over.

For example, a pulse rifle loadout would require:

Q, 7 (pulse rifle), F1 (armor), F2 (helmet), F4 (grenade), F5 (battery pack), Q

Assuming the menu stays open until you press Q again.

IMO it’s OK for the armory and evolve menus to block the movement, as long as there’s no need for scrolling and the buttons are big enough to click quickly, never ever move and never ever change the order. You should also provide a GUI load-out editor that will allow people to create buy binds.

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Your post seems to imply that we need to re-vitalize Tremulous because of the following points, of which I’ll address them one-at-a-time as to not take your points out of context:

Graphics is horribly outdated. Totally eclipsed by PRO(!)prietary Natural Selection 2 and even Unvanquished.

I agree, but having a updated renderer and less bugs is more important right now. Let Unvanquished worry about shiny graphics. Actually, they’re doing both updating and bug-fixing pretty well atm.

Wall-walking? I don’t play PRO(!)prietary games, but I don’t think it’s that uncommon now, and it doesn’t help that only the two weakest classes are capable of wallwalking.

Its still uncommon and popular games that did it, decided to make it slow unlike the Quake-style speed of Tremulous. Wall-walking in Tremulous is treated as another floor to dodge enemy fire from and demands a higher skill-ceiling than any of the recent games I’ve seen. People will try it for the novelty and stay to master it.

Aliens don’t live up to their promise of being highly mobile and base-independent: regeneration rate is painfully slow, and so are build times.

I completely disagree. Good dretches move like actual spiders and jump to different floors/ceilings. Basilisks stick to walls. Marauders double-jump onto human heads and back out again. Dragoons pounce. Tyrants charge in and out to danger. Every alien regenerates enough to not rely on going back to base. Play with good players and you’ll see the difference.

Building system is boring and low default BP settings don’t help either.

I disagree, though BP is arguable for certain maps. People liked building stuff in Tremulous, to the point where its all they did during a match.

No proper hitbox, you can miss a dragoon / human’s head completely yet it still counts as a hit.

I agree. Hitboxes are fucked and have been for a long time.

IMO RCZ building (most of the map filled with stuff with only a thin frontline) was the best, but big bases = horrible lags.

I haven’t had lag in Tremulous for a very long time, so I can’t comment on this.

Boring, static maps / deaths / etc. because there’s no physics.

Explain further. There are “physics” in Tremulous, although a basic one. Even then, I don’t see the issue you’re trying to make.

I mean, what selling points does it have?

Its fun to play, demands skill, breathes competition from both humans and aliens and hard to master. You can build, fight and cooperate with your team and both sides play completely differently. Also its free and open-source. Right now the game is in shambles and needs a decent team to breathe life back into it’s comatose body.

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Because good players don’t lose a lot of HP, and if you lose a lot of HP, you have to go back to booster or wait through a long regeneration time. I don’t think it can be called “base-independent”.

I highly doubt that many people would play (computer) chess and Tetris if the only available versions of them still looked like this (in 2015):

Of course, Tremulous doesn’t look that bad, but it still pales in comparison with the modern PRO(!)prietary games or even Xonotic / Unvanquished. Unless Unvanquishes makes some horrible mistakes and scares all the players away, Tremulous is done for.

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the main PROBLEM with Tremulous is that it doesn’t support a 4th (non-time) game dimension. the workings of a “real-valued” 4th dimension (concept, movement, vision, shadows) is explained.

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I’m ignoring comparison between the graphics in games - we have not done anything yet to take advantage of the newer gl2 renderer features and newer model format. If utilized, this would give trem gfx that are on par with unv- but this might not work on older computers so it’d be best to have new assets look like better versions of the old ones (where using the old assets and renderer if needed won’t be a problem).

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[quote=“lamefun, post:13, topic:118”]
Because good players don’t lose a lot of HP, and if you lose a lot of HP, you have to go back to booster or wait through a long regeneration time.[/quote]

So what are you trying to imply? I apologize if I’m sticking words in your mouth, but in general I don’t think building a game around player’s inabaility to take advantage of the unique alien movement system is a good idea. I think a better solution is to instead focus on helping players reach that sort of level with tutorials, practice maps, community events and perhaps in the future establish an in-game mentoring system (Dota 2 style).

You claim aliens don’t live up to their promise of being highly mobile, I offered my counterargument against that claim. Noobs are a factor, but they are not a reason why aliens aren’t mobile. Just get good. That should be the mentality of the community so people can improve their games and encourage the competitive spirit of Tremulous that existed in 2007-09.

Half-life 2 Physics Demo

Other than hilarious ragdoll effects at a attempt to stay modern, I don’t see any need for Tremulous to have this. Usually these are done client-side so that the server doesn’t overflow with scriptcalls. Improving the physics on actual gameplay objects like grenades would be a much better investment of time.

Of course, Tremulous doesn’t look that bad, but it still pales in comparison with the modern PRO(!)prietary games or even Xonotic / Unvanquished.

I’m seeing lamefun’s point on this. Graphics will always (to an extent) bring interest to other players. Tremulous is downright ugly at times, not just at graphics but also artstyle and general convincingness of the entire user interface. The system settings menu looks like something you can irreversibly break the game by tweaking a few too many options that most people can’t understand. It looks intimidating and complex when in reality its not, which would hurt it in the longrun.

That being said:

Unless Unvanquishes makes some horrible mistakes and scares all the players away, Tremulous is done for.

I don’t agree with this sentiment. If this was the case, games like World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Minecraft, H1Z1, Rust, Starcraft, Counterstrike 1.6, Battlefield Project Reality, hell even fucking Mount & Blade: Warband came out in 2010 and back then it looked like it came out of the asshole of 2008. Except according to:

It just had a peak player count of 10,576 people. 10,576 for a 5 year old budget game thats still around $20! Graphics are no longer the single factor driving people, but rather it’s a game’s reputation to attract and keep new players. Whether Unv or Tremulous will do better at that remains to be seen, but trying to pick a graphics fight over Unv at this point is fruitless when they’re already leaps and bounds ahead and Tremulous has it’s own mountain of gameplay issues to attend to.

Thats why focusing on building a strong community first using GrangerHub is whats going to be the edge Tremulous needs to stay ahead. (Which by the why, the main website is still unfinished. wink wink)

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Here’s a shot of the newer ‘GL2’ renderer - on ioquake3 (which is now in new trem).

You can see some bump mapping on the stone floor and parallax mapping on the bolts inside the archway.
The renderer gives visually similar or better results than the Xreal renderer (what Unv has/had) with assets designed for it.

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Lamefun brought this up from another thread, which I feel deserves to be discussed by a dissenting opinion.

Premise:

Therefore:

I absolutely disagree with this conclusion and hereby make it known that this is by far the WORST idea conceived on GrangerHub. Yes, even worse than adding in the solider from Freedoom as an alien class.

Tremulous is in a massive slump right now, where player numbers are at an all-time low. That being said, that doesn’t suddenly mean we should design the game around 1v1 matchups when both races are Asymmetrical and competent team members are relied upon to win games in the vast majority of successful matches.

Tremulous is a team game, first and foremost.

This should be the ethos of whatever design decisions come after, so once we start tweaking numbers for 1v1, I see only headcaches popping up once multiple players are introduced. Maybe nerfing Tyrants 1v1 makes sense, but what about 5 Chainsuits and 5 Tyrants? The repercussions will be so great that I don’t see how this can possibly defended.

Sparky mentioned that Warmups would be the solution, which I agree with. Lamefun also mentioned that new players have difficulty with experimenting, so why not enable 500BP, infinite credits/Evos and unkillable spawns in Warmup before atleast 2v2 teams are made? This seems like a better alternative to keep players in a server until it becomes popular.

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Hendrich, we are a bit ahead of you on this buddy. Now that you have Tremulous working again, try out test8976 and see what warmup is like so far.

What if the gameplay was dynamic and changed as the number of players changed?

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One thing to consider is it’s defintely not OK to change the reflex-based elements of the gameplay (claw ranges, speeds, jump heights, etc.) based on the player count. Game management rules are OK to change (ie. resource allocation, build timer, whether aliens can devolve, etc), but not basic gameplay mechanics.

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