Down With Numbers

Following on from my last post regarding Nexuiz, the free FPS, I’m now going to ramble about TrackMania Nations, the free non-realistic racing game to which I was introduced a few days ago.

The premise is simple; do a variety of different tracks in the fastest time possible, trying to come top of the leader board in online play or trying to beat the medal times in solo play. There’s no competing for first place in actual contact racing; instead, it’s all time trial based.

Sounds boring, doesn’t it. It’s not. The cars are twitchy, the track has booster pads, there are loop-the-loops galore - and some of the tracks are pretty darn tricky. It’s quick to get into, too - just start it up, pick a track, start racing. Messed up half way through? Hit enter, you’re instantly respawned at the start. Most courses take less than a minute to do anyway, so you get plenty of chances to beat your best time.

But don’t keep listening to me. That isn’t good for you. Playing it, however, is better than an apple a day.

A few days ago, I was introduced to Nexuiz (pronounced necks-whizz), an open source multiplayer FPS based on a much-improved Quake engine. It’s much like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament; deathmatch, CTF, domination and so-on, with a single-player ‘campaign’ mode. Nothing new there.

So what’s special? Well, it’s completely free - that’s a good start. Aside from the freeness, though, the feature that Nexuiz has that properly sets it apart from the rest is its huge level of gameplay tweakability. Now, being open source, cheating is a big problem, so to solve this everything is done server-side. This has the upshot of meaning that gameplay can be changed on the fly - damage values, weapon ammo quantities, health pack sizes, everything.

But now I’m going to stop saying nice things about it and start saying nasty things about it. The first thing that strikes you is that it is quite obviously the usual open source fare, in that it desperately needs polishing. The interface is ugly, the menus are not entirely intuitive, and the maps aren’t anything special.

What about the much-lauded configurability? Well, I have yet to experiment with that. It’s just a daunting set of pages upon pages of variable names and their current values, and while I have no doubt you really can change gameplay around (ultra-powerful bullets, useless rockets?) I haven’t really wanted to spend ages trawling through pages of figures in a godawful menu system.

That said, it is still fun. The gameplay itself is nice and fast paced, and the weapons aren’t bad - think Quake 3 pace with imitation Unreal Tournament weapons. If you’re up against a worthy foe (avoid the bots, the AI is rubbish) then you can find yourself getting quite into a battle, especially if you both posess the railnexgun.

Verdict? Fun game, but plagued with the things I’ve come to expect from for-fun open source development - a distinct inability to finish or polish anything.

Lollercoaster is the product of a demented mind. Despite the out-to-lunch-factor, I continue to harass the crazy Australian in question for a new one every week because they are actually funny. You should harass him too. But maybe read them first, I guess.

Who doesn’t like to see Red Bull getting first post?

Back in the old days (where ‘old’ is taken to mean a few years) I did a fair bit of hacking around with Half-Life. I knew most parts of the SDK very well, and even managed to (badly) hack in something simple that people liked and something more challenging that people ignored. It seemed natural, therefore, for me to make the progression into hacking about Half-Life 2 upon the release of its SDK.

Well, that was a couple of years ago, and at the time I took one look at the SDK and ran away very fast. It wasn’t good. I could have lived with that, though, had I not had to do battle with all the other new stuff that comes with a 6-year progression of engine technology. VMFs, VTFs, GCFs - it was all Greek to me. Faced with this avalanche of new technology, I got scared and ran away to do dull internet programming and not so dull mathematics.

Move on a couple of years. We have now returned to the present. Acting on a somewhat influenced whim and harbouring a procrastinatorial bent, I find myself cracking open the source code, Hammer and Softimage|XSI. Things I sort of know, really know, and don’t know at all, respectively. I can tell you now that XSI is awful, I hate it with a passion and would sooner gouge my eyes out with a pencil than be forced to use it every day, so let’s move on.

I can deal with C++ and Hammer - they’re familiar territory. Unfortunately, our cloud of modification nirvana has a barbed wire lining. The problem with modding HL2 comes in the form of Steam. Where do you put your game files? Never where you think. Where are all the main content files for HL2? Oh, they’re wrapped up in giant files outside of the actual game directory. Why isn’t Hammer configured for my mod? Because the pointless SDK launcher software periodically destroys your Jenga tower of configuration.

The list continues. I have no major qualms with Steam as a game distribution medium for those who just want to play games. But for those who want to make games, it’s a nightmare. Why force you to go through Steam every time you want to make a quick change? Every time you think of a fun little experiment? Why isn’t there some sort of development system you can engage where you don’t need Steam at all?

Because Valve has decreed that it shall be so - or not, as the case may be.