__/ [The Ghost In The Machine] on Thursday 16 February 2006 20:00 \__
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz
> <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote
> on Wed, 15 Feb 2006 18:35:14 +0000
> <dsvsae$1dt1$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> http://www.nexuiz.com/
>>
>> A word has just come out to say that version 1.5 is out.
>>
>> I particularly liked (and was once addicted to) Enemy Territory:
>>
>> http://enemy-territory.4players.de:1041/modules.php?name=files
>>
>> Definitely a state-of-the-art game. Many of the maps are contributed by a
>> gamers community.
>
> Not bad, upon first look. The setup controls for a
> LAN party (or just to play against the 'bots) are a
> bit klunky, and I think it overloads something on my
> underpowered 1.4 GHz Athlon. (Once I turned off some
> of the more esoteric options it ran OK.) An oddity:
> it plays an entire map *series*, and always starts at
> the first map of the specified series, making playing a
> desired individual map a bit tricky. But it *does* have
> bots, unlike Quake 4, which omitted them for some reason.
> Fortunately one can shuffle maps around without too much
> difficulty.
>
> I'm not sure if there's a "wait for others" option,
> or not; play, unlike in UT2004, starts immediately.
> Of course that's because I, the game administratior,
> clicked on "Start"; other clients may have different views
> on the matter. I'll have to check.
>
> The weapons are a little weird, but then any games' weapons
> are going to be a little weird upon first look. There is
> a rocket launcher, a mortar launcher, and something which
> I would call a peewee launcher (I think the official name
> is a Hagar) which can do either. There's a cryogentic
> shotgun, a *real* shotgun (well, as real as a shotgun can
> be in a computer game, anyway), a machine gun, and another
> weapon which looks like a squished coilgun but can shoot
> a single devastating pellet (it doesn't look like much
> but one won't want to get in its way) or three blue balls
> (insert own joke here). There's also what appears to be
> an air pistol of some sort, as a default...a close range
> weapon, of course.
>
> It would be nice to more clearly identify the game ammo
> with the weapon (the rockets-in-a-chest is rather obvious
> but that's about it). Also, carrying around over 200
> rockets is bound to slow a player down in reality --
> though I'm not sure if any game models this all that well
> (though in the Rune variant one can be slowed down by one
> of the runes).
>
> The runes themselves look a little peculiar but I'm willing
> to put that down to my settings. Each are a dual-colored
> spiked ball affair. A nice touch: each rune has a strength
> and a weakness; one of the pairs is "Strength and Venom".
>
> Capture the Flag is what one might expect except that the "flags"
> are toothed wheels (Red has a lightning stroke, Blue a hammer).
> A nice touch: indicating how long it took to move flag from opponent
> to your base, and even saving the fastest time one did so.
>
> The "fake CD 4" track in the SDL variant played fine, but the
> GLX variant had troubles, even though both were full-screen.
>
> I've not tried to play a network game yet, though there were
> plenty of games available on the scanner. A minus: the
> map must be loaded first or one ends up playing "in the dark",
> according to the documentation.
>
> I'd give it a solid B, and hope to look into its innards
> at some point; the GPL is a big plus here.
Yes, the GPL is probably a very important factor, which was worth mention-
ing along with the phrase "Open Source". There is some codebase to serve
as a starting point for any subsequent work.
ID Software, for example, have been re-using and extending their code
since Wolfenstein or Doom, one would imagine. Other companies had to start
in their diapers or pay large sums of money to acquire some source code. I
just hope that good artists and professionals in rendering and illumina-
tion arena add the 'final touch' at some foreseeable stage. It is then
just a matter of modelling new weapons, characters, maps, and objects.
Plenty of 3-D models are already freely available. See, for example:
http://www.oyonale.com/oy_en.htm
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | chmod a-r *.mbox
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