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Topic: development or "What the hell is going on?"

(The following text is Sushi's and Landil's subjective point of view about the current situation.)

Some people say teeworlds development got stuck. Others even say teeworlds is dead. Few actually say modificatons destroy(ed) teeworlds. Let's do a fact check: is this true?

TEEWORLDS DEVELOPMENT GOT STUCK / IS DEAD

The last official teeworlds release was spreaded in November 2009. Indeed it seems justifiable to say that development stopped or slowed down. But just because you cannot see development does not mean there is none. Actually there is more development activity than ever before. We recently  even reached a peak of activity since the project moved to github. After matricks' decision to confide the development responsability to a new teeworlds team, some people held their breath, but (!) as we can see they do a really great job. Oy is pushing one fix after the other. m!nus is caring about the forum very well and Landil is recruiting and training a new graphic team to give teeworlds a nicer look. In addition there are plenty of other people participating in development who are doing a great job, too. The only problem is the normal player does not see these efforts because they are not part of the development community. Just to give you an idea about what happened: the whole code was refactored to provide a better readability, the engine was rewritten in C++. Douzens of new features were added e.g. the dm score hud, colored nameplates, changeable nameplates size, a new font system, an auto-save screenshot function, which saves the scoretable at the end of a match and many many bugs were fixed.

MODS DESTROY TEEWORLDS

At the official forum and in several other discussions we can see a groundswell of opinion against teeworlds modifications. They fear that vanilla teeworlds fades into the background. In fact, one cannot deny a decreasing share of plain vanilla players. But what is the reason for this effect? When we think about the reasons we found one reason: gameplay.
Plain vanilla is imbalanced! The gap between high skill players and casual gamers or rookies is enormous (which does not have to be a problem itself, but makes the balancing and game play problem quite visible). They move faster and have nearly perfect strategies for fighting on the "one and only real ctf map" ctf2. This leads to boring matches which always follow the same procedure *yawn*. Some balancing is needed - we have to think about weapons, power ups and gameplay itself.

Back to the mods: they do not destroy teeworlds, they just show us that vanilla teeworlds is not that intersting to play. Mods represent the innovative force of open source development. New ideas can easily be tested. Thus we are supposed to use these capabilities in a constructive way to advance teeworlds. E.g. DDRace shows us that people would like to have a real coop mode. Do not fight them, as they could become vanilla players again.

WHAT WE CAN DO NEXT

We think the time has come to push teeworlds 0.5.3. Even though there are many good ideas waiting to be implemented, there are good reasons to release now.

  • it is already much more stable then 0.5.2. All known crash reasons are fixed.

  • several security loopholes are fixed. It's incredible not to release a patch or a new release, after fixing it.

  • original and simple game play innovations are needed. 0.6 seems far from release and noone wants to touch the network stuff at present, which has to be altered when we want to add new gameplay features.

  • the community will see that change happens and official development is still active.

AND THEN?

Teeworlds places great demands on itself and so do we. We do not want to reinvent the wheel, there are so many open source projects which face similar problems as we do.

  • One of the coping strategies we favor is the following: twice a year there is a standard release (no need to set a certain date, but a certain month would be fine). One month before the release there is a feature freeze, which means no new features are allowed to implement. The main focus lies on bugfixing and finishing current features. In addtion extraordinary releases are supposed to be spreaded, when security issues get public.

  • Regarding new features, developers should stay in touch with the community to get inspired and be able to advance teeworlds. For sure we need to think about how to manage this process as the teeworlds community grew quite fast and forum discussion could become chaotic. Thus we would like to see a developer who is responsible for the game design who sets a focus on trying to balance and improve plain vanilla gameplay. One idea which came to our minds is to make it easier to move fast. Something like jumppads which accellerate players with bad hooking skills or a higher standard movement speed on platforms.


We (Sushi & Landil) would be glad if you join the discussion.

uptee - a simple web interface for hosting and maintaining teeworlds servers
teerace - a website gathering results of trusted Race-mod servers providing global ranking and statistics
*gV* rox ^^

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

I second that!

Question? search function
Short movies? Lappi's link loft
Teeworlds info'n'tuts on gfx? Landil's sketchbook

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Oy is pushing one fix after the other. m!nus is caring about the forum very well and Landil is recruiting and training a new graphic team to give teeworlds a nicer look.

Landil ftw smile

Everyone thinks that the development has stuck, but when you look at github, you will see, that there are so much changes and fixes every day!!


greets jxsl13

Teeworlds [ friends ] clan
Some YouTube Stuff about Teeworlds

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Tbh it sounds like u dislike the balancing of weapons, power ups and gameplay. But in my point of view it is nearly balanced (power up is weak, but who cares). Its normal that experienced players are better than new players, you can see it in all other games too, however it doesnt mean the game is bad.
The much more exciting question is why new players leave the pure gameplay and teeworlds or play mods.


Sushi Tee wrote:

fighting on the "one and only real ctf map" ctf2.

Teeworlds needs new maps. But who will make maps more exciting than maps like ctf2?



Anyway, its time to release 0.5.3.

5 (edited by Zatline 2011-02-09 21:34:28)

Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Vanilla
It is wrong to say that the balancing of vanilla is bad. It isn't bad, and I also think vanilla doesn't needs a change.

New Gametyp for 0.6.0
I think it is time, to bring out a new standard gametyp.
The most qualified modification to get official, is the original Race mod!
(One of the oldest and best gametyp ever, it should be official)
A new gametyp with new official maps would be great, many players would be glad about that.

And the most of the new players, playing DDrace becouse it is the most popular modification at the moment.
The most servers are DDrace servers and. A player press randomly to any Server with two clicks and he'll lands with high probability in a DDrace server, if not, and it's a nice server, with a stabil ping, with a interesting map and some players, so he playing in this Server too! big_smile

DDrace, why DDrace is so spreaded
I know DDrace gives since long time, but in the past it was not realy popular, in the past the most players played Race, Vanilla and Instagib!
But more and more mappers builded a DDrace map, becouese to this time, tehre was many good maps for Insta/Vanilla and Race, maping beginner made more maps for mods with few good maps and servers, so they got more players for their maps and their sponsored/hosted servers.
Many mapping-beginners did that, cuz it was so easy to build a DDrace map, becouse the rivalry was low.
Most of this low maps were builded with the old [N]race tiles, way? It was the easiest and fastest kind for a beginner. neutral

Teeworlds needs new features
Teeworlds needs a new map!

PS: A 0.5.3 would be nice, but it is to late, there are so many changes in b52 versus 0.5.2, so many changes deserve to be called 0.6.0.

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

I really think The current state of teeworlds trunk is stable and is releasable, and releasing would be the only way to find all bugs and squash them if they even exist at all ^^.

Also many many bugs are in 0.5.2 and trunk version is not that popular, so noobs don't know to use it.

i think an 0.5.3 release would be great.

and if there is anything i can do, please let me know.

if you are looking for support for DDRace, please go to http://DDRace.info.

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

i think race`s are the most good becuse you train by this and my all skills i get by race`s.DDrace dosent do nothin.I like play to vanillia servers but there all full xD

If you want a perfect map for your own server you can PM me to make you one ^^

Please also try play nodes you may download it here!. And as always.Have a nice day

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Zatline wrote:

Vanilla
It is wrong to say that the balancing of vanilla is bad. It isn't bad, and I also think vanilla doesn't needs a change.

Vanilla is boring. Just to give you an impression - the amount of vanilla players is nearly constant since 0.3.X. Figures speak in my favour smile There have to be reasons why and imo it's because of the gameplay. If you look at the pro games you will see a very static game with fast, repetetive movements. If it's an elaborated match people will obtain certain roles (e.g. defender, attacker, flag carrier), but real cooperation or collaboration does not take place. There is no weapon/skill/buff which helps others and  therefore everyone plays on its own. It's a farce to say tdm is fun.
In addition the only real power up (katana) is not used as the so called pro gamer think it's not advantageous. Thus we need to think about power ups in general, which may interfere static gameplay and which are worth fighting for.

Concerning the standard weapons: the grenade launcher is imo too powerful for defending high places; the laser does not do its original purpose of slowing down or killing a flag carrier (it's "just" a distance weapon).


New Gametyp for 0.6.0

Race will become official, so no need to talk about it.

And the most of the new players, playing DDrace becouse it is the most popular modification at the moment.
The most servers are DDrace servers and. A player press randomly to any Server with two clicks and he'll lands with high probability in a DDrace server, if not, and it's a nice server, with a stabil ping, with a interesting map and some players, so he playing in this Server too! big_smile

DDRace is a collaborative mod, you need to play WITH others. That's big fun. Then it's easy to learn and hard to master. Game play is demanding and full of variation (you need to learn a lot (!) of tricks). To put it in a nutshell: it's more innovative, creative and demanding, which heavily influence long-term fascination.

Many mapping-beginners did that, cuz it was so easy to build a DDrace map, becouse the rivalry was low.
Most of this low maps were builded with the old [N]race tiles, way? It was the easiest and fastest kind for a beginner. neutral

It's hard to create high quality, pleasing and demanding ddr maps. A good example for outstanding DDrace maps are the nut_hardcore maps.

Teeworlds needs a new map!

As long as game play stays the same people will only play ctf2.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry: It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Besides -  I am the gfx guy!

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

New Gametyp for 0.6.0

Race will become official, so no need to talk about it.

Oh, very nice! yikes

10 (edited by Sushi Tee 2011-02-09 23:26:29)

Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Zatline wrote:

PS: A 0.5.3 would be nice, but it is to late, there are so many changes in b52 versus 0.5.2, so many changes deserve to be called 0.6.0.

We wrote about 0.5.3 for a special reason. All changes made until now doesnt change anything on the netcode. So it is still fully compatible to all 0.5 version. Since the versioning is like that: major.netcode.patch a 0.6 release would just be wrong.


We did not write that the gameplay of vanilla is bad. Actually i think its pretty much perfect. Still it needs changes cuz the gameplay didnt develope at all since 0.4 release (well a little bit but not worse mention it).
One of the big problem is that all the "old tewworlds guys" fear changes but as u can see... e.g. ddrace changes a lot and ppl are playing it so it cant be that wrong to change even bigger things or add big changes to the gameplay. It could be powerups or jumppads as we mentioned in the first post. It would make begiiners who arent good with the hook much faster and the gap between good and bad players smaller as the beginners can move fast, too.
This would automatically need new maps providing a good gameplay for the new features... like really far jumps and stuff... im pretty sure our official mappers would be glad to create maps for this prupose wink


Anyway... this thread is not only about gameplay. Also it is about how to make the development better and more visible to public.
What do you think about the ideas we mentioned?

uptee - a simple web interface for hosting and maintaining teeworlds servers
teerace - a website gathering results of trusted Race-mod servers providing global ranking and statistics
*gV* rox ^^

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Does anyone remember the teestrike weapons? They were nearly balanced and brought much more fun and variation into the game.

And maybe currently teeworlds is balanced (but it is boring).

@Sushi I agree, we mentioned several topics, not  only "gameplay".

Antoine de Saint Exupéry: It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Besides -  I am the gfx guy!

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Well i´d like some more information about what´s currently going on @ dev team. Dev journal is not up to date there are no news nothing. There was a request about this already http://www.teeworlds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5529. But this is quite old too so ...

As for balancing i can say: Laser is so more than unbalanced in any ctf game its just too powerfull. Its either on low range, mid range and long range strong. Actually  i like the design with the bounce but in practice its giving the laser an advantage which is more than extra ordinary. It should be replaced by a more balanced long range weapon in my opinion.
Powerups are not used. Okay i luv katana but its only a fun weapon, nothing anyone would use in a competitive way. As i heard something like it was originally intended as placeholder for future powerups.

About gametypes why not replace survival with tdm its by far a better team deathmatch type than actually tdm is right now. Is there any competitive tdm community out there if yes plz let me know cause ctf is boring.

Mutant ( from ut2004 if someone know it ).

Or something like team A  has to attack point A team B defend . Point a is either defend within the time frame or captured . After switch positions and Team B  has to attack point B and Team A has the defensive role. There are like 3 -5 such points on the map and you gain points either b defending or capturing.

13 (edited by SALAD 2011-02-10 02:03:40)

Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

I agree with alot that Landil and Sushi are saying. First, I think that Teeworlds needs something as an official gametype like DDRace that involves coop play and puzzle solving. The gameplay of DDRace is so fun because helping your friends(or strangers) through an unfamiliar or well-known map is an experience unique in its own way. Communicating with other players in DDRace while you are either being told to do something or telling someone else to do something is really awesome. Also maybe a new vanilla gametype that involves the standard weps could be awesome. Maybe there could be something like a domination type gametype with flags or something new and creative that could be awesome as a official mod.

Second, making the gameplay more balanced needs to be done to. Either by adding more powerups or more "moves" you can do with your tee would be cool. Maybe Jumppads(like Landil and Sushi said) would be a great idea for it could be really fun to use it to speed you up or reach high places and using it with the hook things could get really creative. Maybe adding another team? (green?) or maybe a new weapon or 2? or maybe even make destroyable tiles (via the grenade launcher) I know these are crazy ideas but we need something to switch up the gameplay a bit.

Third, a new map or so, I think that releasing ctf6 or even making another 2v2 map like ctf1(or make ctf1 more balanced) would be a great idea because playing ctf2 and ctf3 all the time gets fairly boring. Also a new dm 1v1 map PLEASE! dm1 is a near perfect map I must agree but playing it all the time gets very old and making a new 1v1 map with fresh gameplay to master would not be a bad idea at all. When the Race mod gets official, I think it will be great to add more maps like hotrun with really fun gameplay would be cool to accomplish.

Last of all, I think the idea of releasing a new Version twice a year is a very good idea. Having a dropbox for people to report bugs and request new ideas after a version is released. Thanks for listening to my very long post(if you read it all) I hope you consider my information.

-SALAD

14 (edited by Var [TNB] 2011-02-12 12:37:34)

Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

LMAO, are you kidding me?
The difference between pros and noobs it is what makes teeworlds best game ever! You have nearly infinite possibility to higher your skills, this is why this game is fun even after 3 years of playing!
There's never the same situation in Teeworlds. Look CS:S. THERE you can find the same situations. And teeworlds is about improvisation and innovations. No wai.

Stay wild big_smile

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

In my opinion, the problem is not about balancing the vanilla gameplay (which is already a lot balanced), not about adding 3 SMGs and destroyable tiles or anything extremly new, but about unfreezing devlopment.

As Landil said, there is a real need for more communication between the devlopment sphere and the community. What's about using the blog to tell the community the main changes - like annoucing RACE will become official, things like that.

And indeed, it is really time for a 0.5.3 release. There will always be new ideas, new things to do, but there are so much fixes which need to be applied it's unacceptable there is no 0.5.3 yet, and that in place devs promote the trunk version.
Please replace "Are you having any problem with 0.5.2? Your version is outdated, download the unstable version!" with "Are you having any problem with 0.5.2? Download 0.5.3!".
The 0.5.2 version got released though few changes were done, just a bunch of fixes and removing compiler warning.  That's the good spirit!

Oh, and thanks to the developpers to keep this project alive, go on! smile

Not Luck, Just Magic.

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

... who cares about what "mods or vanilla" people play? it's a game, and they should play whatever is fun ..

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

By the way, Landil, people play ctf2 just cause custom maps aren't trusted. Look what happened when ctf3 released: people started playing all 3v3 cws on it. I guess making some custom maps official and creating a bunch of new ones would let people play on them. It's my opinion, i'd feel ridiculous to play ctf2 when there's more official maps.

Stay wild big_smile

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

alias wrote:

"it's a game, and they should play whatever is fun .."

Yeah thats right but it doesn`t solves the Problem!

In my view we have a other Problem. Ok we have tons of Servers, Players and and and.....
But we don`t have a good Community!

e.g. Look at the Map Thread, it is a desert of a Forum. Nobody builds some new Maps and if you see a new map than it is a race/ddrace or something else with some really bad Tilesets.

And if anybody is building a "new" map he only uses the Standart tiles, with standart Backround and Mountains!

Dune wrote:

As Landil said, there is a real need for more communication between the devlopment sphere and the community. What's about using the blog to tell the community the main changes - like annoucing RACE will become official, things like that.

i like the Idea because today everybody use blogs or Twitter.

On the Homepage we should set a button to the Blog, so easily anybody can find these News!

Greatings
iphone747

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

This thread is very interesting and I mostly agree with the above mentioned points. There is no need to tell you the same points again, but I still want to express something related to the quote: "We think the time has come to push teeworlds 0.5.3.".

In my opinion it's okay to release teeworlds as 0.5.3 now. But we shouldn't hesitate to force a 0.6 release. If we release 0.5.3 now, then (I guess) we have enough time, to make a account system for teeworlds. It was already planned for future versions... Why don't we just make one NOW?!

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Crises wrote:

In my opinion it's okay to release teeworlds as 0.5.3 now. But we shouldn't hesitate to force a 0.6 release. If we release 0.5.3 now, then (I guess) we have enough time, to make a account system for teeworlds. It was already planned for future versions... Why don't we just make one NOW?!

Because it takes a lot of time? As people explained, noone started to code the required changes to the network stuff for 0.6, so there is no reason to "force a 0.6 release".

Not Luck, Just Magic.

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

I don't think it's good to release version 0.5.3 in the current state. There are to much incompatibilities to version 0.5.2 like another charset and rotating tiles. In my opinion it's not a good idea to bind network stuff only to the seconds number.

I prefer to include the restrained patches and release version 0.6.0. If we want a 0.5.3 release because the security fixes let's just implement these (as already in the trac done some times ago (yes, were was a pre 0.5.3 containing security fixes)).

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

i think there isn't hurry to release any version, also because last development build is always in home page, very accesible for who want download it. When something will make required that all people must have new version, than will be necessary release it

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

CarmineZ wrote:

i think there isn't hurry to release any version, also because last development build is always in home page, very accesible for who want download it. When something will make required that all people must have new version, than will be necessary release it

This is an unstable version, it's nothing about a solution to the problem.

Not Luck, Just Magic.

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Sworddragon wrote:

I don't think it's good to release version 0.5.3 in the current state. There are to much incompatibilities to version 0.5.2 like another charset and rotating tiles. In my opinion it's not a good idea to bind network stuff only to the seconds number.

I prefer to include the restrained patches and release version 0.6.0. If we want a 0.5.3 release because the security fixes let's just implement these (as already in the trac done some times ago (yes, were was a pre 0.5.3 containing security fixes)).

There are only a few things which are not compatible and the only thing which would really be a reason is the tile rotation but ppl will see it an update to 0.5.3 or just wont play on the map which is a good thing (yes ppl are kinda forced to update). About the font stuff... seroiously... nobody cares about special characters... also updating would fix this issue.
Well this basically all what is incompatible (except for voting (in 0.5.2 you cant give a reason)).

As we said the release would be only to actually have a release. 0.6 will still take a long time since nothing (really nothing) is done for 0.6. And to keep a very instable 0.5.2 as the latest "stable" release is just sad!!
You dont even have to open the game to crash a 0.5.2 server hmm

uptee - a simple web interface for hosting and maintaining teeworlds servers
teerace - a website gathering results of trusted Race-mod servers providing global ranking and statistics
*gV* rox ^^

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Re: development or "What the hell is going on?"

Maybe i not about theme but i want say about my idea for the new client, i think about time join on the server possible was look wallpaper is mod or add to motd.