1 Topic by MirceaKitsune

  • MirceaKitsune
  • MirceaKitsune
  • New member
  • Offline

Topic: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

Hey everyone. I was watching a video about free FPS games last night and found this. Since I love open-source games of good quality I immediately tried it out. Have to say it's really nice, and I love the clean art style and simple, well defined yet fun gameplay. However there are a few critiques I had, and I thought it might be helpful to post what a newbie thinks after his first hours of playing.

The first thing I noticed was that there's no bot support and offline gameplay. Initially I wanted to delay trying the game for a later date when I noticed you can't play it offline at all, when you don't feel like going into multiplayer. I noticed that navigation is pretty complex though (especially due to the hook) and something like that would probably be hard to automate. Still, it would be really nice and appreciated if bots could shoot at players and walk around for starters, then maybe over time they can become smarter.

A smaller thing is that the maps have no music, although the menu has a song. I often play games with my own music in my media player, but not always. It would be nice if maps could be given some songs, but I imagine there might be a lack of music artists perhaps.

Otherwise, since I'm also a developer for some games and a modder, I looked into how you can make your own maps. I haven't found any info however, and I'm not seeing a map editor being distributed with the official build either. It would be nice if the mapping application (if there is one, don't know what the procedure is) would be included by default and easy to use.

Those are the only negative things that jumped to my attention so far, after one hour of playing. Otherwise I really love this, and only have good things to say. I'm hopefully going to try it more today. Cheers and keep up the good work on this project smile

2 Reply by Slayer *gV* (edited by Slayer *gV* 2012-06-14 13:33:32)

  • Slayer *gV*
  • Slayer *gV*
  • Support Staff
  • Offline

Re: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

1) It is really difficult to code decent bots (especially movement) for teeworlds.
It would take much time, which our devs don't want to spend for.
You might try our search function for this topic, it was discussed several times wink

2) I'm not sure about this one, but i think there won't be any ingame music.
It is very important for the gameplay to hear the sounds (bullets, hooks, steps...) and ingame music would make it too difficult to hear them.
Also, like you mentioned, we would need some nice artists with good music that fits to teeworlds^^

3) There is an ingame editor, press CTRL+SHIFT+E to open it.
But you might read some tutorials first big_smile

Edit:
If you don't like video tutorials:
[MAPS] Teeworlds Map Editor Tutorial - 0.6.0
[MAPPING] Qualities of a good map

[MOD] Domination   ||   [MOD] iVampire   ||   [MOD] Streamer
[MAP] Slayer's maps (fly)

3 Reply by Zargon (edited by Zargon 2012-06-14 13:08:17)

  • Zargon
  • Member
  • Offline

Re: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

Here is a video tutorial on how to make maps part 1, part 2

4 Reply by MirceaKitsune

  • MirceaKitsune
  • MirceaKitsune
  • New member
  • Offline

Re: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

I see. Well in any game, music can be turned off if someone finds it distracting or that it covers other sounds. And thanks for the info, I might try the editor then, and see the tutorial videos. Wonder if you can make areas with proper collisions using transparent png / tga images (like another 2D game called hedgewars lets you do).

5 Reply by Nitro

  • Nitro
  • Nitro
  • Member
  • Offline

Re: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

Bevor you are learning the editor you should first learn more about the gameplay ^^

Graphics - Maps

6 Reply by Dune

  • Dune
  • Dune
  • Moderator
  • Offline

Re: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

MirceaKitsune wrote:

I see. Well in any game, music can be turned off if someone finds it distracting or that it covers other sounds. And thanks for the info, I might try the editor then, and see the tutorial videos. Wonder if you can make areas with proper collisions using transparent png / tga images (like another 2D game called hedgewars lets you do).

I believe it's more because of a lack of music artists. There have been no new sounds for Teeworlds (maybe except a beep) for years, and the person who did it in the first place is not implied the game development anymore. The music you're hearing is a very old music that was made for Teewars 0.2 or before (I'm not that old in the game).

I'm a Hedgewars player as well, and the map system there is totally different - and it can be - since only one tile has to be used for the map - solid stuff. In that game, the music is not directly stored in the map, it's an associated config file that tells which audio file to use (and it's wonderful btw).

Although, Hedgewars (afaik) does not implement map downloading, whereas Teeworlds does, and this changes quite a lot of things. The majority of players play on custom maps, and so it wouldn't be as worthy as it is in Hedgewars to link a music to each map.

I have to agree that the menus are quite unintuitive, and lacking several things, such as server hosting and map editor (even if it is integrated to the client, we would only need a little button, but hey, gotta find where to put it). Teeworlds really need a main menu redirecting to the server list, map editor, settings, hosting server and stuff.

About the impossibility to make bots moving well, it is actually quite wrong, some DM bots have been made and they're really kicking ass, and even though they're quite nervous on the hook, they're not that horrible. The problem being, it seems hard to have "universal" bots, means that some code/mapping has to be done for each map (more or less) for the bot to work well (finding path points and stuff).

There are some online servers with bots for you to play alone against them (and they're quite hard), and you can download the server binaries of some of them and host a local server, but playing offline has never seemed to be a concern for Teeworlds players, so I guess we should thank you for giving that kind of feedback (not like I'm deciding anything though), few first-time players do that, so we can't really know what they issued first with the game.

So hey, thank you again and welcome here!

Not Luck, Just Magic.

7 Reply by MirceaKitsune

  • MirceaKitsune
  • MirceaKitsune
  • New member
  • Offline

Re: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

NP and thank you, glad I could help with some feedback. Just saw the mapping tutorials and made a test map... the editor is very well done and easy to use. Just not sure how to test the map (by myself) since when I start the server a map is chosen at random. Also need to find a tutorial about quads, those weren't covered there.

In my case, I play games both online and offline, but usually offline a bit more (sometimes to test things). Usually I listen to music while doing so, and play games with bots as sort of an mp3 player smile It's more relaxing and easy than online matches often. So yeah, I can say I'd really like to see offline gameplay too, in case there are more people like me who also like playing locally.

I'm also glad there is a working bot code already. Although I'm new so I don't know anything about the development yet, I do support including that code officially, if it's finished and doesn't break anything. Most games with bots need a path system, which I imagine can be added as new game entities in this case.

As for music, all games I seen and worked with have music as an ogg file in a subfolder, the map only pointing to it in a configuration line. Best way to avoid bandwidth usage when a map uses a custom song is to not send the song to connecting clients with the map. If the player has the song in his client he hears it, otherwise no music. For new songs, I think there should be license compatible ones out there, but then the project might reuse music from other games and I know that's usually not preferred (even if license allows it).

8 Reply by Zargon (edited by Zargon 2012-06-14 15:30:56)

  • Zargon
  • Member
  • Offline

Re: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

In order to use your own map, you should create a file called autoexec.
Just write sv_map nameofyourmap on a text file and save it as *.cfg, the server would work fine

9 Reply by MirceaKitsune

  • MirceaKitsune
  • MirceaKitsune
  • New member
  • Offline

Re: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

Thanks, I'll try that then

10 Reply by Dune

  • Dune
  • Dune
  • Moderator
  • Offline

Re: My critiques after my first hour of gameplay

MirceaKitsune wrote:

NP and thank you, glad I could help with some feedback. Just saw the mapping tutorials and made a test map... the editor is very well done and easy to use. Just not sure how to test the map (by myself) since when I start the server a map is chosen at random. Also need to find a tutorial about quads, those weren't covered there.

In my case, I play games both online and offline, but usually offline a bit more (sometimes to test things). Usually I listen to music while doing so, and play games with bots as sort of an mp3 player smile It's more relaxing and easy than online matches often. So yeah, I can say I'd really like to see offline gameplay too, in case there are more people like me who also like playing locally.

I'm also glad there is a working bot code already. Although I'm new so I don't know anything about the development yet, I do support including that code officially, if it's finished and doesn't break anything. Most games with bots need a path system, which I imagine can be added as new game entities in this case.

As for music, all games I seen and worked with have music as an ogg file in a subfolder, the map only pointing to it in a configuration line. Best way to avoid bandwidth usage when a map uses a custom song is to not send the song to connecting clients with the map. If the player has the song in his client he hears it, otherwise no music. For new songs, I think there should be license compatible ones out there, but then the project might reuse music from other games and I know that's usually not preferred (even if license allows it).

Yeah, that's the way it is done for the skins, but we would lack of a default music database to work with.

As far as hosting servers and configuring them, you should give a look to the documentation from this site, especially to the Server Setup part.

You'll have to create a shortcut to the server linking it with a .cfg file. The commands are listed HERE, the only settings you should really need for LAN playing are:

sv_name nameOfServer (like Zargon said)
sv_gametype [CTF/DM/TDM]
sv_map nameOfMap

The documentation also contains useful information for dealing with the game sources.

There is no official bot code, several ones have been made, but I don't believe they would be suitable for the official game.

Not Luck, Just Magic.