On getting players
From TremFusion
Contents |
What players are good for ?
Players are the main goal of every game, a game that isn't played is useless. Getting a lot of players fast will give us motivation, feedback, servers, contributors and some kind of power (Tremulous players <=> TremFusion players).
If you have players, you can be sure that a few of them will lend a server to the community, attracting server owners is thus not a need. If we have players we will have serves.
Types of Players
There are mainly 3 types of players:
- Average Players (70%), playing the game and that's all: he doesn't really know what the console is, downloads pk3s without knowing what it is and using basics binds.
- "Opened" Players (20% and yet that's a lot) that has got quite an understanding of the game (usually server owners are opened players) make complex binds, know exactly what a pk3 is, how the search path and so on works, what pure and qvms are ... They know how that game globally works.
- The developer, (10% and yet that's a lot) hacking his client and server and so on that knows where are the 3 lines that loads the QVMs, that changes his server's settings, submit patches and so on.
What they are interested in
Let's say we reworked entirely the renderer to make it 50% faster:
- Average players won't really care. They'll probably not notice and if they do they'll feel that it was easy to do.
- Opened Players will notice it (by reading the !ChangeLog ?) and congrats the developers on it once and that's all.
- The same for developers.
And now if we make something shiny in-game such as new graphics for every weapon. Or we make a new alien,
- The average players will play with it a lot, thinking that developers are actually doing something hard and interesting.
- The opened one and the developers will find it fun and play with it a lot.
So what ?
We badly need players, so what ? Should we focus on making the latest optimization, stereo rendering, including perl or whatever in tremulous ? Or should we making things that makes our game shiny and make players feel it evolves ?
Probably the two of it at the same time ... But for know we are quite making the first thing only and no one of the new things that counts for players (except the mgdev changes).
I (Kang) am willing to make changes to cgame and game, make pretty particles and so on to attract players and make our game more fun. Though I do not have enough ideas for it that's why we need more devs than just me on this.
Come on :P (and soz for the crappy english)
(s0edh3)-> Stereo rendering and raytracing are useless for most of the players. Main focus should be new game play elements(gametypes, classes, weapons, etc ). Second, if possible support for advanced effects( like glsl, full screen effects are already possible, Others are possible but needs some(!) effort. Only some players will able to see those. Thus, no need to invest too much time on those. But of course add the stuff that is already available ). Third balancing (but it will be done by time). Also current menus are unattractive(maybe different menu styles for different teams). ... And some tools for developers maybe; in-game particle editor,... <-(s0edh3)
DaTosst: Hey Kang what do you want say with "Opened" Players ?
Kang: Types of players -> dot 2: Players that knows how the game works without knowing the source code (qvm, scripts, cvars ...)
