Zach wrote: >On 6/22/06, Cliff Hudson <chronosws at comcast.net> wrote: > > >>I've always been disappointed at the decline of Netrek (I started myself >>back in 92 in college) but the client presentation has always felt like >> >> > >Welcome Cliff. > >What handle did you play as primarily? I've been playing since '94. >Welcome to the list. >Are you a programmer? > > Back then, I played under a variant of the handle chronos (I can't remember which one now though, since the name was always taken and I have so many variants. If you look through server logs, I logged on from WSU in Washington State) More recently I have played under ChronosWS, but now I use Jahnweh (no collisions, same handle I use in Eve Online.) I am a developer (8 years C/C++ dev work for Microsoft (Windows/DirectX) and a startup called Wildseed (Linux)) and a program manager (1 year at AOL when Wildseed was acquired.) > > >>one of the largest factors in turning off new players to me (I have no >>studies to prove it, this is a gut feeling.) Personally, I think you >>draw them in with cool graphics and sound (first impressions, right?) >>and keep them with the stellar game play. I know there have been many >>client forks, but even the NetrekXP ones have just been mildly warmed >>over rehashes of COW clients, and certainly not up to the standards a >>modern gamer would expect. Is the community even willing to give the >>game the good, hard look it deserves to bring it up to the 21st century? >> >> > >I agree. What ideas do you have that a modern client should encapsulate? > >Zach > > > I have several ideas. As I said, I believe the game play for Netrek is excellent, and I think changing that directly is not appropriate. Some things which strike me as needing work, looking from an 'attract new players perspective', are: (NOTE: When speaking of the client, I am referring to the NetrekXP 2006 client, V1.0) - 10 updates/sec. Because the client does not interpolate between server updates, gameplay appears 'choppy'. This is probably the area where I would most be inclined to change the server, moving to an event-based network protocol with sync rather than a updates/sec protocol. - Graphics. In general the bitmapped graphics look dated. Now I have the utmost respect for those who have come along and tried to give the game a more updated look with new bitmaps (Pascal comes to mind recently) but it's not just the bitmaps. Smothing out movements (vis-a-vis smooth ship rotations) and better effects (explosions with particle effects, maybe some lighting, trails off the torps or plasmas) are the top things which come to hmind. - Playfield. I've always felt the tactical should be much larger. Obviously the galactic is very important and its ability to convey information should not be diminished, but perhaps it could be made as an overlay, or hidden under some circumstances, etc to give the player more tactical screen real estate (even if no real additional information is disphhlayed on the tactical.) - Sound. Netrek has always been weak on this front. We all know that it sounds like what it is - developers grabbed some wavs from their favorite Star Trek-themed source and slapped a playSound() call in the right places in the code. What needs to happen is someone who is good at manipulating sound files needs to fix these up, balance their levels and integrate them into an overall sound scheme for the game. A bit of background noise (the hum of the ship) wouldn't hurt. To be fair, recent clients have done a better job with some of the sounds (shields sound good, for instance,) but others leave much to be desired (the login WAV on NetrekXP 2006 for instance seems jarring, the cloaking sound takes WAY too long compared to the cloak animation time, phaser blast sound is slightly delayed compared to the graphics.) - Configuration. RC files died in the 90s, at least as a primary method of users configuring applications. There needs to be a proper configuration UI, including a modern keymapping system. Obviously keys can be remapped using the help screen, but this fact is a bit opaque to new players and provides no instruction. The ability to move windows in the client is nice, but quite possibly misguided, especially since you can do it while in combat. There are probably a limited number of genuinely useful configurations, and it may be wise to make it so you can't create dumb ones (for instance, where the galactic is partially obscured by the tactical.) These will obviously seem like minor issues to devs and hardcore players, but I believe new players will expect more polish from a game which is ostensibly 20 years old in its present form. - Window decoration. Now maybe this can be turned on and I simply haven't looked for the switch, but by default the game should be using the OS standard window decorations for the main window, so that it can be resized, closed, minimized, etc. Having a game window without a title bar (as appears on NetrekXP 2006) looks VERY strange. Overall, the client needs to be polished. It looks and feels rough because it was made by developers for hard core gamers, and for those two groups it large meets its presentation goals. But if I put this in front of a new person, the first thing they think is that it looks awfully old (and therefore must not be very interesting.) I think if people can just get past the first-impressions hurdle, they will be more inclined to stick around long enough to see how deep the gameplay goes. That's my $0.02. >_______________________________________________ >netrek-dev mailing list >netrek-dev at us.netrek.org >http://mailman.us.netrek.org/mailman/listinfo/netrek-dev > > > >