q3a mod: slugs and rockets

[Takkie]

edit 7-03-2014:
Here is the beta-version of the ioquake3 version of the SlugRock mod
SlugRock.zip

Completly rebuild from scratch upon the ioquake3 source-code by UglyFoot.
You'll need to have ioquake3 installed to play the mod
(get it here => http://ioquake3.org)
Check the progress on GitHub: https://github.com/takkie/slugrock

The new version is much more configurable, the cvars can be set in the menu and it features all the greatness from the ioquake3 code!

Comments and feedback appreciated
=====================================================
Older version of SlugRock are not available for download anymore.
=====================================================
edit 17-11-2013
I've been working on the new branch 5.x
There are a couple of changes:
the g_teamweaponSwitch is now g_switchteamWeapons
the rockets are killable
the bot code is different because i couldn't remember what i did in 4.21

And there is a bug in this version
When you frag an opponent with the railgun sometimes the fragged opponent
disappears. So Instead of dropping to the floor or gibbin' completly all there is left
is the little floating 1.
I remember having the same problem in 4.21 but at some point i fixed it
and i can't remember how. (keep away from drugs people )
iirc i found a fix in a q3coding-tutorial that was about something else.

=================================================
original post....

Over the past few years i've build this little mod
named SlugRock (slugs and rockets).

All items, powerups and weapons are removed from the map,
except for the flags in CTF.
Every time you (re)spawn in the arena you'll get the railgun
or the rocketlauncher.
In teamgames you can set the option 'forceteamWeapons' on.
In this case players on the red team (re)spawn with the
rocketlauncher and the players on the blue team (re)spawn
with the railgun.
If you set the option 'forceteamWeapons' off, the weapon
you'll get will be random just as in ffa.
Because there is no health available there also the option
'healthRegen', with this option on a player will recieve
5 health points every second until the maxium health of 125
points is reached.
The railgun and the rocketlauncher are not modified!

It was great fun building it and i learned a lot.
Unfortunaly i lost the source code...
Before i start again with a new branch (slugrock 5.xx)
i'd like to get some feedback and some opinions...

[Takkie]

Oh,
I almost forgot to mention, there are quite a few little adjustments in the game.
Also the bot behaviour is more fitting to the mods gameplay.
The rg and rl are in no way modified.
I found them good as they were

[D-Meat]

Looks fun ! I'll try it out tonight

[Eraser]

[Takkie]

Thanks eraser.
Thanks for checking it out D-Meat. Let me now what you think of it

[Eraser]

You know what would be cool? If there was a game mode where all players were paired up and one of them had a RL and the other a railgun. Each pair of players should really work together to have the player with the railgun pick off other players from a distance while the RL player fends off enemies that creep up too close

You could even split that up in two modes where in one mode, there's multiple 2-player teams and another mode where it's a sort of tournament mode idea where it's always 2v2 and the losing team is swapped out for another 2 player team (or random selection of two other players, that would be cool too).

Anyway, just venting my thoughts here

[Takkie]

That's a great idea, Eraser.
Too bad such a thing sits at the end of my todo list because i don't have the skill/experience to implement this in a reasonable amount of time.
My programming skills are at 'copy/paste in the right place' and lots of trail and error.
Although i have a trained analytical brain (wich helps )
It probabaly cost me another few years to get it functioning

[D-Meat]

Eraser's Ideas sound like a nice addition indeed

[3xistence]

You know what would be cool? If there was a game mode where all players were paired up and one of them had a RL and the other a railgun. Each pair of players should really work together to have the player with the railgun pick off other players from a distance while the RL player fends off enemies that creep up too close

You could even split that up in two modes where in one mode, there's multiple 2-player teams and another mode where it's a sort of tournament mode idea where it's always 2v2 and the losing team is swapped out for another 2 player team (or random selection of two other players, that would be cool too).

That's a good idea. Also because if a team will spawn only with RG it will be hard win a match in mid-close combat range (the reload time of railgun is a big handicap and that's why it should be used only for long range shoots).

[Takkie]

Ah, yes. the teamweapons: rockets vs. slugs is very unbalanced.
It was just something that seemed reasonable to implement but doesn't balance.
It still fun to play.
I was thinking about removing the foreceteamWeapons option from the menu.
(still keeping the cvar so if you want to play with teamweapons it still will bepossible)

I'm at my coding limits with this mod, creating a new gametype with weapon selection etc. is beyond me. I feel more inspired to get into mapping again especially to create some maps with this mod in mind.
Perhaps there is someone else out there with more coding skills/experience that wants to implement these features? I'm more than happy to share the source-code of the 5.x branch wich is a lot like the 4.21 version....

[UglyFoot]

I think I could help, though I'm not much sure.

For now I've already done my first try. I think that the first to be done it's that you could choose the weapon when selecting the team and limit the teams to 2 players. For now I've been doing this and I haven't finished yet because there's a bug that I can't understand but I think I'll fix it soon.

Later on, when I'll had this done, you could send me your code and I'll merge it with mine and work from there.

[D-Meat]

making maps is fine

But You seem to have hacked a little bit the menus, and for this I admire you, I'm scared of the moment I'll have to do that

The game modes, like a lot of things in the code, are simple lists. The hard part is to see where are the connections to that list and then it's easy to add a new item and "plug" it to the game

[Eraser]

The q3_ui project isn't that hard actually. I haven't dawdled around in ui (the Team Arena code) though.

[Takkie]

First off @D-Meat

But You seem to have hacked a little bit the menus, and for this I admire you, I'm scared of the moment I'll have to do that

For the menu's: Most of the code is quite self-explanatory.
I just coded out some of the Id stuff and copied it elsewhere...
The map selection i copied from Juhox's hunt mod (same as i did with most of his bug-fixes)
If I look at what you're doing, i can't grasp hardly any of it... So i say, don't worry to much about the menu's.

@UglyFoot

I think I could help, though I'm not much sure.

For now I've already done my first try. I think that the first to be done it's that you could choose the weapon when selecting the team and limit the teams to 2 players. For now I've been doing this and I haven't finished yet because there's a bug that I can't understand but I think I'll fix it soon.

Your help is highly appreciated!
Just say the word and i'll upload the source for you to dl

[Eraser]

Make a Google Code project out of it

[themuffinman]

Yeah RL/RG is pretty imbalanced. I know how you like minimalism, but I really think the idea needs expanding. I'd take Eraser's ideas there and go a little further with something like GL, RL, PG for team mates 1 and MG, SG, RG for team mate 2. In this way you still have emphasis on RL+RG but you cover major holes in the gameplay with the extra 4 weapons. The first teammate would have PG to lay cover from long distance enemy RG, and GL to reach where the RL can't. Second teammate have MG to finish off weakened enemies and SG to provide some defense in close range.

If you really want simplicity then instagib RG is the only way to go. As soon as you add one more weapon you'll quickly realize how broken the gameplay can be in situations where one weapon completely dominates another.

You should load up the source on GitHub. I've got tons of fixes, refinements, etc. that I can contribute.

[UglyFoot]

Some days ago I created the repository in GitHub but I haven't uploaded anything. If someone wants that I add him he just have to tell me his nick.

Since I'm quite new in Git (I've been using it for some time but I'm not used to it) I have doubts about how we have to get organized to avoid conflicts or spending more time in fixing the repo than programming. I think I'll wait some time before pushing anything.

I think that the first that could be done is pushing Takkie's code and merge with yours (muffin).

[Takkie]

Thanks for the input guys.

You should load up the source on GitHub. I've got tons of fixes, refinements, etc. that I can contribute.

Thanks, if you want to contribute to this project please do, all the help and fixes are more than welcome!
And i like the idea of making this a google-project or getting it up on GitHub but for now i agree with UglyFoot
because i'm unfamiliar with both platforms it will take time to set things up in the right way.
I will look into it but for now you can get the source-code here:
SlugRock-501-sc.zip

I edited the top-post and described a bug in this version (501)
I'll describe it here again:
When you frag an opponent with the railgun sometimes the fragged opponent disappears.
So Instead of dropping to the floor or gibbin' completly all there is left is the little floating 1.
I remember having the same problem in 4.21 but at some point i fixed it and i can't remember how.
iirc i found a fix in a q3coding-tutorial that was about something else...

So if you want to check the bug, download version 5.01 here:
SlugRock-501.zip

The quickest way to see the bug is to start a map with bots and set g_forceSlugs to 1
This is the railgun-only mode.

Yeah RL/RG is pretty imbalanced. I know how you like minimalism, but I really think the idea needs expanding. I'd take Eraser's ideas there and go a little further with something like GL, RL, PG for team mates 1 and MG, SG, RG for team mate 2. In this way you still have emphasis on RL+RG but you cover major holes in the gameplay with the extra 4 weapons. The first teammate would have PG to lay cover from long distance enemy RG, and GL to reach where the RL can't. Second teammate have MG to finish off weakened enemies and SG to provide some defense in close range.

If you really want simplicity then instagib RG is the only way to go. As soon as you add one more weapon you'll quickly realize how broken the gameplay can be in situations where one weapon completely dominates another.

The game is really unbalanced and i agree about you on instagib. I played that by far the most in the past decade...
But at some point i missed the RL and came up with this mod.
At some point i started adding weapons to the RL/RG combo and ended up with a RandomWeapons mod. (i really did)
The weapons in q3 are really well suited next to each other, they balance out really great.
Once you hassle with this the gameplay breaks up.
I think for now the bugfix and more refinements are on the top of the list.
I'd love to see this 5.xx version work with fixes.
After that implement Eraser's ideas about two new gametypes
1. 2plyr-Team Tournament style: 2 vs 2
2. 2plyr-Team DM style: 2 vs 2 vs 2 vs 2 etc...
and along that discuss and implement stuff to bring the gameplay together.

I'm not eager to implement other weapons in this mod but will take it in consideration.
I was thinking about equiping the railgun with a offhand-grapple....
But i want the bots to play the game with the same tools as a human and bots don't like to graplle.
Just as the don't seem to like Rocket Jumping.

Again, thanks for the feedback and offering help!

[Takkie]

Oh, i forgot to mention.
With the source-code comes a done.txt
In here i documented where the changes in the source are.
In the code itself all changes are maked with //SlugRock.

[UglyFoot]

Well, I merged the code and I've made some changes. Now you can select a weapon when choosing a team and it works with all cvars. Also I did this changes:
- Now weapon switch every time you spawn in FFA and Single player. I think it's better than random.
- Mod cvars resets every time you start the game, so it's easier to know cvar values.

While I was trying to figure out why the body disappears I found another bug: if you start a game and you change team right after joining, a red circle appears on the head, until you look at the scoresboard.
Another bug I found is that if a corridor is not much tall the bot can get stuck when shooting him at the same time he is jumping.

I've been trying to fix these bugs but I couldn't and I think it can take a lot of time. To fix them and avoid new bugs I thought that I could be easier start from 0 and try to reuse your code if possible. The main changes I think that must be done are:
- Changing the main menu
- Make that bots work without items in the map
- Health regeneration
- "Killable" rockets

and there must something else. Tell me if I forget something. Anyway I'll look at done.txt every time I change a file.

I think that for now I'm going to try this.

[Takkie]

Great stuff UglyFoot.
I like the 'switch every time' (alternate) and the cvar reset additions.
Perhaps the we could have a cvar for the RL/RG switch (set 'random' or 'alternate')

I agree with you that we should start from scratch again.
At this point there are too much minor changes that (can) cause conflicts/problems.

I think we can divide the code up in four pieces.

The user interface (ui)
The in-game graphics (cgame)
The game(play) code (game)
The bot code (ai)

For the UI:
- Change the main menu
- Change map selection menu
- Disable obsolete weapon keys
- Change Playermodel machinegun in RL or RG
- Perhaps add a SlugRock-settings page (in wich you set the cvar's)

For the in-game graphics:
- Change HUD, disable ammo and armor counter etc.
- Smaller ''You fragged ... for ... place" signal.
- Railcolor tag correction / misslehitwall

For the bot-code:
- Make the bots work without items in the map
- Bot aggression depending on HealthRegen
- Better bots (?)

For the gameplay code:
- Only RL and/or RG
- healthRegen
- Killable Rockets


I really like to start from scratch, it leaves much more options open for discussion.
Great input UglyFoot!

[themuffinman]

If starting from scratch you should really use ioq3. I can contribute the following:
- multi-team support for up to 6 teams, which means rewriting the team code entirely
- full widescreen support for HUD and loading screen
- railgun beam fixes, QL-style beam and 25 colors, correct railgun weapon colorization

I'm also lacking the know-how on committing to repositories and using/creating .diff patches, but if you want any form of coordination you have to make the repo and figure it out... it can't be that difficult.

[Takkie]

I think using ioq3 is a good idea.
It can take the mod to 'the next level'.

I'm now downloading, installing git/github and the compiler tools for ioq3.
(That is quite different than just having notepad an a few batch files)
It will take some to to get used to it and set it up right but the documentation is quite clear.

I can contribute the following:
- multi-team support for up to 6 teams, which means rewriting the team code entirely
- full widescreen support for HUD and loading screen
- railgun beam fixes, QL-style beam and 25 colors, correct railgun weapon colorization

I'm looking forward to your contributions.
6 teams... I can use photoshop to colorize the id-models-team skins for the other four teams.
(Green, yellow, cyan and magenta)

[themuffinman]

6 teams... I can use photoshop to colorize the id-models-team skins for the other four teams.
(Green, yellow, cyan and magenta)

There's no need... it's both easier and more efficient on memory to just use bright skins which can share the same shaders but can have any color applied to them. I should probably do team-colored grenades too.

[D-Meat]

6 teams... I can use photoshop to colorize the id-models-team skins for the other four teams.
(Green, yellow, cyan and magenta)

There's no need... it's both easier and more efficient on memory to just use bright skins which can share the same shaders but can have any color applied to them. I should probably do team-colored grenades too.

Well, you'll have to modify the base skins to add an alpha challel that will "stencil" out the coloured parts In the original quake 3 (I don't know about team Arena) each team skin is a separate TGA (this allows to add more that colour difference between characters, changing some details for example).