I was wondering if it would be possible to introduce "something to do during prewar" in KTX. One of the things that bothers me most when playing mix 4on4 games is the long wait in between games because someone doesn't go ready, or, even more frequent, because we're waiting for additional players to join. And it gets incredibly boring.

I'm not really the creative type, so I don't have any real suggestions myself, but perhaps the community can come up with a few ideas?
One thing I thought of would be to make yourself invisible and non-reacting to enemy fire. (Projectiles fly through you, explosions caused by enemy projectiles don't influence your movement, etc). That way you could at least do some trickjumping in peace without people constantly shooting you. The above would probably mean a lot of coding and wouldn't benefit that many people, so I'm sure theres better suggestions out there. Shoot!

ffa rocket arena, no teams, during prewar. starting with 100h/200ra, all wpns but limited ammo. no picking up stuff, except maybe bps. killing and getting frags.

afaik someone made a tetris for ktx prewar

well, i proposed the idea after i saw a tetris qc made by someone in like 1996 :> (nice hardcore qc code, too)

it was shot down quickly because the (valid) objection was made that nobody would ready up as they would be too busy playig tetris

edit: heres the qc http://www.inside3d.com/frikbot/tetris/ ok maybe not 1996, more like 2004 :X

in crmod prematch there was quake tag

Perhaps no that fun. But i would like to see a reaction game.

Someone issues command /startreactiongame
then it would display text "Press +attack when screen flashes (or some other event)".

Then after a random time intervall (2-4secs) the screen would flash.

Then it would display a summary of everyones reaction time. If someone did +attack before the flash, it would show as "false start" in the summary.

I know it would give people with better hw setup and pings an advantage, as they would see the flash earlier. But i think it would be interesting to see if the top players also are those that can react fast etc..

Go race or something (yes, there is race and routes for normal maps like dm3 and dm2 by default).

KTX has enough of unfixed bugs and features noone use so don't expect anything new to be added anytime soon, not to mention the chronic need of coders with time to spare. Even if you managed to figure out something interesting, it's priority would be something like -1 or due to 2029 AD.

Myself beeing a hobby programmer I understand that the priority of these kind of features are very low.

I dont know if tetris would be any more interesting. And myself probably would never use it.
Howvever I came up with a solution to the problem you mentioned phil, and a way to make it more interesting.

* Players are only allowed to play tetris while being ready.
* When countdown starts all tetris games break, and and the highest achived score during this prewar is announced.
(to make it even more prestige it could be shown at the end of the map with the other awards)

How about, during prewar, the map is littered with those little golden orbs and one person is pac man and everyone else is a ghost,(1 player is color 12 everone else is color 0) and if you get touched by a ghost that ghost becomes pacman and when you respawn your a ghost. As you collect the orbs u get points! QuakMan! wahka-wahka

But if you just wanted the something to ATLEAST do while waiting to start, prematch should be PRACTICE mode, every1 gets full unlimited ammo and just practices kickn the snot out of each other...

another nice thing is ALT+ENTER tbh

Maybe a feature that'd bring the client back from minimized state once the countdown starts. Meanwhile you could do anything in your OS, including playing minesweeper!

Sounds like a very good idea. Thats how the automatic game finder thing in wc3 works. Just click "find game". Then you can go www or whatever. When there is a suitable opponent, automatic switch back into the game.

ha nice! i want that feature right now!

This usually happens when i launch ezquake and then before the window is full-screened, I click something else in the OS. Like mirc etc..

When ezquake a second later is shown in fullscreen, it does not have "focus".

Tonight's nightly build should already have it, together with IRC support (another thing you can do during prewar maybe?)

Big creds to JohnNy_cz for all your efforts! Hail to the king, baby.

Great work, both from the community and the developers.
Now there shouldnt be too hard to add this feature to linux aswell, kthx! ;D

great news indeed. love the unminimize thingie

some ideas for the irc:

1) force prefix on nick: something like "qw_mushi". (default nick could be qw_"name" - where "name" is your nickname on qw
2) on connect, autojoin on a irc channel especially made for prewar everyone can chat, even if they're on different qw servers!
3) when your nickname is mentioned, the client should autoreply with the ip address the player is in, and if the game has started or not. (if the game has started, print teams and result)


edit: regarding 2) - user choses his location (europe, na, sa, asia, oceania) and automatically the client connects to the correct irc server and default channel. That way is _guaranteed_ that every user will connect to the same place. Yes, because irc can be used to get matches!

Nice feature, thanks Jonny!

Digging up an old thread here

"Maybe a feature that'd bring the client back from minimized state once the countdown starts."

While that is a cool feature and props to the devs for implementing this I still think it would be cool if there was an in-game solution.

CRMod++ has something like the-interceptor and SputnikUtah suggested called "Practice mode." The CRMod++ manual's description of the feature found here:

http://crmod.planetquake.gamespy.com/manual.html

"Practice - Phat respawns (200 armour, 100 health, all weapons)
- Unlimited ammo
- When you damage another player, the player name and the
amount of damage are displayed on the screen
- When you are killed, the health of the person who killed you
is displayed on the screen
- Weapon, ammo and backpack items do not appear (this reduces
network traffic)"

It was actually very successful as often the server would be full while players competed for the most frags. Also a great mode for warming up and practicing aim without hogging the server such as when playing dmm4 mode.

Pros:

-Fun and enables players to practice before a match.
-Reduces the time and eliminates hogging the server playing dmm4 to warm-up.

Cons:

-The server would fill up with say 10 players during practice mode and it made everyone feel pumped and ready to play a 4on4 match therefore many times there was an argument as to the 2-players would be to leave the server or go spec.

Solution: The server takes note of who the first 8 players that joined and when switching to say a 4on4 match reconnects the remaining 2 players as specs.

Another Con as far as the way CRMOD does it that to switch from Match to Practice and vise-versa required a VOTE to be passed. While voting for Pmode usually passed fairly easy, once in PMODe and say 8 players were playing the vote to match mode became harder to pass.

You could merge that concept of pmode without changing or voting by allowing players pre-match to spawn on the field with FULL ammo/armor/weapons and let them just kill etc. So, they would have to type color 12, "ready". now they are on the yellow team and spawned. When there are even teams "ready" a vote can be called, "Request to Vote to force match start type yes or no in console". Then in 10 seconds the match begins.. It might confuse some people connecting and just joining a team, unless there was a centerprint stating "Pre-Match Warm Up" maybe upon spawning.

Sounds fun!

Another con I just thought of is sometimes you'd get the odd player who would attempt to accumulate frags by discharging in the pool on dm3. A possible solution would be to just do self-damage when discharging in prac mode or as in the crmod++ later releases make it not possible to discharge/use lg while submerged in liquid.

Prewar Instagib... Getsya sharp