The truth about TR2N Origins

General Stuff about Armagetron, That doesn't belong anywhere else...
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Phytotron
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by Phytotron »

arilou wrote:From playing it for a couple of days it's far better than any Arma client (2.8 or 3.0 ) in the areas of looks (with or w/o movie pak) and smoothness.
I notice practically no improvement, and little difference, in these areas. I see the default textures are different but those have always been replaceable and customisable in Arma. Whether they're "better" is purely taste (I personally don't like either game's defaults). And I see alpha blending is enabled by default (actually I can't remember off-hand if this is the case with Arma or not). Oh, and the font is a little different—rounder. I actually prefer the blockier Arma font (and have in the past suggested making it even blockier, actually). I notice no difference whatsoever in "smoothness."


On the subject of building up a new game from the foundation, I'm wondering what areas this will most noticeably include. First thing I think a lot of people would wonder about is rubber. That's a fairly (perhaps the) distinguishing aspect of Arma, however I believe that even Z-Man has lamented the lack of foresight on what would come of it, beginning as merely a compensation for latency (lag) but being abused to the point that it's now commonly accepted as a game mechanic or feature. And the rubber code in general, as I'm told, is a bloody mess. It's not explicitly mentioned in the WWWIA, but I wonder if that might be something that'll be addressed. Of course, I don't expect you all will eliminate it or its gameplay concept entirely—you apparently love 'HR,' the 'depth of grind,' and adjusting/180ing against walls, and all that orror. Unfortunately. But, still I wonder.

And if not that, what substantive changes do you have in mind?


[SIDEBAR]
If it were my project, I would eliminate rubber altogether. There would be something else to deal with latency, that would have no byproduct effect on the physics or gameplay. I would have a wall-touching system reminiscent of the game Tetris. You know how in Tetris, when your falling block makes contact with the others, you get a split-second to slide it before it gets locked in place. It would behave similarly, where you'd get a consistent, predetermined split-second to make contact with a wall before exploding. It could be configurable for being based on actual time or speed (distance traveled), but it would always be consistent. There would be no penalty for consecutive touches, as there is with Arma due to the rubber regeneration. And there would be no 'depth of grind.' Once contact is made, that's it. Only visible gaps could be passed through. Whether a cycle could pass through those gaps would be based on a configuration for whether the cycle was solid or not—or to put another way, itself affected by the lighttrace or not. If so, touching any part of the cycle model against a wall means contact. If not, one could imagine that these beams of energy only affect one another, not the cycle. However, if the cycle tries to pass through a beam wall, that will interrupt the wall he's leaving, breaking contact with the lightcycle and causing explosion. And, of course, there would be no ability to 180 or adjust against a wall you're already touching, with a configuration for distance that would be consistent and predictable.

I've actually tried to approximate this best I could in BiH and Shrunkland, but it's not there, and some of the behaviour is ridiculously, and irritatingly, inconsistent and unpredictable.
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by MrsKsr »

sinewav wrote:
compguygene wrote:Cmon people, how many of you only play one videogame!
Me. This is the only one I need.
Uhm, pretty much same here.
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by compguygene »

dubStep wrote:
sinewav wrote:
compguygene wrote:Cmon people, how many of you only play one videogame!
Me. This is the only one I need.
Uhm, pretty much same here.
A big LOL to that! I fully expected sinewav and dubstep to say that! As Z-man mentioned, a certain level of interoperability is being worked out. More progress was made toward that tonight! So, for those who have a viewpoint similar to sinewav and dubstep that might like to partake of a tournment we offer, it will be possible to use your existing Armagetron Client.
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by Z-Man »

Compguy: would you mind sharing the data collected with the five new users? I'd do some research on my own, but I ran out of people not familiar with the game ;)

Phytotron: it's the general latency compensation that is messy, especially everything related to extra tolerance and ping charity. Rubber code is isolated and rather clean (by our standards, anyway :P), and the only place where rubber is making real trouble are the instakills, which, you guessed it, are a problem happening when rubber meets the effects of ping charity.
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by theroze »

dubStep wrote:
sinewav wrote:
compguygene wrote:Cmon people, how many of you only play one videogame!
Me. This is the only one I need.
Uhm, pretty much same here.
Now i look at Comp's signature. Tron is full of fun, the world needs some more of this sort. Have fun and enjoy it. Some of my classmates play CS:S (Counterstrike:Source). And they are just a couple of dumb people who have no other hobbies but "distributing" headshots.
apparition wrote:You being able to kill so many players that quickly and efficiently is evidence that the community skill level must be dropping... Sad :/
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by MrsKsr »

Relevance at least Roze.. Just because sine & myself only play arma doesn't mean we only play arma.. If that's what you were insinuating =S
"You may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one;
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by Word »

i didn't get it either :?
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by compguygene »

@Z-man The 5 people that I asked to download Armagetron and Tr2nOrigins were 5 school-age children that my children are friends with. Because they all live in the neighborhood here, I was able to arrange to do the test at the same time, on the same day, while we communicated via Instant Messaging. They all currently play at least 1 or 2 other online games on their computers, and are occasional players of said games. None of them are particularly computer savvy, but all of them have installed games before, and have parents that know almost nothing about computers. They are all Windows users, and take a very pragmatic view of being able to do what they want with a computer to surf the web, buy music and put it on their IPods, do homework, and play a few games. There were 2 13 year olds, a 15 year old, and 2 17 year olds. All were boys, except 1 13 year old girl. The girl seemed the most computer savvy, and did successfully play both games. Everybody else, when redirected to the SourceForge page, were just utterly confused by the screen they saw. At that point, it didn't seem worth the hassle of trying to figure out something that no friend of theirs had already done before.
As stated before, nobody was able to on their own, get Authentication to work for Tr2nOrigins.
As I put up Servers in the next few days for Tr2nOrigins, I am going to put one up that will be titled something like "Welcome to Tr2nOrigins, Come here first". It will be a last-man standing server, with a setup very similar to the default Local Game in the new client. Every round a set of directions will be showing on the console screen that will direct people to the webpage to set up authentication. No authentication will be required to play in that server. That way people can jump in and play, while confronted with directions on how to play elsewhere. Once I get a feel for how that works with new users, I am thinking of making some sort of similar server for new people to be directed to in Armagetron. I really think that in Armagetron, some sort of similar server might help to improve the "attachment rate" of new users to the game.
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by Z-Man »

Hmm. So they got to our homepage, managed to find the download (the new page layout makes that bit more obvious) link, managed to click on the .exe specific link (finding that part need to be improved, with automatic OS detection), and then got stuck? Shouldn't clicking that have auto-forwarded them to the true download? If the last step truly was the problem, it's easy to fix. Just link to the launchpad download instead.

I think two things are most needed on the server browser: servers requiring you to log in to play need to be clearly marked, ideally smartly (like, greyed out and with a score minus if you haven't yet signed up). And there needs to be a way to gentry herd newbies into servers where they can learn the basics first without annoying experienced players. The client already tracks some playtime stats; maybe servers could advertise that they're especially suited for players with less than X hours of online teamplay experience, and the server browser would then give them a score plus.

And both our default keyboard layouts need to change :) The natural expectation of any reasonably experienced PC gamer is that control works either over the cursor keys or WASD. You can document your layout on your webpage as much as you like, players don't read it.
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by Van-hayes »

As stated before, nobody was able to on their own, get Authentication to work for Tr2nOrigins.
When I tried it I actually had a hard time authenticating as well, maybe it was the same with arma when it first started i am not sure, but for some reason i couldn't get it to work when i hit the authenticate or authentication menu option. I had put in my username in player setup(or the equivalent if it was renamed) Vanhayes@stats then hit authenticate the whole menu thing came up i put in my password and it always said username not found. Finally someone told me to use /login Vanhayes@stats so i tried that and the same menu thing came up, i put my password in and it worked fine.

Granted this was fairly late at night when i tried it so it might have had to do with me being tired, but i was just wondering if anyone else had trouble with using the actual authenticate menu option rather than the /login method? And if arma had a problem with this as well.
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by kyle »

Z-Man wrote:I think two things are most needed on the server browser: servers requiring you to log in to play need to be clearly marked, ideally smartly (like, greyed out and with a score minus if you haven't yet signed up). And there needs to be a way to gentry herd newbies into servers where they can learn the basics first without annoying experienced players.
I've been thinking about setting up a second wild fortress, maybe less/more challenging maps, Making it authentication only, and then using KICK_TO to send the to the other one, so they can learn to play and authenticate.


Also i think that you should have more first time it's run menus, right now you select the default language and that's it, what about taking them to play and system setup menus before continuing?
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

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dubStep wrote:Relevance at least Roze.. Just because sine & myself only play arma doesn't mean we only play arma.. If that's what you were insinuating =S
Tron for weaks!
apparition wrote:You being able to kill so many players that quickly and efficiently is evidence that the community skill level must be dropping... Sad :/
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by compguygene »

kyle wrote:
Z-Man wrote:I think two things are most needed on the server browser: servers requiring you to log in to play need to be clearly marked, ideally smartly (like, greyed out and with a score minus if you haven't yet signed up). And there needs to be a way to gentry herd newbies into servers where they can learn the basics first without annoying experienced players.
I've been thinking about setting up a second wild fortress, maybe less/more challenging maps, Making it authentication only, and then using KICK_TO to send the to the other one, so they can learn to play and authenticate.


Also i think that you should have more first time it's run menus, right now you select the default language and that's it, what about taking them to play and system setup menus before continuing?
Could you elaborate some more about the use of KICK_TO? Is it something that you would use from a parser script? I am planning to eventually make a standard parser for all Origins official servers for centralized stats, and improved ladders. It might be work making a basic parser to start with that would send players to the server that I am putting up that explains authentication and allows them to play.
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by dlh »

Just FYI, there is also MOVE_TO, and it will not ban the player according to the kick settings.
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Re: The truth about TR2N Origins

Post by Olive »

vogue wrote:For anyone who's too lazy/unwilling to download the game, I made a quick video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYA7ZYYJ7C0
Reversed rubber meter?
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