The truth about TR2N Origins

[Destiny&Manta]

We have developed a new game that is basically an upgraded fork to Arma. We are moving to that arena as of today. This is an informational post, not intended for trolling or arguing. It's just the facts. If someone wants to try it out, they can. If not, then don't there is no reason to fight about it.

We would love to invite everyone to come d/l the game and try it out for yourself instead of listening to any trollers. If you like you can also be a part of our opening week contests. We have a hall of fame and you can win badges to be put in the hall of fame.

Contrary to what Liz and company said, it is not run by wild west, the main community is not centered around any one clan. Wild West still has their own forums, everyone will have the equal chance to come to the new game. However, if anyone starts the drama/harassment/hacking then they will be shunned from the community. Every clan leader fills out the application and has the opportunity to register their clan as an official clan, if VcL or whatever clan agrees to the contract and submits the application and follows the guidelines, then there wont' be a problem. If they choose to cause trouble, then that will be addressed at that time.

The website is http://www.tr2norigins.net and the forum is found at http://www.tr2norigins.net/forum/index.php? but you can go to the site and there is a direct link between the site and forum.

Once you make your acct on the new forum and activate the email, you can use that log in on the new game to play. In the player setup set your global id to (your new forum name)@stats and it will ask you for the password the first time, after that you don't have to log in any more and will automatically be linked to your stats in the ladders.

This forum will remain up, as it is the hub of the Wild West clan. The servers will remain up a short time, before being integrated into the new game. We hope you join us in the exciting new community.

Here is the history on why we decided to fork from arma:
This project started out originally as an effort to make Armagetron Ad more user friendly in regards to new players. Destiny and Zurd started to map out a new web-page and design it so that a new player would be able to come into the game and understand how a lot of the basic rules of etiquette work. The problem was, in order for that to happen a lot of changes would have to be made to the internal structure of the main community and Armagetron Ad was too established for that to happen. After talking to a few people and getting input, Destiny got a team together to come up with ideas and a plan for a new community. By starting fresh, it gave the team freedom to develop without a lot of politics of trying to fit it into an existing community.
The ideas of the team for the new community center around a theme of being unified and streamlined with the focus being on competition. The competitions are integrated with the community web-page which is not clan affiliated. Some of the features that help this happen are a web-page that is editable by several people of the community, instead of the burden falling to one person. Also utilizing a calendar on the main page that is able to be integrated with individual clan calendars make the need for a wiki-ran tourney obsolete. A central authentication system helps the problem of imposter's, and is less confusing than having multiple auth lists.
Clans are integrated equally on the main community website, the ranks and avatars on the main forum are clan based, and every clan has the opportunity to submit their information to be added to the main web page.
The game itself has a lot of new features that help new people navigate. The menu is streamlined and grouped together. The bike and tail colors can be edited using the player set up menu instead of the console. There are more insta-chats and some of them include help topics already built in.
All of these features are the reason we decided to make a fork, and set up a new community in order to reach out to new players, while at the same time accommodate the existing players that want to be a part of this new and exciting venture. This game has its own master server and does not require that Armagetron Ad be un-installed in order to play. Both games can run simultaneously and free from one another. There is no reason for our games to be at odds with each other. I'm sure you understand all the reasons we have decided to part ways. We are pretty sure we followed all Open Source guidelines, but if there is an issue, please visit with us privately and we will resolve it. We (TR2N Origins )wish you (ArmagetronAd) the best of luck in your adventures. Thank you for making Armagetron, It's an awesome game.

[Goodygumdrops]

i don't see why i'd want to be part of a community that has outlawed troublemaking and harassing

[INW]

nice idea to invent something closely related to tron, but i dont think it will kick off.

[Kijutsu]

I tried it, its basically an armagetron advanced copy with a pretty moviepack.

Uninstalled again.

EDIT: Btw, Z-Man was so kind to release a more user-friendly menu already, you can download it here:
http://forums3.armagetronad.net/viewtop ... 50&t=19909

[Mecca]

The only servers I can see are DF and HR, there are a bunch of other servers that are unreachable. Also, the forum link in your post is broken.

[Saffy]

Vcl Taz and Vcl Mecca are already banned.

*EDIT* Actually, this is wrong. I'm retarded.

[Phytotron]

Genuine Questions

Does one have to be in a clan to play?

Is it going to be only competitions and tourneys?

Who's going to have the ability to host servers? Will people still be able to run a dedicated server from their home computers?

Are all the configuration settings still available? Any plans to change, add, remove, replace, or hard code any of them (e.g., try something different from rubber, or a new graphics rendering engine)?

"DF" is a meaningless term to me. Will there be regular, old-school, low rubber, last-man-standing servers; or just gimmicky game mode crap (i.e., fortress and all its zone-based derivatives, CTF, etc.)?

Are all the Wild West servers leaving the Arma master server list? If so, any others as well (e.g., The ServerPharm)?

Did you retain any of my instachats, and do I still get author credit?


I am only interested in answers from those involved in this project.

[Van-hayes]

I have a few Questions as well: by "Every clan leader fills out the application and has the opportunity to register their clan as an official clan" does that mean you guys pick which clans can play and how would you stop an unofficial clan from playing? Just curious on that one as I'm not a fan of clans as a whole.

As for the servers, would the same thing be done with them as well, send an application and have it approved? Are there going to be restrictions on what types of server you are allowed to run? Because I noticed there was no Host server option for internet game anymore. I guess the main thing I am asking; Is there going to be a lot more oversight from with this project than with arma?

Also, looking through some of the Read-mes that came with it, most still say armagetron-ad in them.

[Phytotron]

Some notes of first impressions (a few of these override a few of my previous questions)

• There are several default keys that are not found on a Mac keyboard, and therefore there's no way to unbind them. (A bit of that goes for Arma, too, by the way. Cough.)

• The instachats are pretty dumb, and multicolored text strings are bad. And why are there so many additional instachat spaces? And why do some include instructions? You just want to have people spamming the console with instructions? A much better solution would be an actual READ ME instruction manual that comes with the game (something Arma still needs as well), and/or a screen (e.g., similar to the 'About' screen) that lists the same lines you currently have in instachats.

• Music quit when I switched to fullscreen.

• What are floor detail and mirroring doing in the Screen Mode section? There was no sense in moving those.

• In the HUD, "Show computer info." Why group those things (FPS, ping, and time) instead of leaving them separate?

• Default rubber in a local game is 10?! Seriously? You want to make it "easier" and more accessible to a newer player, revert back to the speed/accel of 10. Making the local game default to 10 rubber gives the false impression, "this is normal and how it's supposed to be." More on this later.

• Was there supposed to be a moviepack included, with that other cycle model? Mac version only includes a textures folder and a 'models' folder that apparently goes unused. Also, if you're wanting to make things easier on new players, it's probably not a good idea to use a rim_wall that has a dark bottom edge that obscures where the wall and floor meet.

• Sounds are screwy. The turn sound is too loud and the engine sound is more just a general woosh that obscures any indication of speed.

• Encouraging the color overflow bug. Not good. (And if you're going to do it, why won't it go into negative values?)

• In your manifestos, it refers to "rules of etiquette" with which new players must become familiarised. Exactly what are these rules, to what do they apply, and who has defined them?

• In the 'Help' sections, as well as new default keys, you encourage multibinding. Lame.

• Game Modes. Need I say more?

• "The game has a feature called 'rubber.'" For crying out loud, when are you people going to get it through your skulls that rubber is not a feature! And then you have the nerve to say, "although technically a misuse of the rubber mechanics in TR2N Origins ... [d]igging refers to the use of a players [sic] Rubber reserves [really?] to get as close as possible to a wall without dying, before turning to grind." Are you kidding? How is that misuse, but defaulting to _RUBBER 10 and encouraging 'HR' not? Hello, conceptualising and treating rubber as a "feature" is misuse and abuse!

[I so wish the Arma devs would hard code a cap of cycle_rubber at like 5 (which is pretty high itself).]


There's nothing substantive been changed to the game itself. I find most changes superficial, pointless, encouraging the wrong things, are just plain dumb. I don't really see any point in making an independent "fork" that's mostly about "noob friendliness" and stronger, lock-down moderation control of players and servers. I'm sure you could have accomplished all that within Arma itself. Look at Z-Man already putting together a dedicated version of Arma for 2020's (stupid) school endeavor—he's even giving it its own independent master server! I suspect he wouldn't have been averse to a "Arma for kids" or some such.

I just don't get the point of this, really. Had you actually changed up the code in some substantial way, rather than just taking it all line for line, that might've been interesting.

[dlh]

I glanced through the source, and I noticed you removed our copyright headers.

Lines like this:

Code: Select all

Copyright (C) 2005  by <...> and the AA DevTeam (see the file AUTHORS(.txt) in the main source directory)

These need to be persistent in the file—you can not remove them and replace them with:

Code: Select all

Based on Armagetronad and work by Manuel Moos ([email protected])

[Mecca]

Some notes of first impressions (a few of these override a few of my previous questions)

• There are several default keys that are not found on a Mac keyboard, and therefore there's no way to unbind them. (A bit of that goes for Arma, too, by the way. Cough.)

Press backspace, it unbinds all keys bound to that action.

Feature: 3 a : a prominent part or characteristic

Rubber is a feature, stop crying about it.

The old school low rubber servers do not get nearly as much traffic as modes like fortress and sumo; eventually people might go back to low rubber and start the cycle over again. It does not make sense to increase the quantity of low rubber servers supplied when the demand for low rubbers servers is so low.

[Lucifer]

I glanced through the source, and I noticed you removed our copyright headers.

Lines like this:

Code: Select all

Copyright (C) 2005  by <...> and the AA DevTeam (see the file AUTHORS(.txt) in the main source directory)

These need to be persistent in the file—you can not remove them and replace them with:

Code: Select all

Based on Armagetronad and work by Manuel Moos ([email protected])

Yep, the game you forked has a lot more contributors than just z-man. I believe the GPL states explicitly that the copyright headers have to be kept as-is. You can add to them, and you must for any file that you change, but you cannot change or remove them. To do so is a violation of the only license you have to fork the game. Remember that if you violate that license, default copyright law doesn't give you the right to do anything but run the game.

For the rest of you saying "it's just an arma copy", you're right, but don't let it dissuade you from checking it out. I'll refer everybody to the WWWIA articles on the wiki, where you will see that tr2n, being a fork (rather than a new game), has now adopted all the same stuff. So they'll be under the same limitations, and sadly run a much higher risk of going down blind alleys. But that's fine, that's what open source is all about, right? Learning? Give them some time to differentiate themselves before you start judging.

[Thilo]

Please list ways that this new game is at all in any way different from the other one.

Thx.

[LucK]

Well I checked out the game and it was a lot like tron but a lot easier to use(if you don't know how to play tron). The floor makes me dizzy and the turning is really goofy. It is like tron but with restrictions which I don't like. Having to register a clan/server every time you want to set one up seems silly to me. When the rubber is set to 5 it feels like it is at 10.

The good note about this game is it seems to be centered around competitions more than free play but it still provides free play.

This game makes me feel like if I say something "out of line" then I will be banned without a second chance and it makes the game a lot less fun for me because I feel like I can't say what I want. Remember this is all my opinion.

[Phytotron]

Genuine Questions

Some notes of first impressions (a few of these override a few of my previous questions)

...before fully judging (you now, "judgement" isn't a dirty word). It's an ongoing thing. I will continue to check it out, and one would think my notes could be taken (if they choose) as constructive criticism to facilitate potentially increased differentiation, which is pretty insignificant thus far.


I recall now having used 'delete' (no 'backspace' on Mac) with Arma keybinds, as all those non-Mac keys aren't in my copy; just wasn't thinking, and my user.cfg etc. are like 3+ years old. Still, it remains that there's no sense having them there in the Mac build—something you'd think these folks would be particularly sensitive to, considering they're wanting to get the game to "hold the hands" of "noobs" so much.


There's nothing strange about the turning.

****************


Another question: Are you going to have your own development team? Are you going to take bug reports and have a debug recorder? Or just take whatever bugfixes and whatnot happen with Arma and dump them into your game?

Speaking of bugs, when I exit the game (ESC out), it won't quit. It just hangs and I have to force-quit ("not responding"). Arma 0.2.8.3_rc4 has done the same occasionally, which I reported in the relevant thread, but yours has done it most times.