FvF Updates!

[m0ns]

Hi everyone that still visits this forum. Recently Gunter entrusted me with the FvF source, I've made a couple updates to the mod. Hopefully nothing huge, I just felt the mod needed some love after all these years. Foq and I have been testing on port 26001, and have ironed out several bugs. We soon will put the updates on port 26000. I guess I'll list them out here.

• Server - Changed to FTE (kinda like DPserver) and protocol 666. The new protocol supports many more engine extensions which can be used for lots of cool stuff. Also higher entity/edict counts. The ticrate is .05 for now. Overall it does feel much faster than stock FvF, for good or bad I'm not sure. All the weapons/monsters/etc should all function the same regardless of the ticrate now. Any engine supporting protocol 666 (pretty much all of them these days - mark v, joequake, fte, qrack, qss, qss-m) can connect. Quakeworld can also connect, as well as the KEX remaster though I have that turned off for testing purposes... I don't really see many QW people wanting to play but who knows.
• Class "buffs" - All classes that do not regenerate health or ammo gain a 2.5% damage increase per level. Classes that regenerate health/ammo now regenerate 5% faster per level.
  
  Cleric/Monk - unchanged now, maybe upon reaching a certain level have them give out +25 health packs instead of 15? or better armor? Not sure... Wait no, the monk's fire attacks should set stuff on fire now too.
  
  Cyborg Camper - has had some of his weapons improved... I felt he may have been the weakest class. Homing scrubs do a bit more damage and the fire rate is increased. He can now carry more bullets for his machineguns. The Blowfish 2000 also has a chance to explode into a "multi-blowfish/grenade". The fire rate for sticky bombs is increased. Weapon 8 is unchanged.
  
  Doom Marine - Chaingun fire rate slightly increased. Rocket launcher velocity slightly increased.
  
  Mage - all fire attacks have a chance to set monsters on fire as well.
  
  Ninja - has some more synergy with the ring of shadows. In addition to the ring lasting 90 seconds (original fvf feature), you now regenerate health slowly and also have a slightly increased critical chance.
  
  Sniper - now has a chance to perform critical hits like the ninja. Once maxed out to the commando the critical chance is doubled.
• New class - Necromancer. As his name suggests, his main ability (weapon 5) - raise dead - can raise any monster corpse (non-gibbed) back from the dead to serve as his ally. Since Zombies are already dead, you can also turn them to your side as well. If the necromancer dies, his minions perish as well. If the minions die they gib - so you can't keep raising the same monster over and over. You can control more monsters per level, to a maximum of 10 (any more than that it gets a bit ridiculous... it is hilarious though). After that - upon reaching level 9 and 10 your minions attack speed will increase significantly. Your minions will also gain pentagram and quad if their master picks it up. To make the minions distinguishable from regular monsters, they are fullbright, get a colormap set according to their owners colors (color 4 ones look bloody!) and smoke particles colored to their owner. They are also non-solid so yours/other player projectiles will pass through them and they won't get stuck on elevators/lifts/doors. That was a big problem. Oh and the necro can only have green armor, a bit squishy like a mage. Also might limit the number of necromancers playable at a time? I can see more than 2 of them getting pretty chaotic. But not sure. The necro is also disabled for deathmatch... no idea what sort of chaos would ensue.. that and there's no monsters to resurrect.
  • Weapon 1 - Scythe. Not much to say here, like the axe but slower fire rate, hits harder and knocks enemies back a little.
  • Weapon 2 - Blood Siphon. Pretty much the cleric's drain ability but with some more flavor. Gibs/blood get funneled from the target monster and heal you and your minions for a small amount.
  • Weapon 3 - Chain Lightning gun. Like the regular LG but consumes double the ammo/much weaker and chains to every monster in a certain radius. Good for softening up large groups of monsters.
  • Weapon 4 - Bone Splinters. Shoots out a random number of nails in a cone type pattern.
  • Weapon 5 - Raise Dead.
  • Weapon 6 - Summon Lost Souls. Kind of a weird drunk missile rocket launcher but with player heads that have a chance to gib/explode and do damage.
  • Weapon 7 - Blight Sliver. A spear that does strong initial damage but also poisons target monster. The poison will then spread to all other monsters in a certain radius. Attacks after the first do less damage but will stack poison up to 5 times.
  • Weapon 8 - Blood Sacrifice. A bit like the quake 3 bfg, instead it launches gibs at enemies but also takes some of your own health as a penalty. It also heals your minions like the blood siphon. Incredibly powerful but can be quite costly.
• Monster "buffs" - since some of the classes got buffed a little, some of the monsters are more angry now. Fiends, knights, death knights, shamblers, lunge forward a little more when attacking and attack slightly faster. Still very much avoidable but you have to be a bit more careful. Ogre grenades are now semi z-aware. Not a buff - but shub/chthon now get their health scaled based on number of players. This way if you're solo they don't have quite as much health. With 8 players bosses end up having a bit more health.
• More maps! - Added some more custom maps - Beyond Belief, The mexx series (has some custom QC/modified monsters based on hipnotic), Prodigy SE. A few newer ones (but still old school) - Ritual and Seismic Ventures. You can now vote for a specific map series in the vote menu. After that series is completed, a random series will be chosen. This should continue until all of the maps are played. Some of them may need tweaking for co-op - haven't extensively played all of them yet. The mexx ones should be good to go, removed a bunch of doors that were in the way.
• Entity stuff - Added gyro physics. All this really does now is visual stuff, gibs and packs float in water and get bounced around by explosions. Gibs stay around much longer now since protocol 666 can handle it. Pretty much anything can go through teleporters now as well. That could get interesting...
• Admin/rcon stuff - For some reason rcon in FTE doesn't work with non-fte/darkplaces/qw clients. Talked to Spike about it and he just has not implemented rcon with NQ clients. So for now if you're an admin you will have to type in console: cmd admin (password). Once admin mode is activated you should be able to do commands just like rcon: cmd say hi; cmd changelevel e1m1; etc.

There's probably a bunch of stuff I forgot but I think that is all the main changes. Thanks to the Cujo bot for it's ai following/teleporting to owner code for the minions, copper mod for the chain lightning/some other stuff.

And thank you Gunter!! I hope you don't hate me too much for this

Hopefully it'll be up on port 26000 soon.

[gulliver-trans]

Sounds interesting.

[m0ns]

Looks like it is up on 26000 now.

Here's a zip file with all the maps now on the FvF server (includes terra, dopa, and the ikspq series as well)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lqavj3 ... sp=sharing

[Gunter]

Well, you're not going to like what I have to say.

Just reading about it, I don't like it.

Too many changes.

Had to buff the monsters because you unnecessarily buffed the players?

Whole new class?

I don't like it.

The Doom Marine's weapons are meant to almost exactly conform to the way they function in original Doom. His rockets were slow to travel, but did more damage on impact. Chaingun fire rate was right out of Doom as well. One thing I have considered for him is to give him the Pistol as a starting weapon (replacing weapon 4 which currently also counts as the chaingun/5), making it function as closely to the original Doom numbers as possible.

Tweaks to the classes should be for fine-tuning balance, and the current balance is pretty tight. Not perfect, by any means, but this is just doling out kewl powerz for no good reason.


Honestly, THIS is exactly why I don't like sharing the source code....


Not everything is about perfect balance though -- it's to preserve the "old school" gameplay. Like how the Doom guy is supposed to act as much like the original Doom game as is viable in Quake.

Once you start heading down this road deviating from that, where does it stop?

I still remember the FvF + Runeqauke abomination....


Now, some things like Gyro Physics sounds like an interesting addition (other than the possibility that it makes it incompatible with older Quake engines). And tweaking some of the monsters' behavior is probably fine, because they always needed various things tuned.


One major change I had thought about would be based on some old Quake mods that let you play as the monsters. I would have it so that as an Observer, you could go and possess any of the living monsters, to control them and fight against the other players.... FvFvM.

You know you wanna BE the humping dog....


I'll try this mod at some point (not this week), but I strongly prefer that this is kept separate from the standard FvF server.

[m0ns]

Understood, well, forget anything ever happened then. Will be putting the stock mod back on 26000. The new one might go back on 26001.... dunno. The new class if anything should probably be something like the time traveler or alien or specialty something now that i think about it. oh wells. Gyro physics on its own doesn't need a special engine, I just wanted it on FTE cause of the extended limits and stuff. Stuff starts to disappear pretty quick with regular quake if you have too many gibs/etc going on. possessing other monsters does sound fun...i remember playing some of those old mods back in the day.

I still do appreciate you sharing the source with me. I had some fun coding these things and learned a lot!

[Gunter]

I do still want to try it, if you leave it running on an alternate port.

Another point I remembered about the balance, is that there is still DM and Purge Mode, even though they hardly ever get used. The Cybrog is already pretty dominant in DM modes. If you make him stronger against the monsters, that makes him too strong against other players.

It is quite hard to keep things balanced with an eye toward both DM and Quest modes....

I remember I slapped in "Shambler Skin Armor" into the DM modes to try and re-balance things a bit, to buff up the classes that don't use explosives, since explosives tend to be a bit overpowered in DM (like how the Quake Solder is "all Rocket Launcher"). So any class that didn't have an explosive ranged weapon would automatically get Shambler Skin Armor instead of normal armor pickups, and so would take half damage from explosives as long as they were wearing armor. It was never really play tested enough for me to decide if it helped balance things better or not... because we never play in DM mode, heh. It's a pretty ham-handed balancing device, but classes like Cleric, Sniper, Fighter, Android, and Ninja were kind of at a disadvantage vs the classes that throw explosions all over the map.

[Gunter]

I gave it a try tonight. I'll give actual feedback on some things. It's good to keep coding and experimenting. I used to test experimental things in the server -- a lot of those scratch1 settings you see in the source code -- before deciding if I'd keep them or not. Or other things just for fun, like I made a Duke Nukem style Freeze Gun for the Android once.


The floaty gyro gibs are pretty neat looking. I do love me some bloody gibs. Problem is they really clutter up the water, and make it hard to see anything else.


There seem to be some new bugs, like the class cycling doesn't go forward and backward with 9 and 0; no matter which one you press, it just keeps cycling forward.

And after playing as a Necromancer for a while, I could no longer chance class at all.

Observer mode seems to not work.

The Necromancer himself is kind of all over the place in terms of balance. The poison spear seems way OP. The revived monsters shedding particles really clutters up the view too much.

I played for a while, then when I had some vore allies, it suddenly crashed with "Host_error: CL_ParseStartSoundPacket: ent = 8195"

Hahah, and now when I reconnected to the server, there's a decapitated vore head at the start moving around and growling at me...

And after a minute it crashed again with "Host_Error: CL_EntityNum: 8201 is an invalid number"

And upon reconnecting, it soon crashes with that same error....

I used the Vote menu to restart Quest mode.


Anyway... this is why you don't put test code on the main server port

[Gunter]

DirtGod wanted to check out the mod, sooo... we tried that, but it kept crashing us out of the game, after I Necromacer'd a Scrag.

After I managed to get back in (it takes a while before the server will stop erroring upon trying to connect) and voted to restart Quest mode, we tried again but it didn't take very long for it to crash us out. He recorded that. You can see his error crash at the end. It seems like we both crashed after merely looking at a dead monster with the Raise Dead spell. It seems like with 2 players, it crashes more than just with one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NizJU7biSzg


This is still on the main server port 26000.... Please remove it from there.

[m0ns]

thought i fixed all that, guess not. oh wells

regular mod should be back on 26000 soon, i sent foq a message. sorry about that

[gulliver-trans]

hey thanks for the effort anyway, m0ns.

adding a little new to spice up the old is always good

unfortunately i have a lot of life stuff going on, myself, so I haven't been able to check it out.

plus I was having issues loading it, tho I probably didn't follow the instructions.