Man…
At the stage now of “I made too much stuff, it’s using up way too much memory, and it’s time to get a little dynamic”. I new that was coming fast, especially while making the newest level “Ground Zero”. I simply got sick of waiting for the game to load up all of the meshes instead of what it just needed…so…it was time to start doing some flushing and re-loading. It took a bit of time, and tracking down some weird things with the IQM models, but it’s working. It’s also now only flushing anything if the map changes, and instead resetting various data that needs resetting in those cases. While tracking all of that down, a couple of other intertwined bugs were solved, at least in some fashion. The one that is still bizarre is the case of the ragdolls. Everything is fine when they are deleted “naturally” during the game, as they time out, but if there are some active ones and it runs through the list and clears them when switching maps – boom – crash. It’s odd, given it uses the identical methods. Has to be some kind of weird timing issue with Bullet. This really only happened when manually switching a map in the midst of a game, when it sits in it’s 10 second intermission between maps, and everything clears out during that time, it’s fine. So, in my “infinite” wisdom, haha, ok, let’s be honest – sometimes you just gotta go the “hack” route, I have the game go into an intermission when switching the maps manually. Sometimes it’s the simplest answers.
This all lead to the multiplayer side of things, and special care had to be taken there, not to mention the map editing aspect. Largely this is all completed now, with a little more brute force testing to confirm it is 100% stable. So far, so good! I am really excited to start testing and developing the more complicated aspects of online multiplayer. I love the base framework that’s in place, and this will be something that will be a lot more easy to deal with than ancient Quake based engines.
I’m also still working on content, and will soon have some updates there. Meanwhile, a bit of minor work continues on Ground Zero, so here is a screenshot(though this one doesn’t show anything new, just thought it was a cool shot!).
I will add a few things more to GZ this week, some car and flying saucer wreckage, a few more detail meshes here and there. It won’t be long before these maps are populated with items like ammo, heath, and armor.
Sometimes I really long for the classic arena shooter days. Not necessarily the peak of Q3 and UT, but more the years in the mid 2000’s when the open sourced shooters arrived. It’s a little known factoid that Alien Arena was the first of the Quake based aFPS games to arrive. It was overshadowed by another, rival title – Nexuiz. Much of this had to do with the fully open source nature of the project, as well as it using the most advanced Quake based engine of the time, Darkplaces. With Forest “Lordhavoc” Hale involved, people paid attention. While Alien Arena’s parent game, CodeRED had received pretty significant attention, including being featured in various gaming magazine print, Alien Arena flew under the radar initially. When Nexuiz was released, it was instantly popular, with over 100 concurrent players much of the time, despite it being fairly buggy, and really poor performing. I still recall downloading the first release, finding it unplayable, and being upset that it was receiving so much attention, and being billed as the “first”. I probably let that affect my perspective for years to come.
Looking back, Nexuiz was actually a really darn good game – once they got the performance issues sorted, which they did. I remember playing those early releases, loving the level designs, and truly falling in love with the soundtrack. To this day I have that soundtrack on my computers to listen to while I work once in a while. While there was indeed some artistic inconsistency, and some of it(the weapons in particular) were downright ugly, it had some really great artistic aspects as well. The Aneurysm map, always stood out to to me(and it was a great layout). I loved Basement, Slime Factory, and some of the other early maps. It’s heavy use of EvilLair’s textures didn’t hurt either, and many of the characters were well done, and just cool. It didn’t have much of a unified theme, but it was a lot like UT in that regard.
By 2005, many other titles have arrived, Warsow, Open Arena, Sauerbraten, and Tremulous. The field was crowded, but all of these games had followings, including Alien Arena. Nexuiz, with the force of LordHavoc driving engine development began to move forward at a rapid pace. With the advent of GLSL, it really came to life, and it led the pack in graphical rendering beauty with it’s real time shadows, per-pixel lighting and other effects. It was also quite popular, and fairly universally praised, especially among the Linux crowd and media, such as Phoronix. While a part of me was always feeling Alien Arena didn’t get it’s due recognition(or whenever it did, it received equal backlash), the other part really admired Nexuiz. I often found myself playing it, usually just as a break from working on Alien Arena, and really enjoying the experience. It drove me to improve the CRX engine that powered my own game. By 2008, I was slowly starting to catch up…but it was a lot of trial and error. My early attempts at per-pixel lighting (using fixed functions) were truly wrong and awful.
By late 2008, and early 2009 though, I started learning GLSL, via the famous Orange Book, and finally, at last, had a breakthrough. In all of my game designing life, that was one of my all-time favorite moments (ragdoll physics working was the other).
I was so happy with this, and it opened up a wave of design. Pretty soon I had everything in the game using it.
More GLSL came, such as Parallax mapping, shadowmapping, various lighting effects. Eventually the entire game was using it to render. During this time came the switch to the IQM model format that LordHavoc and Lee Salzman developed with input from myself and others in the Quake community.
To this day I use IQM, as do many others, and am forever grateful for the work that went into developing it. It’s amazing to me the progress that took place in those days. At long last, our CRX engine had mostly caught up to Darkplaces, and then surged ahead with new tech such as ragdoll physics, and various shadowing/lighting changes.
Back to Nexuiz though. That game was evolving, getting new, usually better weapon models, some player models dropped or replaced, and maps constantly added/rebuilt, and some removed(much to my chagrin). The game play, much like the other open source games of the time also evolved, for the better. It was a glorious time for sure. I would either build copies from the Git repo, or anxiously await a new release, always eager to see the updates and changes. I felt though towards the latter part of the decade, that the game had lost a little of it’s charm for me. It was certainly a better game, but I missed those early maps, and the overall mood. In those days, the open sourced shooters were at their peak of popularity. However, things would soon change, and the Golden Era would begin a very rapid decline.
First, and probably foremost, Quake Live, a free, browser run version of Quake III was announced and then a beta that was free to play released, instantly siphoning hundreds of players from the open sourced alternatives. While this didn’t last long before QL began charging a subscription, the damage had been done. It also didn’t help that many of the news sources that would provide a huge boost to open source projects releases were either dying off, or losing popularity due to a glut in gaming news outlets, and a shifting dynamic. By the 2010’s, things were turning downward, though the games carried on with their diminishing fanbases.
It was March 2010 when an announcement was made that a commercial version of Nexuiz using the Crytek 3 engine and development spearheaded by none other than LordHavoc himself working for a small company called Illfonic would shatter it’s community, and bring a very abrupt end to the classic version of Nexuiz. This was indeed a dark day…
The community was enraged, heartbroken, but very quickly regrouped and formulated plans to keep the classic version alive. Oddly, I believe they were given permission to keep the Nexuiz name(as “Nexuiz Classic”), but chose to give the game a rebirth with a new name and new content. Their log was that of a phoenix. Very fitting. Other forks came about as well, but the main project was now known as Xonotic. I really don’t know the meaning or origin of the name, but I was honestly not a fan. The game however was really re-inventing itself, with new weapon and player models, new maps. These were mostly better on a technical level – though the player models I am not fond of at all, especially the skins, but the game truly had lost it’s charm for me. Pity. The commercial Nexuiz came out, and was predictably hated by fans of the original, but I thought it was certainly a beautiful looking game, though the engine was beseiged with glitches and artifacts, and poor performance. Nexuiz died a very quick, painful death unfortunately.
Xonotic carried on, despite having little to no player base. It’s development seemed to catch a spark when a very talented modeler, Morphed began making weapon models. He stayed on long enough to produce new ones for most, but it’s a shame he didn’t create new player models, as those are the biggest drawback, at least visually. The maps were varied in terms of visual appeal, but most were good playing affairs.
I still follow Xonotic development, and play new releases. It’s still a good game, though I still have a much greater fondness for those early Nexuiz releases. Maybe it was the era, and the nostalgic factors. Maybe it was the maps, the atmosphere…aww heck…who am I kidding? It was the sound track! Hey Xonotic devs, bring back that eerie soundtrack, ditch those “tron” skins, and get Morphed to finish his weapon models.
I hope you’ve enjoyed a trip down memory lane, and that the current state of arena shooters isn’t too depressing. I believe there are brighter days ahead, these games have managed to mostly carry on in some fashion, with a few exceptions such as Warsow and Tremulous. Others have had a rebirth, and of course Quake still carries on in the form of Quake Champions – maybe one day they’ll actually finish it.